Monthly Archives: November 2014

All the woo

Went back to see the woo doctor today. We have officially “treated” so I am “clear” on: eggs, dairy, sugars, grains, msg, oils/fats, and my stomach acids.

We have “treated” but I’m not yet “clear” on: yeast, herbs (cilantro and garlic), nuts, and digestive enzymes.

As far as he is concerned, I should avoid the stuff he treated today for another 24 hours then I can go to town. He says I can start wheat and dairy today.

I’m having feelings. Worries. Concerns.

Still left to treat are: chocolate, corn, fruits, pollens, grasses, weeds, blood components, my own hormones (doesn’t shock me that I might have problems there), neurotransmitters, vitamins, temperature stimuli…

Oh the festivity continues. But I’m eating rice pudding so my life isn’t all bad.

Day 32

Breakfast: gf pancakes, maple syrup, potatoes, turkey bacon

Lunch: rice pudding made with arborio rice, rice milk, maple syrup, nutmeg, cinnamon

Dinner: lamb shank with olive oil, ghee, rosemary, sage, carrots, plus potatoes (with more ghee–you can make a reasonable mashed potato this way), brussels sprouts (the brussels sprouts were my favorite part of dinner–wacky.)

Dessert: blueberry sorbet and a gf peanut butter cookie. Because my husband loves me.

1:45pm- poop, solid, very dark brown, multiple hard pieces

6pm- long, thin, tooth paste-like.

Given that I’ve eaten it a couple of days in a row I’m going to add tomatoes to my “ok” list due to lack of reaction. Really I should update the list because it is longer now.

Good list:

rice, turkey, venison, lamb, chicken, sweet potato, carrots, cabbage, celery, bok choy, bell peppers, tomato, potato, brussels sprouts, broccoli, green beans, maple syrup, peanut butter, ghee, olive oil, banana, blueberries, grapes, cinnamon, sage, rosemary, nutmeg, basil, bay

Know for certain that these things are totally ok.

Maybe list:

pineapple, raspberry?

Bad list:

eggs, carbonation

I am of the opinion that I shouldn’t test any new food on Monday. I think I should wait until Tuesday. I’m trying to decide what to test next. I’m sort of wondering if I should test garlic next. If I *knew* one way or another about garlic it would make a lot of choices easier. It is shocking how hard it is to get food without garlic in it. If I can have garlic all of a sudden a whole new world of processed foods open up to me.

I think garlic might be harder to avoid than gluten or dairy or corn. Which feels wacky. I see the woo-Doctor on Monday. Maybe he will say that I am supposedly “all over” my gluten and dairy issues. That would be nice.

Mom guilt

I’ve been pretty sick this week. I dislike the fact that I have spent a lot of the time I’ve been sick beating myself up for being lazy. Uhm, I’m not lazy I’m sick. It happens. But it feels like it isn’t actually ok. And it has dragged on so long that whatever amount of “slack” I sort of grant myself is expired. Just stop whining already.

But man I’ve been sick. I’m waiting to see if I’m going to get better soon. I barely left the house this week. I collapsed when I got home from Hawaii and I’ve barely done anything since. Some laundry. Swept the floor. Grocery shopping. Not much.

I want to feel better but I don’t know how. I persevere on the elimination diet because I want to figure out the problems with my intestinal tract. I don’t feel better yet. I feel terrible. I don’t think I’m eating diverse enough calories. The lamb was alright, but it would have been good with garlic or ketchup. Sigh. I’m really not doing well at diverse calories right now.

When I decided to get started on this diet I thought it would take maybe a month. Now that I’m on day 33 I think this is going to take months. Ew. Ew. Ew.

But! It would be super nice to go on the road trip next year without diarrhea. I need to feel better. Somehow.

Day 31

Breakfast: rice cereal, rice milk, banana, maple syrup

Snack: peppermint tea, gf English muffin, raspberry jam

Lunch: turkey lunch meat, blueberries

Dinner: gf pasta, tomato sauce, soy cheese

6:45am- poop! Solid! a log!!

6:45pm- poop! Solid! a log! (greenish)

9:20pm- mostly solid, paste-like

Ok. This is good news. A full day of solid poop. I think I should try to have two or three days of poop before I experiment with food. Although I did add tomato tonight when I haven’t had tomato in a while. So maybe I have already experimented. And I had way more soy today than usual. Mmmm soy cheese.

Tomorrow shouldn’t be a lot of variation. Rice, get the damn lamb shanks in to cook promptly. Make more chicken stock so Noah can make risotto. Mmm chicken feet.

I feel like it would be better for humanity if I was locked in a closet for a few months. I’m just not very nice.

Tonight I made two pizzas. One regular one that I totally couldn’t eat. Then I made a gf pizza with soy cheese and I left off the pineapple and… It seemed ready to go. Then I was fucking brilliant enough to read the ingredient label. Eggs. Shit, shit, double shit. Eggs very clearly cause massive diarrhea. I’m not up for that tomorrow. So then I had to cook a third god damn dinner.

My attitude sucks. I hate food so much. I feel so sad and so bitter and …. man food sucks. I need to keep going with the experiment, because every piece of data I gather is useful but my attitude sucks. It doesn’t help that I’ve felt bad for a long time. But the whiny reason isn’t that important. My attitude sucks.

Day 30

Breakfast: gf pancakes, blueberries, banana, maple syrup, peanut butter, grape juice, peppermint tea

Lunch and dinner: chicken soup

Dessert: almond milk ice cream (toffee flavor), err just a few bites. I’ve been working on the singular pint for a month now and it is only half gone.

