Heatwave Hell in Melbourne - And Afterwards

Pic: Koshy Koshy

Last week, Melbourne endured four days of temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius, including three days over 42, and two days at virtually 44 degrees.

Adelaide fared even worse: 42.1 on Monday, 45.1 on Tuesday, 43.7 on Wednesday and 44.2 on the Thursday. On that day Roseworthy, north of Adelaide, was the hottest place in South Australia, with the maximum temperature reaching 46.4.

I wasn’t expecting to write a blog entry primly entitled ‘How I felt after the heat wave’, especially as I’ve just had a whinge about the difficulties of being green and anxious. But then a couple of friends talked about being depressed and tired once the weather had changed so I decided to make a few speculations about it.

It was a week when things got a bit too sci-fi for my liking. The level of heat was something I felt I hadn’t experienced before, but apparently things got this bad back in February 2009, culminating in Black Saturday, when the temperature reached 46.4 in Melbourne. (As you can see these extremes are turning me into a climate nerd!)

It seems there is something we lack when we think and talk about temperature. We don’t have the words to describe the spiritual and emotional effects of extended heat. We know that the very young and the elderly die in heatwaves, as do numerous small animals – bats, possums, birds – and in the worst hours we fancy we experience something of what they must have gone through, but we can’t possibly.

Nor are we able, as a society, to communally memorialise the heat. We commemorate the bushfires of course, and the terrible loss of life and home, as we should. But somehow the communal bruising of extended extreme weather doesn’t get memorialised.

Perhaps we should have some kind of public art work that can be added to over the years, recording the highest temperatures for each summer with accompanying statistics and stories. Some of those stories would be funny but some of them would be tragic – losing grandparents and young babies to heat stroke for example. More than double the number of people died of the heat in the week before Black Saturday (374) than died in the fires (173).

Maybe the lack of a vocabulary for this type of stress is why some people try to go on as if nothing has changed – there were still joggers on my street early in the the mornings of the hottest days. Routines are comforting touchstones in uncertain times, but it's important to adapt and bend. A friend of mine rode his bike to the local shopping centre for breakfast, but he rode slowly, and found it less tiring than walking would have been.  

Suffering the heat

With extreme heat and cold, it’s not, in a first world country, just about the temperature. It’s what battling the temperature, and the practical effects of the extreme weather, takes out of you physically and emotionally.

If your body is overheated for a long period of time, it’s a low-key, extended suffering. It’s exhausting in a way that is difficult to describe. I imagine that battling with extreme cold has similarly debilitating effects.

But why the mental effects, the lingering ennui and depression? Although there is a robust public discussion about the heat, with plenty of warnings and advice about how to cope with it, there is no advice on how to cope with the fears it engenders. Perhaps being very hot for a long period provokes ancient, preverbal terrors. There’s also the strange sense of anticlimax that we experience when the temperature drops suddenly, and we are expected to go back to normal straight away.

Yet it’s fundamentally wrong for the body to be this overheated and it feels that way. It took me three days to get over the physical effects of the heat. In those days I paced myself well and got everything done that I needed to. And there were small breaks, too, during the ordeal, like the Wednesday morning at quarter to six when I opened the front door and the morning air was cool and welcoming so I walked a couple of blocks and it was the most beautiful reprieve. To feel alive in the world and able to move freely without being overheated.

But by the last day I’d had it. I escaped the house at about 3, drove myself to Camberwell library, picturing the waiting beanbags, which no one usually uses – imagining myself on one of them. And when I got there, sure enough there were a couple of empty beanbags. On one side of me, a young man had fallen asleep. On the other, a young couple sat close and chatting quietly. An almost full bottle of spring water on the ground beside them. Forgot. The. Water. Damn. At Ashburton library two days earlier, the staff had put out a jug of water and plastic cups – a great idea. Camberwell library hadn’t done that so the utter joy of the beanbag was marred a bit by thirst, but it was manageable.

Anyway, the end of the ordeal was in sight, and came earlier than expected. On the way home from the library the temperature started to drop – by about 10 degrees Celsius in an hour. That was enough to provide immediate relief and then the full cooling came a few hours later.

It was a sobering glimpse into a future dominated by catastrophic climate change. When I was growing up, it was a big deal (and kind of exciting) for the temperature to reach 100 degreees Fahrenheit, which is ‘only’ 37.7 degrees Celsius. A few months ago the Bureau of Meteorology made an announcement – that the climate of Australia had changed, and that there was no point in looking at climate records to forecast the future. I try to imagine what would have happened if those four days had stretched to five, or six, or more.

In the future, will there be a number of days every year when certain places will be simply uninhabitable? I imagine there could be evacuations. Or instead will there be public places set aside with airconditioning for people to huddle in?

When it came to bushfires – which usually get worse when the cold change hits because the winds fan the flames – my state got off lightly. There was no repeat of Black Saturday. This was a huge relief, although in Victoria alone, the Grampians blaze burned for 52,000 hectares, one person was killed, about 4000 sheep lost their lives, and 27 houses and about 60 other buildings were lost. Terrible, but it could have been so much worse.

So – a huge impost on the body and spirit that probably translates into a huge dive in productivity across the state. I feel as if I’ve gone through some ritual ordeal. And yet in twenty years' time I won’t be boasting to my great-nieces and nephews about how I lived through the Great Heatwave of 2014 – what they will have to put up with in future heatwaves will make last week look like a pleasant spring interlude!

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My Mother’s Memory: The Effects of Delaying an Alzheimers Diagnosis

Could the human capacity to remember be imagined as a shelf on which rest the things we know of the world? And if the shelf disintegrates, our memories have nowhere to rest?

