Well, I'm feeling pretty good, here on the home stretch to the half century mark. Tonight at 6:09 PM EST I officially turned forty-nine years old.
I had come to dread having a birthday. They used to be something that I looked forward to. But at least since 2000 it has come with pain preceded by the notion that I really haven't done much with my life. It probably has something to do with my 26th birthday. That was spent at my grandmother's funeral. I was one of the pallbearers. It also happened to take place a few months after the symptoms of manic depression first manifested and at that moment I was having a depressive episode.
But in the past few months and weeks it's been... different. There has been no dread at all. In fact, I've been feeling pretty good about things. I like to believe it's because I'm finally at long last able to manage having bipolar disorder. I'll never fully conquer it, but the episodes are getting further and further apart. I had a manic episode this past fall, and I was able to tell that it was coming. I got to act accordingly. Fifteen or twenty years ago that wasn't possible.
I'm still hoping that God might let me have family. Call me a hopeless romantic or a daydreamer or a fool like Don Quixote. If He does, I will be able to take care of them in ways that I hadn't before. Speaking of which, I'm finally coming to forgive myself for some of the things that I did during my lesser moments.
So, I've some reasons to be hopeful, and am eager to embrace life, however it is that I find it. Getting older isn't a bad thing at all. I wouldn't want to go back to when I was younger, and I likely wouldn't do anything to make all the pain that happened be as if it hadn't. Like John Locke said on Lost: "I needed that pain to get to where I am now."
Better days are ahead. I know they are. I wasn't able to sit at Microsoft Word for the past month and a half because of some things that arose in real life, but I have been "sussing it out" in my head. I'm also considering a new job: one that would be entirely different from anything that I have done before in my life. The people I would be working with very much want to bring me aboard, they have said that my experiences with mental illness and my training as a mental health professional would make me a unique member of their force. I'm thinking about it, praying about it especially. Should I take this job you will DEFINITELY be reading about it here. I'll give you a hint: as part of the training I will be hit in the face with pepper spray. I doubt my love of Tabasco Sauce is going to make me immune to that.
So, my orbit around the Sun has made it's 49th circuit. Now on to fifty. Ever closer to what I've asked God for all these years: to please let me live long enough to see the return of Halley's Comet in 2062. I'll be 88 years old then. And hopefully my eyesight will be good enough to view it. The appearance in 1986 was kind of a letdown.
Maybe it will be better next time.
0 comments:
Post a Comment