Today I woke up and the sun is shining. My mind is alert and my thinking is much more clear than it has been. I feel good. Days like these are few and far between. When they arrive I want to capitalize on them. This one seems to have arrived as a result of whatever the marijuana did to my body. The only other difference I made last night was eating 4 slices of white bread smothered with butter and Nutella. I woke up with a slight stomach ache—likely caused by the gluten. But I still feel much better than usual.

A couple weeks ago I took an Everlywell Cortisol, Cortisone, and Melatonin test. My morning cortisol levels at 9am (before coffee) we off the charts. I allowed myself to sleep in that day to see if they would be lower but they are cripplingly high. It’s affecting my entire body.

I had an EEG and an MRI this week too. Slowly starting to tackle the things that could be wrong with me.

My bank account is down to zero. Literally zero.

Today my sleep seems to have normalized. I fell asleep around 10:30pm and woke without an alarm at precisely 6am. This is good news.

Lately my blood pressure has been sky high. 175/110 range. My mind is reeling as usual and while I’m calm and collected on the outside, internally I’m falling apart—day by day.

I still don’t have the intellectual capabilities I had when I first started writing this blog in December. For whatever reason the clouds parted for a short time and the sun appeared. My mind was on fire with ideas and inspirations. I could connect disparate concepts and weld them together. Now, I’m struggling to recall words. There’s little or no cognitive activity. No inspiration. No sense of humor. Little personality. And my energy levels are exactly where you’d expect them to be.

The idea that I could ever achieve anything meaningful feels delusional at best and impossible at worst.

I woke up on Monday and to an familiar feeling: a microscopic army is waging a war inside my body. An atom sized man with an axe is going to work on my brain. Poison flows through my veins. My blood pressure is dangerously high. I am in pain. Again.

On tuesday I visited a doctor who used to be my GP. He referred me to a neurologist. In the meantime I’m coping, as I always do. I went to the gym today. I did dips and pullups and curls in an attempt to feel alive again. It didn’t work.

I’ve spent the last hour trying to get through a lengthy article I stowed away in Reader. I can’t focus. I can’t put the concepts together.

I can’t think.

And I feel like I’m falling even further behind.

I feel like I’m fading away and there’s no one on the face of this planet that really cares but me.

When I get my health back, and I will get my health back, I will use all of my energy and focus and will to climb back up the mountain I fell off of a long time ago.

But for now, I must rest my wearing eyes and sing my song of sorrow. It’s the only song I can remember at this particular moment.

Then I ready myself behind the same boulder and start the process over again. This has been my life for more than a decade.

When you’re brain is swollen there’s no escaping it. There’s no “willing your way to victory.” Your vital essence is drained, your talents vanished. Your memories—erased. No information gets in, none goes out. The mental and physical exhaustion is crippling. The cascade of symptoms torturous.

But each time my resolve grows. My determination and grit rise to levels previously unknown. Hardened by the pain. Sharpened by a wisdom only struggle and failure can bestow.

The work becomes the reward. The struggle becomes the path. The ceaseless striving and tireless march toward a vision. A journey into the unknown.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from this Sisyphean task it’s that no one can or will share your vision but you. And only you are capable of achieving that which your mind, and soul, and spirit deem sacred.

The promised land is never out of reach. You’re already there.

So smile at the gods when they crush you once more. Laugh at the absurdity of your plight. Know that eventually, one day, you’ll get over that mountain and peer at the horizons beyond…Only to find an infinite number of peaks in the distance. And a valley full of boulders waiting in the calm silence and shelter…and the start of something new.

The moment I opened my eyes I knew it was going to be a good day. My head was clear, my body mostly pain free. My senses and abilities felt accessible, even—functional.

But throughout the day there’s a lurking sense that I’ll spend too much of this precious energy. That if I work too “hard” or focus for too long there will be a price to pay. My disease always demands its pound of flesh.

The fear of working too hard is knew to me. For a decade I believed I wasn’t trying hard enough, wasn’t working smart enough and wasn’t disciplined enough. A decade of self-torture. A decade of delusion. A decade of crippling (literally) pain.

The ghosts of my childhood haunt me. Being labeled an “underachieving” and “slacker” are the fertilizer that feed my desire to prove everyone wrong.

Now I now that I know my body and mind suffer from PEM (post exertional malaise) otherwise known as “post-exertional neuroimmune exhaustion.” And I’m scared.

For ten years I calloused my mind and spirit and coached myself to believe I could achieve anything I desired. For ten years I failed. But failure is temporary.

