i feel like samson with all my hair gone and, now, the flu. it's been thirty-six hours since i've been anywhere but the five rooms of our apartment. and with a head so full i can hardly stand, it's the easiest and hardest thing to do to just feel sorry for myself.
easy, because i feel wretched.
hard, because all i can do is lie around waiting to be looked after when my default operating system is usually self-sufficiency.
and so last night, at about 9pm, i had a kind of crisis of being when no one was home, my head was full of feathers but weighed a tonne and all i wanted was something cooked for dinner.
i have never grown accustomed to being physically incapable. the worst illness i've suffered was the chicken pox and i've never broken any bones. although no one would call me a super fit a person, i've generally maintained good health for as long as i can remember. God has been super kind that way. and emotional volatility has been so much my burden that i've never given much thought to physical affectations. they've never been debilitating enough.
it was bizarre, then, for the first time, to be put in a situation where i could literally do not very much at all. i'm used to crying out, when i'm crying and my heart is heavy. i'm used to praying pleading prayers for all that i feel. but it was altogether different, lying under my bed sheet on the couch, to cry out for physical relief. i like how God teaches us things even when we hate it at the time because it verges on unbearable. i didn't know how much i'd missed for so long about need and provision and generosity and kindness and thankfulness. and i know now how bad i am at asking for help or to be looked after. i always thought it was a virtue to be an island unto God, but that's not how His people work, at all.
i've rarely felt more pathetic than at 10pm last night, being delivered take-away thai chicken stir-fry in a plastic bag by my friend's boyfriend. the exchange at my front door was quick. i hadn't bathed in two days and all i'd done since i'd woken that morning was watch nine hours of brideshead revisited and drunk guava juice so i hadn't wanted it to last long. i think if it had though, i should still have been glad for it. even the after knowledge that he and his housemates had made it a group expedition to pick up my dinner and drop it off, surprisingly, didn't bother me much. normally, a houseful of boys in my stairwell bringing me dinner would have sent me off on some prescriptive feminist rant.
but besides rarely having felt so pathetic, i'd also rarely felt more thankful. so it makes sense.
