But first, a joke.
If you combine lady fingers with Butterfingers, you get Lady Butterfingers, the world’s clumsiest female knight.
As opposed to Butterfinger, a chocolate bar has always sounded to me like a dairy themed Bond villain,.
“You see, Mister Bond, this yellow ray is actually a beam of pure cholesterol…. and it’s aimed straight at your heart. ”
Oh, and he would, of course, have a Wisconsin accent.
Lady Finger, on the other hand, has no obvious specialty, but she does seem to be really popular with the other royal ladies for some reason.
OK, enough shenanigans.
First, good news, I am still alive and nothing further along the “twinge then fall then nosebleed” type of thing.
I still feel rather frail and wobbly and a wee bit spooked. Death and disease have tiptoed over my tombstone, and I can feel their shadow still.
But I am pressing on.
I posted about The Incident on Facebook. Why? Well as my friend the Magnificent Em quite rightly pointed out. I posted about it to Facebook because I already knew what I ought to do and I just needed someone to tell me to go do it.
She is such a cool chick.
The answer, of course, is to see a friggin’ doctor, sooner rather than later.
Come to think of it, the whole “I’ll take care of this thing when I see the doctor next week” does sound like it comes straight from one of those “if only they had treated it sooner” stories about men who don’t take their health seriously until it is way too late.
So I am not going to wait until I see Doc Chao next Wednesday. I am going to go to the walk-in clinic nearby tomorrow afternoon.
Hopefully, they will be open on Good Friday. I swear, these things ALWAYS happen right before a holiday where everything closes.
I know I should have gone today, but I just couldn’t. You all know that I don’t do sudden. I needed the time to warm up to the idea.
If it turns out the clinic is closed, I guess I will just have to bite the bullet and go to Emergency at Richmond General Hospital.
It was originally a Lieutenant General Hospital, but it got promoted.
Anyhow, I dread going to Emergency but somebody has got to check me out for this shit ASAP. And I know that if I go there, there is a good chance they will admit me for at least as long as it takes to run a whack of tests.
Or even they don’t admit me,, my problem is not, as far as I know, urgent. so triage will ensure that I am there a really long time.
So I might as well pack a bag and take it with me if I have to go.
God, I hope I don’t have to go.
I had a serious revelation when I was writing all that previous stuff down.
Deep down, I feel like nobody could possibly love or respect someone who cannot work for a living.
Especially not if that person is me.
I am pretty shocked to find this floating around ibn my brain. If someone said that shit out loud in my presence I would land on them like a ton of bricks, verbally speaking.
But there it is. My deep deep shame at being a non-productive member of society extends so deeply into the very core of my being that I feel like my being disabled means I am impossible to romantically love.
For who could love one so foul and uiseless a thing as I?
Sounds pretty emo, don’t it.
Obviously, it’s not a statement I consciously agree with, but just as obviously that does not make this emotion disappear in a puff of insight.
It does mean I can start working on it, though. And that’s good. I can try to dig this poisonous vine out at the roots and watch it die.
Harsh image, but then again, I am crazy.
OK, so let’s do a deep dive on this shame. Like my man Nietzsche said, let’s overcome by going under.
I had no idea it was there, but it makes sense. I know that I have dreaded the moment when someone asks you what you do for a living.
Possible answers include :
- “As little as possible! *fake laughter*
- “I sign checks for the government. The hours are short but you don’t get a lot of them. The hourly rate is amazing, though. “
- “I’m an unemployable drain on society. You?”
- “Right now my job is “not killing myself”. Takes up most of my time. “
- “You call this living? *fake laughter*
And so forth and so on.
See, the worst part is that before someone asks me that question, I can pretend to be a normal, intact, functional human being.
But once that line is crossed, everything changes, and people look at me differently. Especially after I tell them I am disabled due to depression.
No matter how cool they are, some part of them just doesn’t buy it. And with those who do, I now bear the stigma of mental illness.
“Uh oh, better keep him away from the cutlery. ”
It’s very unfair that I feel ashamed of my inability to earn my own keep via productive labor. I certainly wouldn’t think less of anyone else who was disabled.
But part of the tragedy of having a wounded sense of self is that the rules for others and the rules for yourself aren’t even on the same shelf.
They’re barely in the same library.
And of course, I know, on a completely different level, that I am an amazing person with an incredible intellect and loads and loads of talent, and that I have so much to offer the world when I am ready to do so.
But that’s head knowledge. Tell that to my heart, my soul, and my spirit.
You can find them undergoing triage in the Emergency Room.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.