I have been feeling “off” for a while now, and I do believe there are a number of factors responsible for this. It’s been an “off” year so far, and I am soooo ready for my life to settle into some semblance of “normal.”
At the top of my list would be my health issues. As my regular readers know, I have been sick quite a bit this year. I had an endoscopy last week and was diagnosed with a small hiatal hernia as well as GERD. I am waiting for biopsy results of tissue from my esophagus, NOT for cancer (the doctor saw nothing that looked cancerous) but to determine the extent of the tissue damage to my esophagus.
Unless something surprising comes in, I can control my issues by eating a more balanced diet (fruit or veggies with each meal and avoid spicy & greasy foods). My doctor also gave me a prescription for medication to settle the reflux down when it flares up, and he wants me to take the meds proactively over the holidays since I seem to get very sick each year in January right after the holidays. Through dietary changes, my stomach is doing fine right now, so hopefully this part of my life is improving.
Then there is the hub factor. Hub has been on a medical leave of absence from work since the beginning of April and returns next week. It’s nothing life-threatening, but he did need the leave. I have gone from seeing him an hour a day for 20 years to having him around ALL THE TIME, and it’s been quite an adjustment, especially since, to him, having me around means me taking care of him. I work from home, so it’s been a challenge.
One the hardest parts for me has been having limited time to blog. I work ~ 20 hours a week for my job (from home) and then blog in my extra time. I have had no extra time with hub always around, and I miss blogging. I feel like blogging about healing from child abuse is my main “purpose” on this earth, and I am being kept from my purpose. I miss interacting with my readers, and I miss the energy and sense of purpose I get from blogging. I am hoping to get back to a regular blogging routine once hub returns to work because I need it.
More tomorrow…
Photo credit: Hekatekris
Blooming Lotus 
You’ve had a rough time. Thank you for sharing all this with us; I find it validating to hear that you too can be overwhelmed by enough comparatively small things going wrong at once. I tend to think it only happens to me and then only because I’m weak.
It’s good that the medics have found some kind of actual cause of your gastric problems. I’ve had appalling difficulties with that lately, but there’s apparently nothing wrong; I just call it “Survivors’ Stomach”. I guess yours may be another variant of that disorder though! It can be easy to forget the toll this stuff takes on your body as well as your mind.
I have had a taste of what you’re describing here this year, too. Trying to find a balance between caring for those you love and attending to your own needs is tricky. And when health comes into the equation, it can really throw balance out of kilter. It sounds like you’re on a path toward better balance in all things now, though, so perhaps the second half of this year will be markedly better than the first half.
I am praying you to have more time to yourself. We all need that. I can’t function without my alone time.
Faith. This does not belong here.
But why do some parts (2 in particular very scared of). .want to and do harm other parts within. Rape. Beat. I see this. I hear it.
Someone said it sounds as if they are introject parts.
Could you do blog on this?
How do i change this within?
It is terrifying.
I hope things will get better in your life.
Thanks for answering on ISurvive. Yes. That is i. Same malanie.
Tying to continue on. It is a lot. It is overwhelming so often.
I do not feel strong at all.
Hey Malanie,
This may be just me. None of us like to be called names or defined by someone else so the introject parts would not fly with us.
We found that for us the ones that most would define as wanting to harm were in fact expressing what they saw happen to other children. At that age they saw much of the horror that they witnessed as happening to them.
For us we came to understand which is not learning that for some of us when they saw someone raped that that person was still being raped. Much like a child that when a television it turned on expects the same show to be on as was the last time they viewed.
We always go with no parts were created for no good reason and it is about all of us finding a way for them to express. If we focused on prevention than we never got to the cause. We went with there are no evil parts. I am not saying some people do not have evil parts. We did not although it seemed often that their might be. We expect that had we looked for them we would have found them in that we could view them as such.
Hi, Malanie and Michael.
I, too, view myself as having no evil parts. All parts are **me**, and **I** am not evil. :0)
~ Faith
i have had success with going with I need to eat for the work I am doing and it is variable. I do not assume my needs are the same as if I were not doing the work I was doing or did not have a PTSD body.
I read once where the experts came to understand that people in combat need more calories than those that are not. They discovered this when those in combat told them they could not function on that few calories. I used to work construction. The heath conscious could not keep up with the not health conscious. Pretty much the rest of us had to carry them. Got sick of listening to how healthy they were.
Yesterday I ate a whole batch of pancakes by myself and had 1/2 a pound of bacon for lunch. And a huge ham and cheese grinder/hoagie for supper. Today I had cornflakes and milk and cottage cheese. It is not different parts of us it is our needs are different as we are in different places with what is going on with our body. Makes grocery shopping hard.
If I eat really poorly as in fried chinese food which is my standard of bad I go with the cause is not in that moment rather somewhere before that. I can now go back and see that it was not really a mistake. I was doing some crazy hard work and eating a the time was not what I needed to do. The reptilian brain does not like to eat when it knows there is danger. Danger does include processing.
“It is not different parts of us it is our needs are different as we are in different places with what is going on with our body. Makes grocery shopping hard. ”
I think I have something a bit like this. I especially get cravings for different types of food. Received “wisdom” is that high-fat/sugar/salt food is addictive and habit forming, but I don’t find that to be true at all. One day I wake up feeling like I really need a pizza, I go out and get one, eat it, feel good. The next day it’s all carrots and spinach. It’s annoying when I predict carrots and spinach and it turns out I don’t need them for a week, so they have to sit in the fridge!
I find that there isn’t as much conflict between what I want and what’s good for me as dietary advice suggests, and that’s not as wacky as some people think. For example, there are certain yeast products (Marmite being one, for people who know what that is), that one only likes the taste of if they’re slightly deficient in Vitamin B. Only people who could do with more iron tend to like black treacle (can’t remember what that’s called outside the UK, sorry) and liquorice. To a certain extent the body knows.
Maybe pursuing the “what I want, when I want it” diet isn’t ideal in the long term, but “ideal” for me is over; it is not a concept that applies to me.
Hey Jan,
Very interesting about the vitamin D and licorice. I have times when I need black licorice. Also interesting about the black treacle as I am right now consuming much maple syrup. In the US we do not really have treacle as close as we come is molasses which is kinda like really really dark treacle. (I lived in York in 2000 when I attended Ribbon York. University.)
I have found over time that people are not all together honest about what they eat. I know many runners that seem to run only so they can eat junk food and not gain weight.
I watched a video on TED and the premise was that the technology of heating food is why humans “upper” brain developed. Heating food is in a way pre-digesting it. The upper brains crave predigested food. If you really look at what is considered healthy and not it really is about how much energy it takes for the body to digest it.
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