Harnessing the healing power of snark
A couple of months ago in a moment of nutritional virtue I gave my husband custody of all the chocolate chips in the house and asked him to put them in the outdoor freezer.
Today, in a massive PMS craving that shook the foundations of our home I flung open the freezer door, BUT THEY WERE NOWHERE TO BE FOUND. I searched some of his previously used hiding spaces with no luck, and was walking to the phone to demand in my best kidnapper tones:
“Where are the chocolate chips, Ryan?! Spill now, or the convertible gets it!”
Then, in what was clearly the power of the Holy Spirit intervening to save my husband’s life, as I flung open the door to ransack the pantry I noticed the last few chocolate-covered protein bars (or, œ”candy bars, rebranded”, as my friend Lynne calls them) on the bottom shelf.
And yea, though we passed through The Valley Of The Shadow Of No Sugar, we were delivered.
Thanks be to God.
A few days ago I saw that one of my Facebook friends had started a thread asking, “If you wrote a book about 2020, what would you call it?”.
Given that so far this year in addition to COVID-19 we have dealt with a Saharan dust cloud, murder hornets, yesterday’s hurricane, and salmonella’s hostile takeover of all the onions, my book would be titled as follows:
2020: Anxiously Awaiting The Final Five Plagues
Originally published 5/11/12
So I spent last week with my parents since my husband was on a business trip, and since my dad had to travel as well for a couple of days, my mom and I decided to have a girls’ night out.
As we split an exquisite slice of chocolate cheesecake we shared stories of crazy experiences we’d had-or heard of-on the job, such as corporate controllers who did not believe in math, companies who listed as one of their values the ability to make fast decisions with little to no information, and people who based their decisions on whether or not to purchase inventory on a simulation tool rather than the reality of which items actually were or were not in stock.
As my mom and I have both spent a number of years as teachers, eventually talk turned to our crazy experiences as educators.
“You know I worked with a principal once who believed that as long as someone had the textbook, then any person was capable of teaching any subject,” my mom said.
“Oh yes, I remember him,” I replied.
“Well I also worked with a colleague-another math teacher-who was adamant about the fact that he did not believe in Indirect Proofs.”
Now, I am the first to admit that I myself hold some crazy beliefs. But I’d never before heard of a math teacher who did not believe in a particular part of math.
“So what did you say?”, I asked.
“I told him that I didn’t realize that that was a belief stance. Plus, you can’t prove that the square root of 2 is irrational without indirect proofs.” (Which apparently is an important thing to be able to do, but I’m not sure exactly why that is, because math makes my head hurt. So I sort of tuned that part out.)
“That’s like being a language teacher who doesn’t believe in verbs”, I said. “But you couldn’t proclaim this belief, because you couldn’t use the kinds of words in which you didn’t believe. So it would be like, “I! No! Which would make it pretty difficult to convert anyone to your cause”.
So, I’ll be the first to admit that I am totally spoiled. Ever since we’ve been homeowners my husband has taken on all the responsibility for the “outside” tasks of homeownership: lawn care, landscaping, cleaning the gutters, the house repairs that don’t require a professional, etc. But even more importantly (to me at least), is the fact that he also handles any and all math-related tasks, math having always been the bane of my existence.
He’s currently working on redoing the deck, and this time I’ve even helped a bit, in that I painted three boards in the time it took him to paint the other twenty-one. But mostly I’ve shown my support by asking questions, listening to reports of what’s been involved in each stage of the project, and celebrating each milestone reached.
It was all going so well, and then this happened:
Me: “So how’s the deck project going?”
My husband: “How much calculus do you remember?”
Me: “And…we’re done with support.”
You’re recovering from driving 17 hours over 2 days to spend 14 hours at a 2-day women’s conference, but you still had to call your husband so he could remind you that, “No, as a matter of fact you are NOT allowed to vacuum the entire house”, because your big fat lying fibromyalgia brain is insisting that not only is that a completely rational, but completely necessary, thing to do.
(Rest easy; this trip happened last summer. I only now re-discovered this post in my unpublished drafts folder.)
Put down your clever. Pick up your ordinary.
