It’s a nice enough looking building, all official and comforting, with people buzzing in and out in their neatly pressed scrubs, looking like they know precisely what they’re doing and where they’re going. In the hallway there, there’s a heart statue, or maybe it’s a statue of kids in a ring, perhaps playing a game of “Ring Around The Rosy.”
The desk is always manned by a sweet-faced volunteer to help you find whatever you’ve lost or find your way, except when, of course, you cannot find it at all. There are flowers there, too, beautiful flowers, always fresh flowers. Usually lilies are mixed in, fragrant lilies, reeking of death and funerals, but the flowers are so beautiful that you can almost forgive the scent that makes you want to vomit.
Over there is the place you cried until you dry-heaved as you took your infant daughter to her third MRI in her first week of life. And just past that is the chapel where you prayed for her life. The stained-glass windows during that frigid February day shone a cold bright light as your daughter slumbered through an anesthesia coma, and you tried to forget all that you knew about neurosurgery.
You prayed with all of your soul.
Above the chapel is the waiting room where you sat after you’d dropped your daughter off into the arms of her neurosurgeon, hoping that the last kiss you gave her warm, delicious head, wouldn’t be the last kiss you ever gave her. You sat in that waiting room with the three people who cared enough about you to show up and hold your hand and you choked back tears as the operating room nurse brought you back a bag of your daughter’s first hair in a bio-hazard bag.
You held that bag and wondered if that would be all you had left of her.
Below that waiting room is the gift shop where you dragged Nathan, someone who you will always treasure for being a friend when you needed one most, to buy your daughter something hopeful. A necklace. Carefully, you pick out a necklace that you will give your daughter and someday tell her, “Amelia, Princess of the Bells, Mommy bought you this when you were having your brain surgery.”
It’s a very beautiful necklace. A crystal encrusted heart on a simple silver chain in a velvet bag. It is perfect.
You hope she knows that this necklace is very, very important.
Two floors and a yawning corridor away, is the happy floor, filled with women and new babies, where your life was forever changed with seven words, “Becky, there’s something wrong with your baby.” A new world was created then, a secret place only you could go, this land of tears.
Your soul broke.
Up above that room, down another winding corridor, you screamed as they wrenched your nursing baby from you. Your breasts wept, too, as you cowered in that bed, terrified, in your secret place, your own land of tears.
In the dark basement, worlds away from the happy new parents above, you joined the ranks of the hollow-eyed ghosts in the NICU as you signed in and out to see your daughter. There, at least, you didn’t scare anyone with your eyes swollen nearly shut from crying and cheeks raw and bleeding from hospital grade tissues.
Above her bed there would be her bed post-surgery in the PICU and seeing her in a gown that bore the same logo as the hospital you’d worked at in nursing school made it almost easy to pretend this was all some vicious nightmare. That maybe you’d wake up to a normal, healthy baby.
Then your daughter would cry, her voice raw and hoarse from intubation and you knew this was your new world order.
When your other children came to see their sister, you’d rearrange your horrible face into a mask of what you hoped would pass as cheerfulness, ply them with candy, and hope that they wouldn’t look too closely at your shaking hands or tear-stained face. When they screamed, “I want MOMMY!” as they left for the day, you felt torn between the two worlds, one of which you’d just as soon leave behind, too.
All corridors eventually feed into the cafeteria, where you remember laughing for the first time in months. It was a jangled, strangled sort of sound, but there it was: a laugh, from your mouth, and it was real.
Down by the statue of the heart or perhaps children dancing in a circle is where you waited with your daughter as you took her home with you for the last time. Surrounded by all of the pink things you could find, balloons deflating slightly in the cold February air, you were exhausted, but ebullient: your warrior daughter had made it.
A mother had never been prouder. You held her car seat close to you as you whispered to her sleeping cheek, “You made it, my girl. You’re a fighter like your Momma, all right.” This time, for the first time in her life, when the tears wet her cheek, they were the good kind.
But late at night, when the rest of the house sleeps, these are the corridors that your mind roams, over and over. Your memory, photographic, can recall everything with the sort of clarity that makes you relive those days constantly.
You are forever delivering that sick baby.
