Two Edifying Vids

Here be two edifying vids.  One, external and political and the other, internal and psychological.

The first is 85 year old pensioner, Vilma Ward, giving it to smirking and revolting Prime Minister and part-time comedian Tony Abbott.   Nice seeing someone serving up some truth to this nasty man on national TV:  Especially when it's a plucky and feisty older woman.  Rock on, Vilma.



The second is a fascinating TED talk on stress, by psychologist Kelly McGonigal. She discusses a study's findings that our belief about stress is linked to how it affects us physically.  Reframing stress in our minds from a negative - like reframing anything else that we close ourselves off against - reframes it in our bodies as well.



I'm in the process of reframing my hardcore beliefs about stress and what I can cope with in the hope that my body will follow suit. It needs to because the financial noose tightens here. Not much transcription work and many encouraging rejection emails on the writing front equal real worries when your partner is also facing his own potential job-loss worries.

I persist with my idealistic thoughts that roam along the lines of "But it doesn't even need to be like this! Money is a essentially a construct, invented out of thin air. It is meant to be a method of exchange of our services, a tool that makes society function easier. In the end it's become a tool keeping you and me frozen into place."

If only idealistic thoughts put food on table and paid bills. I guess despite whatever happens on the outside, I feel rich on the inside. For what that's worth.

This Too Shall Pass

It's a liberating - or unnerving - concept that this too shall pass. But it shall. All of it, whether good or bad. For me right now, feeling bogged down by slowness and infected sinuses and molasses, it is a beauty of a thought, shooting me across the sky into some sort of perspective.

As some of you know, I work as a transcriber. Work that I am very good at, and which my conscientious self takes pride in doing well. And work that I'm also not very disciplined with, because it's not really suited to my temperament.  A word of advice:  if you're going to work from home, make sure it's something you love.  It makes it just that little bit easier :)

I'm also in the process of studying to work as a personal care worker for people requiring assistance in their homes, and to get out and about in the community.  The space between this job and the next feels like it's going to drag on forever and ever, but in reality I will be trained and ready to go in my new work in five months. Hopefully. I am still to organise my placement - all 120 hours of it - before I can get out and working.  Hopefully I will be able to have all of that done and dusted and in five months be off and running ... or as off and running as a CFSey person can be :)

My anxiety screams that five months is way too long because money. Money is tight and I have not been contributing much at all in recent times, leaving my partner to shoulder most of the burden, which awakens pretty much every demon that I have, giving ample opportunity to feel depressed and like a useless loser, basically.  I've been trying to drum up extra transcription work, but it's not been all that forthcoming.

And so once I move into my new part-time work situation, combined with the disability support pension I hope to begin receiving soon, and suddenly the world of Susie will feel a little less precarious. And I will be able to resume a regular writing practice again.  Because my world has been as wobbly as a fault line for some time now, and I need it to stabilise for my health's sake, both mentally and physically.

So I will hang on till then. Wait in the fire, wait in the fire.  This too shall pass, and what has felt like it's forever coming will be here and I can relax.

To be brutally honest, the thought of washing old men's testicles is terrifying to me. The thought of assisting the old man who lives on the end of the testicles to remain independent in his home for as long as possible is exciting and gratifying. The former I will get used to. Hopefully not the latter.

And so I wait until then. But it's a stressful wait. To be honest with you, I'm struggling. Money woes, old trauma that rears it's head up and threatens to devour. Health going up and down like a bride's nightie so I can't get any purchase on anything, so I'm not productive, so I feel like shit. 

I feel like shit. And I feel apologetic about it because I'm paranoid.  And I feel paranoid because almost menopause.  And so this post is turning into a whinge, but I'm sorry, I'm just simply not shiny.  I'm tarnished.  Too much time on my hands with menopause looming so close to be able to resist overthinking.  Which contributes to the extra health things.  But I'm trying.  I'm trying so hard to climb out of this pit.

(In fact, I think the problem with me is not so much that I don't try as I overtry.  And I overcare.  I know this, but I've come to know it just a little bit better lately.  I so want to be free of the past ...)

And so I can't wait to get out there working, in whatever capacity my chronically fatigued body will allow me.  I really can't wait.  I know I am going to be so much happier when I do.  Perhaps then I will be able to write posts that are about things that extend a little beyond my very own navel ;)

To finish, in my class last week we watched two episodes of Derek.  Have you seen it?  Ricky Gervais plays Derek, a worker in a nursing home, and all it took was 29 minutes or so to have me gathered in and in love with these characters.  A lovely light-hearted look at ageing, disability, and what it means to be human in the very best sense.  Gervais is so brilliant in this.

