coffeebarconfessions

I've been doing so well lately I was starting to wonder if I still had Fibromyalgia. Then I woke up this morning. My eyelids were heavy, head ached, and I felt like I was trudging through quicksand. My determination to overcome this horrible illness is so tunnel-visioned I managed to push myself all the way to the gym. Once I started my workout I knew this was more than just a mild fluctuation in my immune function, the main symptom I seem to be left with these days. Regardless, I made it through my workout only somewhat annoyed my diminished cardio-endurance had me huffing and puffing with nary a sweat bead rolling down my forehead. On the way home I started feeling worse. The familiar flu-like symptoms I spent years at the mercy of descended around me like a blanket, snuffing out any post-workout endorphin-glow I might have managed to achieve. Now I sit here feeling so awful I'm trying not to sink into a PTSD fit of "screw my life" despair. Because really, as bad as...

As a child growing up in middle-class America I believed nutritional information, that little box with the breakdown of calories, fat, carbs and sugar on the back of packaged food, was nutrition itself. By the time I was in high school the calorie-obsessed '80s had given way to the fat-obsessed '90s. So basically I believed nutrition consisted of grams of fat, and little else. How was anyone to know polite society wouldn't truly grasp the real nuts and bolts of nutrition until the Atkins-obsessed '00s taught us about the evils of carbs? What freedom! Everyone gleefully chucked their white pasta and fat-free Wonder bread for bacon-wrapped fried cheese and steak. It took me many years to unlearn the bullshit passed off as nutritional knowledge in the good ol' U.S. of A. It took me even longer to finally source what nutrition actually is. Nourishment. I no longer give a rats woo-ha about calories, fat, carbs, sugar or food-guide pyramids. In fact, I rarely eat food tha...

For the woman who loves Mondays, simply because they offer a clean slate to do better, you betcha I'm thrilled it's a new year. While I'm not quite in 'resolution' mode, I am hell bent and determined to implement two changes in my life. The first is to stop reacting. To anything and everything. Always. Forever and ever. This doesn't mean if some horrible tragedy befalls a loved one I can't cry, but it does mean I can't run around like Chicken Little holding my wounded head and declaring to anyone and everyone that the world is ending. Which is something I frequently do. But it hasn't ended yet, hence the resolution to stop reacting. The other change I'm striving for is to finally, once and for all, no ifs ands or buts, get myself on a normal schedule. Staying up till after two in the morning, then sleeping till eleven the next day, is completely annihilating my ability to move my life forward. The problem is it's frequently hard for me to fal...

So I’m strolling through Instagram last night, and come across a very young woman who is disabled with ME/ CFS . She’s popular, a couple thousand people follow her, and quite open about her struggles with this illness. She got sick after catching a “flu” virus. A year later she isn’t better. I stopped trolling for likes on my juicing post, and immediately started sobbing from the depths of my soul. I know her plight so well I want to scream into the loudest microphone in the world! CFS is what first got me sick. Fibromyalgia wasn’t my initial diagnosis. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome was. And just typing the words makes me wail like a wounded baby. Because if I knew then, nine years ago in my twenties, what I know now, a battered and broken warrior in my late thirties, OH MY GOD, what could I have done to salvage my lost life?????!!!!!! Is there anything I could have done to make the last nine years not happen? Is there anything I could tell this girl, who is so upset to be looking at her fi...

For years my doctors told me to exercise. In that "get up off your lazy ass and move already" kind of way. After a while it got silly. Here I was too sick to work, and I was just supposed to breeze through step class like some bored housewife with too much time on her hands? Seeing as I was in too much pain to carry the laundry down three flights of stairs, I ignored such frivolous advice. The pounds packed on, I gained even more weight from going on medications to treat the pain, and then the pain got so bad Vicodin became my breakfast of necessity. I was back to work, but barely, and every other aspect of my life was descending into total chaos. And still, my doctors told me to exercise. It was blatantly insulting. Clearly they weren't of the same mindset as I, and didn't believe the fire racing through my muscles was real. They didn't get how much it hurt to do something as innocuous as blow dry my hair. They didn't get it, how miserable I felt in the after...

My brain is a jumbled, churning whirlwind of thoughts and emotions. Fifty urgent tasks ticker-tape through my mind at a frenzied pace. I've got so many different interests pulling on me, it feels like my limbs are being racked on a Medieval torture device. To compound my frustration, all this turmoil only leaves me utterly spent, exhausted, collapsed. I feel like I'm being sucked down, stuck to the earth, unable to get up off the floor. Sick or not, I've gotta get a grip! If I can't catch the whirling ball of my own reality before it crashes to smithereens, nobody will! So I turned on the Werner Erhard documentary Transformation , about his infamous  est  seminars from the '70's and '80's. Last year his hard-core philosophy of personal-responsibility, wrapped up in a bunch of insults aimed toward the stupidity of humanity, helped me reign in my out-of-control life. Somewhere between now and then I regressed back to my old patterns of anger, bitterness an...

When I opened my email this morning I almost fell off the sofa. This little blog right here has been nominated by Healthline.com for 2014's Best Health Blog Contest ! I've been honored to be named a Top Fibromyalgia Blog by Healthline in the past, but this is bigger. This pits me against ALL health blogs, covering every topic under the rainbow, and there's an actual winner determined by votes. Imagine my surprise when a quick scroll through the competition didn't notice any other Fibro blogs on the list. What a massive opportunity to spread some much-needed awareness!  I'm so glad I started my little Instagram selfie experiment a month and a half ago. Something told me the need for shameless self-promotion was on the horizon, so I better get comfortable with it. Well here it is! Somehow my exorbitantly-dramatic, perpetually-victimized, emotional basket-case, up-and-down like a zipper, I will prevail at-all-costs depiction of life with this illness caught somebody...