Metal Blog

How did I find metal? Or did it find me? I'm not really sure about that. I moved to Washington when I was ten, and as soon as I was in the state, I knew I was home. I could feel the reach of the Mountain in the ground under my feet. This land was my home. I wish the people had been so ready for me. Or I had been ready for the weather. I froze for the first few years I was here, I didn't think I'd ever get the chill out of my toes. Also worth noting -- we moved here from Oklahoma. I had never walked on hills before. At ten, my Mom found me having trouble negotiating the steep hill of our driveway -- I was having trouble adjusting my center of balance to different grades. On top of that, I was getting in trouble for reading. My coping mechanism was being undermined. My curiosity put into blinders, because it made people uncomfortable with themselves. I had a sense of that, even then -- that their discomfort was with themselves more than it was with me. The lie was always in their eyes when they would tell me they were only looking out for me. They weren't comfortable with a student that challenged them that easily, and I didn't have a lot of interest in dumbing myself down for anyone else. Yes, you read that correctly. For reading. At first, it was what I read. I was bored with Beverly Cleary and company, and the school didn't think my parents could possibly know what I was reading instead (Clan of the Cave Bear -- a birthday present from my friend's mom...my first grown up novel...I was in fifth grade). I told them over and over that my parents knew full well what I was doing, but calls went home anyway. I took books out at recess, and got in trouble for that. Of course, trouble meant getting sat against the wall of the building. With my book. To keep the rain from ruining them, I got good at covering paperbacks with clear contact paper. I always had at least one or two mysteries or something with me, everywhere I went. {b}My response, with Mom's encouragment, was to pick a nice thick book from her personal shelf. A volume titled, darkly, "Secrets of the Temple." Oooh. Boo! It was about the National Treasury, and about 900 stultifying pages long, but I made sure to read it and understand what I read in case someone saw fit to try their luck. I remember the look on Mom's face when she set it next to my school bag -- if they wanted to talk, they could just go on ahead and talk, and look like a bunch of presumptive asses for it.{/b} I wasn't popular. I wasn't a girly-girl, not a princess with braids and blushes. {b}i even tried to do the hair and makeup and clothes thing for a couple of years, but found myself to be utterly inept. i just didn't seem to be born with the same sense for it that most girls were, like they only have to be reminded of what they already know. I have none of that. {/b} Instead, I had lots of energy, but wasn't particularly athletically focused; rather that energy expressed itself in sort of rough-and-tumble activity like chopping wood. I was brainy, but not snobby about it. I didn't quite fit anywhere. Then, one day in fifth grade, my teacher rearranged the seating chart, and I was sitting in the back of the class, with the metal heads. We weren't sure what to think of each other for the first few minutes. There I was, smart and relatively tidy. And there they were. Kids who wore tee-shirts and jeans that had holes in them, and wicked, dark looking band logos. One of them kept sliding looks at me over a sketch he was working on. I hid my book under my desk, open, so I could read along while the teacher did...something with grammar on the board. English-related subjects were easy for me, and thus I was a serious slack-ass during those discussions. After those first, few weird moments of sizing one another up, those kids met me with a "come as you are" openness that was utterly absent elsewhere. I'd found people who weren't half-assed -- when they said they were going to do something, they largely weren't full of shit -- they went and did it. Even if it was stupid, they could commit to something and follow through. No one in this crowd of rejects wanted me to pretend to be anything I wasn't -- I could be a little mannish, and some of them even *liked* that. {b}That was something I was looking for pretty seriously in the days after I encountered my temper in my friend's closet.