#stream of thoughts

Please pb please I'm begging you.

today I went to a doctors appointment and they proposed that paraneoplastic syndrome should be investigated as a part of my differential diagnosis, a diagnosis I've only heard of from watching House MD. They said it could be that or an autoimmune condition attacking my central nervous system or something else, but luckily today they finally affirmed something I have long known: my reflexes are abnormal and there is no way this could be attributed to some bullshit functional overlay. Something is wrong, so wrong as to be out of the scope of a neurosurgeon at one of the best hospitals in the country. Something is wrong and even though I never stopped looking for an answer, even when I felt like I should be thinking horses not zebras (despite having (currently) and having had (in my childhood) multiple very rare conditions), I had settled slightly into thinking a condition that didn't quite fit my symptoms explained them all, not something exceedingly common but an Occam's razor kind of situation: "Plurality should not be posited without necessity" so maybe if I have relatively minor symptoms from this one thing, perchance, possibly it could explain the symptoms so severe that I fear I will die an early death. But that's not Occam's razor is. It isn't the attribute one thing to everything postulate, it's the idea that plurality should not be posited without necessity, not that plurality should never be posited whatsoever. So sometimes you need to trust yourself even when you think that you have exhausted every option to figure out what is wrong and what is right--- what is true and what isn't. Don't get me wrong, I still have plenty of debilitating symptoms from common conditions but sometimes you know the journey isn't over and maybe it's my obsessive or self-conscious or frantic nature but over the years, I've lost a lot of my fight (for a plethora of bad reasons) but you must question why there are so many people who aim to instill complacency because those people have something to gain. Often the power those people seek to gain is antithetical to an empowered populous, an empowered patient, someone with even the smallest bit of fight left in them. So keep being strong and annoying and a bitch because I can almost guarantee youre not as mean as you think you are. Keep being. I'll never forget a comment I got on a poem I wrote talking about how I just felt like everything about me was decaying with all sorts of related metaphors. The person said some kind things about my writing as a whole and then ended their comment with "you are so much more than rot on wood." It still gives me goosebumps to write it because the little acts of kindness and power we instill in one another each day mean something. There's a whole big world out there, and that simultaneously means that you can still avoid ever seeing your enemy again after they move to the same big city as you, but it also means that those times we don't want to disappear into the crowd, but struggle to stay steadfast, someone will find you. They say no one is coming to save you and that's true, but it also means that we must save each other, no superhero, no deus ex machina, just some people doing the best they can.

zadia najwan / a poetry book that I might publish someday