Knowing that my ability to grit my teeth and revel in pain is exactly the reason I’m still suffering is…something I still haven’t fully processed.

Paradoxically, I’m my own worst enemy. But I can change. I can slow down. I can heal if I allow myself the time and space to heal.

Today I’ve let go. I’ve given up.

I surrender.

So that I can return stronger, wiser, and more determined than ever to fulfil the promises I made to myself.

Monk mode is a term men use when they block out the entire world and focus all of their energy on a singular goal. It’s a time of isolation and increased discipline. During monk mode it’s just you and your muse–whatever that may be.

Dealing with a chronic disease forces you into monk mode. When the entire foundation of your life (your health) is built on shifting sands you need to carefully prioritize and plan each day. You need to ruthlessly prune the garden of your life and you need to control your environment.

Having shed most of my friends, colleagues, family, and relationships—only my vision, skills, and ability to focus remain.

Monk mode engaged.

But here I am. Alone with my keyboard and a blank white page staring back at me.

I’ve spent most of my life alone. Though I never considered it until now. Some people are afraid of being alone, they latch onto friends or lovers—silently begging them to stay.

The realities of my illness demand that I spend most of my time alone, suffering. And that’s ok.

But even before I was ill—I was alone. Being a middle child meant my parents were more drawn to my brother and sister. That’s the natural order of things. This loneliness never reached my conscious level of thinking until I drank my first cup of ayahuasca.

Deep in the recesses of the Andes mountains I swallowed the saliva of the amazon rainforest. Thicker than crude oil it resisted gravity as it crawled down my throat and settled into my stomach. Moments later a faceless spirit appeared, dressed in black. She grabbed me by the hand and I followed her without fear.

The spirit and I dashed through time until we were peering down from the sky above and we watched as the five year old version of me walked out the front door of my family’s humble home.

Alone.

I didn’t realize for some time that it was odd for a child of that age to be wandering about the yard and neighborhood by himself. But that was me. Wandering. Alone.

As I watched this little boy basking in the freedom and safety of our rural neighborhood I cried with joy and gratitude. But years later as I processed the experience I drew a straight line to my current experience as a thirty-something—wandering a dangerous circuit of south american cities. Alone.

But life is a circle and we always return to the place we started. So here I am, back in NY writing words I’m too scared to speak, all alone with my pain and suffering.

Accepting each precious and great moment with the hard won lessons you can only learn by spending time alone.

I see the bad moon a-risin' I see trouble on the way I see earthquakes and lightnin' I see bad times today

Don't go around tonight Well it's bound to take your life There's a bad moon on the rise

I hear hurricanes a-blowin' I know the end is comin' soon I fear rivers over flowin' I hear the voice of rage and ruin

Tomorrow is the first full moon of the new year. I woke up at 4:30am—feeling wholly refreshed after a five hour sleep. I tend to sleep less in the days leading up to full moons. This is a reminder that we are inextricably linked to nature.

Today I’m wrestling with more anger. This brings me a great deal of joy. For many years my illness was so crippling that I lost the ability to feel anger. This was confusing. Anger, rage and aggression were staples in my life for some time. Not in a negative way. Not in an uncontrollable or toxic way—but in a healthy, proportional way.

Anger like most emotions is a compass, a shield, and a sword. Anger tells us which direction we need to focus our attention. Reflexive anger helps protect us from the evils and injustices of the world. And if necessary anger is the fuel for our response to those same evils. Compass, shield, sword.

When you lose the ability to feel anger you lose the ability to protect and defend yourself. You become prey in a world full of predators. Anger is not a lone wolf. With the loss of anger comes the loss of aggression. The loss of the ability to take action. A complete loss of motivation. A cascade of lost abilities that can’t be replaced. A falling down to the depths of darkness with no way out.

Today I’m celebrating my reclaimed anger. I’m delighted to hear the whispering voice of rage and ruin. And I’m reminded of the relative nature of good and bad.

Last night I had a conversation with a friend who I haven’t seen since I was in Brazil in March 2021. At the time he was struggling with some hard-to-pin-down health issues that resulted in a crippling and energy sucking anxiety. He told me his sympathetic nervous system was overworked and malfunction. Ok. We’ve all been there. But how did he fix it? By focusing on his breathing.

I’ve tried a handful of breathing techniques from Wim Hoff to holotropic breathing. They all provide benefits but the results were temporary, at least for me. The same friend suggested I stop working so much and just do 4-5 hours of focused work per day…WTF, I wondered to myself. Who has the leisure to do 4-5 hours of work per day? Well I guess my friend does.

