I told you I'd report back after the, uh, surgery. By the time you read this, it will have been ten days ago, and you know what? Surgery hurts. That's not a surprise to anyone, of course, and I knew what to expect-- I did a fair amount of research before I even made my first appointment, and I knew what was coming. But still. Living through it is always a different thing than knowing it's coming. Ouch.
Fortunately my body has done the miraculous healing thing that healthy bodies do, and already I'm past the worst of the painful part. And it hasn't been nearly bad enough for me to regret having it done. Even in my partially-healed state, I'm happy with the results. I look much more like my mental image of myself. For the past many years, I've looked at pictures of myself and my, uh, generous assets, and it never looked like me. So, even if the headache part of it doesn't pan out, I'm still going to be glad I had this done.
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Like everybody, I'm so tired of the human pressure cooker we're in right now. It never lets up, and just when you think it is finally going to get better, something happens to make it worse. I want to think that I, and the side that I'm on, will show our true colors under pressure, and of course our true colors are to be compassionate, intelligent, and fair, right? But we haven't always shown to advantage. It just seems to get uglier and uglier.
All of us are quick to point out that we're only responding to the ugliness of the other side, but it's not too hard to imagine some cosmic being watching the pressure build, maybe even throwing in a few extra pressure points, and waiting to see, hoping, that for once human beings will surprise her and respond differently, not out of outrage and blame but out of some other, more generous impulse. At the moment, I can't even imagine what that impulse would be. It would surprise me, too.
You know-- it's occurring to me as I type this, that is mainly true online. In my real life, there have actually been some moments of connection, even among people who would probably come to blows if they talked hot-button issues. I spent some time a couple of weeks ago with a group of people I think of as being uniformly more conservative than I am, and I was dreading it. I was expecting a wall of righteous them vs. not-brave me.
But it was not like that at all. Where I was expecting them to be united in a conservative bloc, a wall of opinions that are different than mine, there was actually a lot of give. They didn't say the things I expected them to say, and they don't all believe the same things. (And of course we were smart enough not to hit the hot-button issues head-on.)
It occurred to me, as it has to almost everyone over the past few years, what a disservice we do to each other when we communicate through facebook posts and bite-sized tweets. We hear the much-promoted extreme positions and we react with outrage, and we don't remind ourselves that not everyone on the other side lines up 100% with the talking points. Not everyone, including me, has predictable opinions.
So maybe that's my task for the next few weeks-- at least until after the wedding, which is still a giant ball of dread and social anxiety looming in my future-- to look for the openings, the ways people are human, not predictable, not monolithic. Be open to being surprised.
And also to remember that weddings can be a lot of fun, right? I can do this. We can do this, because it is a family effort. Wish me luck.
