Saturday, January 21, 2006

Finding out wherever there is comfort, there is pain

I’m suffering from inbetweeniness just now. I don’t have to lie down even most of the day any more, but I can’t concentrate for very long either. Then some little thing sends my pain through the roof. I keep asking myself, am I back to the level I was before I relapsed in September?

I guess I fooled myself into thinking that if I hung on, I would feel so much better after this bad patch and of course, I don’t. I might not feel nearly so bad as I did, and I appreciate being able to do things which I was struggling with during the autumn, but ultimately I still feel physically and mentally crap. Just not mega-crap.

Still I am okay. Many reasons to be cheerful.

Seriously, my greatest problem just now is uncertainty. Uncertainty about what my health is going to do next; is it getting better, is it going to get worse again, is it as good as it gets? I can put the long term questions out of my mind, but what am I going to be able to do tomorrow or next week matters. I am sorry if it seems an obsession but everything depends on it. Almost. Then there’s uncertainty about my book. Will I finish it, when will I finish it, will it be any good?

Then there are other things which I can’t talk about here; will everything be okay? What a question!

Trouble is of course that once you have one or two major uncertainties in your life, everything becomes up for grabs. Of course nothing is ever certain, but most people seem to have a set of likely outcomes; most people could make predictions about the major events and activities of the next six months and get it more or leass spot on. I cannot and am thus developing a fairly boundless capacity for speculation, mostly about things that might go hideously wrong.

We had three great news stories this week. I hate the news usually; I am compelled to find out what's happening, but there are only about half a dozen stories a week which are anything that anybody actually needs to know about and the rest are just provocative, worrying or otherwise upsetting matters that none of us can do anything about. However, this week we had

The Whale who has gone sight-seeing in London

The Parrot who exposed a cheating girlfriend
The Rat Snake who befriended a hamster

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