January 17, 2007

• mostly neutral

  One of the comments on yesterday’s entry convinced me, once again, that I hadn’t been expressing myself fully or accurately.  I’ll get that old business out of the way first.

  watch
  those sugar levels sweetie… your body is telling you something and i
  don’t know how  long you can stay on that type of eating without any
  type of carbs for your sugar levels. Even though we don’t have as cold
  as temps as you do, we are still getting those same artic blasts…
  gawd they are such a joy…NOT! Try to stay warm… i do hope there is
  a break for you there so you can find more wood or get more wood cut to
  keep you warm… try to get well sweetie… don’t stress things…it
  will work out…

  Posted 1/16/2007 9:50 PM by slave_slutangel

  First of all, my blood sugar is level and stable today.  Yesterday was day one, and I had suddenly gone from dangerously high-carb gluttonous addictive indulgence to a reasonably healthy diet.  My irritability and weepiness yesterday were mild compared to similar episodes of carb withdrawal I’ve gone through in the past.  I had slipped gradually into addictive eating, but caught it before it got to an extreme level.

  I have no doubt that I will be able to stick with the low-carb cleansing program for the two weeks that it takes to kill off the yeast overgrowth I allowed to happen when I resumed eating wheat last fall.  For my blood sugar levels, the less carbs the better.  I have reactive hypoglycemia, insulin resistance.  When I eat high carb foods, I get into a spike-and-crash pattern. 

  After this two-week Candida cleanse, I intend to be back on my sugar-free, wheat-free, gluten-free, low carb, high fiber, weird and healthy diet.  I had temporarily lapsed into the stinkin’ “Is life without pizza (and turkey stuffing) really worth living?” thinkin’.  After enough of these experiences it doesn’t take me long to realize that life without addictive/allergenic poison is more worth living than it is the way I end up feeling when I indulge. 

  The trouble is that when I stick to the foods I’m not allergic to (and consequently not addicted to), I get to feeling so well that I begin to feel ten feet tall and bulletproof, like a typical addict in recovery.  Always, when we start feeling bulletproof, addicts tend to shoot ourselves in the foot just to prove it. 

  Some of my fellow dope fiends in NA think that my addictions to wheat and sugar are mild and funny compared to their struggles with harder drugs.  The funny thing, to me, is that I kicked meth and barbiturates over thirty-five years ago and haven’t relapsed.  My last alcohol relapse was over fourteen years ago, and abstinence from booze, meth and downers has been effortless.  It takes vigilance and self-control to resist the fragrant bakery aisles in the supermarket, though — vigilance, self-control, and an occasional reminder that I’m not bulletproof.
  

  ---

  The latest cold snap was brief.  Two days of double-digit subzero temps, and then yesterday it was back into the teens above zero.  Doug shoveled snow off the edges of the woodpile tarp and found more wood, as I thought he would.  Having given up on the ad-search for firewood, I got into the numbers for people I have bought wood from in past years. 

  Today I reached a woman who said her husband has some green birch and dry spruce for sale.  He’s supposed to get back to me tonight.  Last year, I had asked him to cut my wood to a maximum length of 11 inches, and he thought he did okay giving me wood at an average length of 11 inches.  What that means is that for much of this winter we’ve had fire falling out of the stove when we open it.  I prefer being able to put the wood in front-to-back and avoid the fallout, but that’s why we keep the ash bucket in front of the stove.  I’m not going to stress over it.

  That’s something else I meant to say, Pauline.  You’re preaching to the choir when you tell me not to stress, that stuff will work out.  I know that.  EWOP:  everything works out perfectly — I know this.  I just don’t repeat it very often because everyone who knows me has already heard it ad nauseam.  When I said that if we didn’t find any firewood, I wouldn’t have the houseplants to worry about any more, I was looking on the bright side in a way, but really it was just a joke.

  I set myself up for stress when I took on a bunch of tropical plants in a subarctic environment.  It’s mild stress, admittedly.   The firewood search was no-stress, really.  The worst that could have happened was that I’d have to take the chainsaw up the road for an overhaul because it hasn’t been run for a few years.  Then I would probably go get Charley (Doug’s dad and one of my best friends) to come supervise and instruct Doug on the safe and effective use of a chainsaw, since I can no longer stand the vibration and exhaust fumes.  A visit with Charley is the opposite of stressful, as long as Greyfox isn’t around.  The last time I really stressed about anything was during the first few months after Greyfox got clean and sober in 2003, when I kept wondering how long it would last.  I’m over that.

  

  I used to be bipolar type II, hypomanic, mostly depressed.  Some of those depressive episodes got to the suicidal level.  Then I learned how to cycle from positive to neutral, and now I’m learning how to transcend all that dualistic positive/negative bullshit.  Life is joy.  Pain is part of life; suffering is optional.  No kidding, no joke — yesterday was the roughest day I’ve had in years.  I set myself up for it by forgetting I’m not bulletproof and questioning whether healthy abstinence is preferable to sick addictive indulgence.  Even so, that “roughest day” was mostly neutral, just a few weepy moments when cat antics challenged me, and a couple of little irritable responses to Doug and the cats when they thwarted me.  I’m over it today… and my blood sugar is more stable than it has been in several months.

  

  • 7:33 pm
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