Constantly having her wrenched from your arms, always back in those terrible moments roaming the halls, seeing the same desk clerk, smelling those awful lilies, dry heaving into the diaper bag.
The sadness is omnipresent and yet nowhere. It is the new world order.
Save for roaming the corridors all night every night, you haven’t been back to those halls since your daughter had those awful thick black stitches removed from the back of her head.
You must return. New problems, a new specialist, means one thing: you must face your demons and return.
A new desk clerk and a new flower arrangement await you in the official looking building in which you found absolutely no comfort and now you must face up to walking these halls once again. It’s likely that you’ll cry. It’s likely that you’ll dry heave. It’s likely that no one will understand your reaction to this big official building. It’s just a place, after all.
But this is so much more than a place. It’s where the old you shriveled up and died and the new you was dragged screaming into the world.
So you and your ghosts walk the corridors all night every night, reliving the worst parts of your life, wishing they could be laid to rest, knowing that they never will.
Ever.
—————
This post was written by Becky Sherrick Harks and originally published here, on Mommy Wants Vodka.
Riding the Medical Mystery Tour is SO MUCH less fun without the Beatles.
This is her story:
Oh how I loathe going to the doctor’s office. Unless I’m loaded up with snot, like I am today. When I’m loaded up with snot, I can get something to help the snot go away. When I tell the doctor that all the snot in my head is drowning my brain, he knows what to do to help.
Any other time I go to the doctor? Well… That’s an entirely different story all together.
Over the last six or seven years, I’ve lived with non-stop pain in the lower right quadrant of my abdomen. I’ve been poked, prodded and made to drink some of the nastiest shit in creation. I’ve had multiple exploratory surgeries and damned near every narcotic known to man. I’ve received FOUR different diagnoses for that could contribute to my chronic pain (PCOS, Endometriosis, Diverticulosis and Interstitial Cystitis), but I’ve never been given any kind of permanent clue as to what can be done to stop the pain. I’ve been told that I can’t have such and such treatment for one diagnosis cuzz I’m being treated for another diagnosis. SO.MANY.YEARS. of never-ending bullshit have pretty much jaded me against much of the medical community.
Imagine my dismay to realize that it was going to start all over again.
I’ve been constantly dizzy since mid-January. Interestingly enough, it started about a week after I turned 30. I’ve had the continuous feeling that I’m on a boat and not in the “I’m on a boat mother fucker! ON A BOAT!” kind of way. (Which sucks cuzz I used to like being on boats, mother fucker. ) Went to the doctor, who poked and prodded and couldn’t figure out a reason for the feeling, so he gave me some anti-dizzy shit and sent me on my way.
The day before Valentine’s Day, I decided to add passing out to the mix.
After many different tests, I’ve been diagnosed with Orthostatic Hypostension, which means that when I change positions (laying to sitting, sitting to standing), my blood pressure bottoms out and I wake up on the ground with no clue what happened. (Well, I don’t pass out every single time, but the potential is there.) As for the dizziness that never goes away? No clue.
I’ve had MRIs, CAT scans, heart tests… All to no avail. I get to trek on down to the University of Michigan at the end of October to see if maybe they can figure out what’s going on. So far, the only thing I’ve been able to find that fits all my symptoms has been MdDS, which apparently is very rare and can last anywhere from a few days to decades. Color me fucking excited. o_O (And just to clarify, I hadn’t been on any long trips in planes, cars or anything else, but I was INCREDIBLY stressed out due to finding out some things about my boyfriend/fiance that damned near destroyed me.)
Oh! But wait! It seems my body decided to throw another curve ball into the mix!
During all my testing to see why I’m always in pain, I was told that I’d never be able to have another child. My kidling is awesome, so while I hated hearing it, I figured that I’d at least been able to have one child, so I was lucky. Any time I was asked if I was gonna have another one, I’d always say I didn’t want anymore.
To me, it was easier to deal with the judgment of being one of those mothers than to have to deal with the looks of pity and the empty condolences from people who never had to deal with the reality of not being able to choose whether or not they could get pregnant. After six years of being told it would never happen and having all kinds of unprotected sexing with no babies, I had pretty much come to terms with it.