In any case I’m more of an “eight days a week” kind of guy. I enjoy my work, and I have a backlog of ideas I’m dying to ship. So for now, I’ll slow down a little and allow the healing process to continue, but eventually my nature will take over and my desire will bring me right back to the place I belong.

The path of change: to discipline or not to discipline

I was reading the blog that inspired this one. Another founder/investor who’s struggled with chronic disease. Recently she wrote about the idea of discipline coming from a place of love. My mind immediately went to the military. The most disciplined organizations.

For thousands of years militaries full of harshly disciplined men achieved unimaginable feats, endured unspeakable horrors, and withstood unimaginable conditions. Was love the wind at their back? No. It was a mission, a belief, and a drive that is different from love.

The idea that self imposed discipline is self imposed misery is tasty. It’s tempting to dive into the waters of modern self-help focused on self-love, acceptance and forgiveness. But does discipline and self imposed suffering have to come from misplaced guilt or self retribution? Are you really turning yourself into a victim by overriding your mind’s innate desires? I think not.

Yes self love and acceptance are a fertile ground where we can plant the seeds of our future and nurture them into towering shady oaks. But without the complementary “dark side” of growth—will those oaks ever grow beyond a frail sapling?

What if we can’t out-wit, out-love, and out-grit our innate human desires—the sloth, the pride, the gluttony and lust? How can love on it’s own help us adapt to a modern world hellbent on pulling us downward toward our most base and basic desires (and away from our intentional pursuit of change).

No, folks, love won’t solve all our problems…but it helps. Discipline IS freedom. A little self hatred can be transmuted into the desire and will to change. Desire and will can become habit. And if you can love and forgive yourself the whole way through you’re a lot more likely to make it further on that pathless path.

Surprisingly he hasn’t gained that much attention on the dominant channel for tech bros: Twitter. He’s “openly conservative” and his ideas are too radioactive for the sanitized, politically correct environment the alphabet people have manufactured over the last decade or two. (Note: many people think “wokism” started somewhere around 2015, but the millstones of the woke left have been turning for decades and we’re just starting to see the grist (grift) they’ve produced).

When I read this particular tech bro’s blog and watch his new Youtube channel I get the impression that he is a man of truth. Someone who values integrity. That his internal dialogue is congruent with the things he says. That he is trustworthy. That he speak his version of the truth.

Last night I went to sleep around midnight and woke just after 6am without my alarm. When I opened my eyes I immediately triaged my condition—as I’ve instinctively done every morning for the past decade. Am I utterly exhausted? Does my body feel like a lead cannonball? Does my brain feel like a dollop of mercury? Can I think? Do I feel like killing myself?

Shockingly all was well. I then spent the next 15 minutes debating if I should go for a run or hit the gym. I WANT to go for a run. I love working out. For some time it was my only refuge from a crippling anxiety. Now I know that working out is the very thing that impedes my healing. I can’t schedule workouts. I have to feel my way through each day. Like a child crawling in the dark in a smoke filled house, desperately trying to escape.

I decided that 6 hours of sleep was probably not enough. My body’s primary objective is healing and to heal I need rest. I went back to sleep until 9ish and woke up feeling much worse. A slight headache and foggy mind. An achy, tired body. I no longer felt rested. These are the symptoms you tell your doctor and he says you’re just fine—it’s totally normal to feel like shit all the time! (no it is not).

Below I decided to answer the 40 questions presented here by Stephan Ango:

https://stephanango.com/40-questions

**What did you do this year that you’d never done before? **I stopped doing things—like working out and working. I had to stop as my body rebelled against my will. The fevers and crippling fatigue were a signal that it was time to give up. Even after everything I’ve been through in the past 10 years I’ve never given up. But now I have.

**Did you keep your new year’s resolutions? **I didn’t make any new year’s resolutions but I would not have kept them if I did. The last remaining bit of thread holding together my life was cut. I’m no longer holding on by a thread, I’m free falling in the abyss. ** ** **Did anyone close to you give birth? **My older sister gave birth to little Caroline.

Did anyone close to you die? Nope.

**What cities/states/countries did you visit? **I did less travel this year than any of the past 7 years. I only visited Puerto Rico. I’m hibernating and frankly too scared to travel.

**What would you like to have next year that you lacked this year? **Health, energy, vitality, income, success, confidence, progress, resolution.

