daBlog by goddess101

Pity

I often wonder if people feel sorry for me. I get the feeling, after they’ve had a “run-in” with my boyfriend, Rudi, they think, “How can she put up with such an asshole? How can someone like him even have a girlfriend? The girl must be a saint!”

Truth is, and he admits it himself, he can be rude, selfish, insensitive, overly aggressive, acerbic, and downright mean. I can think of several occasions where he has upset my friends and family—making decisions on behalf of the whole group without consulting anyone, accusing them of being selfish or ignorant if they disagreed with him, wanting to suddenly leave a celebratory occasion because he was bored or tired. He is the master of laying on the guilt, manipulating his own friends and family into doing stuff for him at their most vulnerable, often mentioning his terminal disease and bringing up how his life will be cut short because of it.

I had felt sorry for myself too. Living with and loving someone with Hepatitis C is not easy. His condition makes him fatigued all the time, leaving me to take up all the physical burden of everyday life—grocery shopping, household chores, preparing meals, whatever. I love long bike rides and DDR, but he can’t keep up with me because his energy level is so low. I enjoy social drinking and nice wines, but he can’t appreciate the experience with me because even just a teaspoon of spirit makes his liver ache.

And then there’s the relationship itself and his never being satisfied with who I am. Constant comparisons between me and his first love. Contradictory requirements for a perfect mate: be conversationally and socially gifted, yet secretive in order to maintain mystery; be unconventional, shocking and full of surprises, yet maintain the conventional woman’s role of housekeeper, cook and f*ck buddy; strive to be his intellectual equal to work with him on all projects he enjoys, yet remain every bit the emotionally connected female with the ability to assuage his job frustrations and come up with creative solutions to relax him. He wants a girlfriend, a lover, a mother, a brother and an international woman of mystery all in one. And while some have considered me, and I myself strive to be, a modern day Renaissance woman, I am still not enough for him.

What most people don’t realize is that this is the disease talking. Ever feel grumpy or irritable when you’re tired? Ever been rude or mean when you’re in discomfort? (I’m sure any female passed puberty would answer with a resounding yes!) Now imagine feeling like that every day of your life. Now add to that the knowledge that you have a disease that is slowly eating away at your liver, cutting your life expectancy in half, preventing you from drinking and socializing with other young, vibrant people like you used to, and killing both your parents within a year of each other. Imagine having almost been cured of this disease, but then getting that opportunity taken away from you because of IP drug law, leaving you $25,000 poorer. Imagine when you desperately try to persuade your friends and random strangers to help you in your plight to spread awareness, they tell you to just go die already. Imagine that the reason you even got this disease in the first place was through a “life-saving” blood transfusion at birth. If you can imagine that, then maybe you’ll also realize that we’re lucky that Rudi is just rude and mean.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to excuse his behavior. I believe he has the ability to rise above the crummy hand he was dealt and channel all those negative feelings into something positive. And he has. And often does. When my friend’s son was having problems in school, Rudi tutored him for free and even invented a game to help him with basic math equations. He was instrumental in getting the same friend ongoing work when she was in financial dire straits. When an acquaintance, a fellow programmer, suffered a paralyzing fall, Rudi came up with a variety of solutions that would help him continue to be productive. When a fellow college alumnus recently had a health scare, Rudi worried about him for days, though their relationship at that point was on the tepid side, and took the first step to re-open communications with him to offer advice and support. Time and time again, when given the chance to help someone in trouble, he does so selflessly.

And what he has done for me… When I was unemployed, broke and too wary of the ever-increasing finance charges on my credit card bills, he unconditionally gave me the money to get my credit troubles in order. He pushed and nagged me to get off my ass, to stop the self-pity act and not make excuses for not working. He funded my initial efforts to promote my business, spent hundreds—maybe even thousands—of hours helping me get my skills up, and even got me work.

Ultimately, he made me realize and accept my potential as a human being. A year ago, I felt like a nobody who had wasted her life as a slave in a company for 10 years and had an empty bank account to show for it. Today, while my pockets still aren’t brimming to the rim, I am a programming, entrepreneuring, hacktivating somebody who now believes there are no limits to what she can do and learn.

For months now, even years, I’ve succumbed to this scarily-growing apathy epidemic. I lost my interest in people, feeling emotionally disconnected and uncaring. What’s worse, was that I still went through the motions of someone who did care but never with my heart in it. I asked the right questions, gave the assured answers, put on my California business, customer service voice and face, but I was sleepwalking the whole time.

Rudi helped me wake up. I will always remember a question he asked me, not too long after his mom died, “Do you notice how there are so many dead people walking around?” Seemed like a silly question at the time, but I started paying attention. I watched my co-workers as they busily lived their cosmopolitan lives, noticed them schmooze their way to bigger salaries and greater status, looked into their eyes and saw nothing there.

I started seeing dead people.

Since that revelation, the journey from being the carefree, passed-out drunk, corporate lemming to the cynical, untrusting, unemployed foreigner, to the now relatively optimistic, mostly sober, somewhat aware fellow citizen of the planet has been a long and hard one. Rudi’s insistence on pushing me beyond my physical and spiritual limits often left me frustrated, exhausted and demoralized. How could 14 hours a day, 7 days a week of intense programming be normal? Even bouts of dizziness and nausea were no excuse for him. My pleading to take a break, he considered avoidance. Anything not related to programming he declared a distraction. My tears of frustration he deemed blackmail.

Why did I put up with this crap, you might ask? Because I knew he was taking me somewhere I had not been to in a long time. At one point in my life, I was interested in a variety of things, always creating, occasionally taking risks. Then, I switched off, deadened by 60-hour work weeks in a company I didn’t believe in. I had to trust Rudi to get me back home, no matter how bitter the pill. Because I was lost, man. Desperately.

These past several months have been the most transformative and enlightening, as I’ve come to realize how much one person can accomplish through focused action. From a technology standpoint alone, I taught myself XSLT, JavaScript, Perl, php, and CSS. With Rudi’s guidance, I’ve become a decent Unix sys admin, Ruby/C/MySQL programmer and shell scripter. At my busiest, I have juggled 7 clients at once, while still contributing to non-profit work like AsiaQuake and HCV Action. And that’s just this year.

So yeah, there’s no reason to feel sorry for me. Oddly enough, the reason why anyone might pity me is also the reason I am at a highpoint in my life. Despite his current tendency to offend and push people away, I am sharing my life with a good man. I know it.

Now imagine the day when our recent activism leads to his cure, his energy restored, our life free of this debilitating, draining disease, will you pity me then?