You Don’t Have to Be Dying to Need Dignity
on my too-close-to-death experience and the collective mat of mercy that can hold you too
CW: Medical Trauma. (My newest.)
How do I tell you?
That was going to the be title of this post, because for weeks, I’ve not known how to tell you that the other shoe dropped. I’ve been living what might be one of your worst nightmares—a cataclysmic fall from the crest of finally feeling well.
Five days after returning from my epic two week national parks road trip in dear Reepijeep (my jeep with the rooftop tent! I’m missing her! See below for more on the wonder of that trip and why I went.), I had a vein blow out at IVIG Treatment. The next week I had to quickly have surgery to place a port so I can safely get the treatment I need to stay well and working. And two weeks after that, still recovering from surgery, I landed via an ambulance into the hospital for two weeks with severe anaphalaxis. I’m still incredibly sick and am working hard to stay out of the hospital while my immunologist and allergist search hard for what has happened. (There’s much we don’t know, and I have a long, long recovery ahead of me. I’m not ready for feedback on my diagnosis process, but here’s a footnote for the chronically curious.)1
I’m here—but not to make this fall into better fiction. I’m here to let the faces of mercy meet us both in every place we currently find ourselves falling. For I am finding, at the lowest place my limbs have lain, that there is life here on the bottom. There is love. There is human kindness. And that is enough.
Last year I watched Queen Brené Brown’s “The Call to Courage” special on Netflix. While the audience vacillated between laughing and wiping back tears, Brené said the following:
“When we lose our capacity for vulnerability, joy becomes foreboding.”
Foreboding. I hear that word with the rush of storm clouds climbing quick over a ridge. I feel my throat constrict—a sensation that’s now as strong as my skull—and my shoulders tense.
When goodness has often come with grief rushing right behind, we learn to tense ourselves from tasting and touching joy.
Dictionary.com’s definition describes foreboding as a strong inner feeling of future misfortune. And I appreciate that, because I know that what we sense in our bones becomes our beliefs.
The stories we swallow about goodness and grief shape the space inside us to feel and anticipate and receive joy as something either safe or scary.
And the soothing, sacred stories we choose to swallow—as well as the toxic spiritual-sugar-water ones we consciously decide to spit out—can soften the spaces inside us that have become too hollowed and hardened by hurt to trust that that space inside us is strong enough to tolerate the terrifying wonder of joy.
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