That’s a poor analogy in some ways, because the shelf itself holds the kind of basic memories that tell us who we are and where we belong in the world. It seems to me that some of the less important understandings – the items on the shelf – dissolve or disappear before the shelf itself completely gives way.

My mother has cognitive impairment. Her short-term memory is terrible and continues to get worse. She is fast losing her understanding of how the more complex aspects of the world work. She probably has the beginnings of Alzheimers or some other form of dementia, but until she gets tested, nothing can be done. Yet she doesn’t care whether or not she gets tested, and my father is in a state of active denial. The more you try and bring him around to the need for testing, the more defensive he gets.

My mother knows who she is, that she has daughters and grandchildren. She drives to Chadstone alone and walks up and down the main walkways; she doesn’t buy much, but she says the walking is her form of exercise. She rings me and leaves messages saying ‘This is your mother here’. She complains about finding it hard to buy clothes because she’s so short; she recently found a new skirt that she likes, and showed it off to me with great delight. She is as obsessive as she ever was about keeping the house tidy.

But her short-term memory is terrible. She’ll remember some of what she did the night before, but specific details get wiped. Visiting my sister one night she commented on the large, efficient clothes airer that sat in front of the fire. A week or two later my sister found an identical one in a hardware store. She rang my mother to ask if she should buy it for her. My mother had no recall of admiring my sister’s clothes airer, and no interest in the one my sister had found. ‘We don’t really need clothes airers’, she said.

More serious than that, she’s losing her grasp on the world’s complexities. She could probably no longer explain distinctions such as the difference between state and federal, a premier and a prime minister. And while she is still aware of the things that affect her life – her grandchildren, her friends and so on – she finds it hard to follow the thread of conversations that go beyond the basic.

Her memory continues to get worse. A few months ago, in her own kitchen, she began cooking a birthday dinner for one of her nephews. Soon afterwards, she forgot that she’d already started the cooking process.

Memory also includes what goes where. Months before that, another of my sisters dropped over at dinner time one night. Mum was in the kitchen, having just put the electric kettle on the lit stove. When my sister’s horrified eye moved towards the stove and saw what had happened, Mum saw too, and understood right away what she’d done. But it was the fact of her doing it that was the problem.

Yet to my knowledge she’s never had one of those catastrophic existential moments that can confront sufferers with the reality of their illness – the ones where they suddenly become so disorientated they don’t know where they are or what they’re doing.

Such a moment is dramatised in the biopic Iris, about the life of the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, an Alzheimers sufferer. Murdoch is in the middle of a pre-recorded television interview when her magnificent brain fails her. She’s talking about education when she halts – what was she going to say? What’s going on? What is the meaning of the camera, the interviewer, and who is that person on the array of television screens? On the way home she gets hopelessly disorientated.

At the possibility of this happening to my mother, it is tempting to join my father in his denial. There are a couple of factors that encourage such a stance.

Factors that can cause poor memory

My mother is on a few different drugs for her ailments, which include high blood pressure and osteoporosis. Many drugs can cause forgetfulness. One researcher even developed a questionnaire to determine whether a drug regime was causing toxicity. This is something I would like a specialist to look at, but I realise it can’t, at this point, be the whole story.

The other factor is diet, but as I am the only one in the world who perceives this, there’s a fair chance that it is delusional thinking on my part. For Mothers Day this year my sisters pooled their money to buy my mother a coffee maker. I was horrified.

Ever since I was diagnosed with the little-known and incurable condition of low blood sugar, or functional hypoglycaemia, I’ve thought that this condition was implicated in my mother’s long-term fatigue, forgetfulness and low-level depression; caffeine and concentrated sugar, both dear to her heart, are the worst things for this condition. Her memory’s been poor for years, and she’s always useless in the afternoons, slightly better after her obligatory nap. I can’t count the number of times, even before her memory problems became serious, I’ve suggested she give up sugar and caffeine. Each time in her airy way she acts as if it’s the first time she’s heard of it. This is understandable now, but she’s always been completely uninterested when I broached the subject in investigating diet for her fatigue – she’s a long-time foodie.

However, I am fooling myself that Alzheimers or some form of dementia isn’t the culprit. Research shows that mild cognitive impairment can be a precursor of Alzheimers by many years. And Alzheimers is ‘by far the most common cause of cognitive impairment’.

An incomplete diagnosis

About two-and-a-half years ago my mother did get tested. The specialist told her she was on the borderline, could take anti-Alzheimers drugs if she wanted to, and should come back again for another test in two years time. I didn’t find out about this until almost a year later – my elder sister deliberately lied about the results to shield me. However, it wasn’t, in my understanding, a diagnosis of Alzheimers but of cognitive impairment. 

Even once mild cognitive impairment has set in, much can be done to halt and even reverse it and perhaps actually prevent it from sliding into Alzheimers. I curse the specialist and all my mother’s doctors for their slackness. Did the specialist tell her to do brain exercises? Watch her diet? Walk regularly? That she could arrest or at least slow some of the decline if she wanted to? Not by the sound of it, apart from offering the drug option. She was, it seems, just another bumbling 76-year-old woman. Next, please.

When my sister told me the truth about these tests – about a year ago now I suppose, I am vague myself – I wandered around in a daze of low dread, of loss and helplessness. It was as if I was feeling my mother’s loss of mental power in my own head. This laid bare, mercilessly, how bound up my identity is with my mother’s. It was as if my own brain, my own self, were under threat. In a way it was. I had never escaped the over-identification with the mother that is the trap of poorly mothered women.

Yet I don’t want this to sound as if I have come to terms with my mother’s illness. The move towards acceptance of Alzheimers in a parent seems to come in increments. I cannot properly grieve for my mother’s Alzheimers because there has been no proper diagnosis.