What date(s) from this year will remain etched upon your memory, and why? August 8, 2022—the date my doctor told me I tested positive for Lupus and prescribed me prednisone for the fever (flare up) I was having.

**What was your biggest achievement of the year? **Letting go. Giving up. Acceptance.

**What was your biggest failure? **Not finishing the projects I started. Not being vulnerable and open about my condition with friends and family. Getting ripped off by the assholes at Soba and completely derailing my progress.

**What other hardships did you face? **Trying to live life when no one understands what you’re going through—and most people think you’re full of shit. Even your friends and family abandon you one way or another…Realizing you’re all alone and no one is coming to save you, and that you might not be able to save yourself. This is the truth. We are born alone, we die alone, and in between we build bonds with imperfect beings that are wholly self interested. If you’re a man and you fall ill, lose your job or your income or your financial wellbeing, maybe you lose your level of fitness or professional competence… worst of all your confidence—you will be met by the truth. It’s not pretty, but it’s freeing. Peel back the layers of false friends and acquaintances. Break free from the illusions propping you up and chaining you to your current existence. Tear off the rose colored glasses and see the world for what it is. You are free to save yourself.

Did you suffer illness or injury? Yes, that’s what this entire blog is about.

What was the best thing you bought? A new seat for my Ducati.

Whose behavior merited celebration? My own. Eszter’s.

Whose behavior made you appalled? My doctors’. Callused. Cold. Unwilling to do the work to investigate the root cause of my illness. Bound by the constraints of the healthcare companies. I’d visited doctors a few times over the years and they always told me nothing was wrong. Thanks doc.

**Where did most of your money go? **Supplements and health related expenses. Food–food is healing. Healing food is somewhat expensive.

**What did you get really, really, really excited about? **A handful of projects I’m working on and just getting back to making shit on the internet. I took a long break from writing code and it feels really good to be back and to embrace some of the new technologies I dismissed years ago.

**What song will always remind you of this year? Callaíta, by Bad Bunny. ** **Compared to this time last year, are you: happier or sadder? Thinner or fatter? Richer or poorer? **I’m about the same weight but not as fit or strong. I had to take the last few months off after hernia surgery and to allow my body to rest and hopefully heal. I’m much happier knowing that I have an illness and I’m not just “depressed” as the mental health industry claims (about everyone).

**What do you wish you’d done more of? **Spent time with friends. Focused more (hard). Made some money and some new friends. More sex. Fly fished more. Skied.

**What do you wish you’d done less of? **Sleep. The constant naps in the middle of the day. The 12 hour sleeps. The days where I could do nothing but lay around in agony.

**How are you spending the holidays? **I spent the holidays with my family.

Did you fall in love this year? Love feels impossible right now. I wish it didn’t. I feel like I’ve become nothing and you can’t love nothing.

Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year? Hate is wasted energy and anyone worthy of hate isn’t worth the energy.

What was your favorite show? I watched more television this year than the previous ten years combined. When you’re absolutely physically and mentally exhausted it’s about the only thing you can do. BUT when my brain fog is bad I can’t even follow the plot of a netflix series. Sad. I can’t think of a show I really loved so I guess I should just read more and turn off the TV.

**What was the best book you read? Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown ** What was your greatest musical discovery of the year? That I still love reggaeton.

What was your favorite film? Again nothing jumps out at me. Movies seem to have evolved to appeal to the dopamine riddled social media brain and 8 second attention span. In lieu of a great story and artful production we get manic editing, fireworks, explosions and over-stimulating bullshit. I prefer watching older movies and I loved Dances With Wolves.

**What was your favorite meal? **I did a bunch of weird diets this year to see how they would impact my body. I still love a big fat ribeye steak, cooked rare. Creamed spinach. Potatoes. Asparagus. Keep it simple.

**What did you want and get? **Clarity. ** ** What did you want and not get? Disease.

What did you do on your birthday?
Can’t remember :(

What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
More money.

**How would you describe your personal fashion this year? **Confident, nonchalant, carefree, not giving a fuck but looking dope.

**What kept you sane? **Hope, determination, a vision of the future. Acceptance.

Which celebrity/public figure did you admire the most?
The Liver King (LOL)—he called his shot.

What political issue stirred you the most?
Gov’t mandated (ineffective) healthcare treatments. You know the one. Peak insanity.

Who did you miss? Myself. I miss my athletic ability. I miss my endurance and strength. I miss my mental acuity. I miss my photographic memory. I miss my confidence. I miss my body’s ability to adapt to stress. I miss my me.

