Enough people have gotten in contact in various ways, asking if I'm alright, such that I feel a quick update is in order.
In the grand scheme of things, yes.
On the physical side, putting aside for now that my body is a wreckage site that will only get worse with time, I'm doing OK. No further complications, with UTIs and spasms under control, for once. Again I've won the lottery, and ended up with good carers from a good agency. Being in contact with somebody from rehab who did not end up with good carers, I know that this is nothing to be sniffed that.
On the mental side, well… it's a process. My occupational therapist in rehab told me that most people find the first 3 to 6 months after leaving hospital the hardest. My physical therapist was even more blunt: she said I should expect the first year to be “hell”. So far, I can't argue with that (and whilst I had hoped that the four months in a nursing home would count towards getting through this hard period, as that was really just limbo, I don't think it did). I've been able to distract myself with academic research and writing, which is certainly more than nothing. But it's hard to feel like it's enough. The fundamental problem is that my life now feels devoid of meaning. Lacking meaning, the daily indignities, and routine unpleasantness of just being alive, frequently do not feel worth it. As good as my carers are, I am finding it impossible to adjust to a life of total dependency. For a full explanation of where those kinds of thoughts go, you could try reading this. It will give you a sense where I'm at.
But I guess we'll see how it develops. Switzerland is not an option (yet) so I have no choice but to keep going for now.
In the meantime, if you want to read something more substantive of mine, I've just had a piece published over at Unherd. It features tragic stabbings, racists, and descriptions of the indignity of disability. You know, the kind of content I used to provide more regularly here. “Enjoy”.
The search for meaning (in this sense a very practical search, focused on the self, as opposed to the more nebulous pondering of the French existentialists that borders on hang-wringing) is going to narrow down to an activity of the mind. Your body fell from the sky and was broken on the rocks. If you start a YouTube fitness channel called 'Paul's finger gym' I'll subscribe more from morbid curiosity, but its the mental faculties that are the fertile ground.
There is the issue of the impact that confinement can have on the mind; how that effects the mental processes and how do you mitigate that? These past few days I have been convalescing at home in extraordinary agony which is an unfortunate symptom of my illness. Because of my condition I can't take ibuprofen. I cannot bear the thought of taking stronger medication and becoming a pharmaceutical junky so I take the pain as it comes, as a tasting menu for hell. It bears mentioning that I am acquainted with people who endure far worse, and that is unfathomable to me.
I have been digesting the world exclusively through the prism of the Internet which is near boundless in its reach but is otherwise a distortion of reality that is curated by one's confirmation biases – a fairground mirror that one whittles down to narrower and narrower vistas. You end up festering in the fabricated anger of the like-minded and mistaking that for reality, when reality is bigger than God, multi-faceted and contradictory, humbling when you allow it to wash over you and injurious to the ego when you deny it.
An expression that was briefly in vogue online but appears to have fallen out of favour is “touch grass”. Often this used shut down go an argument with the implication that a person has become detached from reality and should go outside and reconnect. Condescension aside, it's good advice.
When I am able, I will, in the course of a day, separate myself from the clamour of voices. I will leave the house with my keys in my pocket and nothing else. I will walk and allow my thoughts to naturally turn themselves over. It doesn't take very long for perspective to restore itself. I am painting a picture of myself as the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog in the painting by Caspar David Friedrich, that was for many years used as the cover for Ecce Homo. It's more prosaic than that. It's acknowledging the moonlight as it ripples on the dark water in the Thames estuary, or catching a glimpse of the street light reflecting dimly in the lysergic glazing of a trio of life-size ceramic emperor penguins crowded together at one end of a second-floor apartment balcony.
It's a re-calibration of the mind. When I don't do it I get bogged down. Nothing gets done, or at least not well. I've been thinking about how I might achieve a similar result when I can't get out of bed, or off the floor. Meditation perhaps. Some way of figuratively raising myself up above myself that doesn't involve the consumption of certain types of mushroom.
also, your conclusion in the Unherd arricle made me laugh. Not that this is a laughing matter really, but that expression of just wanting these idiots to “fuck off” really hit the spot for me and many of my Londoner friends.