I have so much to tell you.

Therapy is expensive and time consuming. I don't have the patience for it--I never really did. Still, my life has been a barrage of difficulty in the last three years, and I have yet to process most of it. I'm not quite ready to get into that now, though. At the moment, I'm sitting here typing in the dark because sleep has decided to spread its charms elsewhere. For now, just know I'll be back sooner rather than later because writing it all out is far cheaper than therapy.

I will miss you, Unincorporated Pinellas County

(Something I wrote three months ago and forgot to post.)

As of this Mid-May, I will have spent 74 days of the last eight months at my mother's house in Florida. The house is in a very unfashionable part of St. Petersburg, technically unincorporated Pinellas County. It's not exactly Lealman, but I refer to it as Lealman Area as reference point in all of my online posts trying to give away or sell things in or attached to this house. This house is nowhere where anyone goes or wants to go.

I've been here enough to watch the empty lots across the street change from overgrown weed filled space where drug deals thrive to tidy little Habitat for Humanity homes. The neighbors know me. The meth tweakers across the street no longer glance at me when I walk to the corner market to buy lottery tickets and ice cream.

The last eight months found me getting very comfortable in a house I'm about to sell. This house and the stuff in it have a history, and I feel attached. Nobody ever told me about this aspect of wrapping up the affairs of a deceased parent.

I've been saying this since I started this blog

I've known about this for years, but it's helpful to see it verified in a meta-analysis. 

"Depression is not a chemical imbalance in the brain and scientists have no idea how antidepressants work, a review by University College London has concluded."

"The researchers say that patients should not be told depression is caused by a chemical imbalance, or informed that the SSRIs can correct the problem. Although it is clear the antidepressants can work, they must be doing so through a different route, the paper concludes."

 You can read the article here: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/07/20/depression-not-caused-chemical-imbalance/ 

Can you imagine big pharma coming out and saying in a TV ad, "Yeah, take this for depression. We have no idea what it's actually doing, but please let us take advantage of your misery to make money."

Is it metamorphosis?

My cat is dying.

My mother is dying.

My job is dying.

My nonprofit project is dying.

I feel caught in a tsunami of impending loss and I'm powerless to stop any of it.

The angst we thought was over

The 1970s and 1980s were a time when I worried incessantly about a nuclear war wiping out the world. It took well into the 1990s for that gut-gnawing anxiety to leave my body.

Now, a mean little madman half a world away is perfectly willing to push the button because he wants to rule the world. Like a spurned lover who orchestrates a murder suicide rather than let his partner move on, the narcisisitic kleptocrat in charge in Moscow could take us all down with him if we won't let him get his own way.

This anxiety is physically painful. If we all go out, I hope it's quick.

What's old is new again

 Throughout the many years I've been writing here, my ongoing struggle with mood has never abated. A large number of articles have been published explaining that we're all overwhelmed and suffering anxiety. I always felt that way, but yeah, it's worse.

At some point every day, I'm stopped by all-consuming feelings of sadness, anxiety, and loneliness. This isn't depression--depression is something I'm hard wired to recognize before it even manifests identifiable symptoms. This is something different. It's an enveloping weight of despair, unhappiness, and deep sadness that I can't really articulate in a way anyone else would understand.

I've never had great luck with therapy. On some level, I feel like therapy is a scam. You do all of the work while paying someone else to sit there asking questions you've likely already asked and answered in your head. Maybe I've just had bad therapists. The last one was bad but in that case, I didn't need her to do much more than sit and listen because I had absolutely no one else to talk to about what I was going through at the time. I knew I was intelligent and insightful enough to work it all out in my head as long as I could hear the thoughts that were colliding in my brain by giving them some space and attention.

At my age, I figure I have like 20 years left to live. I'd prefer to live them not feeling like crap emotionally and physically, but that doesn't look like that's how it's going to go. That certainly doesn't induce any optimism for emerging from the mental and emotional quagmire I find myself currently situated in.

