July 17, 2016
I have been listening and reading all week about the two latest shootings of unarmed black men by police. As if the deaths were not tragic enough, people who have always been sensible seem to be losing it. Everybody has an opinion about #BlackLivesMatter and is spewing hate at anyone who disagrees. People who have never been unreasonable before are seeing racism everywhere, misquoting each other right and left. It’s like the world online is having a riot.
I’ve quit reading and listening to all of it. My opinions are never like anyone else’s so I tend to keep most everything to myself and just listen and ask questions. To try to say what I think in this atmosphere would be worse than useless.
And running underneath all of this is a feeling I’ve never had before. I think I am dying. Not today, not this year. But I think this last flare-up did something to my nervous system and I think that some event is going to trigger the loss of my heartbeat. I haven’t said this to anyone. Why hurt someone else with my worry? And it’s not the dying that scares me. It’s that nothing really happy will happen before I die. That my life will never be any more than it is right now. That there is no cause for hope.
I am never unhappy unless I’m so overwhelmed by the physical aspects of the disease that I can’t think. I’m coming out of one of those spells now. I’ve been losing a lot of sleep because the seizures don’t stop, hour after hour. I’m scared a lot of anything that might bring them on, not that they don’t happen anyway. I’m sleeping now but at odd times during the day, not at night. The disease is screwing around with my biorhythms. I hope I’m on the way out but I’m scared of being forced back in. I just wish I could sleep two nights in a row. I swear that’s all it would take.
So I hear all these people screaming at each other about #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter and I just want to scream back, “Don’t you understand that YOUR life is what matters?” Your life is all you have. Learn to live your life well. If you believe in something enough to commit to it, good, now find something constructive to do about it. Stop screaming and stop hating. You’re wasting your life.
High Desert 