An Open Letter to the World at Large

Dear World:

Thank you so much for your concern. No, really, I mean it. Thank you for calling and writing and sending love across the wires, and for just generally caring enough to stick around. And most of all, thank you for loving me enough to keep asking me how I'm doing and wanting updates on my progress. I am truly humbled by your support.

And since I seem to have trouble expressing myself these days, let me try to answer your collective question as best I can. Because one of the most difficult things in the world right now is the answer to that oh-so-deceptively complicated query: how are you, really?

Honestly, I am alive. I am living as best as I can with whatever comes my way, be that something as wonderful as increased PFT numbers or something as frustrating as steroids or diabetes. I am happy and grateful. I am scared and overwhelmed. I am delighted by the little wonders of life and angered by the setbacks. I am as much a walking contradiction within a single self as Emerson could ever have imagined; I, too, contain multitudes. I am excited for the future with my new lungs and somewhat saddened by the loss of part of my physical self. I am ready. I am still, in some ways, waiting. I am intensely human.

I am not, however, perfect. Especially right now, in this period of transition, I find small frustrations difficult to swallow (no pun intended, for those familiar with the post-transplant routine) and I am sometimes a bit of a pill myself. I am frustrating to my doctors and way more flighty than I used to be -- where the heck did my amazing memory go, anyway? I am not always happy, despite the breath that fills my body, nor am I always 100% fair, to myself or to others. These drugs and these situations play with my mood and my ability to process it all in the way I would like. I am on a burst of very high-dose steroids, and I'm living by the old adage that if you can't say something nice, you should probably just shut up. Which means I am, at this point in time, fairly quiet. You're welcome.

I wish I were better at all of this. I wish I could magically just make up my mind to be all of the good things I was before I ran headfirst into the wall of end-stage lung disease, only stronger, smarter, and more enlightened. I wish I could say that illness has somehow transformed me into a person with all the ironic wit of David Sedaris, all the righteous strength of Martin Luther King, and all the radiant peace of Mother Theresa (minus, of course, the dead part for those last two). Most of all I wish I could just make these past few years easier on everyone by becoming some sort of miracle patient and erasing all the fear and grief and uncertainty. I wish I could do all that AND save the world AND look really fantastic doing it (okay, so I'm still a little vain -- did I mention I'm human?), but instead I'm slowly coming to the understanding that I'll just have to settle for acceptance of myself, flaws and all. Someday.

Which I guess is the real answer to that overarching question, after all. How am I? Well, I'm getting there. I'm thoroughly relishing the journey along the way, even the parts I don't honestly enjoy.

And somewhere, in this whole messy, ecstatic, scary, ridiculous, melodramatic mindfuck of a miracle, is life -- or at least I'm fairly certain that's the case. And that fact, come what may, is always something worth celebrating.

xoxo,
Piper