Flaring Depression

Am I depressed or in a flare? Am I flaring or suffering from depression? How, after all these years, damn near two decades of living with these conditions, can I not know the difference? A flare comes with insomnia and pain. Depression comes with a situational helplessness it doesn't seem will ever alleviate. A pressing down of my person into a flatness the three dimensions of life cannot reside in. A flare feels chemical, internal, an entity inside my body that has taken over control. So am I saying depression is a choice? Because anyone whose ever been there knows it sure as hell is not.

I'm on that hamster wheel running to nowhere. I'm trudging through quicksand, the struggle of placing one foot in front of the other sucking up the hours in my days. Life is backing up on me. Too much to do, too little time. And even less of a desire to get up and fix my reality. Just that panicky feeling, anxiety producing and overwhelming, every time I contemplate what's required to get back on top of my game. The amount of work required to right this ship isn't unfamiliar to me. I've stood at the bottom of this threshold many times in my life. Sometimes I've had the fortitude to take a shaky step out from the trenches, other times I've collapsed back down and rolled around in the mud a while longer before that strength finally knocks on my subconscious and yells at me to get it together, damn it! We aren't getting any younger over here, and the longer you put it off the more work there is to do!

Depression doesn't care. So I guess that's my answer. My melancholy is a symptom of my illness. But which one? Will this lift in a few days or will it continue to progress until the next few years are swallowed whole? The only thing I do know is the only way out is through. God I hate that saying, probably because it is so incredibly true. No magic pills, no quick fix. Just a slow and steady mastication of obligation. Taking one small bite out of what's required to make my life run until the day arrives when I wake up well-rested and enthusiastic, ready to slay the dragon again.

Thanks for joining,

Leah

Weight Management

I've struggled with carrying extra weight since childhood. As a third-grader, I remember racing home from school to eat an entire package of Top Ramen every day, which I have since learned is packed with calories and fat and makes me wonder what my mother was thinking??? Getting braces in seventh grade helped me drop a few pounds, since my mouth was frequently too sore for me to eat for a few days after the orthodontist would tighten them up. By tenth grade I had discovered boys and partying and food was the last thing I cared about. Then I went to college and gained the freshmen fifteen or twenty or whatever I wound up packing on. Eating French fries and iceberg salad slathered in ranch dressing from the dorm cafeteria every day didn't help. Neither did beer.

When I was twenty-four I joined Weight Watchers in preparation for my wedding. Was it really as easy as I remember? The romanticized hindsight of my memory has me believing I lost a good three to five pounds each week when I would step on the scale. Maybe I did. I was twenty-four, after all. I do know for sure that my seamstress told me I had to STOP losing weight or she wouldn't be able to alter my dress small enough to fit for the big day. Not long after the wedding we moved to San Francisco and there was a bar literally downstairs from our apartment. I spent far too much time there, followed by ordering pizza late night, and eventually got big again. By this time I was battling reoccurring bouts of acute pancreatitis triggered by my genetic triglyceride malfunction. I've had four over the course of my life and would be remiss if I didn't admit I've never had a pancreas attack when I wasn't 1) overweight and 2) off triglyceride medication.

One attack was so severe I spent two weeks in the hospital and almost died. That experience changed me. I quit drinking and eating fatty or fried foods and started exercising and again, the weight fell off. Unfortunately a few months later my symptoms that would eventually be diagnosed as CFS and fibro started. The ups and downs I've gone through since 2005 make up the majority of this blog so I'm not going to rehash. Long story skipped, I find myself sitting here today not obese, per se, but not healthy either. So back to Weight Watchers, now known as WW, I go. The thing is I signed up earlier in the year, didn't have anything close to the success I experienced in my twenties, and quit. But with no accountability I make ridiculous choices (like eating a bagel slathered in cream cheese every morning for breakfast) and while I've only gained back five of the ten I lost in the spring, in actuality I still need to lose twenty-five.

Like many things in life, my high expectations had set me up for failure. I thought I would input my food consumption into the app and the weight would fall off like it did when I was in my early twenties. I mean I was eating so much better! Yet no dice. So this time I'm going into it with reasonable anticipation. If I lose a pound a week and it takes me a year, so be it. It's better than gaining weight. If I stick to my points five or six days a week and fly off the rails on Saturday or Sunday, it's drastically better than what I was doing before. And if I have a glass of wine at night but don't have three, that's a marked improvement. Showing myself an ounce of compassion is worth the slow and steady climb toward health if that means I can stick to something long-term and actually get off the yo-yo for good.

