When we come into age, we aspire to be accepting of change, but it’s complicated.
I write this from first-hand experience, several months after an incident that landed me in the ER. I’m fine now—but acutely distrustful of anything at my age that reeks of excessive vitality. It is as if I can convince myself that I am capable of almost anything—but I am newly reminded that this nearly always comes at a price.
The incident turned out to be a false alarm: a transitory, harmless and painless (but weird) ocular migraine–an electrical disturbance in the visual cortex of the brain. They are if not exactly common, not unheard of, even meriting a chapter in Oliver Sacks’ book Hallucinations. Of course, they can be brought on by stress—and inconveniently, mine came in in the midst of a party I had no business throwing, having taken on too much and being too proud to get help. The vision, as I now think of it, lasted only 15 minutes but plunged me into timeless space in which a shimmering cosmic egg radiated rays of light and turned the world fractal. It sounds cooler than it was and landed me in an MRI. Also weird.
If I had been in my right mind, I would have been terrified and dismayed, not only by the potential seriousness of the situation, but by the rapidity with which I was reduced from a woman on full throttle to an institutionalized product on the medical production line. I was stripped and washed down, zapped, punctured, plugged in and wrapped in a pretty blue package—with my butt hanging out. But I wasn’t in my right mind—and perhaps I have rarely been so. Rather, defaulting to my emergency brain, I decided to not only make the best of this, but to put on a show. I would be the most entertaining, accommodating person ever to submit to intensive care. Then they would let me live. All the while, as it became increasingly clear I wasn’t going to pass on any time soon, I might yet have died of mortification for having been such a bother for no real reason.
Everybody says I did the smart thing checking the potentially serious symptom out, but it is so hard for me to stop worrying about imposing my needs on others. During my brief stay in the ER, the thought never crossed my mind that when you’re in intensive care, you are in the penultimate setting to receive care—intensively. But no, there I was telling jokes while being rolled down the hall on a gurney. When days later I recognized this missed opportunity—and only when pushed to go deeper by a friend—did I let down my guard and cry. I then cried on and off for several days, and then for a few weeks after that, I was slow and somber.
But before too long, I was back to normal, and the sense of being restored to my body—to life—has stayed with me. But I have also been left with a cautionary note to self: Take care, dear one. lest I should forget just how much quiet time it takes to sort out what is organic and healthy vitality versus what I have trained myself to deliver: a facsimile, a performance. The first energizes. The latter drains. And only I can tell the difference.
If I am honest, what I think of as full throttle for me is rarely organic nor healthy. High gear was useful when I was younger, and I could manage fueling my advances with Adrenalin. Now that I am older, I am aware that refraining from jolting myself to perform may look like weakness: saying no to things, asking for help. But what is really going on is that I have lightened the foot on the pedal not as a withdrawal from life, but ironically, because I am so passionate about living. I am exactly the right age and stage in life to achieve a new level of authenticity, which means paying serious heed to my real, life-stage appropriate preferences and needs. We are so un-used to tuning in to what we really need that at first it feels selfish and wrong, like shame or failure. But it’s not. Stick with it.
Before I entered the ER, I admit that even my exuberance had come to seem old, like giving one encore too many because one cannot bear for the applause to end. Now, my life has broken free, onto fresh territory where adventures of a different sort are possible.
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