Detoxing

I know detoxes are one of those health nut buzzwords that sound like ploys to get consumers handing over their hard earned, but I'll tell ya what. They work.

I am in the midst of a parasite cleanse. Began a week ago. If I knew I would have a week of headaches, muscle aches, brainfog, lethargy and nausea I probably would have thought twice about doing it. Actually, that's not true. I probably would have been delighted I am feeling this way. Rather like the lovely woman in this picture here. She looks like she's doing a detox too. But she still remains all lovely and ethereal in her angst. I'm more kinda blotchy and grouchy in mine, so believe me, it's much nicer having her as my pictorial representative :) I am delighted that this cleanse is working. I am also really fucking annoyed that this cleanse is working. It is making me feel like poos.

Seems I have to have paradox even in my health regime (and believe me, when I say health, I mean health. My aim when I got well was not just to be well, it was to be healthy. I haven't wavered from it, despite the layoffs and the detours into the couch and eating Milo out of the tin. Whatever it takes. I know what it is like to be sick. I also know what it was like to think I was healthy just because I wasn't sick, but my body was slowly wilting under the weight of the shit I was putting in it and the good shit I wasn't. I lived like that for years, and I think it took a 6+ year bout of sickness to wake me up. Now, I've got a taste of what it feels like to be healthy, to have good wads of energy, to feel like everything is working. I know I'm gonna get there. (I wish I was that committed to, say, cleaning my house, but you know. You can't have everything. If I can be this committed to health and writing, then that shall be a good life.)

When the parasites die off, they release ammonia into your body, plus whatever other toxic stuff that goes along with them. Yerk. This is why detoxing makes you feel worse before it makes you feel better. It's why some people resist doing things like this. I don't understand the logic, myself. I can't wait to get rid of whatever beasties have taken up residence inside me and are stealing my oxygen (literally), making themselves at home inside my cells and eating my food. Now I've begun this cleanse, I know those little buggers are there. Before, I just suspected. That gut feeling thing again. Thinking about having dead things dying off inside my body kinda makes me want to hurl (the way thinking about all the dust mites in the doona gives me the creeps. Hehe. It also makes me laugh, in some way which is probably betraying my sanity levels).

There was a reason why our grandparents' generation and previous used to regularly take things like castor oil, regularly delouse themselves, deworm. What's strange is why we've stopped doing it. Do we think that magically all of these things don't exist anymore now we have antibiotics? Some studies estimate that 90% of people have parasites of some persuasion.

We forget these things when we buy our vegetables (gas-ripened) under fluorescent lights and our meat in polystyrene trays. I want to start living closer to the ground again. I think there's a reason why tilling the soil tills the soul. We belong to it. We come from it and we return to it (but don't you love the paradox that we are also made of the same material as stars, and at the same time we can be described as pure energy? We are all of those things, and much more than that).

I'm going to lie down and dream about having more energy :)

PS: Detoxing is a hopeful place, really. It's not like when I was sick with CFS (although I had hope then, too, that the next thing I tried would be the thing to tip the health scales back in my favour). This feeling ill is a purposeful feeling ill. There is certainly an end in sight. I can still do things. I just lack energy, and find the strange no-woman's land of being half here a frustrating one. Some days, in this kind of state, I have to consciously focus over and over again on whatever it is I am doing at hand, instead of becoming stressed about the things that I need and want to do and don't feel I have the energy for. It is a land that I have worn clear through and I don't relish returning, even for a visit :) Me don't do sick good now, pliz stop.

Tonight, I have the urge to write, at almost-midnight. I have to resist the urge because I need to sleep. But how nice it is, to feel pregnant with words. And hope. Knowing that the words will come, that I get to play and swim in them (scary as it is entering the pool). How lucky I am.