Thanks for joining,

Leah

Off My Game

I've stopped writing. Like everything. I'm still banging out short book reviews for my bookstagram page, and actually got a job as a freelance book critic which is awesome, but as far as the "Leah Tyler the Writer" concept goes, I feel like a fraud. I finished my book a while back. My writer's group is receiving the last few chapters and then it will be 100% workshopped. It's past time to start shopping for an agent and publication. I even started to write a short story but never finished it. I feel like my writing just sucks. The thought of composing a second book seems inconceivable to me in my present state of maladjustment.

My health is in a strange place. Fibro is not my primary complication anymore, thank God. But I am my primary complication. My choices, my motivation, my dedication to the concept of health are all severely lacking. I've gained a significant amount of weight since my relapse in 2016. But I've been out of the trenches of that intense immune fatigue for a few years now. Covid lockdown didn't help, nor did my decision to start drinking wine pretty much every night in order to cope with said lockdown. I joined Weight Watchers to try and instill some accountability. After three months I'd lost like eight pounds, was starving, and totally lying to the app. So I quit when the gyms opened up a few months back. You bet I hit it it hard, considering the previous success I'd had in completely transforming my physical state back in 2013. Three days of intense weight lifting every week, for two months, and I feel myself getting stronger but not smaller. What the hell is going on? Besides the fact that I'm still drinking wine every night to cope with...what exactly?

I saw an old college friend last weekend and she asked me what I was up to these days. "I'm a very mediocre housewife," I said. We laughed, but I wasn't joking. I wrote a book but have done nothing with it. I'm very disillusioned with my trajectory in life right now. My ability to manipulate words into something evocative or impactful or beautiful or compelling just isn't inside me. I get angry when people call me in the middle of the day to "chat." Like whatever I could possibly be doing doesn't matter. Or my husband steps away from his home office to pop into the bedroom to "say hi and see how I'm doing." NOT WELL! Nobody takes me seriously! But am I taking myself seriously? Don't people treat you the way you let them treat you?

So here I am. We begin at the end. I started blogging in 2010 in order to teach myself how to write, so that's what I'm gonna do now. Remind myself how to become comfortable with words again. Reach inside myself and find my voice, my purpose, a spark of that passion that got me through the hardest years of my life. I'm not blogging for an audience, or accolades, or attention. I'm just a desperate woman over here doing the best I can to rediscover myself.

Thanks for joining,

Leah

Loneliness

A few years ago my husband was studying for a licensing exam and had to devote the majority of his non-working hours to cramming. He works best at the coffee shop, so after work and both days on the weekends, that's where he went. I was already living a solitary life and losing contact with the one person I saw on a regular basis hit hard. This was during the middle of my big relapse and I was quite depressed. The isolation compounded my desolation. I acutely remember walking my dogs on Saturday mornings and crying because I was the only person who was alone on the street. Everyone else was with friends, or their children, or other people. But alas I did endure, he passed his test, and we resumed hanging out. Slowly but surely I came out of my relapse and the accompanying depression lifted.

Fast forward to March of 2020. My husband came home from work on a Friday afternoon with three massive desk monitors and an ergonomic chair. He informed me that due to this covid virus that was going around, he would be working from home for the foreseeable future. Now at this point I had settled back into my solitary life and was doing quite well. Isolation was my happy place and where I found my greatest productivity. But now I had to adjust to never being alone. Ever. That was almost as hard to adapt to as solitude. My productivity tanked. I couldn't write, not with somebody in his dining-room office yelling into the phone all day. How on Earth was I supposed to concentrate? Our apartment was tiny. All those delicious hours of crafting my own agenda were gone. He was freaking out, I was freaking out, everybody was pretty spastic. Right when I'd be able to get my head into my narrative, he'd come busting in with some news of something that had happened at work. He, unlike me, was used to spending his days surrounded by people. I think I took a lot of naps and relished in my solitary dog walks because it was the only time I got to be alone.