{/b} I needed to find people who would understand that anger. That rage. And there was metal -- I heard people screaming with growling guitars and drums like metal forges. That was my rage -- someone understood! They understood, and they growled in tones I'll never produce, giving me a voice. It also didn't take me long to figure out that this bunch of kids were getting painted with a broad and negative brush. The perception was "reject." Antisocial. Possibly violent. Unpredictable. Depressed. There were lots of labels that floated around this group. Drug associated labels. Trouble makers. Rebellious. Anti-establishment. I had a cause, primitive though it might have been at that point; i knew it wasn't right that these guys were getting saddled with labels. I saw talent and intellect in them, and the prejudicial approach they were given annoyed me. I had found my people. It just took me twenty-some years to understand that. I knew I was metal when I found my violin. I remember everyone asking me why I picked the instrument I did - I'd tried others with a more classical tone. The owner of one shop called my instrument a "howler." It had a metal voice. It made the noises my voice wouldn't. From the second that instrument entered a private lesson, the discussion was all classical, all the time, sign on the dotted line in blood please. I fell away from my people, and I fell away from music, ultimately, for about fifteen years. Until recently, when I found metal again -- right there, when I needed it. {b}My Rebellion {/b} It started when I realized that my teacher was killing me. Not just my love of music, or my desire to play, or anything that specific. Each lesson brought twisting stomach cramps and anxiety attacks, dizzying, sweating -- it never mattered a whit what I'd practiced during the week, or how I'd shunted the work for other classes to the side to do that work, it was never, ever enough. I could find no way to be good at the thing that I had given so much up for. Passed up hobbies and experiences that most other people considered standard to being young and healthy, because I had to save my wrists for other things, or I had to get up at five in the morning to practice, or I had rehearsals until ten at night. This thing that was eating my life wasn't going to be satisfied until I was gone, playing Bach just like generations before me had, ad nauseum. Forget how Bach might want Bach played. Not relevant in the cloying halls of the classical set. My first break was with the instructor. I discovered she'd been bitchy with members of other sections of the orchestra who didn't kneel at her altar. Several of us lodged formal complaints against her with the Dean of the Department, but I sat down with him and got specific. I planted my feet and told him that her personal games were strangling segments of his symphony orchestra, and I was ready to walk completely rather than work with her any further. As one of few performance majors, I managed to pack a little clout, especially with members of other sections complaining as well. Then, at Christmas, about a year later, I almost did something that would have been utterly unthinkable to me previously -- I almost walked out on a performance. It was in a large Seattle church, and the congregation parked indoors, underneath the building -- never so much as catching a breath of winter air between their luxury SUVs and their pews. Outside the front doors, a couple of my fellow musicians (bass players) were giving a burger or something to a man whose taped together shoes and beat up overcoat could only indicate one thing. On the doorstep of a church, during the Christmas season, but no one knew he was there because they were all too good for their own front door. Inside it was hideous ostentation. A brass cross at least thirty feet high hung suspended above the altar. Flowers buried the edges of the sanctuary. Marble fonts graced the corners. The woodwork glowed. And everyone was jockeying to sit next to the University president. I could hear their conversation as they passed in front of the stage. It was lewd. The idea of entertaining that shallow crowd made me a little sick. But I was all the way in Seattle, with no way home other than the school coach...so I played. Under protest. My conductor knew it, I think. Saw a look on my face, and really understood that I didn't find him or his Miata impressive. His influence alone was no longer enough to keep me in line and in my seat. Conductors all want to be intimidating, but in reality, they bruise easily. It was only a few weeks later, in a moment of metal, I pissed off my conductor so amazingly that I had him out of his seat, sweating and swearing, blustering in my face. And I escaped the university music department, repressed but not decommissioned. {dropnote:"Sonata Arctica: Live in Finland"}http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah3cFQy6SQ8{/dropnote} {dropnote:"Nightwish: Wacken, Floor Jansen"}http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSw0Rih71LQ{/dropnote}