Except in June, I found out that I managed to get myself knocked up.
I had a miscarriage scare in my seventh week, but things seem to be moving along well now (17 weeks). The thing that sucks is that being pregnant seems to lower my blood pressure even more, which presents a challenge.
I no longer leave the house by myself. I haven’t been able to drive since February. I have to walk with a cane, so I don’t appear to be drunk from all the stumbling around I do when I walk. I have to rely on anyone who might be willing to help me get to my doctor’s appointments and hope against hope that the offer of help isn’t just an empty promise. I lost my job cuzz I can’t work without someone in the same building, just in case I happen to fall or pass out. I don’t see any of my friends for months at a time.
And though I’ll probably never say it out loud, I’m fucking depressed as hell over this entire fucking situation. (Except for the Squishy – that’s what I’m calling the baby – THAT has me over the moon.)
I feel as if I have no one I can talk to. Whenever I go to my friends or family, I can see them tune out. I’m sure they want to be there for me or whatever, but they aren’t dealing with this shit on a daily basis. They just don’t understand and I don’t expect them to.
So, I sit in my house day after day, wondering if I’m ever going to feel better. Wondering how the fuck I’m gonna manage to take care of a baby when I can hardly keep myself from walking into the wall. Wondering if I’m ever going to receive a diagnosis cuzz I really want to know what the fuck is going on.
I’m always wondering if there’s someone else out there who might be going through the same thing. Not necessarily the same symptoms, but just the whole not knowing thing. And then I wonder if I sound like a whiny bitch when I carry on about what I’m dealing with. I don’t address this on my blog, for the most part. While I have written about it a couple of times, I try not to focus on it cuzz I don’t want to appear as whiny or like I’m seeking sympathy or something. I hate to be pitied and I’m really trying to avoid seeing anyone feeling sorry for me, ya know?
Thanks for giving me a place to rant and rave. I don’t feel like I’m gonna told be told to suck it up or some such shit, though now that I’ve said that I am TOTALLY expecting to get some comments like that.
Is there anyone else who feels like they’re taking part in The Medical Mystery Tour?
I was bitten by a tick when I was ten. It’s the only tick bite I remember, though a large number of those with Lyme don’t remember a tick bite. There’s no way to know if this bite or another was the culprit. I do remember a rash on my hand the summer I was pregnant, and I now wonder if it was from a tick, but there is no way to know. I always had weird medical things happen as a kid though, so we have wondered if maybe it’s been dormant for many years. Your immune system has an amazing ability to keep things in check (even if you’ve been given a taste of that forbidden formula).
And your immune system is amazingly susceptible to stress, which arrived on my, well, ashy, crumbling doorstep when I was eight months pregnant.
I had Kellen and went into my six week checkup, where they did a pap, which came back abnormal (yeah, my fall pretty much sucked), and gave me a flu shot.
Four days later (and four days after returning to teaching) my face stopped working. I was home nursing Kellen (or trying) and tried to smile at him, at which point I realized I couldn’t move the right side of my mouth. Earlier in the day I had noticed that it felt like I was talking with braces on, like my lips were having to make way for an obstruction on my teeth, despite not having had braces in well over a decade. That morning I drank orange juice that tasted dull as well as had a Starbucks sandwich that made me question their place as a food establishment.
It turned out that my taste buds were not working on the right side. After I finished nursing Kellen I decided to go back to school to finish teaching. I was really scared but didn’t want to deal with it at the moment (because the only two options I could think of were a stroke and brain cancer). As I was driving down the road I lost my ability to blink my right eye. I turned around, and we went to the hospital.
The good news is that it wasn’t a stroke or brain cancer, though the way the doctor told me it was *just* Bell’s Palsy made it seem so benign as though I hadn’t just lost full functionality of one side of my face and now looked like this:
“Are you sure nothing else is wrong?” I asked the ER doc. I just couldn’t fathom that the nerves in my face would stop firing just because they felt like it. The doctor assured me that nearly all cases of Bell’s Palsy are spontaneous and have no other underlying cause than a small virus. (Had I lived in the Northeast, it is likely I would have been tested for Lyme then as Bell’s Palsy is common in Lyme and the first symptom of it moving into your brain, when things get really dicey.) They gave me anti-virals and steroids. (It was because of this I stopped breastfeeding.)
