Feeling a lot better today.
Low bar. Yesterday was awful. I was various forms of miserable all day. Dunno what kind of infection I had/have but I would categorize it as “pretty darn bad”.
Like I said yesterday, I was lucky enough to sleep through a lot of the day. The feeling of being drained was profound. Not entirely unpleasant. Rather relaxing a minority of the time, in fact. But still not real fun.
Right after I ordered my pasta from Pizza Hut, I ordered 3 2L bottles of Diet Coke from 7-11. Gotta feed the habit after all.
Why 7-11? Because I forgot to order them with my Pizza Hut. D’oh.
But after getting my Pizza Hut order from the door, I was way too messed up and tired and frankly freaked out to go get the 7-11 when it arrived.
So my two liters just sat there by our door until Joe got home from work and was nice enough to take them in for me.
The beginning of the end of my illness was when I fell asleep around 8:30 pm and woke up shortly before midnight and realized I felt a lot better.
Not out of the woods yet, but the trees were thinning and I could smell meadow flowers.
So much to my surprise, I ended up hanging out with Felicity (via Zoom) and Joe as per usual for a Friday night. I was not exactly at my sparkling best but I enjoyed myself.
I had assumed that was NOT in the cards when I was so sick. I figured I would be lucky to manage to eat, let alone hang with my friends.
I have been on the mend since. At first, I still had a lot of trouble eating. But not because of negative appetite like before.
Because food now gave me a sick, sore feeling in my stomach and while that was going on, eating was impossible, so I had to wait for the pain to go away between bites.
Which slowed things down considerably.
I seem to be past that now, knock on metaphorical wood. Currently eating my lunch with no issues besides a bit of gas.
So I figure that nasty bug is on its way out. Thank goodness. I really did not want to end up having to go to the ER with it.
It is not a happy place.
But if it had hung on, I would have gone anyway. Damn it.
I learned the second-hardest way not to fuck around with that kind of thing when I went to the ER for my pneumonia and they tested my respiratory function and told me that if I had waited another day, I might not have made it at all.
Yikes. Message received.
Honestly, what saved me was a come to Jesus moment where part of my mind said “Look, you idiot, this isn’t normal, get your ass to the hospital now!”.
Man had a point. Nice to know that in an emergency situation, there’s a sensible circuit in my brain that can override my usual hazy state of mind and make me focus on, ya know, not fucking dying.
The possibility of dying of a lack of common sense has lurked in my mind ever since I was an accident prone child.
There’s penalties for being a dreamer who spends most of the time in the world inside his head, even when he is also dealing with the world outside it.
More after the break.
My life isn’t wasted
Okay, time for another bold step in correcting my internal narrative.
I’ve often bemoaned how I have wasted my life playing video games and hiding from the world while my peers zoom ever further ahead of me by having lives.
After all, here I am, almost 48 years old, with very little to show for my time on Earth.
Or so it would seem. But it’s not like I’ve been in a coma. I’ve lived. I’ve learned. I’m consumed staggering amounts of media. This all counts.
And I have thought. Thought deeply and well about all the things I have learned and all the things I see in the world. And by doing so, I have discovered patterns in the world that nobody can see but me. I understand things that are unfathomable mysteries to most of humanity. And I see things most people do not know even exist.
I am the rare fish who knows he’s wet.
In fact, my life so far can be seen as a long time spent gathering wisdom and generating insight into the world. Like a monk in a cell or a philosopher in drafty garret, I have isolated myself from the world and spent enormous amounts of time reading voraciously and contemplating this crazy old thing called life.
So while this is not the life I would have chosen for myself, it is emphatically not a waste of time or worthless. It’s made me who I am today, good AND bad, and I can’t reject the bad without rejecting the good.
And let us not forget that I am quite ill. I have Avoidant Personality Disorder (AVPD) and it makes true contact with reality very difficult for me. I have such a deep-seated fear of rejection that it keeps me locked in this urban hermit lifestyle even though I know I have all kinds of skills and abilities that would serve me well in the real world.
Given my illness, I have hung in there rather well. I socialize both online and in the real world. I write 1000 words a day on this here blog o’ mine. And I make it through the day.
And all this is leading somewhere. Some day, it will all come together, and I will be ready to climb down from my mountaintop and share my wisdom with the world.
I am serene in my sense of this destiny. This will come to pass. I will emerge from this long darkness in order to shed my light upon the world.
Assuming I manage to live that long.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.