Losing a Whole Year, Gaining Something Else

[S]tories hold power because they convey the illusion that life has purpose and direction. Where God is absent from the lives of all but the most blessed, the writer, of all people, replaces that ordering principle. Stories make sense when so much around us is senseless, and perhaps what makes them most comforting is that, while life goes on and pain goes on, stories do us the favor of ending.
[John Hodgman]

I constantly have what I call "blog-uments" with Joe over the validity and purpose of this form of writing. The arguments don't usually involve the specificities of my blog--he doesn't read it--but are more involved with blogging in the abstract, the idea of it in general. I use the above quote often to tell him exactly why I believe that blogging is not only valid, but perfect for some things: my story, my life, my pain does not end. Anyone who has spent more than thirty seconds with me knows that there is no ordering principle in my life, and I am not able to write for myself any form of blessedness.

But I was talking to my cousin a month or two ago, and he blogs too--though he tends to blog poetry. He said he has two "finished" blogs, that it usually takes about a year and a half to bring his blog to what he considers to be a complete product. That was when I felt the first stirrings of something, though I didn't think about it much then.

I think it most hit me when Joe sent me a video of me opening my birthday present, asking for me to not post it here or anywhere. Watching the video, I knew I wouldn't have posted it anyway--there's something that is too much about us in that video: the way we banter, the toss of my head over my shoulder before I lose it, some sort of telling smile. But I felt for my friends in that moment the same way I think some bloggers think of their children, innocent bystanders implicated in my words and actions here. People who have influence on my life, important and beautiful and wonderful as it is and must be, don't get the chance to speak for themselves here. But my story is incomplete without them. Maybe they deserve a rest, a time to speak and act knowing that these actions, these words won't perpetuate themselves.

Then there is the feeling that this chapter really is done. I started blogging exactly one year ago, and in that year my story--and my blog--evolved and blossomed and grew and took on it's own beautiful life. Although the style is the same, the blog is very different now than it was then. At times it is more raw, but somehow more polished.

I used to keep a blog on LiveJournal, but I grew out of it. I like to watch how my entries have pared themselves down and shaped up, took form and gained beauty out of the mundane occurrences of my every-day existence. Somewhere along the way, I learned how to carve out details and leave those things that are already spoken. [The idea that I did, certainly, have breakfast has nothing to do with the fact that I, five minutes later, fell off of a curb. Only one of these things need be described in detail. And etcetera.]

But the end of my first year of medical school has drawn to a close, a fact that was almost painfully clear when I found that we now had a bulk email address of com-2yr. This summer has been almost boring with the consistency of both my lab and my almost-completely unwavering mind. Stories rise out of conflict, and my first year was nothing but. Now, all is still. I can hear myself breathe. This story is over.

So I decided that I would not blog for this next year. I've blogged since I was 16, and I don't know what it's like to go for a year without this option to help me process the information, the events, the everyday occurences that make me feel like letting go. I look toward it, and I wonder if I will write on paper. Maybe I'll pick up other things, use the time to start writing fiction again. Or maybe I won't do writing at all; maybe I'll pick up something else, start running or taking drives or start listening to new music.

It was a hard decision to make, especially the week of July 4th, when I had so much encouragement from the people at RealMental, the week I was stunned to find myself on Five Star Friday, the week when the first that came to my mind was "Oh shit, they like me." I've made blogging connections with some blogging high-rollers, people-who-know-people, and I would love to be a part of that world so much, and I hope that I one day am.

But even that, it seems, makes this year off more seductive. I still have a huge amount of anonymity. I know that some people do read this blog often, but it's not thousands or even hundreds again. I have luxuries that people like Heather Armstrong do not, and that is the luxury to do exactly what I'm doing.

But the truth is, I know I will come back. In one more year, I will have a different story to tell. Joey will be living with me. My first two years of medical school--and boards--will be over, and I will be starting grad school. Life will be different and new, and with that, the time will be ripe for another story to begin.

In the meantime, I'll be posting a guest post on Perks of Being Me sometime soon, and I plan to write once or twice for RealMental if they'll have me. I'll still Twittering and keeping up with everyone's blogs, and I will be looking forward to jumping back in.

When I originally dreamed up this post, I thought I would leave you with the Vonnegut reassurance that "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."

But the truth is that everything hurt. And was beautiful nonetheless. With that, the story ends.

A Curious Tale of Intrigue

I have a bad habit of testing my doctors, especially the ones who are there to help me with the Crazy. This usually involves wearing a particularly interesting shirt, one that tests the person to see if they have them same absurd sense of humor that I have. Although, once it involved a pair of especially embarrassing socks, and my therapist really pulled through on that one.

The psychiatry residents are turning over in the school counseling center, which means I have to play the "new psychiatrist" game.

Hi. No, I haven't felt too happy or too sad lately. Yes, I've been getting plenty of sleep, an amazing 7 to 8 hours a night. My social life is pretty good: I've got a wonderful boyfriend, great friends, and an awesome family. Nod. Nod. Nod.

