[Editorial Note: A friend read my previous blog entry and wrote me an email to express their concern and well wishes. The apology for the slow reply refers also to previous unanswered emails. As I express below, I felt my reply was better suited to this blog, and a bit too much.... I guess a bit too much "me" for a polite response to a friend. Nonetheless I sent it, and now, with minor edits, I post it. Never fear, nothing private about my friend is disclosed. I am far too self-obsessed for that. Another note, which I consider important, will be appended below.]
Sorry for the slow reply. I wasn't expecting to be able to
touch-type today, but I had a last-minute reprieve from my hand
specialist. It seems that they ran out of whatever chemical agent they
use to dissolve cysts on tendons.
My blog post
was mostly regarding my frustration with going through a cardiac stress/echo
procedure, which I can describe if you want or you can just look it up
if you are curious, getting the initial notes and some of the raw data
from the technicians, but getting no overview/summary or other
communication from the cardiologist. I've learned a little about this
stuff through experience and googling, but I still don't feel qualified
to correctly understand what I have received so far. The word
"abnormal" certainly shows up a lot in the notes. I suppose if there
was anything wrong requiring timely action or instruction from the
cardiologist I would have received it... is what I would say if I were
an optimist.
I like to think of myself as more of a realist than a pessimist, but I would be the last to know.
For
a person with an anxiety disorder, I certainly have found it easier, as
I get older, to take an "it is what it is" attitude towards potential
worries of uncertain magnitude. That may be a gift from my treatment-resistant
depression. More likely it is just that I have a different kind of
anxiety. I'm less afraid of the big things I can't control, like death,
civil war, and the looming end of constitutional democracy, than I am
of many little things most people enjoy, like being around other people,
being seen, being present.
I just spent
fifteen minutes staring at this screen while my mind plunged down
multiple spiraling rabbit-holes of global and personal doom, fighting
back the urge to pointlessly word vomit about them. I don't need the
internet or social media; I can doom-scroll my own psyche. My only
island of peace is in reminding myself that I am stupid and probably
wrong about most things.
This isn't going
well. A friend should not subject a friend to such unfiltered psychic
waste; that's what the "Psychic Toilet" is for. I should use it more
often and see if it leaves me more personable. The word "personable"
suddenly strikes me as more profound than the dictionary definition of,
essentially, "pleasant". Able to be a person, to be seen as, to see
oneself as, a person. Some of this may end up in my blog after all.
Perhaps it would have been better to have had the procedure on my hand, just to slow down this typing.
I sincerely hope you are doing well, and am sorry as usual that I can't seem to talk about anything but myself.
[Cynicism is so pervasive in everything I write, it is difficult for me to say anything positive without it appearing to be sarcasm. I swear what I say next is not. I am more grateful than I know how to express that there are a few people who I can call "friend". The very idea of it is a source of constant surprise to me, or at least when I take the time to contemplate it. There are a very few people from my distant past who, by the simple accumulation of shared experience at that time, I will always consider to be my friends, even if we have not communicated in years, even decades in some cases. To dare to call anyone I have met since, say, 1996, a friend, in most cases I have literally asked explicit permission to use that word, to know that there is a mutual agreement and trust that the word is appropriate. This is how poorly I understand what friendship is, and how bad I am at being meaningfully present in the lives of others as a friend. For the most part, I am the lucky recipient of the good graces of very patient and kind friends. If I lived under a definition of friendship that required frequent and mutual maintenance, I would have no friends at all. I am again so very grateful for those who knowingly let me use that word without contract.]