So after taking some time off I felt drawn to connect with others in the world who are suffering and so began again reading letters and writing. I am perplexed and moved by this letter, and as frequently has been the case, I wish I knew more, but the details, I decided, are for the letter writer to clarify for herself. We don’t need to know the details. Only she does.
Dear Cary,
I shouldn’t be writing you, I shouldn’t be complaining, but I have never been so unhappy in my life.
I went through war and came back: at age 31 I was diagnosed with an incurable illness, not fatal but chronic and incurable, I was mostly in a bed, drifting in and out of consciousness; I still don’t know with what strength, I managed to find relief in alternative therapies, and finally, after around 11 years, it seems like the war is over. In spite of a couple of relapses it seems that I have regained an average degree of health to allow me to have a life, to go out and spend time with friends, to work, even if only part time, all the things that I missed in the most important decade of my life when I was supposed to find a career, a family, some kind of position in society. I find myself old(er) and still in a sense it’s like I haven’t changed much since that November 2004 when my illness started. I learned a lot, especially to appreciate myself. For doing what needs to be done in spite of all feelings of helplessness, for trusting a higher power and trying the impossible to get better, for keeping a bit of good mood amidst the storm.
It is such a irony that now I feel worse, emotionally, than in all the previous years. I find myself completely alone, different from most of those around me for my strange situation of single unemployed middle aged woman with no past for ten years, and I find it very difficult to make friends who can understand or even just tolerate my past and who I am. With regards to partners, I feel like damaged goods, I can’t have children, I would like to do so many things, travel the world, create art and music, help people, and yet I will always have strict limitations with my diet and environment. I stopped dating because I always feel like I fell from the moon and no one understands me. Where is everyone?
Can you give me any ideas about what to do next?
SadWarrior
Dear SadWarrior,
Name your illness. Write down what happened to you. Write it in detail. Spend time on this. Tell your life story. Write it in a notebook or write it on a blog, tell it in the comments field here, or write it in a letter to a friend, but tell it all. Tell what happened and what led up to it and what happened afterwards. Spend time at it. Tell it all.
What war were you in? What happened to you in the war? Is your illness connected to the war? I assume it is. I assume something happened. Perhaps you were exposed to a substance that harmed your nervous system or your immune system, and/or perhaps you had experiences of trauma that compromised your psyche and your soul, from which you had to recover by being comatose or taking to bed, by having no energy. I don’t know that. But you need to find strength in the telling.
Are you a warrior? Then call upon your warrior self but ask, too: Who is your enemy? If you are a warrior, who is your enemy? What have you been fighting? What has injured you?
You are at the turning point. That is what this means, that you have written to me. You have reached a dark place, a low place, where you must make a choice. Writing out your story will be your way of illuminating what your choices are. Right now, you cannot know exactly what is your set of choices.
Your choices will have to do with the people in your life. Put those people in your story. Put the people closest to you in there. Analyze them. Try to understand who is helping you and who is your enemy. And how are you yourself the enemy? In what ways to you hate yourself or have undermined yourself? Who has injured you in the past? What wreckage are you crawling out of?
There will be much to do but it starts with constructing your narrative. Doing so will pull you back together. Do not expect great results and miracles right away. Do this as an act of faith. Do it as if instructed by your higher power. Do it to become visible to yourself.
Tell your story. Write it down.
You need to rejoin a community but in order to join a community and be known to others, you have to show yourself. If you have a trusted friend and advisor, or a sponsor, or a spiritual guide, cling to that person and make it a daily thing. You will have to work hard to make and sustain bonds. Work hard at it. Work hard at making and sustaining friendships. Go to any length to make this happen. Reach out to others. Be on your road. Tell your story. Trust that you will be shown the next right thing to do. Get enough rest. Eat well. Listen to your favorite music. Sleep well. Rest. Keep writing your story and telling it. A sign will come to you. It will start to make sense.
Be desperate. Do not be afraid to be desperate. We are all desperate. None of us knows the secret. We are all desperate cats, leaping on couches, staring out the window, arching our backs and hissing at the world, at the approaching cars, at the moon that hisses back. Be desperate. Be not content. Do not apologize for what has happened. You have landed here and are making sense of it, doing the best you can. Be desperate. Find what you need. Cling to your people. Don’t let go.
