Always Be aCcepting
Still sick. Different from yesterday, both better and worse. Shanda is sick today today, which makes it harder. I was doing okay this afternoon but had to go out and see a physician and get a prescription which too forever and made me feel terrible. Shanda was pushing me away until late in the day because her brain imagines that not thinking about being sick will somehow let her avoid it, when in reality it just exacerbates the issue.
We did get to talk for a minute about topics that are often behind a couple layers of avoidance. Things like helping our friends stop fleeing and dating as shared activity and the way I imagine my life goal as having no one need me so I can stop being in charge. Being sick wasn’t the best for this but it did keep us on the couch and talking, and made it harder to ignore being overwhelmed since we were both fully whelmed already.
M popped in, though we weren’t able to connect today. You told me that some parts of your life look easier in the comming week, which sounds like great news to me. Yesterday we did get to connect for a second, which has been pretty rare the past several weeks, and I ranted about clothes and medical care. Got to talk to DerbyK for a second too, hopefully offered some reassurance, and I got another lesson in pride – not the lesson most people need but one I sure do.
I’m not sure yet if tomorrow will be better with respect to illness. I never really recovered after I went out and now I’m feeling worse than I did when I woke up 12 hours ago. I hate being tired but restless, bored but unable to focus, dirty and unable to get clean.
But it has helped me see the way I often choose acceptance even when other options are available. I can accept almost anything, deciding to be satisfied with how things are instead of wanting them to be different. It’s how I produce much of the calm that you see and that I share. But I do it too much. Not in a way that keeps me from protecting myself from the outside world, but in a way that devalues my existence. It’s hard for me to imagine any option provides as much reliable relief as acceptance, and harder still to imagine that any other option is as cheap. There are social implications to this – I imagine my acceptance is cheaper than that of others to – but fundamentally it’s internal. And it’s sort of a big barrier to imagining a life where I can want things.
I’m too good a Buddhist to be a good human. It’s not a humble brag, it’s a lament about how far I am from being a real boy. It’s a scream about how sick I am of getting harmful advise from a world that can’t imagine how broken I am. A world that reacts to me with pity and shame instead of empathy.
ZiB
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Sent from a phone.