There are many points along the way in this blog where I've talked about one's right--my right--to stop being alive. Although I've always found a way to keep going when I surely felt like doing anything but that, not a single day has come and gone where I didn't remind myself that I have another option and I don't have to stay if I don't want to. I always thought that these ideas would fade and drift away during the healthier times, but that hasn't been the case at all. If anything, each day, week, month, year of my life just pushes that conversation forward and makes it louder, demanding more attention as I become less adept at focusing on just getting through to the end.

So, what is the purpose of therapy in my case? What I've written here are thoughts I would like to analyze and dissect, but there are some things you can't even bring into therapy unless you want to be dropped as a patient or effectively incarcerated.

My loneliness isn't a result of not having people in my life. It's the result of the people in my life either not recognizing or not being interested in the profound sadness that is killing me.

Reinvention but not really

This year, I turned 60. I knew it was coming, but for some reason it hit me hard. I'm old. I'm a senior citizen. That's not how I feel; this is what my culture tells me.

A lot of things have happened in my life in the last few years. Some were surprising. If you had told me that I would become friends with an author whose work I admire and who is the ex-wife of my state's former governor, I would have said your were hallucinating. That happened, though, and it's among other surprising things including doing my second and then third public radio interviews, being part of the TED organization's $10,000 Mystery Experiment, having surgery for something incredibly odd, and then being diagnosed with a complex auto-immune disease.

Life is a journey, but it's also a carnival house of mirrors that disorients and confounds without notice. I'm not sure what to make of it all. Keep evolving--it's a trip.

May. Fascinating.

 

The origins of May. From the dictionary: https://www.dictionary.com/e/may/

The dread

 I'm 12 hours away from going to see my mother. Everything is wrong in her house and she's not willing to even try to do anything for herself. She would much rather sit surrounded by walls of resentment and fume at the world for the indignities of old age she's experiencing. 

She doesn't know I'm coming. That's going to be sprung on her at the last minute. I'm not staying at her house. Instead, I booked an Airbnb for two weeks where I can have my own space, some quiet at the end of the day, and complete control of the television. Also, I am way too fucking old to sleep on a futon.

I'm dreading this trip. There's a knot in my stomach. We need to have some hard conversations that my brothers, being too chickenshit to talk to her themselves, have pushed me forward to navigate. That's grossly unfair, but typical of adult siblings with an elderly parent. The sons walk on water, the daughters wipe up shit.

My own health is in decline. I don't have the compassion bandwidth to manage the life of a person who would rather wallow in a victim narrative than show any gratitude for living into old age and having ample help to facilitate day-to-day comfort.

2020 has been bad

 I have surgery tomorrow. It's going to suck. A lot. Six-inch incision, three layers of stitches 4-8 weeks of recovery and a lot of pain. Ugh.

My persistent philosphical argument

Part of working from home during a pandemic means watching a lot of television. Today I happened upon Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, Season 5, Episode 22, "Painless." The whole story centers around the question of whether or not death by suicide is a fundamental human right. I still say it is.

The never-ending Florida

I'm still in Florida. It has been 56 days. I don't know when I'll be home. I'm starting to know my way around, even though I don't go out much. I know where the Goodwill next to the new tax office is and specifically, where to drop off donations. I know I prefer the Disston Plaza Publix to the Winn Dixie on 54th. I've made some friends here-- that feels surreal.

Metro Diner's breakfast is pretty great, even when delivered a little late via DoorDash. The Home Depot on 22nd Ave. is always too busy, even at 6:30 in the morning during a pandemic. Haines Rd. always seems to confuse me--something about running on the diagonal and halves of intersections that are blocks away from each other. Jacaranda trees in bloom are one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.

I went to my first open-air laundromat today--having never known they existed before this. Gas at the Wawa south of Walgreen's at 38th and 34th was only $1.71 today, and I can't wrap my brain around that. I got my mom out of Freedom Square just before they got slammed with COVID-19 and 17 people died (so far). When I no longer needed navigation help to get there, I knew it was time to get Mom back to her own home as rehab wasn't doing much, anyway.