Effexor, again.

Yeah, I know. I'm getting side tracked. That will happen. I'm sure if ADD had been the "popular diagnosis" when I was a kid I'd have had docs shoving Ritalin at me by the bucket load. My Mom tells me that my piano teacher had particular frustration with me, because she'd be explaining something and I would, for all appearances, be totally somewhere else mentally. Then, she'd ask if I understood, and there was no doubt I'd taken in everything she'd been telling me. It was just that if I tried to focus on one single thing while she explained it, I couldn't do it.

All that is kind of ironic when you think about it -- the woman who is teaching me how to focus my attention on each hand separately, read two different musical clefs simultaneously, and eventually, when I'd grown a little more and could reach then, to get both feet involved in the activity as well. If anyone was asking me to scatter my attention, it was her.

Oh well. It served me well, sort of. I frustrated a lot more teachers than just her with my tendency to look totally bored with what was happening around me, especially in academic settings. The more I tried to focus on one single thing, the more everything just seemed to scoot around at the fringes of my ability to grasp and understand and apply.

This hasn't been taken away by all the meds, but it was blunted I think. At least, I feel very scattered. And if I don't have anything to do or think about, or a project lined up for a day, it drives me bonkers. It's a downer. I don't know what to do with myself. Again, I'm coming up against a part of me that is totally normal (I know this). It just seems MORE than it ever was, and I think maybe that's because I had "help" dealing with it the last few years.

This wasn't ever such a troublesome aspect of my personality/mentality to deal with -- not like my temper, which is still pretty scary. I can tell you the story about the Scaggy Biker and Gordy if you want later. Anyhow...the multiple mental tracks thing. I know I've always been like this. But now that it's been a little dull for a few years, it seems more distracting than anything, and I'm not sure how to readjust.

Kerry said that there are clinics that dispense methadone for the kind of withdrawals I've had...who bought off the FDA to get this one out there? I can see where it might have some uses, in cases where, as the crazymeds site says, you feel like whale shit on the bottom of the ocean. It could be good for that, but even then, I would think it would be a short term thing.

There's so much I want to do, discuss, read...it's overwhelming. I want to write -- finish the series on the matriarchs in my family, write about my experiences with Crohn's, write things that will help people learn to laugh at themselves before they go insane. I want to learn tai chi -- NOW -- I want to move, and be graceful, and controlled and precise, and I want to do it perfectly, and I want to add sword forms into my regimen. I want to take ballet again. I need to move, to be physical, to sweat and have my muscles aching and my feet hurting and KNOW in some tangible way that I'm here, and that I'll still be here tomorrow.

I want to read everything. Biology, chemistry, physics, philosophy, history, culture...single subjects make me antsy. I want to know, and I can't seem to make my brain settle down and be quiet. It's like being so hungry that your vision gets narrow and you start grabbing handfuls of whatever is close without really paying attention to what it is. I want to sit up all night surfing the net and finding out what I can find out.

I want to garden and clean and run errands and take care of all the crap that's wrong with the apartment and just take on the entire world all at once. I want to kick the shit out of the idiots and the creeps who I run into. I want to help the people that I can. I want to be perfect for Kerry -- a dynamo haus-frau who does everything perfectly. But I know I can't do that -- I'm not June Cleaver. Never have been never will be. It just doesn't do anything for me. It works for some folks, and that's great. But me? I'm just not built to live like that, even if we could get away with it. I'd be going crazy looking for things to do that had nothing to do with anything domestic. I'd probably be cooking up whiskey in a still out back, or making my own gunpowder and testing it out on the crackheads in the apartments behind us or something. That or the urban assault spud gun -- that's a napkin drawing that could become a reality all too easily if I were left to my own devices for too long.

You see, I could very easily be a danger to myself and others with my kind of energy. And I've always, always been like this. I just don't know how I dealt with it all the time before. School was never encompassing enough to really be helpful. I had to throw in ballet and all kinds of other stuff to get myself to feel productive and settled with myself. Otherwise, there was always a little part of me that sat there at the end of the day and said "you could have done more. You should have done this, or that, or the other thing. What the hell? Why didn't you do all three? You could have..."

And people wonder why I don't want kids. I'd be a disaster! I really don't think I could do that. Especially in the years before they start articulating opinions. Babies just don't do anything for me. I'd be running around with the thing in one of those yuppie slings that lets you hold the kid on your back, and I'd forget it was there, sit down and squash it or something. And that's probably the least I could do. Hopefully I'd be arrested for felony stupidity before I let things get too far.

And yet, that part of my mind is still yawning and half asleep, which is sort of a nervous thing. I mean, if it's this agitated now, what is it going to be like when it's all the way awake? Had it's shower, brushed it's teeth and is settling in with teh paper and a bagel and cream cheese before running out the door to do whatever it's going to do?

The Bitch is Back (Please, Elton, don't sue me!)

We're taking a little break from the Crohn's -- kinda. I mean, the entire reason that I started taking anti-anxiety meds in the first place was not because I wanted to treat my anxiety, but because there was a certain logic to the idea that if I could do something to control my anxiety, my gut would be a little easier to deal with.

Now,though, we have a problem. I was on Celexa for about 2.5/3 years and it worked well for the most part. Toward the end we kept having to bump the dose to get the same response, and it came time for a change.

