I’ve been feeling moody lately. It’s hard to explain to someone that loves me that I’m not depressed, because they’re too used to my varying levels of depression, but I’m truly not depressed.

I don’t feel hopeless and I don’t feel (completely) helpless.

I just feel frustrated because my progress in everything has slowed as though I’m trying to swim in caramel, and lonely because I have little contact with anyone other than my cats, husband, parents, and siblings (in order of amount of contact).

It will take time before people will want a tutor/advocate again; that’s just how the summer is.

It will take time to get the house the way I want it (because I can’t do much myself and I can’t ask my husband to do much more than help clean or move specified things and even then, it’s rarely on my timetable) and then, once the house is all tidy, it will take time and energy to keep it that way.

It will take time before I’m a weight I find at all acceptable.

It will take time before I can do exercises on my own, without a personal trainer, and even then it will take a while before I build up any normal level of strength or endurance.

It will take time before I’ll even have the option of fostering a dog, or before I meet anyone new.

As my favorite psychiatrist once told me, “Sometimes life just sucks.” So, if it gets you down, that doesn’t mean you’re depressed, it just means you’ve properly evaluated the situation and will just have to endure through the suckitude.

Most people see a decade-marked anniversary with dread, resignation, and a little resentment. It isn’t “look how long I’ve lived,” but looking at all the youthful years behind you that you can never experience again. Although 40 is the new 30, it is still seen as that milestone between young, fledgling adult and Adult.

However, this is the first year I’ve had a birthday without a nugget of depression lodged in my brain. This is the first year I’ve looked at all I’ve experienced and look forward to the future. In fact, my thought was that I’ll only get to live those years twice-more-over, if I’m lucky. Compare that to turning 17 and crying that I was still alive. Or last year, where all I felt was pain and all I looked forward to was more pain and disappointment and further making my loved ones lives difficult. Don’t get me wrong: I still see fibromyalgia as something that won’t be magically disappearing anytime at all soon. However, I see hope for having a future with less pain. It will be a long road and there will be bumps along the way (heck, I’m awake now because I’m in too much pain to lie down comfortably and am just waiting until I’m too exhausted to stay awake), but it can and will happen if I do what I’m supposed to.

In any event, I am happy to be turning 30. I am happy to be old enough that people take what I say seriously – I always knew what I was talking about and have always known best, but it’s a lot harder to take from a 4-year-old, or even a 24-year-old fresh out of grad school. But now I have years of experience and a track record to fall back on (and not just in the teaching field). I am happy to feel a separation between myself and my students. But even more, it’s like starting fresh. All the advantages of the ECT, without the post-ECT oh-no-what-did-I-do-to-my-brain-and-what-did-I-do-to-myself-this-past-year crisis that was jumping into way too deep a pool too quickly.

I look forward to see what the next 3 decades (and the 3 after that) bring:  hopefully, love, children, contentment, and chocolate. Oh, and a size 8 figure (I looked hot, but could still eat). Hey, it doesn’t hurt to dream

Apparently, fibromyalgia and gluten sensitivity have a lot of similar features, according to Deirdre Rawlings, writing for FOODS FOR FIBROMYALGIA.

Physical symptoms associated with gluten intolerance and celiac disease include the following:

• Abdominal cramping / bloating
• Abdominal distention
• Appetite increased (to the point of craving)
• Back pain
• Constipation
• Dehydration
• Decreased ability to clot blood
• Diarrhea
• Dry skin
• Edema
• Electrolyte depletion
• Energy loss
• Fatigue
• Gas / flatulence
• Mouth sores or cracks in the corners
• Muscle cramping (especially in the hands and legs)
• Night blindness
• Weakness and lethargy

Emotional states associated with gluten intolerance and celiac disease are:

• Brain fog
• Depression
• Difficulty concentrating
• Disinterested in normal activities
• Irritable
• Mood changes

How many of these sound like a person with fibromyalgia, depression, mild anxiety, and irritable bowel? Exactly. How about if I just list the symptoms I don’t have?

• _____?

Yeah, I’ve got it all. And my weekend (Friday-Sunday) was very, very gluten rich and surprisingly increasingly painful. So I might have a sensitivity, if not an allergy (I also sometimes break out in unexplained rashes, which I currently have), and I ought to ask my doctor to do tests to determine whether this is possible. Until then, I should eat a low-carb diet.

But gluten is sooooo yummy. My favorite foods are ice cream, bread, chocolate, and pasta.

So I could change my diet and possibly turn everything around (and also lose a lot of weight without my favorite foods to tempt me) but lose the comfort of those favorite foods except on rare occasion.

