Chronic Pain, Life Consumer #1

Where you in an accident? Is this a sports injury? Nope, people. I'm just clumsy.
I fell on the sidewalk in front of my house. Something people probably do everyday. But in my case, 15 years of other injuries plus a recent trip to Paris in which I did physically in 10 days what I probably hadn't done in 10 years, that spill onto my right side somehow injured my spine, which led to a ruptured disc, and rendered me partially immobile for seven months and counting.
Sometimes the pain is worse than others. But sometimes I think it is less about how much it hurts and more about how I can cope that day. Most of the time, I wake up stiff and very sore. I shower, eat, start my daily routine. The pain cuts across my back and feels like some huge Andre the Giant-type person has picked me up and twisted me like you do bubble wrap when your tired of popping the bubbles individually and want to hear that satisfying crunch, crunch, crunch sound. Only my pain isn't quite that pleasurable.
But I make it through the day. If I am feeling energetic (I know, a seeming oxymoron but most days I feel normal-just hurting), I will go swim. My daily goal is a minimum of 10, but I am always pushing for 20 laps. If I am unable to swim, I lie around the house a lot, reading, writing, maybe chatting on the phone. I try to make myself walk 20-30 minutes, usually after dark when the Mississippi summer heat has subsided some.
What really gets me is the days that I cannot make myself swim. It seems that if I can swim, then I can somehow get through the day feeling there is hope that I will recover from this after all. But on days when sipping coffee all day still can't manage to get me off the couch, that's the days that I need to be blogging. Because if I can focus on others, encourage someone else in ways to cope with the pain, then it makes it less overwhelming for me. Maybe that's selfish, but that's what we have to do. Help someone else to take our minds off ourselves. So what are you tips? How do you make it through the day?

Pebbles & Pearls

Pebbles & Pearls

I credit an article entitled, "Magical Living" by Readicker-Henderson in the July/ August 2007 issue of AARP magazine for helping me to let go of so much toxic anger this semester that has resulted in my unshakeable joy, even in the midst of sorrow. I feel pretentious comparing my sufferings to someone with Crohn's disease, but I think his journey to self-discovery is universal.

For nearly twenty years, Readicker-Henderson was trying to learn how to deal with the fact that he had limitations that kept him from being the healthy man of his youth who could do anything he determined to do. It was not until he began to lose his eyesight and hopped a plane to Alaska to watch the beluga whales swim and hear them "honk and bark at each other" that he realized what his wife had been trying to tell him for years in order to cope with his illness: he needed to shut up more and just listen. In other words, not focus on what he couldn't do, but find the silver lining in his suffering and just listen. He had to learn to enjoy having to slow down and enjoy the world at a slower pace.

It was decades after his diagnosis before he was able to come to peace and find something positive amidst his pain. He credits his wife for showing him if it weren't for his illness that he would never have slowed down and appreciated his humanity and other beauties of life.

Readicker-Henderson says he is beginning to regain his eyesight, and of course, appreciates it now more than ever.

"It may take longer to walk down the beach...but that just gives me time to contemplate the white feathers on the egret," he says now of his illness. Rather than focusing on what he can't do, Readicker-Henderson says, "Each morning I wake up and think 'what's possible today', not 'what has to be done'."

Even though he came to a point where he accepted his lot in life and began to make the most of it, he still has days that he rages against his pain. I loved that he admitted that human side of himself. In that respect, he reminded me of Andrea Coller,winner of the 2008 Glamour non-fiction writing contest that I blogged about on July 19. He still makes mistakes, but his determination to be happy and as healthy as possible far outweighs the momentary desire to rage.

LOVE/HATE relationships

Writers describe way to become a writer as "falling in love with writing. not the idea of it, but the actuality."
Barry Hannah told me, paraphrasing from Faulkner, that if I wanted to be a writer that he couldn't help me, but if I wanted to Write, well then, that was a different story.
I do wanna write. Always. With everything in me, I want to write. I only do it because I must. Or I wouldn't do it. Because it is lonely, solitary, mostly unrewarding in a monetary sense. And it takes A LOT OF TIME. Time that I really wanna spend doing other things sometimes. But I have to do it.
And I do love doing it. Except for when I hate it.
Things I hate about writing:
I never seem to have a good story. A really good story.
I try to record other people's good real-life stories, borrow and make them mine. But I haven't perfected this yet, nor invented any really good ones of my own.
I don't generally like the people associated with the business. They're pretty snobby, what with their good grammar and all.
It is solitary. and when you get on a good roll, it can even hurt. Because you can't stop, no matter how cramped your hands get or how bad your back hurts. Because it must be done
It also hurts to want to tell stories so badly in a way that profoundly affects people and then realize you're just not very good at something you want to do more than breathe. YET.

Things to love:
Creation. It's exhilirating.
words on a page that sing with authenticity and some type of poetry and beauty and trueness.
Again, creation. Nothing tops it.
The fact that someone might get something from something you wrote. Important life-changing stuff.
Finding and making lifelong friends with others who share this strange and exhilirating passion. People who understand this life-consuming, heart-wrenching love.

Fortunately, I'm great at handling rejection. It's a very important part of making it as an artist of any medium. I've never taken it personally. My friends attribute it to my sales experience, noting it makes me a good salesperson bc I realize there are plenty more people out there who will say yes. You just have to ask a lot of people to get to that yes.

