as small as a world and as large as alone

6:00pm December 26, 2012

I’m tired. And… tired. Gradually exhausting all the things I can handle doing. Reading stopped, but despite being really sleepy, can’t sleep a wink. So then put on an obscure eighties concept album for awhile and felt better. But then got a headache that the music made worse.

I’ve got that weird kind of boredom that isn’t really the same thing as boredom at all. I just don’t have a better word. It’s what happens when my body backs me into a corner but I can’t even fall asleep. A burning desire for distraction from pain in a situation where actual distractions make the pain worse.

I’m actually still getting better but it’s slow and it’s kind of up and down instead of a straight line.

And my brain is fuzzed in ways that make it hard to find the places in the world where none of this matters. Those require shutting down thought a little more and more access to a certain kind of clarity. Then I can “call up” the people and places that really matter to me, even in really ugly situations. Except it’s not like I imagine them up – I can’t do it with anything that never existed. It’s more like a kind of awareness that involves seeing the patterns real things make, the way each part of the world connects to each other. And then being aware of tiny pieces of that. Only the ones I’m familiar enough with on a deep enough level.

And when I’m aware of even one of those things, I can’t be lonely or disconnected or bored (in the real sense or the weird way I’m using the word) no matter what else is happening. And when it’s a friend I’m connecting to (not all human, not all animal, not all discrete units even)… not sure the best description. Like a kind of love that can’t be hidden or warped or made into all the confusing or invasive things that word sometimes means. It’s like the most connected yet least invasive sense I’ve had with anything or anyone. Because it’s not an emotional connection (even if you can have feelings about it), it’s a connection built into the world itself somehow.

Can’t describe it easily but know enough other people who’ve experienced it. Despite the fact that most people never talk about this, or talk about something that they only mistake for this (while not imagining this exists). Still have found enough to convince me it’s a thing.

Anyway at times like this, when I can finally get to that point, it feels like an anchor. Like in the hospital, when the entire world went white and my mind stopped working and everything I’d ever known was seeming to fall away, and someone grabbed onto my hand, and my entire world revolved around that hand even when I wasn’t aware of anything else but chaos. It’s like that. Only far less overloading than the physical presence of another person.

And I’m mostly just hoping that I find that soon. Because there’s still too much combined exhaustion and pain and confusion to really do much else. And that feeling just plain sucks unless I can find that kind of connection to something. It’s weird because things aren’t as world-shatteringly awful as they were just after the nerve block. But I still seem to need similar coping techniques to get through whatever the hell is happening now. Which seems to be partly the pain itself and partly the lingering effects of having spent at least a week in severe enough pain that it… does things… to your body.

(Not sure how to describe that part to someone without a common reference point. Other than to say that aside from the pain itself, severe enough pain eventually feels like you’ve been doing hard exercise – and beyond your current limits. Afterwards you feel too worn out to move, it warps your mind and your emotions, you can end up delirious enough to hallucinate or lose track of where you are (if someone throws an ice pack on me in sufficient pain I often become utterly convinced I’ve suffered a skiing injury), and there’s all kinds of after effects both cognitive and physical even when the pain has died down to something less evil. And I seem to be in that stage right now. (Pain borderline evil, after effects everywhere.)

I really hope the steroids they injected eventually take. And that I can find those connections in the meantime. There’s certain trees, rocks, dirt, cats, and humans I wouldn’t at all mind being around right now. (And that feels just like really being around. Sometimes better, because actually being around involved sensory input.)

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