Letter-writer, you expressed so much of how I am feeling — strangely ill for 10 years in the prime of my life, not knowing why or what; trying my best to keep my wits and tend to my health as best I could; facing attitudes/accusations, even from my parents, that I was lazy and making my health issues up (they still mostly feel and act this way towards me, out of habit and disappointment and anger, even though finally a large brain tumor – that is slow-growing and therefore had been impacting me for a long time – and other tumors and other serious health problems were medically proven and I began to receive real treatment, after being brushed off by doctors for years); losing all personal connections with people as they all moved on in the narratives of their lives but I couldn’t; now being single, middle-aged, with a ‘missing’ 10 years behind me (those years were not empty, just lived as if on another planet/dimension), can’t have children, don’t know how to find anyone (especially in my conservative, educationally- and culturally-backwards, middle-of-nowhere area of the country that I had to collapse back to during the worst part of my illness) whom I can connect with/be friends with/date. I realize that I’m always going to be seen by many as strange, different, unpindownable, a loser in the ‘game’ of life (as they see it, not as I see it) — it’s such a profound loneliness. Though it does feel almost holy, ancient, transcendent, and I feel so much compassion for others in the past (and in the current moment, of course) who went through the same sort of thing, especially if they never found out what was wrong and were treated with disdain, as if they were making it up.
I was so moved when I read your letter that I had to lay my head on the desk and just breathe for 5 minutes afterwards. I hadn’t visited Cary’s site for the last 2 years, and for some reason had a feeling tonight that I should visit it, and I felt compelled to scroll through so many of the past columns — I didn’t want to read the repeated Salon columns because I had already read them once or more when they were first published — so I was just scrolling through very quickly to find any new letters that have been answered by Cary post-Salon, but I didn’t know to what purpose I was doing this, and it felt like I was wasting time just scrolling and scrolling, and it’s after 3 am and I felt like maybe I was just stalling going to bed (again), hoping to make the current day last as long as possible so I don’t have to meet tomorrow too soon, but then I read your letter and I had to let it sink in by resting my cheek on the cool glass of my desk. Was I somehow led to read your letter? I don’t know… maybe!
I have to say that Cary’s advice to you didn’t strike me as being very helpful this particular time (sometimes his advice is great, inspiring and poetic and insightful, but sometimes it is not, which is absolutely normal and understandable), which I was so disappointed by, since it felt as if I had written this letter to him myself. I also am not sure if he understood that you really hadn’t been in an actual war (a literal warzone in the world with a political/violent war going on) but rather had just been in a personal set of battles in the last 10 years which you figuratively referred to as a war. (Or maybe you _were_ in a literal warzone in some other country, and I am the one who did not understand your meaning. But I don’t think so.)
Anyway, I wonder what you ended up doing, how you have gotten on in the last year, since you wrote this letter. I wish we could be acquaintances in real life, but I know that is impossible. Yet it does really help me to know that there are other middle-aged women out there with this strange situation of almost having been in a private exile for many years, the years when they wanted to get married (as in the kind of ‘expected’ scheme of things, while still relatively youngish – under 40, anyway – to someone who was also relatively youngish – under 45, anyway – and to someone who was not weighed down with baggage from multiple past marriages and grown children, etc.) and to have their own child/children and to solidify their career they’d spent their whole 20s setting into place and to fortify some close friendships: all this is lost. Pieces can be picked up and expectations can be re-molded and different goals can be set and the past can be re-construed and re-explained more positively and generously, but the losses, narrowly defined, are mostly permanent, and that must be come to terms with.
I feel like I’m interacting with the world from behind a distorted sheet of glass, with an unassuagable sense of generalized homesickness in the pit of my stomach, which has not lessened as I’ve recovered some of my health. Folks are looking at me through the murky barrier, making incorrect assumptions about the type of person I am and the probable reasons for how my life has turned out the way it has, getting an “off” feeling from me because of the missing years/connections and the wild independent solitude of my heart.