Six months in we accepted things weren't going back to normal anytime soon and decided to move. We found a much bigger place with enough space for his office area. I got my dining room table back and was able to put my desk in another part of the house with two whole doors I could close between us to create silence. It's certainly had its challenges, but I believe we've done a remarkably good job of adapting to togetherness. But on Saturday morning when he took off to go run errands and I settled in for a day alone at the house, it was blissful anticipation for us both. Walking my dogs in the sunshine I realized how far I've come from that depressed crying girl who felt stabs of loneliness every time she saw people together. I just wonder what the adjustment is going to look like when he goes back to the office. 

Thanks for joining,

Leah

And Then I Got Covid

It was a Sunday evening in early November. I was lying on the sofa watching TV and my body was aching far more than it usually does. Shooting pains pinging against my flesh, my clothes hurt my skin and eyeballs ached. I had a gross taste in my mouth. And I was really cold. Probably a bad flare, I thought, while reluctantly pushing myself off the couch. I went into the bathroom to rummage around for the thermometer. I'd been relying heavily on that thermometer since March. Ever since covid happened, each time I felt crummy I'd take my temperature to decipher if my symptoms were a flare or if I had indeed contracted covid. Fever is not a fibro symptom for me so I figured as long as I didn't experience a temperature spike, I was dealing with fibro. For seven months my logic held steady. Flopping back down onto the sofa, I pushed the button and stuck the stick under my tongue. 99.4. Shit. I'm usually around 97.5 so this reading, given my other symptoms, registered as a low-grade fever.

Still unconvinced, I writhed around for the rest of the evening as I continued to feel worse. Advil would've helped but given the serious nature of covid, I needed to let the symptoms bloom to see if they went away (fibro) or increased (a flu but hopefully not covid). At midnight I went to bed and took my temp again. 99.9. Not going in the right direction. Seeking peace of mind that it was just the common flu, I went onto the CDC website and made an appointment for a covid test the next day. I froze in a feverish half-sleep all night and woke up feeling awful. In the morning my temp was 100.4. So I relented and took some Advil. My money was still on the old-fashioned flu because nothing had hit my lungs, which is what covid did, right? Yet I had no coughing, no congestion, no shortness of breath.

On Monday night I tested positive for covid-19. I immediately slid into a hyper-paranoid state, obsessing over every physical symptom being the beginning of the end as I waited for it to kill me. But it's a strange virus. I had a fever for like three days that easily abated with Tylenol. My doctor told me to get a pulse oximeter and my blood oxygen levels remained in the high 90s. I had a sore throat, some days but not others. And my taste and smell abated for a week but never fully went away. Mainly I slept like 18 hours a day for around three weeks. I would wake up, eat and get dressed, and fall back asleep. Toothpicks couldn't have propped open my eyelids but I was too tired to care. Everyone who depended on me for anything got ignored. Yet it was not the worst flu I've ever had. I'll admit, I was having flashbacks to when I had CFS/ME. Was this going to last forever and destroy my life too? But honestly I was too tired to care. Being awake for six hours a day doesn't leave much time for freaking out.

I would say it took over two months before I felt like covid was gone for good. Not that I was sick the whole time, but I would frequently wake up feeling crummy and figured this was it. The "deadly" part of this virus had finally gripped me. Yet it never did. I don't know if increasing my vitamin D and zinc supplements made a difference, or if the daily aspirin my doctor recommended helped, or if doubling up on my antiviral med (not remdesivir but in the same family. Also, not something my doctor told me to do) stopped it from becoming an extreme case. I'll never know. I'll never know why I didn't give it to my husband. I'll never know why it kills some people and for me was a moderate flu. And I'll never know why a mysterious virus invaded my body sixteen years ago, gave me CFS/ME and fibro, and never left. But covid was a flash in the pan for me.

If you're so inclined, drop me a comment to let me know how covid or the side effects of living in lockdown have impacted you.

Thanks for joining,

Leah

The Writer Who Doesn't Read

The cook who doesn't eat, the dog trainer who's never owned a dog, the marriage counselor who has yet to be married. I mean honestly, how effective can one be? Yet for a number of years I fell into the aforementioned category. I was a writer who didn't read. I could list my litany of excuses but that's not the point. What matters is my apathy was rewarded quite painfully. I spent years writing a novel. Then I had some people read it and realized I had made an excessive amount of mistakes and needed to rewrite it. So I did, then I tried to find an agent and my manuscript garnered absolutely no interest. So I rewrote it again and joined a writer's group. Within a few months I realized the mistakes my beta readers had pointed out were the mere tip of the iceberg peeking through the surface. The foundation of my book was a hulking mess. I had made a disastrous point-of-view mistake, what's considered a fundamental flaw in the structure of a novel that usually requires a(nother) rewrite to fix.