2:45pm- solid, brownish/greenish, smooth, nearly a log. paste-like.

Today I am going to need to cook some lamb. I need a change from chicken and turkey. I feel like I am starting to go nutty because all of the sauce-type-things I use with meat seem to involve garlic and/or onions so I am not supposed to eat any of it right now. Dry meat is hard to chew and swallow. Even in soup meat is feeling dry and bleh. I want some flavor. Damnit.

Food is feeling really hard. But for the chance at less diarrhea… I have to keep trying. I’d like to have my butt stop hurting.

Improvement

I only slept for about eight hours last night. I haven’t slept through the morning. I haven’t done much, but I haven’t been asleep. I’ve talked to the kids a bunch. They’re about done with me sleeping through the mornings. Physically it’s a mixed bag.

My ankle (The one I twisted almost two weeks ago) continues to be uncomfortable and sore. Kicking pants off causes it to hurt pretty badly. I’m starting to think I’m not going to be able to run the half marathon in two weeks. My knees hurt as well. That’s not an injury issue, that’s an inflammation issue. Also: doesn’t seem like a good omen that I am so dizzy that walking around my house is a problem.

I’m trying to eat more calories. I continue to struggle emotionally with having a very limited diet. It would be easier to follow the elimination diet if I could also cut myself at the same time but I’m told I shouldn’t do that. Instead I’m crying a lot.

Yesterday Shanna accidentally knocked some of my food out of the fridge. Glass bottles mean festive messes. And less food in the house for me to eat–which feels super huge right now. I said her name, I put my hands on her shoulders to direct her away from the dangerous mess (shards of glass are festive, yo) then said, “It was an accident, baby. Everyone makes mistakes.” Then I burst into tears and had a hard time not muttering/whispering that I don’t matter anyway and it has never been important to feed me and…. I slapped my hand over my mouth and sat down to just cry for a few minutes. Luckily Shanna was already off with her sister again.

I am having a hard time with how self-obsessed and vicious I feel. I think I need to continue the elimination diet–I had normal poop again this morning. But this is really really hard. I struggle with being kind and patient. I suspect I might have an easier time if my body hurt less.

It is better than it was. Most pain has settled to more like the 3-4 range with only occasional spikes up to 5-6. That’s improvement!

But I feel like shit. I feel like I want to clench my jaw really hard only I can’t because I’ve already cracked a tooth and I don’t want it falling out early. It is hard to consciously keep your jaw relaxed when you want to clench really hard.

It will be ok in the end. If it isn’t ok, it isn’t the end.

I’m feeling kind of scared that this elimination diet process is going to take many months given that I’m more than a month in and I have a long way to go. I am just about to the point where I can start seriously testing food. And I have the added confusion that the woo-allergy doctor tells me he is going to clear up my problems so maybe the elimination diet is going to be pointless.

Oh good fucking grief.

Days 28-29

28-

Breakfast: puffed rice cereal, rice milk, pork bacon

Lunch: rice, soy sauce, grapes

Dinner: rice, turkey, broccoli, sweet potato (with maple syrup and brown sugar), grape juice

12:45pm- diarrhea

11:45pm- diarrhea

29-

Breakfast: fried potato, turkey lunch meat

Lunch: rice, broccoli, soy sauce, grape juice

Dinner: chicken stock, chicken, cabbage, bok choy, carrots, gf pasta into “soup” 🙂 (Thanks Noah!)

7:15pm- green, paste-like, semi-formed

 

I slept for about 12 hours last night. I have already taken a nap today. I’m not feeling better.

Or I’ll cancel plans.

Today hasn’t been a great day for my health. I started out the day by passing out/collapsing in the bathroom. I tried to stand up from using the toilet and woke up I have no idea how long later with my head wedged in the corner between the bath tub and the wall because I fell forward. I’m lucky I didn’t slam my face.

I slept through a lot of the day. The kids woke me up as necessary but mostly I was unconscious.

I feel so bad.

Health inventory

I am feeling excessively whiny. I am hoping that if I record the full whine I can stop repeating bits of it to Noah and anyone else who will listen. It is hard to not talk about it even though I know it annoys people to hear about.

Starting at the top, because I often do that. Head hurts. I have a headache in the forehead part of my skull. I have a raging headache in the back of my skull where I have my usual minor headache caused by looking down too much. I have a fractured tooth and that isn’t feeling good. I get a crown in just over two weeks. My TMJ (yes, this one has a real diagnosis from a real doctor) is acting up like mad and both sides of my jaw hurt like crazy. I’ve clearly been clenching and fighting the clenching and that makes me ache something fierce. I also have a ton of sinus pressure and I feel like I have a cold.

My neck hurts. The muscles supporting my skull are all corded with knots.

My shoulders and arms hurt really badly. Surfing was a lot of very unfamiliar motion and even moving my arms hurts. I can feel a lot of knots I’m not used to having. My range of motion is impacted. Surfing was fun but very hard. Luckily my forearms aren’t as painful as usual. (I’ll thank my lucky stars for that one.) I’m having a lot of general joint pain (I include the TMJ with that) and my shoulders/elbows/wrists/finger joints are all painful. It isn’t my normal “typing fucks me up” pain–it’s different.

