There Is No Wealth But Life

The End of the Year

By Rae December 31, 2012 Life 8 Comments

Right now is New Year’s Eve. It is the first time in a million years that I am not sick. I can’t verbalize coherent sentences due to hormones, and the cramps are annoying, but I am not sick.

::Cue Angelic Chorus::

I really don’t remember much of 2012. That fact alone serves as motivation to blog. So, here’s a little of what I do remember about the year:

Glasses. At the start of 2012 I only wore glasses when driving at night on long road trips. I tried contacts but that was a complete failure. Now that the end of the year is here I rarely leave the apartment without glasses. I cannot see the priest’s face at church without them. Which I guess could be a good thing, but still…

Races. One of my automated achievement alternative to resolutions for 2012 was to run a marathon. That did not happen thanks to multiple injuries (what can I say, I was trying really, really hard!) but I did complete two half-marathons, one metric marathon (HA!) and 20 miles of walking + a 10k to earn a finisher’s medal at my second attempt at a marathon. It was the most fun I have had in years. And totally worth the fact that I was only this week (two months post marathon!) able to run without pain in my ankle.

Health. So very, very strange. Among other interesting things, I really think that my goiter has shrunk, though I’d have to have another ultrasound to confirm, and I’m too busy watching others’ ultrasounds these days. In any case, for the first time in more than 10 years I am not abnormally cold. So that is cool, er, I mean an appropriate response to the actual temperature!

Work. I have been on leave since August, and I am so very ready to get back to work. Of course I am terrified that I won’t be able to handle it, but that is yet more proof of how much I need it. Also, Josh’s job is absolutely fabulous.

Apartment. We’re not moving!! At the start of the year we were still desperately apartment hunting. We signed a lease mid-January, and have just renewed it. Which means we may indeed stay in one place for two years. How incredible would that be? I have been utterly spoiled with this place.

Friends. I am still a completely wretched friend. Much of the time I cannot muster coherent thoughts when I really care. So I continue to have very few friends who somehow have patience with me. Thank God.

Reality. I am constantly reminded to not take myself seriously. For real. I have no idea about the future, and absolutely cannot count on myself to have an appropriate emotional response to anything significant… or even many insignificant things, if you must know. So I continue to ignore emotions, while at the same time trying to value them appropriately. Yes, Yoda, there is a try.

And that is really all that is blogable that I can remember. Here’s to 2013. May I forget all of its trials as easily as 2012s!

Revisited: The Case for New Year’s Resolutions

By Rae December 31, 2012 Goals 2 Comments

Repost: still true, two years later.

. . .

The case for New Year’s Resolutions is fairly straightforward: the change of the calendar year provides a natural opportunity to stop and reflect on the passage of time and to consider what one would like to accomplish next.

The fact that many others are making similar resolutions, and that our culture encourages us to stop for a day of rest and celebration should only increase a feeling of communal optimism and energy for goal-setting.

Except, of course, for all the jokes about February 1st, and how New Year’s Resolutions are always broken.

The challenge then, is not so much to make a case for New Year’s Resolutions themselves, but to counter the eternal pessimism which declares all attempts at change futile, and all determination ignorant.

And to the eternal nay-sayers, I simply respond “why not?”

Do you think that any of us can really convince ourselves that there are no areas in which we desperately want to improve?

Is it somehow better to sit around on December 31st and smugly contemplate that while I am fat, unhealthy, in debt, isolated, addicted to various substances, stressed out, unemployed, friendless, and have learned nothing in the past year, well at least it is okay because I never tried to improve?

There were many resolutions that I left unresolved a year ago, and I don’t feel the least bit better about my failures due to the fact that I never officially determined to improve.

So for now I have resolved to make New Year’s Resolutions. I may fail, but I may not. In either case, I will celebrate the making, the planning, and the hoping.

Saint Nicholas

By Rae December 5, 2012 Happy Days 2 Comments

Tomorrow is the 5th Feast of Saint Nicholas that Josh and I (will) have spent together.

Hoping for a Hipster Saint Nick who appreciates irony?

