Isolation Street

I'm doing it again. Isolating. Not writing. Not engaging. Nothing is important enough to blog about, so I blog nothing at all. I'm back to being fully enmeshed in writing my novel. My YouTube channel is still the thorn in my side, like each time I have to step out of my book to create, film, and edit our weekly episodes, I'm being pulled from the womb of creation. Shoved into the cold, bleak reality that I actually live in, not the over-dramatized and fully manipulate-able world I'm creating where people can engage in all sorts of insane behaviors and I suffer no actual consequences.

My real world is nowhere I want to be right now. Especially after I spent 12 hours in the ER the week before last, suffering from and being diagnosed with an acute case of colitis. The simple action of receiving a diagnosis in 12 hours is a miracle that's hardly lost on me. Hell, I've had fibro for 14 years now and they still have no clue what's causing that... But I guess my body wanted to offer up some diagnostic proof for my pain, so the CT showed inflammation in my lower intestine. Is this another chronic illness or a one time thing caused by an infection or something? I don't have any of the symptoms of colitis on a regular basis. Did intermittent fasting, or the way I was doing it, kick something off? I guess I won't know until my GI appointment in September.

The mentality I had to adopt in order to survive my CFS relapse is, by normal standards, the laziest way a human being can possibly live. Basically I had to lay around all day and could only be active in short burst, until the first moment that veil of fatigue started to slide over my eyes, whereupon I had to immediately resume doing diddly squat. ASAP. If I ignored the muslin obscuring my view and pushed on, I faced long spells shrouded in thick velvet cloak of extreme fatigue. No short bursts were possible at all. That does something to a person's mind, forcing oneself to not exist while existing. To squash down every biological impulse telling me that to endure I must fight, push back, work harder. Where in the survival of the fittest life chain does a person with chronic fatigue syndrome exist?

It took years, and I'm still not sure why or how, but thankfully my tango with CFS is behind me. But my mind has not recovered. It's not that I sit around all day doing nothing. No, that's not it at all. But that extra push that's required to get me back to a normal, functioning, productive, part-time member of society, well, I'm terrified of it. I'm terrified of myself. I'm terrified I don't know how to recognize the line, what it takes to not fall flat on my face in the cesspool of never-ending sickness. So I sit here in perpetual excuse mode going nowhere with my life. Years are passing me by.

The only times I've ever changed my life were when I got so sick and tired of my own shit I couldn't handle me for one moment longer. Or I became so terrified of the impending consequences continuing to travel down the road I was on would yield, I didn't feel I had an option. So what I really want to know is, am I there yet?

Thanks for joining,

Leah

Check out the YouTube channel I started with my husband! We're vlogging about our experience with intermittent fasting...which I don't think will be the channel name much longer!

INTERMITTENT FASTING: OUR LA STORY

https://youtu.be/W9HHnWnzFC0

The Reunion

My birthday came and went with a bang. The celebrations are still trickling in, actually, in the form of the twice-a-year get-together-for-our-birthdays with a couple of friends. This fortieth didn't hit me nearly as hard as my first fortieth, or even my second. I haven't noticed any new wrinkles. My gray hair isn't multiplying. No new aches or pains. Thanks to intermittent fasting, I've even lost eight pounds. So naturally I thought I could sail right into this next year feeling, well, not older.

Then I found out about my twenty-five-year high-school reunion taking place at the end of the month. Seriously? Like, I graduated from high school twenty-five years ago? How is that even possible? So I called up my best friend from back in the day and we started reminiscing, bringing up all sorts of people I haven't thought about in years. We talked about what they're up to, how life turned out, how many kids and what kinds of jobs, how many husbands or wives?

It was all fun and games until that feeling of having my life robbed took over. Sigh. I'd made such progress in taking responsibility for my circumstances. Showing myself compassion, not anger, for never having become a famous interior designer or cosmetics CEO. Accepting my reality for what it is and seeking to enjoy and improve my life instead of being angry over what getting sick has cost me. But hearing about what my contemporaries are up to depressed me. Everyone seemed to get the whole cake while I'm sitting over here with a sliver of pie.

