At Least They're Committed

Between rib-kicking laughter and girlish giggling, Ellen on Sunday morning told me I really must go see the doctor about the deformity that has developed along my left hip, slightly above and behind the scar.

“It sticks out like sausage in a man’s pants that has woefully lost its way,” I told her on the phone. The picture it painted was not pretty. We squealed.

I’m not really worried about being deformed. I need to get my weight down and then we’ll see if it’s still a factor. The “supports” I bought to keep my bad hip in place before surgery help squish it into place, but most times I don’t wear them. Once I lose 12 pounds, I do believe I’ll be happy with my body just as long as I can move.

The laughter Sunday morning helped conquer it once again: the insecurity, the fear, the depression. All that negative energy is pushed back and tucked away, and I feel good now. It had been fading since Friday — the person I feared I’d alienated seems unfazed — and with the past few days in the sunshine, literally and figuratively, life is all rosy and stuff.

Soon after her birthday, Ellen — a doctor of psychology from Stanford — and I will have been friends for a decade. I told her Sunday about the past few days and she suggested I start writing these things on paper, you know, something I can burn. I agreed.

But that brought me to the point, one she profoundly understands. Part of the reason I blogged was to be brutally honest to you, my grandchildren, and maybe even to others out there who feel the same way.

“History isn’t what happened; it’s what someone said happened.” Well, kiddos, this is the truth.

I didn’t know what the hell I was going to do with this blog when I started it. Brian was walking me through it because he said I should give it a shot. It quickly evolved in a scattered, nonsensical but very genuine manner. Nature had already tried to kill me twice, I figured the third time might be the charm (and who knows, maybe it will be but it has not happened as quickly as I’d thought) and I wanted you, my grandchildren, to know that if you feel lost and fucked-up like me, that it’s OK, in fact, it’s pretty damn good. Sure, we’re tormented, but dammit, we’re troopers!

Even before Facebook, people tried to idealize their lives; they would send letters at the holidays boasting about their achievements, their children’s achievements, their new material acquisitions, the trips they took and how perfect their lives were. That’s bullshit. There’s no such thing as a perfect life and it concerns me that people buy into the facade and subsequently feel as if they and/or their life is inferior.

Depression runs in our family. My dad’s mom (who didn’t care for me much, but no biggie) would lock herself in a room for days. Her wise parents just said, “Let her be.” She could be horrible. I’m not horrible. I don’t take after her side of the family, I take after my Grandpa Gray’s family. It took me 40+ years to realize that.

And so I feel good. This latest fall and resurrection is a reflection of how many other stories on this blog? Well, like, a lot. But these struggles have made me stronger and tenacious and successful in life. You guys have my genes, good, bad and misunderstood, and as I told Ellen, “I’m a fuck-up, but I keep getting up.”

You need to know it’s OK to hate yourself some days, to mess things up . . . and then to buck up and take responsibility for your mistakes and wait for the next proverbial wave to come along, splash you in the face and carry you in its warm, welcoming and — yes — happy tide.

I’m not going to write anything new in this blog. I don’t need to. It represents 7 years of my life that had extreme highs and lows and I hope that  if you can relate to it, you come away feeling good about — and forgiving of — yourself; proud of your lineage, challenges and conquests; and that you know that whether I’m alive or not, I love you precisely the way you are.

It’s kind of interesting, isn’t it, that with the structure of a blog, my ending is where you’ll begin.

Seriously. I’m not going to pull a Favre. OK, I came back once and I’ll absolutely blog again, but not on here. I have other plans.