Just a Lost Wednesday.

Yesterday was just a Wednesday. Nothing special, nothing abnormal. Just a hump day, 48 hours after my first PT session in 5 weeks. I woke up feeling mostly my self. Some soreness and aches in the regular places my body stores and deploys the pain signals to remind me that I no longer inhabit the body of a 20 year old.

A few hours of reading and writing at my floor desk, designed for perpetual wiggling and sitting like a yogi, and my typical Wednesday turned into a spiral of symptoms emerging in a cascade that moved me to the couch and reminded me that I, in fact, now inhabit a 51 year old body that is broken from the actions of that 20 year old me.

On this particular Wednesday, my body also decided to sprinkle some age-appropriate hormone glitter on top of my symptom spiral and I landed in a puddle of pain, flu-like exhaustion, brain fog and dizziness. By lunchtime my day was completely lost and I was once again in a race with my body to grasp the last threads of “functioning human” before the “broken human” stole those threads and began weaving a blanket of anger, grief and despair to rest over me on the couch I was now relegated to until Thursday.

As a society, we don’t spend much time talking about this shit, so I'm going to take us there. I get it, pain and illness are depressing and no one wants to stare down their mortality if they don’t have to. Also the same reason most people no longer read what passes for “news” these days. It’s a form of self flagellation that really isn’t necessary– until it is.

Society itself is structured to hide death and dying so everyday people don't have to face their mortality in any way. We do this in the West, but other cultures honor their elders and dying by keeping them in community and in containers of humanity, not locked away in hospitals and facilities of medicine. While I was doing documentary work in Nepal, the 18 year old daughter of the host family I was staying with for a week asked me why we put our elders in homes. I had no good answer to quell her rightful bewilderment and disgust at such a practice.

When you’re faced with a chronic situation of the body that you no longer can control or predict, your life goes through a series of perpetual changes when you slowly see what Was surrender to what Is and it triggers an ongoing cycle of anger --> rage --> despair --> grief. Over time, you are always looking up from a mountain of loss, and if you aren’t careful, the weight will smother the few days of goodness that slip through that relentless cycle.

And on a typical Wednesday, when I careen from functioning human to a broken avatar of my former self, the mountain of loss is harder to crawl out from under than the mountain of pain. On those days, stuck on the couch navigating my symptoms with my data machine to try and understand a Why, I can’t help but look at ALL that’s been lost.

And not the big mountain of accumulated loss– the social gatherings I can’t attend, the friends I can’t drive to visit, the family I can’t fly to spend time with, the movies I can’t go see, the dinner dates I can’t accept, the long drives into the mountains I have to say “maybe next time” to– that’s all a giant mass of missed moments, voided connection and unrealized joy.

On that derailed Wednesday, I see the individual loss accumulating into the mountain and I wonder when my good days will once again outnumber my bad ones. Each hour surrendered to the fog of opioids because the fog of my brain is too much to bear, each meal skipped because standing at my stove for 30 minutes to cook is too much tax to pay for sustenance, each writing session skipped because tapping on a keyboard in that moment is one tax too many to pay– each loss carries a tax and on a random Wednesday when payment is due.

On those days, the loss is much harder to bear. The individual slices lost are a painful debate in the part of my brain that still has just enough executive function to decide on reheated rice and pretzels for a dinner on the fly– a debate that starts in disbelief, wanders into judgement and self-loathing and lands in loss and grief.

And that’s just it, we’re not talking about one loss or one situation. If I was just navigating structural pain, that would be somewhat more bearable and predictable. While pain is nuanced once it becomes chronic, structural pain from a deteriorating spine has a landscape I know how to navigate well. But we humans contain multitudes and our amazing bodies are networks of nerves, tissues, fascia, organs, cells, water, bones, blood and well– organized chaos.

When that organized chaos loses its map, all those beautiful networks of nerves and muscles take on a mind of their own. The nervous system kicks in and fights like hell to make sense of the broken elements and re-routes signals as a defense mechanism. My body has been doing that alteration for 25 years. Compensating for a fucked up neck from too many well earned soccer injuries and photojournalism adventures has left my nervous system completely confused and lost.

Three years ago, when my wasted cervical discs decided to take control and end my months of torture at the hands of corporate overlords, the pipelines that tell my brain where my body is located in time and space had to work even harder to keep the wheels from flying off.

And during my second round of PT this spring, as my therapist began unwinding the new and unseen pipelines my body had built to send those signals to my brain, the wheels flew completely off. Not just structural pain from a broken spine, but full on neurological symptoms from an autonomic nervous system that relied on my altered proprioceptive systems to continue communicating around a corrupted spinal column.

That stack of dysfunction has a life of its own and on the days where the chaos steals my delicate threads of normalcy, I simply have to surrender and let my body take control. At that point, my mind is relegated to the back seat wrapped in anger and fog while my somatic body steps in and takes complete control.

The days where I fight it, where I rationalize that the meds will allow me to go out for coffee in a few hours to feel human for a hot second, or the cannabis will clear the nausea and I can cook a proper dinner in a few hours, the loss itself is like death by a thousand paper cuts. I slowly watch my previous life fall away one missed coffee date and one shitty dinner at a time.

As I get close to crossing the third year mark on this unfamiliar life of a "Wounded Storyteller," a day like I just described (yesterday) is not just a rare, one-off “Wednesday”. Not every day bears that pattern of slow destruction. I still have days where the pain rests in the background and I can re-enter the land of the living. But those days are still out numbered by the Wednesdays. I have hope that balance will return and those Wednesdays will be rare and have a predictability I can plan around.

But they might not, and I have to learn how to accept the fact that my new body is now a medical mystery that I’m meant to sink deeply into as an embodied somatic self and embrace the communicative necessity of this current chapter in the wild ass story that is my life. And that maybe in sharing all of this awkward and deeply personal shit through my writing, someone else whose life is now dominated by “lost Wednesdays” can find a little compass of their own.

Bearing witness is something I’ve built my entire life’s work around. I never in a million years thought I’d be turning the skills of the professional witness against myself to make sense of a broken body in order find a clarity in the chaos of it all.

Yet here we are, just trying to navigate a lost Wednesday.

This essay was written organically from my daily field notes for A Somatic Unraveling: Field Notes from the Cremation Grounds a creative writing project helping me write my new Quest Narrative and find a way through the pain towards...whatever comes next.

I'm publishing the companion data from my HealingOS on Github. I'm also scanning the 22+ year archive of my raw, organic writing for patterns using my cstreetOS.

Please share this work with someone who is also staring down the reality of lost Wednesdays. ;)