[Wherein I Imagine the Internet Giving me a Hug.]
There has been a lot of good v. bad stuff in the last week. In fact I have internally crafted the opening lines of many an engaging blog post since admitting to the public any joy in seeing SHARKNADO; being nowhere near a pen or keyboard any of those times, this is what the internet gets. My apologies.
In lieu of compelling personal stories that involve too many people who might not yearn to be mentioned in a blog post, I’ll have to very briefly skim over a death in the family and entice you with…
[Hold on, I can’t keep Noam Chomsky talking in the background right now. Pandora will provide something easier on the focus.]
Where was I? Oh yeah, enticing. Sorry everyone, my head is full of the fatigues. Is it too self-aggrandizing for me to post a picture of myself as prescribed “enticement?” Hell, I suppose keeping a public diary has already set that bar. Let me, then, double down on it by making it a before/after shot.
In 2003 I had just endured my first major and truly disabling exacerbation. This had been after about a decade of tiny aggravations and pains that became “new normals” and I had no idea what signs for which to look out. Hindsight shows them all perfectly, of course. Ten years ago I thought I had died, and it was life after that point that began to normalize as absurd. It helped that my life at the time was generally pretty absurd; the resulting PTSD from a week of severe attacks contributed to aforementioned absurdities. I didn’t know what was real for a very long time after that.
And this is where I again jump in to glaze over the details of my thereafter twenties. Things got cray.
At no point during my life had I ever believed weight loss like this was physiologically possible for me… but I also believed my body looked nothing like what all of my mom’s nursing books said because I was both obese and living with nonsensical fatigue and neuralgia (which, in the frame of reference of a minor, translates simply as “growing up”).
Things could of course have been worse. I had a home where I always knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was loved and I don’t regret the person I am today for all the infinite “what ifs.”* I still stand by that as the hallmark of what strength it appears I have now.
(Because it appears I’ve got droves.)