Sometimes, we all find ourselves saying, "I feel very weak".
But how weak do you exactly feel?
What would you understand if I say I feel weak in the sense that I feel as if there is no strength left in my body to even feel the body?
Would you understand that the weakness I feel makes me not able to raise my hands?
Would you understand if I say it does not make me able to stand on my feet?
Would you understand if I tell you that occasionally, it does not make me able to sit?
Would you really understand it if I tell you that, at times, it does not even make me able to talk?
I hardly think anyone would believe what my weakness entails much less understand it.
Still, whether you understand it or not I never stopped feeling it. I have been feeling it for two decades.
But the peculiar thing is that despite how long I have been feeling this, I never seem to have properly conveyed this to anyone. But strangely, my father understood it. I have never contributed anything to my father's understanding of the weakness I feel. It was never spoken by me. He just understood it. He understood it as exactly as I felt it. This I can vouch, for I have seen a glance of pain on his face for the weakness I feel, whenever I had the strength to look up at his face.
There is a difference between muscular weakness and overall weakness. Mine is the latter. It's not like I do not feel the muscular weakness but mine isn't restricted to only muscles.
Sometimes I feel myself floating in the air. In other words, I cannot feel the density of my body, that it has mass, that it occupies a certain space. The only thing I feel is that I am breathing. The ebb and flow of my chest and the air that goes in and out through my nostrils.
This is the weakness I feel. Sometimes it comes sporadically and sometimes, it is more frequent than usual.
Everything requires strength. And the best way for anyone to realize it, is by being deprived of it. As I was explaining how breathing is the only thing I feel on the days of acute debility, I could not help but presume that breathing is the only thing that must have required the least strength to be done. I don't know this for a fact and chances are very likely for me to be wrong but it is just my attempt in explaining how my weakness spread through the body on very special days.
If I have to presume breathing to be the least effortful activity then I have to attribute some activity to "assume the position of the most strenuous", and needless to say "talking" is the most appropriate activity in this regard. It just drains every shred of energy I have in me.
When I say talking is the most enduring task for someone whose central nervous system is affected I do not say it whimsically. In fact, the simple task of talking involves the exertion of numerous muscles which include the thorax, rib cage, diaphragm, lungs, heart, and abdomen. This explains why an hour of conversation, whether personally or telephonically, leads me to repose myself in quietude for the rest of the day to restore my strength which I have wasted in talking. This also explains why words come out late on the days when I feel weak to my stomach. Hence the saying, ‘’feeling weak to the core’.
I feel weak in the time when I am manhandled by others and what they think as assistance is nothing less than a scrummage. I want that to stop, I so dearly want that to stop. I try to ask them to stop but alas! the only thing I am capable of doing is mouthing the words I intend to say only without the voice. And when the voice does come out it is too late.
Be it as it may, it is not rewarding. It is not rewarding to feel this exclusive. Exclusivity is never good. It is like something specially made for you. A custom-made state, to feel, to endure, and to suffer, all on your own. Because of this exclusivity I have lost relatability and reliability in others to understand and internalize the struggle I go through.
I cannot just say, "I feel weak", it is an absolute injustice of an expression to what I feel. Weakness as a word diminishes the intensity of my struggle and merges it with the general sense of term.
I wanted to explain as exactly as I felt but I cannot justify to explain this weakness verbally. Not just weakness of body but a complete physical, emotional and mental burnout. It is impossible for me to explain it for what I feel and experience is pure pathos.
Do you know what "pathos" is? It is Greek for suffering. Primarily used in Greek tragedy to showcase the sufferings of the protagonist on the stage. It is an essential element of a tragedy. It leads to a tragedy to reach its end. Without pathos, there is no tragedy. It is in this capacity that I find a parallel. And when I draw the parallel between the pathos of a Greek tragedy and the weakness I suffer I could not help but acknowledge "weakness" in its entirety as the pathos of my own tragedy.
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