My chest and upper back feel sore, like I was punched a lot. (And yes, I do know what it feels like to be punched a lot.) My abdominal muscles right below my ribs are still so sensitive that gentle touching hurts. Luckily the pain has come down a few notches and I will no longer scream if the kids idly brush me. *phew*

Then we get into the intestine region of the torso. Oh holy hell. It is improving! That’s a great thing. After the plane ride just about anything would be an improvement. I feel tender and sore. My lower back aches really badly, but I’m used to that. It spiked into much more intense pain when I was bleeding last week thanks to cramping but it isn’t as bad now. *phew* But my belly region is very uncomfortable and sad.

My hips hurt. My hips hurt so much. My thighs hurt. My knees hurt. My calves hurt. My ankles hurt. Seriously, my ankle hurts so fucking much I can’t sit cross legged. My feet are sore and tender.

Have I mentioned that I don’t feel good?

Tomorrow I will be blessed with a meal cooked by someone else that is within plan and multi-course and is likely to help me feel loved and taken care of while having flavor. Noah is still being my hero with cooking for me, but he has less experience with this range of restrictions. He’s doing his best, but it is hard to adapt to an elimination diet. Especially while he is still cooking different stuff for him and the girls that follow our more normal diet.

Today the girls asked the babysitter to make them ramen for lunch. When I smelled it I almost started crying because I wanted it so much. I am committed to figuring out what is making me sick, because clearly I took some inflammatory food out and then put it back and my body is freaking the fuck out but it is hard feeling denied food. It is excruciatingly hard on a daily basis. I feel like I don’t deserve food.

My friend told me it is great that I haven’t fallen into the “I can’t eat anything” trap and now I feel ashamed of myself because I totally want to say that over and over. I’m trying so hard to be positive. I think it would be easier if my kids weren’t eating my favorite foods in front of me while I can’t have any.

It is shocking to me in an ongoing way how visceral food is. I read people write things about how food is just fuel. Oh man. It totally isn’t. It is love and comfort and bonding and right now I’m shut out of my favorite forms. Holy shit this is hard.

I am trying to keep my whining to myself. It is hard. I’m trying to keep up with the whirl of activities but it is hard. I feel dizzy and weak. My friend pointed out this weekend that I am drastically under caloried for the amount of exercise I’m doing and she’s right. 17 days till the half marathon and then I will be cutting back my exercise a lot until I have food more under control. I do want to do this race though. I’m still upset with myself for paying for a 10k I didn’t do this year.

Tomorrow I drive to San Pablo. That will be a good trip. In the evening Pam is coming over. She’s about to head off for a long visit with family on the other side of the world so I have to store up my Pam attention while I can. Friday we are going out to Modesto to see friends for the day. (Luckily the friend I am going with is very happy to do most of the driving. *phew*) Next week I have another visit with the woo-allergy doctor and therapy and a massage. I am one lucky, supported person. The week after that I see the Kaiser specialist (I have low hopes and much bitterness in my heart), have dinner with a friend I haven’t seen for a bit, have a dentist appointment to get a crown, hopefully we will get to decorate the tree with the home school group, and Pam is coming over–all that before Thanksgiving. T-day we are staying home while I cry about not being able to eat a real Thanksgiving dinner. I just can’t watch someone else eat what I want to fucking eat and can’t. I can’t. I would be so mean and self-involved and such an asshole. So we are staying home. Then that weekend I run the half marathon.

December will be slower than November, for one thing less exercise. I’m not driving much in December. Other than the grocery store the only driving I have booked for December is therapy. Given that the kids have been wanting to stay home while I have therapy because they want the screen time I’m not even sure if we will be making the park days.

I could seriously use a whole month of not doing much. For one thing, I need to build the trailer that is sitting on a pallet in my driveway. Also: I’d like to finish the planter box project in the back yard. I have been so exhausted I have not been physically able to do the work. I feel pathetic, but bodies have limits.

I feel like an asshole because numerous people have asked me how they can help and I don’t have good answers. One friend told me to give her a list of foods and she would meal plan for me. I *can’t* follow through on that. Every few days I seem to be changing what is excluded or included because I have no real guidance. The best I can do is what I’m recording here. That isn’t great.

I don’t actually think there is much help I can get. I’m lucking in to going to someones house where they already follow a diet that lines up with my elimination diet. I only had one or two “no’s” to add to their list of no so I didn’t have to think hard.

I feel like I can’t think very well. I feel confused and stupid.

Despite feeling shitty I continue to be grateful that I get to be married to Noah and I’m really glad for my kids. They are so awesome.

Days 24-27 (Not really “on plan”)

24-took Ibuprofen and pot.

Breakfast: gf pancakes, strawberries, banana, peanut butter, maple syrup, grape juice

Snack: yogurt parfait with blackberries, strawberries, granola, and orange juice (that wasn’t part of the parfait)

Lunch: cantaloup, watermelon, some other green melon, grapes, cheese, butter crackers, chocolate with macadamia nuts, and some pineapple juice (on the plane meal)

Dinner: 1/2 a turkey wrap, 1 skewer of chicken teriyaki and a few bites of rice

2:30 am I woke up with lots of solid poop.

3:00am second surprise volley during what I thought was just peeing. Not boding well.

10:45 am small pieces that shoot out really fast (I always worry about accidents when it gets harder to hold in)

11:40 lots of yellow diarrhea

On the plane I had terrible gas pain.

25- took pot and fish oil

Breakfast: chocolate milk soaked french toast with banana, peanut butter, maple syrup, chocolate sauce, black tea, sugar, cream (So damn good)

lunch: chicken fried rice with gyoza (almost certainly made with egg)

Snack: Dole whip with pineapple

dinner: more fried rice, one french fry

8:20am- light diarrhea

1:45pm very solid poop

7ishpm yellow, paste-like, lots and lots

8pm- yellow, only a little bit, mostly formed

10:30pm greenish, medium sized logs pastey.

