The Weight of the Silence

People talk about surviving major health battles like it’s a finish line. You beat the odds, you navigate the kidney journey, you keep breathing— and then you wake up one day wondering what it was all for. They told me, and I believed it, “you’ll live your best life ever” when this is over. The reality is, this has turned into a continuation of the same frustrations that I had before with the addition and subtraction of a few of them:

1. I am no longer on dialysis, that is a positive. However, I do miss my sister friends who used to love me at the clinic. But, I’d rather miss them than be there in a chair for 5 hours unable to move my arms or body.
2. People just assume, now that I have a transplant, he is OK now, we don’t really need to show any concern or care. He can take care of himself now. That is so far from the truth. Depression has just switched to a morphed form, rather than having gone away. It is now the depression of the reality of life that, I am for the most part unimportant and nobody seems to care about that fact. I am the last person to receive any news from anyone, the last person to be asked for my opinion on anything or my participation or involvement in.
3. Life just moves on for everyone, not me. They just move on and live their life as if nothing happened. Which I guess I do want that for them, I would just like to be a part of something or included in their thoughts. The only ones who seemingly would miss my participation in anything is my animals. IF I disappeared, they would notice.

Right now, I am staring down a massive employment gap, dealing with age working against me, and feeling like nobody is ever going to give me a chance in the workforce. When you’ve been out of the loop because you were fighting just to stay alive, the world moves on without you. You send out applications into a black hole, and you realize how easily overlooked you become. You stop being the person anyone asks for advice, and after a while, you learn to keep your answers to yourself because it feels like nobody cares anyway.

Some days, survival feels less like a victory and more like sitting in a quiet room with your animals, trying not to drown in discouragement while the clock just ticks away. It’s hard to see a positive future when you feel completely invisible to the rest of the world. I just wish I had one thing in my life going well, something I can smile about, anything.