The FedEx store at 4th and 52nd was extremely busy when I was there today making copies. That surprised me, just as I've been surprised every time I headed out of the house that the roads were busy, busy, busy. If you didn't know there was a pandemic going on, you certainly wouldn't figure it out from Floridians' behavior.

The people at Haines Road Animal Hospital are incredibly helpful. I like the sign near the pharmacy drive-through.

I prefer the pizza from Fortunato's to any other I've had here. If I don't get to Mazzaro's Italian Market before I leave, that will be criminal--it's just down the street.

The people at Accord Home Medical Supply are just gems. Total Wine delivers and has helped me keep my sanity. I've learned what number most of the channels I watch are on Spectrum's service.

I want to go home.

I'm in Florida. I've been here for weeks. Since March 9, so, about a month. The weather is wonderful. Nothing else is.

I am stuck 1800 miles from home in the middle of a global pandemic, caring for an elderly parent by myself. I can't even go to the beach, which is something that would normally bring me calm.

Writing usually helps, but I don't have time.

The photo at left was taken the last night the beach was open for sunset gazing. A treasure.

A lesson learned and still in progress

This has not been an easy lesson along the way, but the dude has a point or two or ten. The last minute and 45 seconds nailed it.

Writing is a lost art

Maybe it's Twitter. Or Facebook. Or Instagram. Or Tumblr. Or TikTok. Nobody blogs anymore. People who have something to say have stopped writing and instead are limiting themselves to photographs and 280 characters. Maybe they all moved on to podcasting. Maybe people who liked to read are listening, instead, to podcasts and Audible books. Whatever the cause, the blogoshpere has become a barren cyber landscape of abandoned blogs.

I'm still here, sort of. In 2011, I felt like my blog was home to perhaps too many thoughts, and I was starting to ramble. I gave myself the assignment of joining Twitter as a means of forcing myself to express my thoughts in 140 characters or less. What I didn't know was that Twitter is a bizarre, addictive bubble of nonstop interaction that seems tailor-made for the ADHD brain. I love it there. I hate it there.

In 2020, I'm planning to spend more time here. Writing is much better for me than whatever it is Twitter does to my brain.

An observation

Over the last couple of weeks, I saw people posting lots of things online about what their decade looked like. Many talked about the milestone achievements and major life changes they had seen between 2009 and 2019. I couldn't come up with anything of note that I had done in the last decade, so I decided to read this blog from 2009 to present.

First observation: I was a better writer ten years ago.

Second observation: Given the odyssey of health related issues I was trying to navigate in 2009, I'm surprised things turned out reasonably well. Also, I inadvertently figured out the  answer to much of what was wrong when I started this blog--and I wrote about it a full two years before a doctor figured it out. The thing is, my memory issues were so severe at the time, that when I was finally correctly diagnosed with a B-12 deficiency, I had completely forgotten that this had been my own conclusion in early 2007. Mind blown. Trust your own instincts. Float your theories to the doctor when you have them. I now wonder how much pain and true suffering I could have avoided if I had simply mentioned it to a doctor that my overall symptoms appeared to be pernicious anemia.

So much wasted time and money trying to figure out the wrong things.

Shrill is phenomenal

For some reason, I woke up this morning thinking about this scene from "Shrill," the Hulu series starring Aidy Bryant. This scene exactly expresses thoughts I've had for decades. In my opinion, it's one of the best things I've ever watched.

And the labs say...

It has been a few years since I had a complete physical. My doctor's office finally caught up with me, so I went last week. Why do doctors seem surprised when patients refuse to get a colonoscopy? It's truly not on my agenda. No one in my family has ever had a polyp problem, not even my 82-year-old mother.

The doctor asked about my eating habits and I explained that I'm on a ketogenic diet. "No issue with that!" was his quick reply. He said that he has a lot of patients who have had great success with controlling blood sugar and weight by taking a keto approach.

My lab results came in yesterday and my blood sugar and cholesterol are solidly normal, across the board, except for my triglycerides, which are blissfully lower than low. Hooray.