26- took pot and fish oil

Breakfast: fried rice and gyoza (still tainted with egg)

Lunch: bag of pineapple, pieces of sweet bread, pineapple soda

Dinner: 1/2 a turkey sandwich, 1/2 a slice of lemon cake

Sometime in the am I pooped and didn’t record the time. There were many semi-solid pieces.

1:45pm- yellow, loose, lots of little pieces (I wrote people in the book. Ha.)

3 more rounds of burning, awful diarrhea on the plane but I didn’t get times and I was in the midst of changing time zones anyway. So much horrifying gas pain on the plane. Terribly painful bloating.

27- took nothing

Breakfast: fried potatoes, turkey wrapped in pork bacon.

Dinner: rice, turkey, carrot, cabbage

I felt like shit all day and couldn’t eat more.

1:45pm- yellow, mostly formed, in several pieces

6:30 pm diarrhea

7:30 pm diarrhea Burn baby burn

That brings me up to today. When I haven’t pooped yet. Wheeeee.

I seriously think I should stop eating pineapple. But it was good.

I’ll catch up on data eventually.

I haven’t been able to talk myself into eating much today. I feel too awful. I’ve eaten breakfast and breakfast wasn’t big. But I’m managing to produce a very large amount of poop. I didn’t eat much yesterday either. Yesterday I ate: fried rice (about a cup), two gyoza, a bag of pineapple, a big chunk of sweet bread, half a turkey sandwich, and half a lemon loaf slice from Starfucks. And I spent the plane ride running to the bathroom for horrible diarrhea.

Today no diarrhea, but lots of solid poop. WHAT THE EVER LOVING FUCK IS WRONG WITH MY INTESTINES?!

But I’m pretty sure I should stop eating pineapple. My tongue feels like I’ve been licking a cheese grater.

WHINE WHINE FUCKING WHINE.

My body feels so yucky. I’ve done very little today. I feel very ashamed of myself for doing little. But I feel so bad.

So tired.

I am so tired there aren’t many parts of my body that aren’t in overwhelming pain. A 5 is probably the average level of pain for my body parts with some pieces spiking to 8 and 9. I didn’t really follow the elimination diet in Hawaii–I had too little control over cooking. As a result most of the time I had the most heinous gas pain I think I have ever experienced. Double over in pain and can’t breathe bad pain.

I am much more motivated to figure out the food stuff. I’m going to get strict on food again and work through this puzzle.

I am not going to do the full marathon in March. I feel like a steaming pile of dog shit. I can’t eat adequate calories for the amount of physical activity I’m doing let alone marathon training. I’m hurting my body with pushing myself to continue to exercise long after every part of me hurts.

The surfing was rad, but I was in so much pain when I arrived that by the time I left I felt nearly incoherent. And today is worse. The abdominal muscles you use to push yourself up over and over on a surf board hurt so bad that my kids gently touching my chest causes me to shriek with pain.

I tried not to whine too much, I think I did ok. I did do some whining about being in pain, but I didn’t make it the focus of the whole trip. I still participated. I did have fun. I don’t think I brought everyone down.

It was a nice trip. I’m glad I went. I had fun talking with grown ups without having to filter. I was blurty and I over-shared a lot of things, but I rarely have a safe environment to do that any more. Luckily these are people who have been through the crucible already and they aren’t too freaked out by my stories. *phew*

I’m glad I went. I really want to bring my kids there.

Day 23

Breakfast: gf pancakes, strawberries, maple syrup, grape juice

Lunch: turkey soup and homemade smoothie: (orange juice I froze from our tree last year, blueberries, strawberries, banana, grape juice)

Dinner: we went out. It was glorious. We went to a Mongolian BBQ restaurant we love. I had lamb and chicken and bell peppers and cabbage and bean sprouts and carrots and I feel like there was at least one other vegetable. Pineapple out of a can. Wheat noodles. Soy sauce, sugar, cooking wine, vinegar, a splash of bbq oil, I winked at the sweet and sour sauce but didn’t really add much. It tasted really good.

Yesterday I woke up at 1:30am with diarrhea. I assume Toxic Smell was getting even with me. It was so tasty I don’t care. It’s been a rough few weeks of sometimes having diarrhea but not getting to eat what I want.

At 9:50 am There was a long, on the thin side (but not pencil thin, closer to a normal log)paste-like log. So it is up and down in consistency.

I’m very likely to go off-plan this weekend. Unfortunately for you all, I will tell you all about my poop as a result. You’re welcome.

Days 21 and 22 (whoops)

21 first- no pills

Breakfast: gf pancakes, banana, peanut butter, maple syrup

Snack: gf English muffin, peanut butter, raspberry jam

Dinner: soup made with turkey stock, turkey, venison, bok choy, soy sauce, green beans, carrots, bell pepper, celery

It was a festive pooping day.

2:30am- green/black, cloudy, not solid (blueberries!)

7:45am- formed poop, two logs

9:15am- three small brown pieces, very sticky and hard to wipe up

11:45am- yellow, multiple soft pieces that quickly dissolve

Day 22- took pot and fuck the rest of the fucking puke-inducing vitamins

Breakfast: gf pancakes, peanut butter, maple syrup, banana, grape juice, peppermint tea

2nd Brekkie: rice cereal, rice milk, maple syrup, turkey bacon

Lunch: two chicken soft tacos from Taco Bell with no cheese (I was told I could have wheat…) This was my first eating out in over three weeks. It tasted sinfully good.

