I have felt so silenced lately; by worry over the future and anxiety over the day-to-day.  I have totally let myself go.  It is as if I punish my body for what my eyes are doing, or maybe my eyes have led me to complacency about my overall health.  Maybe I am just a lazy fuck who is afraid to leave the house.  Or perhaps it is just this moment, this single moment clouded with self disappointment.

When I see myself through sparkling fantasy glasses, I am writing every day and materializing the sheer genius that is my book.  I am thin and gregarious and full of light.  So why is it that I feel heavy, as if the burden of who I have so long perceived myself to be is keeping me motionless.  I sometimes think that I keep myself isolated and unproductive out of a sort of habitual fear; safe in the misery and the dark and the quiet.  I get consumed by these dark days and turn to the arms of self-doubt; I chastise myself for not being better, thinner, prettier, for not writing and not living.  In my heart I know that all I want to do is write my book and there is even a part of me that can identify with the possibility that it might be really good and that I actually have something to say, but then the old tapes play; the tapes that tell me of my worthlessness and my failure to be anyone other than who I am.

When I was first diagnosed with RP, I had a fleeting thought that it was a punishment for having been so obsessed with my weight for so long.  I have believed for most of my life that being overweight meant that I was unlovable and without value.  I have been overweight for most of my life.  I always thought that people felt sorry for me when I walked into a room and I often turned down invitations because I was ashamed of my body.  Then came RP; then came the reality of going blind and dealing with all the day-to-day struggles of being different when all you want is to be invisible, to blend.  Isn’t going blind a bigger deal that the extra 20 pounds I can’t ever seem to shed? And does being overweight mean that I am not a good person, not a good writer, not good enough?  What the fuck does my weight have to do with my value as a person?  And yet I feel worthless, muzzled, squashed.  I keep hoping that what I see through the sparkling glasses will become my truth and that I will truly feel the value of who I am.  I hope that going blind will help me finally see.