Saturday, October 26, 2013

Let me tell you about how I lost half a person.

My ID from October 2011 says 260 lbs, 5'8". I have been overweight since I was eight years old. I guess I am still what is considered overweight, but the last time I stepped on a scale (two weeks ago), it read 170.

May 2012 I wore a 44-inch waist.

How the hell did I become a 32?
No, really, how? My father was a 32, and he was skeletal and creepy looking (If you knew him... don't try to deny it...).

I'm not, by the way. Skeletal and creepy looking. Attribute this to six inches less height. My 170 still has plenty of pudge on it, but I am, for the first time in a very, very long time, beginning to feel comfortable in my weight, and look at my body as though it might be my own (The testosterone is helping there...).

The pair of chesticles still don't help, but one of the benefits of the massive weightloss is that I now almost look flat when bound under a baggy shirt... That and I'm getting a killer set of cheekbones.

So how did this happen?

Start with the Warehouse Job. I got a job as a janitor in a warehouse that was just opening up. Two square miles of concrete divided among five people, sweeping, moping, buffing, sanitizing, scrubbing and polishing. The day I first went to work, the Maintenance manager joked that he had lost twenty pounds since starting work there.

I lost ten in the six weeks I was there. To start, we had no way to heat food for the first two weeks, and my job started at 7 am. I skipped breakfast the first day, found there was no way to heat my lunch, and when asked why I wasn't eating proclaimed that I was fasting. Off work at 3:30, home by 5, and then relaxing and tying to figure out what to make for dinner.

Ultimately, I never took a lunch to the warehouse. I would spend my breaks reading or drawing, and it was easy enough to say I was fasting during the day.

Which, well, yeah. I was. I sometimes grabbed a mocha or something at the Coffee shop on the way home (after that first week, once paychecks were a thing), but predominantly I wasn't eating anything substantial until well after dark for a good six weeks. Add to that that the job was a mile and a half off the beaten path (i.e. bus line), and I was fasting during the day, getting massive amounts of exercise (Job routinely left me actually sobbing because of the impact it was having on my feet), and I was not surprised when I found that I had shrunk out of my "skinny jeans" by the time the job went away.

The job went away because of the headaches (have I mentioned the headaches?), and the fact that the chemicals I was using to do by job were actively harming me. In the weeks that followed losing the job, I found a few new and interesting things:

I just wasn't hungry before about three in the afternoon. Not only that, but if I tried to force myself to eat before my body started telling me to, my stomach would quickly reject anything put into it. I am a normal person who does not enjoy vomiting, and I was not presenting any symptoms of starvation, so I have kept with this pattern since then.

I suppose here is where I should say that I have always sort of had to be coerced into eating breakfast. If you wake me up an make me food I will eat it because you made me food, but I like my breakfast foods to come at around three or four in the afternoon: Tea and pancakes with homemade syrup is bliss. But I have never felt the need to get up in the morning and shove heavy things into my body because "it needs it".

Oh. And it doesn't.

My uncle has been fasting every other 24 hours for many years now, and has never felt better. My family were skeptical of this idea for a long while, but it seemed to be doing what he needed it to do, so whatever.

As it turns out, Intermittent Fasting is totally a thing...

And for the first time in my life I actually have a metabolism.

I need to back up. I have to set the stage a little: In April 2010, while overseas for school, I ate a packaged sandwich from a corner shop because I was starving, and went into a diabetic episode.

Three and a half years later, I haven't touched wheat or corn since, mostly because I happened to have the right travel partner during that episode. I've also changed my diet in one more significant way: I was raised (rather lax) vegetarian. I was a little surprised at how readily and joyously my body took to red meat. I think feeling the immediate rush of energy and stamina after a few bites of steak was what did it. It is now not uncommon for whoever is making dinner to offer chunks of raw meat around, because raw meat.

The creepy pebbly painful volcano-skin that has clogged the hair follicles on my arms, legs, and cheeks for as long as my mother can remember are gone. I have needed an inhaler once in the interveining time, when I walked through a cloud of cigarette smoke (I was diagnosed as asthmatic in seventh grade?). Suddenly, for the first time in ever, I can run. I can run for the bus, I can run down the nature trail, I can run because I feel like running. My knees don't constantly ache when I walk long distances, I no longer have shin splints, and my feet are springier and more flexible than I can ever remember. My bones feel stronger. My teeth are treating me better. I am currently down sick, for the first time in six months, which is huge considering my immune system was hilariously crappy for a good portion of my life. "Walking distance" is now somewhere in the realm of four or five miles (out. Then there's the walk home.)... These are things I can attribute to diet change, and pretty much that.

