Granted

You take a lot of things for granted.

You take for granted your physical health.  That’s cliché, but it’s also true.

For years, I ate crap and taxed my body with irregular meals.  One day, I woke up and found I was suddenly fructose and lactose intolerant.  I also found I was reactive hypoglycemic.  Just like that.  I’m sure that, in actuality, I was deteriorating into those conditions, my body regulating normalcy until it could no more, like a button whose twine frays but allows the button to still function until it finally snaps clean off.

You take for granted your mental health, that you’ll always have the resiliency to go on.  I think people who’ve never suffered genuine anxiety – like a bout of hyperventilation, or a panic attack – don’t know how fragile their minds are, instead thinking they can always strive forward, on and on relentlessly, obliviously.

You even take for granted that you won’t go crazy, that at some point in the middle of the night, when you’re tossing and turning trying to find sleep, and listening to the sounds of the house settling that have become so commonplace they’re white noise, that voices just won’t start chatting to you.

And you even take for granted the unspoken rules of society, that strangers won’t waltz into your house when you leave the doors unlocked; that the guy behind you will give you space at the ATM; and that drivers will give you right of way at an intersection when the little WALK signal has come up and the ticking for the hearing impaired has begun to pulse frenetically, like it’s urging you across the road.

You take a lot for granted and then, one day, something just goes.  As easy as clicking your fingers.  Your sanity.  Your resiliency.  Your security.  Or even all of them.

Then your world becomes fractured, and you see everything through cracks, always hoping those cracks won’t get wider and wider, that the prism of your mind, your body, your life – the prism of you – won’t just shatter and collapse, and leave you with nothing but chaos, or nothingness, or whatever it is which lays under years of aging, conditioning, and whoever you are.

You take a lot of things for granted.