Breakdown

I’m listening to the album “Plans” by Death Cab for Cutie, and the song “Brothers on a hotel bed” floored me. It’s not because I feel like I’m getting old (necessarily), or that things have grown stale between me and my partner; rather, the line “he lives inside someone he does not recognize when he catches his reflection on accident.”

That was me. In many ways, it still is. I’m living inside someone I don’t recognize. I’m not myself, and I haven’t been myself for about a year.

I’m not sure the cause. Honestly, I think it’s a whole bunch of stuff piling on at the same time: almost dying in the hospital, dealing with a failed kidney transplant, transitioning into a new lifestyle that revolves around dialysis, moving into a new home while at the same time helping my parents move out of my childhood home (and getting rid of lots of stuff with sentimental or nostalgic value), and more. It was a lot, all at once.

Not to mention that I’m now permanently on a low dose of prednisone, which my body does not respond to well. It makes me cranky, irritable, and generally less forgiving, all traits I am ashamed of and actively worked towards curbing.

That said, I think I finally have made peace with everything, and have started to turn things around as of late. There wasn’t a big a-ha moment or anything. Honestly, the thing that has helped me most is going back through the posts here on this blog, and re-reading the things that past me has written.

Reading is a uniquely effective method of living in someone else’s mind, and it turns out that it’s also effective at remembering what it feels like inside your own mind when you’ve forgotten.

I’m finally starting to feel like me again, slowly. I hope that others haven’t noticed too much irritability or unkindness on my part, but if you have, please know that I am deeply sorry, and am working to get back to my old self (warts and all).