Of course, that dark dread, which returns periodically, is not just about over-identifying with my mother’s brain. There is a much more prosaic way in which it translates to my own experience. If she has Alzheimers this means it runs in the family, so I have a greater chance of getting it.

And this is ironic too, because mental debilitation of different sorts was an early symptom of what I now see as my OCD. I spent my twenties and to a much lesser extent early thirties dreading the onset of hallucinatory schizophrenia, and the future risk of Alzheimers. I had no idea that these lonely worries were part of a completely different disorder that was not in my future but very much in my present. I have always been a vague person, and worry about my vagueness came second only to concern about my social anxiety symptoms.

My identification problems with my mother make it difficult for me to witness with any objectivity her poor management of her debilitation. At the same time her shortcomings seem too conveniently related to her illness (a selfish stance I know, reflecting my own damage).

There have been so many ways she could have improved her memory, and even at this stage she could do more to preserve what she has. Frustratingly yet predictably, everything about my mother’s character that complicated my own development is writ large in her failure to take control of her cognitive impairment to the extent possible. This failure is all too consistent with her careless attitude to not only my illness as teenager, but her own physical health.

My mother’s identity has always been weak. Her lack of a strong sense of self, her utter emotional slipperiness, her reliance on others for affirmation – all these have been bound up with a chronic lack of attentiveness, resulting in an inability to shield her children from nutty relatives, poor teachers, the ravages of neurosis. Now these same weaknesses impact on her own ability to hold off some of the effects of her illness. And the illness accentuates those weaknesses to strengthen its hold on her, encouraging her not to care.

More than that, the cognitive impairment itself seems to be all of a piece with these weaknesses, a natural outcome of a lack of attentiveness to self and others. It seems as if my mother is making the ultimate escape. How dare she leave when she has never been fully present? And what does it say about me that I am incapable of viewing her dilemma except through the lens of my own needs?

The upside

I don’t want to be completely negative. My mother’s excessive acceptance has its good points. She is childlike and easygoing. She has lost some of the more bitter aspects of her personality. If she does descend to full-blown Alzheimers, I can’t imagine her being difficult to manage. If anything, she will be overly compliant.

My father is in good health and at seventy-eight has more energy and sprightliness than most men his age (‘sprightly’ seems the wrong word for him – he doesn’t really seem particularly elderly to me) and is a very giving person. He has taken over much of the domestic load, although his semi-incompetence in this area is becoming a problem – he burned my mother’s nylon undies recently when he put them in the dryer.

For a mother who was always so absent, so lacking in maternal instinct, my mother gave a good impression of presence. I always believed she was looking out for me even when there was evidence to the contrary. Now I know she never will be, never can be. I must look out for myself, be my own mother. It’s a heavy, difficult task. I cannot give to her at this point the care that a fully functioning daughter could. But I will give what I can when the time comes.

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The Afternoon Belongs to the Sleepy

I heard a saying once: the morning is for God, the evening is for humans, but the afternoon belongs to the devil.

Whoever wrote this had a circadian rhythm similar to my own – bright and shining and preternaturally alert in the early morning, lapsing somewhat around 10 am but functional till lunchtime, then going to hell in the afternoon.

The afternoon: when things that have been left unfinished in the morning are visited on the weary soul like the returning curse of a bad fairy. The afternoon, when you become an existentialist. When the garden sinks into an endless trance, except for Ferdie, the kelpie cross from the flat around the corner who, tail wagging in delight, poohs on the generous grass of my front yard.

He knows he's not supposed to, so, lacking the moral rectitude of many in the canine world, he confines his doings to areas of the yard that are outside the sightline from my office window. Perhaps he is a kind of devil – his peculiar pale-rust coat and disconcertingly light eyes suggest this – but I know the impression is misleading because, after chasing him around the corner once, I got close and thought he was cringing until I realised he had picked up a stick in his mouth and was throwing it on the ground in front of me, urging me to play catch with him. Not a devil perhaps but certainly devil-may-care.

The trouble with afternoons is that they often mean deadlines, but I'll do almost anything to avoid having to send a completed job to a client at this time of day. What horrors of sloppy diction are laid bare, what ridiculous mistakes and omissions have been left unseen by my oxygen-depleted brain when something is sent off before close of business (ie 5 pm)?

Better to be ahead of the game, to have most of the thing finished by the morning – what a shining time to get things done! My brain is like a purring engine that's just been serviced. It runs smoothly with minimal noise. Small errors that escaped my attention jump out at me. Creativity is at its height. I treasure these few hours. They are the secret to any kind of success I have in my career.

The zombie-like nature of afternoons can be minimised by judicious planning. The trick is to reserve this time for things that require only small amounts of either mental or manual labour. It’s quite a good time for starting new work tasks – to freewheel a bit, do some basic research, produce creative insights and provide an extremely rough first draft, but not to draw all the threads together or supply rigorous logic. One non-professional task I like to do in the afternoons is weeding the garden – it's mindless and refreshing. Clearing out the email in-box is also a productive way to pass the time when blood-sugar challenged.

Since I started taking antidepressants there is an added complication to the afternoon. At around 5.30 pm I like to stop work and fling myself onto my comfortable old couch under the large window in the spare room. It’s the lightest, airiest room in the house and I can't be seen from the couch when I'm lying on it because of the upward slope of my front yard (but I can poke my head up and check for Ferdie's arrival).

It's a perfect place to read by the bright light of the late afternoon sun, except that, with the drugs in my system, between 5 and 6 is the time my mental energy is at its lowest. Yet when I close my eyes, hoping for half an hour of sweet oblivion, my brain seems to be trapped in a halfway house, too tired to think but not tired enough to sleep. It feels a bit mangy, a bit old, as if it doesn't know how to either turn itself off or keep itself on properly. TS Eliot wrote:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw.