Dan and I decided to head down to San Diego. I had taken a leave of absence from work because I was overwhelmed. The stress of the fire and the rebuild was compounded by this new development, and I knew that I was spread too thin. It has always been hard for me to walk away, and while it was sad, I am proud of my ability to say, “I can’t.” We left the day after Thanksgiving, a trip that was nearly thwarted by an incredible and overwhelming sense of anxiety. I couldn’t sit down at all because I felt so antsy and uncomfortable. It was one of the only times I’ve ever had the urge to scrub a floor. It’s unknown if this was a natural progression of the Lyme or because I had been prescribed Zoloft to deal with the PTSD. It’s been posited that SSRIs may actually exacerbate Lyme symptoms in some people (many also find them helpful).
That was also the day that the dizziness set in, and it’s kept a firm hold on me for over a year. I spent the entire trip in San Diego sleeping. When I wasn’t, I was scared. I truly thought I was going to die but was afraid of going to the ER because I didn’t want them to think I was crazy. I wish I had gone while in California.
I made a deal with myself that I would make an appointment with my neurologist in January if I was still sick after Christmas. I scheduled an appointment. That week I woke up and felt fine, nearly canceling the appointment to see the doctor. At that point being dizzy was the biggest issue; it was debilitating and frightening. The symptoms came back strongly the day before I went to see the doctor It would be the first of many cycles but also the clue that led another doctor to Lyme disease nine months later.
At first I was diagnosed with Benign Positional Vertigo, which is caused by ear crystals shaking loose. The test for this is tilting your head back to see if it gets worse. It did. But the exercises didn’t work. So an MRI was ordered. While I passed the muscle tests with the neurologist and chiropractor I was seeing, I drop things a lot (more than normal), so I worried a lot about MS, especially because I was told that mid to late 20s was typical for age of onset. With every click on the MRI machine I just hoped that I didn’t have MS and if I did that the test showed it. I didn’t want to be sick, but I also wanted an answer to why I felt so badly.
One year ago, September 8, you kissed me. You think it was so innocent. Just a momentary lapse of judgement. I wish I could tell you this. You have no idea the damage you caused.
I was content in my marriage, content with my life. I love my husband (I guess), but we never had any sexual chemistry between us and we haven’t had sex in years. He said it was because I was frigid, and I thought I was because I never felt any attraction to him. Over the years he has lost all desire for me, but still, he is a good man and we have built a comfortable life. He’s a reclusive intellectual and a bit depressed, like I am, so we spend a lot of time in silence. he silence, like the sexless marriage, has become unbearable.
Then YOU came along… you are fun, energetic, full of life and we talk and joke constantly when we have lunch or a drink. You remind me of everything I gave up when I got married, including spontaneity, humor, fun, and passion. I am not frigid; that one kiss proved it. The arousal and feeling of pure joy in that one kiss are indescribable and it still haunts me every day. I was not expecting this, not looking for this, yet it happened.
When I see you with your partner I get so jealous. Her laughter is a knife in my soul. I don’t laugh with my husband, we don’t have fun. I laugh with you though, and whenever we part, I go into a deep depression for days afterwards at the thought of not seeing you again for a while.
I feel you would never leave your partner for me – it’s far too much a miracle to expect from Life. And I’ve never, ever wanted to cheat on or leave my husband. So what am I to do? I feel like I’m dying a slow death from a neglect that I never realized was happening until you kissed me.
I have no valid reason for leaving my husband, he’s a good person and he tries. I feel like I’m the one who’s screwed everything up, that he should have married someone who could love and appreciate him better and was attracted to him. He says he loves me though and if I leave ever him he’ll be crushed. It’s cowardly of me, but I wish instead he would find someone better than me and leave me for her so I could try again in life. I would want to try with you, but as I said, it’s far too big a miracle to expect and probably more than I deserve.
My therapist hasn’t told me to stop seeing you, and for that I am grateful. He understands you are the only bright spot in my life, even though it depresses me so whenever we part. He acknowledges my feelings and agrees this is all so tragic, but so far we have no answers. This is all such a mess.