I tried Effexor. I was a good girl, tapered up on the dose, but had some pretty unacceptable side effects. Random heart palpitations, blood pressure spikes and crashes, high potassium levels...they just weren't part of what I had envisioned going on my life. So we took the dose back a little, and a little more, and still I was having the side effects. Not so much. Usually only when I was really exerting myself, but I do that cleaning, because I can't seem to approach anything half way. And I wanted to get back into dance, or take martial arts, or something -- no way that was going to be happening.

Finally it came to this: in the doctor's office, doc looked at me and said, "you aren't turning cartwheels over this one, are you?"

Well, no, not really. I mean, it works, I suppose. I'm not crazy. I'm not lobotomized. But the side effects were more physical than anything, and I wasn't liking it.

We decided that if I were to actually get off the sample bandwagon, this one was WAY too expensive if I wasn't utterly thrilled with it. So off I go. This is a process with Effexor. Look it up anywhere on the internet, and you'll find entries for Effexor withdrawal and most of them say it's the worst or second worst experience they've ever had.

I was a good girl, I tapered down. The first night without a pill was absolutely insane though, and I wimped out at about 8:30 pm the next night -- four hours early from the next dose. I'm okay with that. It didn't take me long to come back down from the ceiling, it was amazing. Kerry is wondering how this shit got through the FDA with a withdrawal and response like that. I wish I had an answer. Maybe some money changed hands. Maybe an intern "hid" under someone's desk. Who knows. All I know is it sucked.

The thing that seems to be the most consistent, though, is my temper. Hence the title of tis entry. The bitch? Oh, yeah, she's back. She's been hiding under a load of serotonin reuptake inhibitors for the last few years and she's got a lot to say. She's got loads of bile for people who honk their car horns and yell out their windows. Little things get under her skin and make her crazy, like not being able to open a jar. And when something really warrants getting pissed off? Good gawd, it's all I can do to keep her contained.

My temper has always been like this. It's always been bad. I always knew that seeing red literally meant that. I knew that when I get pushed so far, I would black out and come out of it really not knowing what had happened, which is really pretty scary. I know that my first response to anger is physical. It's a powerful feeling, physically; it's an instant adrenaline shot. I can feel the muscles in my arms and legs tighten up, and there's no flight response. It's all about fight.

So I'm stuck. I'm fundamentally a non-violent person. I dealt with that temper for years by just burying things, and ignoring them, or finding ways to blame and thus get pissed at myself rather than someone else. Better to hurt myself than lash out at others.

Okay, so that wasn't so healthy. Apparently I'm outta practice, anyhow, because I can't find the ways to blame myself, and I can't squash it. You know what they say about us Scorpios? That we deal with things on a more intense level than most of the world at large? That we're passionate and loyal and occasionally violent, and an overall handful for anyone else to deal with? And last, that we hide all that from the rest of the world? Well, whatever you think of astrology, that is an absolutely apt description for me.

The bitch just won't stay in her box anymore, so I have to figure out how to let her out without causing total havoc everywhere I go. I've had the urge to destroy things so often this week it's actually startling. How do I contain that? How does anyone?

I don't want to be that person who is calm on the outside and full of dislike for myself anymore. Or the person who lays everything down for everyone else without ever thinking of herself. And I don't want to be caught up in this useless cycle of feeling panic over my temper that made me start burying it in the first place. I don't want the whole world knowing my business, but I don't want to be the Ice Queen anymore. I don't want people thinking for years that they know me when they really don't.

There's gotta be a middle ground. On the one side, we had better living through chemistry. On the other, I was self-destructing even though I didn't realize it, and I kept on going until my body physically got ill and made me stop.

Crohn's Essays: 2

Okay folks, this one is pretty rough. No edit, no nothing.

What the Hell?

That feeling had been going on for weeks – like part of my stomach was trying to grind up glass instead of the salad I'd just polished off. I was trying to get healthy, you see. Eat more salads, fresh produce, quit smoking, get some more exercise. You know, all the good stuff that makes the New Year's list. Except I never kept New Year's lists. The self betterment scheme was a strange off shoot of a banned book month that we'd instituted at the apartment. Healthy mind, healthy body. Besides, I had to do something with myself. I had two Bachelor's degrees, and I was working at Wendy's for God's sake.

Reality check. Consider me thoroughly humbled. My best friend was the assistant manager at the Wendy's close to where I lived, and she was understaffed at the same time I needed work – why shouldn't we both win?