Dinner: turkey soup (what a let down after the AWESOME of fast food)

3:30am- small yellow pieces, log shaped, smooth looking like toothpaste

? afternoon- small chunks but not real distinctive

 

So far the doctor of woo says that I am cleared for wheat (THIS IS SO EXCITING), sugar, and all cooking oils/fat. *phew* The dairy treatment didn’t take (and given how many sub-parts I am “reacting” to he says that isn’t surprising. If you are only “reacting” to one small part of something one treatment is often enough. If you react to every subcomponent it can take a couple of treatments.) so we redid it and I get to cross my fingers for Monday.

So I had wheat today. Let’s see how festive my poop is tomorrow. Awesome.

Hoops, self-care, and being mercenary.

Today was the kind of day where I walk out of therapy saying, “That’s why I pay for therapy.” It doesn’t happen every time. I’ve spent the last two weeks wondering why I pay for therapy. Then I get reminded. Because I’m not good at framing things.

Today my therapist and I spent a lot of time talking about my friendships with women. She asked me if I have noticed that I like to pick (for my closest relationships) women who are not good at taking care of themselves, let alone anyone else. I reflected for a few minutes and said yeah, I’ve noticed. My “besties” have pretty much been universally people who can’t feed themselves regularly and appropriately, most of them can’t finish school or work or clean their own houses. They don’t exercise. Many of them have trouble with hygiene (and I have low standards).

I don’t say that to be mean, I say it because it is true. I pick a lot of people like that. I could go down a list. They are all functional in some ways at some times. But not consistently and not across the board. They are all people who struggle with the basics of their own self-care.

Then I enter into a relationship and turn my neeeeeeeeeeediness towards them and.. guess what? They let me down. Because they can’t take care of themselves or their actual dependents… let alone me. It isn’t a reasonable expectation of them. I don’t go pick people with a whole drawer full of spoons. Then when they can’t take care of me I feel like it is a statement of my worth as a human. I decide that since they can’t/won’t care for me in the ways I need/want I should die.

This has been a consistent pattern of mine for decades.

I get into relationships with people who can’t take care of themselves and then when they can’t care for me it feels like they don’t love me enough. Very much like my mom. It feels like no one will ever love me enough.

But Noah does. He can’t meet all of my needs, but he does love me enough. Getting one of those people in a lifetime is a lucky break not attained by most people. I shouldn’t complain. I shouldn’t be so greedy.

My therapist suggested that I need to stop thinking about these people as sources of support. The trouble is, I tend to treat people like they are on the inside or the outside. Either I can ask them for things or I can’t. So if I have to pull back from expecting things from someone, I push them all the way outside the box. I don’t know how to have a middle ground.

I’m struggling with this with Sarah. (Former housemate Sarah–remember her?) We are trying to find our way back to friendship. But she got shoved outside the box. How do I let someone in a little but not all the way? (To be fair, she’s gotta be in a similar position because I was more volatile and problematic when we had problems. I am inherently scarier.) It was nice taking the Impact class with her. When I started crying and feeling scared there was someone in the room who understood why I was crying. I didn’t have to explain anything. She just knows. She’s already put in all the hours and hours of time listening to the stories so she understands. Whatever difficulty we have in dealing with one another’s needs… we understand one anothers’ history. So in the class I could turn to her for physical comfort when I generally won’t let anyone touch me.

I feel like there needs to be an in between slot. Not in the box not outside the box. Part of the frame of the box. There and accepted and loved but… not to be depended upon.

I can’t expect people to know how to treat me even after many years of telling them. People don’t listen. I know that. They don’t actually care that much. They may “care” but they don’t care enough to adapt their style of interacting with people. (No shaming here, I am similarly entrenched in being who I am.) I don’t gentle-down very well for people. I struggled like hell to behave appropriately around Jenny and my niece when they visited. I am not good at adapting to other peoples needs. I don’t think that other people have trouble adapting to me because they are terrible, unloving people. I’m hard.

I know that I am hard. Sometimes Noah starts rattling off all the ways I need to be accommodated: all the things he has to pay attention to, all the topics he has to avoid, the body language he has had to carefully learn. I feel pretty bad for him, actually. I don’t entirely understand why it is worth his effort. But it is.

Why do I manage to ignore the fact that Noah thinks it is worth jumping through hundreds of hoops but I dwell on the fact that other people can’t clear some.

It isn’t that my friends do nothing for me. It isn’t that they don’t adapt in any ways. It isn’t that they don’t care. It isn’t that they aren’t trying. I am hard. That isn’t their fault and it isn’t appropriate to get mad at them for doing their best.

Ok, then what do I do? When I can’t get mad at other people because they are doing their best, that is when I tend to decide that I should die because I am so terrible for asking for my needs. Over reaction much?

My shrink suggests pulling back. She said that I put too much energy into wanting friendships because I don’t have anything else to distract me, like a job. I told her that it isn’t that I need a job. I don’t have much of a family and my friends get all the energy that I would put towards my family complete with all the broken that resulted from my actual relationships with my family.

I do have a family now. One complete with no abuse. I am the most potentially problematic person in the house and I actually manage to keep a pretty tight rein on my crazy with my kids. (Noah gets more backlash.) I’m not perfect, but I have it on good authority that perfect parents raise incredibly fucked up kids. I’m better off not trying for perfect.