He seems to have uncannily predicted the effects of Luvox on my early-evening mental state.

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A Pill Popper's Progress

Please note: the following is my experience only and is not advice about whether or not to take antidepressants. If you are experiencing any serious side effects from pharmaceutical drugs, including suicidal thoughts, contact your doctor or a close family member immediately.

Now that Christmas is over and I have time to breathe I can finally catch up on this neglected blog. It's more than three months since I started taking an antidepressant for the first time in ten years – and probably the first time that I was capable of handling the side effects and waiting for the worst ones to stop. It's high time for a progress report!

I'm taking only 25 mg of Luvox a day, a miserly dose compared with the allowed daily maximum of 300 mg. Being incredibly sensitive to anything I put into my system, I can't imagine what I'd be like on the full dose, apart from comatose – I'd probably make a zombie look like an ADHD sufferer. So even on my tiny 25 mg I'm declaring the experiment a success. This amount is enough to take the edge off my fears and obsessions, to the extent that I can perform certain social feats, and I've totted up a few triumphs that are improving my quality of life. Then there's the relative freedom from obsessional thinking that was becoming more and more debilitating.

On the minus side, there are continuing side effects that won't go away. I consider the trade-off worthwhile but they are significant enough to warn me off a higher dose. As well, despite my progress, the basic structure of my social anxiety is still intact.

The graces

When I started taking Luvox, I was amazed at how quickly I noticed positive change (I know what you're thinking – the placebo effect!) and how quickly life itself seemed to respond to my improved resilience.

Reduction in OCD

The most quick-acting and lasting effect of the Luvox has been a reduction in obsessional thinking – a low-level form of OCD, I'm now convinced. My obsessional fears about people and groups have been par for the course for decades, and in recent years I'd developed a mild body dysmorphia that had me examining various body parts in the mirror in an attempt at reassurance that instead led to horror whenever I discovered some shocking new flaw. But I hadn't realised just how debilitating my OCD had become until my latest periodic fixation reared its head yet again – stains on clothes.

Every now and then, an incident in which a piece of clothing was ruined by an irremovable stain – oil is a common culprit – would spark an obsessional fear that all my clothes, as well as sheets, doona covers and so on, were or would become irrevocably stained. Everything else shrank in the face of that possibility and I would wonder how civilisation was at all possible with this ever-present threat, and how people with children managed to afford to clothe them, when surely the little blighters would be routinely ruining everything they wore (I'm still amazed at the temerity of anyone who wears white, including brides!). I'd had a couple of these attacks when I started to realise they might actually signal the OCD that I'd been wondering if I had.

The strength of this fear in me is a good measure of my obsessional thinking in general, and Luvox has quietened these fears. When a loved piece of clothing stains, I still get upset but it no longer signals the arrival of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. I still obsess about people and social situations, too, but less so.

Reduction in social anxiety

Work has been an area of giant strides. Two days in a row – try to imagine the angst – I had to drive out to different locations to meet clients I'd never met before (well, I didn't have to – but with the drug in my system I was willing to give it a burl). Both of these involved long drives to locations of varying familiarity with all sorts of fears of doom and dark forebodings going on beforehand.

Having the two meetings in the same week created an accidental curve of therapeutic exposure. Upping the ante even further, both happened to be male clients, which I find far more anxiety-provoking than female. The second one was far harder than the first, connected as it was to my main copywriting client.

To top it off, I actually went into the workplace of a long-standing publisher client and worked in-house for three days – three whole days! While this was a triumph, there's no way I could have sustained it – or would even have wanted to. But to be able to actually achieve some work while in the company of others, and to say hello and interact with people I hadn't seen for a couple of years and had communicated with mostly by email was a huge boost to my confidence.

In all these scenarios the drug didn't take away the fear but it took away the worst of the physical symptoms. Having fear is strange on an SSRI like Luvox. To an extent your body and mind still perform their usual, rusted-on routine (mind conjuring up social catastrophes while stomach churns and somersaults) but there's a numbness there too, a sense of detachment, as if you know you're bluffing and there's a fair chance you might actually be alright. The first time around on Luvox in 2001, I remember telling a friend it was like having a platform underneath me for the first time, whereas before in social situations I was always falling into the cellar of my unconscious terrors. This time around it sometimes feels as if the drug is holding me, keeping me steady. It's like a good fairy or a guardian angel.

The other triumph is that I'm now attending a mental health group that meets on a weekly basis. We sit in a circle in the front room of a forties Tudor-style house converted to the group's office in a middlebrow suburb about fifteen minutes' drive from my place. I can't say I go every week – sometimes work forbids it – but the exposure has been incredible. The meetings go for two hours, way too long for someone like me, and my usual habit of homing in on 'scary' people is still there, but the Luvox allows me to stay put and work through this (touch wood – as I become more familiar with the group members, it actually becomes harder for me).

Better sleep

I'm also sleeping better. Nothing seems that pressing any more that I can't eventually get to sleep. My dreams are clearer too, vivid and fun to interpret in the morning, although they fade quickly after I wake.

The curses

Here are the side effects of Luvox that have continued into my third month on the drug. I can't speak for others – I suspect some of my symptoms are to do with have a dodgy immune system and a sensitivity to common food chemicals rather than being typical side effects of the drug, but I could be wrong.

Memory

My memory isn't as good on Luvox. For example, I struggle to remember what is on telly that evening after checking the guide online (the litmus test for me of good working memory). The other thing is reading. Depending on the level of detail, I struggle to recall much of what I've read even after a few paragraphs. Non-fiction, with its endless new names of players and organisations, is much worse than fiction. Part of this, I tell myself, is low blood sugar. There's no doubt the drug makes me even more susceptible to blood sugar fluctuations than I was previously.