Yeah, except that a few months turned into almost a year, and the last half of that the pangs started coming. Just a twinge here and there at first. A little nausea, some pain. Chalk it up to a gas bubble and move on with life. Wash some trays, line them, try not to beat the idiot at the front counter with it. Nothing against people who sit at the front counter of a fast food place, but when you've been there for a little while, and you're still staring at the menu with your mouth hanging open and a vacant expression on your face, it makes me want to do something to make sure you're still with the rest of us in reality. There's a weird catatonia that comes over people when faced with a menu, and I've often wondered if it would respond to the same therapy as hysterics – a sharp slap to the face.

In the end it was the stress, we figured out, although the many doctors thought my concept of stress antagonizing the gut was just too strange to be believed. I believe it though, because I've had to live with my gut, and they haven't, and I know that it gets worse when I'm staring down someone's throat while they gape at a menu board. Or at the sandwich maker who got totally baked out of his head before he came into work and doesn't even know what a hamburger is at this point. Or at the incessant dinging of the drive through timer, or the cacophony of fry timers all going off at the exact same instant, and yet somehow completely out of rhythm with each other. I know that my gut hurt worse when all of these things would come together like some sort of unholy gestalt, and the hair on the back of my neck would stand up, and my shoulder muscles would force everything up around my ears. I actually envied the pressure fryer because at least it had a vent.

Some things just made my gut worse. My job. My period. Rice (of all things). After a while, salads. Then hamburgers. Then ramen. Anything fried. So pretty much everything at work, where I spent most of my day, was totally off limits. And most anything else was off limits to a point – unless I wanted to avail myself to a fast food public restroom; I had a hang up about all public restrooms at this early stage in the game though. And let me tell you, I cleaned the fast food restroom often enough to know, beyond any shadow of any doubt that might flit through anyone's head, that no one (and I mean no one) steps into a public restroom in a fast food joint to take a dump unless it's absolutely an apocalyptic necessity. Like they just got released from the hospital after a heavy meal of activated charcoal and laxatives.

And I'm supposed to plunk my ass down on one of those seats? Yeah. Right. Not in this lifetime, thank you ever so much. There is no squat-hovering over the seat during a gut crisis, either. It's either sit down, or fall down. Your leg muscles just don't have the dexterity to help you levitate over the public toilet when you're focused on the pain in your gut. Besides, I might have gut problems, but I still had some sort of control over my ass, unlike most of the people who locked themselves in there during business hours.

At any rate, eventually, food wise, I was pretty much down to Chunky Soup (steak and potato), Campbell's chicken noodle, and Cup O Noodles. I had so much chicken broth in me (I wish I were joking) that I could literally smell it in my sweat. And since I had lost about a third of my body weight and all of my energy, showering was not something that came easy. There was a lot of time for smelling. I still can't eat anything that is blatantly chicken broth. Just the idea makes me nauseous.

I noticed there was a distinctly red color in the toilet at one point. I called my wonderful boyfriend in to ask his opinion. Stupid me, he's color blind and couldn't tell me a damn thing. The question was cleared up within the next two days when it looked like something Biblical had happened in that toilet. I had been wondering how much one person could shit in one day up until then, which seemed like a reasonable point of contemplation. Now I was wondering how one person could bleed that much and not pass out.

Then my ankles did this weird thing. One of them swelled up to about three times its normal size. No joke. It was like the worst sprain a person ever had, except that I hadn't done anything to it. It was just huge. And I couldn't walk on it, really. Which was kinda funny, because I had diarrhea so bad I had to sprint to the bathroom about six to eight times a day. I'm reasonably sure it was a funny picture. The rest of the time I sat with it propped up, thinking, “wow, maybe there's really something wrong with me. Like a parasite or something. Or an infection. Something that's gonna take some serious antibiotics. Or maybe a trip to the vet or something. Jesus, maybe I better head for the doc-in-the-box down the road!”

So I called Mom, and we went to the doc-in-the-box. After an absolutely humiliating exam, the details of which have no place in a humorous commentary, the doctor came back into the exam room and said that we had to get to the hospital in the next city because the sample he took showed a lot of blood.

Sooo...what the hell? I'm hemorrhaging now? Come on, guy, you had your finger up my ass with all sorts of lights and shit, and you can't tell me anything?