Or I could go on as if this weren’t a possibility.

Yeah, yeah, I know. I made an appointment for next Wednesday (3/10) with my rheumatologist and I will definitely be bringing this up.

Luckily, my “adoptive” grandmother (my husband’s maternal grandmother)’s husband has gluten intolerance and he eats a gluten-free diet, so she could have some great suggestions, and there are many cookbooks and diet books out there.

I don’t know what I’m hoping for. Maybe a notable sensitivity in tests, but not a complete intolerance, giving me the the ability to indulge in very small amounts and leading to a breakthrough turnaround that changes my life. Yeah, that would rock.

I know it seems like a silly little thing, but I am absolutely thrilled that my husband has made some new friends! Last weekend, I was unhappy that he left the house after freeing up my car to go prep for Sunday’s Magic tourney in Boston, and less happy when he called to say that he wouldn’t be home until 1am. However, when he got home and explained that he’d met some guys and went to one guy’s house and hung out there, I was thrilled!

This week, he’s stayed in contact with them through Magic websites and is hanging out most of tomorrow at his friend’s house to test Magic decks and watch the US vs. Canada gold medal hockey game. I’ll miss him, but I’m so, so happy that he found intelligent people with similar interest that he can spend time with and that he is feeling less isolated.

When it comes right down to it, Peter is more than my husband, he’s my best friend and I want him to be happy and content. I knew I could not do that on my own, but I can give him the freedom to spend time with friends.

Eleven years ago, in January of 1999, I was in a car accident. It happened just before spring semester of my freshman year of college, and I wound up having to take the semester off. However, I was alive and relatively well despite the mangled wreckage of the little red Mazda coupe I walked away from, and I was fervently grateful (compared to two years earlier, when I was deeply depressed and actually cursed having lived to see my 17th birthday).

This was the beginning of a great deal of introspection. Although I didn’t rediscover religion and (my version of) God until taking Chaos Theory two years later, I did begin to truly etch into being my understanding of my reason for being. I was no longer just living because my death would hurt others, but deciding what my life is. Then again, this is what all college students do after their first semester, when a teenager realizes she is now an adult and is living and learning toward the molding of her own future. In any event, that semester off is when I etched into the stoniest part of my mind my reason for living:

I am here to enrich the lives of others.

In other words, I’m not out to change the world, but if I can make the lives of those whose paths I cross a little bit sunnier, or at least suck a little less… well, that is what I’m here for.

So I became less interested in the diagnosis as in the prognosis. I became less overwhelmed by trying to solve my own problems as I became obsessed with trying to find solutions so other people I meet with similar problems might not have to flounder, or at least not feel alone. I became the person you know now. I became a math teacher for special needs students. I became a disability rights advocate. I became a better daughter and sister and friend. 

Fast-forward to a year ago. I was in severe pain constantly. I was struggling with attendance and performance at my cubicle-based curriculum job but could no longer be a classroom teacher. Just knowing me and my situation made friends and family sad. But worse was my home life: because of me, both my husband and my cat were losing hair and I had completely derailed the future we had set out for ourselves. By May, I had worked in physical therapy for over 6 months with little-to-no progress and all my prescriptions were refilled simultaneously. I recognized I was depressed but I was out of new medications to try. I had determined that everyone’s  life would be better if I was just removed from the equation, and that could only be done by a horrible accident. I stopped wearing my seatbelt, started driving less safely, and had started to research dosages each of my medications that would be safe if taken alone, but fatal in combination.

So I checked myself into Sheppard-Pratt, got 10 sessions of uni-lateral ECT (electro-convulsive therapy of a single hemisphere), and now find myself in the same place with a completely different mindset.

I have come to realize that it wasn’t my physical situation that made me a drain on people’s lives a year ago, it was my absolute, soul-deep despair.

Right now, I see options. I see being on disability an opportunity to be a better me, to better fulfill my other roles in life, as well as a chance to feel better. I have accepted the fact that I can’t be everything I want to be and that trying to just hurts the students I want to help and keeps me from being a good wife or being there for friends and family.

So once again, I look at why I was put on this Earth and remind myself that I am here to make others’ lives sunnier, happier, easier, or at least less sucky. I am here to be a good wife, cat-mommy, sister, daughter, aunt, friend, and more… and if I have to put the role of educator on the back-burner and put off the role of mother, well, I should focus on what I can do with the energy I have and be happy that I can afford to be so many things to so many wonderful people, and I will cherish and enjoy the time I can spend with them.