Being more careful with my diet would definitely help. My weekend treats, mild as they are (rice cakes, tomato and hummus; cashews) result in greater tiredness, even exhaustion. So I need to indulge less, and this is difficult.

However, it not's all bad where memory's concerned. Having a quieter mind in some ways increases my ability to focus (although I can be a bit slow on the uptake), so I suspect in some ways I might be retaining some information better, especially the kind that occurs in conversation.

Digestion

There is evidence that SSRIs can disrupt the workings of the digestive system. I don't know whether this is related, but I have a permanently bloated stomach. (I've heard people complain of putting on weight while on anti-depressants, although I haven't put on a pound, probably because I'm on such a strict anti-allergy diet.) On the other hand my body image issues are reduced on Luvox, so the slightly distended tummy isn't such a terrible thing now I've got used to it.

Numbness

Unlike many on SSRIs, I mostly enjoy the relative emotional numbness I feel on Luvox. It's preferable to the combination of disassociation and depression I used to feel. I still feel just as concerned about the fate of the world, and the suffering of humans and animals, but the concern doesn't make me feel as unhappy and unsettled as it did in the past.

However, the reduced sexual response that is a common effect of SSRIs is also my experience, and this is where numbness (not just sexual but emotional) can become a burden.

Future possibilities

While Luvox alone is helping me, combining it with therapy would enable me to get the maximum benefits.

As I've said, Luvox blunts rather than removes my social anxiety. For me there are two aspects: the performance itself and then the replay at home afterwards. Common to this is an 'oh no!' reaction as I relive one or two incidents where I feel I've made a terrible fool of myself. I torment myself by going over the incidents again and again, and cursing myself for whatever I said or did. (I'm aware that the 'oh no!' is something my brain has built into it, and then finds a memory to attach itself to, but awareness doesn't seem to make much difference to the angst.)

The Luvox doesn't actually stop this process, but it blunts the pain and shortens the length of the remorseful period. Therapy could be a useful adjunct: someone to hold my hand as I expose myself to the horrific social possibilities my mind conjures. In theory I could do much of this exposure work alone, but in practice I need a skilled and knowledgeable psychologist who can parent me through the worst. 'So what if you acted strangely in front of aunty X and cousin Y the other night. What if you're right, and they do think you're weird – so what?' the skilled psychologist might say.

Or as I face my mental health group and try not to blush and look self-conscious, I could be doing something more useful: not simply allowing myself to think disallowed thoughts but actually making myself think them. My imaginary psychologist might encourage me to picture myself in bed with half the meeting as they sit opposite me – so that I'd gradually become more accustomed to, and less fearful of, such 'scary' thoughts.

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A simple but totally unproven exercise for getting to sleep

(I was very bored with the layout of my blog, so chose another template and mucked around a bit with colours – any feedback welcome, including feedback on readability. I’ve also rearranged the links and added subject headings. Lastly, though you would never know it, I got rid of quite a few labels, but the list is still too long.)

I developed this sleep exercise about a year ago, based on some reading I’d done on the brain. I decided to include the exercise in my blog because I’ve been having sleeping problems for the last few months and hadn’t been doing the exercise for a while. I tried it again recently and it seemed to work. I thought it was worth putting in the blog, but I’m warning you it sounds very silly, and is probably based on childhood memories of sci-fi films.

I would be very interested to know if it does work for anyone else (and if it doesn’t), or if readers make their own adaptations.

The exercise

• Do this exercise slowly.

• You can do it more than once at a time.

Picture the frontal cortex of the brain being turned off (picture the frontal area of the brain, along the forehead, being plunged into darkness as ‘electric lights’ are switched off).

Picture the visual cortex being turned on (picture the centre of the lower back of the head lighting up as if an electric light is going on).

Imagine you are a director giving instructions to an operator sitting at an operating panel that includes buttons. Picture the operator carrying out the following instructions as you give them.

• Produce 200 mg GABA ( as you ‘give the orders’, picture the operator punching the amount in, the substance, and then an ‘Enter’ button).

• Produce 200 mg melatonin (as above).

• Produce 200 mg tryptophan (as above).

Now order the operator to ‘Activate the sleep process’. Picture the operator slowly moving a large lever, like a gear stick, in a downwards motion.

Now, gently focus on any images your brain is producing rather than words. Let the images turn into dreams.

Please note the following:

• This exercise has no scientific validity – it’s only been tested on me.

• I don’t have problems getting to sleep, but waking up too early in the morning and being unable to get back to sleep. I therefore use this exercise in the early hours (4 am to 6 am), and it doesn’t plunge me into deep sleep but light dreaming.

• Part of the reason it does work for me may be habit – ie my brain now sees this exercise as a signal to move into sleep mode.

• It does seem to relax me a bit, perhaps because it occupies the mind.

• If I’m really alert it won’t work – sometimes it acts like a test as to whether it’s worth trying to sleep or just giving up and getting up.

• The exercise is based on my very limited and probably completely inaccurate knowledge of the human brain. The frontal cortex is the seat of active thinking, and the visual cortex is active during sleep.
  

• The exercise refers to sleep-inducing substances that the body produces, and I am in no way recommending that people buy these as supplements.

• The ‘amounts’ of these substances are totally arbitrary.

• Everyone’s different – if trying this exercise produces distress, stop.

I know this exercise is daggy. But it works for me, and I thought it might at least inspire others to make up their own exercises.

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The home front

Last week was a time of a gigantic ‘autumn clean’ that left this blogger so exhausted she has not had to provide the usual excuses for her normally excessive telly-watching.