It is the second one that we will celebrate. It seems that I am the one who decides whether we celebrate random days, and apparently I only bother with Saint Nick’s when we have siblings living with us.

I did not have anything planned for this year (hence the lack of stockings) but when my sisters randomly said they had an early Christmas gift for Josh, I ran to get a shoe.

The fillings aren’t exactly traditional. But they are awesome, because I just made up a rule. When you get a cookie cutter in your ~~stocking~~ shoe, you get dibs on all cookies made in that shape. How awesome is that?

I sort of feel guilty for stealing this day from people like Joy who grew up with it for real, but what can I say? Random Saint-day stealing isn’t really stealing if it isn’t even recognizable when you are done with it.

Tell the Truth. Especially to Yourself.

By Rae December 4, 2012 Sad Days 2 Comments

Please Note: This does not reflect my feelings in this moment. I do my best to not publish such posts when actually living them.

. . .

Tell the truth. Never tell a lie. Oh tell the truth, ’till the day you diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiie. This song has been going through my head today.

I have not actually heard the song in at least 15 years. But the glory of annoying children’s songs is that they never go away.

. . .

I heard my older sister’s voice. I never thought of the irony of this until today, but when I would say something negative about myself as a pre-teen, this sister would disapprovingly ask me whether I would say such a thing about my daughter or younger sister. And since I would not, then I should never say it about myself.

. . .

I heard my philosophical, academic moral self. What is the point of the life of any person with disabilities? What is the source of the value of a hypothetical person who contributes nothing to the world in practical terms?

. . .

The truth is that I feel absolutely worthless. If I continue with the pattern of recent months, I will continue to feel this way for another week and a half.

There is nothing that anyone could tell me that would make it better. I just feel what I feel.

I would not harm myself for several different reasons, but the fact remains that I cannot justify my existence on this earth to the only person whose opinion I really care about right now. I cannot convince myself that there is any reason to live other than the fact that I simply must because it is not for me to choose.

And so I tell myself the truth. Because as miserable as I may be, I detest dishonesty.

I remind myself that perhaps this is good. This is, of course, an invitation to consider what really matters. The value of human life does not come from externals or events.

. . .

The problem is that even though it does not really matter how I feel, it still feels like it matters. All we really ever have is the current moment, and the only way we possess it is through feeling.

So here’s to not feeling. Here’s to long runs and hot showers and large glasses of freezing cold water.

Here’s to feeling something that does not matter at all.

Sometimes we can’t make things better. Sometimes we have felt all that we need to, and there is nothing to gain by continuing to feel the only thing that we can in that moment.

So here’s to healthy distractions. Here’s to telling yourself the truth and then not worrying about it.

Okay

By Rae November 13, 2012 Life, Uncategorized 12 Comments

My mind will not work well enough to allow me to calculate when I was first introduced to Julian of Norwich. The only thing I can work out is that it was not nearly as long ago as it feels that I finally read the Showings fully one January.

I absorbed as completely as I ever absorb anything that All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

But somehow on a personal level there remains a difference between knowing with confidence that I am well, and that I will certainly be well, and that my world will be well, and knowing that anything in particular is okay.

This May, Josh and I went on a marriage retreat. We had intended to go ever since we went to a similar one while engaged. But somehow we either could not afford it, or could not get the time to go.

Then I was injured and could not run the marathon for which I had been training since January. So we signed up for the weekend we were told was for “improving good marriages.”

Within the first hours of the retreat we realized that other people have very different definitions of “good.” There were perhaps two other young couples there. We overheard an older couple talk to one of the other young couples asking them how long they had been married. When the answer was a year, the older woman laughed and told them that they should come back after they had been married for seven years and had real issues.

Josh is balding, and I dress like a middle-aged woman, so we were spared the direct questioning of our presence, but it was clear that even the presenting couples generally expected that the first few years of marriage would be happy, then things would fall apart, then there was the chance for this retreat to keep couples from divorce.

I am still a bit baffled by the assumption that the first years of marriage will always be easy. Am I the only one who knows couples who have managed to divorce after only a year or two?