He couldn't, or he wouldn't, and either way, Mom and I went to the hospital and learned the hard way that we had been “routed” from the hospital that was in the town where we lived to the other one. At one point, we got lost, so Mom pulled into the parking lot of a convenience store where there was an apparent tent revival happening in the parking lot. She came back with bunk directions, but I had an idea where this was, so I finally lost my patience and told her to get in the damn passenger seat and let me handle it.

We found our way to the hospital, but I let Mom tackle the issue of parking. Jokes on her.

I was assured in clipped tones that while I was anemic (they weren't sure how I managed to stay upright), I wasn't hemorrhaging. The doc wanted to do another “exam” a la Area 51, but I put a stop to that. Once was quite enough for one day. I brandished the results of the exams the other doctor had run like a shield – “fecal guiac something or other! See! Already had one of those today. No need for you to bother with that one.”

So he settled for a pelvic. Doctors are in a funny position when they're doing a pelvic exam. You'd think they'd be a little more conscious of their technique. This one had obviously been a chimney sweep while working his way through medical school. And while he's doing this, his head is about level with my foot.

That gave me something to think about. Lucky for him what he lacked in finesse he made up for in speed.

He told me, in the most unremarkable voice possible, with his back turned to me as he washed his hands, that I probably had Crohn's, which was serious, but very treatable.

Well, what the hell? At least I wasn't crazy....

Crohn's Essays: 1

The Basics

Crohn's disease is an inflammatory disease of the digestive tract. Pretty simple, on the outside. It can affect the who shebang from mouth to anus.

If words like anus, or rectum, or feces, or mucus make you squeamish, you can either brace yourself and read on, or you can leave now. There'll be plenty of that. And diarrhea, constipation, and farting. This is not a polite-society kind of condition to get saddled with.

Crohn's is the devil in immune form. The immune system goes off its Ritalin, or whatever it usually does to keep itself occupied, and starts attacking healthy tissue, leaving people with ulcers, opportunistic infections, and malnutrition. Then there are these things called fistulas. What this means is that your immune response has eaten completely through gastrointestinal tract tissue and all sorts of nasties are leaking into body cavities they shouldn't be in.

Every time you think you have it figured out, it throws you a curve ball. It's very sold on it's own individualism. No two cases are alike, and isn't that just special. What one person learns from his or her experience with Crohn's does not necessarily apply to anyone else. Just remember – this makes you very special. You always wanted to be special, didn't you?

In a way, I feel like a hack writing this. The issues I've had with Crohn's have been fairly minor compared to what others have endured. However, I have been...encouraged...by friends and family to put this to paper. It doesn't hurt that the words, the experiences, themselves want out, too. They rattle around in my brain, driving me nuts sometimes. But the chances of my finding someone who can relate instead of sympathize are slim. I know plenty of people with Crohn's, which is sort of weird in itself, seeing as so many I “talk” to online feel like they're living in a state of isolation where there is no one who can understand what they're dealing with.

The thing of it is, even other Crohn's sufferers (or Crohnies, as some of us have taken to calling ourselves) don't really know what another Crohn's sufferer goes through – like I said, the cases are very individual. During my first flare up, I couldn't so much as look at a bowl of rice without doubling over in pain and running for the bathroom (which looked pretty darn awkward). Rice – which just about everyone looked to as a miracle food because it was one of the few things they could eat with aplomb. Meanwhile I could attack dairy and onion laden foods with abandon. So much for consistency.

Now, you gotta figure if the disease is the devil itself, the medications to deal with it can't help but be the devil's own minions. It takes evil to deal with evil, after all. Whole hosts of antibiotics, steroids, special anti-inflammatories (because you can't take aspirin, ibuprofen, or NSAIDS as they can cause bleeding or intestinal inflammation – and you have enough of that going on already, thanks much). Then, because the disease will certainly rob you of your sanity at some point, you wind up delving into the world of anti-depressants, anti-anxiety, and sleep medications. It's all about better living through chemistry. And let's not forget the immune suppressants. The ones that are supposed to go to the root of the problem by telling your immune system to knock it the hell off. But, most take a few weeks to really work, so you're waiting, and spending money on this stuff, hoping that it will show some effect.

Trial and error is the name of the game, and it sucks. I know from experience. However, what can one do with an experience that sucks this bad? Hang on to it like a security blanket? Probably not the best idea. But it's still there – in the back of my head, every time I look at a bowl of rice. Well, maybe there is an answer out there. Write it down. Look back on it and laugh at the awkward times, cry a little for the most dismal times, but above all else, through all that, show other folks who might be in the same position I was that there is, indeed, life after a flare up.

