Lyme Files: Emotional Disconnected

Apathy.

You don't think about these words and their link to the emotion until you have it. Apathy was the greatest and worst thing when it came to enduring Lyme.

I was so lucky to have a supportive, though not always understanding, family. I was able to continue to somehow work because the people I was around got use to me and didn't stare to require me to do weird things. Like...remember words. I could boil my work to single elements of process and since it was writing and reading and listening based, I could take my time. This also helped me keep brain connections going.

These things are. . .indescribable when it comes to luck and love.

The apathy makes everything nothing. Great joy, great pain - everything turns numb. I could rock out to songs that talked about numbness - like Linkin Park, Numb, oddly enough. I remembered how to feel things like depression, sadness and happiness - I was literally to apathetic to emote.

When the worst of things happened, it felt numb.

I will be talking a lot about the apathy. It's a description of an emotion I don't think I had ever heard much and I don't hear much even know.

 

While feelings of depression and numbness circled me - the apathy was very strong inside me.

Depression flows from a sadness and unworthiness and helplessness. And numbness is a lack of stimulation or an over-feeling.

Apathy comes from lack of interest - it is stopping human functions because there is no reason to be. Everyone is apathetic about something - math, art, science, politics. Lyme set my apathy on fire and made me uninterested in living which, through emotional math, means I was only existing. I was a walking emotional vegetable. Really not very interested in anything.

Like someone hooked up to life support. Life and death were not active thoughts. I had no interest in life or death or pain or other people. I had the shadow of what that was like - I could preform as if I was, but, on my own. I had little interest. I had no energy to engage.

I think everyone might feel like this at some point - you know, teenagers

The problem was, through this apathy, I forgot how to feel. It's probably less dramatic - I had so much brain damage, certain emotions and deeper emotions were cut off.

When I did fight my way from the apathy, it just made my situation sharper and more painful.

Life was like being a passenger in a car and you didn't know where you were going. It's not a bad feeling. It's numb. You just sit there. You'll get there or not. It's numb.

When It Hit Me
So many years of not talking about anything I was going through or feeling came to a crashing halt when I got my first Road ID band and put "survivor" on there. I decided to list the tick-borne illnesses I had because of the medication I was still one.

It had been such a struggle for me to put that word on a tag. To me, cancer patients are the only people allowed to be survivors in the world of illnesses. When you get cancer, you become a brave warrior fighting heroically against something.

My education led me to always believe when you have Lyme you need to be quiet about it and you certainly never dealt anything serious enough to be labeled a "survivor."

Lyme is about not dying. Living is different.You get better or you die.

Lyme is invisible. While my hair came out in chunks, my organs stopped functioning and things were horrible, it was done in private and under a veil of shame.

I am a real supporter of Road ID and I think it's something a lot of people should have, so, I was showing and talking about the product.

My coworker looked at it, pointed to the word "survivor" and asked, "How good does that feel?"

And I burst into tears.

Not RIGHT away. Later, when I replayed the moment and allowed myself to react to something. To the acknowledgement of how bad it had been and how I survived.

I had survived.