I don’t think anyone knows the isolation that infertility brings with it unless they’ve lived it. Sure, we have several friends that we share all this with. Or rather, I do. I don’t know that my husband, Brian, has really told anyone what we’re going through. If you know him in real life, you know that he is silent about things that bother him. If you don’t know him, I cannot stress how quiet and private he is. But most of my friends know what we’re going through, and a few of our family members. Most people are unfailingly supportive, even if they don’t understand a bit of what’s going on.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t make it any less lonely, and doesn’t make me feel like less of a freak. Save your breath — rationally I know I’m not a freak. But that doesn’t keep me from feeling that way. And no amount of support from my very fertile friends makes it less lonely. Infertile friends — we are blessed with a few of those, too, though I wish they didn’t have to go through it either — make it even easier.
But when I’m in that exam room, having my lady bits poked and mishandled by the doctor and his ultrasound wand of pain, I am alone. When the Clomid headache sets in and I can’t even think straight, no one else is going to deal with that pain for me. When we schedule our love life, it’s just the two of us. When my cycle abruptly ends with the inevitable period, it’s just me.
That’s isolation.
That’s infertility.
But what really shocks me is the unexpected ways that infertility continually separates us from our family and friends. While it colors how I look at the world, it also colors how people look at me.
Between daycare and lessons, I come into contact with about 11 or 12 families each week. I have at least one doctor’s appointment each month and sometimes more, since I’m always having blood work and such, I need to let the affected parties know that either Brian will be here with the Munchkin Coalition, or that I’ll be late for lessons. None of them get too nosy or pry into my personal life, and all of them offer their support quietly, discreetly, and in a very sincere manner.
Except for one person. Who feels the need to tell me (again and again and again) the three stories she knows about other people suffering through IF, and how easy it was for her to get pregnant with her multiple children, and how she just can’t imagine how horrible it must be. And then, she says it…. “I am SO glad I didn’t have to do any of that! I just got pregnant so easily!” And laughs.
I’m not kidding you. She laughs at the misery of others and her amazing good fortune. One of these days I’m either going to punch her, or tell her what I’m thinking. Which is “Me, too. I’m glad you never had to go through any of this, because you couldn’t take it.” Nothing says “You’re a Freak” like that kind of statement.
My next example is a conversation I had with a family member who has expressed absolutely zero interest in our fertility situation until a recent phone call. Which, I have to say, was lovely and all that, but also really strange after two years of completely ignoring the situation.
It’s hard to catch someone up after two years of constant flux and ordeal. She then said “I wasn’t sure if you wanted to talk about it or not.” Um…yeah. I have a blog about this, ya’ll. It’s pretty much all I do talk about, it seems. Asking how it’s going makes me feel like you care, like you’re interested, like I’m not alone. The only reason I don’t talk about it 24/7/365 is because I know how that would annoy people.
So instead I wait to be asked, and feel separated from my family.
Finally, a very sweet friend recently made a comment that showed me just how much people must view me through what I’ve come to think of as The Infertility Filter. After all, it doesn’t just color how I see the world, but also how the world sees me.
We were talking about her family, and her new niece. She related an adorable story about her nephews as well. We rarely get to see them, so it was neat to catch up and think of them as little people and not as the babies we last saw. We parted ways and about 10 minutes later my phone beeped. She texted to apologize for her story, because she thought the content might have been inconsiderate and hurtful given our infertile state.
Granted, after I spent the next ten minutes really thinking about it I was able to see how someone could have taken offense or been hurt, given the actual content of the story she shared. If they were seriously sensitive and felt the world revolved around them. I, however, love to hear stories about other people’s kids — I spend 5 days a week caring for other people’s children, right?
Even though I was completely un-offended and hadn’t spared it a second thought until she texted, I appreciated her concern.
But I also had to wonder — who else is censoring what they say because I can’t get pregnant? Are we the topic of conversation when we’re not there? Are we your dinner conversation? How often are we referred to as “Brian and Andrea. They can’t get pregnant.” Or “this couple we know who can’t have a baby”.