It was clear that this retreat was designed for couples who either skimped on marriage prep (which is something like 99.8% of couples, I’d guess) or else had been married long enough to completely forget who the other person was.

Yet we went through the weekend. I don’t think that it occurred to either of us to leave. We listened attentively to the presenting couples’ stories. Despite being equally tired, we managed to dutifully work through each issue with greater attention than we had five years ago for our incredibly beneficial engagement retreat.

It was emotionally draining without being particularly helpful for our relationship.

On Sunday morning I thought about the marathon I was missing. I was thankful that my cycle had aligned to make it so that I could not have run even if I had been uninjured, otherwise I might have been just a tad bitter.

I took more painkiller before breakfast and mused that this must be what it is like for normal women who have painful periods. Sure, it hurts, it slows you down, but you can totally live through it. I’ll take it.

And then it was time to take an hour and write Josh a long letter about life and death and love.

I thanked God that it was my chance to be in the room to write (as opposed to staying in the meeting room with the other women) because it meant that I could use the restroom, take painkiller, and sit scrunched up in the chair with my thighs pressing the heating pad into my pelvis.

So tired. Maybe just a little numb. But perhaps too tired to remember what does or does not count as numb.

It did not matter what I did not feel. I wrote.

I know how to make myself write, as long as it does not matter what I say. When Josh and I were dating and I was upset I bought a journal and wrote out everything I could think in the form of a very long letter to Josh. I know how to fill pages.

And so I wrote until I got to the point where I realized that I had never planned for this. We had never planned for the possibility that this could be our entire life. We never planned for me never getting better.

Of course we considered infertility before we got married, but we never considered not having children at all. We never talked about what would happen if I got worse instead of better.

We thought that it was just a matter of time before we would have the resources to have a solution. I would have surgery with an endometriosis specialist. I would try NaPro. We would take life one step at a time, and it would be fine.

It did not occur to us that I was already fighting far too hard to maintain a half-normal level of activity, and that this would eventually cause me to break more completely.

We did not plan for a reality in which I could do only one thing at a time–poorly.

We did not plan for a life where Josh was so worn out from supporting me that he would not be able to write.

We did not plan to spend our entire lives just getting through the days. We did not plan to spend our lives doing nothing that we consider to be valuable.

And somehow it took almost four years of marriage for me to realize that this may indeed be our entire marriage–our entire life. Could that be okay?

Yes.

I cried for the first time in a long time because I was so tired, and I had somehow never thought of this obvious question.

But I did not struggle with it, or with the answer.

I don’t really need to have a life. I’m not sure why Josh and I are married, but we are, and that is far more than I need. Somehow, I am not deprived.

Josh and I discerned the hell out of marriage.

And marriage is what we have.

We did not get married for the purpose of having sex. We did not get married for the purpose of having children. We did not get married for the purpose of giving some great gift to the world.

We got married because we had a personal call to love each other in a particular way.

It is not for us to decide whether this happens to involve loving each other through the stresses of over-abundance, or the desolation of emptiness. Either way, we are married. That is what we decided. That is what we planned for.

Whatever happens–even the most mundane of daily dreary suffering–is okay.

Some days have been very bad. Some days I have had to talk myself into believing that what I needed was merely what I wanted. But most days are, at their very essence, good.

And so I finished the letter knowing that I could be okay, we could be okay.

Falling in Love on All Hallows’ Eve

By Rae October 31, 2012 Holy Days 2 Comments

Seven years ago I went to visit Josh for Halloween. Well, I did not go for Halloween, but it happened that vacation days and cheap flights aligned for the end of October.

Josh and I thought we were so very different, but everyone else saw that we were just two variations of a cerebral, uber-religious, cautious, conscientious, theme.

We went to a cemetery to pray (because, hey, it wasn’t like we were going to have a more appropriate time to pray there together), then to mass, and back to Josh’s family’s house to enjoy a bonfire with his family.

Time was running out for me and my chest froze when I gave myself a few minutes to think about what I was about to lose. I was not in love with Josh in that possessive YOUMUSTBEMIIIIIIIINE sort of way, but somehow he was my closest friend before we even knew each other. When we sat beside each other I leaned away from him in a way perfectly calculated to hide the fact that I would have gladly melted into him if only it were remotely appropriate.

