The day before yesterday, I had plans to help another starting freshman student move to her new home in London. I awaited her call or text message to remind me where to meet her, and let me know it was time. As it happened, not only did it never arrive, but a phone call to her failed immediately, giving me the recorded message that this number was not currently available, and the previous day, none of my texts to her were answered. I still don't know what happened.
The day before yesterday, I got into another fight with my boyfriend in which he didn't see me trying (although I was) to account for his feelings and mind them, and I didn't see him trying (he wasn't sure he was) to account for mine, and he wished I'd just drop it and leave it alone like he wanted to do, and I wished he was willing to bear some pain and effort in the short-term in order to learn habits that'd make us both happier in the longer term, but he was no more willing to commit to that than I was to just drop the issue, certain as I felt that it would come up again.
Yesterday, I had an appointment with my doctor,
who has in the past seemed dismissive and distrustful of me. I was reluctant to go, but did anyway. I felt very discouraged. I kept thinking about the failed moving day, and even though I now no better than to catastrophize it, since the most likely answer is that there was just some problem with my fellow student's phone and she either didn't remember my number without the use of it, or didn't think of using another phone to contact me... but still, not actually knowing was really bothering me.
I kept not thinking, but feeling, that my plan for school was too ambitious and would certainly overshoot my capacity or take too long to prepare. I know with my logic, as opposed to my feelings, that the only way to find out if I can is to try, and I still remember why the logic is sound that leads me to believe I could. But in that discouraged, I dare say even reactively depressed state, I could not remember why I cared to try.
On the way out to go see my doctor, I forgot my mp3 player for one thing and had to go back for it from the bus stop, reasoning that at the time it was, the likelihood of this making me miss my appointment was very low, I didn't actually care if I was only slightly late, and if I didn't get my mp3 player and bring it with me, the chance of not having it making me much more miserable was high. Even if I don't want to listen to music, not having the ability to choose to makes me nervous and tense.
I also saw my tomato plant.
There was a time around April/May of this year that I asked our landlord here if I could use one of the little square garden plots myself when planting time came, since I was very interested in doing some gardening even though I was a newbie at it. He agreed to that, and gave me the one which had had a rotting pumpkin in it since the last autumn, and said that was good for a garden, of course. It was the second of four little squares built into our side yard with plank edges that he'd set up.
Later, come May when the weather was getting reliably warm and frost didn't seem to be coming back, I went out with my seeds and used two and a half little packets of them, carrots and tomatoes and some low-to-the-ground herbs. I had gotten advice from one of my coworkers who gardens a lot about repelling pests and good plants to plant near one another that wouldn't give a newbie too much trouble.
The same day, the landlord's wife comes out and starts her own planting, and she digs up and uses and plants in all four of the squares. And when I complain that the landlord promised me one of them, she goes and talks to him of course... But as it turns out, he never told anybody about that but me, so he just apologizes and his wife gets all the gardening space and I get none of it, my seeds wasted, my time and effort spent in anticipation and preparation for nothing. Landlord's wife says the soil is too shallow for tomato plants to grow well anyway (although that didn't stop her from transplanting some, just in a different one of the squares).
Determined and angry, I went into my house and brought out a flower pot bowl thing that we happened to have, and set it not far from the squares and said I was going to plant something in that. I planted a few tomato seeds in it. In the following days and weeks, I weeded out all but one of the tiny seedlings, watered it whenever I remembered and the soil seemed not to be moist enough, and watched it slowly grow. Next to the wife's transplanted tomatoes, it seemed like a runt of a litter. Over the months, it grew to nearly but perhaps not quite two feet above the soil, in a maybe not quite one foot deep little pot, and although it seemed to wilt sometimes from heat or thirst or maybe something else, it looked like it was pretty healthy, despite being small.
When it bore flowers and then lost them, there was only one little forming tomato that had taken on its little branches, but that one fruit grew and reddened. It was not as big as even the small tomatoes you would buy in the grocery store, nor as big as several of the tomatoes that its transplanted neighbors grew, but nevertheless it was there.
Any time I left the house or returned to it, which was not every day, mind you, I would see my tomato plant, especially since recently its transplanted neighbors have been harvested and taken away and its solitary red tomato is the only red in the garden. There was the one single fruit of my independent labour at gardening without space or cooperation.
Yesterday in particular, I could really use that reminder. A solid, physical, undeniable thing, small and modest but wholesome, that I had brought about, by trying to do so.
It felt, bizarrely, as though the tomato plant was forgiving me for my flaws and foibles, and had tried its feeble best as a two foot tall tomato plant growing in a one foot deep flower pot, and had put some effort into giving me something in return for my care of it, even though I had sometimes forgotten to water it for days at a time. I felt forgiven.
It didn't immediately cheer me up, for I did not, immediately, want to be cheered up. It is very rare indeed I get to show a doctor rather than merely tell them about the lows of my moods; generally, the act of going to the doctor's to begin with was proactive enough that it cheered me up considerably on account of actually doing something. But today, I did not want to see that doctor again, and my discouragement was weighty, and I rather wanted a medical professional to see it first hand, so I held onto it, and made a mental note to write this blog post later, which would help me focus on something positive, when I was ready to do that.
My doctor seemed no less dismissive and accusatory this time. The problem I have with my throat, that makes me gag and retch whenever I brush my teeth, and feels like I have a hair stuck in it? She says unless I am actually having trouble swallowing (something physical like food, I guess), she cannot give me a referral to a specialist. She didn't bother to ask if that was what I was asking for, no, just said I couldn't have it. I mentioned that there had been times I had been kept up at nights, my swallow reflex triggering repeatedly, but feeling uncomfortably blocked or aborted. She said nothing to that, almost as though she had not heard me.
Her responses to some of my other matters held a similar attitude; she personally does not believe the evidence for intestinal flora being important to healthy digestion is strong, so she will not prescribe me anything to improve intestinal flora, but she will, if I like, hand me a chart of foods I should and should not eat for better digestion, and seem to expect that it is no harder than a whim to radically change one's diet.
It seems very much to me as though this member of "a caring profession" does not care to help me unless I am in a particular amount or kind of suffering; otherwise, she does not advise me. As though it were somehow beneath her, a general practioner, to put any effort forth on improving health that, though not good, is not yet in the realm of critical illness or injury. Apparently it's meant to be my own responsibility to judge how best to make my crummy-but-operational body work better, and to put forth all the effort of that path myself. Of course, how stupid of me. I thought doctors were meant to help their patients to be more healthy, regardless of how healthy they are to begin with.
I took the bus past my home to the college, and went back to the Learning Center, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite places, to talk to someone. Isaac, my favorite person to talk to so far, whose sound judgement, signs of honesty and assertion I could do anything I put my mind to have inspired me to try, was not there; he will likely hang out there sometimes, but he recently gave up his post as scheduled staff of the place and was not there yesterday, so I ended up talking to "Shay" Sheryl instead. She had put on a lecture I liked, full of effective ice breakers, and with a casual, engaging atmosphere.
I talked to her about some of my stress, and about my plan for school, and she was supportive, giving me some helpful suggestions, and becoming a little alarmed on my behalf when I told her the Counselling and Accessibility office would not book students for ongoing counselling until after the tenth day of classes when they were no longer able to get their student fees and tuition refunded without specific cause. I learned her nickname, and enjoyed her company, though it was not quite as uplifting as Isaac's had been.
I felt better, not completely restored but much better than I had been, on my walk home. And when I got there, I ate my tomato. It was delicious.
