Well, well, well…what do we have here? A writer who hasn’t written isn’t just irony, it’s sad—at least it is for this writer. For this writer, it means that I haven’t felt like my feelings are worth recording…worth remembering.

It’s just that…life is precious. I know it as well as anyone (probably even more than some), so I have no rational excuse: I need to stop wishing my life away.

I’m very hard on myself as I struggle through the melancholy that sometimes clouds my vision. I feel like I have a lot of things going right for me. I have a solid grasp of who I am as a person. I know empathy. I have patience. I have the love and friendship of a wonderful man. I have a job that—okay, yes it can be stressful, but it can also be rewarding. I am living in a home that captures my heart and gives me solace.

I have so many of these riches of the soul that my permanent zip code should be on cloud nine. When I am surrounded by these things without distraction, I do live there. It’s the distractions that weigh me down. They make me feel undeserving of the good because I am not impervious to the bad. My shield isn’t resilient enough to keep them away, but I feel like it should be by now.

That isn’t the way it works though, at least not for me.

I don’t even know where to start since I don’t want to write a 10,000 word position paper about the thoughts that have polluted my mind since I stopped using this blog…my pensieve. I suppose I should chip away at the thoughts that shame me most.

I feel ugly. Really, truly, solidly ugly. I’m not really talking about my physical appearance. That has never mattered to me all that much. The outside has nothing to do with me…it’s a collection of genes that my parents passed along. As I get older, I am beginning to see a pale version of my mother staring back at me in the mirror. It’s the living part of her I have left.

Rather, I feel like all the negativity inside me has seeped through my skin…and now I’m coated in it. I show it to no one, but it screams at me to get my attention beneath the disguise. I’m, again, distracted by it. I’m missing beautiful, sweet, fleeting moments of life because I can’t push aside my feelings of failure and worthlessness (which only multiplies those feelings). Talk about a slippery slope.

In late 2013, my doctor, in an effort to help me control my pain, began prescribing different combinations of medications that would prove to be a mistake. If I have one fault (and I have waaaaaaaay more than one), it is that I trust too easily. It’s a fault that I struggle with controlling because I think it can be positive. I don’t want to be a cynic who believes in no one and nothing, but I also need to trust my intuition when trusting someone else feels wrong. It’s a balance I have not mastered, particularly with the medical profession. I always assume that a doctor is way smarter than I’ll ever be, and I should always defer to their advice. The thing is though, no one knows my body as well as I do, and no one ever could. This patient needs to grow a spine (and preferably one that isn’t deformed or damaged from surgery this time).

After months on opioids, I was referred back to the pain clinic when I expressed interest in either spinal cord stimulation or neuraxial drug delivery as an alternative. My pain surgeon happens to specialize in both. It was her professional opinion that neither was an option on my treatment table. She scheduled more steroid treatments and another round of PT. She also prescribed a transdermal patch that would deliver the pain medication since the pills upset my stomach.

I was on a relatively low dose (compared to some people) for about a year, having only increased the dose once. Maybe it would have been different if I felt like the medication actually took away all the pain, but I was respectfully afraid of the drug and feared increasing the dose. The patch, plus the narcotics for break through pain, plus the steroids, plus the muscle relaxers…I lived in a haze, if you can even call it living—and I was still in pain because I didn’t want to increase any of the doses.

PT had me to cease all my regular exercise routines (at least for "a while" they said...but never really defined a timeframe when I could return to activity) because they surmised that any activity that required me to be in an upright position was worsening the problem. I felt like I was losing a friend. Exercise has helped me keep the demons at bay when darkness looms for over a decade.

Back to the drugs: I was afraid of them almost from the start but tabled my feelings and followed blindly. It struck me one night in bed as I listened to Nick’s deep breathing next to me how shallowly I breathed in comparison. Would there be a night when I stopped breathing completely? How long was I willing to gamble with my life?

Maybe I just didn’t give it enough time, but those thoughts were enough for me to pull the plug on this treatment plan. The year and a half of narcotics, steroids, and inactivity altered my physical appearance. I would be lying if I said that it didn’t bother me or that I’m not bitter—it is a visual reminder of a bad decision, after all. But those feelings will not help me fix it. I have some hard work ahead of me, and I suppose I’m going a little rogue on approved activities…but for the first time in too long, my mind is in a positive place.

If I cannot have a perfectly working body, I at least want my mind. On the medications, I was so tired. I felt like all of my energy went toward staying awake during the hours normal people are awake. Everything was dull, like I was experiencing my own life as a bystander. I felt like my brain processed conversation and information in slow motion. There was nothing of myself that I recognized…I felt so lost. I am relieved to be free of them, even if the pain is greater. I don’t feel like I’m forfeiting my life anymore.

Losing the extra weight will be slow going. It’s something that I need to do not only to feel like I’ve resurrected a semblance of myself, but also because I know that the lighter I am, the less stress I will place on my spine.

I can’t be the exercise extremist that I used to be. I cannot eat vegetables as heartily as I’d like because my body does not digest them well (and tells me so quite pointedly when I force the issue). I’m still figuring it out. I know how to lose weight…I just have to figure out how to follow through within the boundaries of my physical constraints. I still believe that if you can conquer patience and consistency, you will win at weight loss every time. Point blank, you just have to want it badly enough that your goal mutes the other noises vying for your attention.

Basically, I have to not give up on myself. That seems simple enough, doesn’t it? It’s not simple at all. When enough different people inject the word “can’t” into your vocabulary, you start to believe it. The ceiling on the realm of possibility lowers. Fear has imprisoned me…fear that I won’t be able to walk at all one day, fear that I will become a burden to my loved ones. Fear has stopped me from being as fit as I’d like to be, and my fears are slowly becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even if any of my fears come to fruition, I will regret forever that I didn’t use my body the way I wanted to when I still had the ability to use it at all. So, I’m breaking out of this jail. Yes, it seems simple…but I know this is going to be hard. No hiding from it now.

I am suffocating under circumstances I cannot control; I need to reclaim those that I can.