We had an intense connection. There was no hint of romance.

The only way our relationship could continue would be if Josh were to change the direction of his life toward the priesthood. But Josh was not going to be a priest. He was going to get married. It might happen sooner or later, but it would happen.

I knew that no woman would tolerate her husband having such a naturally intimate friendship with me–another woman. I also knew that there was no way that I would allow Josh to play the honorable martyr and marry me just because we were clearly such a good, reasonable match.

And so, just for a moment, I allowed myself to indulge in grief over what might have been… If only there had been that ineffable something.

Moderate Romney and Abortion

By Rae October 17, 2012 Life 12 Comments

Apparently Romney thinks it is time to make it clear that he is a moderate on abortion and contraception. This seems to me like a great way to gain 5 undecided votes and remind hundreds of thousands in swing states that there isn’t that much of a difference between the parties, so why bother showing up to vote?

ROMNEY: I’d just note that I don’t believe that bureaucrats in Washington should tell someone whether they can use contraceptives or not. And I don’t believe employers should tell someone whether they could have contraceptive care of not. Every woman in America should have access to contraceptives. And — and the — and the president’s statement of my policy is completely and totally wrong. (Source)

Asked whether insurers should be required to cover birth control, Romney said, “Well it’s a question as to, should you get a car painted, you know, red or blue. I mean you can decide which you’d like. People who want to have contraceptive health insurance can choose that in their policy. Those that don’t have — that choose not to can buy a policy with or without. It depends on the kind of policy you buy of course.” (Source)

There’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda (Source)

I am very interested in whether this makes a difference to any of my pro-life/anti-HHS mandate friends. It does not make a difference to me, because I do not expect either candidate for president to actually be pro-life, and so I think it crucial to weigh the balance of all of their policies. But it leaves me bewildered by why my deeply pro-life friends are so very happy to vote for Romney.

What are your thoughts?

Sick Is The New Healthy

By Rae October 12, 2012 Health 7 Comments

Apparently sick is the new healthy for me.

So far 2012 has been an incredible improvement for me physically compared to the five previous years. Or, more correctly, it has been a huge improvement in the area of reducing pain. I still have what I’d like to call “hormonal issues” related to memory, fatigue, etc. but they are better by half, and straight up physical pain is about 20% of what it was a few years ago. Amazing.

And yet there are several indications that I am actually less healthy.

The first is that I now have a weight problem. In the past I had a cultural problem, I now have a weight problem. Five years ago I gained 20lbs in one year. It was not good since I had been at a healthy weight and it happened because I went from being fairly active to barely moving due to pain. But the weight was not much of a health problem in itself since I was simply at the very highest range of a healthy weight. I went from 6s being really loose to 8s being snug. I was the only one who really cared.

This time is different. I just went from being just barely a sortof “healthy” weight to solidly overweight. Physically, it is not healthy. Socially, I’ve crossed the line from a sort of neutral, not especially attractive/no one really notices my size, to a place where cultural judgments of sloth come in.

This summer I saw a pregnant friend and freaked out a little internally that maybe she had preeclampsia… because her face looked just like mine.

Then there is the whole fertility cycle thing. The main reason that I have been able to stay off the pill since February is that I simply have not had to live with the same hormonal fluctuations and pain that come with normal fertility for me. Part of it was most likely due to significantly increasing my running, but part of it is unexplained. I’m just not healthy.

And yet.

About a month ago, on the same day that I learned that I had gained 20lbs in 9 months (a nice healthy pregnancy gain, right?) I also got the results from all the typical complete physical blood tests. Everything was perfect. That matched up nicely with p+7 results which the nurse proclaimed to be fabulous (apparently what I read as low average they read as excellent?). So I’m healthy?

I am also confident that it is really only 19.75lbs of fat gained because I have (very slight) muscle definition on my arms for the first time in my life. If I account for the burden of carrying all this excess weight around, then I am also the most fit that I have ever been in terms of running.