My shrink then clarified that by “distraction” she meant interactions with adults. I pointed out that when I worked, I was a teacher and I had the same problem I have now. Clearly a job isn’t the solution.

What is the solution? It occurs to me that the highest possible payoff for my energy is to really focus on being appropriate with my kids and home schooling them so that in 20-30 years maybe they will be the relationships I have wanted my whole life. That really is my best shot.

It isn’t really worth putting that much energy into most friendships. I will know them for a few years, maybe a decade or so, and they will wander off to their Next Thing. I do the same thing. I’m not being judgmental. It is ok that people do that.

My shrink suggests that I should stop deciding that people are my friends and thus anything they do is ok. Instead I should look at their behavior and decide if someone is acting like my friend and when they aren’t I should create distance. Not because I’m being mean, because I am taking care of myself.

Recently I went off on poor Pam about hoops I don’t want to jump through. I was bitching and whining in context of home schooling. I want x kind of event but I only want it y distance from my house with z frame work and other people want me to do something else! What the heck! I don’t want to jump through their hoops! For example, today park day is 27 miles from my house. No, I don’t fucking want to drive that far to sit at a park. Not because I have a problem with anyone there (I actually feel like this group is remarkably delightful) but more because I have to drive past almost 100 parks to get to the one that is close to the house of the organizer and uhm… yeah no. Yes, they move around. But they generally stay closer to the house of the organizer. Cause she’s smart like that. She’s been doing this many years and she’s not going to drive all over the place because she’s gotten burned a lot with people not showing up. I get it. I’m not cranky with her. I’m sad that we don’t live closer to one another but I’m not angry and I don’t feel betrayed and she sure as shit doesn’t owe me anything. She comes to stuff at my house when it fits into her schedule.

Hoops are funny things. I use that word to mean a wide variety of things. It has been my experience that people in SF/Oakland act like the freeway only goes in one direction. I have to drive to them. (Not universally–there are some people who drive here from those places and I rarely go to them so I get that I’m a hypocrite here.)

With home schoolers, we all mean very different things when we say we home school our kids. Some use prepackaged curriculum and sit down to do school every day. Some people are Unschoolers Out In The World and they are almost never in their home. Most people are some kind of hybrid and things shift from year to year. I’m selfish and self absorbed so I want other home schoolers to live near me and mostly do things how I do them. When I want to socialize with other people I have to accommodate to their preferences (cause inviting people to just come hang out with me and the kids isn’t working very well lately).

I’d be thrilled if people would just come visit me more often. But, many of the home schoolers seem very uninterested in that and I’ve mostly stopped asking. I’ll try again at some point. Maybe. We’ll see.

Some days I think I would be better off if I actually lived more rurally so I would let myself stay home and not feel the constant anxiety that I am somehow “not doing what I should do” by not going to museums and zoos and and and and every fucking day.

I am not real big on entertaining my kids. I seriously expect them to learn how to entertain themselves. I really expect them to learn from any environment and I have stuffed my house full of good learning opportunities. I don’t need to take them to a museum every day for “stimulation”. They haven’t read every book in the house yet. We’re stimulated.

There are tons of science stuff I want to do with the kids, but most of it takes a lot of set up and clean up and I’m not willing to do it when I have only an hour or two in between other things I have to do. They would love to do bigger art projects. (Although man we already do big art projects.) There are hundreds of things we could do in our house. But I can’t do them in an hour or two. I really need whole days home and I just… don’t seem to be getting them. Even the days we are “home” we are invited to the park and I don’t want to say no because I’m scared shitless that I am going to isolate my kids. So instead we drift through socializing and don’t do a lot of the really interesting things I think of. We just don’t make the time.

My shrink told me to stop putting energy towards people who aren’t acting like my friends. Given that I’ve had to pause this typing multiple times because one of my former students is negotiating to come for a visit because she loves me a lot and she misses me… it is kind of a fascinating dichotomy.

Why do I chase people so hard when they don’t seem to like me that much when there are plenty of people who like me just fine? Because I feel more comfortable with people who will speak to me with contempt. Because that is how I feel about myself.

I need to stop feeling like I’m “doing everything wrong” when I don’t want to do the same thing as someone else. I’ve been pretty sure about the home schooling path I wanted to take for more than 16 years. Why do I let myself spend so much time feeling bad because I don’t do the exact same thing as other people? There isn’t a rule book. There isn’t a One Twue Way to homeschool. I don’t feel guilty when I stand next to traditional schoolers. I’m absolutely sure that isn’t the path for me. Why do I feel so bad about home schoolers who make different choices?

Because ours is a species of conformity. That shame feeling is biological.

I love my friends very much. Even when they aren’t very good at caring for themselves. I have similar issues and I don’t feel like I belong on a holier-than-thou-high-horse. I’m just a broken girl trying to put myself back together. Trying to make a coherent whole out of the broken pieces of my psyche.

If other people don’t love me enough, that just means I need to love myself more. I need to try harder to take care of me. Self-care is a radical act. It may mean I step back from situations because I need to care for myself. That’s ok. I’m permitted. Caring for me is hard. Sometimes I feel very overwhelmed by how hard it is. Asking for help isn’t the most effective way of dealing with my issues. Not really. Staying home and taking care of me is much more effective.

And in the process, maybe I will teach my kids how to take care of themselves and they won’t have to learn it in their 30’s. I was not mothered appropriately. I can’t change that now. But I can change what I pass on. That is the only part I have control over. I can’t fix other adults just like they can’t fix me. It is self-hating to try.

