Have eight years with a j-pouch really turned me into… an optimist?!?!
December 2005.
It had been a little over a month since I moved to Halifax to start my first full-time traffic reporting job. After my on-air shifts on weekday mornings, I would drive around the city to get a better idea of the roads and highways I was talking about. One of my drives took me to Mic Mac Mall, where I bought a copy of Big Shiny Tunes 10 from HMV.
When I got back to my car, I tore open the album’s plastic wrap and slid the CD into the stereo. I started off on the long route home from the mall in Dartmouth – around the Bedford Basin, rather than across it on one of the Harbour Bridges – to my new home, where I lived alone for the first time in my life.
The novelty and independence were exciting, but also unsettling. I worried whether I could really hack it as a broadcaster, and whether I could carve out a life of my own, on my own.
I wasn’t off to a good start. I mispronounced street names in my reports. I annoyed the Bridge Commission with my hourly calls to ask if there were accidents (there rarely were). I backed my car into a concrete pillar in a parking garage and pulverized the passenger side taillight. I had to spend the bonus I earned the previous summer to repair it.
As I drove, I passed landmarks that were becoming more familiar: Pete’s Frootique, The Chickenburger, Mount Saint Vincent University. Big Shiny Tunes 10 reached track seven, Sum 41’s “Some Say”:
Think before you make up your mind
You don't seem to realize
I can do this on my own
And if I fall, I'll take it all
It's so easy after all
Believe me, it's alright
It's so easy after all
Believe me, it's alright
It's so easy after all
And in that moment, I felt hopeful. Warm. Filled with a sense that I would be alright.
I remember that moment with some clarity, even though it was over 16 years ago. That’s because for big chunks of my adult life, pessimism has been my baseline, and any break from that became memorable.
That pessimism may not have been evident to everyone, because I tried to be more upbeat when interacting with people, both in person and online. But through my twenties and into my early thirties, I wouldn’t have described myself as an optimist, and I doubt that the people closest to me would have either. It’s not like I was a moping around every day or snapping at people, but my thoughts were often coloured with cynicism.
A big part of that came from the challenges of living with ulcerative colitis, which I was diagnosed with in 2008, and then the rough patch that followed my first surgery in 2013. When I had my second surgery on February 11, 2014, it’s not as though a switch flipped to optimist mode, but looking back now, it was a turning point in my ability to take a hopeful perspective on life on a more regular basis.
~ ~ ~
Gratitude is a common theme in my pouchiversary posts, and if you’ve read any of them before this one, I’m sorry to be so repetitive. But it’s important, dagnabbit. I still feel overwhelmingly grateful for my j-pouch. For the doctors who made it happen. For the nurses who helped me recover in hospital and at home. For the UC patients who came before me and underwent the operations when they were still unproven.
Being able to live a very normal life – which is how I would describe my life today, apart from the seven or so bowel movements I have on an average day – doesn’t feel normal. It feels wonderful. It fills me with gratitude and grounds me in the present. It reminds me of how lucky I am, and how many good things I’ve been able to experience, both before and after my UC diagnosis.
That gratitude has steered me through some of the worst days of the COVID-19 pandemic, which in retrospect, don’t even seem that bad. I can say that because I’m lucky enough to have a well-functioning body, a loving girlfriend, a good job, a comfortable home, and a small but close circle of friends and family. Remembering all that I have and all that I can still do keeps me from slipping too far down on days when I start thinking about the things I don’t have or can’t do, and my pelvic pouch is an easy go-to when I need a reminder of the good in my life.
Last fall, I was interviewed for two articles about living with inflammatory bowel disease for (Canada’s) Crohn’s and Colitis Awareness Month. One of those articles began with the line, “Rasheed Clarke is an optimist.” In the other article I was quoted as saying, “It can be disheartening at times, but you can keep trying. I’m very grateful for the research that has gone into this disease because I know that I’m the beneficiary of a lot of people’s efforts. It makes me feel very lucky.”
Sickeningly sappy, innit?
But it felt good to be chosen as an interview subject because – and this is just my guess here – I’m living somewhat of a success story when it comes to IBD. It also felt good to describe my life in upbeat quotes instead of dour comments, which made up the primary content for this blog in the first few years after I started it.
I hope I didn’t come across as too happy-go-lucky in those articles, because I know and have lived the gravity of this disease, and I’m well aware there are people with Crohn’s or colitis who don’t have it as good as I do. Whenever I talk about IBD these days, whether in an article, or a podcast, I try not to paint too pretty a picture, because I worry that someone struggling with IBD will feel even more unlucky because their disease isn’t in check. Rather, I hope people having a hard go of it with Crohn’s, colitis, or a j-pouch will feel as though life can indeed get better, and that it can be downright delightful. For what it’s worth, there were times I didn’t think I would get better, but here I am now, an annoying optimist.
~ ~ ~
Joyful as I may sound, I still have rubbish days. Many of those days, however, come about for reasons unrelated to my j-pouch. My bowel habits have a way of staying stable even when I’m under stress, or feeling down on myself. And yes, I do still have days when I feel down on myself.
Case in point, the three or so days it took me to write this blog post. I knew for a while that my pouchiversary was coming up, and that I wanted to put together a reflective piece as I have done for all of my previous j-pouch anniversaries. But I struggled to write anything. I had a hard time focusing. I didn’t know what exactly to express or how to put my thoughts down in a logical way. The more I wrote, the more I felt it was all shit. And you know what? This post is pretty shit. I’m not proud of it in the slightest.
But here’s the thing. I don’t care.
The old me would have scrapped the words above and never let it see the light of the internet. But I hit publish and put this crap out there and said I’m done with it. It’s not great, it’s not even good, and I’m okay with that. I’m going to look on the bright side and say my pouchiversary post is done for another year and maybe I suck at writing now (or always have) but whatever. My pouch lets me do plenty in life that’s more fun than grinding out blog posts that few people read anyway. And that makes me happy. And hopeful. And they’re not such strange feelings anymore.