I hate being pigeon-holed anyway, but to be ostracized by perfectly well-meaning people is kind of a bummer in and of itself. How many stories are we not hearing because someone is worried about our reaction or our feelings? Sure, it’s thoughtful. But it’s also terribly isolating.
A lot of the time, people with infertility isolate themselves. We really don’t want to make people uncomfortable or uneasy. We don’t want to be seen as abnormal, so we keep our problems hidden away. We don’t put our needs and concerns on the prayer list at church. We don’t ask friends to accompany us to the doctor for moral support (at least not after the first time you turn us down).
We don’t offer information, and we are crushed when you don’t ask. Quietly crushed. It’s so terribly easy to believe that we are all alone in our struggles, especially for couples who don’t know any other infertile couples. The longer we’re infertile, the more it builds up, and the lonelier we become.
That’s one reason I blog. Granted, I started blogging before we were “trying”, and I’ll hopefully still be blogging long after we have children, so it’s not technically an “infertility blog”. And yet it is.
I found that when we really started having trouble getting pregnant a lot of my information, ideas, inspiration, and encouragement came from the blogging world. I learned more from other infertile people than from doctors or journal articles. I want to give back to that. I want to be a source of information and encouragement to other infertiles out there who have just received a diagnosis, or just finished their fifth failed IUI, or who have discovered that Clomid doesn’t get everybody pregnant right off the bat.
So I make it a point to live our story out loud and proud. I won’t act ashamed of my infertility, and I won’t pretend it doesn’t exist to make someone else comfortable. I won’t be silent about something that affects so many people, and I won’t make anyone else feel embarrassed either by their fertility or their ability to pop out kids like it’s easier than breathing.
If you got here through a search, you are not alone. Pull up a seat, pop open a bottle of water (no booze in the infertile zone except CD 1-4), and share your stories. Ask questions.
If I can’t answer, maybe someone else can. Let’s learn from each other, and lift each other up. Need prayer? You got it. Need to gripe about how much this sucks, how cold your doctor’s hands are, or how much you really hate scheduled nookie? Go for it — we’re listening.
You are not alone, you don’t have to be isolated, and you are okay.
If we are all determined to do this right out loud, infertility does not have to separate us from them.
When I was seventeen, I was kind of a heavy kid. My largest weight was 240 lbs, weighed by the scales of the United States Navy. The recruiter was very interested in getting me to join, on account of my having a very high score on their tests. He introduced me to a master chief who was in charge of recruiting people to work on the nuclear power plants aboard naval ships. They tested me and found that I was smart enough to enlist as a nuclear power specialist.
The only bar was my weight. I had to get down to at least 180 pounds. The next year was full of jogging, eating salads and wrapping myself up to sweat off the pounds. It didn’t work fast enough. I still had around ten or fifteen pounds to go.
The date came nearer and nearer for my final entry. My recruiter, who was a first class petty officer, had me drink a laxative for a couple days before my last medical exam before basic training. It was awful. I ate nothing but salad and laxatives, but I came in at exactly the cutoff weight. I was sick enough that I didn’t really feel that I had accomplished anything.
I left for basic training that September. The days were long and the nights short. I was at NTC Great Lakes. Then came the time for psychological testing. The only two specialties that had this testing were those who were aiming to become SEALs and, yep, nuclear power specialists.
Honest answers got me disqualified from service altogether. I wasn’t fit to be in the service. I was angry, disappointed. This was supposed to get me out of the town I hated and into a new life. Why didn’t they test like this before I got all the way to NTC Great Lakes? I was shuffled into a ‘separation division’ the very next week. I read a lot, and I met people from all over the world there. There was even a recruit from Nigeria!
I stayed in the seps division for a week and a half. The petty officer in charge told us about his struggle with depression, and how the Navy was providing the help he needed because he had finished his training. He thought that it was kind of messed up that they didn’t screen earlier too.
I arrived home via airplane. Chicago’s O’Hare airport is HUGE! I bought a pack of smokes and walking what seemed like a mile from the gate to the smoking area outside, while waiting for my flight home. I was depressed. I thought that I must be the biggest loser ever to have come all this way just to be sent home.