The desire to crawl back in my hole of isolation rose up. This is hard, trying to rebuild after another bout with this strange sickness. What a nebulous and unpredictable existence. I drop out of life for years at a time, unable to physically and mentally engage with others in any sort of consistent fashion. Then I get "better" and start my juggling act: trying to get all the dropped balls of my life back into the air without winding up sick all over again.

But enough, really. Because this is it. That is my reality. Love it or hate it, I'm forty-three years old and cannot spend one more moment of my precious time and energy being angry at what is. It took this whole twenty-five-year-reunion trauma to remind me how damaging comparing myself to others can be to my self-esteem. So I'm shaking it off and proceeding on my way. Reminding myself that picture-perfect lives usually have their own source of discord. Mine just happens to be plastered all over the outside of me.

Thanks for joining,

Leah

New YouTube video about our attempt to intermittent fast while celebrating some milestones now live! Click this link or:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bL2TcBkG5o

That Time of the Year

My birthday's in a week. Already I'm feeling down. Stupid, for a double-stroke survivor to not greet the occasion of every anniversary of my birth with sweet gratitude that I'm alive. But my birthday hasn't been a very joyous occasion for the last couple of years. Since my thirty-ninth, actually. That was a great birthday. I was healthy. I was working. I was hitting the gym regularly and looked and felt better than I had for the majority of my life. I'd moved back to LA the year before and was finally hitting my stride. How was I to know the flu that would kick my whole relapse off was little more than a month away? Lo, that bitter pill of hindsight!

My fortieth wasn't a birthday, it was damage control. It was finally sinking in that my flare, nearly a year long by now, wasn't a flare at all and wasn't going away. No, I was indeed getting sicker. All the juicing and resting and supplements and dietary changes that had helped me get a handle on my fibro before weren't saying boo to whatever ailed me now. My mom, bless her heart, saw the depressed valley I was careening toward. She flew into town and plied me with food and drink to distract me from the fact that I was sliding into middle age with my life completely out of my control.

My second fortieth birthday was better. Kind of. My husband tried that year, he really did. If I'd had normal health like him, he would have knocked it out of the park. The entire day was a surprise. We started off with a gorge-fest through Grand Central Market, an LA institution of food vendors and grocery stalls that's been around since 1917. Super cool, but it was really hot out. Which made our next stop, a lane at the gun range with a .45 caliber, a much more temperate experience. But it was really loud. By the time we'd shot through our boxes of bullets, I had sort of floated into a numb state of sensory survival. Which coupled with bourbon made dinner oddly fun but the entire day completely exhausting. I think I spent the next two weeks in bed.

My third fortieth birthday, what can I say, things were getting worse. My husband and I were now deep into the anger phase of my never-ending relapse. Not that I'm saying a word against the man who's never left my side through the unimaginable. But he cited having to work the next day as the reason he didn't take me out to dinner. Luckily my girlfriend swooped in and distracted me, bless her precious heart. So I was spared having to spend the evening of my third fortieth birthday starting World War III with my husband. No, I waited until the weekend to do that.

I understand calling this my fourth fortieth birthday makes me sound a year older than I actually am. But I've decided to remain forty until I'm fifty, at which point I will then admit to being forty-five. My husband has another surprise day in store for me this year, and has even taken a whole week off. My health is more up than down these days. I've got no reason to be bummed out. But I've reached maximum burnout and need a week in a hammock on the beach so I can find the drive to continue rebuilding my life. Yet no vacation is forthcoming. So I've got to coalesce a little relaxation out of my staycation over here. I may even live life on the wild edge of abandon and go ahead and take the whole week off.

Thanks for joining,

Leah

If you haven't yet, check out the YouTube channel I started with my husband about our experience intermittent fasting! Thanks!

Or click this link:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvYqsw45upm__5g5qRRaUCA

The Road to Reclamation

Tuesday concluded my seventh week of intermittent fasting (I.F.). It's been a wild ride. I'm happy to report I've lost six pounds, which certainly isn't going to break the internet but is nevertheless a steady and healthy rate of weight loss that gives me the greatest chance of long-term success.

But do I feel better? Well, yes and no. When I feel good, I feel very good. Much better than I did before. All the stuff I was doing to myself, like eating too much and not stopping when I'm full and eating crap because I have no accountability, that's all but stopped. Nutrition has become extremely important to me again, seeing as I'm only eating two meals a day and have a short window of time to consume my nutrients. I don't feel bloated or inflamed anymore, my wedding ring fits again, and my alcohol consumption is way down. All positive.

