January 2024

How the fuck is it 2024??

I have no idea how we got here. Last year was a bit of a shit show for me. There were health issues, the physical and the mental kind. I am bipolar, apparently, a diagnosis that unfurled in my chest–turned my worldview outward. There it is, I thought. There is an explanation. I am crazy, but in a clinical way, in a way that can be medicated and maintained. I thought back to my exes.

“I don’t know how to help you when you get this way,” one said. Me, hurling barbed wire and razors at another until he cried, his pain giving mine permission to break.

I thought of lying on my bed in Oakland, mattress on the floor, unable to move for hours, for days, going to the hospital because when I finally, finally, willed myself to get up, to go pee, it hurt so bad.

I thought of all the men I fucked and didn’t want to, couldn’t explain why to myself, after, as I walked from their apartment, as I drove myself home.

No, I have not been well for years now. But getting a diagnosis for the un- made me feel like -well was possible. Getting diagnosed is not the same as being treated, though, and that took the better part of a year. So, still a shit show.

And then there was the physical. I have blood clots, too, apparently. The kind that makes nurses and health care professionals double-blink. Whisper, that’s terrifying under their breaths and to my face. Exclaim, “You’re so young,” as I nod sagely. Yes, yes, and yet. They didn’t come from anywhere discernible. Also unfurled, bird-like in my chest, one for each lung. Is it serious? I asked the doctor in the emergency room. The wait was supposed to be two hours, but something about my tests pushed me through in twenty minutes. “I wouldn’t have waited another day,” he said noncommittally. And that’s how I realize for the second time in two years, I have nearly died. Have looked down the barrel of mortality, skipped away when the chamber jammed.

I was lonely for the first time last year. My two best friends in Illinois graduated. My cohort dispersed–to research and teaching and assistantships. I have a job off-campus, and the flush of real-life does not jive well with the ivory tower. I felt isolated and ostracized. I kept tripping up making friends. I got way too drunk at a party of strangers, couldn’t remember what happened, what I’d done, but have wounds that remain to this day. The “friend” I was with wouldn’t tell me what happened, alluded to cataclysm but wouldn’t tell me the cause. Terrifying.

I tried stepping into my gae era, which was fun for a while until I realized that I–being a nigga in my heart–am the problem, it’s me. I don’t love myself enough, yet, to love women properly.

I don’t know. It was a weird year. I doubted myself more than I ever have. I hurt so much. I hurt others too.

And then January came.

I went to Chicago for New Year’s, ran the streets with my best friend and remembered who the fuck I am, how very very much I am loved. And it was good. It was so fucking good.

My best friend came to visit me for her 30th birthday. We did what we have done since we were 13 years old, sitting on the floor, sharing the bed in her room. We watched movies and played games and painted and talked and now that we’re a bit older, got high (which wasn’t, frankly, necessary because we are perfect together as we are). And it was good. It was so fucking good.

I went home. Did hood rat shit with my friends. Threw ass in the club and nearly came to literal blows over mine. Got drunk without judgement. Watched my best friend celebrate the fuck out of her thirty years of life. And it was good. It was so fucking good.

When I came back to Illinois, to the Corn, I had my last hematology appointment. We are now just in the monitoring stage, Alhamdulillah. I got to a titration of meds that didn’t need to be changed. Felt good in my head and in my body, felt ready to start a new school year on a new leaf, with my best foot forward.

And then, canonically, I was late and rushing, a thing I always am and a thing I should never do. I fell, broke the best forward foot (well, the ankle). I, subsequently, got too high, had a weird drug reaction, have since felt a ringing in my brain that is horrifying in its own way.

Both of these are being managed, will resolve, in time, with patience. And I am grateful. I am grateful to be resilient. I am grateful to have insurance. I am grateful to be young enough, with a brain that’s spongey enough, to snap back, to have bones that mend even when they break. I am grateful to have a family that can afford, fiscally and temporally, to drop everything, to come be with me when I need.

But it is so frustrating to have gotten to somewhere good and find myself starting all over again. I am always, it seems, starting the fuck over again. Life is cyclical, it is. Breezy says that it’s a spiral, that with each turn around the bend we are still going upward, still getting closer to…something.

But the last few years have felt less like a spiral than a swirl.

So that’s what I (and my therapist) are working on in February. How to say thank you. More, please. How to stop getting in my own way. How to feel like I deserve to be and feel and experience good.