Day 19

I got up this morning, had breakfast and started writing, as usual. I began with three pages of free writing, what Julia Cameron calls, "morning pages." This usually gives me some direction in term of the content I want to focus on for the blog.

I wrote out the question: "What should I blog about today?" The answer was immediate: "Healing." I have been focused on thoughts of healing because I have been battling sinus infections for weeks and woke up this morning feeling slightly better. I was amazed, once again, by my bodies ability to heal.

As I began writing about healing I soon realized that I would have to write about sickness and infirmity. That's when the critic stepped in: Uh, yuk, nobody wants to read about that stuff. I felt compelled to censor myself when I saw words like diarrhea on the page (even when I upgraded to gastric distress I felt certain that I had gone too far).

It is easy to spot the places we have shame. They are the hidden places, the dark closets of the psyche. For me, illness is a specter I do not want to face. It's not just the discomfort or the inconvenience of illness, those I can deal with. Illness, for me, is a character issue. It marks its victims as weak and vulnerable. It is difficult for me to admit weakness and vulnerability.

For most of my life I fashioned myself a survivor, a fighter. I suppose it was one of the two faces I saw on my mom when I was growing up. She was often sick, hospitalized with mysterious tumors that seemed to grow inside her like moss on a tree. When she wasn't sick she was a 98 pound ball of fire. This was the woman I wanted to emulate, the one who refused to take shit off of anyone, not the one laying helpless in a hospital bed.

Throughout the time I was in graduate school I battled a whole range of seemingly unrelated symptoms: everything from gastric distress to nasal congestion. The symptoms peaked on the day I sat facing my committee, just after completing my exams. They would decide if I went on. There was a table between me and the four stoic professors. On it sat a box of Kleenex that I carried into the room with me. They posed questions and I answered, pausing only to cough, sneeze and blow my nose. A mound of discarded tissues grew in front of me. My eyes burned and watered. I ached all over. I wondered what they saw when they looked at me. No one ever acknowledged my condition. They were only interested in the answers to their questions.

Looking back I wonder why no one ever paused to ask: Are you alright? The truth was that I wasn't alright. I probably needed to be on my sofa sipping chicken soup, but instead I was sitting in a cold room being judged by people who cared not one bit about my well-being. We were all just cogs in the wheel and cogs don't get sick, they just keep moving.