Musings of a Restless Mind

This is a book Sharon started in 2000 but never finished. That really doesn’t matter as much as you might think since each chapter is self-contained. I’ll be posting the other chapters weekly.

I decided to start writing this book today. It’s been kicking around upstairs in my head for several years now. Though not exactly in this form. But I’ve had the title, “Playing to an Inside Straight” from the beginning. I’d thought I was going to write a book about Fibromyalgia Syndrome (FMS) to begin with, but with time my focus has shifted. After all, FMS is just a syndrome with no clear diagnosis, no clear causes, and no clear procedures for treatment, let alone a cure. A syndrome, in layman’s terms, is simply a collection of symptoms that have occurred together in a significant number of people to be noticed by the medical establishment. I can’t even prove that I ever had it. Even if there was a clear test today, I am so much better now that I might no longer be diagnosed with it. And then the reasoning would go, because Western medicine believes that it is incurable, that I never had it in the first place. Not that I found a way to get better. We live in a time of hubris. Maybe it’s always been that way. But you and I are not living in another time; we’re both living today. And that is what both of us have to deal with.

Don’t get me wrong. I was trained as a scientist and I understand the importance of studies and documentation. But I also grew up in the fifties and sixties, where it was argued daily whether or not smoking was dangerous to one’s health. Anybody with a modicum of common sense knew that something that made you cough and have difficulty breathing was not something that was good for you. But it took the scientists twenty years to prove it. And now they’re delineating how bad second-hand smoke is. Well, gee whiz, both my parents smoked and I knew that by the age of seven. Science has its limitations. Truth is not an easy thing to prove. And depending on what truth it is that you’re waiting for, you may be dust long before it’s found.

Which brings me back to FMS. I knew that I would be dead if I waited for the research to find a cure. More on that later. And I only had so much energy (for those of you not familiar with FMS, its two major symptoms are fatigue and severe muscle pain), so I spent what energy I had on getting well, not on documentation. And because of that, I dropped the idea of the book. Partly because I didn’t want to have to prove to someone that I had had the disease and then have to prove how I recovered from it. It occurred to me that that might actually keep me from getting well. And that, in my book, is just plain stupid.

But most of us, at some point in our lives, do stupid things. If we’re lucky, or it is a minor stupid thing, we live. But sometimes the stupid things we do in life maim or even kill us. Case in point. When I was really sick, but also in the process of finding relief, I read an article about one of Dr. Kevorkian’s assisted suicides. It was a woman, my age, and suffering from the same illness. Mostly because she couldn’t stand the pain, and Western medicine told her that she would just have to live with it because they couldn’t do anything, she had, in the poker analogy, decided to get up and leave the table permanently. What a waste.

Not that I didn’t understand. I used to have pain in every single cell of my body. My husband couldn’t hug me, it hurt too much. Someone would gently bump into me when I was out, and waves of pain would echo throughout my body for several minutes afterwards. I didn’t have a clue as to how I could live with that sort of pain for the rest of my life. I understand the suicidal impulse. But I also have a great respect for life. And I believe in God and that maybe the world is unfolding as it should, even if at times it is not a pretty or a comfortable process. And if you’re one of those who believe that this is all there is, even more reason to not give up so easy. After all, this is all there is, bad or good, that any of us can be really sure about. And I’d rather continue playing out my hand, just in case my luck turns.

Which brings me back to this book. It occurred to me recently that what I really wanted to write about was not the illness, but how I dealt with it. How, in fact, I have dealt with my entire life which has included childhood abuse, growing up as a minority, post-traumatic stress disorder, FMS (which probably started in my twenties), and other personal difficulties. One of the metaphors that I have used the last twenty years for life is a card game. You can’t control the cards that you’re dealt in life, only how you play them. You can lose with a good hand, and you can win with a bad one. But most people aren’t taught that in life. They fall under the spell of positive thinking that they can control every little detail in their life, and when, one day, their luck changes, they think they’ve failed. We have become a society of rational power. Logic is everything. We are the masters of our universe. And when Nature or God reminds us otherwise, our first response is to counter-attack. We think we can make a perfect world with technology, and yet if we really understood the science of our world, we would know that that’s not possible.

