October 6, 2012
There’s a question of whether you can truly believe what a blogger’s saying if you don’t know his or her real name, or see his or her face, of whether there’s disingenuity in hiding behind a pseudonym online.
I’ve been thinking, lightly treading, one moment to the next, about whether or not there’s any point, a benefit, to considering shedding my pseudonymity, whether, if I wanted to take a new, fresh step in my writing, that would be the right step.
Bloggers are doing brave writing, soulful pieces about their journeys; Clare and her discovery process with alcohol: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3; Andrea’s recent revelation about her PTSD. They’re able to write in the open, under their names and I admire that.
But having always been an anonymous blogger, an open identity looks like open and perhaps treacherous waters from here. Many PF bloggers have come out into the open and seem to have enjoyed the process; why not consider it?
Would it enrich my writing? Would it enrich the experience of blogging?
It’s an interesting thought exercise. On the one hand, I haven’t had the experience of people caring enough to want to be open and honest with people in my real life about my health, my thoughts about my health, and experiences stemming therein. I certainly couldn’t have been this open about my family’s life with money with, well, anyone. More of you know that genuine and authentic side of me than anyone in my real life.
On the other hand, of those who care, there’s nothing they can do and I chose not to enlighten them to the depths of my health journey and the related life choices. Mostly, it was years of knowing that if I added one more thing to the list of things for my parents to worry over, that they couldn’t fix and had to feel guilty about not being able to fix, I couldn’t live with myself. So the encroaching, progressing and overwhelming chronic pain and fatigue issues were all safely tucked away under the hood. They were never to know that it was more than just a bit of pain I just couldn’t shake, that it’d ever gotten worse than the pain they knew about, the pain that started when I was 13. Not the chest pains, not the vertigo, not the breathing problems, not the weekends of being flat out steamrollered, unable to lift limbs for the exhaustion, nor the parade of pharmaceuticals that wouldn’t breach my crushing defeat. They were to know nothing about it. Not when just the fact that I worked incredibly long hours with the little pain they knew about was so distressing.
I kept up a facade for so long that I’d forgotten it was there.
It was a sharp shock remembering this past week that knowing me, my name or my face or even knowing me since birth don’t lend itself to knowing much about me.
I got into a tiff with my dad over, of all things, weddings.
PiC and I had a very quiet courthouse wedding last year with only a handful of people. My side was represented by my parents and very close friends. The rest of the extended family saw the engagement ring at the funeral soon after and then the lying started.
It’s ironclad tradition to have an engagement party, oh well, Mom was so ill we just had to have a quick and small one. They all, of course, felt left out, but what could they say during funeral arrangements?
Then the questions, because, it’s my family and if we did a formal engagement, the date must already have been set.
Oh, well we can’t possibly think about planning anything now, obviously.
We have to wait a while, now, we thought we’d have Mom around for a while…
Oh, I hear someone calling my name, gotta go.
We never got around to planning the reception. Life and grief and work and everything got in the way. I still can’t really bring myself to want to plan one, yet. I had the worst times thinking about planning it while Mom was struggling with losing her very self.
He brought the subject up the last time we were back home and my throat closed up.
It came up again, this time with the “your aunt and I will take care of all the arrangements,” “you don’t need to worry about the guest list, I’ll deal with it,” and after several attempts to put on the brakes gently, to interject some sense into the runaway train that leads to the 18-hours of Miserable Asian Wedding, trying to compromise before it turned into the Scary Vision of Stress, he said “well, everyone just has to suck it up and deal with it.”
He didn’t know. He doesn’t know how deep my wells of grief are intertwined with my helplessness to save her and my helplessness to save myself.
I lost it.
“NO. No, because if I ‘just deal with it, I will DIE. I can’t even do normal stuff because I’m sick. I can’t even live a normal life now, get dressed, cook meals, eat meals, drive a car, walk to and from the garage without planning which things I can do in a day without falling over, so no, I Can’t. Just. Deal. With. It.”
I shouldn’t have. I really really shouldn’t have. I was tired, I was short-tempered, I had completely forgotten how much I had hidden even from him. Because in all these long years of chronic pain, fatigue and mystery illness, I hadn’t even told him that it wasn’t just the initial joint pain that he knew of in one isolated area anymore. That it was everywhere, that it was fatigue, and shortness of breath, and chest pain, and dizziness, and and and.
And he didn’t know that my years powering through work and school and work and moving and taking care of everything and more work, that was all on the Scholarship of Faking It. He had no idea that I’ve been slowly falling apart for nearly 20 years.
Because I deliberately didn’t tell him, in case he let it slip and Mom found out and worried herself into an earlier grave. /Sigh. And now I feel horrible for telling him because he’s been having survivor guilt, guilt for making my life difficult all these years, guilt for being dependent on me. And I know that. But I just ran right over him.
And of course he felt terrible over it.
So now that’s out and we both feel worse for having it out there in the open just making us both feel bad.
It’s more complicated, of course, than just a secret held too long, grief clouding judgment, guilt clouding judgment, a father feeling he’s neglected his duties. It’s all of that and more.
At the end of this, I don’t think I see a way for me to be a better blogger when I haven’t even figured out how to be a better, more open person yet.
September 17, 2012
There is definitely something to be said for setting boundaries.
I had plans, it seemed like so many plans for this weekend but they really boiled down to getting a huge list of work done because they really needed doing.
