It's Elemental, My Dear Watson

I threw up on February 28, 2025. It will be about March 30th before I am fully recovered from a de facto sea change in my physiology.

There is a sebaceous cyst on my back near my spine. It drained once a few years ago after a decade of gradually growing larger.

To my shock, I overall felt so much better and functioned so much better after it drained dramatically, bleeding all over my clothes for a week and throwing out my shirts everyday like I was changing a bandage instead of changing my shirt.

An even bigger shock: I stopped being suicidal though this occurred sometime in my fifties and I had been suicidal ever since being raped at age twelve.

Some weeks ago, I dreamed it drained again. So I suspect it probably will at some point in the not too distant future and it seems likely my functionality will markedly improve afterwards.

I identify with Aereon, an Air Elemental in The Chronicles of Riddick. She believes in no God. She calculates.

And she's physically insubstantial, which is true for me as well though it fails to make me able to glide or have similar cool abilities.

No, it means that I used to be unable to pull the tags off a purchase by hand without cutting myself because my tissues were too insubstantial, a detail that changed somewhere along the way telling me that in spite of the entire planet calling me crazy and a hypochondriac and a teller of tall tales etc etc etc, I'm a scientist, my life is my lab and my body is healing though that's not supposed to be possible.

In my mind's eye, I am rushing headlong towards a cliff and fearing the fall. Change is coming and I don't know what or when and I don't trust that life will provide me a hangglider to make this a cool transition instead of a disaster because it never has before.

I've been a Velveteen Rabbit forever, longing to be real, existing in some space I don't know how to describe, on the edge of a society that doesn't accept me, doesn't believe me, doesn't see me as substantial because in some important ways I'm somehow not.

I don't know what is coming. I do know something is coming.

I wish I could be more optimistic about that undeniable knowledge that SOMETHING is coming. But I'm pretty sure planet Earth will make sure it's terrible and not anything positive even though logically it SHOULD be something positive.