It leaves me confused. Wondering what exactly it is that causes me to have such a lack of confidence in my faculties. Leaving me feeling inadequate, as though I am no longer in control of myself, my ability to negotiate myself around in the small part of the world that I inhabit. I know that I've been isolating myself to a degree. I've been unwilling to go out and about normal types of activities that would take me away from home.

I find comfort in the predictable, in routine, in being at home. There I am able to exercise authority over my responses. I can negotiate everything. Outside, when I'm exposed to the outer world, however narrow the framework, my lifetime of self-assurance becomes thinner. This is just, I know, an emphasis due to age, common in youth and the impaired, to the normal human condition. Not that other animal forms don't seek comfort in the familiar.

I suppose it might have a great deal to do with the episode, now a year in the past, of having to be admitted to the emergency department of our local hospital when I realized something was organically and by all the manifestations being demonstrated, quite wrong with me, internally. A month later however, I was restored to my full physical capacities, and more. Yet my confidence in myself appears to have been quite disturbed.

This, despite having the good fortune of a life-companion who knows me as intimately as I know myself. Who insisted that we retreat this summer from our home for our usual week away in the wilderness area of another country. And where I discovered that I was indeed still capable of meeting physical challenges.

Yesterday, when I exited the hospital after seeing the opthalmalgic eye surgeon who had given me the regrettable information that the retinal tear in my left eye, a 'fourth stage' event, had returned, I was of course, disappointed. Admittedly, my eyes had been copiously and irritatingly eye-dropped previous to examination, and this created an unclear vision for me, apart from the distortion that the tear had created.

Yet I felt inadequate and confused, and incapable as I sought to identify our car with my husband awaiting my presence so we could return home. I felt like a child, helpless, or close to that, in the face of a world I wasn't quite familiar with.