I do not think I could have made the Intermittent Fasting thing work on wheat and corn and tofu. For one thing, I probably would have grabbed toast that first morning, taken a peanut butter sandwich for lunch, and never been maneuvered into this. Beyond that, the balance of proteins vs. carbohydrates that I currently consume is vastly different than that which I consumed throughout highschool and childhood. Because while a great big veggie sandwich on sourdough might be great (I was craving subway ALL of this last Convention, thank you SO much Camie... :P ), I'm not hungry, and dinner is Greek Lamb Sausage and balsamic pearl onions over rice.

Oh, and then my Roomie came home from India and introduced me to Yerba Mate, so that might have had an effect as well...

Friday, October 25, 2013

On the Sampson Complex.

I first cut all my hair of when I was ten or eleven. I can't quite remember. We went to the local beauty salon and I got this awful bob thing with bangs and looked a lot like a pudgy medieval pageboy.

Much better rendition than what I had.

Then when it was getting caught in my belt at sixteen I had my best friend cut it into something similar, but better. 

Not a bad selfie, but I'm not sure why I decided to add the wings...

Then, again, let that grow out,
I look like my mother in gesture and expression here... 

 and out, 
Girlfriend wants Mango.... NAO >:U  

and out. Fall quarter of freshman year at College I was told I had "Hammerspace Hair" when I pulled  it out of the collar of my jacket. 

"Where did that come from?"

..... And then by spring I had cut it all off again into something radically new and shorter!
With my Roomie. Because the baristas at our coffee shop apparently thought so...

But that was again let to grow out again. 
The Donegal sky...

until I felt the need to get it off me again, and clipped it back to something resembling order by then end of that summer. 



It stayed sort of shaggy for the remainder of college, and then somewhere after the bleach job I did for my father's funeral was shorn away, I started experimenting with Even Shorter things.



 These fluctuated from short and (almost) manly



to "kind of dyke-y" in the words of my girlfriend (though that might have been the turtleneck...). Then I grew it out a little, into something longer and shaggier, and then about a year ago I just sort of stopped cutting it. It's now past my shoulders again, gets tangled if I don't brush it every day, and eats metal brushpins. Why metal, you ask? Because my hair is ridiculous enough that anything short of metal pinned hairbrushes just won't work. 

I get my hair from both sides of the family, I suppose. I have my maternal grandfather's hairline, and my father's hair, minus the bright auburn. Thick and strong (I used to pick a friend's little sister up and tote her around the house by letting her grab my braid...) and prone to unmanageability and tangling. Mine also grows stupidly quickly, as pointed out above. 

I think I have a Sampson complex. The longer my hair, the stronger I feel that I am. I know this is fallacious, that really there is no corollary, and that all I am doing is projecting an outward societal marker of "Lady", but I cannot help but feel that Long Haired Men have an important and vital place in our culture. I feel that long hair conveys a certain strength and a certain set of values, and can serve as an indicator thereof. There is a certain conviction of place and presence to be found in a man with long hair, an indicator that he is secure enough in himself to take the comments inevitably made to men with long hair. I find a man with long hair to be manlier, in fact, than a man with a buzz cut. Long hair says that a man is unafraid to embrace his own beauty and softness and vulnerability. A man with long hair is unafraid to be fabulous. Because what could be sexier than a man in a musketeer goatee and prom hair? 
With Baby's Breath!
  
Actually all of these are wonderful Here Have a Link...


Mind you, I do feel the need to cut it off when it's getting in my eyes, or in my mouth, or caught in my collar or belt. And sometimes I do. 

I've been having the urge to cut it off again for some time. I'm not quite ready to (I need to do a few things first that involve long hair) but it is tempting. 

For now, my Sampson Complex reigns. At least until I can get a few costumes together.... Then it's off to the land of Shaved Head! :D ... and then the inevitable outgrow again... 

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

On Offense.

I am a practicing member of a minority religion. I have been since I was twelve years old, officially, and sort of before: This is the religion my mother raised me to, though she now no longer "really identifies with anything". I am a Witch, I chant invocations and do spells. I own a Besom, or ceremonial broom (which I also sweep the kitchen with, because a Practicing Witch is also a Practical Witch. My kitchen is Magically Clean whenever I can be arsed to clean it...). Wicca, for those who don't know, is a lot like Catholicism, only without the guilt and shame aspect, and without so much massive organization. My roommate also happens to be a practicing Witch.

So: While it is appropriate for me to jokingly say that I was late to my appointment because my broom is in the shop, it is not appropriate for you to ask if the particularly selfish and obnoxious friend of whom I have just been speaking flew away from the incident in question on her broomstick. Also, I'm sorry if I shocked you by becoming offended by the comment, and pulling out my pentagram and telling you that I am, in fact, offended, and a Witch, and have a broomstick. (Also, hearing anti-Iranian sentiment on your lips earlier in the night was just a little jarring and disconcerting to me, given the circumstance. It might have been funny had it come from your husband... Might...)