My flares, on the other hand, are having a revival. They are more frequent and more intense. I'm not just suffering from pain and lethargy. No, that down comforter of fatigue keeps wrapping itself around me for like three days each week. I have no idea if fasting is causing this or not because in all honesty, science and medicine don't know a concrete thing about diet and health. They just have a lot of conflicting theories accompanied by interpretable evidence. So all I pretty much have to go on are random mice studies and I.F. gurus who, like any respectable guru, swear up and down fasting is the answer to every problem that ails humankind.

So where does that leave me, the sick girl over here who after thirteen years is still so determined to regain some semblance of a life, she'll try anything? My fatigue has me back in the trap. You know, the one where I have so much to do on the days I feel okay in order to get caught up from everything I could't do when I was too fatigued to do anything, I'm not getting enough done. Not being productive makes me bitchy and short tempered. So do flares, in all honesty. This serves as notice that I'm officially bitchy and short tempered.

I've all but stopped exercising, which is something I'd been doing twice a week consistently since the beginning of the year. I've stopped writing my book and therefore attending my writer's group, that's how consumed I've been with getting my YouTube channel off the ground (about I.F., of course!), this blog going again, and my social media presence present for the first time in a long while.

Despite all the aforementioned negative, I'm sticking with intermittent fasting. Over the course of my illness, anything that's ever made me feel better in the long run has made me sicker initially. It's just the way it works with me. My life was a flippin' mess when I started I.F. at the end of May. I couldn't for the life of me force myself to pick my healthy habits back up and was well on my way down the rabbit hole of obesity and increasing sickness.

My life seems to happen in layers. Every time I've gotten a handle on my illness, this is how it has happened: First comes nutrition. Then exercise. Then the ability to wake up every day and care about the outside world. Eventually I find myself the same person most days, and on the fringes of resuming my position as a contributing member to society. If it takes me a few months of setbacks to find that path, I'm willing to keep on stumbling.

Thanks for joining,

Leah

Well for goodness sake, check out my darn YouTube channel! Click this link or copy and paste: 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvYqsw45upm__5g5qRRaUCA?view_as=subscriber

Earthquakes and Fireworks

For a week that started with an energy dip, followed by a consuming need to lay down the stresses of the world and take care of myself, life sure did ignore my request for some peace and quiet. First off, it was a three-day work week. Which may be nice for the gainfully employed, but I'm one of those people who work for themselves but nobody thinks really work. Meaning holidays frequently leave me with sorry little time to get any actual work done.

Plus there was my book club on Tuesday night. We meet once a month to discuss a piece of quality literature and drink wine. Not necessarily in that order. Instead of cancelling to tend to my health like a good girl, which I most decidedly am not, I pretty much started the party on Tuesday night. The 4th of July kicked off with a bang when on Thursday morning I was sitting on the sofa talking to my husband and the earth started doing this slow, shimmying, unpredictable rolling thing more commonly known as an earthquake.

It's been a while since I've been through an earthquake big enough to make me take pause. As for the event itself, it was uneventful. Thank God. Nothing even fell over. That gave me plenty of luxury to run around in my bathrobe moaning that I was in no way, shape, or form mentally or physically prepared for a natural disaster right now. I mean, I hadn't even washed my face or brushed my teeth yet. I had writhing cramps. My hair was dirty, and I absolutely could not leave the house without doing my roots first. And what about coffee? I still had two hours to go until I could break my fast, for crying out loud. If I'm going to wind up battered by falling objects and homeless, shouldn't I at least have my coffee first?

The fireworks cracked like gunshots all night long. Sigh. We Angelinos love our illegal fireworks. Needless to say, the dogs were freaked out. I was on edge from the damn earthquake and kept expecting another one was starting every time a firework popped off. Which is like the absolute worst way to live when residing in a disaster zone. But not being neurotic has never been my strong suit.

