LETTER TO ARTHUR

ToastierShorti

Last night I could not sleep. I felt sick with the pain in my neck. My back felt like someone had stuck knives into it and I kept getting fierce cramps in my leg... so I got up, made a drink and hot water bottle, and wrote a letter...

Dear Art,

Pardon me if I do not call you Arthur, but abbreviated your name implies creativity, and as artists we need to take care of the tools we use to create our masterpiece. You have only one tool – pain, which you wind into my joints in the hope that I will be moulded into the shape you have planned for me. That, my friend, is not creativity: that is destructiveness.

I use the term friend, as identifying our relationship, lightly. We are constant companions and if I use the term enemy towards you, I will become bitter and there is no space in my life for that.

When I am being creative, I have many tools to hand, my imagination can take me places you cannot even dream of visiting. My heart can skip a beat at the sheer joy of a moment, and you cannot stop it. I can breathe in Springtime, be warmed by the sun, feel a snowflake on my nose and drink raindrops from my lips. You will never know the seasons. I am able to comfort my aching hands, gently stroking a warmth that calms them. You will always be angry. I can rest in under the bubbles of a warm bath, or beneath the goose down in my duvet. You will never know rest. I can see the moon and stars in the midnight sky. You have no eyes. I can hear the birds at dawn, the ripple of waves scurrying among the pebbles, the rustle of autumn leaves. You have no ears. I am alive.

You have taken up residence under my skin, but you are not me and I will not be moulded into any other than who I was born to be. Whatever brush strokes you paint, I will paint over them. That is my promise to you.

stickywicket

Wow! Congratulations on putting your pain and sleeplessness to such good use. That's a great analysis and some of it is very poetic. If I was to get up, in pain, in the night, what I wrote would resemble a list of expletives :oops: I do hope the drink and hottie ensured you got back to sleep after writing this. Thanks for sharing it.

barbara12

Hi ToastierShorti
I have read that twice and it is brilliant, and in its way very relaxing to read thank you for sharing it x

dibdab

Hi,

Thank you for sharing what I'm sure so many of us feel- we are so much more than this wretched disease, and it must not defeat us or shape who we are, though there are times when simply "being" is just about all that Arthur leaves us. Hope you get a better night tonight, hang in there and keep fighting to retain your unique and talented persona! :P

Deb x

stickywicket

One other thing, toastiershortie. Over the years, I've come to realise that the relationship between me and my arthritis is more complex than I first thought. It isn't pure enemy. It's taught me a lot of valuable lessons which, without it, I'd have managed not to learn. So look carefully before you 'paint over everything'. Not much of it is good but what's good is important

daffy2

What a lovely example of turning a negative into a positive. There's no doubt that the mind has such a big part to play in coping with conditions such as arthritis.

frogmorton

So well-written and eloquently put!!

Thank you so much for sharing with us all. I am sure your words have struck a chord with others as they have with me.

You take care and keep on remembering the things Art can't take from us

Love

Toni xxx