I’m not feeling great at the moment.
A partial explanation as to why can be found here :
But now I have had a bit of a nap and woke up feeling worse than before. I feel pretty ill at the moment. My breathing is slightly rough, my lungs and throat and just inside my ear canals feel raw and sore, my muscles ache, and I have a nasty headache.
So I might be becoming ill with my usual flu-like bullshit. Or worse.
I will hydrate and rest and get Vitamin C and see how things turn out. Hopefully this will turn out to be just another one of my weird transient ailments and by this time tomorrow it will be gone and forgotten.
But, as always, I will be monitoring the situation, ready to flee to the ER or UC if things take a turn for the worse.
Right now, my symptoms are mild. But having had pneumonia that might well have killed me once in my life, I desperately want to keep it from happening again.
I distinctly remember the day I went to the hospital for the pneumonia. I was getting ready to go hang out with Le Gang on a Friday night when I had a real “come to Jesus” moment of clarity where I examined how I felt and came to the conclusion that how I felt was NOT normal and I had to go to the ER.
That’s when the triage nurse was so shocked by how low my blood oxygen was that she instantly turns the oximeter away from me so I couldn’t see the reading and went and got a more senior nurse, plus another young nurse, to come see.
I could tell by the wide-eyed and worried looks they were giving me that I was in serious trouble. And what followed was 8 or 9 days in the hospital, on oxygen and heavy duty IV antibiotics most of that time, and the distinct feeling of having dodged a bullet.
I am quite pleased with that “this is not normal” moment. I feel like that judgment, which may well have saved my life, was very mature and adult of me. It meant that I had to disrupt my plans for that evening in order to go to the hospital, which is never fun, and I am very glad I made that call.
It proved that I am not a total idiot when it comes to looking after myself.
When I was talking to not-Galina today, she mentioned how if I could somehow pay for someone to deep clean this room of mine, the province might spring for a service to come keep things clean.
That would be nice. And looking around this room of mine, it’s really just the end of the room with my computer in it that needs cleaning, plus the bathroom.
And the bathroom is not that bad.
Now I doubt that cleaning services have the option to pay for just half a room to be cleaned. In fact they might have like a three room minimum or somesuch.
And there is also the fact that Joe and Julian do technically owe me a thorough room cleaning as that’s what I have asked for as a present for two birthdays in the past.
I suppose the compromise would be for them to pay for the room cleaning. That way their obligation would be discharged without them having to do it.
Now I am going to go lay down for a while in hopes of feeling better when I wake up.
More after the break.
How I really am
Was re-watching this recent video of mine when it occurred to me that I have no idea how to even tell how I really am.
That’s how disconnected from my true self I have become. The very question is painfully perplexing to me.
I don’t think I am capable of ever answering the question, “But how are you REALLY?” honestly even to myself.
Don’t look at me. I don’t fucking know.
My instant gut level response is “bad”. I know I am not truly well. I know that, deep down, I am a very sick man who has been suffering from the effects of a mind malformed by a deep and terrible untreated trauma for almost 50 years.
And I am only 52.
I get through life, such as it is, by ignoring that scared little animal deep inside me and living a life where I never have to decide what to do with myself and I can spend almost every waking hour pretending to be someone I am not.
Who is also the person who I would rather be. And that’s a big problem.
Because it means I never face the true causes of my problems. I escape them instead.
Because who wants to be scared and sad and filled with trauma and pain? When there is a very well established alternative?
Sure, in the long term, it’s a terrible alternative. It’s like treating a toothache with pain medication instead of going to the dentist to get it fixed. Sure, it treats the symptoms, but the root problem festers onward.
And in a way, I feel like that’s what I have been doing with my therapeutic journey. Therapy and journaling and vlogging help, but at the end of the day, they mostly just make me feel better in the short term while long term progress remains painfully slow.
But I don’t feel like I have the spiritual resources to speed the journey along via transformation. I can’t imagine going on some kind of deep mystical introspective journey that bypasses my heavily compromised rational mind and its corrupt gatekeeping in order to manipulate the symbols of my mind directly and allow me to do that badly needed surgery on myself that would let me heal.
So, instead, I just keep spinning my wheels, getting next to nowhere, knowing I am getting closer to liberation every day but also knowing that my progress is so slow that I might die before I truly get anywhere.
But hey. As long as progress is being made, right?
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.