I don’t think describing my health problems (which, in trying to figure out what mysterious things were wrong with me and to get key people to see that they were real, I’ve already done) and writing my story for myself and trying really hard to connect with others where I am currently living would help me, in my case. I’m going to need to move far away, and patch together a different sort of life with enough differences and peacefulness and interesting aspects (and continued medical attention and healthy practices) that it will be a clean break from the past, and from the once-hoped-for future that has been permanently lost, and from the shadow world of the now which is so in-between and fuzzy and undefined in a bad way. I don’t know how to get there, as I am tired, and spent all of my resources in the long descent, but I am grateful to be so much better than I was.
My best wishes to you, sister-stranger.
Bless your heart, Sad Warrior. You know more than most, which gives you insight they lack due to all you’ve survived. Be proud of who you are. How many can claim to have cheated death as you have done? Best of luck.
LW, so glad Cary is reading and responding again so we all can benefit. I cannot imagine your suffering that arose from being a warrior, but the one that came through illness. I also belong into the category of people who have faced death and now live with a second lease on life. There are very very few people who I can relate to and vice versa. But those I can, I make every effort to cultivate. I do not pretend to be normal and I hope that if you do, that you will soon stop (it’s soul crushing). “Normal” is believing the illusion of life as real and pretending that what is real doesn’t even exist. I’m unwilling to do that and I hope you are, too. The more you speak your difference, the better a chance people of your tribe have to identify you as one of their own. This will alienate all the right people.
Please trust that your kind is out there. If not in your town or city, then on the www. If you find some books by people to whom you relate and look for those authors’ facebook pages you will find your people among the posters to those pages.
As to “damaged goods:” All those who don’t seem damaged either had the misfortune of life not making an impression on them or they are pretending. My guess is that you are trying and failing to pretend instead of treating truthfulness like a badge of honor. Or, it is also possible that you still feel like a victim. In that case it is most crucial for you to separate two things into discrete distinctions: 1) Having been victimized and 2) feeling like a victim. The former is life happening, the latter, a personal choice. Choosing not to feel like a victim (if that is your poison) is hard and liberating work. Victor Frankl wrote the seminal book on that-Man’s Search for Meaning. Love and blessings to you; you are not alone.
Keep on Sad Warrior. Enjoy the sun on your face.
Cary, thank you for writing. I grew up reading Mike Royko and knew as a kid that the 25 cents for the paper was not enough compensation for what he provided readers.
Thank you SadWarrior for your letter, and Cary for your thoughtful response. I feel compelled to respond, and want to reiterate, you are not alone. I too survived a severe health crisis of 10-12 years that was a combo of stress, auto-immune system breakdown and trauma release. After many years of visits to doctors, allergists, nutritionists, healers, my illness has still not been completely diagnosed. At the height of it taking me down, I was in bed for 2 years, couldn’t work, couldn’t leave the house and had to rely on a few close friends for support. And then followed a debilitating depression, a grieving, that I’m still coming out of. I found through a slow and gentle practice of living one day at a time, practicing self-compassion, and writing, I started to heal and crawl out of it. Know this: being in the world takes courage. You are brave. Keep reaching out. Write it all down. Find a good therapist/support person. And read books by Mary Pipher, Tara Brach, Pema Chodron, Kristen Neff – all have suffered dark hours, depressions, illnesses that have taken them underground. Start here, now. The community is here.
You understand something profound that others do not. This is a gift. It does estrange you from them, as do most extreme gifts. But it is a gift nonetheless and you should embrace it. I had an illness that made me subhuman and unable to work. It lasted about 1 year until I found someone who could diagnose it. UCSF cured me (operated) for free essentially, and i was hospitalized for weeks. My employers shunned me after i was cured — they had imprinted on my illness and could not reverse this to include a cured version of me. So i got a new job and new friends. Before I was sick I was cavalier about death –“one more project like that and i am ready for the bridge” — but after i was cured I loved life. Coming back from almost-death does that. You did it too. Dostoyevsky wrote about it. Anything after that is the fantastic gift — it is all free because theoretically you already were dead. This gives you an incredible power that people who fear death do not have. They have everything to lose. You already almost lost it — you are now on gifted time and you need to cherish that time. Cherish life. I think you probably need new friends, and they should not be from online dating sites. You need to be around people you can share your gift with. Seriously — who can you interact with in a deeper way?
Beautiful post. Thank you for sharing, Nikita.