Instead, as I’ve heard it termed, I got VolunTold for a duty that I was very displeased to be set up with. I can’t decide if my favorite part was that I wasn’t even consulted or if it was that it triggered one of the worst episodes of physical pain I’ve felt in months. After all, it was just assumed that since I was probably going to be around, I would deal with it.
Family was in town and instead of kenneling their semi-crazed, oversized, attention-starved pet that couldn’t stay with them in their arranged accommodation, they brought him to our place where, the last time he was left inside, despite being housebroken for his entire life, he peed a pee the size of the Great Salt Lake. But since everyone else had plans for the whole weekend “except for me” because I was “only” working from home, I was responsible for him.
Within minutes of arrival, he starting racking up a body count, human and canine, of targets he lunged at, trampled or nearly trampled in his manic bids for attention or half-mad disregard for current occupation of space and the numbers just kept ticking through the weekend. Any notion of leash manners was laughable, and after two walks, I thought my wrists and elbows might be permanently dislocated in trying to keep him under control. This was great for my health, needless to say, and I was on the heavy doses of narcotics before noon on Saturday. Those meds, I normally never touch. They’re for dire situations, used once or twice a year.
I can’t really wrap my head around the entire situation.
This dog clearly needs help – he’d nearly driven me insane by Sunday, and I knew it wasn’t really his fault. I was bedridden all day Sunday, thanks to his antics having undone all the good of the previous week’s destressing, good eating and exercise.
How is it not clear that this dog has issues?
He: can’t sit still for up to two seconds to have a leash put on, trembles so viciously that he nearly collapses in his anxiety to run when told to wait for that leash to be put on, yowls like he’s being beaten when he’s got to wait for a door to open, is willing to trample anyone and anything in sight to get out and about, barks like he’s being chased like demons if he’s been held back for a few moments from racing down a hallway. If you even look like touching a leash, he goes off like a pinball shot out of a chute. Any movement or sound triggers a panicked scramble to his feet and a racing to your side as if he’d been stabbed in the side. If I stood up, he was in front of me, blocking any step I made, he didn’t follow me so much as paced me backwards, not allowing me even an inch of personal space to even go to the bathroom. The anxiety comes off of him in palpable waves.
In any case, this basket case was beyond my physical capabilities to care for over the weekend, much less to Dog Whisper which isn’t in my job description even were I asked to deal with that. And since I wasn’t even granted the courtesy of being asked if I was happy to dogsit in the first place, the glamorous crippling opportunity that ruined my chances of accomplishing anything between the walking, the stalking, and the constant cleaning of fur and spillage, there wasn’t a bowl of food or water he wouldn’t run through or kick over. I thought Doggle and I were the certified klutzes!
I have no idea how much it would cost to get this guy some therapy or re-training but he seriously needs some help. And no, before you ask, he’s not perturbed because he was a rescue – he was purebred and obtained from a breeder, raised from puppyhood. He also wasn’t always like this.
The point is, the responsibilities of a pet owner are myriad and owners should be prepared for all necessary costs including health care, training, hygiene, and placement if you travel. One couldn’t possibly imagine that pets are welcome everywhere much less showing up virtually unannounced.
The cost of kenneling him should not be worth too much but I’m actually sitting here pondering the likelihood this conversation will go well and hoping the family see reason because either way, this can’t happen again. My health is not a lower priority than the dog’s putative happiness or the supposed value of keeping the “whole family” together. Of course, this isn’t my side of the family so they very well may think otherwise. Meanwhile, this is our home and while I don’t like to make difficulties there has to be at least some basic respect.
More than ever, I’m ever so grateful for Doggle, and he’s worth every penny we’ve paid, every minute we’ve spent playing and training, and a bargain in every sense of the word. He’s finally being more of that therapy dog I wanted, entertaining but mellow. He had his first SQUIRREL! moment this weekend and tried to chase it up a tree, actually trying to run up the tree trunk after it. He seemed surprised when he didn’t make it.
June 12, 2008
Do yourself a favor and save yourself a really uncomfortable visit to the dentist. I don’t mean skip it entirely! Even though I didn’t have a copay, I was levied a toll of the worst dental pain ever on Monday. As a rule, I like the dentist. Admittedly, this is because I’ve been fairly lucky and have had very few cavities. Also, the dentist pales in comparison to the torture of the orthodontist under whose heel I suffered for years.
So, coming from someone who doesn’t fear the dentist and enjoys dental visits: please, please floss right or you will quickly learn why people rate fear of the dentist second only to public speaking.
Turns out that there is a wrong way to floss: my way.
I’ve been using a Reach flosser because I always complain that my hands are too big to fit inside my mouth. It’s been so long that I’ve given away all my free regular floss from all those Walgreens FAR deals. I might have an old dusty box hiding in a supplies box somewhere, and I’ll have to break it out now.
This is how you floss correctly:
1. Take a long string of floss, wrap it around your fingers.
2. Wrap a section of the floss around your tooth in a C shaped, and scrape it so that you’re hitting the front and back of your tooth. (Ugh, I don’t like the thought of scraping. But it’s better to floss that way than have the dentist doing it later!) Do the same for the other side.
3. Use a new section for every tooth. This prevents you from just moving bacteria from one tooth to the next one.
It’s pretty simple, but I sure wish my dental school friend had told me this earlier!