July 27, 2004

• New profile pic–

  and all that jazz…

  Writing the CFS-101 blog helped me in one big way.  I realized that the first line
  of Dr. Maros’s article, “…a fragile figure, looking immediately for a
  place to lie down,” described how I was a few years
  ago.  From a relapse in the fall of 1999, triggered by a viral
  infection, for almost three years of very gradual recovery, I was barely
  functioning, breathing only with difficulty, unable to walk from one
  room to the next without hanging onto furniture or a family member for
  support.  For months at a time, I never left this house. 
  Doug, Greyfox, and I thought I was dying.

  
  In November of 2002 I started getting better rapidly when I cut out the
  addictive / allergenic foods and started taking targeted amino acids
  and other orthomolecular supplements to balance my body
  chemistry.  That led into a remission so good that I began to
  think I had found a cure.  The next relapse wasn’t terribly
  severe, but in contrast to the remission that came before, it felt
  worse than it really was.  My hopes of a cure were dashed. 
  My unreasonable expectations were disappointed.  I took it pretty
  hard.  This week I’ve gotten it into perspective, though, and I
  see how far up I’ve come in the last twenty-one months, even factoring
  in how far down I slipped last winter.  I guess the lesson in this
  is to try to live without expectations.

  
  I write here occasionally about my new healthy diet and how much my
  function has improved from it.  Sometimes, also, I mention how my
  form changed.  Unexpectedly, even though I didn’t skip meals, do even any moderate
  exercise (I’m a couch potato) or cut calories, the weight dropped off and soon my pants were
  falling off.  I lost about 40% of my body weight in a year or
  so.  That was pleasant, yes, being lighter on my feet as well as
  breathing easier and all.  But one of the things I’ve noticed when
  I blog about this subject is that almost no one congratulates me on my
  recovered health and function.  Most comments are about the weight
  loss, and some of them express thoughts that range from alien to
  absurd, in my view.

  The point I guess I’m trying to make is that most of those who comment
  here
  skim right over the significant facts of my healthy new diet and the
  recovery I’ve made through it, and zero in on the somewhat
  insignificant side-effect of the weight loss.  All caught up in
  form, few of the people in this culture focus on function.  I
  accept
  that, but I’ll never understand it.  Sure, strangers seeing me on
  the street have only the surface appearance from which to form an
  opinion, but here on Xanga I let the whole naked truth hang out. 
  It seems crazy to me that people still judge me here by surface
  features, but I’m
  willing to concede that it appears to make sense to other people.

  
  The reason I took the camera along on the latest water run yesterday,
  Monday, was that one of my readers suggested I get a new profile pic to
  show my new slender self, and another reader seconded the
  request.  I told Doug to just snap away and take a bunch of pics
  so there would be a chance of catching me with some expression on my
  face other than slack-jawed blankness or scowling concentration. 
  What I neglected to do was put on a skin-tight pair of pants (like the
  black stretch jeans I wore with my red silk blouse on my last trip to
  town), so some
  imagination is needed to see the slimmed-down legs and torso inside the
  baggy
  pair of vintage (size 10 long) Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and sloppy
  thermal knit shirt.  Maybe you can tell by our garb and the gray
  skies that this was a cool, rainy day here.

  Okay, so I’m showing you the form because some of you expressed an
  interest.  I’m writing these words to express my own feelings and
  to set something straight.  Another one of the readers who
  commented on that blog that I thought was about my healthy diet, and
  most of you thought was about my weight loss, said something about how
  nice it is that I can feel so good about myself.  Bullshit. 
  As if I hadn’t felt good about myself before the size 20 G.V. jeans
  slipped down around my hips and had to be replaced by 18s and then
  16s….   Of course I didn’t feel good about being ill, but
  if I identified with my illness I’d have been a gone goose a long time
  ago, since I’ve been ill all my life.

  Ladies (and
  any of you guys who has gotten this
  far–sometimes I suspect that my male readers tune out whenever the
  word “diet” appears in a blog.  They don’t comment on them,
  anyway.)
  People:  sure, there was a time in this life when I didn’t feel
  good about myself.  It lasted from age 7 when I “killed” my
  father, until I was about thirty and worked through that shit in
  therapy.  That was when I stopped telling lies and started keeping
  the commitments I made.  Through all the ups and downs in my
  career, my finances, my relationships and my weight, over the past
  thirty years I have felt good about myself.  The thing about all
  this that really disgusts me is how differently people treated me when
  I was deathly ill and morbidly obese — appearances, again, taking
  precedence over substance.

  I agree with that
  person who commented:  feeling good about myself is a good
  thing.  Where our opinions diverge is at the implication that my
  weight loss had anything to do with it.  I’m not that
  shallow, and not that dependent on external validation.  The way
  other people treated me reflected poorly on them, not on me.  No
  matter how skinny I should get, if I wasn’t on good
  terms with myself inside where it really matters, I wouldn’t feel good
  about myself.  But I was being truthful when I put down under
  expertise in my profile, “staying on good terms with myself.”  The
  way I do that is by following one simple rule:  “Do nothing to
  damage your self-esteem.”  It’s not an easy path to follow, but it
  has its rewards.

  
  If these pics need captions, here they are:  It was a routine
  water run to the spring where we get all our water and where most of
  our neighbors get their water — the drinking water at least, even if
  they have wells to water their gardens and do washing.  Unless a
  well around here is very deep, the water is mineral-rich, cloudy,
  smelly and often polluted with Giardia.  Since water systems tend
  to freeze up anyway, many of us simply opt not to have wells
  drilled.  The artesian spring at mile 89 of the highway is clear
  and sweet.  

  We took Koji with us because he wanted to go and wouldn’t have gotten
  his regular walk today otherwise, since neither Doug nor I has enough
  energy to haul water and be walked by the dog in the same day.  I
  selected pics of me that don’t show ugly or blank facial
  expressions.  I selcted pics of Doug and Koji that show what it’s
  like being leashed to that dog.  There were a few “action” pics of
  me trying to stay on my feet and not be dragged around by my puppems
  before I got him settled down, but Doug’s action shots look sooo much
  better….
  

  • 8:41 am
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