I know why I gained weight, so losing it should be easy. I gained weight because I am eating about 2000 calories a day now, compared to around 1,400/day a year ago.

The problem is that I like feeling better more than I dislike being overweight. Not that eating less would actually allow me to lose weight, but it might prevent me from gaining another 10lbs by the end of the year.

So the solution is clearly to go blind and then forget all knowledge of fertility awareness. Then I won’t have to deal with a few of the reminders that sick is the new healthy.

In the meantime I live in this really odd place of enjoying feeling better and trying to do everything I can to be healthier, while at the same time periodically freaking out because I can’t seem to grasp the fact that I really am this overweight.

HHS Mandate And The Doctor Who Wouldn’t Give Me The Pill

By Rae October 7, 2012 Endometriosis 8 Comments

Note: I wrote this post in May, but was too unwell most of the time to have energy to edit, and too tired to want to deal with comments without editing. Thankfully I’ve remembered that the trick to these things is to keep them long and picture-less so that no one will read them anyway. So here’s a whole new intro for you since no one will even remember what I’m talking about. HHS who? #DrinkTheIrony

Remember the HHS fiasco? No? C’mon, you know, the decision to give women the pill for free–sort of?

One of the things that really, really bothered me about it was hearing so many people say that the “FDA-approved contraception methods and contraceptive counseling” section of the guidelines was crucial to the health of women who might need to use the pill for therapeutic purposes.

I read in numerous places that I should rejoice about this because it would mean that there would be free treatment for women who suffer from PCOS and endometriosis! Thanks be to the government, the Catholic Church would be forced to finally provide women with legitimate healthcare.

This assertion irritated me first because the Catholic Church does not have a problem with the use of hormones for treating women’s health issues. The one example provided of a Catholic institution’s health insurance failing to provide the pill for a health issue seems clearly to me to have been a problem with our large bureaucratic health insurance system, not the Church’s moral teaching.

But, more personally, these arguments troubled me because they reveal a lack of understanding of the reality of how gynecological problems are treated in the real world. Here is a little glimpse into my life from a few months ago

. . .

I finally found a doctor who wouldn’t prescribe the pill for me. Would you like to hear more about such a grand physician? Read on!

Early this spring I went to see my primary care physician. I had a list of things I needed, including a prescription for hormones to shut my cycle back down after I had freaked out about the risk of blood clots in the previous pill. A year ago this doctor had asked me if I needed a prescription for the pill (for contraceptive purposes) and I had declined. So I thought that I could save a trip to the gynecologist and get this prescription along with everything else.

I realized that, not being a specialist in women’s health issues, this doctor might have no idea what to prescribe, so I wrote down a few possible options in case I needed to know exactly what I wanted.

But I never got to discuss choices with my doctor because she wanted to know about what I had been on before and why. When she heard that I had been taking the pill for a health issue, she said that she could not prescribe the pill for me and that I needed to see a specialist.

I nodded. I am pretty good at hiding complete shock.

Besides, the doctor’s stance made sense (at least the not prescribing medicine for specialized conditions that she isn’t trained to treat part) and everyone knows that the pill is super easy to get, right?

So I considered my other options. I have seen two other gynecologists at two different practices in the past year. The one who wrote my last prescription was the Catholic NFP specialist. Not only does it take a while to get an appointment with her, it also takes over half of a workday to make the trip to her office. And I have taken more than enough time for health issues. Scratch that. I would have to see the other doctor, or at least her practice.

Except that not only had the specialist who performed my surgery moved on from the office where I saw her, her colleague who sees patients for routine issues had also moved on, leaving only the male big-wig who spends his time in surgery or teaching, not writing prescriptions for patients not in need of surgery.

My only option was to find a new gynecologist and wait months for a new patient appointment.

Because apparently the pill is really easy to get, as long as you don’t actually need it for a health reason.

. . .

