Catching you up (15)

(Selections from August, 2009)

I think Stress has a problem with me. I've been keeping meticulous track of my health, nutrition, etc. for several months now. I am like happy clockwork, but now the work-related stress has increased. I lose my very explicit health journal somewhere, please anywhere but the friends' house we stayed in last weekend. I take two days off for a pre-booked holiday. I run out of omega vitamins. And my temperature drops. Sudden continuous cramps. Skin gets worse. Anxiety levels start to broach dissociative levels. Migraines. I know what hormones are causing this, but they shouldn't be causing it a week before ovulation.

Can I be the supermodel of mindfulness?

Because certainly without this very active monitoring, I would be far, far worse. Even when I feel the sour taste of dissociation, that lingering soup of emptiness "what if" floats in, I:

Look out a window
Hold his hand
Take a photograph
Read a chapter
Watch a show
Play a game
Eat

The latter being the least healthy of the above.

I'm losing faith that I will ever be able to cope in a job that involves some intensely stressful times. Would this be worse if I wasn't regularly exercising (which I love, when I actually go)? Should I count my blessings that it's only affecting me this much?

I try to remain ambivalent, but I recognise the patterns too well now. I am deteriorating.

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I'm going to see a specialist. An endocrinologist, in fact. Despite working in healthcare myself, I feel a bit uneasy about it. What if I'm wrong? What if it's all in my head? I don't have a medical degree, so I feel automatically unqualified to make any decisions about my care. So, here's the evidence:

I was shorter and more boyish than my female counterparts, until puberty hit. Magically, in a year, I grew to my full height and suddenly I had breasts of porn star quality. I take it that doesn't happen for everyone? It's supposed to last longer than that. Puberty. Periods were extremely light, and I often never had them at all. Didn't miss them.

I had no desire. Not really. If I did, I wouldn't have turned away all those guys over those years in physical disgust, sometimes literally. Even the ones I loved. I was completely asexual. Not homosexual and not heterosexual: Asexual.

I steadily gained weight, entirely in my torso, and it continues today. Entirely in my torso. I look pregnant. This doesn't seem normal, to me. If I lose weight, I look even more pregnant, as my legs and arms become more and more toned. But still, the belly persists. The breasts are balloons. I look like an asexual pregnant porn star. Or a classical Venus of Fertility. Except, I am neither a porn star nor fertile.

Which came first, the stress or the addiction to it? No doubt I had an extraordinarily stressful childhood. I suffered severe, chronic stress and depression for many, many years. Not months, years. It seems like pocket change now, 10 years. A dime. 315,360,000 seconds of cortisol and sugar and tears.

And then I got sick.


And kept getting sick. Getting sick, sick, sick, until I left home. And then the sickness went to my head. I was so fragile. So sensitive. So raw. I couldn't cope with any criticism, any negativity. I held everything together for 1 year. 2 years. Crack. And then I was sick.

I don't know when the anxiety appeared. It was subtle. It still is. I coped by leaving. Leaving home, leaving school, leaving work, leaving him, leaving the country. It always worked. For at least 31,536,000 seconds. And then I get sick.

In all honesty, much of that time has been spent trying to understand why. I'm not working in healthcare solely because of a great desire to heal the world. It feeds my addiction. Second by second. Coping, lasting, getting to tomorrow. Another 1440. Anything to know more, to solve the mystery of me.

People honestly don't live like this? I'm not sure I can comprehend that. My number one goal in counselling was to stop leaving, but I ended my last session still having no idea how I got to the point of leaving, to begin with. And then I left my job and...

I got sick.

Scientifically, I know practically the entire process. Psychologically, I cannot accept it. Am I responding to bad situations that need to change or am I responding poorly to average situations and I need to change? Surely 630,720,000 seconds is more than bad habits and coincidence?

I know myself. I know my life. I've been keeping busy and doing anything I can to get by. I'm damned lucky. And I'm damned good at surviving. That's saying something, because I am definitely not well. I have never been well.

This insidious imbalance in me will not win.

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Thinking on my scattered and many talents, it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps I didn't know what to be when I grew up because I didn't actually want to be anything at all...

Except me, just as I was.
And will always be.

Read on the NHS Choices blog.