Limits in all Dimensions

Chronic fatigue syndrome is all about limits. Exceeding them, testing them, being horrified by how small they are and then learning to live within them. Now I'm finally not pushing my body to go farther than it can, but I'm beginning to realize that I have spiritual as well as physical limitations. Apparently I can't just make over my life in an instant. 

It seems childishly obvious, I know. But I'm the person who moved across country to go to grad school full time when I was too sick to even work 15 hours a week. I have a history of unrealistic expectations of myself. And sadly, being aware of this fact does not now make me immune from it.

The other day I actually made a list of the strategies I am going to implement to turn my life completely around. No more will I be a bored, maudlin invalid! I will transform myself through art! I will go from somebody still mourning my losses and caught up in my own insecurities, somebody who is been afraid for at least 17 years of taking my creativity seriously, to a person maintaining the schedule of a professional writer. I will follow a strict timetable of writing and reading, I will discipline my imagination, I will drink vegetable juice every day and do more yoga, and I will start wearing button-down shirts. Life up until this point, it's sad and undisciplined wasting, will be completely obliterated. Goodbye, old life. Make way for Homo Superior.

I got really excited about this for about two days. I wrote a lot. I made myself. I wore the shirt and I drank the juice, but I couldn't do the yoga because after two days I was completely crashed. I was in way over my head. All my fears and doubts and expectations that I can't possibly meet right now just fell in around my head. It's too bad that my brain has to work suspiciously similarly to my body.

I hate being afraid. I hate being afraid so much that I have made it my personal mission of my adult life to seek out, hunt down, and destroy everything that holds me back. I hate fear and I hate being a coward. Every fear I find I have to run at full speed, sword in each hand, screaming and clad in bear hides like a berserker Viking tripping on mushrooms. It is a bloodsoaked mission of vengeance against all the ways I am weak.

I really have freed myself from a lot of my fears. I used to be terribly shy, really afraid to open my mouth in front of people I didn't know. That had to go. I was afraid of moving to new cities, so I moved to four of them. I was afraid of making art, and I made myself make it. And I loved making it, often. I’ve really won a lot of freedom for myself over the years. But now it's pretty clear my tactics have to change; I just don't have the energy to fight so hard anymore. I'm going to have to figure out how to do this the easy way.

I guess the things that I'm seeking, things that I think will make my life worth living again, are subtle qualities. They are positive things; they aren't just the absence of fear and hate and all the other fucked up things in my brain. They are things like creativity, gentleness, play, forgiveness. Actual and practiced love for myself. I can't intimidate them into working for me like I'm used to. And I can't just decide that I have them and act like I do. Otherwise I'll have anxiety attacks while trying to write short stories, because I don't know what I'm doing and I'm failing and I am NOT having fun, yet I cannot be a person who doesn't know what she's doing or fails or doesn't have fun, and thus I am living in two mutually exclusive realities simultaneously, which is hell on the nerves.

So I'm going to have to live within some psychic limits. I just don't have the spiritual resources right now to do what I want to do. No more running into the jungle to shake out my demons. I think I'm going to let some of those demons just hang out for a while. I'll take embarrassingly tiny steps and lay some groundwork. I'm pretty sure I know how to do this.

Yes, The Olympics are Inspiring

Gabrielle Douglas Enacts the Human Experience

Feeling evil and watching the Olympics with my family, I accidentally did the thing I always try not to do, which is to go on a loud long bitter rant denouncing everything I'm jealous of. "I hate the Olympics. What is the point of the Olympics? All these young, beautiful, healthy people spending their entire lives in the pursuit of a meaningless goal? Fourteen-year-olds flinging themselves around bars, young Asian men with synchronized concussions, people making their bodies hurt when their bodies don't have to hurt. If I was healthy, I wouldn’t waste it like that! I mean, what's the fucking point?" 

My dad, who loves sports, answered my rhetorical question. "It's about being alive," he said simply, and turned back to the TV.

"I guess I just don't know what that's like!" I said, and stalked off into my room, feeling like a stereotype of a stereotype of a stereotype of an embittered invalid and a reverted adult living at home.

The weird thing is that half of the time when I make these out-of-control public rages, what I'm saying is actually the opposite of the truth. Honestly, I'm inspired by the Olympics. It's an appreciation that I've only recently acquired, and only fully recognized as I lay on my bed where I had tearfully flung myself after my teenage outburst. The Evil, i.e., my bitterness and jealousy, would have me not be able to take any joy from the things in the world of bodies I can no longer do. But there’s some good left in me, too, letting me get over it and begin to connect with something that's always been alien and opaque to me: sports and their mysterious meaning.

I've never understood them before. Perhaps there's a joie de vivre about moving your body that I don't have anymore. That's true often enough, but I didn't get sports even when I had a healthy body. Sports always seems so pointless to me. Get sweaty, hurt, lose, all to put a ball in a certain place a number of times. Of course, I've heard the "metaphor for life" theory before, that sports are about teamwork and strategy and hard work paying off, and outlet for warfare and survival in this tragically civilized society. But it wasn't the kind of metaphor I connected with. I am still a teenager; it's jocks versus art kids, and you gotta know where you stand. I always got picked last, never got the ball passed to me, never made friends with any of my teammates, and if you want a metaphor, write a fucking poem. 

Of course, this line of thinking isn't exactly sophisticated. I think it's more symptomatic of my tendency to elevate the intellectual over the physical, a tendency that is by no means the cause of my illness, but has tripped me up over and over again when I try to take care of my body. I'm not good at sports, and I don't understand sports, and if there's one thing I hate it's things I'm not good at and don't understand. I'm still the nerdy kid hanging out in my high school's gifted office, desperately looking down on the popular kids, channeling all my warfare and survival drives into the highest SAT scores and the most nuanced direction of No Exit. My economy didn't value moving your body for the sake of moving your body.

I guess it's the classic lesson learned too late, or scarcity creating value. Now I think it's bizarre to like art and not like sports. They are both about pre-intellectual motivations, about the defeat and glory of being human. Why would the arc of a dancer's leg move me, but not the arc of a perfectly executed spiral pass? Why is one method of contacting and expressing the subconscious better than another? Particularly when the athlete has to be so disciplined and rigorous in the pursuit of her goal, when so many artists (and I'm talking about myself here, obviously, illness aside) are really deep down lazy narcissistic bums? If I had even a fraction of the dedication and perseverance as these athletes, do you know how many novels I would've written by now? Do you know how many, uh… blog posts I would've written by now? And comics I would've drawn? And pugs I would own, and friendships I wouldn't have let slip away?

And so, slowly and very much from the sidelines, I'm beginning to have a genuine appreciation of people moving their bodies competitively for no intellectual reason, and drawing real inspiration from the Olympics. I'm sorry if this sounds like a 90s Nike commercial. Of course I'm ignoring the money, egos, exploitation, drugs, and concussions, but right now I'd rather just buy the Hellenistic Ideal that can't be completely destroyed by being sold so vigorously. And perhaps I can take even more direct inspiration from these athletes, not even filtering it through the language of metaphor. Because our bodies aren't just metaphors. If there's one thing I've learned from illness, it's that sometimes bodies just mean themselves. I can learn to joyfully move my body, for no reason, even now on such a humble scale.

Grendel

Grendel

I know that any good blog needs pictures, and I'm afraid I've been terribly remiss in this. Please accept my apologies, and this picture of my pug, Grendel. Tragically, she was disabled at a young age when she chewed on an electrical cord and brought an iron table down on her leg. Although the healing process was long and painful, she developed an abiding spiritual resilience and sense of humor that in the end made her a better dog.