When I first lost my vision, I started saving magazines to read when my sight returned and when it did, I drove myself off into the sunset, as the credits rolled, and the profound song blasted, well, profoundly. The song was, no doubt, Gloria Estefan’s Comung Out Of The Dark, which, by the way, I sang to myself, in my head, when I was trying to fall asleep in the hospital that first week of darkness.
But this ain’t Hollywood.
Time continued to pass and the magazine pile grew larger, until a bin was brought down from the attic, filled and the lid put on, as if to hide the fact that days had turned into months, and that the contents remained unread.
Now, two and a half years later, I have received a machine that allows me to read. What that means to Type A Sister Rain is that the magazines now become an item on my To Do List. So I began going through the magazines and quickly found the new equipment isn’t optimum for pages filled with different colored fonts and images. I persevered because, with me, stubbornness tends to prevail over sense. Finally, I realized this was supposed to be enjoyable. And it wasn’t. The rest of the magazines went into the recycle bin.
In a way, letting go of these magazines was like letting go of the holding pattern I was in, waiting for my vision to return. Over the past few months, my thoughts and actions live more in the present and the future than in the past. (Don’t worry past, you’re only ever a creep-up-on-me minute away.)
The empty bin has been returned to the attic, and the magazines have begun their recycling journey. I have been working on ‘reinventing’ myself since my vision loss, but ‘recycling’ myself is another way of describing it I suppose.
Those magazines may be turned into newspapers or egg cartons. What I’ll become? I’m still in Research and Development.