I shouldn’t take them pulling back as a signal of my lack-of-worth. Instead maybe it is a sign that they are making healthier choices and I should be supportive. We aren’t teenagers any more. We can’t live in one another’s back pockets. We have very busy lives. Very full lives.

Friends show up when they can. They give what they have to spare. Family is on tap to give until it hurts… not friends. It is sad that I don’t have an adult family to depend on, but life works that way. Instead I have some of the best friends anyone has ever had. I should not take their best and bludgeon them with it. That’s not exactly gracious. That’s not a way to get more love from them in the future. I do want more love. Even if they have none to spare today.

That isn’t about me.

My worth is separate and distinct from the behavior of everyone in the world. That is hard to remember sometimes.

And then I come home from therapy and my wonderful daughters cuddle me and “read” me stories and tell me “funny” jokes. (I made a video today of Calli’s knock-knock jokes. They are “funny” and wonderful.)

I am financially stable. I have at least three people who love me intensely. I have a lot more people who love me at least a little. That’s more love than many people get. I haven’t been raped in eight years. I haven’t moved in over eight years. I exercise more than I ever have. I hate this elimination diet, but I’m making real progress on something that has been painful and exhausting my whole life.

Today’s run was nice. I like coming down the big hill and seeing the sun rising over the valley. I like where I live. I like my life. I’m whiny and I have trouble seeing the good parts on many days, but I don’t want to be any where else. I don’t want to do anything else. How many people can say that with a straight face?

Ok sure, I do want a vacation. Hawaii will be awesome. But I will come back. I will come back to Wonderland and the best family I’ve ever had.

How many people get to be so lucky?

This week is crazy.

Monday was one of my slowest days. 9:30 doctor appointment. Babysitting from 8-12. Went to grocery store and bank on the way home from doctor. Came home and did chores and chores and chores.

Tuesday (today): must run 6 miles, 9:30 therapy session which means a three hour trip out of the house. No park. The kids want to stay home with Noah and play Minecraft. Shanna has just finally started playing instead of watching endless tutorials so I’m not actually cranky. I feel kind of weird about being happy that she is finally learning to *do* something with the game.

Wednesday is insane. Run 5 miles. Babysitting from 8-12. Doctor appointment at 9:30. I have to pick food up from the co-op right after 12. 12:30-3 I plan to sit on the couch and read to the kids. At 3 Pam shows up. I run out the door immediately for a 4pm dentist appointment. Noah won’t be home until after bedtime because he’s teaching.

Thursday I plan to hide in my room. Also: the kids and I need to go on a bike ride.

Friday at 5:30 in the morning I leave the house to head towards the airport and Hawaii.

It is a very full week.

I wonder if I can stay busy enough to not feel lonely. I doubt it. I wish I felt emotionally more stable. I really don’t. I feel like I should hide and not talk to anyone because I am such a raging asshole and I hurt everyone. I feel sad. I feel like I am disgusting and bad. If only I didn’t take everything so seriously, so personally maybe I would deserve friends. Maybe if I were less self absorbed.

Thing is, if I become less self absorbed I will probably die. I’m not very good at taking care of myself. I put off my needs as long as possible until picking up the pieces is a frantic, almost unattainable goal. I monitor this process so I can get as close as possible to the edge. If I didn’t monitor it… I’d just not be able to recover. I wouldn’t leave myself that extra inch I NEED.

I’m scared. I feel like the things I need are too much trouble for people so I should just die. I should stop being such a god damned inconvenience.

It really sucks that seeking treatment for suicidal ideation results in all kinds of bad shit happening. We are not a country that wants people to feel better.

My heart hurts. I slept 7 hours (my sleep schedule is getting wacky again–7:30pm through 2:30am) so I’m not underslept but I feel like shit. I feel flattened and unimportant.

A while back Pam observed that I expect too much from my BFFs. She would know as she’s watched my behavior for a long time. I expect my BFFs to fill a lot of the hole in my heart left from my mother and my sister. But that isn’t fair. No one can do that. So I flail and my BFFs flail and then we pull back. Then I notice that months or years have gone by and we aren’t really close friends any more. I was drowning them in my need and that means we just aren’t really friends now.

I’m sorry.

I’m in this hard place where asking for anything feels so completely unreasonable I just can’t do it. I’d rather sit here and cry. Everything I need feels so complicated and I can’t explain it and I feel so much frustration that I put people off by expressing that frustration where they can hear me and then I don’t have friends any more.

I have nothing to give. It’s going to be hard with the kids for a few days. They are a bottomless pit of need too. And they need me to give and give. I feel so empty. Probably good that it is a therapy day.

Whatever. It’s another day. Get the fuck up and do your work, bitch. No one is going to do it for you.

Day 20

Pills: birth control (last day), Ibuprofen, fish oil, multi (last day because apparently allergy), B-complex (same deal), probiotic (last day for now but “after treatment” I should restart).

Breakfast: gf pancakes, peanut butter, banana, maple syrup, grape juice, toast with raspberry jam (yes, I reacted).

Lunch: rice, turkey, cabbage, carrots, blueberries, potatoes

Dinner: venison, bell pepper, rice, soy sauce, cabbage, carrot

 

4am: completely solid brown poop. The canonical “log”.

9:15am: long, thin, very smooth and green.

Bad moment

This minute is really bad. I’m very sad. I’m confusing a lot of grief over my mother and not being cared for with grief about friendships not working how I want them to work. There is nothing I can do about either situation.

Right now I am completely empty.

