{"id":7109,"date":"2013-03-28T14:56:13","date_gmt":"2013-03-28T19:56:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/?p=7109"},"modified":"2013-03-28T15:00:01","modified_gmt":"2013-03-28T20:00:01","slug":"better-like-a-fever-broken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/7109","title":{"rendered":"Better…Like A Fever Broken…"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I have said many times here, this is a life blog. \u00a0 Nothing more or less. \u00a0 And sometimes life gets a little heavy. \u00a0 Not to scare anyone…I’m fine now…really…but this first quarter was about the worst I have ever had. \u00a0 Every winter it seems the period between Valentine’s Day and April just gets worse and worse. \u00a0 But I think that’s over now. \u00a0 As they say, what has been seen cannot be unseen.<\/p>\n

I was in that chilly gray sky of the mind state all morning long yesterday. \u00a0 I’d been that way for weeks and it just kept getting worse and worse. \u00a0 Things went badly at work. \u00a0 Things I should have been able to shrug off that I took to heart. \u00a0 My co-workers were noticing, which only made it worse. \u00a0 It fed on itself. \u00a0 And it wasn’t about nothing either. \u00a0 I’m 59 years old and never had a boyfriend. \u00a0 You can’t walk that far in a life without time spent in the arms of an intimate other and not be damaged by it. \u00a0 We were not made to be solitaries. \u00a0 And I have been betrayed by people I trusted deeply<\/a>. \u00a0 Or maybe it was my congenital naivety. \u00a0 People who look like that…<\/em><\/p>\n

So it was deep in that feedback loop that I randomly chanced across that Hemingway quote<\/a> in my Facebook stream and naturally the first thing that came to mind was a kind of despair that, no this isn’t why I feel the way I do because I have no courage. \u00a0 I do not take risks, I run away from them. \u00a0 Just ask Tico. \u00a0 I am not a good man wounded, I was damaged goods to begin with. \u00a0 Unworthy. \u00a0 The child who was never meant to be. \u00a0 And right then it was as if something tapped me on the shoulder and showed me something about myself that I’d never really looked at before, that through it all I have lived an honest life, because I never thought doing that was something to pat yourself on the back for.<\/p>\n

A feeling for beauty…the courage to take risks…<\/em> Yeah…actually I’ve taken a few haven’t I?<\/em> And so it goes. \u00a0 I felt right then as though a terrible fever was breaking. \u00a0 Seriously, it was like a smothering curtain had been pulled off me and I felt alive again. \u00a0 Life was good again. \u00a0 The road forward clearer, and…enticing. \u00a0 Then I remembered what had happened to Hemingway. \u00a0 You try to be rational about things, but for a moment I felt like I’d been given a lift up, from a hand that would have known the need.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I have said many times here, this is a life blog. \u00a0 Nothing more or less. \u00a0 And sometimes life gets a little heavy. \u00a0 Not to scare anyone…I’m fine now…really…but this first quarter was about the worst I have ever had. \u00a0 Every winter it seems the period between Valentine’s Day and April […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[145,103,12],"class_list":["post-7109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-a-life","tag-the-human-heart","tag-the-struggle-for-our-lives"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7109\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}