Writer's Block, and Other Blessings

So if you come to this page with any sort of regularity (or even if you just stop by every once in a while to check in on Sampson), you may have noticed that there has been a distinct lack of blogging going on around here lately. And this alone wouldn't really concern me if it weren't for the simple fact that, well, it's a BLOG after all, so the act of actually BLOGGING is more or less central to the whole idea. Which of course leads to what will from now on be known as "BadBlogger Syndrome" (or BS, for short): a crippling condition that makes one increasingly unable to form a coherent written sentence.

Or, to put it another way, I've had a SERIOUS case of writer's block. Hey, just one more illness for my collection, right? Add it to the list, boys.

Being a good patient, of course, I've worked diligently over the past few weeks to come up with a cause and a treatment for this new illness of mine, and unfortunately nothing seems to work. I do know that my writer's block most definitely was not caused by a lack of Cf/transplant/medical stuff going on in my life -- actually, quite the opposite. In the past month or so since I stopped updating regularly, I've been on IVs, been taken off of IVs due to side effects, seen my doctor several times, had the wonderful opportunity to be present at some very inspiring and impressive events within the CF community, and dealt with many of the "little perks" that seem to go hand-in-hand with a lifetime of chronic illness and immuno-suppression (neupogen shots, anyone?). In short, it's been as wild and as thrilling a ride as ever, but for some reason or another very little of it has ended up here. Not even that time I caught my overweight puppy happily gnawing on what I thought at the time was a red plastic chew toy but later turned out to be a Boost Plus bottle that was (when I left it) half full on my kitchen table. Score one for the Sam-Man on that caper, for sure.

You see, it's not that my life lately has been CF or transplant free (because hey, let's face it, when is this life ever free from the demons that haunt us the most -- whatever those might be for each of us?), but rather it's just that I haven't really been able to bring myself to sit down and WRITE about that stuff lately. And I'm realizing now that maybe those sorts of breaks are not only okay, but even necessary. Maybe sometimes it's important to take a step back from some of the things that do affect our everyday lives, that make us different and special and crazy, that teach us lessons and bring us pain, that make us hope and wish and believe and cry and start all over again the next day, and that do -- no matter how much we hate to admit it sometimes -- define a piece of each and every one of us, whether that means submission or rebellion or anything in between. Because like it or not, I AM CF -- it's just that I happen to be a whole lot of other things along the way, and sometimes those other things take precedence.

So I guess when it comes right down to it, I might be suffering less from BadBlogger Syndrome or writer's block (or whatever you want to call it) than I am from just your average, run-of-the-mill identity crisis. After all, as Walt Whitman so famously wrote, "I am large, I contain multitudes." And it would seem that at least one of my multitudes sometimes requires some distance from the part of itself that carries this disease so openly and willingly. Which is why I think that, for me personally, there will always be a value in the spaces that come between the sentences on any page, the lines on any poem, or, yes, even the posts on any blog. Because ultimately I know that, when the space is over, I will always find my way back to the words that keep me going and the lungs that keep me alive.

And back, of course, to the community of individual multitudes who make it all worthwhile.