Pain and fear, isolation and loneliness.

I thought to write here today. Even though I don’t really want to.

It’s the topic everyone works hard to avoid bringing into conversation.

PAIN: Chronic and severe and endless.

With the result that there is a loneliness that seeps over the sufferer. She knows no one wants to hear the same old, same old. So she lies, or covers up or uses a selection of old tropes.

Q How are you?

(1)Oh, you know.

(2)Much better than yesterday. (Lie)

Q What does the doctor say?

(1)We don’t say: Well (s)he too is sick of my calls.

(2)We mumble a selection of vagaries.

(3)Waiting for a call.

(4)Will call them today.

Along with the loneliness there’s the exhaustion of just plain dealing with life. Or not dealing.

There’s lack of sleep for one. There’s the ongoing decision of:

(1) suffering and being alert or

(2) ingesting painkillers and becoming a zombie.

Friends and relatives get impatient. I understand that.

But it really makes things far, far worse when they ask for details of the pain and it’s offered, only to be met with deadly silence or the clicks of an escape hatch being opened ("gotta run, talk soon!") and the listener vanishing.

So chronic pain is isolating for multiple reasons. We are not looking for solutions. We know all the solutions, we’ve explored many avenues, some involving more pain we can’t endure.

Out tears are in isolation along with frustration and a sense of hopelessness. And loneliness.

We are the brave.

We learn to let very few in to what is really going on. We forego, with longing,  the things we used to do in our health that we would simply take for granted. For example, I see someone walking on the street or in a movie and I go "look at that! they're walking with a smile!"

My big job today was sorting my weekly pills. A job I detest with all the fires of hell. It takes 30 minutes. If I don’t drop pills on the floor.

My helper comes tomorrow so I don’t have to do dishes which is excruciating, standing at the sink.

It’s over two weeks since I slept in a bed as the recliner is the only place I can do a series of catnaps through the night with some small semblance of comfort.

I can see why some go insane from this kind of existence.

And so very few that understand it.

I know I never did.

And I realize one of the greatest gifts in life we can offer each other is to listen.

 

Covid-19 Day 6 of self-isolation

Objet du jour = leftover yarn balls, bowl hand carved by my last gentleman caller a few years back. Signed and numbered.


@@Received a notice under the door that the building is in lockdown so it is most terribly quiet. The library and community rooms are off limits and no visitors allowed. I feel safer and am very glad they are finally doing something though it may be too late with so many wandering willy-nilly all over the city, caring for grandchildren and running to Costco.

@@I can't believe how busy I am. It took me a while to set up Zoom for meetings. Great when it works but because everyone here is just about remote working now the drain on the system means it gets a bit non-buffery which can be irritating. Also busy monitoring items for the Covid-19 site but I have 4 moderators/admins now and that helps a lot.

@@I am working on a collection for another book called "Elder Reflections" which will incorporate life stories of people over 65 with a weekend workshop planned for the early fall to finalize. And hopefully publication before Christmas.

@@I heard from three of my four brothers today and I am so grateful for their reaching out. I am again reminded that when the world seems so perilously dangerous, we have all the time in the world to type loving letters and emails and texts and make phonecalls and have have zoom meetings and start new rituals.

@@I was saving a huge book, Pachinko, that grandgirl gave me for Solstice (we all exchange books at Solstice). I started it this morning. Oh the wonders of a beautiful book!

@@So how's it all going out there? I do read your blogs but time constraints are rough on commenting and also on responding on mine. I will get there........

Dreams

I find dreams can be so revealing of the subconscious. I am really good at analyzing them, I took a short course a few years ago and found that I could analyze other dreams while being baffled at my own at times.

I had this dream last night. Briefly:

A friend of mine in Toronto has this nightmare of a house, she is a hoarder and it's packed to the rafters with stuff. You don't need details - it's all just stuff. Pathways are laid out in the rooms to navigate through the garbage. Her bed's accessed by crawling across boxes. The stairs to the basement is jammed with newspapers and magazines. The window on her door is covered with a garbage bag. And this was when we were allowed in. For the last twenty+ years I'd say no one has entered Hilda's (pseudonym) house. So I imagine it is far worse now. It's a huge concern. We had cleaned her out a few times in the past but it was all in vain, she refused to get psychological help, she accumulated more rubbish and excess was poured into her car so that she could never take passengers. A typical out of control hoarder. I wrote about her here.

Anyway, last night I dreamed of her. Sitting in a tidy house. Surrounded by mannequins in various costumes, elderly clothes, lounging around on the chairs and sofas in her much expanded living room - she had bricked in the front door.