I really, really don't care that these views are simply those espoused and disseminated by Hollywood -- It's still offensive and rude to the pair of Witches sitting around your table. Intent is not magical, regardless of what so many seem to believe. (Seriously. Why have I had the "intent is not magic" conversation with so many people? What did they teach you? If something is offensive, it's not okay, regardless of what you meant by it. If someone is hurt by something you say, the appropriate response is not "Well I didn't mean for you to be offended!" or "Well that's not what I meant by that!" it is in fact "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be offensive." There is a huge difference.)

In ninth grade, I had my pentagram grabbed from around my neck, held in my face, and was yelled at because "Do you know what this is?!" by an irate christian girl at my school, who proceeded to tell me that my religion was devil worship. While I do in fact follow a man with horns and hairy legs and hooves, he is called Cernunos, the Lord of the Hunt, and in point of fact they're called antlers... And I do not remember how I reacted. I think I just snatched it back and ran away. I know I later wrote a heated post on the internet about it, on the one place on the web I felt safe talking about my religion.

I am finding that, rather than sit back and passively take whatever is being said about me, or my friends or family, I would rather tell the person being offensive that they are doing so -- and letting them see it by getting a little offended is something I am suddenly unafraid to do. Even around their own table at dinnertime. I am unafraid to let people know that they have hurt me, made me angry or upset -- and this is a big step for me.

I strove for years to "put up with" ridiculous bullshit, insults and injuries and endless criticism for not living up to some imaginary standard. If not at home, where I was mocked for doing ritual to the point that I was mostly unable to practice my religion throughout highschool, then at school where I was constantly the butt of jokes and slurs. The classroom-appropriate word for "bitch" is "witch", after all...

I don't feel like taking gut-punches silently any more. This applies to things beyond Wicca, and people beyond myself. If you say something racist, I will call you on your racism. If you say something sexist, I will call you on your sexism. It may not be loud, it may not be something that shocks you, but I will say it. If you say something outrageous, I will be outraged. Yes, even at your own table. Especially if I love you.

Thursday, October 17, 2013

On invisible disabilities, helpful suggestions, and how tired they make us.

Disclaimer: This will come off as a bitchy rant if you are one of the sort of people this was aimed at. I'm sorry, I woke up with the headache today, and am in no mood to coddle anyone.

So, to all of you lovely, wonderful people who pop up every time I mention that I have a headache to ask if I've tried X, Y, or Z: Yes. Yes I have. No, no it didn't work. Thank you for the suggestion, but it didn't work. It didn't work the first time I tried it, or the second, or the third. Maybe in a few hundred tries it'll work, when I have new glasses and my hormones are balanced and my thyroid levels are just right, but not today.

The last CAT scan was clean, Judith Hay is not applicable to these headaches apparently, and all that the vast majority of headache cures do is give me a little extra headache over on the other side. The Valsalva Maneuver is just useless in this case. Throwing up is ditto.

I've been getting these things for two years as of August. I was in Costco with Mum when the first one hit, and have been trying every hippy-dippy pseudo-science cure I can come across since then. I've been on prescription medication that has nearly killed me, and pop supplements like candy. Unless you've come up with something you can be sure no one else has suggested in the last two years, and I haven't found it on the internet, or my mother hasn't found it on the internet, in two years of tireless research? Yes, I've done it. No, it hasn't worked. The most unique thing I've had suggested -- thusfar only one person, though I had already tried it on my own without any measurable success -- was to induce vomiting. It worked for her daughter -- sadly it does not work for me. Neither does whatever batshit thing you've just suggested. Including and up to snorting cayenne and cow dung.

Am I giving up and being miserable for life? No, but there is the possibility that these things will never go away. That just means I continue taking my herbs and vitamins and minerals and supplements and going to my doctor (Who is also baffled and stymied) and taking care of my body and trying to get enough sleep.

Telling me I "deserve" not to be in pain is insulting and belittling. I do not need your affirmation that chronic headaches are awful things that no one deserves. I know you were trying to be encouraging and helpful and supportive, and you probably didn't mean it this way, but this is just insulting. In enthusiastically informing me that I don't deserve these things, you are implying that somehow, somewhere, is the belief that I do. Or that someone, somewhere, does in fact deserve to be cursed with chronic headaches, which is a fate I would not even wish on my rapist.

