~a column by Colleen O’Brien
“Why are people so mean?” asks my preschooler.
“Why are people so mean?” asks my junior high student.
“Why are people so mean?” asks my first-year college girl.
By the time she’s 21, she is no longer asking that question because she has a lot of required book-reading under her hat, is no longer within her parents’ cultural purview, and has met many people good and bad. Often, they’re both, she tells me.
What she writes in her Sophomore ethics class is “The world is not about me.”
That she is brighter than I is a relief. I was at least 44-1/2 when I got it.
I understand that each of us is center stage in her or his own private garden, but most of us have at least figured out that our secret garden is the place to which no one else is invited. In it, we tell only ourselves that we are the bravest, brightest, best-looking beasts in the jungle, and the quick-witted of us steer away from those we come across outside our hideouts who don’t know the rule. They always want mirrors handy, and I don’t want to play with them.
When I recovered from a case of break-through COVID-19 – about a month’s worth of moaning and groaning, hallucinating, trying to get the axe out of my head – I was relieved in many ways: to be alive, to be out of pain, to notice there was a sun in the sky.
It was a mere week later when I realized I now had rheumatoid arthritis, a chronic disease that had not shown up in my body for 22 years.
I turned into a princess, asked the universe how I, of all people, could get this killing disease when I made it through COVID. Hadn’t I suffered enough?
And yes, why was the world so mean?
It’s taken me the better part of a year to get over myself. Had I been a bigger person, I would not have whined (well, not as long); I would have quit napping after having to hobble across a room; exercised as much as my body would permit; unplugged Netflix; kept a journal of my misery through COVID and into RA.
And darned if I haven’t forgotten most of it already. I had a first-row seat to a world-wide pandemic and refused to write about it out of pure poor-poor-pitiful-me-ness.
I am now back to normalcy thanks to powerful meds that may kill my liver, but at least I’ll not die of pain.
I have taken my own sweet time, but I am finally resuming my work of writing and editing. Even as I approached both with a smidgen of martyrdom, once in position at my desk, hands flexing over my keyboard, I was suddenly doing things I loved to do – writing and fixing other writers. There’s nothing like it, for me at least. It takes me out of time, out of pain, out of worrying about the end of the world, out of my own secret garden which is already thick with weeds.
I still nap a lot – my body is now trained to it, longs for it, in fact; so, I indulge it. I’m off Netflix for no better reason than that I did something that screwed it up and have no friends who know any more than I do. I don’t miss it. (Yet). My mental focus is returning because I have something to zero in on rather than the Why-me? of life.
Alas, I’m still losing my words…my family’s favorite incident of this colander-brain phenomenon being when I couldn’t think of the word acupressure and said taxidermy instead. I didn’t like it that I was so off the mark, but a good laugh is as refreshing as a cold beer. And, if you can find any relativity between acupressure and taxidermy, other than they both have four syllables, drop me a line.
