Last Fall

(Part of the Thursday blog-off with Melanie. See her entry here)

For me, last fall was a time of unraveling tensions. At the end of summer, I had been homeless for more than a year, living in a tent when it was dry and in a car when it was wet. I was surrounded by thousands of flies and hundreds of yellowjackets. During the long days I had very few minutes when my face wasn't being buzzed by one or the other. I was suffering from a slow healing serious injury which stretched from my shoulder blades to my fingertips. I was adjusting, poorly, by degrees, to new medication prescribed to clear up the fog of my newly diagnosed schizophrenia. As such, I was suffering extreme anxiety attacks. I was constantly depressed. I had woken up from the fog to discover I had no discernable purpose in this world. Oh, and I was told by a dentist I needed a biopsy to see if an abnormality on my lip was a carcinoma. In short, my life was in hypertense shambles.


Fall brought, gradually, a resolution to most of my problems. As the weather grew cooler, the number of flies and yellowjackets lessened. That may not seem like much, but having these insects constantly in your face and after your food wears you out, trust me. The injury to my left side gradually got better, though I never recovered full feeling in my two outside fingers. I came, if not to a peace, then to a partial understanding of my circumstances, and with the help of medication stopped having the anxiety attacks. I had an epiphany which reminded me of my life's purpose, though I wasn't presently mentally healthy enough to make much progress in that direction. Progress was gradually made by a charitable organization trying to get me an apartment, and eventually, on the same day I found out I had cancer, I found out the organization had gotten me a place. On October 31st after 14 months of homelessness, I moved into the apartment! A week later, I found out the cancer had not spread, and within a few days I had a successful operation. It took a while to heal, but by late November everything that had pushed my life to the extreme limit was resolved except my depression.