But it's actually my experience in the theatre that was the greatest help. Auditions taught me that sometimes it wasn't about your ability to bring a character to life. Sometimes you just didn't happen to fill certain criteria a director was looking for: a certain look, style, etc. Things that one person couldn't possible fullfill in every role. So you audition for a bunch until you meet your match. You ask a ton of people before you get a yes, I'd be glad to buy your product. You knock on millions of doors of befriend millions online to get elected into office. It's about numbers. Everybody's number is different. Larry Brown wrote for seven years before he had something published. How long is it going to take me. What's my magic number? What's yours?

Accept It, Life Happens

I was fortunate to have a scholarship to study creative writing in Paris last winter.
While there, I had some money stolen. I never told my parents because I didn'tt want them to worry. (Of course I realize they're very likely to find out now).
But as I was trying to cope with the loss and actualities like, "how am I going to eat in Paris on $40 for 8 days?," (it turns out that you can but the trip was practically over before I learned these things,) I emailed a few close friends as a way to calm the panicky feeling of being in a foreign country for days with little to no money for food.
I knew there was a possibility of borrowing money but I didn't want to deal with the consequences of more strain on my already-strapped budget when I returned. (If I'd known I was going to suffer a spinal injury in less than three weeks that was going to keep me unemployed for almost a year, if not longer, I would really have been panicking.)
Mon amies all had their different ways to encourage me during such an emotionally strung-out time. But friend, and fellow writer, Susan Cushman's was the most drastically different.

"The Orthodox Christian wisdom on this sort of stuff is, I think, a little different than the Protestant Evangelical response, in this way:

The Prot.Evans tend to say, "God has a purpose for this happening; be open to learning from Him."

The Orthodox tend to say, "There really wasn't anything supernatural about the fact that... the money got stolen. We all make mistakes, and someone was probably tempted and stole. Don't beat up on yourself (or the thief) but instead try to learn the lesson of, as you've already said, being calm and accepting of the circumstance."

You know, having the love and encouragement of my closest friends was essential.
It gave me someone to cry to, and then get over it. But it was Susan's response that has gotten the most mileage with me.

(To read more of Susan's sagacity, click below.)

wwwpenandpalette-susancushman.blogspot.com/

So far, seven months of my life have been altered because of this accident. I can't sit, work, drive. My financial situation is bleak, my future prospects are nil, and there is a great chance I will hurt like this for the rest of my life. And I have no medical insurance and I refused to go to the doctor until I could find help with the bills, thus prolonging the treatment.

I'm fortunate that I do have help now with an organization called Vocational Rehabilitation, but I'm still impatient on many days. I want relief and I want it seven months ago. In the meantime, I'm trying to find ways to use this opportunity to learn as much as possible: how does God want me to maximize this time, how can I serve others within this limited capacity, what Purpose does this, hopefully temporary, disability serve?

Then I read this article on glamour.com. Andrea Coller, the creative non-fiction essay contest winner in 2008 the year would be my age if she hadn't died days before her essay was published from Hodgkin's disease. Instead of the strong, brave, noble persona we associate with people with terminal illness, Coller bucks that notion and admits her fear and what many would consider her less than noble ways of dealing with cancer. Read her very real way of dealing with Hodgkin's here:

www.glamour.com/magazine/2008/05/essay-winner-surviving-cancer

But even Coller knew that she had to find a purpose in her illness in order to cope with it. For her, it was writing.

"I can't wait to get back to my life. And I'm going to write more. I think this whole experience has finally dragged me, kicking and screaming, into writing a memoir. This disease needs to start paying for itself!" Coller said in an interview with Glamour's "Life With Cancer" columnist and blogger, Erin Zammett Ruddy.

Stories like this are teaching me that I definitely have to make something productive of this time. Learn something. Do something I ordinarily wouldn't have the time to do. I just wish I could have this time AND felt cooking, cleaning, playing something outside with my son. But I know I'm not as sick as others. So, even though my physical therapist warns about me overdoing it, I've got to Get Up and Get My Life Back. Because I CAN.

Broken English

For any literary lover in Oxford who has never attended Broken English, you need to change that status. The first Wednesday of each month that school is in session, 2 MFA students, usually one poet and one fiction writer, reads aloud from their work at the Jubilee.

They advertise that they start at 8:30 pm, but rarely do. Except this past Wednesday night when I actually had a babysitter but didn't arrive until about 8:45. So, I missed the first reader, Wendy, who I was curious to hear because I'd met her a few months ago and you always wanna hear the work of people you know.

But, luckily, I did get to hear Tim Earley. I had no idea he was even reading, so it was a surprise and delight to hear his poetry. Tim was my T.A. for Shakespeare last year, and I knew he had an MFA, but never read any of his work.

There were no books for sale, of course, but after hearing his poetry and learning he had an out-of-print collection of poetry, I decided I definitely wanted to buy a copy of Boondoggle someday. I even managed to find two copies on Alibris.com for $12 each.

My favorite was one of the country poems in which he used the line, “ a chandelier over our garden tub, makes me believe in me and you”. I love the subject matter because I can definitely relate to people who have formaldehyde smell in their home because their trailer is new and “we were rich”.

That one Wednesday a month is always a treat, and Tim did not disappoint.