"He said I was unequipped to meet life because I had no sense of humor."

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Numbers

So I got the numbers and as I had expected they were about the same - 2.2, so game on biopsy!  To be honest I'm kind of excited to be able to write and post photos of the biopsy stuff.  C will be around the the procedure and I'm hoping to get some fun pictures with my Kidney Doc.  Mad Doctor stuff.  It is a grab bag of emotions for me right now - not all bad but certainly some difficult feelings in the mix.

I got lunch with my mom on Thursday - I talked to my mom about Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian philosopher.  He's kind of a side-show youtube sensation, famous for proclamations about what toilet design can tell you about a culture.  Well he has some slightly more serious talks on the true functions of organic fruit (to comfort the buyer) and one that struck me about how in a permissive society, as we live today, in a permissive society a person feels guilt for not actualizing all of their desires - for not being everything to everyone all the time.  Old fashion guilt, he says, came from our unspoken transgressive desires, which we had purged from us in psychotherapy, or expressed in art as Aristotle would have it.  We used to feel guilty for wanting things.  Now that we can want anything, we feel guilt when we do NOT want things!  And we suffer a crisis of impotence.  We cannot possibly enact all of our desires - physically or emotionally or pragmatically so we must not be enough.  Permissiveness does not make us happier we only feel guilty for different things.

I carried on for some time on my unsuspecting mother but there was a reason and I remembered it; when I enter a health crisis this guilt or inadequate feeling dissipates - as though it were never there.  I was waxing on about the abstract benefits of a health crisis.  And it's true - in a lot of ways kidney failure was one of the best thing that happened to me.  I have clear memories of the weeks after the hospital when the world was spread out before me, new and ready, everything but my next few days stripped away.  My life was the equivalent of a near death experience in a safe clinical environment every few weeks!  At least it was in 2002.  It never took long to lose perspective and get bogged down in the stupid shit of everyday life once again (namely my insecurities and my resistance thereof).

My first reaction to hearing the high creatinine level was a kind of calm focus.  What I had to do next was clearly laid out in front of me, prioritized and simple.  And I did not have control over the outcome, which meant I couldn't do anything wrong.  That was a welcome feeling after years of my future outweighing my present.  I never once wondered why it had happened, or why it had happened to me.  I was never angry about it.  The wounds feel quantified to me; they are mine and I know them.  I wouldn't trade them for anyone else's scars or naivete.

Yet I'd still rather not go through this - especially again; it is something that given the choice I'd rather not happen to me.  My curiosity and even tracking my experience here feels like a kind of masking, intellectualizing the hurt to damped it.  I mentioned to C that I hoped I could remain productive should I be laid up again - that in 2002 when I was going on dialysis I moped about, played Civilization III and ate impressive sums of chocolate chips.  I didn't even read much.  I was attending to myself at the time but that too was a loss I did not understand, even though I felt it.  It is a challenge to plot a course among the centers of my emotional well-being.  The lessons of clarity of purpose (not dying) remain elusive to me.  Joy and suffering create meaning and it seems like it might be my turn for some of the latter.  But really, given the choice; no thanks you know?

Thanks for reading!  

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