These past few days, I've felt like I'm suffocating anytime I'm in the house. Anytime I'm not moving. Maybe not suffocating. Like I'm being strangled? We keep talking about the difficulties inherent in the transplant program, and it just feels like everything up until this point I was handling just fine until I'm just not. I need to keep moving, I've gotten blisters on both feet now, and it hurts to keep pacing the sidewalks and trails, early morning, midday, nighttime, but I can't stop either. The strain of it all manages to keep the screaming in my head and heart to be quiet. And we've also started having some hard conversations about certain other things. For a while there, after I finally came back down from my college town after struggling to do anything but drown in depression and total isolation, things were nominal. I even eventually set out to try for a few job interviews. Then Covid. Then moving to a new home...then the parent's sight started to go. Transitioned to needing a cane. To being unable to drive. Eventually the sight went away enough that I had to help manually perform the dialysis. Unable to walk more than a few steps with a cane, needing a rollator or wheelchair. Constantly more doctors visits. Never any good news. Always trying new medicines, one of which nearly killed the parent. Repeated illnesses that I had to apply at home after training with the nurses at the dialysis clinic. The car accident. Worse eyesight, less and less mobility, growing pains across the body. Other, even more devastating medical diagnoses of ailments to come.
This same infection that the parent has? It's already dealt with thanks to the antibiotics we were sent for me to administer at home.
I just don't understand why it's affected me so badly this time. To drag up questions about my self-worth, my purpose in life, having to consider more than ever a future without the parent at all, and realizing that I'm past my third decade, and do I have anything to offer? Anything of worth? I have this, my writing, and not...much else. We've managed with Social Security, some old investments from the grandparents, but costs are always going up, yet qualifications for getting further assistance are strict enough that we don't because of said minor passive income. I live my life in tiny chunks, never any longer stretch than a few hours at a time before I need to go help out with one thing or another. So what do I do? What can I do? In college, I found so little passion in anything except for performing with my friends at conventions and to make people laugh in the audience, my degree little more than just something to do after I realized how bad I was at numbers and math and science. That, and writing Mists, DoDA, and other sundries. To entertain, to create, that's been what keeps me going, when I can do it. Caring for the parent is what I do, every day, but outside of the required medical stuff, the home I've lived in for all these years abruptly feels like a tiny box without any air holes. Which is absurd. I've been so gifted to be able to live here, to help the parent out, to have the opportunity and capacity to do so without having to struggle nearly as much as others would have had to. What room do I possibly have to complain?
But I just can't stop walking, trying to get some kind of demon out of me, out of my head, that I can't even properly identify. The sun's gone down, it's cold, the paths and park are closed, so I'm just going back and forth on the sidewalks, the only illumination the motion sensor lights on the garage doors of every few houses in the neighborhood and a few street lights.
Fuck my feet hurt.
Vote Closed.