-Patti Digh
So I’ve started this post about a hundred different times in my head, putting more and more pressure on myself to create some kind of literary masterpiece instead of just writing about what’s been going on. Then I remembered this quote by Patti Digh, and I finally decided to get some words out of my head and onto my screen.
I have marked a number of milestones over the past 2 years that I do eventually want to write about:
-Fall 2017 was the 10-year anniversary of contracting The Hostile Alien Intestinal Bacteria, my tipping point into fibromyalgia. I also hit the midpoint of my 40s.
-November 2018 was the 10-year anniversary of my fibromyalgia diagnosis.
-June of 2019 was the 10-year anniversary of the birth of Cranky Fibro Girl.
But for now, I’m just going to stick with what cost me all of 2018. In a word: mania.
I’ve written a little bit here about being bipolar but that year it got triggered in a massive way, and it took me the whole year to recover.
Just a wee bit of background. In 2016 we moved back to North Carolina, near two of the state’s best medical schools. This has given me the chance to do a major upgrade on creating my medical team. The doctors I had in Atlanta were good, but the were just a jumble of random people to which I added someone new every time another medical crisis popped up. Now that I’m in one of these networks everyone is connected. All of my doctors have all of my medical information. And, most importantly, I’m now a patient at a pain clinic where everyone believes in the existence of fibromyalgia.
So at the beginning of last year, the P.A. that I see at the pain clinic and I decided to switch me off of a pain medicine I’d been taking for a long time and onto something new. And I was so excited to finally have something new to try after all these years of being sick.
Sadly, it did not help my pain. It did, however, trigger my bipolar disorder, and I went manic in a massive way.
I have Bipolar II, which I guess is sort of the “lesser” version of the disorder. So I don’t have blackouts, or secret second lives. I don’t go out and buy multiple new cars. I don’t have affairs.
My mania is more internally focused. For example, I’ll go into grandiose thinking and decide that I can make tons and tons of money by monetizing my blog, and then sign up for a lots of business classes. Or I’ll get hyper-focused on learning how to cook, so I’ll order piles of new cookbooks and sign up for an online cooking school. I’m happy to say that I no longer binge-eat or binge-spend like I used to. But my thoughts kept spinning more and more. They were racing more than they normally do, and getting more and more constricted. I started dissociating. I was anxious, and frantic, and frenetic.
I did not stop taking my medications. But I did ignore anyone who voiced any kind of concern-right up until I ended up in the emergency room, afraid I was having a heart attack.
Thankfully it was “just” mania and panic attacks. And thankfully I started listening to Lynne, and my P.A. and I immediately began tapering down the medication. But the process took a long, LONG time; all told I was on that medication from February to September. And those months were pretty miserable.
I couldn’t sit still. I couldn’t focus on anything for more than a few minutes, so I couldn’t follow a plot in a movie, TV show, or book. I lost my ability to do sequential tasks, like follow a recipe. I couldn’t hold a thought in my head for more than a minute or two. I was anxious, and restless, and twitchy all the time, and there was nothing, NOTHING I could do about it but endure it and move through it moment by moment. It was awful.
One of the only things that brought me any relief was to go outside and walk and walk and walk until I tired myself out and got a bit mental and emotional breathing room. I also discovered podcasts, which my fractured mind was able to focus on for short periods of time.
The mania did eventually run its course, leaving me with a pretty decent exercise habit which I’ve kept up over the past year. And 2019 turned out to be a pretty fantastic year.
Eventually I do want to write about All The Things, but for now let me just put down both my clever and my ordinary and hit “publish” for the first time in 2 years.
Thank you for being here with me.
Earlier in the week my husband met with a lawn care expert to get some advice on landscaping our yard. I was busy with some task or other at the time, so my husband opened the door to greet the guy and then the two of them went outside to tour the yard. For the most part I could hear them talking as they discussed the condition of the lawn on each side of the house. But then there was silence for about 30 minutes or so, with no sign of my husband, so my reptilian brain, amygdala, and fight/flight/freeze system swung into action.
Of course my husband eventually came back inside the house, and I greeted him with the following words:
“Oh, thank goodness you’re back! When I couldn’t hear you anymore, all I could think was that I never saw that man’s face, so if he’d killed you and buried you in the backyard, I couldn’t have identified him to the police!”
