Sleeping beauty fretting mightily instead

I keep forgetting that in addition to chronic pain and discomfort (hence being constantly drug affected), that alien babies also cause hormonal imbalances which can lead to emotional sensitivity, mood swings, anemia induced fatigue – no, exhaustion – and insomnia among other things.

While I fight denial of fact, and in many ways fear the planned twot to tit incision that will result in an anticipated 8 weeks of recovery… I wonder what I will be like when all is done.

Aside from my physicality, will it also affect my psyche? My sense of self? What will be the impact on my energetic body? What about my sexual being? And how might changes in my pain, discomfort, emotions, moods, energy level, perceptions, outloook, sexuality, etc effect the way I interact and am perceived by others?

I worry about the effects… the affects… (how to use those two correctly *grinz*) What horrors or beauties might be revealed along the way or by the end?

And I think about the last 18 months or so of my life. Would I have made the same choices if I wasn’t deceitfully hiding what was happening to me and trying to cope on my own? Would others have made the same choices with more knowledge of my current state? Would any of it changed or mattered?

These feel like they are important questions as I reflect on what has been and what might be. In the immediate now they are important because a dear friend has volunteered to coordinate care and comfort by friends and family. And so I ask myself, as one prone to walking with strength through the world… who do I want/need around me? Who will step up or agree and why? Who should/could/would be there regardless of my opinions or notions? I fear the band wagon.

Like a python digesting an antelope, I will be vulnerable for a long while. Lying there. Waiting to return to a state of animation unrestricted by the processes and limitations of the body. And like a python, I need to scout the territory before I take on the challenge. I already move through the world and sleep with one eye open. I think, for this, that I will need to close them.

For weeks… months? as I blundered through the medical system, I’ve been asking: what is family? What is friendship? Aside from blood, with whom do I have mutual feelings of family and how close are those bonds (sister? cousin eight times removed?) Who are my friends as opposed to just acquaintances? Where can I place my trust? Where is it deserved? Where can it be earned or enhanced in the time to come? Where must I LEAP… and “trust” that it will be OK? I fear the band wagon.

I keep coming up against the wall of: I thought that person/s liked me. I thought that person/s respected me. I thought that person/s was my friend. I thought that person/s was family. I thought I was a part. A maudlin morose place that inspires self-disgust. Perhaps because there is more truth to all that than I dare face; perhaps what I think I have/know is just castles in the sand and kites in the sky.

I am disillusioned and uncertain both inwardly and outwardly. I despair… (prone to drama my mother would say but I am relentlessly introspective and believe my feelings to be authentic if affected) despair and am starting to consider that I am slipping into a dimming place… now please pass the evening primrose and st. john’s wort cause it certainly can’t hurt now can it?

And I return, as I have this uncomfortable, sleepless night to trying to be objective about the possibility that my perspective is through a lens that is coloured by the realities of my body; the physical, chemical, mental, spiritual realities of my body. The theme of betrayal seems to run everywhere. In my body, in my relationships, in my job, etc. Where is the truth and the possibility of objectivity in any of that?

I’ve been trying to be objective about the possibility that perhaps my tendency towards stoic silence (which must seem strange considering how vocal I can be – but I mentioned the other day that I was conservative and rigid to a group of dykes, two of them LD members, and they laughed until I gave them examples)… where was I? … silence!… has impacted my recent past and irrevocably affected the flavour of my future. I also have a tendency to be a bit of a hermit. These things will not do in the months to come.

I know I must reach out and to allow access if I am to survive the next six months with my body, mind and soul intact. But time passes and I feel like/know that the answers are getting more and not less complex.

I am haunted by thoughts of who will stand guard so that I can sleep and recover. Who indeed? And when I come around, like Sleeping Beauty… what then? what will have changed?

As Ichigo has got me saying (even at work where they want to call me Nemo) ….. just keep swimming, just keep swimming…