I hope everyone remembers what it was like, how it felt to live in this strange alternative universe of fear and social distancing. I hope everyone remembers it because some people will have to keep living it.
The need to speak my mind, and the heartache of not being able to, has only made the moment more palpable, more intense and full of emotion. But no amount of emotion is going to change my circumstances. No matter how hard I try, I can’t speak the words I want to say.
Last week I officially kicked off the campaign to publish my memoir, When Force Meets Fate. Originally I planned to call it Not Like The Whiskey, but I decided that was too obscure and not many people would get the significance. So I changed the memoir title and now we have When Force Meets Fate. It …
Each fall, for the last few years, I’ve lived on edge, hoping a major wildfire doesn’t strike where I live and force me to choose between the lesser of two evils–stay and risk dying in my home or evacuate and risk making myself sicker and getting injured.
I regret that it took a life-changing illness, and losing some of my privilege, for me to truly empathize with the struggles of less fortunate people. I wish I had come to this realization sooner, when I had more health and energy to help other people.
It was both a relief and a concern to find the source of the mold. The relief was knowing where it was coming from and the concern was: How the hell do I get rid of it?
When chronic illness becomes a new kind of normal, it also becomes a cruel existence, one in which pain is a constant torture and exhaustion is as frequent as breathing.
Telling myself to not take my health for granted has always been a mental game I’ve played, an affirmation, perhaps even a mantra that I’ve repeated to make myself feel better about the fact that scary stuff can happen to anybody, at any time.
I could see all kinds of things that I had missed when I was stuck in my bed. I could feel the breeze swirling around me; I could see hummingbirds buzzing around a tree branch above the roof. I didn’t realize it until later, but it was the first time I had been outside in two years.
I’m not proud to say that it took getting sick and losing some of my privilege for me to grasp how fortunate I was as a healthy person. But it is one of the few good things that has come from my poor health.