For the last year or two, pacifying insecurity from attachment has become a futile nocturnal chore of necessity. Never able to wholly rid my body of instinct, night after night, even our dogs sense my alerted “fight or flight” state of nervousness, evoking a mirror-image mimic of restless hell.
More than a reaction to a mad world absent moral backbone, chronic anxiety and depression structure the disease’s sole promise:
“You will be ground down, worn out. You cannot win.”
The nights drag into weeks, months, years, and decades. Without rest, sheer will is the only weapon to lay anxiety and depression to temporary quiescence. The rules, hopelessly skewed, demand anxiety and depression be met head-on in unadorned rawness, allowing them to run their course. Somehow, you struggle on.
Coming to terms with moderating my attachment to those I love is anything but straightforward. Fear of a loss of perceived (did it ever really exist?) control is a game properly played in the trembling nuance of twilight’s shadows.
My only shockingly meager piece of advice after 17 years of round-the-clock Parkinson’s fallout? Keep at it, keep trying, again and again. And again. Don’t quit, ever.
Somehow, inexplicably, despite the sure knowledge of failure in the end, taking the option of surrender off the table helps. I will go down fighting. And smiling.
Thoughts of childhood calm the turmoiled mind. My favorite television childhood TV show was “Get Smart,” a 1960s sitcom that follows hapless Agent 86, Maxwell Smart, who somehow manages episode after episode to cheat death through no skill of his own. Each week, one of the show’s characters inevitably illustrates the agents’ dire circumstance. As Maxwell Smart emerges, against all odds, victorious once again, he turns to the camera and exclaims with a grimly authentic smile, “And loving it!”
Surprisingly, this helps me survive the lonely nights, the pure joy of reacting to life’s impossible follies with hardened audacity.
“And loving it” – you got that right, I say to myself, smiling fiercely into the darkness, my words settling close to my heart, taunting and taming that which “is,” gradually gaining breath, inflating the empty shell of quiet night with the warm comfort of love.
I am here, still in life, come and get me. I wonder if tonight the demon warriors will visit in reclamation of mortal audacity, knowing that I will not go down without a fight.
And I am ready. And loving it…