I'm reading When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron. I'm also doing lots of online research on IC (interstitial cystitis), a condition I've been recently diagnosed with, a condition that's made my life fall apart. The biggest falling apart was in the beginning, when I had gone back from the States, where I first fell ill, to China. I'd returned there to continue my doctorate program in Classical Chinese Literature. Yet I found myself completely unable to concentrate on my program, or my life. I was on a bladder leash, unable to stay away from a toilet for longer than 20 minutes. This discomfort and dismay turned to ever strangling anxiety and depression, as I distanced myself from friends, professors, the city, as well as my past and future.
Some of the research I've done on IC has suggested that writing can bring some relief to the ever present psychological aspects of this disease. But the problem with this prospect, for me as an intellectual and writer, is that IC is all over the place, and nowhere. It influences every aspect of my life, starting in my body and bleeding like an eternal pussing boil all over the map, but it has no apparent meaning or story, except that of cruel and meaningless loss.
I obsess over it. There is neither known cause nor cure, and western medicine is lost and mostly ineffective when it comes to IC. There are online forums, with thousands of mostly women talking about their symptoms (in all cases worse than mine), their paths (in many cases years long), and their choices of treatment. It is a labyrinth of information, as well as disinformation. IC, apparently is different for every single sufferer. What works for one will not work for another. Perhaps this is why my urologist, a few sentences after diagnosing me, said she didn't expect to meet with me again. Although this depressed me at the time and made me feel helpless, I'm lucky. Many urologists are less humble, and try to treat what they don't understand, iatrogenically complicating many patients' condition. That is, they make it a lot worse.
So IC is a narrative weed, a specious illness that has taken over the carefully cultivated garden of my life.
So this is where I start. Pema Chodron says that in meditation, when the mind wanders, just look at that, label it 'thinking' and then bring your mind back to out-breath. I have had to bring my focus in life back to a very simple point--health. When I start to lament a past health which has been lost, or to freak out whether or not I'll ever regain my health...I have to come back to this very moment. It is the only place of peace, the only source of security, and thus strength.
And so this is where I begin to write. IC has taught me a lot. It is not a specious illness. It is not a weed. IC is a spiritual teacher, instructing me slowly in the arts of healing oneself. I am learning that there may be no known cause or cure, but there are people who have recovered. And a good many of them did so through natural therapies, through diet, yoga, meditation, qi gong, acupuncture, sometimes through the use of homeopathic and Chinese medicines, but never solely in the way these doctors laid it out. IC requires personal moderation of all intake...to feel out, substance by substance, what the bladder, with its inflamed and eroding lining, can withstand. So there is recovery, and it's not easy. Sounds fun.
I'm just glad the tragedy of meaningless is over. The narrative freeze-out has given way. I begin to write now. And to heal.
