Frankly, I'm worried. The past couple of years, my experiences of free time – including those lovely, long Easter breaks we get here in the UK, and summers, with their long high-latitude days – have been characterized by mild illness, by an inertia that is ultimately frightening. Frightening because that inertia is the demon that threatens my view of myself, of my time: it is clear to me that the remaining and best purposes of my life, and the actions/productions that would make me happiest, are to write various things – and that inertia is the greatest threat to those. It would be all too plausible for my remaining days, and years, to fizzle into nothing; there are, after all, legions of mildly failed intellectuals in the history of the world, all stuttering into blurry silences. It's confusing to thus overlay the pleasure of summer, of that amazingly bright sun cutting into my front room around the corners of the curtains, with feeling rather wonky...
Mild illness: that is to say, endless digestive upset sometimes, the tsetse sleepiness of my sub-functional thyroid. Or, that which now threatens, again: taking interferon to fight my liver problems - and interferon unfortunately has many unhappy side effects, including a broad-spectrum psychological and physical depression. I've done different kinds of interferon twice over the past five years, and both were times of long, dragging misery.
What perhaps makes it worse is my own awareness that none of these illnesses is really incapacitating: that, if I could only make myself do so, I could take care of myself enough to both do my job and get writing done, every day. There is, after all, little else left in my life, and little prospect for anything else happening; the truth is, the chaos of my life over the past decade has actually landed me in a place of comfort and security, an environment that supports me in pretty much whatever I want to do.
That way lies guilt, of course, but perhaps a productive guilt: if grieving leaves me simply nowhere, and trying to generate desire/ambition devolves into rather weak puffs of air at this late stage of my life, perhaps the sense of duty to myself, to what I've been given in my life, will drive me onwards...
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