So I’m writing a NEW BOOK. This is PRETTY GREAT. This comes after a year in which I couldn’t do much at all, because my body accidentally exploded. It’s extremely good to be back at work so fully. I am definitely moving along the recovery road. But I’m also on a deadline, which means that my body is under some stress. Stress seems to trigger relapses. I don’t get as sick as I was before, but it does mean that I often feel like I’ve been pushed ever so gently down a flight of stairs that’s covering up another flight of stairs.
On these occasions, I want to yell WHAT and also WHY and sometimes I THOUGHT YOU WERE GONE.
I’d been told that recovering from a long-term illness was not a straightforward process. Baby steps, say the doctors. My physical therapist told me, “As you start to move forward, your body is going to do some weird things.” This apparently has to do with something about muscles releasing chemicals and different chemical exchanges and neurological firings, but let’s keep it real and say it’s ghosts. Because neurological damage is weird and sometimes it feels like I have a POLTERGEIST.
Like the general house poltergeist, my body poltergeist has a weird daily agenda. Maybe the house poltergeist likes to flip the china cups upside down and leave brooms on the table. My body poltergeist throws neurological switches all the time. Today, maybe it’s just going to make me feel like my legs are burning or that something is crawling on my arm. Tomorrow, it makes my left arm weigh too much to move. The more I work, the more it rattles around. As I draw power down to write and concentrate, it switches back on the pain. If it gets really angry I get dizzy again or have trouble with my vision.
When this happens, I have the old thoughts of, “What if I can never do all the things I did before?” I think about moving around and exercising and traveling and going on book tours. I think of simple things and grand ones. But then I realize that a year ago I couldn’t walk well and now I can walk just fine and am basically FINE except for the times I’m not and so what.
And then it stops and nothing happens at all! And I forget. Forgetting is exciting. Forgetting is what makes it weirder when it returns. I get impatient. It’s like I had an uninvited guest, and every time I think they’ve finally gone, they reappear and say, “Oh hey I forgot my brush oh I’ll just stay for Doritos and maybe a week I’ll just sleep here on your bed and use your toothbrush.”
Then I saw this drawing by rubyetcand I suddenly understood what I had to do:
Like the baby, I kept getting mad because I wasn’t THERE. But there is no there there. I am what I am right now, and I’ll be what I am tomorrow, and in a week, and so on and so forth. This IS the dance. So many of us have things we swing in and out of. It could be something that manifests in mostly in the muscle and bone, or depression or anxiety, or a life condition or a relationship or state that we have to work with. It’s OUR DANCE.
So okay. I have to take little lizard steps. I LIKE LITTLE LIZARD STEPS. I especially like jazzy ones. I will write my book, and if the one arm doesn’t want to work, I’ll work with the other.
And I make sure to do ACTUAL LITTLE JAZZY LIZARD STEPS every day. I dance them out in the living room. It excites the dog. Once you take a few actual lizard steps, you realize how cool they are.
In any case, a book will be finished soon! And I hope wherever you are, you are dancing too. Let’s do some lizard steps together.
[Also, make sure to click on rubyetc. She is SO GREAT. Here is her twitter.]
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