In my defense I read voraciously in my younger years and literature had evolved quite a bit since then. Not that I would've known, seeing as I didn't read. Which is why I was staring at the prospect of writing the same book for the fourth time. A notion which made me vomit a little bit every time I thought of it. Nevertheless, I persisted. I think it was upon presenting my fourth chapter to my writer's group that another major issue resurfaced. I had so many characters and storylines going on that I wasn't effectively representing any of them. Why was I trying to pursue a career I had absolutely no education in?

Taking a bite out of my original idea and chewing on it for a while, I devised a way to split my book in two. My initial objective had been to write a story about a girl who gets fibro and it rips her life apart. In order to accurately represent the experience, I gave her a full year of normal living to prove she wasn't "crazy," just damaged like everyone else, followed by a series of physical catastrophes (what we call trigger events) to highlight the fallacy of the "fibro's a psychological problem" conspiracy. Redrafting, I decided to make her sidekick the protagonist during that year of normalcy and basically write the prequel.

At this point it was painfully clear I needed to become acquainted with my contemporaries. I read a few books but didn't really know what I should be reading. So I joined a book club. It was 2019, around the time I was trying to pull myself from the isolation of my last relapse and rejoin life. Ohhh I felt like an alien. Luckily this book club was of the "bring a bottle of wine and some pot luck" variety. The liquid lubricant helped ease my social anxiety and eventually book club became the highlight of my month. So I joined another and was forced to discover audiobooks. Because who on Earth has enough time to lie around reading two books a month? Certainly not me. I was trying to write one, remember?

In 2020 I read 86 books. Audiobooks became my lifesaver back in March when lockdown was mandated and my husband started working from home. I could slip on my headphones while doing housework and not have to listen to him shouting into the phone all day. What joy! Not only that, my writing has improved exponentially. I have since moved on to a more professional writer's group and am happy to say I just submitted chapter 23 for review. Not that my manuscript doesn't need polish, but it seems the nuts and bolts of writing fiction no longer elude me. 

If you're so inclined, drop me a comment to let me know about your reading or writing journey!

Thanks for joining,

Leah

Chronicles of F.I.B.R.O.

Well hello there. It's been nearly a year since I last posted a blog. Is it too dramatic to say that between February 7, 2020 (my last post) and today, the world has pretty much flipped on its head? I don't think it is.

The break did me good. It's not like I haven't wanted to write in all this time. I just haven't known how to keep writing a blog centered solely around having fibromyalgia. Back in the day when I started blogging I was a very sick girl. Sick was the only way I knew how to relate to the world. My days were spent in a defensive huddle trying to fend off everything life hurled at me, a perpetual victim too burdened to take charge. I still have those days but thankfully that is not every day, anymore. Once I gained a semblance of control and found some stability, I was able to branch out and start moving forward. My worldview expanded and for a while there I was even hurling toward the stars. I believed I had conquered fibro and "that phase of my life" was behind me. Then it became very hard to write this blog.

Can I pick myself up off the ground and stop laughing, please? Because it wasn't long before I tumbled back down to hell and all that progress I thought was mine forever vanished in an instant. I relapsed. And with the physical relapse came an immense depression. They both took me years to recover from. Somewhere along the line I realized talking about my feelings was helping to keep me sick. So I stopped. It was easier to shift my focus to doing something else than feed the immense negativity threatening to swallow me whole. So what on Earth was I supposed to blog about then?

What a decade it has been. Throughout all of these ups and downs, I've grown tremendously as a person. Be it age or experience, my swings aren't as wide and lows don't dip nearly as deep. This has allowed me to pile the plate of my life high with a variety of different interests. They keep me marching forward regardless of the fluctuating state of my health. So how, given the many changes I've experienced over the last ten years, do I keep writing a blog solely about being sick? My answer is I don't. I write a blog about experiencing the world as a person who is sick.

Welcome to Chronicles of F.I.B.R.O.: a chronicle of my journey to find inspiration, balance, resilience, and optimism. I'm an aspiring novelist, rapacious reader, devoted dog mom, dedicated wife, avid health seeker, wine enthusiast, and commentator on life. All fit into a package who lives with chronic illness.

