Admitting how deficient I've become in my blog post yesterday proved amazingly cathartic. It's like putting my business out in the street made me responsible for cleaning it up. I spent the remainder of my day yesterday pondering, without judgment, how I got here: When I quit my job in 2015 I had no clue my chronic fatigue syndrome had been reignited. Assuming I needed a couple months of rest and a hell of a lot of sleep, I set out to make up for my loss in income by becoming a proficient housewife--something I'd never excelled at in my life.
I did it. For a couple years my husband didn't wash a dish or cook a meal. I packed his lunch every night before bed so he could grab-and-go to work in the morning. Everything we ate was clean and made from scratch. I even went so far as to deep clean every inch of my apartment and reorganize every cupboard, closet, and cubbyhole. Like I said, I didn't realize my CFS had been reignited. Until the crippling fatigue kicked me in the ass. Suddenly I was back to making a shower my daily activity. Some nights I was so dizzy and weak I couldn't muster the strength to empty the dishwasher. Still, however, I refused to let him lift a finger. He was working more than double time to cover my lost wages and I figured it was the least I owed him. So I'd sit on the sofa zoning out on TV or cell-phone solitaire until I had just enough energy to get up and get the job done. Sometimes that didn't happen until my insomnia kicked in at one o'clock in the morning.
In a moment of extreme desperation I decided to commit to a nutritional plan that promised to rid me of the viruses that were making me sick. Nothing else was working and I couldn't get the fatigue under wraps. This program was a tricky and complicated protocol I committed to about 60% of the way. But that 60% consumed my life. There were so many requirements! First came the quart of lemon water on an empty stomach first thing in the morning to detox my liver. After about an hour I drank 16 ounces of fresh celery juice to restore the hydrochloric acid in my gut. An hour after that came the all-fruit smoothie full of supplements. Then there was the coffee I was supposed to give up but didn't...
Given my extreme insomnia had me waking up late and all these liquids had to be consumed far enough apart so my body could absorb them individually, I wasn't actually eating anything until like 4 or 5 p.m. Which left me shaky and weak for the majority of my day. I got used to feeling too fatigued to leave the house, even after the CFS started to abate. I could actually get through a yoga session without having to rest halfway through, but mentally didn't recognize the improvement.
About a year into this program I totally burnt out. I'd become ridiculously obsessed with food and what I could consume when. Like it was pretty much all I though about. I'd also gained a ton of weight. Yet the one thing that made the biggest difference for me, has always made the biggest difference for me, was something not on the aforementioned protocol: fresh veggie juice. It's simple; when I drink juice every day I don't have horrible flares. When I don't, I do. No matter what else I'm consuming, it's the one consistency in my life.
So I declared myself a part-time housewife, stopped cooking, stopped packing my husband's lunch every day, and started focusing on myself as an individual. I managed to eek out some incremental progress until my dog was seriously injured in July, forcing me into full-time caretaker status once again. And that's when my bitter resentment took over. For too long I've felt like I was my last priority. Everything required to take care of everyone else is urgent, while I sit here withering away, desperate to regain a sense of myself, and terrified I never will.
Thanks for joining,
Leah
No comments:
Post a Comment