I Actually Think I Wouldn’t Be as Nice to Other Sick People

But…it’s not a joke.

I keep joking about how I’d make a better “Emerson in the woods” (or “a Riggs” as an essayist) than anything else.

But…it’s not a joke.

And… we live in a time of full-time advertisements of ourselves. (Advertisements said with a British accent because I like how they say it better.)

Writers-in-the-woods are ornery for a reason, perhaps (there’s a wood joke to be made somewhere there?), but I found myself chatting with a pal online recently, saying:

“IF a person feels like their purpose is pain and they aren’t sure why they must suffer… maybe we have nowhere to hide any more?

Therefore, we have to ask ‘What is a meaningful life for ourselves’, even when we find no clear reply?”

The harsh truth is: I know that if someone took my pain away tomorrow… I’d start going and doing and working and running away from my current life so fast that I’d write and think like a different person.

So is my life really a ‘meaningful one’ if I’d escape it that quickly?

I wouldn’t escape the parts that have the meaning (motherhood and people, and people and motherhood), but I would do more.

I would travel with the circus again. And I would make shows again. And I would dive head-first into the choreographic projects I had been (sort of secretly?) talking about and planning for, once more, world-wide… Because when I can “go and do”, I know exactly what to do.

I don’t know how to be a foil in the foliage to myself. I loved living a life, formally, that was equal parts risk and travel and stage-lights and nerves, as it was peaceful syllables in secretive woods.

I like a quiet, scared home and a ferociously private personal life (even if being a writer make create the illusion otherwise), and a “public life” of performance and creation that is people-centered (not “spotlight centered”).

Right now, my life is almost and utterly people-less.

(Except for here. If you’re reading this, you are part of the Writer’s Woods that haunt the living, and long and linger on lilting words and perseverant paragraphs. We are the Emersons and the Riggs. We are the quiet few who wish to carve our name on the cave walls of the world in the hopes that someone will one day remember the symbols we scratched.)

How do I make peace with the fact that I WOULD be a completely different person with a fully felt purpose if some of my pain could shift?

If some of my physicality could be predicted or relied-upon ahead of time, even just a little bit… I would be relentlessly resolved.

My old “bad days” were so good compared to now.

Who would “I” be if I could escape the Collector’s Edition of “me”?

I wouldn’t be able to hold onto another’s perspective because… I’d want to be free of all of this.

I actually think I wouldn’t be as nice to other sick people, even… Because I would want to runaway from us.

Because I want to runaway from me.

Who else can write that “out loud” and not feel like a …. Well, an ellipse’d-implication of whatever curse-word you desire.

The Sick are often a reminder that others don’t want in their lives; A wanton, ill threat that they hope won’t wake them as weakness one morning, down the line.

They avoid and turn away….

We are the cement to the shoes they’re hoping not to step in.

They can feel us breathing on their neck, and know it could happen to them.

Even worse…

We are the wild fire in our own quiet woods.

We are the living ghosts that haunt…

And my old “bad days” were just so much better than I ever knew.

THANK YOU