The clean-up was occasioned by a triple whammy: an annual property inspection by the property manager (usually presaging some kind of rental hike), a visit by a painter to give a quote on the ceilings (fear of the owners prettying the place up in order to sell it, and no, he wasn’t planning a postmodern version of the Sistine Chapel) and most serious of all, the owners themselves, asking politely (it’s their legal right of course) if they could come and have a sticky beak.

It was on for one and all. Well, not entirely. I didn’t clean the windows, and I didn’t dust the tiny horizontal surfaces that abound in this impossibly high-maintenance ‘villa’ (why have only one ledge on the skirting boards when you can have three!).

I damp-dusted everything else though, and rubbed grime off a series of cupboard walls and doors. But the most debilitating job was the garden. With a back and front yard, as well as a driveway, it’s a lot of work to keep it looking reasonably neat. The whole place is really too much for one person, and especially this person, who doesn’t have a lot of energy to spare at the best of times.

( I would be remiss here if I didn’t acknowledge that my dad actually provided mowing services gratis and even returned the next day to dispose of an unfortunate dead rat on the driveway that had somehow escaped both our notice – not a good look if left there for the owners to discover.)

The way I cope with the maintenance requirements of this place is to have a list of jobs that I work my way through but am always behind on. Thus, I am never living in total disarray and yet never basking in the sweet order that my obsessive personality adores.

Except for the last few days, of course. As I dragged myself around in deep physical exhaustion I was able to enjoy the sense of being ‘looked after’ – by me! Of course the house will slowly descend into its normal interim state of semi-dirty tidiness, but until then I’m enjoying the fresh aura of clean.

Even if I had the energy I don’t think I have the will to keep this level of maintenance up, but now I understand why people pay to have these services performed. I’ve also come to the conclusion that the results of zealous domestic work – this sense of being looked after and the visual effects of cleanness – are a compensation for living in unrenovated housing, and of course a way of exercising control over the space.

My mother was obsessive about housework. There was no question that it came first. I internalised this very early, and received her unalloyed approval only when I tried to help her in her endless quest against mess; how welcome were her happiness and attention on the rare occasions I felt motivated to ‘clean the kitchen’ after the evening dishes, removing the conglomeration of administration and junk that endlessly migrated to the kitchen table and benches.

Much of that mess would have been my father’s. He’s a hoarder, and I am only now beginning to appreciate the scale of the battle she has fought with his encroaching, largely paper-based chaos for decades. She’s been physically somewhat debilitated in the last few years, and it breaks my heart in a way that is no doubt excessive to see that his watercolour painting, small political battles and admin tasks now encroach on the dining room and sunroom of their house (his ‘study’ is so chock-full of boxes and papers that he can’t do anything in there besides use the computer).

In my twenties I was able to tolerate short-term messiness, as long as it was created by me and not an overly busy housemate. However, prolonged and extreme untidiness, I now realise, has always spelled chaos to me. I had a friend in primary school, T, whose parents were literary. The two front rooms were relatively tidy, but T’s parents were cheerfully oblivious to the accretions of long-term mess that beset the rest of the place. I once galvanised T and one of her younger brothers to join me in a clean-up of her bedroom; the strongest memory I have of this episode is determinedly sweeping marble after marble from under one of the beds.

Seven years ago I flooded my flat and ended up moving back to live with my parents for over a year, much to the chagrin of my mother. During this time her approach to housework became evident; I remember her once literally sweeping around my feet as I stood in the jarrah-floored sunroom. It seemed to me at the time that she would have loved to sweep me away.

Post-visit relief

After all that elbow grease, the house inspection went almost impossibly smoothly. The owners are an elderly woman and her husband, and the flat has been in the family for decades – the wife’s father bought the three adjoining flats new, and left one to each of his children. I knew all this already, but found out from the wife that the development, one of a small minority of art deco styled buildings in the area, was built in 1937.

I was very curious about who the first-ever tenants were, as I imagined them as some proto-yuppie couple moving into what would then have been a stylish ultra-modern apartment (the kitchen has a wonderful fold-out ironing board, complete with what appears to be original floral ironing board cover, that would have been cutting edge circa 1937). But the owner had no idea who they were, as she would have been only around six when the place was first tenanted.

Anyway, I’d only ever met the husband before, not the wife. The property manager turned up breathless at my door as the couple came up behind her, the wife helped along by her husband, the pair having inexplicably caught the tram. ‘She’s blind, you know’, said the property manager. As well as immediately obliterating my fantasy of this all-powerful landlord and inciting my compassion, the irony could not escape me – much of my cleaning had probably been unnecessary.

However, the husband and the PM both went away to have a good look through. It became clear that the only appropriate thing to do was to sit the owner down in the loungeroom and chat to her – she wasn’t interested in accompanying her husband on the inspection, and she was tired after the tram ride. She was frail and very cluey, with a guttural voice and a strong Australian accent.

I felt for her, because her blindness, seemingly acquired in later life, clearly annoyed her. As they were leaving her husband grabbed her arm and moved in the direction of the large spare room over the hallway. ‘There’s a front bedroom over here’, he said jovially. ‘Come on, I’ll show it to you.’

‘What’s the point?’ she responded angrily. ‘I can’t see anything!’

I have now got over my pathological fear of the landlords, and the whole episode did not suggest imminent sale to me, or a rental hike out of the ordinary. Also, the tattered ceilings are to be plastered and painted if an insurance claim goes through. So I think it’s safe to judge the visit a success!

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Heroes and villains: food intolerance, hypoglycemia, candida and the Failsafe diet – Part 3 of 3

Please note: the following shouldn’t be taken as medical advice. It’s simply what I’ve gleaned, and in other cases am guessing because of a lack of accessible information concerning health issues I’m currently facing. If anyone has any relevant information that they think would be useful, please send it to me.

