Angry Nerves, Angry Grief, Angry Me

Today’s Agenda: Survive, Swear, Repeat

Today is one of those days where my body is not my own.

I stand in the bathroom, breathless, clutching the sink, every muscle and joint shrieking, my nerves screeching beneath my skin like an exposed wire, a live current of agony that never shuts up.

I am exhausted in a way that doesn’t just settle into my bones but hollows them out, making each breath an accomplishment. Walking from the living room to the bathroom leaves me winded and trembling like I’ve scaled some impossible mountain in my own house, and I live in a single-story.

I catch my reflection in the mirror, and we are not on speaking terms. Barely recognize this version of myself, 44, and at war with my body, betrayed by fatigue that drowns everything. I want to scream, but all I can do is cry. There aren’t words for this—the weakness, the vibration, the furious, frantic buzzing under my skin like a swarm of rabid bees in a jar, all nerve and fury and no escape.

My mind spirals back to my dad, who knew pain intimately. He wore it, bit through it, and most of the time joked about it. We shared this language of pain. There were different dialects, but the same dictionary. One part stubbornness, two parts dark humor. I remember him when my body riots like this, and the grief comes in tidal waves, crashing over every part of me, flooding my cells until I’m nothing but ache and memory and absence.

This morning, I had a plan. I would be productive, sneak to the store while Phil was on calls, and pretend I could muscle through.

But my body said hell no. Where do you think you’re going? Oh, pumpkin, you’re precious, sit back down.

Now I’m stuck in this limbo of frustration and fury, not scared, just incandescently angry. Angry at my own biology, at times, at the crap of it all. The grief and the pain are a tag team, pummeling me from the inside out. Every nerve, every muscle, every bone, every cell—devoured, gnawed on, then spit back out.

I know, somewhere in the haze, that this is just today.

Maybe the intensity will ebb if I rest, if I surrender, if I just let myself be.

I think about my endless to-do list and feel the panic rise, then another part of me, the part that remembers my dad’s voice, tells me: just stop. The world can wait. Dad would tell me to rest, promise me tomorrow, and then probably make a fart noise or say something so gross I’d laugh through my tears.

So, universe, I get it.

Message received.

I surrender.

I’ve had my moment.

Now, I rest. That’s the best I can do.

Maybe even binge-watch some trash TV; Netflix always delivers on that front.

For today, that will have to be enough.

Also, side note: thank goodness for voice-to-text because on days when my hands and fingers decide to go on strike, at least I can still get my words out, just in time for my boys to hear the whole glorious ramble.