Time in a bottle

As the calendar turns to the last month of the year, it makes me think about the passage of time, and how I’ve slipped in the commitment I made to myself to do more writing. When I don’t write regularly, as those near and dear to me know, I start getting cranky. All those words building up in my head. It’s not a matter of “not enough time;” I simply haven’t made the time. I’ve let my days and weeks tire me out from cookie-baking (Snickerdoodles for a neighborhood cookie-swap), on-line holiday shopping and those endless, endless appointments. I dread weeks like last week – every day, a different doctor, a different therapy. They drain me, emotionally and physically. Shoes off, shoes on, shoes off, shoes on, clothes off, bathing suit on, clothes back on. It’s overwhelming at times. (Although I did learn that while you can’t wear a lidocaine patch in the pool, you can remove it, place it carefully on its original plastic backing, then reattach it afterward.) I start to feel poked and prodded and invaded until I want to curl up into a ball with the blankets over my body. And I think, “how has my life come to this?” A whirl of exercises and ice packs and therapy?

It’s certainly not the life I’d imagined for myself. The wide-eyed, pigtailed four-year-old dressed in a plaid smock her mother made never dreamed that one day she’d be unable to twist herself into a pretzel or sit upside-down on a sofa, with her feet in the air and the ends of her braids brushing the ground.

The fourteen-year-old high school freshman, who read Shaw and Perls for fun, opening her mind wide to the possibilities of the world, never thought that one day she’d be unable to sit in her own bathtub and on a first-name basis with her pharmacist.

Having to be shot full of cortisone and then having her getting her lumbar facet nerve endings burned off is definitely not what the college sophomore wanted, even as she blithely wrote her obit for a journalism class that predicted her early demise would occur when hit by a car while jogging, then really was hit by a car while jogging. (But despite her injuries, was jogging just two weeks later)

It’s not even what the 25-year-old woman dreamed of, newly emancipated from the oppressive relationship she never thought she’d succumb to, roaming the nooks and crannies of Boston with her camera, that one day she’d look so sad in photographs.

It’s not even the life I pictured for myself two, three years ago. Well…maybe in some karmic way it was. After all, my goals were to quit my job and become a writer.

Wish I’d specified something about my health in those plans I’d made.

But regardless of how I turned out, it’s the life I have. The only life I have. I can spend it wrapped up in my sorrows (which at times, is very attractive), or I can get up and do something about it (which, at times, seems the hardest task in the world).

And sometimes I think it’s never going to change. That I’m caught in a vortex of medication and pain and exercises and doctors and I’ll never, ever escape its grip.

But then again I wasn’t a powerless, clueless five-year-old forever.

I wasn’t a starry-eyed teenager forever.

I wasn’t a flat-broke but unfettered twenty-five-year-old woman forever either.

But the only constant in the universe is change. And one day my situation will change, too.

After all, if it’s true what those t-shirts say, that “Fifty is the new thirty,” then forty-five is the new twenty-five. And I had it pretty good at twenty-five.

Even if I didn’t realize it at the time.