Muddled Serenity

I do and don't have news. Things are and aren't progressing. This is a really funny stage of illness - I want to connect with people and I want to have restful time, I want to sleep and I want to fill my days with activities, I want to do far more than I should be doing at the moment but get frustrated with all I can't do.

Crafts are keeping me going, and getting back to the library at least to read or be there, which wouldn't have been possible not that long ago. I still fall asleep if I read a lot, but I recently made it through my first novel in ten months (yeah, exactly) and am working on a second! Physically, I feel so much better when you think of where I was just three or four months ago, or, worse, back in September-December. I was so relieved at Christmas when my steroid injection kicked in long enough that I could just about bear to sit in a fairly high dining chair without being in extreme pain. Now I could do that without seeing it as overcoming a huge hurdle, and I need to remember how much i longed for the immense relief of feeling as I do now, which isn't pain free, but while I'm prone to fatigue and aches, it's nothing compared to having someone lift my legs to move me around in bed.

Doctors say that we forget pain - the childbirth effect - and it's true that I can't quite conjure up the precise feeling, though I remember well enough the emotional parts. Somehow in there I felt relief that things had come to a head, after months of going downhill without any sense of what was at the bottom. That was odd. I also knew that I would come to a point where I saw the spiritual work that was being done in me, and my pained-self was adamant that recovering-self remember the pain and that, regardless of how much I felt I had learned, I was on no account to come to the conclusion that the pain had been Worth It. It's in my head like an imprint, carefully impressed by my former self, knowing how I would remember selectively and come to conclusions of which former-me would not approve.

So soon, though, I saw the changes that my illness was bringing. I've said here before that I felt relieved to find myself again, even as my identity was under threat from a totalising illness, and I feel like I rediscover my entire illness-experience whenever I take stock. I appreciate those who sat with me, lifted me, paid for long phone conversations because they couldn't cross oceans to be with me, shared my confusion about what was happening, brought me hot chocolate because I couldn't get out, looked at travel brochures with me and planned trips we didn't take, told me what was happening in their lives and made me feel like I had something to contribute. I clung to brief messages of support and prayer that confirmed that the world hadn't forgotten me. Whether because I was enjoying an elongated stretch of denial or because these things hit when you're tired, I don't know, but I've been upset about the loss of the past year while coming to the conclusion that, if this is the worst arthritis experience of my life and the medications only get better from here, a year isn't that much when I'm 26. I've been distressed on behalf of my pained self and euphoric about my current fatigued-but-recovering self - a kind of survivor's guilt, maybe, based on pity for the "me" of six months ago.

God and I have had some frank conversations about the whole thing, and while emotionally I felt like I was being cast off like a faulty doll I have never felt God's presence in such a comforting, disturbing, detached, internal, inexplicable way. I wanted to be independent and I didn't want to be left alone. I wanted to go backwards and forwards while being, more than ever, trapped in the present. I want to make up for lost time, living a life of the utmost significance while appreciating the details. I am appreciative of being able to walk to the car while frustrated I can't walk the length of the town.

As a walking mass of contradictions, I don't really know what to do but live with all the conflicting emotions and impulses, and I'm finding it strangely easy to continue as I hold all of these thoughts in tension.