Lucky

I’m lucky. Very lucky. I know this. I know this so deeply that I torment myself about it. I almost died from a Covid complication. I’m lucky. I’m still here. I spent months recovering from brain damage. I’m pretty sure there is some residual stuff happening. I’m pretty sure my heart isn’t quite the same from the Pulmonary Embolism. I was disabled going into the whole business. I’m lucky. I can’t really tell the difference. I don’t think I can. My memory has never been that great.

I had my husband and two young children for the duration of the shutdown. I’m lucky. It was a good environment with the person who is my best friend and kids who were more or less keeping it together as well as young kids can. I’m lucky. I wasn’t alone.

It terrified my family that I almost died. It kinda terrified me too, but I was too busy feeling lucky. I struggled to move. I struggled to think. I more or less went back into my life as though nothing happened, but something did. I’m lucky, so just suck it up and deal.
I spent years working toward my personal ambitions. My work is in corrections, so when Covid started, everything I cherished about my personal successes, ambition, and pride stopped. I’m lucky. I lived and everything would be fine eventually. I hoped.

So we were all in this mixing pot of anxiety and bad times. I felt myself pull inward because I couldn’t really think for the longest time, and I’m too lucky to complain.

My Autistic first grader received lackluster education. I get it. His school was trying like everyone else. He was doing fine regardless. I counted my blessings because he’s lucky. I’m lucky. My preschooler daughter in preschool. She was being entertained in her play-based education, but does it really matter? She’s healthy and too young to care about specifics. I’m lucky it’s one kid’s education I didn’t have to spend a year thinking about.

While I recovered from the hospital, my brain would kind of stall because I’m disabled anyway and my brain was injured from oxygen deprivation. People would talk at me and around me and I’d just sort of float on through and try to get something done. I privately cried that I wasn’t able to phonebank any longer. I privately cried that I couldn’t write anything through fuzzy incomplete thoughts. I’m lucky. This wasn’t the worst I’ve experienced for this kind of thing, just a little scary and a little isolating.

Sleep was off. Thoughts were off. My auditory hallucinations that have been my companions for years were muffled in a way because maybe the brain damage from the Pulmonary Embolism…maybe not. Who knows? I couldn’t think well enough to care…much. And, it’s not like I see people like me in studies. I told myself I’d be fine. I hoped I would be, but there were days I stagnated into while the entire world seemed on hold. At the time I wasn’t sure how to ask for help. In the best of days asking for help is not a strength for me.
The year was spent in worry until about three months ago. My sense of time has never been great, so I’m not entirely sure when things felt more at ease. I guess crazy people can’t track time like others can.

My ability to read unraveled for much of the year, but it eventually improved. I’m lucky. I’d finally learned to genuinely read in my late twenties; math is forever a lost cause, though. I know how to get by not understanding things and not being able to do. But, with all of my luck it was hard to express that things had been very hard. I spent a year in Covid lockdown fine.

I felt fine with all of my luck and all of my blessings and all of the love that I know I’m surrounded by. But, sometimes I’d stare off into space because my brain was tired and I was having trouble doing much of anything. And, through felling blessed and lucky; through having some notion that things would be better at some point…eventually, I still felt gloriously horrible. I told myself I didn’t have the right to feel a little hopeless, a lot frustrated, a smidgen scared, and at least a little smattering of lonely. I’ve had every resource to help me through a year of Covid and hospital recovery. But, despite my best efforts, I felt stuck not knowing where to start in order to change my perpetual funk, which is humorous in a way because starting happens regardless. I suppose I didn’t know how to middle. And, time somehow passed and I progressed. The world around me didn’t seem to change while also seeming to do something.

I’m lucky, though, so lucky. I’m pretty sure I have some residual health problems from a hospital trip that landed me in the ICU for a couple of days. But, I managed to locate the pieces of myself that were missing and that I desperately needed. It’s not everything I lost, at least not yet. I assessed recently where I ended up after a year, and through all of those stalled and lost feelings that swamped my brain while I told myself how lucky I was, I ended up somewhere that isn’t so bad. I returned to phonebanking at some point. I wrote some prison and reentry programs. I’ll teach again soon, albeit remotely.

I never really asked for help, but I received it because I have people who get me…and I’m unfailingly too honest. I think what I learned most was forgiving myself of the struggles I manufactured and accepting the struggles I didn’t. Those internal narratives that did little more than weigh me down while I was anxious in the way that everyone else has been. I’m probably most lucky from realizing that bit…a little late in the game, but I came around.