The last two weeks of life

Maybe it was bound to happen at some point. Maybe I'm just the kind of person that feels obliged to not let others down and doesn't like to show it when she can't handle things. The kind of person that was't used to, or even very familiar with, not being able to handle something. Maybe this is how I was gonna learn. That I was born with a mind that needs empty evenings on a more regular basis than midnight meetings. That even though I could be a good organiser, maybe a good chair woman even - the other half of me needs her quiet.

Just too bad I had to meet with my cooking skills.

Today, 5 years ago, my life changed. I woke up with an odd feeling stomach. I emptied myself from uphigh and below, and most of what came out was water. I texted my best friend to check if I had made her sick too with last night's dinner. She said no, but had thought I'd been a little liberal brushing hair out of my mouth with fingers that had just been cutting chicken. I had thought the same.

I still remember the date because Friday November 11th 2005 was the morning of the national student conference I'd helped organize over the past year. I was part of a 5 member board and with a small team responsible for providing some 300 christian students with food for thought in the form of workshops and speakers. It had been fun and new and exhilarating, and by November, I was kinda done with it. I had enough issues with the new college challenge of balancing out highschool friends and bridgeyear promo and schoolwork and student union and college friends and church duties and family visits and workouts and the need for money and doing nothing every now then. I got fed up with 2 days and nights a week taken by something I couldn't get out of.


But by the end of October, it was just two more weeks. Skip through m and then go on living. No biggie.

My friend had looked over my dayplanning during class and jokingly added one minute of spare time. I hounestly didn't think it was that bad. Examperiod was only a few days ago. I hadn't cared for the subject matter, and therefore hadn't cared for the grade; couldn't even learn for it as it was a take home essay. I had finally cut out two of the Back Home Obligations - no more Saturday work or Sunday morning kiddy club for me - and had spend my first weekend in Maastricht for no reason other then the heck of it. We had planned our breaks two weeks in advance - lunch at 12:30, coffee at four, and a few extra ones every time someone made your phone buzz. Our first dinner at a student pub ended in a detour through half the inner city to find the best place for dessert icecream. The following nights we took turns cooking. I remember how we fried up all of Judith's freezer contents and how we passed around an 'examweek is' list through the UL. I remember the giggly churchservice that provided 'strenght for today and bright hope for tomorrow' with a whole new meaning the day before the exams. How we vowed to study till 10 PM; how I gave up by 8:30 and how I got a call 20 minutes later, if I was in for The Matrix. It had arguably been two of the most relaxed college weeks to date. So really, how much harm could two weeks of utter stressfullness do?

Cos yeah, stressed out I was. The Monday after exams saw the first lecture of a course on multiculturalism. It was basicly why I went to college there in the first place. School had been slopping a bit. I was told that's what you do as a student and I still get B's while slopping. But this I wanted to do and I wanted to do it right. The teacher announced the course needed some extra input from us, to stay up to date with a few established newspapers and get a feel for the public discussion. She also added the first 3 weeks where gonna take the most of us. If that wasn't gonna work for us, we could approach her.


It hit me that I should probably do that. Cos I was gonna be pretty much non-available for the two weeks leading up to the conference, and might be kinda drained the week after. I didn't. Cos she didn't look like the kinda person that thought much of extra-curricular activities. Cos comparing the course and the conference work, at that point I didn't either. And cos even though in that instant the realization there was no way to stuff all I needed to do in the time I had for it completely overwhelmed me, I couldn't bring myself to give up in the one thing I actually wanted to be doing.


And so, I stuffed in the 700 things I needed to do in my already pakced scedule and for the next 10 days felt like I was drowning. I think I felt that was normal. That and the fact that I was too ashamed to admitt I couldn't handle it. But that's what you do. You score less than B's. You do a ton of things besides studying, not curl up with tea or take a solitary walk in the woods. It was the first time I explored that side of me, that I wasn't the girl on the side watching, that I got asked to take the lead and that I could pull that off and have fun doing it. So this was what normal people feel. When it's too much, you stress out. When you bump into a limit, you push a little harder. When you're exhausted you keep going. When you feel lousy, you ignore that for a bit. You just keep doing what needs to be done, and then you can enjoy the weekend you worked so hard for and rest up afterwards. It'll blow over. You will have lived.


Except it didn't blow over. I made chicken for my bestie and her boyfriend who were in town and who, like everyone else, I hadn'd seen for too long. And then it all fell apart. I dragged myself out of the bathroom and off to the conference that morning, hoping I had just got rid of whatever it was that made me feel funny. But ofcourse I got as sick as I'd ever been. I spend two weeks at home walking into walls I thought should have been gone by then. I caught on to another 2 weeks of autumn flue. And when I finally felt better again, something else had introduced itself. Something that made biking hard and shops move and wouldn't go away.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I know. That's something's really off when in the following year you loose 18 pounds while eating twice as much as you used to. Something's off when the mechanism that makes you feel satisfied after eating seems broken, cos even when you stuff yourself to the point of gagging you still feel like you're about to faint from hunger. And those were the good moments. Something's messed up when leaving out thyme and rosemary and about a dozen other ingredients from your sauce suddenly dóes make it fill you up. Kinda. Something's not right when unpacking a hedgehog home makes you heart skyrocket to the 130's, when every tepid shower on a plastic seat with the windows wide open puts you in bed for half a week, when going somewhere makes the world shake and  look fuzzy and actually registering what someone says to you takes all the energy you've got. People stress out and push themselves over limits and get sick on wrong  moments and fall down hard. And give or take a few months of hitting into walls, they bounce back up again. They don't feel like they went running 5 miles in the rain with a bad case of the flue 5 years later every time they have to take a step out of their house. And I know it doesn't help when no one can tell you why and you and your dazed head have to find these things out by years of trial and error and attempting to focus on the newest googled guidelines where 9 different camps of medics tell you to exercise more or do less or see a shrink or change your diet or take supplements or hold vibrating balls or do the stuff you like, without telling you hów exactly. Kindly adding that the worst thing you could do is listen to any of their colleagues' advice. I know all that. 

But sometimes my thoughts wonder back to those two weeks, and I want a little more. Something more solid. I want someone to tell me what's wrong and that I didn't do all of this myself, that I didn't screw up in such a gigantic way that it not only cost me my life, but also the right to feel any for form of bad about it, the right to expect any form of sympathy. I wanna visit the girl I was 5 years ago and steal her agenda. Undo the parts I did. Turn away the threat of impending doom I can still feel when I think back on those weeks. Scratch out the Saturday bridgeyear reünion and the Sunday family circus visit, somehow inprint on her that the classes I had been looking forward to for a year and what not could be postponed by two weeks. To make some choices and not commit a part of  myself to 20 different causes. I want a second chance and I want to do it right this time. 

Mostly, I wanna tell her to stick with what was orginally  in my shopping basket - pasta sauce. A bunch of veggies, mashed tomatoes and minced beef. To not put all the ingredients back cos I remembered boyfriend Willem was too good a cook for something student fashion like that.

Not sure why I thought instant sauce with chicken would be more impressive.