This Donut Hurts

I haven't really felt like discussing it here because it depresses me and I spend most of my waking hours either discussing it with myself in my head or tormenting my sister, NU, or my mom with my latest fears and obsessions about it, but it's feeling slightly ok today, so I'm going to spend some time discussing my lower back. More specifically, I'm going to discuss the crap that hovers around the disc at L5/S1 in my spine which is herniated and currently pressing on my sciatic nerve. This (imagine that your disc is a jelly donut and that the jelly is made of fire and your vertabrae are crushing the donut and forcing the fire-jelly to harden and constantly burn your nerve, which is like...a nerve) causes me horrific pain in my back and leg on good days and horrific pain, numbness, and muscle spasms on bad days. I won't mention the terrible days.

Needless to say, I can't walk. I mean I have to walk sometimes, but when I do I look like I'm about 80 years old. People look at me strangely on the street--like they pity me or want to stay away from me. At one point NU described my pain gait as my "pimp limp" which often helps me as I'm stumbling around trying to pick up my dog's poop without screaming too loudly. I think about her saying this and I think about me being a pimp, and sometimes this makes me laugh out loud. Lately though, I've been too depressed to try to make myself laugh. All I can think about is getting back inside where I can lie on the floor and feel horribly alone. Pain sucks. It is one of the loneliest things in the world because you can't really describe it to anyone in a way that makes sense. You're just alone with it, in the way that you're just alone with yourself.

More than anything, this lack of walking sucks. I am a walker. I walk fast and I walk everywhere. I think nothing of the 20 minute walk to the subway station, I walk my dog all over the neighborhood, I used to walk to work when I had a job--I walk anywhere I can. Now I stumble to my car, drive to the subway, stumble onto the train, and grimace my way to my chiropractor's office, which is downtown in a fancy neighborhood (though he himself is neither "downtown" nor "fancy"). A dude has to deliver my groceries. I haven't figured out yet how to vacuum or take out my trash, which explains the squalor, which explains some of the depression. Some.

I've tried a lot of things and currently have 5 doctors helping me--one I hate (my neurologist) one I feel ambivalent toward (my former physical therapist), one I just met and love but feel weird about (my healer who lives in CA and does sessions over the phone--more on him later if I don't chicken out) my chiropractor (also just met and love him but am uncertain about him) and my new physical therapist (haven't met her yet--but her name is Sunshine). Remember that I just walked out of my job. I have COBRA but it doesn't pay for the new age healer, surprisingly enough. I have very little income. I have a lot of time for worrying (also a lot of time for meditating and healing, but I'm not there right now--I'm moving toward it). I had surgery for this condition over 10 years ago, and I don't believe in doing it again. But I also don't believe in navigating this already challenging life while I'm hobbling, clutching onto rails and swearing under my breath, yelling at my dog, and trying for hours to find a comfortable sleeping position (there isn't one).

The healer helped. He eliminated my pain completely. Twice. And then it came back, the way my ego constantly comes back when I meditate. It doesn't want to go away. Yes, I have a disc pressing on a live nerve, but I've had this for quite some time without this amount of pain. It's like it's the memory of the pain that doesn't want to leave. Like the way my past doesn't want to leave--it stays in my head and is sometimes more real than my present, which is actually full of many things I asked for and got--basically, the life I want is right here all around me. I feel like I've spent the last two year churning around in some giant soul-renewal machine--I clanged around and got beaten and welded by my divorce, leaving the midwest, moving in with a stranger, learning to dislike this stranger, having a horrible job and leaving it, and many other things. I asked for a job that would bring me some joy (I got it--I'll be teaching high school in January), my own apartment ( I've been asking for this since before I was married) and a relationship that would actually help me to grow (I have many, and have learned that I can also have this with someone I'm sleeping with, and in fact this very growth factor is what sustains my attraction to him).

This morning I looked around and saw all of this stuff. I think the machine finally dumped me out here, with only part of a half-grown soul, in a life I want. I am physically damaged by it. But I got something else: a month to heal. Actually, a lifetime to heal. It's so much easier to see it this way when I'm not doubled over in pain so I'm going to try to stay here for as long as I can.

I guess I'll probably change my mind about this soon, otherwise what's the point in having a blog

One of the best days in my recent trip to England was the rainy day we spent in a very cozy room with a fire, alternately watching TV, drinking tea, and making out. One of the things that came on was this weird American movie from the the 40s on Channel 4. It was about a woman whose husband leaves her for a rich old lady. The spurned wife starts a chain of beachfront restaurants and wins the affections of a smarmy mustache guy who ultimately hates her because she has to work for a living (even though he keeps asking her for money) and smells like a restaurant. The woman has one good daughter who dies and one bad daughter who steals her boyfriend. This woman's life keeps getting worse and worse, and for some reason it was all hilarious to me, even though there were a lot of parallels with my life, except my husband left me for a rich young lady I don't have any kids to steal my boyfriend. And I don't own restaurants, etc., etc. The theme of "it sucks to be a broad on your own" was really funny to me, I guess because it hasn't changed at all in movies or in our collective unconcious. Also, R. is in a play now where he's playing an annoying American in a kind of Noel Cowardesque drawing room comedy, and the dialogue seemed sort of perfect for him. For someone who's spent his whole adult life in the States, his American accent is really bad. English people almost always do Southern accents when trying to emulate us. Maybe it's because of George Bush.

