Energy Crisis

Okay, so today I was reading an interview with Alicia Keys in Glamour, and she talked about how she dropped out of college to make her first album and the record company wanted something more commercial so she ended the deal and then she had to wait around for months while her lawyers won back her rights to the music she had made. She says all she could do was keep faith in her decision. "In between crying, I harnessed that feeling of being held back and not able to fly – like the caged bird in Maya Angelou’s autobiography – and wrote a lot of songs." Eventually, she got her songs back, signed with a new label and made the record she believed in.

Reading that brought some tears to my eyes because for years I’ve felt held back. The cage turned out to be my poor health.

It was hard to pinpoint the exact nature of my problems because so much craziness has happened in my life over the years. I was a straight A student until college, which I ended up flunking out of. The obvious culprit for that was my alcoholism, which developed when I was a second-semester freshman and which may or may not have been exacerbated by a car crash I was in that made me feel like my life was spinning out of control much as my car had done on the icy road that February afternoon. It took seven years of drinking myself into oblivion, but I eventually got on a new path thanks to reiki and I learned new coping skills thanks to AA. But after five years of being clean and sober, I noticed that my life was still unmanageable, and that’s not normal for someone in recovery. 

Most of my problems could be traced to lack of funds because I lacked the energy to hold down a job for more than a year. It took everything I had to even last a year. Finally I would have to quit and rest up for a year or so before I could work again. And those rests weren’t very restful, let me tell you! I was homeless, floating from place to place, and hungry. Often I had to eat food that didn’t agree with me. Sometimes I stayed shacked up in unhealthy relationships for too long because I had no where else to go. I stayed with various friends and relatives, spent some nights at homeless shelters, and occasionally got lucky with a house- sitting gig.

I managed to not pick up a drink (or a drug) and even quit smoking cigarettes during those rough times, but around my five-year clean anniversary I came very close to relapsing. There wasn’t much fun in my life anymore, and I got to thinking about all the fun times I had back when I was drinking, and I seriously considered picking back up where I left off. Instead I went to a meeting every day for a week, and that cured me of those delusions.

But I started to seriously question what was wrong with me. I thought I must be dying. My energy level was progressively decreasing every year and I wondered if I had cancer or something. I managed to find some free healthcare, and all the tests that were run came back normal. I started to see a shrink, which I had done periodically and sporadically over the years since I suffered from chronic depression. I was raised to shun allopathic medicine and embrace alternative, natural medicine, so I had refused to take antidepressants over the years, but I finally found myself willing to try them because I felt I had nothing to lose. I was at a point where I felt like if this is what life was like, then it wasn’t worth living, so what harm could some medication do? This was different from the nearly constant suicidal thoughts I had been living with for years. This was utter defeat. Utter hopelessness. No matter how far down I sank before, I had hope that things would get better and always managed to float back up to the top. But now I saw clearly that things had actually been getting worse, not better, and that took all the wind out of my sails.

Meanwhile, no one could see the depths of my suffering because I looked perfectly healthy on the outside, and I wore a cheerful mask in an effort to appear normal. Mere words were useless. Unless I broke down crying in front of someone they just didn’t believe how bad things were. And let me tell you, it is very difficult for me to allow myself to break down in front of anyone. I grew up having to hide my feelings because it wasn’t safe to express them.

I have Complex Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (CPTSD) — I was just crying a minute ago because writing this brings up a lot of grief, and now I’m laughing because it’s just so ridiculous how much I’ve had to deal with. It’s like the blues:  there’s always a point where it becomes hilarious. I know I’m not the only one who’s had a tough lot in life, and there are others who have it worse, but that doesn’t make a hundred pound load feel like fifteen pounds. Anyways, most people have heard of PTSD. It was first coined to refer to Vietnam vets who hadn’t recovered from exposure to a traumatic. Well, Complex PTSD results from exposure to multiple traumas or to ongoing trauma that lasts for extended periods of time as in the experience of concentration camp victims or prisoners of war, and the symptoms are the same as PTSD with a  few twists. Multiple traumas and on-going traumas both describe what my childhood was like. Without going into the actual details of my childhood, suffice it to say that depression is a common symptom of PTSD (and CPTSD), and fatigue is a common symptom of depression, so my shrink suggested antidepressants as a cure for my energy crisis. Although the antidepressants did get rid of those near-constant suicidal thoughts, they didn’t increase my energy level significantly, so it was apparent that depression wasn’t the cause of my exhaustion.

Back to square one with me feeling like a zero.

Some folks postulated that maybe reiki was draining me of energy. That’s ridiculous, but I adhere to the belief that anything is possible, so I stopped doing reiki for a while. That didn’t help. At all…

Finally, I was at the welfare office one day for an appointment, and I told my social worker that I suspected that I had fibromyalgia since I had met several people who had it, and what they described fit. She said her mom had it and was very sympathetic. As it turns out, I could get a welfare voucher to go to a doctor to confirm or rule out a diagnosis. I had no idea where to even begin to find a fibromyalgia specialist, but I quickly found out that rheumatologists diagnose and treat fibromayalgia, so I went to see one, and sure enough he diagnosed me with it. That was in March this year. (The CPTSD was diagnosed in 2004. Both  conditions started in childhood but went undiagnosed until I was nearly and in my thirties.)

Now the thing is that no one knows what causes fibromyalgia or how to cure it. It’s not a progressive disease, though. It just seemed that way to me because as I got older the stamina of youth was waning. After receiving the diagnosis, I decided to dedicate the rest of 2008 to working solely on my health. Then, in January, I will switch my focus to starting up my own business because I obviously can’t hold a regular job. PTSD and Fibromyalgia are classified as disabilities, but I haven’t found a doctor that will support my disability claim, so I kept getting denied and finally gave up.

Since moving to Cali this summer from cloudy northeastern Ohio, I haven’t needed the antidepressants. The increased sunshine does the trick (which was very illuminating). I found a wholistic doctor here who believes that fixing my nutrition will clear up the fibromyalgia (and burnt out adrenals, as it turns out), so I’m giving his program a try. I’m settling in for a long haul on the road back to health. I think it’s going to take a year or two before I feel a big improvement in my energy level, but I’ve already felt some small ones and they give me hope. I’ve had a couple days where I felt completely normal and like I can accomplish everything I want to do. Oh, what a feeling! I used to be an overachiever until I got to college. Like Humpty-Dumpty, I had a great fall, and so far I haven’t managed to put all the pieces back together again. But I’m working on it! 

Moving to Cali was a big transition for me. I am still feeling the stress of it and am walking along the edge of a relapse. Going to meetings helps, which I’ve started doing, but I’m not going often enough and I haven’t gotten a new sponsor yet. I have eight years clean and sober under my belt, and I know what I have to do.

Alicia Keys’ words have inspired me today. I’m going to look for ways to harness that feeling of being held back and not able to fly. She wrote lots of songs during that time. I’m going to dance!