Friday's quakes were a much bigger deal. My apartment rocked and rolled for a really long time. Twice. Again the outcome was uneventful, thanks be to God. But what's so stressful when you're going through it is you never know how it's going to end. You don't know if the earth is about to juke and jive until the walls crumble to the ground. Or will the whole thing stop and not start up again for another five years? Or maybe it will stop and then ten minutes later the San Andreas will kick up her heels and drop California into the Pacific Ocean?

It's pretty fair to say that even after throwing my earthquake pack into the dog stroller, gathering up our electronics and valuables, and setting a pair of tennies and socks by the front door, adrenaline and cortisol were having a party inside this body o' mine. It was much easier to cope with the prospect of another earthquake after a few glasses of wine. Clearly my good decision making was at an all-time high.

Can I get calm and boring this week, please? It would be a wonderful switch from the chaos of last week. A week where, technically, the worst thing that happened was I didn't get anything done because of my stress over what could happen.

Thanks for joining,

Leah

2nd video about my first month intermittent fasting is now live on my YouTube channel: Intermittent Fasting: Our LA Story! Click this link to view or go to: https://youtu.be/fCSwwn34wRU

Hello Perspective My Old Friend

Last night I was exhausted. Like couldn't keep my eyes open exhausted. So I went to bed. The second I hit the start button on my sleep timer, a switch flipped on inside of me. The Ocean Waves track I listen to for sixty minutes every night to fall asleep, which usually does the trick in about four, was agitating and grating to my ears. So at around 3 AM I got out of bed, took an extra sliver of clonazepam, reset my sleep timer, and was out within a half hour.

This morning I woke up at 10:45. Stepping on the scale, I'd gained a pound since my weigh in from the day before. Sigh. If only I hadn't drank pizza and ate wine the night before, maybe I wouldn't have gained that pound back. Now I could launch into a whole diatribe about the normalcy of weight fluctuations and how a pound up or down isn't something to take to heart. But that's not the point of this particular blog post. And quite frankly I'm glad I ate wine and drank pizza last night. I mean if I can't make intermittent fasting fit into my life, I haven't a chance of staying on it long term. And I'm the kind of gal who drinks wine and eats pizza sometimes. Okay maybe the pizza is sometimes.

Nevertheless, I've been on a productivity tear these last few weeks. The more I'm able to accomplish, the more I demand of myself. It's a stupid cycle I repeat like a hamster running on a wheel every time my physical health gets strong enough to allow it. It's like I don't care if I relapse again, the need to catch up on fourteen years of lost living becomes this driving, super-important force that consumes me.

Plus I gained that pound back that I'd lost the day before. So despite it being 81 degrees outside, I decided to put my 14-year-old Yorkie in his stroller and turn half of our dog walk into a jog. When I came home I had tons of energy (because that's what intermittent fasting is doing for me), and I still had to kill like an hour and a half before I could break my sixteen-hour fast, so I did yoga.

It really was one of those mornings where I should have shuffled around the block with the pups, planted myself on the sofa, and worked on the computer all day doing things that are creative or move my life forward, like my book, this blog, or my gentle toe-dip back into social media. But I'm so freakin' burned out on how much work it took to get the first episode posted on our YouTube channel, the thought of getting on the computer was incomprehensible. And I really had made my flare worse with all that exercise. So I decided to juice and do a bunch of food prep for the week.

Chronic fatigue syndrome was my first diagnosis. When I have referred to relapsing in the past, it is because CFS has taken me down. Last time my relapse was triggered by the flu and lasted for like three years. I have said it a million times and I will say it again, give me fibromyalgia any day over the life-stopper that is CFS. So today after I spent three hours cooking and doing dishes, I felt the tip of that deep, pervasive, enveloping fatigue start spreading from the inside of my bones and keep going until it had taken over my eyelids.

Hello perspective my old friend. What a reminder of what my life could easily become again. I have got to stop running around like a psycho when I feel better. My life is improving. It is taking forever, but ultimately I am moving forward. I am not "behind" in life because I'm a loser or stupid or didn't care enough to try. I'm behind because I'm sick. Luckily my particular sickness isn't terminal and goes through periods where it abates enough for me to trick myself into thinking I'm normal. But that doesn't mean it's impact on my life, and what my life should have been, isn't a son of a bitch.

