BEDRIDDEN LIFE
A Few More Things
Or Tweets, let’s be honest
Differences between Husband and Wife communication:
Me: Do you think you’d be able to go to the store later and get me some Trail Mix? Only if you’re able. I know how busy you are at work.
My wife: You didn’t say please.
Me: Sorry, I was only asking if you were able. Asking you to please do it would imply that you’re able. I would have followed up with a please.
My wife: Please leave me alone.
A supposed top MD at a world-renowned hospital once diagnosed me with a neuropsychiatric disorder — “illness anxiety” — because, he said, “There is nothing I can do about chronic fatigue syndrome.” “You don’t think I have CFS?” I asked. “No,” he said, “forget about that.”
“Oh,” I said, “how do you treat that?”
“It’s very difficult,” he said, without further explanation.
I was listening to the song “Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gotye. It calls to memory a time when I rented a big black SUV and drove from Manhattan, NY, to Greenwich, Connecticut, to a bed & breakfast for some alone time for a few days. The song came on the radio a million times as I drove fast as hell from point to point, jamming the brakes on any time I hit traffic. I loved driving and listening to that song while appreciating the ginormous mansions and bucolic scenery of Greenwich.
Jung said that “the right way to wholeness is made up of fateful detours and wrong turnings.” I can relate to this as it pertains to snacks. I’ve gone long periods without snacking, I’ve chosen the wrong kind of snacks, and I have shared snacks when I shouldn’t have. And so, with snacks now being a staple in my life again, I feel whole.
My wife and I welcomed a new member to our family, Reginald. He is a rescue from Amazon.com for the reasonable price of $29.98. He can’t go for walks, but he’s good for snuggling or beating to a pulp when feeling frustrated or stressed out. He’s already brought so much joy to our family. He’s a stuffed animal.
Two years later and I now think I know why I felt highly agitated for hours, as if I’d been poisoned, and on the verge of a psychotic break after drinking a medium DECAF coffee from Dunkin’, after having not had a single cup of coffee in five years. It’s because it more than likely wasn’t DECAF after all. It had to have been the old accidental switcheroo — regular for Decaf — which always happens to the most vulnerable and unsuspecting of people.
For no other reasons than nostalgia and to summon up the part of me from 1993 that dreamed big dreams of being a rap icon on the streets where I grew up — Francis Wyman and Wing Terrace, Burlington, Mass — I found myself listening to “Hits From the Bong” by Cypress Hill on repeat one day.
My old therapist, a Jungian analyst, said something to me once. He said that “unconditional love in families is hard to define, perhaps too idealistic; family is more apt to reject, so we need to challenge the family archetype.”
“Sure,” I thought, “that just gives family members a free pass to act like jerks whenever they feel like it.” But then I really wondered, Could this be true?
So I set out to conduct a painstaking 15–20 minutes of research on the Internet to find out the answer.
And this is what I arrived at:
It seems the experts are split on whether the concept of unconditional love in general truly exists.
I once had a positively ridiculous but not surprising talk with a potential new psychiatrist, who would have — thank God — acted primarily as my medication prescriber. He said, “ME/CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) is psychosomatic, studies show, and fixing your chronic fatigue is doable.”
Great, I thought.
When questioned, I told the psychiatrist I was a little hyperactive as a kid. He said that I have ADHD and I agreed that that might have been the case. And so, he said that he was going to treat my ADHD with Adderall, even though I reported not having experienced symptoms of hyperactivity in a very, very long time.
I don’t know if it was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard or if it was some sort of paradoxical magical genius attempt — trying to treat the hyperactivity I may have had as a kid but no longer have as an adult — by a man I was completely mystified by.
“This girl I graduated high school with,” I might say. Meanwhile, the “girl” is forty five or forty six years old. I only say “lady” or “woman” if the person is in their fifties or above. I know many that do this, too. Is it because it’s not uncommon to say “girl” and guy, not “woman” and guy or “lady” and guy? “Lady” and man and “woman” and man we will say, of course. What l am I talking about? Why do I, and others, say girl when referring to a fully-grown adult woman? Can someone please explain this?
