Cranky Fibro Girl

Harnessing the healing power of snark

Take My Mind, Please

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Today I am very grateful for my coach.

When she heard about my severe sleep apnea her first thought was, “Wow. Imagine the amazing things she’s gonna do when she’s rested!”

That was really nice to hear, because when I got the results of my sleep study, my first thought was

I

have

not

slept

for

thirty

five

years.

Thinking that thought was a lot like kicking a tiny pebble and accidentally dislodging an avalanche.

Suddenly it was as if I’d woken up one day, and everything was wrong with me.

If I could, just out of the blue, contract a serious intestinal bacteria, then what else could happen to me?

If suddenly my sleep is all wrong, then what else could go wrong with me?

If Heath Ledger could drop dead in the blink of an eye, then I could too.

Suddenly, all I could see was evidence for being weak and sickly. But that’s not what my coach saw.

She said, “Look at everything you’ve done, even though you’ve been completely exhausted!”

This is true. Even if I haven’t really slept for the past thirty-five years, I have done an awful lot of amazing things. I do have a pretty fantastic life.

She said, “You’ve had relatively good health over they years, given how impaired your sleep has been. To me, that is evidence of how strong your body is.”

Also true.

She said, “Once you get your sleep apnea treated, world domination is just around the corner!”

That sounds good to me.

Yeah, What She Said

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It is interesting to me that we ask a question about the writing life that we do not ask about other professions. For example, we do not say, “What are your odds of making it as an investment banker? As an elementary-school teacher? As a chemist?”

In those, and most professions, we assume that an interest in pursuing the career implies a probably proclivity for it and a reasonable chance for success. Not so with writing. The truth is, when you want a writing career and are willing to do the work to get it, the odds work with you, not against you. This is a simple metaphysical law.

Julia Cameron, The Right To Write

Blasphemer

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Lately I’ve been thinking about taking piano lessons again. I played for a long time earlier in my life, from about the age of 5 until my senior year in college, about 14 years ago.

I got this same urge a few years back, and so I started looking around for a teacher. I asked my aunt, who is a professor of music at a college in a neighboring state, for a recommendation and she gave me the name of a good teacher here in Atlanta.

I was a pretty talented pianist back in my day, but when I started taking lessons with my new teacher I realized that I was not even in the same universe as her league. She is very, very good.

I gave the situation the old college try, but it was very hard because I was very intimidated. So one day, as is my wont, I tried to lighten the atmosphere with a little humor.

We were working on a movement of Bach’s French Suite V and she was explaining to me how to interpret some of the ornamentation (like trills) according to the rules of the Baroque period. So, me being me, I responded by saying, “Yeah, and doesn’t it make you wonder just who got to make those rules up, anyway?”

But no, if her blank face and stunned silence were any indication, never in life had it occurred to her to question the Sacred Scriptures Of Musical Interpretation. And furthermore, her horrified visage reproached me, the fact that you would even make such a flippant remark about something so precious and so holy just made kittens DIE!

She’s not my teacher anymore

A Little Mystical Poetry For Your Weekend Enjoyment

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I found this over at Zena Moon.

We have not come here to take prisoners,
But to surrender ever more deeply
To freedom and joy.

We have not come into this exquisite world
To hold ourselves hostage from love.

Run my dear,
From anything
That may not strengthen
Your precious budding wings.

Run like hell my dear,
From anyone likely
To put a sharp knife
Into the sacred, tender vision
Of your beautiful heart.

We have a duty to befriend
Those aspects of obedience
That stand outside of our house
And shout to our reason
“O please, O please,
Come out and play.”

For we have not come here to take prisoners
Or to confine our wondrous spirits,

But to experience ever and ever more deeply
Our divine courage, freedom and
Light.

~Hafiz

Classified

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Ironically, just as I was in the middle of writing yesterday’s post I got a phone call from the nurse. I was really excited to hear what she had to say, which unfortunately turned out to be: a whole lot of nothing.

After an awful lot of hemming and hawing, she told me that my sample had been located, and it had been analyzed, but no one was allowed to know what the report said.

So apparently I was wrong; my poo was not on the run. It was actually in the witness protection program.

Apparently the secrets it contains are so valuable to some (what was the effect of the drug on my illness) and so dangerous to others (actually, dangerous to the same people, as apparently releasing any information about my sample would unblind the study, thus causing the earth to crash into the sun and bringing the end of life as we know it) that it is being highly guarded in a secure, secret location. And I don’t have a high enough security clearance to have any further contact with it.

Well alrighty then. Now I understand how Sydney Bristow felt when the FBI wouldn’t tell her how they were planning on taking down SD-6.

Seriously, I Could Not Make This Stuff Up

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So I’m two and a half weeks past the end of the kick-ass antibiotics, and I’m happy to say that I am starting to feel like myself again. So much so, in fact, that every day before he goes to work my husband sits me down, looks me in the eye and says,

“Remember. You are still recovering from a serious illness. You are not well. You need to take it easy today.” Otherwise he will come home to discover that I’ve re-shingled the entire roof and added an extra room to the back of our house while he was gone. And I’ll be upset, because I didn’t get around to repaving the driveway as well.

The people in charge of the study still call me once a week as a follow up, and last week I asked them if they had the results from my final stool sample. The nurse said she didn’t have them at that moment, but that she would call me back this week.

So I heard from her on Tuesday, only to learn that, “We’re having some trouble tracking down your sample.”

Apparently my poo is on the lam.

If I had to guess I’d say that it committed an act of violence against Science, and then escaped to some Latin American country which has no extradition treaty with the United States. It is bilingual, after all.

I Am A Writer

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“Did you write today?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’re a writer today.”

It would be lovely if being a writer were a permanent state that we could attain to. It’s not, or if it is, the permanence comes posthumously.

A page at a time, a day at a time, is the way we must live our writing lives. Credibility lies in the act of writing. That is where the dignity is. That is where the final “credit” must come from.

-from The Right to Write by Julia Cameron