Getting sick again, to the point where I can't do anything but veg out on General Hospital and Jane the Virgin all day, is the most important thing for me to avoid. It's not being a loser. It's not not accomplishing my dreams. It's not never getting my book published. And it's certainly not failing to get in shape again. No, the most important charge I have, the only one that matters, is doing everything within my power to not relapse. It may happen by circumstance, I have an illness. But I have an obligation to myself, a personal responsibility to put my health first, and I have not been doing that. Tomorrow I will.

Thanks for joining,

Leah

Check out the YouTube channel I started with my husband: Intermittent Fasting: Our LA Story!

WEGO Health Award

Somebody nominated me for a WEGO Health Award. Me. Like I deserve a nomination for any sort of award. Nevertheless, I want to thank the person who took time out of their life to throw my hat in the ring. I have some strong opinions about myself when it comes to this blog, not to mention my basically nonexistent fibromyalgia awareness efforts. Flaky and not dependable are two terms that come to mind. I disappear for months at a time. Half of my blog is spent ranting and raving over what is. Life is an overwhelming experience for me. Sometimes getting up each day takes more than I have. As a result, consistency is not my strong suit.

Yet somebody still cares. It's a marvel. I don't feel worthy of having people care. Every time I stop blogging for an extended amount of time, I start up again with the fantasy that everyone has written me off as an unstable drama queen and I can kinda use this blog as a journal nobody will read. Albeit one published on the net, but a personal accounting of my twists and turns nonetheless. It doesn't take long for the hit counter to start rolling, letting me know people are indeed reading. Who are you? And why are you still with me? I honestly want to know.

I have a bad history with comments. There was a lot of hate exchanged in the comments section of this blog back in the early days. Reading the comments people left me used to inspire a freak out. Before I'd even open the darn thing, I'd prepare for the worst. My heart would start racing. My vision would tunnel in. Blood flow whooshing in my ears, I'd close my eyes and press the button with all the trepidation of a person nuking the world. And if the comment was mean, well, I'd most immediately, quite certainly come undone. Is it any wonder I shut comments off for a while?

It's a new day over here in Leahland. Comments don't scare me. Trolls and cyber bullies don't scare me. Quite frankly, I don't think there are all that many pointed in my direction anymore. And if there are, I don't care. I've got stuff to do. I've got a life to live, health to reclaim, and success to achieve. Perhaps I'm armoring myself up in preparation for the YouTube channel I decided to start with my husband. We're vlogging our experience with intermittent fasting. I can only imagine how rude those comments are going to get...

The thing is, in spite of my fear and paranoia over being made aware of the general public's opinion of me, I've encountered some amazing people along the way. Like the person who cared enough to take the time to nominate me for the WEGO Heath Award. Thank you, whoever you are. Finding the motivation to put myself and my sorry little existence out there year after year can wane. It means a lot to know somebody still cares.

Thanks for joining,

Leah

Nominate Leah for the WEGO Health Award: Best Kept Secret

The Little Loser

Three pounds. Last Monday revealed, after completing two weeks of intermittent fasting, that I lost three pounds. Thank God. It was a paltry relief, though, if that makes sense. I'm not gonna say I expected that simply narrowing the window of time I spend eating each day was going to quickly morph me into a perfect version of myself but...it would've been oh-so nice.

Last week I lost three pounds. This morning, none, bringing the total of my three-week weight loss to three pounds. Not exactly stellar. Also, in the same amount of time my husband has lost like ten pounds. Yay him. Now he weighs himself every day. That seems excessive to me. My moods are already questionable when I first wake up, and it's entirely plausible that a pound or two fluctuation could take a somewhat grouchy mood that burns off like the morning fog and make it stick around all darn day. But there's no denying he's experiencing more success than I am.

Intermittent fasting is certainly doing other things besides not help me lose much weight. Stirring up flares, for one. The flare I had the first week was epic. I got a big boil on my right cheek. I was a woman on the verge for like four days, which is a really long time to be ready to snap. Suddenly my tolerance for subjugating my own needs for the sake of another's convenience was nonexistent. I was on a mission to reclaim my lost life. Fueled by that special kind of amped-up anger only my worst flares can trigger, I decided no one was going to stop me and turned into a psycho bitch.