Who was the best new person you met? Eszter!

What valuable life lesson did you learn this year?
I learned about the truth.

**What is a quote that sums up your year? **“Everything that is tearing us down today will become a memory, and this memory will be shared as an anecdote or a story or a poem or a play or a warning. It will be shared with another human being, who will then understand that he is not alone in his sadness. This is why we show up for others and tell our tales and listen to others. The great congregation meets daily, and you are someone’s angel today.” -Tennessee Williams

Today I’m finally launching a project I’ve been working on for some time. I’m a little disappointed that I’ve had to cut the scope of the project considerably to ship it… But I’ll have plenty of time to launch new features after I stand up the MVP.

[interlude for a motorcycle ride in Upstate NY in January]

I was going to write about how I keep reverting to the anger phase of the 5 stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) but the motorcycle ride sent me straight back to acceptance. Working through mysterious health issues is beyond frustrating. Blasting down a country road with a roaring L-twin ducati motor between your less is a great prescription for frustration.

Occasionally I feel like I’ve totally moved past my illness and feel “normal” again—full of energy and vitality, strong, productive. Even…extroverted.

And then I wake up sick again. And the cycle repeats.

When you’ve lost everything the only thing left is anger. And frustration. When I tell my friends I’ve lost myself they think I’m talking in spiritual mumbo jumbo new age speak. But i mean it literally. I’ve lost my ability to think, to learn, to interact with others. I’ve lost all my skills and my talent. Then my money. Most of my relationships. Everything leaves you bit by by when you are sick for a long period of time. In a way it feels like you’ve died and everyone continued living their lives without you.

I want to write more about this but I’m tired. Here’s to my resurrection in 2023.

My vision is blurry, artifacts float to and fro in my line of sight. My chest feels tight, my body weak. The physical pain manifest as psychological pain and the cycle repeats. A downward spiral—except I’m familiar with this staircase and I don’t have to slide to the bottom floor. I prop myself up with some coffee, a chat with an old friend…A pouring my last remaining energy onto this clean white page.

For a number of weeks I was hopeful, optimistic even. The winter weather didn’t bother me. The few rays of sun that escape the overcast December skies of New York felt like enough.

Enough felt better than ever. A new thing for me.

But not enough for a workout or a productive day of work.

Non desistas non exieris.

I studied latin for four years at prep school. I remember very little but learning about the Romans left it’s lasting impression. The old trope about latin helping you learn romance languages might be true…but not if you have no memory or cognitive energy. Not if you’re so riddled with anxiety you can barely read a page in a textbook or complete a Duolingo lesson. Or write a handful of flashcards.

Non desistas non exieris. I won’t give up.

Ablata causa tollitur effectus—but what is the cause? The root cause. When my doctor told me my blood tests indicated I have Lupus I didn’t believe him. Hours spent scouring the web lead me to the not-so-radical idea that food can cause sickness and that it can also heal. A couple months later and another round of blood tests and my rheumatologist said I definitely didn’t have lupus. I “looked” healthy he said.

The curse of being young, and handsome and fit.

My dedication to fitness (in the hope that it would yield an improvement in my health) seems to have made things worse. Grinding out workouts, applying my will with reckless abandon to achieve my “goals” left me more and more broken. Daily naps, twelve hour sleeps, crippling physical pains that never seemed proportional to my workout intensity or duration.

Now that I’ve cut back on my training by 80% the fevers have stopped. A modicum of energy has returned. But these last few days are evidence that the war has not been won.

Non desistas non exieris.

The “sleep when you’re dead” mantra is common among ambitious people. And it should be. Ambition requires having orders of magnitude more output than the average person who would otherwise settle for an “average” life and lifestyle.

A biological need for a significantly-less-than-average amount of sleep is one of the few true competitive advantages in life. The “experts” say the average person needs 8 hours of restorative sleep per day but we all know someone who can thrive on 4-5 hours. Maybe they’re manic. Maybe they’re just built different. Who knows, but the math is startling.

365 days * 8 hours per day = 2920 hours of sleep per year (121.6 days sleeping)

365 days * 5 hours per day = 1825 hours (76 days sleeping)

A person who sleeps 5 hours per day has 45.6 extra days per year. Now run the numbers over ~76 years (avg life span). You get the point.

The importance of sleep is highlighted by this simple observation:

Humans need 4 things: food, water, oxygen, sleep.

You can survive without food for 30-90 days.

You can survive without water for 4-10 days.

