Sunrise Letters
Day One
Today I will finish the revision outline for my book and send it to my editor. Today I will get blood drawn for the second time this week, because my sodium is low. Today I will go to my rheumatology appointment, and unlike last time, she will not tell me that my rheumatoid arthritis is in remission. Today I woke up and it hurt to stand, to walk. But I walked around my apartment and stretched and then it felt a little better.
The more I move, the better it feels. It’s the initial movement that’s so painful; pushing through that pain and knowing I’ll be rewarded for it.
Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disorder. When I say, I have rheumatoid arthritis, I think that people assume I have osteoarthritis, which is itself a natural part of aging. With rheumatoid arthritis, your immune system begins attacking the synovial lining of your joints, and your joints, in response, swell. The synovial lining is what lubricates the joints.
For a over a year I have been taking Humira, which is an immunosuppressant. Low sodium means that this medication could be affecting my kidneys or liver. But I am hoping it’s just a fluke. Before Humira I tried all the cheaper immunosuppressants— about 12 different medications— a process required by my health insurance, because Humira is one of the most expensive medications. Each medication caused a different adverse reaction. One made me vomit on most days. Another caused severe GI distress. One gave me sores in my mouth. Another gave me eye pain. And another made my hair fall out. Several simply didn’t work. When I took Humira and it actually worked, I enthusiastically began injecting myself once every fourteen days. I don’t care about the Black Box Warning. Before this, I could barely move.
Now I can barely move again, but just in the mornings.
An autoimmune flare, which is what happens when someone comes out of remission, often occurs because of stress or, as they say, overdoing it.
I rest as much as I can, but I also have to survive.
This morning, as I was writing my morning pages, I started thinking about the difference between floor and ground. A couple years ago I noticed that someone used the word floor when pointing towards what I thought was the ground, outdoors. Isn’t a floor something built? A structure on top of the ground?
I notice this all the time now, that people call the ground the floor. It was bothering me for a while. This discrepancy, I thought, demonstrated our continuing disconnection from the actual earth, and our increasing familiarity with indoor spaces. How sad that we conflated floor with ground.
I Googled both words, and the dictionaries told me that the word floor specifically refers to the floor inside of a building, and ground is the ground outside. In the search results there were Reddit and Quora threads; YouTube videos and grammar blogs, all arguing about the differences between floor and ground.
Six years ago, Dazz316 wrote on Reddit:
“Ground is always the floor but floor is not always the ground. Ground is the literal earth. That is ground. If you're on the bottom floor of a building you are on the ground which happens to be the floor. Any level above that has a floor but ground is only at the bottom.”
I did what I always do when I want to find out more about a word, which is to look up the etymology; the history of the word.
Ground was once grund, meaning the "bottom; foundation; surface of the earth," also "abyss, Hell," and "bottom of the sea.” But this word had evolved from Proto-Germanic grundu, possible translated as “deep place.”
Floor was once floruz in Proto-Germanic, which is itself related to flur (German), meaning “meadow” or “field,” amongst other relations. Its root is pele, meaning flat, to spread, but this root can also bee connected to the Greek plassein (to mold, to spread) and Latin planus (flat, level).
The words are obviously quite different, and have different meanings.
So, why does it seem that they are increasingly conflated?
It makes me think of the phrase touch grass, which means “you need to get outside and be in nature, because you’ve been online too long,” or something like that.
The thought of people staring at their screens so long that they need to touch grass makes me very sad. Then I remember how often I am in front of my computer screen and I get sad for myself. For what we seem to have prioritized. But I’m also grateful that much of what I am doing on my computer is inquiry. Asking questions. I was born asking questions, I think.
Every day I go for a walk outside.
Right now, outside my window, there’s a small lizard hiding beneath a planter, and a small bird circling the planter. Outside my window the ground is covered with patchy grass and long brown pine needles. Sunlight casts a rectangular line across my small yard. Tomorrow I am going to get outdoor furniture, so I can sit out there in the mornings, when it’s cooler and the bugs aren’t as plentiful, and write.
Grass, and ground, reach up into us and connect us to the earth, which is our home. Floors are built in structures that are supported by the ground. Without the ground, we would have nothing.
Today, may we all touch grass.
<3