My parents waited for me at the gate in SLC International. My mother was an awful mess. She was spiraling into another one of her episodes, brought on by my leaving home. My father was stoic as usual. The ride back to the shitty little town I grew up in was not fun. My mother had only a tenuous grip on reality. Great.
Days later, my mother lost it completely. She was screaming that my father was Satan. I said, fuck this and left with my cigarettes into the hills. Dad took her to the hospital. Again. I was shunted to the side. Ignored. What about me? Mom had to have attention and I couldn’t burden the family with my trouble, right?
I still had a bit of money from the Navy. I had earned nearly two thousand dollars while there. My friend introduced me to crystal meth, so I spent that summer in a haze of drugs. It made me feel GOOD. I’d never felt like that before. The novelty wore off after a while, and I put it down because I saw that the humans around me were becoming less and less human from that drug. I didn’t like the days after a binge either, feeling unwashably dirty and depressed.
I was finally arrested at a drug party, nearly a year after I came home from the failure in the Navy. I was lucky. I didn’t have any drugs of any kind on my person, but they still charged me with ‘internal possession’ from a dirty UA. I took a plea in abeyance and got a job.
For the most part, I kept my nose clean. I paid rent to my parents, paid my dad back for the lawyer he hired to defend me, and drank beer nearly every weekend with my friends. I wasn’t happy. I felt inadequate and like I was a failure. Certainly, philosophically I’m glad I’m not a sailor. The thought of being responsible for killing other human beings isn’t something I enjoy contemplating, even if they are enemies. Yet, I cannot help but wonder what might have been.
I think back to that young man. He wanted to be someone important. He wanted to be part of a group that accepted him as he was. But he was met, yet again, with rejection. He was pissed off that, when he came home in such a state, once again, he couldn’t count on his family to help.
I hid away from the world and my family after that. After so many years of rejection by peers and social groups in school, the separation from the Navy was like the cherry on top of a shit sundae. I was a fucked loser for dreaming anything at all.
I don’t exactly hate the town I’m in, yet, all the things that I do value in life are of little consequence to the people here. They don’t consider deep questions. They get the easy answers from their religious dogma. Those who deviate are, of course, shunned to the greatest degree of shunning possible. Its like you’re invisible to these people.
I’m a long hair, a hippy. I have a beard and I wear t-shirts that I’ve bought at rock concerts. I read philosophy and science books. I read mystical stuff too. I’ve read the Bible cover to cover, the New Testament several times. I’ve familiarized myself with many schools of religious thought. I’ve studied psychology and read several books on the subject. The purpose of all my studies was to bring me closer to understanding myself and those around me, has but created a great divide. I feel that I cannot share my deep perceptions with any but a few. It’s as if the gulf between me and other humans, which I hoped to bridge using knowledge, has only widened with my efforts.
Society is so shallow. It’s been disappointing enough that I just don’t go out anymore. Perhaps I need to find a dating service like the skit on MAD TV: Lowered Expectations. Maybe my desire for an intellectual match has to be tempered with the fact that not everyone is interested in the questions of existence.
I’m just so damned lonely. I have friends to be sure, but I don’t have a lover. I have material prosperity, yet no significant one to share it with. All of my resources are hoarded for my kids. I have so much to be grateful for and to be sure, I certainly am. Many do not have what I do, yet I envy those who have someone with whom to share their burdens. I am not Ebenezer Scrooge who counts wealth as the sole measure of human value. I am not satisfied with this solitary existence, nor do I think that Scrooge truly was with his either. Yet, the missteps and missed opportunities become the regrets of old age. Is that my fate? To be an old and lonely man, regretting that girl in high school who would light up when we would meet. That girl who always seemed to be so happy to see me, yet I couldn’t see that she liked me until years had passed.
Going to bars is soooo awful. I really don’t like it at all. Karaoke is the sole exception. Grocery stores? Church? I want to scream out loud I’m so frustrated in this quest for companionship!
I just hope and pray the theme of my youth peters out. I hope and pray that failed liftoff isn’t simply an oracle showing me the dismal future. I know that there are many, many people in my same situation, dying for a friend, longing for a lover. Hopefully I can find someone who wants to build a new rocket together, one that will launch both of us into greater heights than either of us thought possible.
