“Get stuff.”
Later I will tell this story as a funny story. It turned out to be, in fact, my kids’ favorite story from this time in our lives. Get stuff! How hilarious! How dumb! How useless! And later it will become funnier to me, or rather I will be able to appreciate more how funny it was, this example of the ways all of us fool ourselves, the ways in which we think we are competent, the ways in which our own view of ourselves is so limited in perspective and scope, the ways in which we all struggle to prepare ourselves and cope, and yet how misplaced our confidence is, how limited our abilities.
At the moment, however, it is crushing. Humiliating. Specific to only me. Even though I can’t think clearly enough to fully think through what is happening, what had just happened, I’m able to fully experience the confusion, the panic, the terror of being unable to think, the shame of having thought so poorly. I’m merely going through the motions of thinking, going through the motions of being a person who can go to the store, a person who can make lists of things she needs at the store and then go to the store and then get those things and not have any of that be confusing or strange or even remarkable in any way, going through the motions of being me. But I’m not me. At least not the me I’ve been able to rely on for as long as I’d been alive, not a me I recognize.
I walk home crying, and not only from being upright too long.
“Get stuff.”
Who was the me who had written myself that note? Who was the me who had thought it had made sense? Who was the me who walked to the store? Who was the me who couldn’t remember why she was at the store in the first place? Had this me always been like this? Am I only seeing now what a fiction this is, this self that is apparently assembled, context-less and free-floating? Is this me my brain? And if it is, who am I when that brain isn’t working?
My best thoughts were incomplete thoughts. Useless messages from a self I didn’t recognize. The me who was Me—my consciousness, my self, the thing that used to be able to understand context and purpose and thought and story—was somehow dampened, muted, held prisoner by the me who was the rest of my brain, the me who regulated my breathing and got signals from nerve endings and oversaw the beating of my heart and the circulation of my blood and the production of my cerebrospinal fluid, and the me who could walk to the store or make dinner if I needed to or babble like a drunk person in response to questions without actually thinking or understanding or even making sense.
I walk home, crying, defeated, and return to the darkness of my room, to my bed, to the comfort and humiliation of being flat. The hubris of thinking that I could think! The cockiness of assuming I could complete an errand! I lie in shame, staring at the ceiling, podcast voices interrupting each other in the background with forced banter, until finally I begin to feel myself shifting into sleep, the sensation of pain merging with the sensation of slipping away, the voices becoming more and more indistinct, less identifiable as people speaking words. And as I start to feel the me who is still me fully fall away, my brain whispers to me: Shampoo and conditioner! My phone is too far away to write it down, but I feel my brain confidently telling me, That’s okay, You’ll remember it, you can go back to the store tomorrow. Just make a list.
17
August 2015
The thought saunters in, as all of my thoughts do these days: a plain fact, casually registering in my consciousness, free of judgment aside from a friendly welcoming impulse. My brain is now perpetually agreeable to thoughts. My brain perpetually says yes, acknowledging thoughts with pleasant surprise, without discrimination. And so I’m not disturbed when the thought appears. Instead I welcome it the way my brain now welcomes all ideas, with a moment of feigned recognition, the way you might improvise delight at parties when being introduced to someone you don’t remember but surely should. Ah! Hello! Of course! That’s how I reacted when the thought made itself known, when I sat up in bed, the whole world a flat and unceasing sensation of pain, and felt some part of me think: Remember, if it gets really bad, you can just take all of your medicine at once and kill yourself.
I have wanted to die twice before. Well, wanted is a strong word. Perhaps better to say: Twice I have realized it was an appealing option. The first time was in the midst of labor with Emi, the pain so wrenching and overwhelming that I found myself having reached a place of surrender, thinking I understand now; if it’s my time, it’s my time; I’m okay with this, I can go now. And then suddenly the pain gave way to progress and I emerged on the other side of it into a new plane of existence, for sure, but not the noncorporeal one I had, for one surprisingly peaceful moment, imagined.
The second time contained no such grace.
In the bathroom, I open the medicine cabinet. There are easily fifteen bottles there, medication I have been prescribed but, for the most part, have not taken. Powerful prophylactic antibiotics, for the surgery I ended up not having. Painkillers that were barely capable of wounding my pain, let alone killing it.