In my last entry I described the Failsafe diet, which was developed for children with physical and behavioural problems caused by intolerances to human-made and natural food chemicals. While I’m a great fan of the diet and Sue Dengate’s website, with my own long history of hypoglycemia I was disturbed that the possible role of sugar in contributing to behavioural problems was being dismissed out of hand. I was also concerned that a controversial medical diagnosis, the so-called ‘leaky gut’ and its associations with yeast overgrowth, was also being dismissed.

With cane sugar (sucrose) no longer a culprit for most Failsafers, what seems like an unhealthy degree of tolerance for sugary foods has developed in the food companies that have sprung up to respond to the needs of children with allergies and food intolerances, as well as more specifically Failsafers and their families. So, as well as using my own experience as an argument for the existence of hypoglycemia, I decided to look at what else was ‘wrong’ with sugar, even if it wasn’t the main culprit in conditions like ADD.

Is sugar good for anybody, especially kids?

Sucrose does occur naturally in fruits along with fructose, but table sugar isn’t really a natural food. Although it comes from sugar cane or sugar beet, it’s extremely concentrated and processed. Our bodies were built to ingest sugars in the form of complex carbohydrates, such as those occurring in fruit and vegetables.

In the small amount of research I did on sugar, I discovered a few interesting things. The main one was that processed sugars rather than fat are now said to be the cause of obesity; the latter has increased in the US during a period when carbohydrate consumption has been going up and the consumption of fat has been going down. Thus, low-fat diets are not necessarily the answer. Sugar has also been shown to be a physically addictive substance that has chemical effects on the brain.

In addition, processed sugar, and, importantly, other forms of concentrated sweetness, have been linked with coronary heart disease; dietary sugar and salt have been linked with the development of cataracts; and one study has found that a diet with a high amount of sugars and carbohydrate ‘may increase the risk of pancreatic cancer in women who already have an underlying degree of insulin resistance’.

But, rather than be a total killjoy and recommend that everyone give up sugar, it does seem, from my very limited knowledge, that there’s some truth to what Dengate says about it: both children and adults are better eating sugar as a dessert than in the form of fizzy soft drinks.

I’d go further and say that homemade desserts and sweet foods are the best way of eating it, and that junk food containing cane sugar or fructose should be avoided.

Fructose, a different form of concentrated sugar made from fruit, seems to be particularly problematic in processed food, even for those without a genetic intolerance. It seems that much of the junk food that is causing obesity in America is sweetened not with sucrose but with corn syrup, a highly processed form of fructose that is cheaper to produce than sucrose, much sweeter and even more harmful; some scientists believe that the body processes it differently from cane sugar and that it’s more likely to cause obesity. ‘Crystallised fructose’ is, apparently, just as bad.

In fact, ‘sugar-sweetened beverages’, which commonly include corn syrup (ie fructose), have been linked with ‘an increased risk of gout, hypertension, and diabetes’, although it’s not clear whether the fructose is directly causing these conditions.

I do think that kids who are benefiting from the Failsafe diet but still aren’t totally well should be taken off all forms of concentrated sugar for a few weeks to see if they improve further. And, partly because of its addictive qualities, I think all kids should only have sugar in their diet in a very restricted way. (In my family, of course, that ain’t going to happen in a million centuries!) As I’ve said, this isn’t medical advice, but just my opinion.

The food intolerance industry

There are a number of websites offering allergy-friendly foods for beleaguered parents; in fact there seems to be a whole industry encouraging children with food allergies and intolerances to eat as normatively as possible. Unfortunately some of the products on offer seem remarkably close to standard junk food.

This website offers coconut ice, chocolate pudding mix and ‘blackberry crunch’ complete with tapioca flour and cane sugar. Meanwhile, this website offers allergy-friendly two-minute noodles. Admittedly these foods are for children with relatively limited allergies and food intolerances, but the Failsafers still get colourless lollies, carob sticks with cane sugar and ‘maggots’ made from puffed brown rice, cane sugar and canola oil. What happened to Failsafers only eating unprocessed food? And why do these companies encourage sick kids to eat heaps of sugar?

The unsavoury fact is that all processing changes the composition of food. As a hypoglycemic (for the moment, anyway!) I react to plain rice crackers made from brown rice without a trace of sugar.

I’m being very cynical here, but it’s obviously easier for the food industry to deal with low-amine and low-salicylate foods (the Failsafe diet) than it is for them to deal with a hypoglycemia or candida diet. In the latter diet especially, you really do have to eat mainly whole foods. But on a diet low in natural food chemicals you can eat plenty of sugar, thus boosting the food industry’s profits.

Of course, all children need treats, and it’s easy for me to pontificate – I’ve observed my sisters using food treats to bribe their kids to be good, and I can’t say that if I was in the same situation I would never do that. Any parent struggling with trying to get an ill child to eat a restricted diet probably welcomes these foods, and I’d assume they’d be a godsend for special occasions.

But common sense tells me that if a kid is reacting to many food chemicals, then unprocessed food with a minimum of concentrated sweetness would be the way to go, at least until the child’s system had had a chance to start healing.

Links between hypoglycemia and food intolerance – a shaky hypothesis based partly on my experience

Let’s assume that hypoglycemia can exist as a separate issue, at least in adults with food intolerances, although perhaps not in the majority of cases. What is the relationship between the two? Where does the whole thing begin?

