alone

I dont know where this goes. It probably has little place on this blog. Its not really particular to my illness or healing process. Its something that has been with me since I was a young child. Still, it hit me last night with particular poignancy, and I thought I would blog it.

I was lying on my couch last night in the still hours of the morning where nothing I could do or listen to or read could any longer cover up the fact that life is short. So short, I could see the end of it staring right back at me, even if it 50 years away. It seemed a blink, a string of too short days, joys angers and errands blurring into each other and then silence. It reminded me that my oldest terror is lonliness.

When I was 4, I began having a reoccuring nightmare. In this dream, I was not a boy, or a person, but a star. A huge boiling nuclear reaction orbiting a massive galactic center. In this dream, I could hear nothing but the hissing burning of my gasses, the still rumble of the energetic reaction that was me, and the deep silence of space. In this dream, I had still a human consciousness, with a human sense of time. I knew that I would spend the next 4-5 billion years alone, hissing and burning and with noone. I would wake up sweating, and plod down the hall to fall asleep outside my parent's door.

I still feel like that when I get still enough to hear it. Anyone who knows me knows that I am, despite my best intentions, a frenetic ball of energy, never finishing anything, but bouncing from interest to interest like a Rimsky-Korskov bee. But all that motion, all those hungers, fail to distract me from the impermenance of this life.

It sounds trite when I write it like that. But I hate the aloneness of it all. It dogs me everywhere. In the middle of a group, there is a certian sad lonliness that seeps through.

And I fear it.

When I was sick, it was worst of all. Anyone who has been seriously ill can tell you that. How they hate the lonliness. The isolation. Even the impendingness of your own exinction is a kind of comfort, a promise of somethign different, but each new day going forth, sick, and condemned to your teetering mind, is torture. Company brings no surcease. Nothing.

Now I have the illusion of company. I gather round my friends, and spend as much time away from this house as I can. I travel, I play poker, I surf, I visit. But I fear the times when i go home. I fear the emptiness of the house. I fear the time between the end of the day and the moment I fall asleep. That dead time is the worst. my mind is still and clear and the illusion of being anything but alone is impossible to maintain.

In illness I tried to discipline myself to the lonliness. I once took a camping trip by myself for 2 weeks. I spoke to noone. I did not take a book, or a light. I thought I could confront the lonliness and win. I tried the same thing in law school, long walks at night into the forrests around Cville. No light. I would force myself to sit still in the forrest until the terror came upon me. Then I frced myself to stay even longer. Sometimes I sat until morning. But that feeling of embracing the ultimate fact of our own lonliness never came. No comfort. It bothers me still today, though I have learned to live with it. Its part of me, I guess. I will be buried alone after all.

I dont know what has me thinking about this. I guess when I was ill, I felt like a man looking out of a cage at the world going round and wanted so fiercly to be a part of it. now I am a part of it, and though I am no longer ill, that same ache is still there.

Ok, this is going nowhere.

A random thought

I have always been aflicted on one side of my body, my left, more than my right. My left side gets the pain, the arthitis like bite, the visual disturbances, the tremors and the tics. I feel it on my right, but not very much. I have never seen an explaination for this, though I have seen other sufferes complaining of the same phenomenon.

I did, however, read a book recently by Dr. Brewer, who studies and writes about Wilson's disease, a condition similar to h'penia. In that book, Brewer acknowledges the possibility that someone with a less developed motor control in one side could see symptoms focus there. My left side is strong, but almost completely without agility. A manual dexterity test given to me rated the nimbleness of my left hand at 1, out of a scale of 1-100.

I should note, if I have not before, that I am taking megadoses of panothenic acide, vitamin B-5, now. It used ot cause almost immediate diarreha. Now, it helps my nervous system bounce back from stressors.

Interesting. a little interesting.

Hope all is going well in the great inter-void. I got work that Z in Alaska is greatly recovered with the help of antihistamines. Z is h'delic, so we all knew that was going to work. Z, try megadoses of Vitamin C, that will function like an antihistamine and might do your system some good also. Keep with the supplements, because the anti-histamines are a band aid until relief arrives. For those of you not keeping score, h'delics are in great danger of alcoholism and drug abuse becuase of the anti-histminic properties. Theier livers really detoxify the stuff quickly and they can be sober in minutes. A good friend of mine, a h'delic, can drink rediculous amounts and be stone sober an hour later. neat trick, but ultimately deadly.

but again, best to Z.

wow,

I used to post almost daily. Now, that I am well, almost never. I guess that finally shows who needed who in this relationship. I really appreciate all the love and support I got from this blog through the months and has it been years, that I have posted. Thanks all. You were the community I never thought I had.

I am well. I am getting so close to completely well that I hesitate to post. Each day seems to visit a substnatial improvement. I hardley think about it at all anymore, excpet when I take my handfuls of pills.

I feel like I am remapping the neural pathhways to happiness. It seems that being ill, everything got associated with illness. Its taken years, but that fog has lifted and I am reforming my normal connections t the world.

Was it the pills? Time? Diet, excersize and meditation? God? I dont know. All of them. But I want to thank the PTC for its role. In a world without answers they are, at least, asking questions.