Such a little thing

                                                                    

I wasn't going to write about this, it's such a little thing.  But it's the little things that matter most sometimes.

I giggled on Sunday.

All my life I have envied people who could giggle.  I love that melodious trill of laughter like water over stones that erupts so effortlessly from some people.  No body would probably ever notice this about me but my laugh isn't mine.  I have had ptsd (I don't like to put it in caps) and bipolar disorder since I was very, very young.  Very young.  And when that happens you don't develop your own true personality.  You don't understand how the world works except through your unique prism - a complex prism of viewing the world.  So you imitate.  You watch other people do the common ordinary things of life, laughing and talking, working and loving and really, just living.  You try to pick the ones who seem to be doing it well and you imitate them. But it's never quite real - and you know it - and they don't.  Except sometimes someone with exceptional vision comes along and they get what's going on, but that's rare.

So I've done all the usual things that people normally do in life, worked, married, divorced, been a mother, an artist, ...etc. etc. and I've pulled it off pretty well.  And when I couldn't I've hidden away so that no one would know how tough it can get when you can't even imitate anymore and you are simply lost.  And through it all I've cried - a tremendous amount.  And laughed too, quite a bit.  But I never could get that just right.  My laugh was always very breathy and low and often didn't even have sound.  Just my mouth opening and the force of air being push from my lungs.  I've been embarrassed by it at times and worked really hard to make it sound right, because I can feel deep inside, the joy, the hilarity of life, but I can't quite get it out.  And to giggle?  Never.

So now, after years and years and years of not understanding why life works so awkwardly for me, so often painfully and disconnected, I've finally found a doctor who got it, got it.  She's about 12....not really, but lately it seems every medical professional I meet is bound to be a least a decade or two or even three younger than me.  Her name is Jennifer and she is a pyschiatric nurse practioner and she knows her stuff.  Finally!

Jennifer got me in the first twenty minutes - and in this 23 years long search of mine for someone who could figure this out, that is nothing short of a miracle.  I now take the itsyist, bitsyist tiny little pill that replaces in my amygdala that certain little something that has always been missing.  Not that it fixes it.  There's no fix.  But this is as good as it gets in terms of replacing what can never be replaced.

The changes are, frankly, inexplicable.  It's like waking up from a long, long sleep ( I say that kindly, what I really want to say is nightmare).  And this one little change that has happened, is that I giggled , really and for real....giggled.  It just erupted from my throat on Sunday morning while watching a program about Kevin Spacey - whom I adore a bit - and who is actually a very, very funny man.  I had that reaction that you have when you are engrossed in something and you suddenly think you hear a bell ringing, is that the phone?  the doorbell? a sound that nudges you......and it was me !  It was a genuine, authentic trill of laughter - water running over the stones - and I think I will remember that moment for the rest of my life.

Much, much credit goes to my own darling Elizabeth, my daughter who never gave up on believing that life could be more for me than the little corner I was locked in.  And another Elizabeth , whose own search for a better life for her daughter gave me more courage to fight my fight than she will probably ever know.

Isn't life an incredible thing?

Danny Boy an Irish Song

From Valentine's Day to Saint Patrick's Day.....where does time go?
Another performance from the dynamic duo of Marco and Eva ..."The Ruby's"
This is a little star in the making folks, enjoy!  And Happy St. Patrick's to you!

A fighting chance

                                                                      my art

All is fine.  I went back for the followup x-ray.  My daughter went with me although I told her again and again that it really was no big deal, she didn't need to go.  But sometimes you can tell that the going, the lending of support is something they need more than you do.  So the look on her face when they said, "just a cyst" was more relief to me than the diagnosis itself actually was.

I'm not afraid of cancer.  Maybe I should be, but I'm not.  This is probably a ridiculously delusional  attitude, of which I've had many in my long and winding life, and comes in part from surviving it once already.  On a more rational level I know it's nothing to be cavalier about, it takes many, many lives every year.  But for me, in the particular play of my own life it is not at the top of the list.  I worry more about the everyday struggle of coping with PTSD from unsharable things and the littered path I have to walk from a lifetime of undiagnosed and self medicated disarray.  And how to make the path easier for my exquisitely wonderful, beautiful, smart, funny, savvy and brilliant daughter who has guilelessly inherited her own journey with it's particular brand of disarray.  She has taught me so much.  I've always known, from day one, that she was way, way smarter than me.  I think, now, that we are coming to a place where we mutually help one another.  I hope so.

"Inner" disabilities come with their own often invisible struggles.  Invisible to others that is.  As they are very, very visible to us.  When you look normal on the outside and even beautiful, as in my girls' case, but are forever mopping up hurricane like devastation on the inside it wears you down.  It's a daily mountain to climb to find a place to stand solid.  I get very jealous of people sometimes, who's disabilities show.  I want mine to show - no I don't - yes I do, sometimes.  I want people to understand - feel for her, for me.  It isn't polite to show the inner........stuff.  So we don't .  Except to each other, or when it accidentally spills .....  seeps under the door.  But you work really hard to prevent spillages, keep that black door closed,  if you know what I mean.  No body likes to see that kind of stuff.  I wish I was as strong as Maggie May who lets the all of her life show with brilliance and grace.  But I am far from that in courage and in prose.

So, anyway.  I was not worried about a malignant diagnosis.  They are sooo good at mending physical things now - you really have a fighting chance.  And of course there was the off chance that with a new bout, I might get some reconstructive surgery to fix the lopsided terrain of my chest - we laughed about that one, leaving the doctors' office (cancer humor).  So now I am back to trying to get a fighting chance for my girl - and for me.   I'd say, it was a good day.  Yeah, a good day.

Thanks for reading, you have no idea what it means to me.

A Valentine Song - Fade Into You (Mazzy Star cover)

These Sweethearts are my dear friends from Moscow  -  An expat living in Moscow with the love of his life, his daughter......Enjoy!
 He writes my most favorite blog   impressions of an expat




Happy, Happy Valentine's Day.
Love, Liv