Hospital Reflection 4


Find myself down here in southern cal at my parents house with an infectious tick bite, which isn’t such a big deal. It’s really just a small thing, but looked at in the context of the last few months of medical emergencies with my sister, it seems totally absurd, almost laughable.  But I’m not laughing–instead I’m digging myself into a hole of perpetual illness where those close to me and myself are very related and interdependent. It’s hard to deal with ongoing illness in life–it becomes an obsessive thing because its so destabilizing.

I’m seeing the relationships with friends and loved ones become shaky in the face of nervousness and instability. My family is small and dysfunctional, although not in the biggest way. This makes  how we get along much more special because of the skill it takes for us to put our differences aside. This I see as strength–something that is lacking in my life in general sometimes, but usually in a small way that simply requires a change in mindset. But this ongoing process of illness is different. It’s during great destabilizations in a life that your life story gets rewritten, new contexts for a possible life emerge, things get more complicated. It’s where what you think you want to do and what you think you need to do are all fucked up in your head. Like a flowing river, where the people in your life float down and sometimes say hello, but otherwise you are somewhere else.

Everyone has different expectations of those they claim to love, and these expectations are under a microscope right now, as things are so shaky. By shaky, I mean this: When my sister has a simple headache, we have to decide if she needs to go to the emergency room. And I mean this: Looking back at the last 5 months and seeing blood and hospitals, interspersed by carefree happiness and then back again to the ER waiting room. Watching my hope get eaten away. Watching despair sink in when all the doctors don’t know what really is going on. And at the same time, fighting against this type of life inertia. By shaky I mean this: Realizing that I usually live a good life and smile alot, but super emotional things (the uncertainty that eats away at my sense of a stable life) pile up which eventually turn me into a desperate person–a person that drives others away because of an obsessive and passionate nature.

Things bleed together in my mind because the backdrop of my thoughts is shifting constantly. How much of this is the result of actual events happening and how much of this is only in my head is debatable. It’s hard to want something so bad, like for my sister be healthy, and then deal over and over again with the frustration of having that not happen. Every human has a breaking point, and I wonder where mine is sometimes. Or maybe we don’t break, but we just recontextualize ourselves constantly so as to not lose it completely.

I Try to look at what I am motivated by. The things that keep me happy. My family, the people I love, the things I do-music, art, writing, talking. With all the emergencies that have happened with my family, stress is created in the wake between myself and the people I think I depend on. Depend-dependence-my weak nature? Or is it normal to need people? We grow up in our alienated universes and break out of our stifling communities, reject our society’s values, and then we fall back on each other, we second guess ourselves and what we are doing. 

I take a break for a while and sit around, and then I realize looked at in a certain way, none of this is a big deal, the universe works the way it does and we deal with it. If this is the absolute case, I am in the wrong being so negative and I also should not expect others I love to break out of their lives and universes to bail me out of my own self centered universe. But I don’t want bailing out, nor do I want others to interrupt their lives for me. If we are confused and frustrated, I say it’s better together than apart. There is no interruption in lives that really feel they are connected. There is no right way to be or act, no thresholds for any sort of behavior. People choose if they want to be involved in someone’s life.

Is it possible to navigate through different people’s worlds not exactly knowing what you are feeling sometimes, not knowing what to say, to try and be honest and real, and maintain some semblance of connectedness? Sometimes sadness lasts for a while. There are reasons for people’s sadness. I know this, but my reaction, before I try to figure out why, is to try and figure out how to be there for someone. In this way, my life is connected to and also is totally (and sometimes uncomfortably) affected by those around me.

I do not have an idea of an ideal life, or a good understanding of what it means to be a completely self supporting person. I have never seen this in anyone I have known, nor have I been provided any example of what this means.  The scariest thing is realizing at the end of the day, we cannot help but be connected, and also, this connection is not dependent on what you want it to be.