I questioned her as to what she was doing, there were at least 5 of these faux humans, heads down reading, as was she.

"Oh," she said, "Finally, everything is taken care of, see? My friends and I are really happy together. We read to each other."

I had absolutely no trouble analyzing this dream. Dreams are nearly always about ourselves. Very personal.

I realized:

(1) I am isolating far too much.

(2) I have been indoors since last Thursday and the weather has been beautiful

(3) My door to new experiences has been blocked.

(4) My imaginative life is now greater than my reality.

(5) I need to bring some flexibility in to my life. I am getting rigid.

So, I'm heading out today. To interact with some children I know.

It's far too easy to get locked in place.

Black Disc

I wish there was one.

To hang on one's door. Or on one's Twitter or Facebook account or give an automatic email response. When one is incommunicado, please don't bother.

Like for today.

Feeling scowly and sad and a mite worried and physically challenged and super-tired.
And you know, this is when everybody decides to call, bang on the knocker, phone, message. Want to visit, want to make social interaction with me. And frankly? I don't. Not at all. I feel like one long week of rain. Miserable. So I ignore. And hide.

What makes it worse is the gorgeous weather outside, the blue of the ocean.

And yes, thoughts of Irma and the dreadful happenings of climactic weather conditions for our neighbour down below and to the left of where I am. And they have a guy in charge, so I hear, who doesn't believe in climate change and the warming oceans that cause this and that it's going to get a whole lot worse.

So I should feel grateful and safe.

And that makes me feel small and selfish and self-centred and even more miserable.

Bootstraps don't work.

Sleep is the antidote to misery.

I curl up and sleep and assure myself, like Scarlett, that tomorrow is another day.

Which is exactly what I did yesterday.

Day 4

Oh the misery.

Oh the hacking.

Oh the sleepless nights.

And sleep filled days.

The isolation.

The pity pot.

Grandgirl arrived to great excitement on Sunday.

She and Daughter hung out in my house until Tuesday.

She'd arrived with the remnants of some kind of bug.

Non-infectious, we believed.

Poor fools.

Mine started on Tuesday. Grew to an unmistakeable fever by Wednesday, was full-fledged by Thursday and today, Friday, has developed fresh symptoms like stomach let down.

All the bodily functions we take for granted now become questionable in execution.

I'm the type who hates being catered to even though many offers have been flung through the phone and on media.

I am completely uncivil and unfriendly and unsocial in my illness and the slightest effort thrown in these directions sends me spinning downwards.

So I Coventry myself and wander around the house quite aimlessly, unable to read or knit or concentrate on anything stimulating on Netflix.

I collapse regularly in a heap on my bed exhausted from the effort it took to get there.

So yeah. A bit of a whine.

Because I know you're all far away and can't knock on my door with a cheerful countenance and chicken soup.

Blog Jam

~~~Through The Fog~~~

I spend a lot of my time alone. Which is my preference. People would say I'm extroverted but I am not. I spent a lot of my time as a child escaping, to bathrooms, under the stairs, solitary bike riding, solitary walking and cliff hiking. Reading. Writing. Playing the piano with the door closed, oblivious to any query as to what was I was playing in there.

I live in my head most of the time. Always have. Escapism? I suppose so. I sometimes find the insanity and pain of the world too much to bear. This heading straight off a cliff into nothingness which looms ahead of all of us. I talk to the spirits of my grandmother and mother that live inside me. Certifiable? Perhaps.

I find it such a challenge to be understood. I would love to do light and fluffy like so many I know but I'm just not put together that way so I hold myself back a lot of the time. I have very few friends that I share my inner thoughts with for fear of being found incomprehensible, or being ridiculed and rejected. I differ in values with a lot of my family. As I get older, I realize the chasms are getting larger rather than smaller. And when I reach out across the voids created by others that were once close to me it is more often than not met with a stinging silence.

Daughter recently went on a hiatus from Facebook as she discovered that it was increasing her sense of isolation, seeing photos of other family members temporarily unite from other corners of the globe and excluding her even though she is in the same city as them and is all by herself. I surmise it was probably inadvertent. People just don't think, do they?

I saw that for myself in the past 9 days when I was carless. Only one person called to see if I needed groceries or anything else. But it just takes the one. I see that too. We just don't think outside our own personal self-contained little boxes.

I am going to try and do better with this. To jump outside my own personal safety net a little more and see if others could use a hand or even a listening ear. And risk.

For after all I am the change I wish to see in the world, right?