I’ve been struggling with the low thyroid for a long time. It’s been slowly getting worse. I had a fall, and my bowels stopped for quite a long time. I thought it had to do with the fall, but now I think it was more the low thyroid, which can cause constipation. I felt, not so much tired all the time as having difficulty waking up. I had very little energy for doing anything. I also realized that my brain was not working properly. After more than two weeks without a bowel movement, the medical people here sent me to Dartmouth-Hitchcock via ambulance. After two days, they got my bowels working again. It’s so funny, I always thought “bowel movement” referred to the stuff that came out, but now I realize that it refers to the peristalsis of the intestines that moves the digested food along.
I started reading Thomas Merton’s book The Seven Storey Mountain, because I’ve enjoyed it in the past, but this time through I’ve been finding it difficult. Some of his misery feels like what I’ve been going through for the last couple of months. I tried to find the words to describe it without success. But what he says here about his father resonated with my struggle with the thyroid thing. I found myself wondering if what I am struggling with is somehow strengthening me, even if I lose the battle. That makes me think of the quote from Rilke: Being defeated, decisively, by greater and greater beings.
From my journal for August 18:
Merton writes about his father’s struggle with a brain tumor that eventually killed him. “Of us all, Father was the only one who really had any kind of a faith. … [His] was a great soul, large, full of natural charity. He was a man of exceptional intellectual honesty and sincerity and purity of understanding. And this affliction, this terrible and frightening illness which was relentlessly pressing him down even into the jaws of the Tomb, was not destroying him after all.
“Souls are like athletes, that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers … And my father was in a fight with this tumor, and none of us understood the battle. We thought he was done for, but it was making him great. … his struggle was authentic, and not wasted or lost or thrown away.” p83
What’s worst about this low thyroid thing is not so much the physical disability as the mental one. It feels like my brain is caught in my earliest paradigm, where God is “capricious, malicious, and willful” and I am being punished for “always doing everything wrong.” I don’t actually buy this, I’ve been working on changing it for a long time, but my emotions now come out of this worldview so it feels true.