I am a woman with endometriosis who has spent most of her reproductive years without health insurance, but still struggled to receive adequate care with the best health insurance. It seems very close to insulting to those such as myself to assert that requiring all employers to pay for hormones for contraceptive purposes is somehow a service to women suffering from reproductive diseases. Say that it is good for women who want to avoid pregnancy if you like, but don’t tell me that it is about helping women who suffer from actual problems with their reproductive health. Oh wait, I just implied that pregnancy isn’t a problem in itself? We can talk about that later.

The truth is that the HHS debate was about religious freedom vs. free contraception for the purpose of preventing pregnancy. It had nothing to do with helping women with existing gynecological health problems.

I feel little kinship with some who are fighting against HHS because many of them ignorantly minimize my sickness and mock legitimate options for care. But their ignorance tends to be harmless and nothing more than pathetic.

In contrast, some of those who are fighting on behalf of the HHS mandate are baffling indeed. They use cases such mine to assert that requiring contraceptive coverage is somehow the answer for women with reproductive health problems, and that I should be happy to trade freedom of religion in for a pill.

The truth is that diseases of the female reproductive system bring a whole lot more complications than cheap pills alone can resolve. And one story of one woman’s suffering due to insurance bureaucracy and confusion is an incredibly poor reason to assert that adding more layers of government bureaucracy is a better solution than existing Catholic coverage for women who need hormonal treatment.

If you want to talk about actually helping women, if you want to talk about reducing reproductive diseases, if you want to talk about affordable health care coverage for all conditions, I am all ears. But please, please do not tell me that the money I give to my local Catholic school needs to be used to pay for contraceptives because “women with endometriosis need it.”

Money for contraceptives has nothing to do with endometriosis and receiving adequate care, okay?

Real health issues are really complex. Please don’t gloss over the intricacies of reality. And please do not use my health condition as a political joke to reduce my religious freedom.

Dark Waltz

By Rae October 2, 2012 Failure, Things of Which We Do Not Speak 4 Comments

This was written only a week or two ago, but details don’t matter.

We are the lucky ones.

We are the blessed ones.

Who can tell what on this great blessed earth we are?

Last week was a challenge. I’ve had a challenging month, a challenging summer, a challenging marriage, a challenging life. But let’s just focus on last week.

On Monday I reached the point where I had time to think about how I was feeling. I greeted my suddenly observant self with a strong desire to run away. I wanted to run from my life, to run physically from my apartment. I hated my life in a way that I have not felt in three years. I considered the irony of my emotions in light of the fact that what I really wanted was to be alone with Josh. Running away from home is a great way to achieve that, right?

On Wednesday I broke down in a way barely recognizable as a breakdown. You see, I am accustomed to seeing my life as a failure. I live daily with the knowledge that I am not good enough to live my life. When I look for areas of success to balance out a particularly negative day, I find nothing. Looking at my peers serves only to confirm that which I already know: I am far, far from where I should be.

Yet on Wednesday I was overwhelmed by how unlikely my success is. Of course I don’t think of it as success, but my life is amazingly good compared to what it should be.

As I crashed under the weight of others’ lives falling apart, I drowned in the goodness of my own life.

It should not be this way. There is no reasonable explanation¹ for why I have a good life. Sure, I made choices. Josh made choices too. But why did I make those choices? Why was I born with the delayed-gratification-loving gene?

My life should be so, so much worse than it is.

I look at the difference between my life and the lives of some whom I love and I cannot fathom why there is such a difference. I am crazed by my inability to come up with a way to give them a little of what I have.

I don’t even believe in luck, but maybe, maybe it is true. I am lucky.

There is nothing to be done about this terrible truth. I still live with the pain of daily life, though goodness knows I am skilled at carrying on without processing the full weight of reality. I still live with the feelings of bleakness in my own life, and the devastating grief that always comes from caring about more than a very few others.

I am peculiarly blessed. There is something very dark about that. Yet all I can do is to attempt to live calmly in the light while remembering the truth to the best of my ability.

1. Other than pure randomness, of course, but I’ve never found that a satisfactory explanation.

Of course I hate the thought of being a “lucky one” because where there is luck there is no way to bring others into the dance. And yet it is a sin in the deepest sense to believe myself to be unfortunate when I am blessed unthinkably.

Follow There Is No Wealth But Life