Big picture

It’s with a feeling of quiet achievement and sadness that I continue putting my Patreon and my website together. The achievement feels quiet because everything takes longer. Sometimes, it feels like I’m writing and developing the website through a sheet of nearly opaque glass. The sadness is about the time

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Expectations

Sometimes, I drive myself away from the page with the expectation that my thoughts and writing “should” be profound and uplifting. I come here now to remind myself that my creative work, whether sacred or profane, is what I live for. My body is wracked by pain and exhaustion. I

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Forgiveness

  Jan 20, 2020 Here we are, twenty days into a new decade and weariness remains, settling over me and dragging my heavy bones into the earth. We enjoyed a few days of snow, then a couple of days of chaos as snow alternately melted, froze, and fell again, making

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An interior life

  December 11, 2019 I wake, tired and nauseous, knowing I will have to go back to bed to get more rest. A few broken hours of sleep won’t cut it. But I come from the shower – the heat having warmed my bones, settled the pain, and opened my

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Objective fatigue scale

Hello Dear Ones, To those of you who deal with fatigue on an ongoing basis, the phrase objective fatigue scale might create cognitive dissonance. I get it. However, when I talk to Carmen (my dear wife) about how tired I feel, I throw about numbers like 2 or 3 out

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Sanity

I find it so hard to trust – to trust doctors and even to trust myself. I’m not sure which of these came first. I understand that my long-term difficulties in working with doctors stem from the first four years of my illness when they didn’t believe me. It was

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Alienation

Hello Dear Ones, Alienation feels okay, until it isn’t. I walk in a half world: on the outside, looking in. I want to speak, to tell someone what it’s like. It seems I only get to this place when depression has yanked the floor out from under my feet. It’s

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Something beautiful

Carmen drove us into the sun this evening to show me something beautiful. I’ve always found the ocean revives my soul. Although I could see the beauty this evening, I had trouble feeling it. You still have to try. I had this other-worldly feeling of dreams I had when I

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Feeling powerless

Hello Dear Ones, There’s nothing worse than feeling powerless. Obviously — at least to those who are chronically ill — this is the cornerstone of our problems, greater than any pain or symptom our body/mind can throw up. It’s the reason I started this Patreon – to reclaim my power.

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