Healing — September 6, 2024 – John Agliata

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
Bow🎶
Dumb🤪
Resilience💪

THE DAILY UPDATE

Three Things I Am Grateful For Today:

Warm hand-made blankets.
Computer mouses .. mice … whatever.
Significant dates on the calendar.

Pursuit of Wordle Godhood: Today’s result: Five.

Wordle 1,175 5/6

⬜⬜⬜🟨🟨
🟩🟩⬜⬜⬜
🟩🟩⬜⬜⬜
🟩🟩⬜⬜🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Pursuit of Connections Godhood: Today’s result: The Perfecto Streak is now four, but I highly question where “geyser” landed.

Connections
Puzzle #453
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟪🟪🟪🟪

The song in my head when I woke up today: I Will Not Bow, by Breaking Benjamin

Sept. 5: It’s Been Awhile, by Staind
Sept. 4: So Far Away, by Staind
Sept. 3: Banana Boat, by Harry Belafonte
Sept. 2: One Love, by Bob Marley
Sept. 1: Welcome to the Black Parade, by My Chemical Romance

Favorite line from the song in my head when I woke up: I don’t wanna change the world/I just wanna leave it colder

Baseball Practice Tunes: The drive to baseball practice yesterday evening was done to my Nu Rock playlist:

Hail to the King, Avenged Sevenfold
Shotgun Blues, Volbeat
Ashes of Eden, Breaking Benjamin
Come Out and Play, The Offspring
Lola Montez, Volbeat
Ain’t No Rest For The Wicked, Cage The Elephant

Something I’m looking forward to today: The end of the work week. It’s been a good one.

Something I’m looking forward to in the next seven days: My neck procedure a week from today. I slept like poop last night because I dared to do something athletic at baseball practice and am now paying for it.

Something I’m grateful for from yesterday: A good talk with Boy The Younger.

What I’m writing: Yesterday’s Two Crappy Pages involved no writing. Boo.

What I’ve written: Five Dumb Things About The American Workplace

It has amazed me how, over the past five or so years, no one has seen the gaping wound I’ve been walking around with. To me, it was as apparent as the wound on my forehead that time I passed out and bashed my head into the concrete on the side of the house (thanks Long COVID).

Sometimes, the worst wounds are those that so few know exist. That has been the case with this one. Over the past five years, I’ve talked with very few people about the details of the wound — mostly to professional-types who get paid to gaze into such ugliness and attempt to work their magic to make it all better. In the course of that time, I have been told by most of those very few that I am healing, and I’ve nodded and gone along with that, knowing they were wrong.

I know what healing looks like. I know what healing feels like. I was not healing. I was simply walking around with a gaping, ugly wound that wouldn’t close, no matter what I tried, no matter what the professional-types recommended, no matter how I framed the issue. I knew I wasn’t healing. I felt it. I saw the infection creeping into other areas of my life. I was not OK.

Something I have learned over the course of my bumpy journey through this life is that I can be incredibly resilient. This resiliency was born out of necessity. I learned it in my childhood. I honed it as we waited for the birth and sure death of my first son. I sharpened it further through Long COVID and a myriad of other medical maladies.

Resiliency is great. Resiliency also sucks. No one wants to have to be resilient. It’s cool if you can be, and it’s a great skill to have, but please don’t confuse resiliency with bravery. If you take suicide off the table, what other choice do we truly have but to be resilient?

My belief as the months with this wound turned into years and the years rolled on was that I would find a solution if I just kept going, just kept talking to the professional-types, just kept searching the interwebs for some actual appropriate and applicable knowledge. I can’t say this was always a conscious thing. Resilience can become a default state, and it has become that for me, so I just kinda did it. It wasn’t pretty. Not by a long shot. It has been an ugly internal battle that, outside of those professional-types, I have largely fought alone. Battles you fight alone are often among the ugliest.

And then one day last month I found something. That I found it on my own, not through any of the professional-types, is a good reminded that resilience needs to be matched with self-sufficiency, that the only person who can truly make a difference in your life’s most important battles is you. For part of these five ugly years, I have put my wound in the hands of professional-types and said, “Fix it.” That’s OK, and I don’t regret the time spent with them searching for a solution. But I’m beginning to sense a pattern in my life that the big changes come through me, not anyone else. I fix me. Period.

The something I found isn’t as important as the fact that the something was found, and suddenly, a few weeks later, I feel the wound healing. The things that would irritate it and make it scream don’t seem to have that capability anymore. Certainly not as severe, anyway. Not even close. Now, all of a sudden, I see the path to a better future and a fully healed wound. Yes, it’s gonna leave a scar. Big, long-lasting wounds do. But scars don’t hurt. Scars don’t bleed. Scars are merely reminders of the wounds you have overcome. I have a really good collection of those scars. I’m kinda proud of them. Each one is a story of survival. I like that.

So yeah. That’s where I’m at right now. Healing. For the first time in a long, long time, I can say that about this wound. It feels great.

Would you please help a brutha out? I’ve created a weekly eNewsletter called News-B-Nuts in which I’ll be sending out news nuggets and witty commentary to subscribers. If you can, would you support this endeavor for just $5 a month via Patreon?

Healing — September 6, 2024

THE DAILY UPDATE

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