Remembering the Typewriter

In order to move on you need to understand why you felt how you did and why you no longer need to feel it.
Mitch Albom (author of Tuesdays with Morrie)

What I remembered through sickness

I know I am whining and it will stop...I promise...as soon as I realize and accept why I want to whine in the first place.  :) Once again, something is coming to the surface...through all this...the physical symptoms as well as the mental/emotional ones...something wants to be heard.  Writing about it helps it to come up, like  syrup of Ipecac for the soul ( terrible analogy...I know)

I spent the last two days in bed with the flu.  The fever left my head spinning and my thinking erratic.  It came and went.  When it left me I would feign normalcy coming here to write or attempting to do some form of housework.  With every attempt to be normal, however, I was left even more exhausted and had to return to the bed or the couch where I would slip once again into crazy dreams. I remember a snippet of one dream well. I saw myself swallowed by my home...the mess and the dog hair and broken things...and then suddenly a typewriter appeared on the end of the counter I was complaining about...  A beautiful little red electric typewriter.  wow!  What do you think that means lol? 

The Typewriter

My sister gave me a typewriter for Christmas once...when I was feeling overwhelmed by life after our mother had died and we were forced to play the adults in the family.  We had no money...she had no money...but she won 600 dollars out of the blue that year.  She gave some to Dad to help with Christmas, and she bought me a beautiful electric typewriter.  (To this day I now wonder if she intended it for both of us...she writes too...and I being as totally narcissistic as I was back then...made it all about me...She tells me it was for me and the story works better if I say it is for me...but anyway...I got a typewriter out of it lol).

That typewriter was one of the greatest gifts I had ever received...it was like a blessing from heaven when the world seemed to be raining only chaos. It was a thank you when I felt no one appreciated, let alone knew, what I was trying to do. ( Believe me I whined and complained back then a heck of a lot more than I am doing now...it was hard not to hear me, I suppose?)  The gift reminded me there was more than the overwhelming chaos I felt I was living in and responsible for fixing.   It was  a door that offered me freedom...it opened up into the world of  who I really was, not just who I thought I had to be. I still cry when I think of that.

The fever  dream was in a sense about the same thing.  It is letting me know I am feeling the same way I felt back then. That is probably why I got so sick with this little bug.  I am feeling overwhelmed again, feeling myself suffocating under the chaos of our living situation, my health, social responsibility and expectations.  Everything seems to be "messed up" and I feel it is my responsibility to fix it...but I don't know how.  I am so tired and I don't know how. 

The typewriter is a symbol that there is a way out of this...maybe not out of  the physical chaos or some of the mental crap...but it tells me there is a way to be who I really am beyond all the responsibility I carry and the guilt I experience for getting sick and not doing enough...for allowing the chaos to build up. ...but a deeper way out.  I need to write. Someone somewhere recognizes that I need to write; they recognize what I try to do even though I don't always succeed and they are giving me a gift...showing me  a way out.  They are telling me to write.  Well that is what I like to believe :)

Thanks J.  for being so good to me.

All is well in my world!