Cafe's Catch Ups and Chronically Explaining

Sometime I hate the voice in my head

There is something uncomfortable and strangely disorientating about being home, sitting in what should be my local café, typing away on my laptop, and somehow feeling completely out of place.

I’ve been coming here for literal decades. They’ve moved locations a few times, opened other branches, reinvented themselves more than once, you name it, they’ve probably done it… and every single time, I’ve followed them. I went to school with the owner’s youngest son. I still recognise the staff. The owner still knows my face. Family friends drift in and out. On paper, this place should feel like slipping into a favourite jumper. Hell I have photos from being inducted into Rotaract in their old location, this place was once a launching pad for me.

Somehow I have found my way back and I’m sitting here writing a blog that none of them will ever read because these aren’t those kinds of connections. They’re the people who know your parents, remember what school you went to and ask how long you’re in town for. They’re not the people who subscribe to your Substack or know the inside jokes your internet friends do (thank you to each and everyone of you).

Yet, there is something overwhelming inside me that wants to explain myself to every single one of them. I want to explain the extra weight. The exhaustion they can apparently spot from across the café clearly etched across my face. The fact that I now enter a room walking stick first that seems to cause a collective “Oh...” from people who haven’t seen me in years, which always hits me wrong because excuse me… disability advocate over here and yet we’re still doing this.

Don’t get me wrong. If the last time you saw me I was twenty-two, a size 10, and operating under the wildly optimistic assumption that my body and I were on the same team, then yes... there’s some adjusting to do. Frankly, I’m still adjusting too. My body has been on what I can only describe as an unauthorised software update for the better part of a decade.

But I am so incredibly tired of feeling like I owe people an explanation for what happened to that version of me.

I know this is a me problem. I’ve spent enough hours in therapy to know exactly which shelf this particular emotional baggage belongs on. I know these people aren’t judging me nearly as much as my brain thinks they are. I know that once I leave this café, I probably won’t think about them again for another ten years or until we inevitably bump into each other at the supermarket while I’m buying snacks that my endocrinologist would probably describe as “an interesting choice.”

Logically… I know this, I am fully aware of this… and yet emotionally… well
Logic meet anxiety… you two are going to be at war for a while.

The reality of becoming visibly different in a town that remembers you as someone else is exhausting. Sometimes I don’t want to explain chronic illness. I don’t want to explain mobility aids or medications or thyroids that have apparently chosen chaos as a personality trait, hearts that don’t function, joints that take creative license with the directions they move. I want to turn around and say to people, that even if I hadn’t got sick, almost a decade has passed and looking like the 22year old me at 31 would be WEIRD.

I’m homesick for a time.

For a version of life where everyone I loved lived within a 15min drive. Before chronic illness became part of every introduction to myself. Before home became somewhere I visit instead of somewhere I return to. That version of home doesn’t exist anymore.

That’s the grief I keep tripping over.

So, for now, I will simply sit here, typing away furiously onto this laptop and pretending that I don’t feel the eyes, that the comments and pointed stares don’t exist, that the repeated whispers of “isa” aren’t being heard everytime someone else I recognise comes up to say hi… I will be here.

With my coffee,
Listening to the soundtrack in my own head, which continues to be equal parts existential crisis and stand-up comedy.
Embracing the absurdity that, despite everything, this place is still home...

Even if I’m still working out what that word means.

xxx

A Slightly Out of Place,

Chronically Bex