If so inclined, please drop me a comment and let me know how you are doing!

Thanks for joining,

Leah 

Stupid Society

The Super Bowl commercials this year were dumb. Usually they're funny, or poignant, or heart-tugging. This year exactly two of them made me laugh and two of them made me tear up. That's it. Everyone's been raving about The Irishman. All the billboards told me it got 9 Academy Award nominations for best picture! I watched it and was furious I wasted three-and-a-half hours of my life on such a pointless journey. Aside from Al Pacino's acting, I was not impressed. I'm sorry, were the women even invited to speak? Yet this is the stuff everyone thinks is groundbreaking...

I'm constantly on my own case for not engaging with society. Write a blog, I tell myself. Connect with people. Reach out. Go on Facebook. Post on Instagram. Tweet something funny or silly. None of it's that hard. Yet I don't. I remind myself that there are people in the world who care about me and I make no effort to reach into their lives. Why can't I force myself to engage with what's relevant? Is my social estrangement even necessary anymore, a condition of my ailments, or is my self-absorption pure habit. I'm not depressed. Is this a symptom of long-term bitterness?

But maybe it's not me. Maybe my Super Bowl Irishmen experience showed me the world has just gotten stupid. No wonder I don't want to engage. I don't want to dumb down to intermingle with mainstream society. I'd rather sit in my isolated existence and write a book, praying one day it's good enough for people to read. People in the world I've completely lost touch with. Don't worry, the bigger picture of my conundrum isn't lost on me.

Thanks for joining,

Leah

Supplement Yourself

I've always wondered if nutritional supplements work. I started on them in 2006, the year I was diagnosed, and have tried pretty much everything under the sun since. There's no way to really know if anything is doing anything. I don't know what's malfunctioning in my body, giving me fibro in the first place. So how could I possibly know if a specific herb is helping a specific problem caused by I don't know what? My pre-surgery experience gave me some answers.

My doctor instructed me to lay off herbs and fish oil for two weeks prior to my surgery. Science doesn't know how they impact bleeding. Most vitamins, minerals, and amino acids were fine. So per her instructions I stopped taking milk thistle, turmeric, resveratrol, spirulina, and fish oil. I stayed on magnesium, potassium, lysine, vitamin D, and a probiotic. By the end of the first week my flare had taken me over. It was the kind of flare I get when I'm in a much sicker overall state. I hadn't had one this severe in months, possibly even a year. Of course I throbbed and ached, couldn't sleep, and found it impossible to keep my eyes open for the better part of the day. But all of that paled in comparison to the mental takeover. I became absolutely convinced there was no point in continuing to live. Surgery was a waste of time and money. I'm such an unimportant member of society, why was anybody squandering their efforts on me? I was terrified it was going to increase my pain or create more problems than it fixed. I wondered if it was going to kick me into another five-year relapse, which is not outside the realm of possibility. The world became a dark, cold, awful place I was certain I didn't possess enough strength to survive. I actually called my mom and told her the devil had taken me over and she probably shouldn't come out from Arizona to help assist me. I had no way to guarantee my mind would perceive anything accurately. The last thing I wanted was to permanently damage our relationship. Lord knows I've done enough of that.

Fortunately for me during this entire experience of mental anguish, I couldn't take a full breath to save my life. That's one of my earliest symptoms of this illness I don't experience very often anymore, the inability to breathe. The whole time my mind was folding in on itself, my lungs were rejecting air. It was an astounding physical reminder that my emotions were not coming from me, they are a manifestation of my illness. My physical impairment was so strong I couldn't ignore its relevance. Perhaps that's the only thing that got me to surgery day without losing it completely, the constant reminder every time I tried to take a breath that something was seriously sick inside me.

The day I came home from surgery I started on my full regiment of supplements immediately. I haven't dipped as emotionally low since. I haven't flared as badly since. I haven't been unable to breathe or want to obliterate my own existence since. No, I don't know what's wrong with me, what fibro is, what's actually causing these problems inside my body. But after my surgery/supplement experience I'm more convinced than ever that my potions and herbs make a tremendous difference.

Thanks for joining,

Leah

And So I Try

I'm on a mission of self-improvement. The life I'm living isn't one I want to keep investing in. Instead of continuing to make excuses for myself, all the while growing increasingly more miserable, I'm determined to do something about it. Concurrently I have a chronic illness that kind of does what it wants regardless of how well I take care of myself. Which these days isn't all that great. The result is my life is pretty much a joke. What can I do but try?

