imagination and fiction

So this is it. This is what real life feels like.

Dizzy and nauseous driving down the 105 trying desperately to not run off the road or into the car to my right.  Okay. Maybe not so desperate – affirmations are working. I am okay. I am okay. I am aching and I am okay and I am driving. I can do this. A routinely awkward trip to the gynecologist made all the more unpleasant by a sudden surge of adrenaline, fear, and blood pressure rendering me incapacitated. The room spinning even with closed eyes. The undertow overpowers my consciousness forcing my mind and matter into the swirling rhythm of black tides. “It all looks healthy and more or less normal”, my GYN assures me. Yet I can’t help but worry, but what if its not normal? What if its cancer? Do other people do this? Other normal-not-in-any-way-hypochondriacal-normal-people, of course. Do they do this too?

The events of the day have once again assured me that I will never be a medical professional. Squeamish at the smallest sighting of blood. Rattled hours later by a momentary loss of groundedness. Even the pulsing of a finger when applying pressure to an open wound brings me to the edge of loosing my lunch.

And perhaps this is the failure of the American education system. The inability of basic scientific rationales to assuage my fears or inform my immediate associations. I’ve no qualms about evolution yet I’m deeply suspect of scientific explanations. Sure, you say systane is a breakthrough in comfort technology with no adverse side effects but how can I know I won’t get hooked on the eye drops? I mean really, is it a good idea to get used to comfortably lubricated eyes? My mind is imbued with imagination and fiction so, no. I don’t have a future in the medical profession. And I probably shouldn’t be trusted to teach high school science.

However, it’s not all bad. Beyond the horizon of paranoia and fear my mind opens up to fields of possibility and passion. I can imagine what I’d like to see or do or be in the future and have it sustain me through the winter.

I guess that’s where I am right now. This is it. This is real life? And in real life I am a dreamer, a thinker, a planner, a daughter, a wife, a manager. I want to be something more though, something different. Someday a mother. Yes. But before then… I want to change the last part. In the meantime, a resolution? Let the dreaming persist, amplify the imagination, the optimism, the love but not let it be an opiate. After all, if you’re going to die in a dingy grey room at the gynecologists’ office drowning in a vortex of deep black skies you want to know you did more doing than dreaming and that it made you happy along the way.