Wednesday, March 14, 2012


Dear Polarimbi Readers,

I have not posted for ages, quite literally, years. And for that, I must apologize, especially to my old friends and supporters.  I am back, and I have a lot I want to share and say in the hope that doing so will help in some small way.

I have aged in my absence, but I am certainly more wiser, more experienced and more capable of managing this crazy condition. It is a terrible beast, but I have it on a leash, for now, the most part.  I know myself more; I have, for all intents and purposes, found myself.  And I like myself.  And that is a good thing.  (Now where I want to go with myself, raises a whole other set of issues and questions, but we will not take these on for now). 

I have found that I have aged, physically. My poor body has been punished by unrelenting waves of turmoil and nauseating ups and downs.  My poor heart, I have loved and I have lost. I have had my heart stabbed and broken and broken again and broken again. It is on the mend right now, but it still pumps, and it is a muscle that is now stronger.  And it does still feel.  My poor blood, it runs but it struggles at times, I now have hypertension that must be controlled with medication.  And so my poor liver, having to filter all those fucking pills, I diligently take my meds and I take on all their side effects, I have accepted that this is what I must do to stay within My Manageable Zone, a zone of blips and trips,  in which I am still able to function, to mother, to work, to live life, proportional to the events that occur. I have, like many like me, gone off my meds, intentionally and unintentionally, with a rather disastrous set of consequences, including a second hospitalization and field trip to Cloud Cuckooland. 

What I didn't have before but now have, as I explained to a friend, is a barometer that constantly measures and monitors whether what I am feeling inside is indeed proportional to what is happening outside.  And I have to adjust that barometer if I am feeling super high or super low.  I work at all this, all the time.  And none of it is easy.

At the moment, I am in a mild depression. It is, thankfully, not to the point where I am sitting on the floor of my shower in a fetal position. Nowhere near that, fortunately.  It is what my son calls, sucky. It sucks. Everything feels and tastes blah. It is feeling down in the dumps. It is low speed and high drag.  I have learned to inject a dark sense of humor when I'm down like this. Like the time I told my sister, when she asked how I was doing, that I was playing around in the mud.  She thought that was hilarious, and we both laugh-cried. Now one of THE MOST IMPORTANT things I have also learned over the past couple of years is to have faith in the saying, “This, too, shall pass.”  I really do hang onto those dear words, and hanging onto them for dear life has helped me from dropping into the abyss.

I will have a lot more to say and stories to share, my friends, but for now, I will leave it at this.  I am also learning to appreciate the fine skill and art of stopping. Of stopping so I can sleep. Of stopping so I can eat.  Of stopping so I can tell myself that everything is going to be ok. 

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