... Is A Bitch

I would think, that after all these years, I'd be good at re-entering life. All it takes to succeed at a task is a little practice and persistence. By these simple criteria, I should be at least at ease with this process. I'm not. Despite all my years of practice, I find re-entry a bitch. O.k., so what I'm coming out of is worse, a lot worse. After all these years of trying, I am getting tired. But I'm persistent... stubborn, no... persistent.

This is by no means easy to write about, but this is a dual purpose blog: it is both record of my re-entry and the re-entry itself. Due to my poor health I've stopped and started my life so many times that I've lost count as surely as I have lost time. I'm barely making it any where near what I once thought I wanted my life to be; I'm not even sure what my desires are half the time, as climbing up yet another crater wall takes all my focus. I try not to look down, but the gaze has it's own direction at times.

There's a landscape to this kind of place, were poor health necessitates the need for careful consideration, were necessity meets panic. It's called a mine field.

At the beginning, when I was younger, a certain obvious (oblivious) panic fueled my re-entries. I was blind to the mines buried both shallow and deep, and to the magnitude and the effect of their explosions. I was pure reaction, mostly because I was, oh, so sick and because I needed money. This lead me to be less than discriminating in my choice of entry points. I took what I could find, as those without money are want to do. And the bitch of this, of course, is that to work only for money is not good for the health.

There's this terrain between myself and the kind of life I'd like to live, where I make plans I can keep, to pursue a meaningful way of contributing to the word -- as much to make enough money to keep me more than just alive as it is to be of value -- and not just be another social burden; to hopefully enjoy the kind of life I barely have the courage to dream of. There is the threat of poor health, limited choices, jobs that don't pay enough to pay the bills amongst the million other threatening unknowns out there. This is the minefield.

Ah, but the good stuff blooms like an acre of wild flowers: the friends, the kids, the music, learning and re-learning, laughter of every description, creating, sex and love, and there are even good jobs; there are always words and stories. There are good people to meet in passing and to befriend. There are beautiful days and pleasant surprises. There is a tender space between me and these things, as if the flowers' roots could brush a mine to life, and this space requires attentive navigation, patience, and no small amount of risk. I know I'm not alone, that all of us have to create our own maps through some kind of terrain, not always a war zone, but often enough.

Mine fields are scary places, full of unknowns, surrounded by battles of one kind and another. Just as often they are in the middle of some kind of beauty, perhaps these are the abandoned and forgotten ones, left for some one to stumble upon and then to find their own way out. Those who make a successful escape are likely to keep running, if they can. Sometimes a group gets caught in the same field -- poverty, family dysfunction, political upheaval. Sometimes the field is a private plot on common ground, with mines preventing those who share this space to unite and find a way out together. Sometimes there is no way out. Or there's only one.

I don't know how I stumbled into this mine field that I've been negotiating for the past 21 years. I know my position here is not my fault; the land of the chronically ill is large, but no one goes there intentionally. I know that just as I began to trip out of one kind of field I landed here, the two overlapped, and I've been trying to map my way out ever since.

In the middle of this mine field I sit alone. I remember an episode of M*A*S*H* (the television show, not the movie), where a orphaned Korean boy wanders into a mine field and needs to be rescued. The language barrier between the boy and the the doctors means the child does not know the danger he is in. The panic is only felt by the doctors who find a map they cannot read, and then realize it is the wrong map. In the end, in under thirty minutes no less, the child is rescued. But life, black comedy though it is, is not a series of thirty minute episodes, tidied up by a well written denouement.

I am aware of the panic I feel, and though I'm not exactly an orphan I have been abandoned to my fate. I've run into language barriers; the words I speak holding a different meaning to the person I speak to. I know my caring friends, and the doctors who are willing, are helping me to plot a map and at times feel at a loss as I try to describe where I am so we can attempt another way out. My family has removed themselves to a location no where near mine and occasionally throw out directives -- as if they know, as if they have the map. There is no ultimate rescue for me. The seriousness of this illness inside can always be triggered. But I have to believe that life, black and bruising as it can be, is, in the end, a comedy. As for the denouement, who knows?

So here I sit, plotting (and blogging) my next map out of this mine field; it is another chance. No longer young and reckless, I am perfectly aware that a wrong step, or an unexpected blow, could cause another mine to discharge, hurling me back to my rock.