Something changes

When we go through some physical problems we also go through mental challenges too. It's the nature of being human, our mind and body work together and only rarely is pure harmony occurs where nothing bad happens. But as noted, that's rare and almost always we think too much and often condemn ourself in the process when it doesn't happen and worse when things go wrong, even medically.

And that causes changes to us, our character, temperament and personality. Everything changes. The old becomes forgotten. The habits become stuff collecting mental dust in corners and things to do piled loosely around our mind. And the new becomes overwhelming. We find ourself asking not just the what if questions, but why does it matter questions. And we find the answers don't fit who we were let alone who we are.

We change, sometimes tremendously where we're not the same person in any way or manner. And when we see this, often we don't as only others see it, we are taken back by who we have become, and often ashamed, but almost always lost. Lost that we didn't realize it during the change and didn't realize afterward until we ran into ourself.

It's like we kept looking in the mirror seeing our ourself as we were and then one morning as someone else, almost unrecognizable. We know it is ourself, but we know now it's not ourself, the one we thought and thought we knew. We don't know ourself anymore and we have to find our way to who we want to be from a strange place.

I woke up this week to find myself there. Standing in my home wondering what happened. All the problems of late, especially since last October and the recent discovery of a blocked pulmonary artery changed me where I'm not me as I thought of me. Some of this change relates to the medication and the physical side effects which changed my life since then.

I've stopped the medication, far short of the time prescribed by my physician and cardiologist and am getting through the body's recovery to some new sense of normal, whatever that is. The medication drained me physically and then mentally, and now I find myself changed beyond where I even thought or even know.

I am not me while I am me. And I don't where the old me went and where the new me came from, except I know it's been me all along. I just don't know what me is me. This isn't new. I've been here before, just not so obvious a change. It reminds of the Peanuts cartoon I keep on my desk.

It shows Charlie Brown in bed with the blanket up to his chin and his eyes wide open. He's facing outward saying, "It's not wise to lie in bed at night and ask yourself questions you can't answer." It's what I've thought every morning this week waking up in the darkness of the early morning hours and lying there for some time before getting up.

And then nothing changed from my thoughts when I didn't get up. And I have no answers, just the questions I asked myself in the dark. The questions are old, as old the time of man, but it's new in that this is a new me I don't know. So I have to wander, searching for a me I recognize and know, enough to become me again.