I went to one rehearsal of the play, which is community theater. R.'s friend, a 65-year old millionaire, is playing the butler, and kept fucking up his lines because he had just smoked a bunch of crack. Earlier that morning, a lone horse had stopped by the cottage just to, you know, say What's up. A three-legged dog down the road is the protectress of a small dairy farm, where the cows wander up from the valley of their own accord every evening at five to be milked. R. screamed at his French ex-soon-to-be-tenant "Get off my property, you French asshole!" He yelled this in Spanish. The very kind old woman who insists on doing R's laundry gave me a long sad look when I didn't answer her question about getting married. Or I didn't answer it right. She gave me this look over a plate of very tiny pancakes ("flapjack") she had made and a very elaborate tea set. Then she asked if R. could take the hoover upstairs because of her hip. And open this jar. Every morning I watched the sun come up while lying in bed and often there was coffee brought to me during this event. Every night I watched the sun go down and the moon come up. The wind was like a person. Can you understand why I want to live there? If I get my wish, I'll live there part of every year.

I keep feeling like I have to justify everything. Why am I quitting my job? Why do I have a boyfriend who lives in England? Why do I like living alone in a very expensive apartment in one of the most expensive cities anywhere? I have these very tiring, intense conversations with my family members where I exhaustively explain each of these things. I'm gettting really sick of it, actually, because I don't think they really care. And I realize that I'm probably really Explaining It All To Myself, but I don't even think I need an explanation. I've always felt that I need some kind of story to parallel all of my activities, like a mini commentator showing the world that yes indeedy, I am one important motherfucker. My brain won't shut up--I keep thinking about the line from that Mary Ruefle poem where she says her mind is like the back of a tapestry. Every time I meditate, I have to dig past all of those twisted and knarled threads, and sometimes I just kind of get buried in the mire, rather than get out on the other side, where there is most surely light and peace and maybe levitation? I'm alone almost all of the time, but things are freaking loud in here. I want the things I do to just be the things I do, without analysis. This is what I want today. I was going to try to draw a parallel with movie I discussed at the beginning, but you know what--never mind.

Basically I'm a tired, naked spider. Or dirt.

Just at the moment I was putting my first post up, the neighbors from whom I've been stealing my internet access moved out, and now I'm internetless. This morning I am at one of the miniscule cafes in this city--I came here with the intention of applying to two jobs and grading lessons for my distance students. Instead I'm doing this while listening to the man next to me make some of the most horrific eating and drinking noises I've ever heard. I admit that loud chewing, smacking, and slurping is kind of a pet peeve of mine, but this guy is taking it to a whole new level. It reminds me of how happy I am that I live alone and I don't have to listen to someone else being human all the time. It also reminds me that I've never noticed any of these kinds of sounds emanating from R., and if I did I might find them sort of cute, and how, with the exception of one or two little things, he really does absolutely nothing that bothers me, and how unexpected and unfamiliar this is. Of course, he lives on a different continent, which makes hearing any sounds he makes difficult. (I think this guy next to me may actually be sucking on his scone.)

There are so many things I want to write about, but I don't know where to start. I think this blog is going to be a kind of way for me to sort out all of this stuff that's been unearthed during this giant physical and spirtual upheaval I'm going through. (Oh, I will be earnest in this blog. Just wait. I will be earnest as hell.) Two metaphors come to mind: one is a plant growing via speeded up film--all of that dirt underneath coming up quickly and haphazardly. If gravity didn't exist it would be a tumbling upward. I'm the dirt in that metaphor. The other is a new one I'm sort of sinking into this morning, as R. just gave it to me last night. When he was little he had a pet tarantula who shed its skin once a year. He said watching it get rid of its skin was scary and painful, and when the skin was gone, sitting like a little spider suit next its nude former owner, the naked spider looked like it was dead. It didn't move or eat for a couple of days. In this metaphor I'm a naked, dead-looking spider. Because my life span is longer than a spider's it might take me a few years to get my new skin, rather than a few weeks. It seems to be taking a very long time, and sometimes it hurts very very badly. To my family, it looks like I have a terrible, horrible life that has been horrible for two years. Sometimes it looks like this to me also. But sometimes it just looks like a life that is trying to become something completely other than what it was, and by definition this can't be easy. I don't want my life to be easy though, I guess. At least I have to keep telling myself this.

I promise that at some point I will discuss actual events that are taking place, but I have to say that one of my new symptoms is that I prefer to live via metaphor. I love Jung's autobiography because he hardly mentions anything physical that he does, other than rituals. In the chapter "Travels," he writes about going to India, but mostly discusses conversations he had with a guru and visions he had. I had a vision (that's right, I said "vision"--more on this later) nearly a month ago that has given me very valuable information about what is happening to my soul right now. It makes sense to me that in the midst of this internal change that my external world is still shifting--my job going away, my boyfriend away and staying away. There is literally a big question mark over my face right now (not my physical face). But this isn't a bad thing. It's not really a good thing either. It's just a thing.

I'm still really self-conscious about my spirtuality--I grew up in a fundamentalist household, where hell is real and the devil is a mean guy with a pitchfork who wants to tempt you and make you his slave. So I spent my twenties either completely ignoring this by being secular and earthly, thinking that my poetry came from my brain, or feeling horribly guilty and begging God to forgive my horrible dirty pasttimes and maybe, just maybe save me from eternal poo-shoveling in some sweaty underworld. What is happening now is not ignorable though, because it comes totally from me. I'm creating my own "religion" not because I decided to, but because I'm just doing it. I have had several guides in both book and human form, but basically I'm making this up as I go. And it's really the only thing that's ever made sense to me. But I'm still going to make fun of myself for it periodically. And then give myself a backrub and some tea and a nice warm sleepy dog to cuddle with, because I'm just really, really tired.