This was adapted today from what was originally a short McCheese update on Friday night. It won’t be edited until Sunday afternoon.
The no-writing-at-night experiment tripped me up two days in a row due to other obligations, but my schedule is empty next week and I’ll be back to terrorizing the populace soon enough. There’s been nothing too exciting to report, other than I made it home from a morning dentist appointment without sweating through my shirt. (The excitement bar is currently so low that it poses a major trip hazard.) This first week of adopting new routines was buoyed by an optimism that will gradually fade, at which point we’ll see how determined I really am.
It’s almost impossible to overstate how comically difficult it is to maintain any sort of consistency in the face of Parkinsonian apathy and sleeplessness. What’s harder to describe to people who’ve never known me offline is the strangeness of being suddenly stripped of my consistency, dedication and motivation — everything that used to keep me going. It feels like a mugging, but they took my personality instead of my wallet. There isn’t an insurance claim you can make for a loss that profound or a police report you can file.
I don’t mean to sound dramatic: obviously, I still exist. It’s just an absence that’s felt so acutely sometimes, especially at 3 am when those constellations of loss collide with personal disappointments. Late-night existential crises, and their unanswerable questions of whether you’d care more about the future if XYZ was different, are traps best avoided. Nevertheless, crumbs of bitterness and ruefulness entice me. All those decades of planning and organization, of the tunnel vision required to pursue goals that never meant as much to other people as they did to me, and this is where I’ve ended up? This was the destination?
The life I have now isn’t chopped liver and I’ve undoubtedly been luckier in most respects — freedom, safety, even health — than I’ve had any right to be.* It’s just a cosmic joke to have spent what were probably the best years of my life (as trite and premature as it sounds), obnoxiously focused on things that no longer matter. There’s no use in tallying the cost of the dumbest, most wasteful sacrifices I made while more worried about the future than the present; this isn’t Susan Lucci’s Ebbie. At any other time of the day I’m aware of the pointlessness of such exercises and appreciative of my overall privilege.** It’s only at 3 am that I fleetingly identify with an unlikely figure and want to sing-shout “All your life and what does it get you? Thanks a lot, and out with the garbage.”
For Crankenstein’s sake, let’s hope I don’t act out an Ethel Merman dream. But if it ever happens, it’ll be “There’s No Business Like Show Business” or “Rose’s Turn” that startles her awake.
* “Health” wasn’t a typo. My spiel to fellow j-pouchers who are angry or upset when their UC diagnosis is changed to Crohn’s is “There’s never been a better time in history to have Crohn’s!” And it’s true: the treatment options available today are infinitely superior to what was available in the 1980s, ’90s and earlier. They’re getting in on the ground floor of the IBD opportunity of a lifetime!
** You never know, maybe the thief that made off with my personality will find it so insufferable that they abandon it an alley, where it’s recovered and returned to me.