As for the "reason/solution"? If you want to help my solution to my headaches? Sign petitions to prevent incandescent bulb bans and support bans on heavily perfumed products and chemicals in public spaces. If you want me to come to your home, do your best not to utilize fluorescent bulbs, and shield them well. Do not use lysol or fabreeze in your home or car if you want me in them, and do not apply perfume if you want me within a yard of you. Bathroom deodorizer cones are right out. Chlorox/bleach of any kind makes me fall down. And if you know me, you know that I go out of my way on a daily basis to avoid all of the identified headache triggers.

And yet, the headaches still come.

And then I go camping, away from flourescents and fabreeze and deodorant, and the headaches still come. Three weeks in the back of a booth in the woods, living in a tent and completely shielded from noxious chemicals, and still the headaches come. After detox, after chiropractic, after massage and new glasses, still the headaches come.

Mind you, I think the new glasses are helping. But that's just one aspect of the storm. The more things I try -- the more things work on some small level -- the greater my understanding of these headaches are. I am living in a perfect storm of pain, and any one thing you suggest? Yes, that may treat one aspect of it. The vitamins and minerals and herbs help. Just a little, but they help. The new glasses help. After each chiropractic treatment, I feel the difference.

But nothing is enough. The pain comes back. I find myself huddled in a ball on the sidewalk clutching at the side of my face making alarming noises whilst passers-by gawk. Maybe someday (Tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, three years from now, ten... ) I'll have found all the keys, and the vast complex lock to "No more headaches" will finally be open.

Until that day? Yeah, I've probably tried it...

I know you just want to help, and are just trying to help, but... Gods I'm sick of it. Half of the things that make me tired about having an invisible disability can be summed up nicely with "Yes, it's real, yes, I've tried everything I can think of to make it go away, please stop." I do not feel that someone posting that today was a bad day for the chronic back pain that keeps them wheelchair bound would be getting responses about trying chinese herbs several years into the condition. Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know many wheelchair bound people, but I know plenty of (young) people with invisible disabilities. While, again, I cannot speak for the whole group, the number of conversations I've had with them about people telling us to "Take an aspirin and get over it!" or that "you're in your twenties! You're the best you're going to feel in your whole life!" put me, and my sisters and brothers, on the verge of tears. (The "you're in your twenties" came from a fourty-something in a coffee-shop after a con in Seattle, while I was attempting to look up a dispensary nearby so maybe I could not think about shooting myself, and my little sister was digging for her six bottles of depression and anxiety and thyroid meds so she could take them and the same. We simply looked at each other and widened our eyes in agreement of "This guy knows not..." and "Oh gods I hope not...")

Maybe you, ever-so-helpful person suggesting today "lots of sex?" do yourself have a chronic pain condition that makes your life difficult. Would you like me to advise you to go try chinese herbs to help? Or tell you that you don't deserve to have an aching back? To tell you not to give up looking for the thing that will make the pain stop? All that you are doing in offering your encouraging advice to "not stop looking" for a way to fix my head is implying that I have stopped, that I have given up to go crawl under a rock somewhere. 

No. 

When I found that the disability was making me so depressed I could barely get out of bed in the morning, I fought as hard as I could to get out of bed every. Damn. Morning. Even if "morning" came at three in the afternoon. Even if all I could do upon getting out of bed was to stumble the three feet to my walk-in closet and lock myself in there because even the sight of my roommates walking around not having headaches made me too depressed. And when I found myself locking myself in the closet every. Damn. Day? I took my laptop with me, and my sketchpad, and my pencil, and I wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and came out having done something, anything productive and creative. And all the while I took my vitamins and herbs and minerals and supplements and still the headaches came like clockwork. But the walls that had been up around my ability to write and draw since about halfway through college crumbled in that tiny enclosed space with nothing but my thoughts and the walls around me. I wrote and drew and papered the walls in art, and at the end of it had something to show for all that depression and headache. I'm now about halfway through the roughs for a several-hundred-page comic. I threw another short thing off over the course of vacation, and am going to a convention this weekend to sell this first, precious, completed thing. No, I can't hold down a job because my head hurts too much on too regular of a basis. But I can produce creative till all the bile that wells up is drained off, and all the puss is wiped away, and all that's left is raw, tired, and empty. And then all I can do is get in bed, go to sleep, and hope that tomorrow is a day in which I won't have a headache. 

Some days, it's true. Some days, some glorious days, I have no headache, and that is awesome. But every other day? Every other day, all you do when you suggest something is to suggest something I've done that hasn't worked. To remind me of one more thing that has failed to produce results. 

Who knows, maybe in a few more chiropractic visits, peppermint oil will start doing something. But the peppermint-camphor-gods-know-what-else Ayurvedic thing that my roommate brought back from india with her? It helps the other kind of headache, sure. Just not these....