About two weeks ago was my most recent kidney team doctor's visit and it went mostly well. Last Sunday was my ninth month since transplant and Monday was my 53rd birthday. Something about these two events orbiting each other made it feel bigger than it really was but my life wasn't living up to the grand idea of the feelings surrounding this auspicious occasion. So perhaps there was never anything that could have been written to make me happy. It's a fault I must admit to, a cross that I bear, that I am particularly hard on myself when I'm judging my actions.
There are people I carry with me at all times... they live within the voice in my head and tell me that my performance is worthy of whatever it is for which I'm trying to take proud ownership. More often than not I see myself as failing, but the more I take ownership of that failure the more comfortable I become with being a failure and so I only ever have to live up to the expectation that ultimately I am a failure. And in this way I am constantly settling for less than amazing.
Then again there are brief bursts throughout my days in which I experience wonder and amazement in even the small things I am involved in as part of my simple existence. A conversation with Annie, or Charly, that tells me they are better than me and that was always the goal... that they be better than me. Or perhaps the wind in my thinning hair as we ride upon the waves of the mouth of the Merrimack river as we head out to sea... well... into the ocean a bit. Out to sea sounds like you're really far off shore... "into the ocean" is so close that you can practically recognize your friends swimming in the water. I suppose we were somewhere in the middle.
And then there are idea's around which I write... some better than other's, none worthy of true greatness... and I know because I see greatness frequently enough in the writings of a friend... perhaps former friend... who is dying. Even drawing the full house of kidney disease, dialysis & transplant isn't enough to compete with her royal flush of a cancerous tumor in her lungs that exploded before she even knew why she wasn't feeling too well and now runs throughout her bones and she lives with an all but definitive death sentence with a touch of hope as she spends as much time as she can with her four adult children and her 6 or 7 year old twin boys. Reading her words is like punishment because she's such an amazing writer and yet like a train wreck, I can't look away. I'll miss those words when she's gone. But hey.. I'll continue to write my sophomoric drivel and pretend it's worthy of the 20-40 people who might actually read it, or some part of it... or glance over it... or read the title in my Facebook post of the link to it.
See what I mean? I'm hard on myself. Always so hard on myself and it makes me wonder if this... the Kevin's kidney & me blog... isn't a failure in itself. Is it perhaps even an unhealthy undertaking? Does it draw out of me the worst opinions of my self as I try to make the imaginary readers of said blog think that there's some upcoming moment of glory? And could I even ever live up to that moment? These thoughts haunt me.
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