I shouldn’t be up and about.  I should be resting.

But my brain won’t rest right now.  My instinct is to burst into tears of desperation right now.  And that isn’t something I want to do here, in front of my dad and daughter who have been preparing meals, cleaning, changing my bandages, changing my clothes, pulling on and off my socks and shoes, and basically making the living happen while I sleep and stumble around doing nothing helpful at all, only to give up and go back to sleep.

So, I am writing down shit instead of letting it burst out in tears.

While I try to write it down, my nose is oozing out bloody goop, and I am cognizant of the fact that being at my desk is the very wrong place to be.  It isn’t helping my recovery after surgery.  But I don’t know where else to turn but this page.  I can’t walk, or swim, or do yoga.  I can’t get out the ugly feelings and the hopelessness and the desperation in any other way right now.  It needs to be put onto paper so it can leave my head and my heart.  Or at least a little of it can.

I’ve felt helpless long before I was recovering from surgery, and I think I will feel that way long after.  Being disabled makes me feel like I am not enough and can’t do anything all the time.  I don’t imagine that will ever change.  Today that feeling overwhelms me—that knowledge that I will never be the bounty of help and the ball of energy that I once was.  And it sucks.  It sucks big hairy balls.

Don’t judge that statement.  There isn’t a better way to say it, really.  It is the worst.

Don’t try to tell me it isn’t the worst.  You aren’t the one feeling in. Living it. Bearing it every single day.  Weighted.  Burdened.  Crippled.

So today, instead of resting, I am trying to recover by writing it down, getting it out, and letting the awfulness that I am feeling be on this page, not in my heart.

Sometimes what we need to recover from is not the bloody post-operative nose ooze.  Sometimes we need to recover from feeling like the life isn’t worth the struggle.  Sometimes we need to just say that—not because we are considering ending our lives, but because the question really does loom large for some of us.  Is this worth it?

Sometimes we recover from our helpless and hopeless state only by admitting that we feel helpless and hopeless.  So here is my admission.  Here is my attempt at recovering.  Here lies my helpless, hopeless, humble, human self.  On this page.