This is a good example that kinda sums up my reality. It concerns my lack of regular exercise. I used to be in shape and while I'm not anymore, I'm still capable of getting through a yoga or weightlifting session before coming home to die in private. When I had surgery my doctor said to take two weeks off all exercise. Last Monday would have been 17 days post-surgery. It was also the first Monday in the new year AND decade. Didn't everybody plan on exercising last Monday? Well I didn't do yoga until Friday, when my fibro pain got so bad I had no choice but to force myself through an agonizing practice, the relief I anticipated afterward my ultimate reward. Except the pain emanating from my low back ever since is not a reward, it's a disabling punishment. Now I'm a rotation of heat, ice, and ibuprofen who can't get off the sofa. Sigh. I tried.

On a good note here's what I did last week to move my life forward. I joined both the library and a second book club. I set my alarm for 10:30 a.m. every morning. I resumed drinking coffee right after waking up instead of waiting. While it's giving me more energy in the morning, and more of a drive to start my day, it's wreaking havoc on intermittent fasting. Yes, I've gained a few temporary pounds back. Also I've started listening to this really hardcore, ex-Navy Seal, excuses-don't-exist motivational speaker while I put on my makeup. I don't know what he's doing to my brain but at least I'm putting on makeup. And I'm writing this blog. Knowing I had to put something on these pages kept me accountable. I can't yet tell if it's stemming from sheer embarrassment or an honest desire to improve myself, but with week one and some tiny accomplishments under my belt I did what I set out to do. I tried.

Thanks for joining,

Leah

Hello Again My Old Friend

It's January 3rd and I'm starting to write this at 3 a.m. So I guess that answers my question, new year same me. I stopped blogging in August after I got hit with another health hiccup. I kind of stopped doing everything involving other people except going to my monthly book club. Talking to strangers about a neutral topic is fine. But people I know, well, it's too hard to be sick and an actress at the same time. I'm weary of the game, pretending I'm okay regardless of what's really going on. Like, who has that in them after fifteen years? Not me. But who only wants to hang out with strangers who don't really know who you are? Ugh. Reality.

Unfortunately the mental result of withdrawing from people has been pretty catastrophic. So once again I'm forcing myself to reach out. Untangle the mess that is my life. Let people know I'm alive. I did manage to do something worthwhile in 2019. I wrote a novel. After my stint in the ER in August, I decided if I were to perish I needed something to show for myself. So I shut out everyone and everything and wrote for like 15 hours a day, six days a week. I'm now in the process of turning the rough draft into a first draft and boy did I do a rush job! But the essence is recorded and I have the raw material ready to be formed into something beautiful.

This isn't the book about a girl who gets fibro that I set out to write nearly a decade ago. I already wrote that book twice and made so many mistakes I needed to start over a third time. Which proves I can effectively sit here and write books to myself for the rest of my life and accomplish absolutely nothing in the real world. Scary thought. Starting the same book for the third time was awful. I was weary of my characters and bored with their choices. Then I realized I was telling too much story in one story. Sweet relief! Still passionate about my original idea, I decided to write the prequel. This book is about a famous feminist in her 60s who decides to look for the child she was forced to give up for adoption as a teenager. Little does she know, her daughter looked for her decades ago and did something terrible.

In order to sell this book I have to edit my rough draft, get back to writer's group, reignite my social media, hire some test readers, edit more, solicit an agent, deal with epic amounts of rejection, land a publishing contract, promote the hell out of me and the book, deal with epic amounts of criticism, and somehow be lucky enough to have all of this actually happen. Exhausted yet? I am. How on Earth is a woman who can barely function as a nonfunctional housewife supposed to do any, let alone all, of that?

So here I am. Ground zero. 2020. New decade, new promise, new hope. I have to rebuild myself from the ground up. I had surgery the week before Christmas and am still a little under from that. My lifestyle habits are atrocious. Admitting all of this is embarrassing. And incredibly liberating. Laying myself and my dysfunction out once again is proving cathartic. Hopefully taking this blog along on my journey becomes an effective tool to help turn the ship of my life around and stop spinning my rudders in the muck of sickness and isolation. 

Thanks for joining,

Leah

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