You can survive without sleep for 3-10 days.

You can survive without oxygen for 4-6 minutes.

Survival here is the key word. Go a day without eating and you’ll be cranky—but you can still perform. Go a day without sleep and you’ll become a shell of your fully rested self.

As humans our hierarchy of needs is fixed, and while we can survive without sleep, after only one night of sleep deprivation we start to feel the effects. Your motor skills deteriorate, your cognitive function creeps to a halt. Patience, endurance, confidence…everything not required for survival leaves your body.

For the past two days I’ve slept for about 10 hours each night. That’s much more than my usual sleep requirement (~7 hrs). It was the first sign my short period of productivity, wellness and vitality was over. My energy levels fell off a cliff. Thick, dark clouds formed in the atmosphere of my mind. The brain fog is back. Yay.

A return to baseline.

My biggest fear, realized.

If I don’t rescue myself (no one else will) in 2023 I may not make it.

Here’s to giving it my best shot.

Happy almost new year 🥳

For me everything feels impossible. For the last two weeks I felt like I was wearing someone else’s body…Walking in a meat suit that miraculously functioned as it should. I reconnected with friends, had and pursued ideas, learned more programming than I had in the previous year…I thought maybe I’d made a lot of progress.

Until yesterday I went to the gym…And realized it was all an illusion. As is typical I had no energy for a workout. So I went home after 20 mins of a light work, and new something was off.

This morning I woke up at 3:30am…Sleep disturbances are one of the common symptoms that emerge from a flare up…But only in the most acute and severe flare ups. This worried me. I didn’t have much trouble falling asleep but then I woke up at 5am. Not good. I fell asleep once again and woke up at 7am. Finally I slept until 9am.

When I rose the first thing I noticed was the tell tale soreness in my lower back. Another common symptom. Here we go. What causes this? I don’t know. I still don’t know.

I have the energy reserves of a centenarian and the drive of a John Deere tractor. Eventually I overspend and my energy reserves start borrowing and eventually I break the bank and the end result is a litany of crippling symptoms that crescendo in psychological disturbances I don’t particularly like to share. The cascade of symptoms from physical, to neurological to psychological is predictable but always unexpected.

Now, it’s 12pm. My vision is blurry. I see floaters and artifacts that had disappeared these last couple weeks. Staring at the computer screen it feels like I’m peering through a looking glass, but the glass is bent and amorphous. I can’t find the worst I’d like to use to write these very sentences. Creativity? It’s g0ne. How about survival. Can I make it through the day? Doubtful. I’ll likely need a nap. I’ll try to meditate. I’ll use NSDR. I’ll call a friend. I’ll do some pushups, but when I drop to the floor and the first 3 feel impossible I’ll have to give up.

A note on pushups: I score in the elite level on all physical performance tests. I’m not an average human for whom doing 20 pushups is a challenging task. When I’m healthy I can do hundreds with ease. This is why I feel so dismayed. I’ve been given gifts—many of which I’ve forged myself from whole slabs of granite, with all the requisite sacrifices and pain…but I can’t claim the ROI. I have nothing to show for my efforts–and that has been the most consistent part of my life for a long time now. Just writing about it hurts. Writing about it it less-than-mediocre prose hurts more. I could try and edit this post but I don’t have the energy. I need to conserve it to do other things. To pray I don’t go bankrupt. To pray I can actually heal. To apologize to all the people I’ll let down for as long as this lasts.

If this experience has given me anything it’s a deep and lasting compassion. When most of your life is easy, when you’re bestowed with gifts and privilege…losing everything is the only way to walk in someone else’s shoes. I no longer have to imagine what it’s like to be average—average IQ, average athletic ability, average height, average income, average beauty….I’ve felt it. And I’ve felt much worse. I used to despise average people. What could be worse than being a member of the masses–stuck in the middle of the bell curve…Now I have nothing. No gifts. No tools. No money. No prospects. No hope. Nothing. I feel completely destitute.

At times this has felt freeing. Only when you’ve hit rock bottom do you have the clarity and perspective to rise. Maybe. People say that but I’m not sure. I thought I hit rock bottom at the end of 2018 and the first half of 2019. The searing pain, the repetitive illnesses. The fevers. The staph infections. The flus. The financial ruin. The absolutely positively crushing depression and anxiety. The total destruction of my heart and soul. Letting down friends. The shame of it all. It stings worse than you can imagine. But I endured.

That’s the best explanation I have for how i’ve felt for the better part of the last decade.