My weight loss seems to have stopped--I've been on a plateau for two months now, and that's disappointing. I read somewhere that keto is only good for weight loss for six months, and then it doesn't work anymore. Apparently, my body got this memo and took it to heart. Boo. It's discouraging since I still have another 50 pounds to lose. Sad face.

Anyway, I suppose that I can at least be grateful my blood pressure is great, my blood work is phenomenal, I'm not gaining any weight, and I'm never hungry. Yay.

Pain

I want to talk about pain. Not emotional pain, but actual physical, neuropathic, chronic, nociceptive and any other type of pain. I have it all. Except for somatic pain. I don't think any of my issues are related to emotions other than that the pain causes me to experience emotions.

I have been in constant, chronic pain since 1999. It started with a bad knee. Surgery helped, but even after I was declared well and healed, the pain never went away completely. I feel as though I've been collecting painful places in my body ever since.

One of the reasons I stopped going to the gym was that the initial muscle soreness and expected aches never eased. The more I exercised, the worse I felt. I hired a trainer who determined there was nothing wrong with my routine, form, or technique. I talked to my primary care doctor who sent me to a rheumatologist. The rheumatologist told me to meditate, do yoga, and stop trying so hard to do life.

My doctor had sent me to the rheumatologist because he suspected I had fibromyalgia. I blanched at that suggestion for several reasons. Maybe ten years ago, my then-primary-care doctor told me that fibromylagia was just doctor code for depression or similar mental illness. He said that most illnesses that required diagnosis of exclusion were really just emotional problems the patient wasn't willing to deal with head-on.

Years later, another doctor, the cardiologist I wrote about on this blog once or twice, told me almost the exact same thing. He said that fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, both, were not physical illnesses at all, rather, they were physical manifestations of mental illness. He also said that they were largely named and then heavily marketed not by physicians or researchers but by pharmaceutical companies. I told him I doubted there was any validity to his belief and he countered with, and I quote, "Really? Then why do you think those 'illnesses' are treated almost exclusively with antidepressants? It's so doctors can get mentally ill patients who think the problem is physical or mechanical to accept the appropriate treatment for an emotional issue. That's also why meditation helps so much."

I feel like there are a lot of things medical professionals believe that may, in the end, stop ill people from getting appropriate, effective care. It's a lazy way to practice medicine.

Everything is relative, 2018 weightloss edition

At a meeting a few days ago, a colleague walked in the room, looked at me, and said, "Look at you! You're wasting away!"

I replied, "Really? You think so?"

The colleague asked me why I didn't seem enthusiastic about it, since she had never seen me wear such fitted clothes and I had obviously lost a lot of weight to be able to do so.

I explained: "These were my new fat clothes when I bought them...with deep shame."

So, although I'm grateful to have lost some weight, I still have nothing to be proud of. Talk to me when I weigh 120 pounds, and then you'll see me feeling some sense of accomplishment.

We agree to disagree

Frank believes my ketogenic diet is going to kill me. He said that the weight loss--I'm down 23 pounds--is surely coming at a terrible price. Frank won't accept that this is OK until he sees my blood work. He's sure that a high-fat diet that allows me to eat copious amounts of bacon, oil, avocados, butter, and eggs can't possibly be harmless. He's sure I'm clogging my arteries and ramping up my cholesterol to unhealthy levels.

I've tried to explain that dietary cholesterol doesn't really have an impact on blood cholesterol. That's all left to genetics and individuals' livers.

Here's the thing. I have a weight goal of 105-110 pounds and I think I can get there. I will gladly accept losing another 60 pounds from where I am right now, which will get me to pretty much the upper end of my goal weight, but it's a healthy weight--and admirable.

If this diet is harming me, so be it. I will go on record as saying that in the most fat-shaming society on the planet, I would rather die a skinny person than live as a fat one. If it kills me, it kills me, but by god, I will be thin when it does. Isn't being skinny really the very most important thing, medically? Why do you get weighed at the doctor's office? Why does the doctor tsk-tsk over a weight that's not ideal? Nobody cares about my blood pressure or my cholesterol. If you're thin, then you have achieved the American ideal of health--because you don't look like a big fat fucking failure.

Please pass the coconut oil.