Now that my house is unpacked and the art is up, I’m seeing the places where I have space for more art. Like over the toilet in the powder room on the main floor, and 2 or 3 places in the kitchen. Not fine art locations, but someplace to put up decor that has not yet been added to my life.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the art that I have. Papyrus my grandmother bought when we lived in Egypt. Art that was a gift of love and an homage to my Turkish heritage. A great mother’s day collage. Even the creepy old photograph of the ancestors who go with the beautiful dresser in my bedroom. These things are me and they are mine. But observing that there are places where I get to pick new art has gotten me thinking. If I could choose my style, my colors, my statements, what would I pick? I don’t have a clear answer and the question itself is mostly hypothetical given my current finances not leaving much (okay any) room for buying non-essentials just yet. I’m still saving up for a dresser & some shelves for Ainsley so she can finish unpacking her room. After that, there’s a list of other things the kids & I are hoping to add to our lives. Like a non-inflatable place for guests to sleep.
The process of thinking about what I want and like got me thinking beyond decor and art choices and into other aspects of my identity. Like dancing. I love dancing. Not going dancing - which I think of as the thing people do at clubs and high school dances, mostly a lot of uncoordinated gyrating - but choreographed dancing, with partners and steps and everything. I want more dancing in my life. So on the eve of starting what I understand to be 6 hellacious weeks of Gynecologic Oncology, I’m researching swing and salsa dancing opportunities in Asheville. I have done all but the last step to actually join a swing dance club that has regular Tuesday night lessons (paying the modest membership fee will have to wait for payday). Tuesday is the one weekday day that I don’t have to drive children all over creation for their activities. It’s fate. I’m going to learn to swing dance. All because of the blank wall over the toilet in the downstairs bathroom.
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In the movie The Matrix there’s a scene where Neo gets plugged back in so that he can learn some stuff from Morpheus. When he is uploaded to the learning interface, he looks like he looked back in the matrix, not a skinny, bald prisoner of war, no weird bolts on his arms or head. Morpheus called this his “residual self image...a mental projection of your digital self.” I think people actually have these projections in their subconscious. When I was pregnant, I had dreams where I was not and could move freely, twist at the waist, run and swim (and in my 2n pregnancy, run over the tops of rooftops with a machine gun to awaiting helicopters).
My subconscious needs an update to my residual self image. . This morning I had a dream about making a last minute decision to do something for myself. In the world-bending reality of dreams, I decided to take a short 4 hour drive to see dear loved ones who are, in fact, about 16 hours away. I’ve been feeling frustratingly lonely lately and I am disappointed that my schedule and my means make it so hard for me to spend time with people I love. In this dream, I had a side kick, a travel partner, a media naranja who convinced me not only that I should make the drive, but that it would be good self-care for me to do so.
I suppose in the Freudian vein, we are everyone in our dreams so this was just me talking to myself. But at the same time, myself was taking the form of my ex-husband in one of his supportive and loving moments (of which there were many). So I woke up very, very sad to realize that Minneapolis was in fact not really a 4 hour drive away and missing my archetypal life partner. Kind of a downer of a way to start a Friday.
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Recently in clinic I had to do a hard but very necessary thing. I had a patient with a reason for visit that was not really appropriate for our clinic. Think of someone coming to an eye doctor for a broken toe or a dentist for an ear infection. But because she was pregnant, the people who were supposed to be taking care of her were reticent to do so. When a person is growing a person in their uterus, doctors seem to forget that the rest of medicine still applies to them. Pregnant people can get cancer or pneumonia or appendicitis. They can need x-rays, surgery or pain medication. Just because they are also pregnant, it doesn’t mean the right place for them to get that care is from their OB. So I had someone who was in a significant amount of distress and needing help. Technically speaking, I was capable of giving her the help she thought she needed. I could have ordered the test & the prescription. I have the capacity to do this. It is allowed by law. But it isn’t good practice. And the things that the patient thought she needed were not the things that would have helped her health in the long or short term. So I had to offer a very dissatisfying plan of care and make recommendations that caused significant distress to the patient. This sucked. It was also the right thing to do. There’s no sanctimony and there’s no judgement. This wasn’t a drug seeker, this wasn’t manipulation. It was honest to goodness hard times. I’m going to think of her for a long time, hoping that she got a resolution to her pain & trouble, knowing that my interaction with her only added to her distress.
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