Happy Tickaversary - Year 9: Lomtalanítás

Since the last time I posted, Wix has added a bunch of AI buttons and is making me pay for a premium subscription in order to block any AI crawlers from stealing my content. Every time I paste my blog, I get an error message and the website crashes. This is really frustrating, and only adding fuel to the fire that is my disdain for technology and fear of AI destroying the environment, distorting human psychology, and literally killing people.

As you'll read soon, my return to life and livelihood is driven by the need to connect, to live fully as a human being in community with other human beings. As I'm in another transition phase, having not yet fully immersed myself in a sustainable community lifestyle, I'm struggling to find the balance between discovering, expressing, and sharing of my Self and insights with the world, and keeping them guarded for the sacred, real, personal, face-to-face relationships I foster in physical life (which are as yet too few and far between to fulfill my expressive and connective needs). In short, I want to share my gifts with the world, but the world, driven by artificial intelligence and money-driven algorithms, is proving itself increasingly irresponsible and untrustworthy with my content.

This is not a conspiracy-theorist's paranoid rant against AI and technology; this is a fight for the sacred human form I just lost 20 years of my life trying to save. This is me realizing the tragedy of throwing pearls of humanity before the swine of greed and inhuman computers. I don't want my art stolen; I don't want my life stolen; I don't want everything I've worked for fed to a computer and twisted into output that will deprive human beings of true unconditional love, validation, and connection, or worse, their actual lives. I'm angry that there is a loneliness epidemic, and we're solving it with computers and emotional support animals instead of teaching HUMANS how to BE HUMANE and socialize with one another in love and not fear or violence.

I survived death only to be reborn into a dystopian dumpster fire. And that's an awful feeling. (I wrote a song about it, but I'm afraid of putting in on the internet where it will get lost, stolen, or abused so... shoot me a PM and we'll get together for open mic night, 'kay?)

Anyway... now that' I've gotten that off my chest... I present: The Tickaversary Post.

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This year’s tickaversary post is way late again, because on the actual anniversary of my first tick sighting, I was cruising at 39,000 feet to make a permanent move across the Atlantic Ocean. I made the opposite trip 10 years ago, shortly before my entire life fell apart. It seems only fitting (and kind of obvious in hindsight) that I should reverse the trip to put my life back together.

First, let me just do the compulsory jaw-drop, mic-drop, knee-drop laugh-cry: from years on the couch, disability, $50k in doctors and medicines and devices, 4 lifetime prescription medications, allergies to everything, a dozen diagnoses, and suicidal depression, I hauled my happy, healthy, 40-pounds-lighter, upright, and unmedicated self to a new country and new language to start a new life where I can eat pizza and ice cream, ride rollercoasters, and rent a 3rd-floor apartment without an elevator.

* insert emoji salad here* 😁😭😊😆🤪🥰😪🤩🥴😴😭🙂🙃

I still can’t believe it is, or was, real sometimes.

None of it was pretty, and it was hard AF.

It felt like hell nearly the whole time.

I have PTSD out the 3^rd-floor-stair-climbing wazoo.

I am still a total misfit in society because I live my life in a very different way.

The way you live when you almost died. The way you live when you’ve spent your entire life in a depressive gray cloud and suddenly discover a whole rainbow of color that you now have 40 years less than most people to experience -- fearlessly, joyfully, and maybe a bit recklessly. Yet also the way you live when your body still holds the memories and fears of a 40-year nightmare -- triggered, introverted, and way too deep. The way you live when you know far more than you can express in a lifetime, let alone in response to a text that says, “Hey, what’s up?” Messy.

I haven’t posted any updates since last year, because I couldn’t: our plans and circumstances were constantly changing, and I was continually being pushed beyond my limits. Last April I declared an international move completely and utterly impossible, and this April I sent off the last 4 pallets of my earthly possessions on a cargo ship, and set off on a one-way ticket. The “impossible” happened a million times in between, amongst the most mind-blowing stresses and curveballs of international immigration.