It is hard going up and down like this so many times in a day. I feel wrung out like a towel. I feel like everything is all my fault and people should try very hard to get away from me because I am so terrible. I want to die so I don’t hurt anyone else.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything.

Cycles

A long time ago I asked a friend to stop saying something to me. She refused to honor my request. We didn’t speak much for many years. Many years later she apologized because she hadn’t understood what that request was really about.

I feel like I’m in a similar situation again. And I don’t know what to do about it. I feel like maybe what will happen is I just won’t speak to this person for a long time. How long? I don’t know. I never know that kind of thing in advance. With some people I think it will be a short time then I never hear from them again.

Like J. She’s gone. I miss her so much. But her life is overly full. And I don’t want a life like hers so I haven’t talked to her in about a decade. Will I ever see her again? I don’t know. Probably only if I hunt really hard to find her.

The strange thing is, I have multiple people from middle school who keep up with me and track me down every so often. Even though they moved out of state. They want to still know me. It’s weird.

But I don’t know how to guess which relationships will last or why. Long, long ago I thought Jenny was done with me and she would never come back. I was wrong. She’s never really left. She’s just on a long rotation sometimes.

I don’t know how to trust people. A few weeks of silence often feels like years. Time distortion for the win. I think it is funny that multiple people today asked how the voting discussion went yesterday. It didn’t happen. Lots of enthusiasm, no desire to show up.

My feelings are so all over the place. I’m up and down and up and down and up and down. I’m getting vaguely threatening emails from Kaiser. I turned down going to see their psychiatry department and they don’t like that. I wouldn’t be completely shocked to have a police officer knock on my door to “check on me”. Which… on one hand is good… on the other hand… fuck you.

So many feelings. I will find out on Wednesday if I am supposedly “clear” to eat wheat and dairy. I so hope this works. I’m willing to drink a little snake oil if it firms up my poop so I can eat wheat. That’s fine with me.

I would do the poop transplant in a minute if it were available as a solution for me.

I found it weird that I *should not* have regular olive oil but cold pressed is dandy. Apparently the “regular” is treated with a chemical to make alllllllll the oil come out and that chemical isn’t actually great for people. Awesome!

I’m going to jump topic to describing what the doctor does a little. He puts this little strap around one arm, a little like a blood pressure cuff but worn below the elbow. That arm receives “the electrical impulse that matches the food”. The other arm you stick straight out and he tries to push it down.

It sounds so fucking crazy. But on some of them I could hold my arm up and some of them I couldn’t no matter what. He starts with arsenic because no one can hold their arm up and you don’t feel bad about the idea of being allergic to arsenic.

He moved on to a forking long list of things to try. And did you know how many little subchemicals exist in most of these things? I’m apparently “allergic” to like 6 different parts of milk. Most of those would be mostly helped by just drinking raw milk. $16 a gallon, here we come.

But he can break down the wheat problem too. Yes gluten, but apparently I have problems with multiple different proteins and binders other than gluten. And supposedly he can treat them all. He does them in layers checking for where your allergic reaction is in your body. Then he tap-tap-taps your back. It’s wacky and I feel kind of doubting… but I’ll try it.

It’s funny having a good doctor experience and a bad doctor experience in the same day.

I am in such a bad mood. I want to cry. I can stop taking birth control pills since they obviously aren’t helping me. I can stop taking almost all of the vitamins since I seem to have an issue with b vitamins. That’s kind of sunny.

Sadly, no problems with the fucking fish oil. Deep sigh.

I’D BE OK IF I WERE ALLERGIC TO FISH!!!

Alas. We don’t get to write our own allergy list.

I should go do something else. But all I want to do is cry.

All the woo.

Apparently this wacky shit is “next generation NAET” which isn’t all that encouraging. But Placebo is one of the most effective drugs! So I’ll try it at this point.

The doctor found 23 reactions (some to families of things and we didn’t divide it up yet), which could be an allergy could be an intolerance could be… who the fuck knows. These things make my body react.

Foods: Eggs (found that one by myself!), dairy, sugars, wheat, oats, yeast, chocolate, corn, fruits, herbs/spices, msg, nuts, and oils/fats.

Me: Apparently I’m allergic to my digestive enzymes and stomach acids as well as some of my blood components, my hormones, and my neurotransmitters.

I’m also allergic to pollen, grasses, weeds, vitamins (particularly B vitamins… which I’ve been taking religiously “for my health”), and probiotics.

Cheers, motherfucker.

Supposedly many of these can be treated (with this wacky ass combination of acupressure and electromagnetic stimulus) to the point where they don’t bother me any more. If that is true, I’ll fucking try it. Kaiser just tells me to eat more Fiber 1 cereal so at least this sounds like a fucking plan.

When I got home I discovered that the groino from Kaiser I’ve been working with on the PMDD decided that she didn’t want to keep trying options and she referred me to psychiatry. I called psychiatry and said, “I use pot. Will I be treated or told that no one will treat me?” “Well, you will have to stop before we can treat you.” “Then let us not waste my time with an appointment. Have a nice day.”

I emailed the groino and told her I will not be troubling her with my problems again in the future.

So today we did “treatment” for wheat, oils, sugars, and dairy. I go back on Wednesday to see how well it took. Hopefully I will be able to eat in Hawaii. *cross fingers*

Also: he says I would be way better off if I permanently switched to raw dairy. I see his point. Even after treatment, raw milk is easier to digest–period.

Well, I’m trying to be hopeful but not stupid. It’s not a miracle. Nothing is. But it is a little hope.