Week two was a huge improvement. I didn't have a flare. I drank a bunch of water so wasn't really hungry. I realized not eating for sixteen hours at a time wasn't going to send me into starvation mode. No, it was actually helping me feel much better. I seemed to have found a path of accountability and control. I went to the gym once and did yoga once.

Last week, not a good week. Another flare. The kind where I don't want to brush my teeth or take my vitamins, like the fundamental need to take care of myself didn't matter. I didn't exercise once, haven't done that since February. I even skipped my weekly writer's group. Now I live for my writer's group. It's the one thing I do in the outside world that makes me feel like I'm moving my life forward. But it's also the kind of thing I can't attend in an overly sensitive and irrational state. Having people rip apart my work is hard on a good day, but necessary for the betterment of my craft. But if I know I'm already sensitive and irrational, well, can somebody say powder keg?

Now every time I start exercising after an extended break, I go into terrible flare cycles for a while. I assume flexing my muscles releases the toxicity that's stored inside of me. Eventually if I stick with it, my flares go away and I wind up far better off than I was to start. Honestly, it's the only way I've been able to get out of pain. An absurd reality, I know, but one that I own all the same. Maybe that's what's happening with intermittent fasting? I've heard there's a whole cellular die-off and detox benefit to this lifestyle. That could be contributing to my uptick in flares.

Who knows what this week will bring. I'm certainly changing my weigh-in day. Deciding to step on the scale after my weekends of binging was a stupid idea. I feel too good overall to stop, even though I'm not seeing pound-or-inches results. I still need to exercise more, I still need to drink less, and no magic wand has been waved over my life. But ultimately I'm more in control of myself and moving in the right direction.

Thanks for joining,

Leah

Nothing Lost, Nothing Gained

So my first week of intermittent fasting is under my belt. Do we really wanna talk about my first week of intermittent fasting? I don't. It was a mess. I was a mess. What's new? Where to start...

Let's just say I thought I was a person who already kinda intermittent fasted. I wake up late because I go to sleep late. I have no desire to eat until hours after I've been awake. In fact, I view food and my need to consume it as a nuisance.

Don't get me wrong. I'm the perfect gal to take out to a fancy dinner with a sumptuous wine paring. I'll eat that plate up and drink you out of house and home, relishing every moment. But when it comes to taking time out of my day to prepare a nutritious meal and consume it for the sake of my health...well...there's so much other stuff I need to be doing.

With that attitude, one would think I'd be skinny. Or at the very least still really sick. Yet I'm neither.

One week of intermittent fasting showed me I was in no way, shape, or form already practicing intermittent fasting. Last week I was HUNGRY. Every morning I woke with food on the brain. Cutting myself off from food and drink by eight PM proved torturous. By the time I was ready to break my fast around noon, my mouth was watering. I was lightheaded. Spots were floating around the room. My body didn't look an ounce skinnier, but how on Earth could it not?

My weigh-in last Monday morning yielded not one single pound of weight loss. It was a bit of a shock. Then I remembered that's kinda how my life goes.

I didn't gain any weight either, but whatever. Considering how many hours I spent hungry, that's no consolation. Every morning I literally salivated while watching my clock as I waited for those "non-fasting" hours to arrive. When they finally did, I ate. Man did I eat. I was so afraid of being hungry once my eight-hour eating window ended, while I was in it--I ate. And I did yoga once.

This week was different. I broke my fast with coffee instead of plowing through a meal and didn't eat food until an hour afterward. I exercised twice and one of those was a weight-lifting session at the gym. Still not great but an improvement. The biggest thing I did was drink a lot of water. Like all the time. Every time I was hungry or thirsty during my sixteen-hour daily fast, I drank eight sips of water.

My husband told me eight sips makes me an obsessive freak, but what's new. It killed my hunger pains. I experienced no periods of light-headedness. My mouth didn't water once. I felt so much better as a human being, it's not even funny.

Having some control back in my life feels golden. Tomorrow I weigh in. Goodness gracious, for the love of all things holy, please let me have lost one pound.

Thanks for joining,

Leah

Adrift

I've been a lost little ship at sea over here. While my health has improved dramatically since last year, my life has not. I no longer have that nightmare of a chronic-fatigue-syndrome relapse to blame. No, this is much worse. I only have my lack of discipline.