Eight Months into the Pyroluria Journey

I've been taking pyroluria supplements for about eight months now.  For a few months before that I was taking B6/zinc in pyroluria-sized doses.  So have I noticed an improvement in my health in that time?

Well, I wish it was that simple.  When it comes to health issues, sometimes you have to go backwards to go forwards.  And I think that's what's going on with me.

If pyroluria existed in one compartment of my body and affected no other parts, and if taking supplements meant that I simply fast-tracked from point P to point A, then I would be able to have a much clearer indication of where I'm at and what's going on.  But sometimes getting your body to do what it needs to do can create some extra problems along the way.

I know from hair mineral analysis and by my doctor's assessment respectively that I am a slow oxidiser and an undermethylator.  This means that my body has accumulated a whole lot of gunk in its travels that it's been unable to get rid of through the proper detoxification channels.  This is why I need to do extra things like have saunas and coffee enemas to help it along.  It's why my body has sequestered away in its tissues certain things like copper because it didn't know what else to do with them.  Better to shove them away in a room wherer you can close the door than let them float around in your system doing constant damage.

The problem with the process of taking stuff that my body needs to function better is that it begins opening up all those doors where it shunted things away in years gone by and it begins doing some spring cleaning.  But the spring cleaning can happen too fast, and if your body struggles to get rid of it of all of this vacuumed-up stuff, like mine does, then it can tend to recirculate in your body.  Not nice.  All of this spring cleaning has put extra pressure on my kidneys, my adrenal glands, and suddenly I find myself back in the land of adrenal fatigue and pending sickness benefits.  So I am suspecting that maybe I got too excited about spring cleaning and went too fast.  But you sometimes don't know these things except in hindsight.

When my doctor told me that it can take undermethylators up to two years to get right, I didn't really want to hear that news.  But it turns out that I think she may just well be right.  Time to climb up onto that Zen ledge, the one that sits above the raging waters of loss and frustration, and watch my emotions and frustrations pass.  Things are as they are.  There are ways of finding peace no matter what situation you are in.  You just have to stop believing that commonly-held idea that a bad situation means no peace to be found.  It's not true.  It's just hard to get there.  Impossible if you don't believe you can.

Adrenal fatigue is a true shocker ~ you can't really know how unsafe and vulnerable a body can feel until you're stuck in one that's lost its muffler a few corners back.  Makes it harder ~ but not impossible - to lean into the curves and ride it out.

Knowing why this is happening is helpful.  Doing what I need to help my adrenal glands heal again is a long process ~ a full-time job all its own.  And knowing that I am on the right track is comforting, even while it feels like it's flung me backwards into the saltbush. 

Messing about with clay - one of the things I need to return to
to help my body heal itself.

River System

Pic by Neil's Photography under a CC licence

Sometimes the days are good, and you want to stay there because they are good and you feel like yourself in them (even if nothing amazing is happening) and there is a river and you're flowing in it, and it's good.  Even if not-good things are happening in it.

Call it parasympathetic nervous system.

And then there are the other days.  At those times you have to lie in bed breathing before you can get out and face the day that feels doomed, and you keep rounding the corner and falling over your very own self-hatred.  Because being you is hard for certain functional reasons where your body does not behave the way you would really like it to so as to have an enjoyable life.  You are feeling anxious.  And then you start feeling anxious about feeling anxious.  A delightful, satanic swirl of round and roundness.

Call it sympathetic nervous system.

On top of that, in trying to describe this sort of stuff you're thinking, who gives a fuck about your self-indulgent griping?  Nevertheless, that thought doesn't make the situation any easier.  It just makes it as hard as it was before and like you're being judged at the same time.  Even though you're not being judged by anybody but the nasty ones in the chorus of The Cast of Thousands (and I guess anyone who is reading this who is thinking, harden the fuck up, but if you are - I'm sure there's a few other pages on the interwebs written by people who are very strong  and who are not pussies like me).


In these days, going along with the flow is hard, even though you train yourself in the good days for days like this.

So much of life is about staying in the flow.  You used to think that the problem with swimming in the river on these sorts of days was getting your foot caught in the unseen crap on the bottom of the river.  But now you think that maybe even worse than the initial problem of getting your foot caught is the expectation you have that the riverbed should be tangle-free.   And the expectation that your life should be hassle-free, or that your body should be limitation-free.

It's the expectation that is the real causes the stress.  Wisebrain says so.