Now I’m two months into my new life in Europe. After a period of distress, dissociation, grief, and a mess of emotional processing, I had a massive healing experience in Budapest and am dancing out the honeymoon stage in Vienna. Affordable healthcare? Free entertainment? Public transportation? Rent-controlled housing? Somebody pinch me! I’m doing things I never thought I’d do again and feeling things I never knew I could feel, in a social system I was never allowed to admire. (Conservative Americans think I'm a communist now, and I'm okay with that because my husband just went to the doctor for free and there is no series of extra $500 invoices chasing us down for the next 12 months.)

I’ve been living high on love and vibes and this new awakening, which I’m told by the best experts (i.e. the only ones I want to listen to) is a sustainable way of life: transformed, open-hearted, living and loving in big ways. At the same time, this is all new to me and the only neural network my brain has to run on is that old programming that nothing lasts forever, the buzz will wear off, the honeymoon will be over, and I will come crashing down hard into reality and depression (like a meltdown over AI destroying humanity); my only context for this type of transition is a “mid-life crisis,” and I’m second-guessing myself and my sanity constantly every time I want to try a new thing, or impulse-buy a pair of Rollerblades, or sign up for cuddle orgies (platonic, but who the hell cares? YOLO!!!) Am I being impulsive? Escaping into fantasy? Burying my subconscious in coping mechanisms? I’m still trying to pathologize my entire life.  But I’m getting better and louder and quicker at fighting back: happiness is not a disease, a sin, or a depravity, and woe unto the systems who taught me to believe it is. I’m so thankful for my life, and so dedicated to living it fully with an overflowing abundance of contagious love and joy and healing. That is my purpose.

I started writing a much longer and deeper dive into the rocky remission process, because I think it's important to share; I've felt very poorly-resourced in navigating the post-remission re-entry phenomenon that has nothing to do with cancer or a near-death-experience. It's long and hard and lonely sometimes; no one tells you how to come back from the dead. So for the next 40 years, I’ll be figuring out what that looks like, with extreme wariness of systems that try to capitalize, programmatize, and exploit our humanity for profit, and leaking snippets of love and joy in my professional endeavors. But for now… I’m just… I’m just gonna rock out and swim with swans and climb mountains and eat schnitzel and maybe start inline-skating again. Because, though I’ve never been the bargaining type to make deals with God, the most important thing that came out of this decade of Lyme is a promise I intend to keep with every fiber of my being: if I got a second chance at all the things I loved and took for granted, I wouldn’t waste it this time on fear and self-doubt. I was gonna live.

So here we go.

Again. Lomtalanítás means "trash hauling-away" in Hungarian, and there’s an annual event in Budapest where residents have the opportunity to throw all their large and bulk trash on the curb for spring cleaning – entire barricades of old wooden wardrobes, cabinets, windows, armchairs, desks, rugs, junk, junk, and more junk are erected on the streets overnight (and claimed by marauding bands of trash pirates who sit on a pile all day and wait for the family truck to haul away the treasure before the municipality sends it to the dump. It’s a whole spectacle. I’ve been known to scavenge some free garden planters and art supplies myself!) Anyway, this year’s lomtalanítás was emotional and spiritual for me as well, as I threw out my entire old life and traumatized belief systems. My house may be cleaned out, but there’s that empty period of deciding what is worthy to put back in (and fighting off nasty interpretations of Jesus’s words about seven demons coming back.) So while I’ve been sitting on this post for a month and getting super wordy and introspective, I’ve decided to just leave that in its storage box for now, set up a milestone post, and go back to collecting angels for my new housewarming. If I don't come back, I'm off living big (and shunning AI.)

Love to all the Lymies reading. I was once where you are, and I couldn’t believe in a million years I’d ever be this happy again. IT’S POSSIBLE. You can throw out your faith: in God, in country, in family, friends, in the medical system, in the world, even in yourself (only for a little while, though)… but don’t throw out hope – audacious, ridiculous, fantastical HOPE. Your life matters, and all of it -- the shadows, the traumas, the illness, the failures, the shame -- all of it is meant to be brought to light and LOVED. You and your whole story is God's gift to the rest of us. Don't toss it in the dumpster.

❤ Herzliche Umarmungen ❤