All the while, I'm wearing my ridiculous "Panflute Flowchart" shirt, one of the many absurd shirts I own and wear on a daily basis. The test is simply to see if the person I'm talking to notices it. They fail HARD if they don't notice it at all. Noticing it and expressing distaste is a slightly more acceptable reaction, although wholly less acceptable than loving it and finding it funny.

New psychiatrist tanked this test--he did not even mention my shirt. How disappointing. My last psychiatrist [resident] wore white cowboy boots on our first meeting: badass. This one was wearing a suit and a tie, pretty mellow stuff. He was soft-spoken and seemed almost nervous, but these things are forgivable--he's still kind of new at this.

He seemed so almost-bland, though, and I would have written him off except for this: he has the cartilage of his ear pierced. It makes me think that there is something he's not letting on, and this shoots his intrigue level through the roof. I think next time he's getting my "Bad Poetry" shirt--we'll see how well he holds up then.

At Least One Reason I Loved The Fall

"Are you trying to save my soul?"

"What?"

"Are you trying to save my soul?"

"What?"

"The Eucharist...that's what it means. Are you trying to save my soul?"

".....What?"

Ruminations on a Bad Eighties Song

"What do you think it means? I mean, how could she blind him with science?"

"Maybe it's a boredom thing. Like, she was talking about her dissertation in a bar, and it was so boring that it blinded him."

"Yeah, or maybe she was carrying a beaker of sulfuric acid and she tripped and spilled it on his face. Or magnesium in a flame--that will blind you if you look directly at it."

"It could be methanol. She could have been doing a transfer and forgot to take off her gloves, and got methanol on his hands."

"Or maybe someone put cesium to close to a tank of fluorine. Blinded by science. Of course, it would do a lot of other things too...deafened by science..."

"Or dismembered by science. Maybe that's what the song should be called."

An Amazing Forf of the Lie

Today was a truly amazing, humbling day. I woke up at the time I normally wake up on weekdays, but entirely rested. I lounged around in bed, and then went to check my email. I was very surprised to find a comment on my blog that I had been "nominated" this week to Five Star Friday. I certainly don't feel that my writing is particularly amazing--especially next to the others, like one of my absolute favorite bloggers, Jim Griffieon of Sweet Juniper--so it was especially humbling and exciting to find myself listed there.

I can't help being very thankful to RealMental for providing me another forum to reach out to others about my mental illness. That blog has the very special quality of allowing people with similar--but still very different--lives and problems the opportunity to reach out to each other. As many shitty, lame, juvenile things there are in cyberspace, it's ability to connect people who need each other always leaves me speechless.

The Tangerine Mind Sunshower Light Fantastic

I feel like I haven't had much to talk about lately. My life is pretty constant--I wake up, go to lab, hang out with retinal cells [bust my ass to keep them alive, bust my ass to kill them, etc], come home, make dinner, jazz around my apartment, go to sleep. Which sounds distinctly uninteresting when I try to write about it.

I think it's good, in some respects, to have nothing to talk about. My therapist released me from care last week because we had accomplished all of our therapy goals. I'll still go to her for 30 minutes a month to have check-ins, but I think it's a good sign that she felt confident enough to release me. I feel so even-keeled these days, so OK that it feels incredible. It doesn't mean that I feel complacent, or that I don't think about my health--it's just that I feel fine, that I don't worry too much. My emotions are so in-range, so unbelievably HUMAN.

It feels good. It feels good. It all feels so good.

The End of Things

Today was Ryan's last day in the lab, the last day that there was someone who had been there longer than me. It's funny, because I only spend 1/5 of the year in lab--I drift in and out and others fade away, defend and leave.

So now, I have an odd sort of lab seniority, where I'm the one who has been there the longest, in a weird way. I won't be the one who has spent the most weeks there [Mike, our post-doc, will still have me beat], but I am the one who will remember more people. I am the one who will remember what it was like when our lab was a Boys Club [me not excluded], the one who will remember misanthropic Ryan and Shaun, the mess.

Ryan tells stories of the misadventures that came before me, but he has trouble remembering when I arrived. Was I there with Josh or Wolverine, he asks while telling the stories, but I have to say no.

Already I find myself telling stories, about how he's addicted to Mike & Ikes. Once, he offered me some, and I responded with, "No, I only like the red ones."

I watched as he absent-mindedly picked out the red ones as we continued our conversation. He held them out and I ate them. Later, I told him that this was the moment I knew he loved me.

So, for someone who claims to hate people, we've had an awfully good ride. When he talks about going to college in the late '90s, I remind him that I was 12 then. We send each other inappropriate youtube videos and discuss the inner nuances of the vilest Tucker Max stories. To everyone who comes after, he will be the ghost in my stories, the one whose name is indelible from lab. I may forget that they didn't know him, and I won't bother to explain the soup he left in my cabinet or all the colorful crap he left on my desk. Instead, I'll tell them about how he left the red ones on my keyboard, but not about how sad I was when I left five boxes on his desk and told them they should last about one hour of his journey to Washington DC.