I mean, here I am. Five years since a flare up that should have by all rights damn near killed me. Half the time I thought I was pretty much dead, anyway, except for the pain. That was a constant reminder that I wasn't actually dead – yet. Now I look back on so much of that, and I can't find it in me to regret any of it. It changed who I am, mostly in good ways. Like walking through a fire or something – I came out on the other side more aware of life, and how good it can be, and wanting to take advantage of each and every moment. Corny, huh? Yeah, but it's the truth.

I digress. Here I am. The love of my life sleeping loudly next to me. He's been working on getting a nursing degree – a direct product of time he spent with me in the hospital, I might add. I know that the snoring hulk next to me is the dearest, sweetest man on the planet, even with all his faults. He put up with me through everything and he's still here. He never ran from me. I think he probably considered it – he would have been nuts not to, I think. But he helped me get through it. So did my family. I include his family in that, as well. I was so fortunate to have the support I did – and that, again, is a whole essay in itself.

Now, I have spent two years working 50 hours or more a week on a community emergency escape plan the idealism of which was almost as astounding as the logistics of it. I'm looking at going to law school. I serve a group of teens at a concert venue on the weekends – a group of kids who make me proud every week. I write fiction, some. Okay, so some of it is fan fiction – but hey, anything to get a person started, right? I've learned to sew aprons, to embroider, to clean houses, I've worked in food service. I've learned to pick my battles a little more carefully than I used to. I have learned to follow the advocate that is in my soul. I look back at what I did before Crohn's and realize that it was killing me as well – not allowing myself to be true, either to myself or to those I cared for. I'm okay with who I am, and that's pretty cool, too.

Not that I don't still have my moments. We'll talk about panic attacks and anxiety in one of these essays. My dear sweet darling occasionally has to get the flat metal spatula out to peel me off the ceiling when I get too wound up for my own good. Good thing he's tall enough to do it without standing on a chair or anything – that could get dangerous.

But for the most part, it's cool. I've had to face the fact that I'm neurotic, and learn to be okay with that. I've had to learn to roll with my temper a little different without squashing it in a stupid effort to turn myself into someone I'm not. Life could be a lot worse. As a friend of mine says, “hey, I'm still on the right side of the grass.” There were times when I wished I wasn't. There were times when if I'd had an iota more balls than I do, I'd have done something about that. Ultimately I was chicken. Not that I was scared of dying – I'm not. I was more afraid that I'd botch the attempt and live to regret it.

Lucky...

What makes luck? Do we make it ourselves? Is destiny involved? How do we define ourselves as lucky?

Last weekend my Aunt and Uncle were hit by a car while they crossed the street -- they not only survived, aside from bruises and strains they appear fine. Amazing considering that the car was moving at 25 mph. Lucky? My Aunt told me that if I told her how lucky she was she would come over and kick me -- how lucky is it to get hit by a car?

For the last eight years and some, I've felt very lucky to have a wonderful man in my life. He puts up with everything -- Crohn's disease, panic attacks, stubbornness...you name it. He doesn't think I'm lucky, but I do. The fact that my Aunt and Uncle were hit by a car rattled me; any of us could be there. Any of us could be gone just as quickly. What if it were mine? What would I do without him? I can't even comprehend.

Tonight, talking to a friend who grew up in less than ideal circumstances, I suddenly felt very lucky that I had the parents that I did, my Mom in particular. I didn't have to look to babysitters for stability and guidance in my life. Wow. Even when Dad was gone with the Air Force, which was often, Mom was always there.

Maybe luck is simply a matter of perspective. We feel lucky that our family is still with us when they might not have been, while my Aunt places emphasis on the incident more than the outcome. I look at my childhood juxtaposed with my friends, and even when I knew I had things pretty good, I feel that much more lucky.

Funny how life will stop you short and make you take stock of your blessings and your actions in the world.

Essay Collection: Matriarchs 2

You're never too old – for anything.

This isn't a direct quote from anyone, but it has always sat at the back of my mind, an almost constant part of my internal dialogue. It also goes to: you're never too young for anything. You can always manage to do the things you have to do, and nothing is impossible.

