I should be writing more. I want to, but I start telling myself a thousand reasons why not, and so I don’t. But I accumulate all these thoughts in my head and by the time Sunday comes I try to sit down and write, there’s just too many of them and I don’t know where to start.
I dreamt that I had late stage cancer this time last week, and it provoked me more than usual. I think about dying all the time, don’t get me wrong, but there’s something different about wanting to end my own life vs suddenly dying in an accident vs having to accept one’s impending mortality with a sense of helplessness.
“It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.” — Umberto Eco
I started to think if there would be anything I would have done differently if that became real. It was a good exercise, because I realised there wasn’t. In a lot of ways I am having the time of my life now. I don’t have people’s deadlines to answer to except my own, I am working on things I really care about, I have time to spend with the people I love, and I have the presence to show up for people who need me. There isn’t anything that I wished I could have done, except I would take the remaining time to churn out the ideas I have sitting in my head.
I don’t actually need that dream as a reminder. I have begun to measure my pulse rate again, and it is wild and low. When I see my TCM practitioner she tells me she could hardly feel my pulse. Sometimes I feel like my heart is going to stop beating anytime. There is also the question of my eyes. They are definitely better since I got back, but the visit to specialist last week showed that they are still pretty dysfunctional. There are also my anxiety attacks which still occur once in a while. Or my migraines, when I overstrain myself.
I am not sure if I’ll ever be back to a normal spectrum of health again, or having a dysfunctional body is an acceptance I need to have because I had probably gone too far in burning it out.
So yes, I am doing a lot of things and making decisions that most people wouldn’t, or arguably my past self wouldn’t even consider, but I have to, because I don’t know when I’ll be incapable of working, or being. The thought of being unable to work scares me more than actually dying itself.
I can’t imagine life without writing, without being able to see some of my ideas come to life. Instead of wasting my psychic energy being neurotic I am trying to be better with expressing the hidden parts of myself more, like attempting to write terrible poetry/prose and posting some of them on instagram. Who cares about the poetry being terrible if I feel cathartic writing them?
I keep asking myself now – what can I do more of, to become more of myself? How can I build the resilience to endure the alienation of being more and more myself and less and less like others?
I guess all I want to do, is to know myself before I die, or worse, lose the capacity to, while I am still alive.