Monday Musings: "Five Years and Five Years Hence"

I wrote the poem “Five Years and Five Years Hence” when I was at college and was feeling particularly down and isolated. It had been five years since I had my final surgery for my “Chiari Malformation” and though I was a lot better than I used to be, I still face unrelenting pain and other humiliating symptoms each and everyday. It is easier to deal with when I am at home, I don’t get so depressed about it, but up at college I would look around at all the healthy students and then I would come back and look in the mirror and I would only see a broken person who could not be fixed. That is why I wrote “Five Years and Five Years Hence”.

This poem is about how I was once an innocent, carefree child. I was once someone who had never heard the words “Ehlers Danlos Syndrome” and “Chiari Malformation” (though to be honest my childhood was still wrought with sickness and now I know why). The point of this poem is that I was once someone who felt lighthearted all the time, and now ever since I learned about my medical conditions I feel like I have this unbearable weight on my shoulders every single day of my life. I can not longer do anything without carefully thinking things through beforehand. I wrote this poem because I was so frustrated by that fact. I was frustrated that I couldn’t go out and be the normal college student.

I felt very melancholy when I wrote this poem and I felt like every thing was futile because I would go to college and then get sick and have to drop out of the semester only to come back again the next year to repeat the same damn thing. My life sometimes feels like a pointless series of setbacks, the more I try to accomplish, the more I end up losing in the end. I felt like it almost wasn’t worth trying anymore, and yet I inherently find it impossible to give up hope. I found myself wishing that I could just give up hope, that I could just stop wanting more in my life, but that isn’t the type of person I am at all and it never will be. The last stanza of this poem signifies this spark of hope that always stays lit in my heart and how I still manage to look at the world as a beautiful place even though I am going to live with this genetic condition my entire life because there is and probably never will be a cure. I write

“Occasionally hope still flares in my heart And my eyes still look with wonder On the days (I count on one hand) That I’m not falling apart.”

It has been five more years since I wrote this poem and I would say that generally I still feel like I am carrying a heavy weight all of the time, I will never be able to go back to being a carefree person again. That being said, while I do suffer through intense periods of melancholy (which is to be expected), I still find the world to be a place of wonder and amazement. Just because I have this horrible medical condition does not mean my life has to always be one long, sad grey road. My life is a nature trail after a rain storm, it is muddy and messy but it is still surrounded my beautiful flowers and wildlife. I just have to wade through the muck to get to the wonders of the world, which makes it harder to get to them, yet not impossible.