The Escape Clause

Here's my brutally honest confession: sometimes I like being sick.  I don't like the physical realities of it, of course.  But, at a deep level, sometimes I am deeply grateful for the time to take care of myself, to get away from the demanding schedules of daily life, and for the excuse to just stop.

I'm looking at that confession very carefully these days.  Because obviously you've gotta watch out what you hope for.

It's not right, or good, to like being sick.  This is not a good way to get a vacation.  This is not a good way to even out the pressures of daily life.  This is simply not an acceptable alternative.

So I'm looking at what this means, when I confront this very honestly.  And what I'm coming up with is that I seem to need an excuse, a permission slip, to stop.  That I seem to need an acceptable reason to take a break from the daily grind.  That there is a sense of deep gratitude when the life that I have consciously put in place is disrupted.

Whoa.  This opens up so many unsettling questions.  Who is orchestrating this life of mine, anyway?  Why is one part of me needing to find an acceptable excuse to take a break from the plan that another part of me has put in place?  Why is sickness acceptable when some other reason isn't?  If I feel, on some level, safer and better cared for when I'm sick, does that mean I'm not safe or well cared for when I'm well?  Whose job is it, anyway, to take care of myself?  And how in the world do I fix this so that I feel like I'm being taken care of enough when I'm well so that I don't have to get sick to feel OK?

Big questions.  Tough to grapple with.  And in looking at the answers, I'm finding that each one opens up even more questions and rabbit holes to go down.  So many, in fact, that I think I'm going to tackle each one individually in separate posts.  Because the orchestration of life includes so many factors, ones we have the ability to choose and not choose.  We can't be sitting around bemoaning the fact that we have an imperfect life, because life is -- by definition -- riddled with imperfections.  It takes some deep looking and understanding to get to the bottom of these things, with the goal of finding a way to create an inner and outer life that is comfortable and safe to to be in without getting sick.

I am certainly not someone who gets sick a lot, but I have certainly run headlong into a health crisis this year that makes it worth to start examining these uncomfortable issues.  Confessing that there is an element of relief in it makes me realize that there are other ways to escape our lives as well.  A happy hour drink on the weekend can rapidly become an any hour drink on any day, and suddenly the bit of R&R self care that you indulged in in the beginning has turned into something dysfunctional and destructive.  It is easy to batter your immune system; it is easy to fall into addiction; it is easy to blame dysfunctional relationships and let that be your way of not fully inhabiting your own life.   It is far harder to be healthy, and stay in the thick of things, and know that you are thriving and energetic and well supported by your own life decisions.

I keep coming back to this idea of who is running our lives.  Are we running our lives, or are they running us?  And I fear that, for me at least, my life was running me most of the time.  My inner landscape in the months (and years) leading up to my diagnosis was that of Indiana Jones, running like hell away from that big rock ball bearing down on him in the cave.  Absolutely running flat out trying to keep ahead of this force of nature which I have somehow loosed upon myself.

Which means I have to dig way deep and figure out how to change that.  I need to rejigger either the outer mechanics of my life, or change deeply my inner relationship to it, or both.  I should not have to feel like I'm at odds with my own self, needing to devise intricate subliminal strategies in order to get out of a contract that doesn't feel like it serves me well.  Our lives should feel, at the very least, like a pact that has been signed by all parties and negotiated by a very good advocate for our own well being.  We should be behind the things we're doing, so that we don't have to look for escape clauses and loopholes all the time.

This seems so fundamental.  But, as Ferris Bueller says, life moves pretty fast.  If you don't stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it.