I’ve been waking up lately with my head crammed with a bunch of disjointed thoughts. That in itself is not unusual; my head is a confusing place to navigate through. But they don’t fit neatly into a single blog post, and there’s not enough in any one of to make a post on its own, so I hope you’ll pardon the disjointedness.
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I lost fourteen pounds last week.
I’m not, it turns out, a big proponent of weighing oneself religiously as a gauge to determine dietary success or loss. I’ve seen myself gain weight even when being scrupulously faithful to my plan, and lose weight when I’ve cheated. And gaining weight, or losing little or nothing, when I’ve struggled so hard, does nasty things to my emotional state. So I weigh once a week at most. When the weight loss slows down (it’s always fastest at the beginning of a diet, and always fastest with very heavy people), I may drop back to once a fortnight or once a month.
And I’m not even crowing about these fourteen pounds: it’s mostly water, which my body accumulated in response to the inflammation caused by the reaction to bread, and in response to the high levels of salt and sugar I consumed during the funeral trip.
I haven’t done badly this week, though I’ve eaten breadstuffs twice. Each time, the day afterward, my hands itched like crazy, and were noticeably inflamed. A stronger reaction than I had when wheat was a regular part of my diet. Which is good: it will be an instant barometer of what I can tolerate and what I can’t. I’ll keep you posted on my progress, even when I . . . I was going to write “fail” or “stumble and fall,” but failure is an impossibility, remember? The goal is not to lose weight or lose fat, or even be faithful to a diet, but to build new habits. And I have to say, if that was the goal, then I made happy progress toward it.
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Lots of dreams these days. Or nights, rather. Interesting, confusing dreams that fade too quickly. I’m going to put a mini-tape recorder by my bed, because writing my recollections, even the moment I wake up, is too “left brain,” and the dreams fade quickly, while mumbling a rambling narrative in the dark seems to catch more of the imagery. In the morning I’ll transfer them into a dream journal, and I’ll share interesting dreams with you all.
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Two nights ago I felt melancholic. The house felt empty; Mom’s absence felt more acute. I had a couple more episodes of “Did I do enough?” to help Mom (yes, I did everything I knew to do or could physically do, but I recognize it’s natural for survivors to question themselves this way).
I’m still doing well, very well. I fully expected to fall into Crazyland for a while when Mom died, but now I just don’t think that’s going to happen. Acupuncture has played a huge part in my chronic depression not just going into remission (or whatever the appropriate term might be), but being no longer accessible. I can get sad, but that level of dark despair I wrote about in yesterday’s post just isn’t part of my constitution anymore. And while there will almost undoubtedly be more emotional upheavals to traverse in my life, I don’t think it will ever debilitate me the way it used to before acupuncture.
So I felt melancholic. It’s appropriate. I can feel it, breathe through it, embrace it, and move on. And I did.
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