It's rough being smart. I grew up being totally unable to accept that I could not do things perfectly from the first attempt. I'm still that way. If I have to try something new, I wait until I can do it by myself, where no one will see the ugliness that comes of it until I get it right. In a sense, I think that's why this essay has been so difficult to write compared to the one about my maternal Grandmother. My memories of her are very sensory and concrete. My paternal Grandmother, Grandma Waddell, is somewhat less corporeal, but no less significant, in the way she influenced me.

I started playing piano when I was about six because I wanted to play piano like Grandma Waddell, who taught both organ and piano to help make ends meet, even while she worked at the hospital as a dietary aid, and then a certified dietitian. When I say I wanted to play like Grandma, I mean just like Grandma. Same stuff, same difficulty, now-as-in-yesterday. She made it look so easy, the fact that she'd been doing it for probably fifty or sixty some-odd years never occurred to me. Piano practice was the bane of my existence, much to my Mother's frustration (and mine). If I couldn't do it perfect, there was no point in doing it, and, again, I mean perfect the first time. No going over it slow. No isolating one trouble spot and actually working on it. Perfect from start to finish. Mom, however, made me practice, and I got better, naturally. It didn't change my level of frustration one little bit, though. It never occurred to me that Grandma had had to practice, the same as I did. I didn't appreciate that until she told me about her teacher, who would hit her knuckles with a ruler every time she made a mistake.

It's funny; one of the last times I went to visit her at her house, I played a couple things, and she said that I had gotten better than her. I think it was Rachmanninof that started the discussion. Since then, though, I haven't had much urge to play the piano – piano was Grandma's thing, and it didn't seem right if I got better than her. I didn't stop enjoying piano, it just seemed like a line I didn't want to cross.

I took me a long time to put together the pieces of her history so that I could appreciate it fully. I knew that she and Grandpa had gotten a divorce, because I had three Grandmas: Grandma Ramsey, Grandma Waddell, and Grandma Flay. I knew that sometimes, it flooded, and she had to row across the water to her car so she could drive to work. I knew that she had kept the farm house and the land after the divorce. I had no concept of what all this had cost her most of my life. I just knew that Grandma Waddell had a permanence about her. Like someone who wouldn't be pushed in any direction she didn't already want to go.

Now I know that she worked a few retail jobs, which must have been incredibly difficult, considering how shy she is. She told me that when she was in school, a lot of the kids thought she was stuck up because she wouldn't talk to anyone, when really, she was just shy. She had to take care of three out of five children, clean, cook, and make sure that everything was taken care of for all of them on a retail salary and what she made teaching. She eventually had to sell some of the trees at the farm house for lumber to keep things going. I remember that because she told me she was in such straits she'd gotten her Bible out, and read the line: “look to the trees.” She looked out the back window, and there was her answer. She let me know that sometimes, God does answer things directly, even in this day and age.

She taught me what it means to have real faith, as well. Following her divorce, the Methodist church she had been a devoted member of turned their back on her. Yet she kept her faith – it wasn't about where she practiced, or even that she 'practiced' at all. It was what she kept with her at all times, everywhere she went. Faith was about compassion, ethical behavior, beauty, and miracles. It was about being able to forgive others and move on with your own life, instead of cursing someone who harms you and being held down by their actions. As a result, I had my own disagreements with people who considered themselves faithful but would be lost without a structure to house it in and a ritual to practice by. She never claimed that her faith was perfect, so I wasn't fooled by those who did. She could admit her mistakes without seeming like less for them.

After the last of her kids graduated high school and got out into the world (she was 63), she went back to school. I remember being very proud of the fact that my Grandma was going to college, even though I didn't know what a dietitian was all about back then.

I learned to love my tenacity through her example. She was comfortable with how she led her life, content in her own company, and I learned this (quite valuable for an only child!). I didn't know any words for it when I was little, for the quietness and solidity of her presence. Hours could go by in her house with the only sound being the clock ticking above the fireplace.

When I'm relishing my own peaceful stillness, I hear echoes of her playing “On Wisconsin” like the medium rolling pace of the river itself, or “In the Garden,” like my heart, more than my head, remembers those songs. And I catch a sense of something solid and timeless, that looks back on obstacles as what they were, without romanticizing them, and also without regret. This is what allows me to continue looking forward and upward when I come across new challenges, rather than getting hung up in the problems themselves.