Lacking discipline is far too simple a phrase to convey how far I've let my life go. I was furious that I'd relapsed so hard. I had to quit my job. I had to quit lifting weights. I had to quit socializing. I had to quit bathing daily and putting on makeup before I left the house, that's how pathetic I became. I couldn't walk my dogs on the main drag, the traffic too overwhelming for my sensory capabilities. My depression threatened to swallow me whole.

As a way to cope, I checked out. I drank to much. I ate too much. I stopped caring that I couldn't exercise. I watched TV for twelve hours a day. Cell-phone solitaire became my best friend. It's embarrassing and sad when I think about how poorly I treated myself as punishment for getting sick again.

But today I'm not that sick anymore. I still have flares, of course. Which is a far cry from life being one giant, two-year, never-ending, ever-present flare. I can complete a workout at the gym. I can suffer from a poor night's sleep and still fulfill light obligations the next day. Usually. Getting my period doesn't induce so much pain I race to hurl myself off the nearest bridge. The greatest gift I've been given is I'm no longer yanked to the ground by dips of extreme anger, let alone anguish. Most of the time.

Yet I still drink too much. I'm not eating all that great. Exercise is something I am trying to find the discipline to do more than twice a week. I've gained forty pounds and am displaying no urgency to change the evil ways that put me here. While I've abandoned TV for the most part and have devoted myself more than full-time to writing, I'm still trapped in a motivationless cesspool of shit I'm too unmotivated to drag myself out of!

Last week I committed to intermittent fasting. It's been one hell of an experience thus far. My first weigh in is Monday morning. I'll let you know how it goes.

Thanks for joining,

Leah

My Social Media Meltdown

Friday was a day for the record books. I don't know what was wrong with me, but I woke up off. I was moody and melancholy and all-together miserable. The world was a dark, awful, hopeless place where I didn't belong and couldn't find a spec of beauty. I hadn't felt this down-and-out in months. It's not that I thought my sick days were behind me, per se, but I was beginning to believe we'd taken a break for a while so I could actually make some progress in my life.

But not on Friday. No, Friday was one of those days where I poured myself a stiff one at four-thirty in the afternoon. Once that was done, I decided to set my sights on social media. I have a terrible relationship with social media and usually try and avoid it. Especially when I've been drinking. It's become a platform for bullying and hate, and I find my mood, faith in the future, and self-esteem significantly lower if I spend too much time on it.

Especially on Friday. I was relatively tame on Instagram. It was a picture of my first drink. In hindsight, I realize I was warning the world to watch out for what was to come. But how was I supposed to know that at the time? I drank two more and started posting smart-aleck comments on a few big "influencer" pages I follow. Well that got my toe wet, but apparently I was looking for something more akin to a full-body soak. So I moved on to Twitter. By then the ranting raver had come out. I blasted the writer of my favorite show about how disrespectful the season premiere was to the characters' arcs. Then I went to a couple websites that had reviewed the episode and gave my peace of mind to the comments section. But apparently that was too impersonal for me.

So I sunk my teeth into Facebook, which is the most convoluted place I could've possibly gone. And by this point, I was really in a tizzy. All the pent-up rage I've been suppressing by utilizing the site as little as possible started flowing outa me like lava. On my fibro support page, I went off on Facebook for not circulating my posts because I don't pay them. They've decided I'm a business, which I'm not, and are going out of their way to ignore my content until they get their paper. So what's next? I went to my feed and scrolled. It only took a few minutes before I completely freaked out. The post I wrote on my profile page was definitely more of a rant. I mean, everyone's blatant political agenda and lack of human decency really offended me. Except what I wrote was extremely dramatic and made people start asking if I was okay...

Um...maybe...

Then my computer, literally, died. Now I'm a conspiracy theorist from jump so that sent me over the edge. I know my phone and computer are already recording everything I do and say. Now it seemed like they were going so far as to send the information to the appropriate parties. And my punishment was instantaneous! Is it fair to say I went wild?

I woke up Saturday morning having returned to a refreshingly normal state of mind. Thank God. I had to figure out what was wrong with my computer and felt a little sheepish for acting like such a freak online. But as my grandpa loved to say, there's no use crying over spilt milk. My frustration at social media met one too many bourbon drinks and bubbled over. Good riddance.

Thanks for joining,

Leah