coffeebarconfessions

Last weekend was Easter, a Christian holiday that here in the USA, is a supreme mandate to eat a bunch of crap. Sure, we're supposed to eat the chicken eggs colorfully dyed and scattered about the yard, but from my observation, the chocolate eggs got a lot more attention than anything fowl. In fact, I myself showed up at the family feast hungry. So I proceeded to stuff my face with epic amounts of cheesy hors d'oeuvres, cookies and Cadbury mini-eggs, and that was before dinner was even served. My gastronomic indulgence carried on into the main meal, where I targeted the scalloped potatoes and rosemary bread with the focus of a heat-seeking missile. And then there was the coconut cake... Needless to say, within two seconds of dropping my fork on my empty plate, I felt awful. The feeling only worsened as the day progressed. By the time we were headed home, the only thing on my mind was how badly I needed to down a bucket of kale juice. The healthy cells in my body rebelled agains...

Well, my little tantrum yesterday did nothing to serve my interests whatsoever. All reflecting on every problem in my life, at the same time, accomplished was to freak me out. When freaking out and a flare go hand in hand, I literally turn into Chicken Little. After stewing around in that psychosis for a while, it takes so much extra effort to get myself back on track, I want to scream! I thought my progress in this arena was past such blatant regression. What happened to What Is, Is?  Sigh. I guess progress isn't perfection. I have two verses from Psalms tattooed on the inside of my right forearm. It's the two verses I said while chanting my way around my rosary beads for two days in the hospital. The two days between when the doctors told me I had two strokes and was going to die, because they didn't know how to stop more from coming, and when they told me they found the cause, and I was going to live. In my heart of hearts I credit Psalms 23:4 and 118:17 for saving my li...

Some days I don't think I will survive this journey. Today is one of those days. Every effort to rebuild my life seems but a weak, cheap attempt to fool myself into believing things can be different. An endeavor to convince myself I have a modicum of control over my reality. A desperate call to somehow keep putting one foot in front of the other, when really it's pointless, because the tightrope I'm traversing just snapped. What cold, painful reality tells me is there's too much water under the bridge to move forward. Because it's not just water, it's swamp sewage sludge up to my neck I have to not only wade through without getting sucked down, but somehow figure out how to lift myself out of, as well.  So much pain sits in my past. My reality is a precarious joke. It feels like I spent so much time ignoring the fundamentals of life, because they were so screwed up I couldn't even comprehend them, that the damage to my existence is already done. Most days I ...

Dear Pfizer, Last night one of your commercials for Lyrica came on TV. In this ad a woman claimed her overactive nerves, caused by Fibromyalgia, gave her pain and kept her from doing the things she wanted to do in life. Obviously she went on to tout the praises of your drug, but I wasn't listening. Instead, I was hung-up, obsessing, and ranting and raving over the use of one word, wanted. Fibromyalgia kept her from doing the things she wanted to do in life? Like rock climbing or going to an Eminem concert? Because this Fibromyalgia patient over here experienced a completely different reality. Not only did Fibromyalgia keep me from doing the things I wanted  to do, it also kept me from doing the things I had to do, like washing my hair and going to work. And I know a hell of a lot more patients sing my song than Miss Wanted To Do's.  Needless to say, as a nine year veteran of Fibromyalgia, I found this phrasing offensive. In short, here's my beef; You're $opping up the ...

Habits become habits because after a being does something a certain way for a certain while, the brain forms communication synapses to make doing it that way easier. It's a wonderful function of adaptation, unless of course a person is trying to break a bad habit, like quitting smoking or not avoiding their life anymore because reality bites. In those cases, the brain seemingly urges itself to continue partaking of said bad behavior. I've found trying to talk the brain out of doing what the brain wants to do can be an utterly maddening experience. I'm trying with all my might to actively change my evil ways. After so many years of feeling so awful, and trying to do anything about it making me so crazy, I developed deep neural pathways of avoidance. It was so much easier to get lost in the fiction book I'm writing, than deal with pain in my body so bad it annihilated my entire life. Unfortunately, this coping mechanism ensured that the day I actually did look at my life ...

When I reached my tipping point last August I was a bona fide mess. In order to survive I had to pull it together and figure out this ridiculous existence I found myself living. The first thing I did was halt all communication with the outside world. I didn't realize it at the time, but my complicated external relationships were directly impeding my ability to care for myself. At first the silence was painful. I was outrageously angry that engaging with the people I knew was so damaging to my self-worth, I simply couldn't do it. How, after everything I've been through, was I still nothing more than a pawn in everybody else's manipulative dramas?  As the quiet spread through my psyche I redirected, squashed, yelled at and ignored that anger. Simply indulging it was too painful. Replacing my mental negativity with positive thoughts was the only thing that kept me from spiraling into a full-on meltdown. Plenty of tantrums slipped through the cracks of my new foundation, bu...

This morning I did something I haven't done in ages, I went to the gym. The ability and desire have been percolating inside me for a while now. When I found myself filling a bag with bottled water in order to do bicep curls at home, I knew the time had come to pick up the torch of something taken from me many years ago. Of course it still took me a couple more months to actually get myself together enough to walk in the door, but today I did. Although it was a gym I'd never been to before, I decided to skip the tour and generic personal training session and jump in with both feet, all on my own. After all, I weight trained for years before I got sick, and even some years after Fibro set in. It's like riding a bike or having sex, right? You don't really forget how... When I couldn't even find the women's locker room I felt stupid. After asking for directions at the front desk, and still not being able to find the locker room, I felt even stupider. As I circled th...