The Cliff

Inspired by this.

About a year in, and I’m still trying to find words for the experience, conceptualize it.

One story I came up months ago as a story about a fall off of a cliff.  You’re standing on top of a cliff, in perfect health, able to see the whole world spread out in front of you. Then something happens, you trip or the rock crumbles beneath your feet, and when the dust clears you’re at the base of the cliff.

What you want is to get back to the top of the cliff, as quickly as possible. That’s where everything good is. Maybe you had a house on top of the cliff and the house was where you lived and you have to get back to where you lived.

But it’s a steep cliff, you can’t just climb straight up.

So maybe at some point you start walking along the cliff. And some part of your brain is going, am I back at the top of the cliff yet? No? Well, this is just a waste of time then.

Eventually though, maybe after a very very long time, you realize you’re just not going to get back to that house on top of the cliff any time soon, maybe never, and you’re getting tired of sleeping on the cold ground. You build a small shelter at the base of the cliff, tell yourself this is home now. And you cry, for a long time, because your little shelter at the base of the cliff isn’t nearly as nice as that cozy well-built house you had at the top of the cliff.

But then something happens, once you start recognizing that you truly aren’t living at the top of the cliff any more. You start to notice which way is up. When you walk along the side of the cliff, instead of telling yourself “I’m not at the top of the cliff, this is terrible”, you can see when you get a little higher than where you were at the complete bottom. So you keep walking that way. And the path doesn’t go consistently up, of course, it goes up a bit and down a bit and you don’t know if it’ll ever get you all the way back but at least you can see that it’s going somewhere.

I hit a turning point in late June. Up until then, I expected my health care providers to figure out how to get me back to full health, and I sorta figured it might happen pretty quickly, right? But they weren’t getting me anywhere and I was just getting worse. (In the metaphor, that would be “let’s check to see if there’s an elevator in the cliff. No elevator? OK, well, do you see a hot air balloon lying around anywhere? Stairs?) At around the same time, within a week, two things happened: the first was that I figured out I could still walk around Dolores Park if I took it slowly enough, more resting than walking. In other words, the base of the cliff wasn’t quite as unlivable as I’d first thought. Then, the most recent test came back negative and my new primary care provider refused to give me anything to test or check or try or work on before our next appointment. So I cried a lot, and also I decided I really needed to be doing my own research. I didn’t have a diagnosis, but CFS seemed more likely than anything else, so I started looking into that. I also became open to exploring alternative medicine, and while I didn’t have any immediate successes there I did notice that having a reiki session that didn’t seem to really fix things was a lot more pleasant than going to a doctor’s appointment that also wasn’t really fixing things, and I decided to prioritize among the things that might help, things that would feel good even if they didn’t. I went down to the ocean, I listened to guided meditations, I did yoga, and I took long hot baths.

Really the only things I do now for health that I don’t like doing are the limits, such as not making more plans than I can handle for one weekend. And I can see that that helps.

I still want to be at the top of the cliff, as soon as possible. It’s nice up there. But it’s nicer where I am now than where I was before I started walking.