In college freshman chemistry, our instructor gave us a humorous interpretation of the three laws of thermodynamics: “You can’t win. You can’t break even. And you can’t get out of the game.” The first one refers to the perpetual motion machine. You could also say it as “You can’t get something for nothing.” The second one refers to the loss of energy due to friction and other things in an engine. You always put more into something, than you get out. That’s probably true in life. Certainly when you go to school, you learn more than you’ll ever get to use in life. But since you really don’t know what you will need to know, you learn a little extra. But it is not an efficient process. And the last one refers to what is called entropy, or the universe tending toward disorder. You have to eat to live. You have to keep putting energy in, to keep your body organized and living. Death is the ultimate disorder. In a way you do get out of the game, but you don’t get to go play another one. This is it. Take it or leave it.

But if you’re going to take it, then learn the game. Understand the cards. Know the players. And play the game to the best of your ability. And this is what this book is about. Autobiographical where it needs to be, but not my entire life. It is a synthesis of what I had to learn the hard way, because there was no one there to tell me how to do it. But all of my life, I’ve had this ability to think outside of the box, to ignore what, very often, passes for common wisdom, but isn’t very wise. I also discovered that I had the ability to teach and create the metaphors that helped people learn what started out to them as unfathomable. For a number of years, I taught chemistry part-time at the community college level and a certain amount of my effort went into getting people over their fear of the subject. I had this irrational belief that, if taught properly, anybody could be taught chemistry. Not that everybody should, or would, want to be a chemist. When I went to school, most science subjects were taught on a sink-or-swim basis. If you weren’t a natural, there wasn’t much out there to help you. Things have changed a lot in my lifetime. Textbooks, for the most part, don’t expect you to be a genius anymore.

And I have a gift for writing. For putting my experiences into words. Lots of people have experiences. But communicating them to another individual requires a creative talent. Some people communicate in paints, others with words. Another thing I’ve always repeated about life is, that if it hands you lemons, learn to make lemonade. And what’s the good about having made lemonade, if you don’t share it with someone else?

So I’m writing this book, because I believe I have some important things to say and that I can say them in a way that will be understandable. And if I can stop one person from leaving the table of life before they’ve played their hand out, it will have been worth the effort.

As I write this, I am waiting to get my first novel published. I believe that I will become a successful writer, but I have no proof. I was going to start working on my next novel, but I can’t get this book out of my head. And in my life, I have learned that there are times and places for things. And somehow I know, that if I don’t write this book now, it will never get written. Mostly, because I see my life changing before me. Different clouds are gathering on the horizon and will move me to a place where I may not remember as clearly all the lessons the last two decades have taught me. And I owe a debt to my past that needs to be paid.

My life has always been filled with metaphor and a story within a story, and today is no different. September 8th is both my mother and her mother’s birthday. I was raised a Catholic and I also knew this day as the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I was born in a hospital named for the Virgin Mary: Our Lady of Angels. I grew up in Los Angeles (La Ciudad de Santa Maria de la Reina de los Angeles in its original Spanish name). I was named Sharon Therese, and at the time of my baptism, Therese was the saint’s name that was used. But since that time, Sharon has also become an acceptable baptismal name because the Rose of Sharon is considered another appellation for Mary. Sharon refers to a plain in Israel, therefore Mary was the rose. And, from what my mother has told me, she prayed a lot to Mary during her difficult pregnancy with me. From the moment of my conception, in one way or the other I have had to fight for this life. I am not so sure as to why I have always fought so hard. But one of my favorite stories from the Bible is about Mary’s simple yes to the Angel of God that she would be Christ’s mother. For a teenager, in her time and culture, that could not have been an easy yes to say. And so in the darkest of times, simple or not, I have just said yes to God when I didn’t know what else to do.

So I think it appropriate that I sat down today to begin writing this book. Mid-way through the story of my life, so to speak. A new millennium. The year of the Golden Dragon. My third anniversary of being a cancer survivor. And survivor is the operable word here. Because all survivors, in one way or the other, are gamblers. They play the odds, look for angles, and when all else fails, they bluff. Or in the immortal words of Captain James T. Kirk, of the Starship Enterprise:

“No, Mister Spock. Not chess. Poker.”

And this what this book will be about. Teaching you how to best play the highest stake game around, life. So roll up your sleeves, pull up a chair, and lets start by talking about those cards you’re holding.

September 8, 2000
S. T. Gaffney