The Tenth Post: A White Blank Page

A blank page. An opportunity or just a cruel misfortune? I have not written more than a simple Facebook status in years. Years. It’s been a long road to get back to this abandoned page. A road that’s included pain, sorrow, joys, celebrations, and life. Life didn’t quit going on when I did. Cliches kept on comforting...the sun rose and set as it was supposed to. Yet, I didn’t write.

Today I read a text from someone that was so sad. It isn’t ok to share the text here, it was overwhelmingly personal and private. But its sadness shook me to the core, it brought me a back to the days when I had the words in me to tell my stories. Writing my stories helped me explain myself, to myself. They were real, sometimes joyful, often times painful- ripping my soul out time and time again. They were also healing and hopeful.

I’m back on this page because I realized that if I don’t start again, this would be it for me. I would be over. Not my life, but my thoughts, although from just a random person on the street, wouldn’t matter to me any longer because I would have somehow thrown in the towel on the one medicine that never came from an M.D.. For a few months now, the feeling of the loss of myself has come and gone in waves, and this morning, those waves carried me here, to the possibility of writing again. After reading another’s sorrow, I didn’t want my feeling of hope to slip too far away.

(And so I sit here, between each sentence, warming my hands with a heating pad, so they don’t feel like frost bite. They are frozen, but not from fear or writer’s block, but from my physical disabilities. My fingers achingly curl under and then won’t reach for the keys my brain says to hit, unless I heat them up every few minutes- the result of a cervical fusion a few years prior. It’s not my only problem, but let’s just say, my feet work the same way as my hands in that they need heat (I put heating pads on my feet 75% of the day, if not more), or they won’t go forwards, backwards, and certainly not sideways. Approximately 20 surgeries on my spine or for my spine, have left me often walking with a cane, and more than often in severe pain.

Poor me. Poor me. Poor me.

I’ve been like this, or progressively getting worse, for more than 15 years now. So I don’t think about how sad it is for me anymore. I get angry for my kids, who can’t go to the park because I can’t walk two blocks. Yet, I have amazing friends who drive my kids everywhere, include them in their family outings, and even come hang out at my house because they know I can’t leave this place. In the end, I’m luckier than most because I have my husband who does everything in our home and outside of it, to keep our kids from having lives that are permanently affected by pain and the fear of losing their mother to this illness.

My pain has been my excuse to stop writing.)

This blank page. It is a challenge. One I would have backed away from the last few years. Not today. Today, I am using strength from those friends around me who are doing things like kicking cancer’s ass, dealing with the loss of a child or parent or sibling, struggling with mental illness, divorce, chronic illnesses, or chronic pain. As they rise up, I will cipher their strength to do something selfish- save me. I know they’d want me to, that’s how friendship works, give and take and give and take without ever taking a tally. My warning to all: I’ll be greedily gathering up your inspirations to aide in my own healing.

And from now on, I will seek out a white blank page. Because maybe there is a chance that one day the words on my page could also give someone else the strength to begin anew? Or be a reminder to me, if I ever am so short-sighted to forget the strength of words again. Yes, that’s fairly presumptive. To me, however, that’s also hopeful, and, ascending in the right direction.