It was very difficult to find useful information on the web regarding this question. This website by a parent of child with reactive hypoglycemia provides lots of worthwhile information and is keen to promote hypoglycemia as a distinct health issue, but makes no reference that I could find to food intolerance. The Australian-based Hypoglycemia Association does acknowledge food allergies and intolerances, but its information is fairly out of date.

The adrenal connection

Because of my own issues I’m most interested in adrenal fatigue and leaky gut as causes of hypoglycemia. It was extremely difficult to find worthwhile info on the web that linked food intolerance and allergy with adrenal fatigue and leaky gut. I’m convinced there are connections, and some websites seemed to acknowledge that there are, but they weren’t all that authoritative.

When your adrenals are fatigued, you don’t produce enough cortisol. Cortisol is a hormone that has balancing effects on blood sugar, which is why adrenal fatigue can be linked with hypoglycemia. But it’s also involved in helping the body deal with allergies, regulating ‘immune response’ and ‘anti-inflammatory actions’.

This suggests that if you’re under stress for a long time you may be more susceptible to allergies. Some people are genetically unable to cope with food proteins such as gluten and/or casein (a protein in milk). However, food intolerances can also develop.

In leaky gut syndrome the lining of the intestine supposedly becomes damaged, making it possible for tiny pieces of undigested food, toxins, parasites and waste to penetrate the lining, causing the immune system to respond by creating antibodies. This then results in symptoms of food intolerance.

This website says that, according to Dr Sherry Rogers MD, ‘The leaky gut can cause food allergy, and food allergy can cause the leaky gut’. In the case of gluten, ‘gluten sensitivity inflames the gut to the degree that the body will make antibodies to intestinal bacteria and chemical additives in food’. [This is confusing: possibly Rogers is talking about food intolerance when she says ‘the leaky gut can cause food allergy’.]

This medical doctor concurs, claiming that adrenals themselves can be affected by food allergies.

One interpretation of this is: you start off with a fixed allergy with a genetic component (say to gluten or casein) and, perhaps by consuming the allergen, end up with a leaky gut, which then results in all sorts of food intolerances you didn’t have before (eg to food chemicals such as amines and salicylates).

Perhaps at the same time you may be stressing out your adrenals as they struggle to deal with the gluten or other allergen you’re ingesting. And then the adrenals will be less able to cope with the food intolerances you’re developing (if it’s not actually directly contributing to their development). You may also develop reactive hypoglycemia. Perhaps you’ve also got some exterior stresses as well, which are putting even more pressure on your adrenals.

This scientific article suggests that pollen allergy can induce anxiety (which would then presumably have an unwelcome effect on the adrenal system).

This source, not a very scientific one admittedly, seems to suggest that the exterior stress can actually cause a leaky gut via the adrenals, without the further complication of a genetic allergy:

When we are under physical, emotional, or environmental stress it triggers cortisol, a stress hormone to be released. Cortisol raises blood sugar which feeds bad gut bacteria, yeast and other pathogens causing an overgrowth. When the intestinal flora gets out of balance it causes symptoms of gas, bloating, constipation, diarrhoea, and indigestion.

And this scientific article suggests that children are susceptible to stress just as adults are. It finds that environmental stresses in children can contribute to their developing allergies, but that the children who do so may have a particular allergy-inducing response to stress in the first place. (Again I’m not absolutely sure whether the author is talking about genuine allergies here or food intolerances, which seem to be much more variable.)

One possible reading of the Failsafe diet is that once you give up food chemicals, this takes the pressure off the adrenals and they can perform properly, therefore eliminating hypoglycemia.

But if the leaky gut theory were correct, surely you would need to eliminate concentrated sugar for a while (and perhaps fermented foods?) to allow the lining of the intestine to recover.

Children and sugar

The study, cited in my last entry, that seemed to prove that cane sugar played no role in behavioural problems was done on children. Perhaps, for most children, taking pressure off the adrenals by removing intolerances is enough. Yet excessive sugar, inadequate nutrition and use of antibiotics are all considered to be contributing factors in leaky gut. Children’s immune systems also have to deal with the effects of pollution, dust, pollens, pesticides etc. Perhaps a few children do develop a ‘leaky gut’, and need a rest from sugar until the condition resolves.

I grew up with an undiagnosed lactose (or casein) intolerance and a possible undiagnosed gluten intolerance. This could have contributed to a leaky gut. Once you feed sugar into a leaky gut you may be contributing to a yeast overgrowth and causing hypoglycemia.

Perhaps the leaky gut led to the sensitivities to amines and salicylates that I seem to have developed. And maybe that was one reason why I never got better on the candida diet: I was ignoring the amine/salicylate problem.

I’ve finally snagged an appointment with an allergist, and will ask them if it’s possible to take a test for adrenal function – if not, they may be able to refer me to someone. But in the meantime I’ve researched some ways I can support my adrenals. They’re incredibly simple really:

Exercise
Daily meditation
Vitamin C
Vitamin B
Magnesium

Other options are supplements of cortisol and a hormone called DHEA, both of which have been used experimentally to treat adrenal fatigue. But I reluctantly let go of the idea of taking them as they seemed to be unsafe.

I’m not blaming Dengate. I’m incredibly grateful for her website, which has allowed me to get rid of my hives, given me extra clarity about my food issues and encouraged me to go to a conventional allergist for the first time in my life.

It just annoys me that the issue of hypoglycemia is being blindsided, by the food intolerance ‘industry’ as a whole, when there is already so much ignorance about it. There needs to be more research about the links between adrenal fatigue, food intolerance, reactive hypoglycemia, and food addiction; or the research that has been done needs to be explained so that it’s understandable to the average person.

So, as so often occurs in my blog entries, I’m left with a series of questions rather than answers:

What role does fructose intolerance pay in reactive hypoglycemia? Does the role vary depending on whether the fructose intolerance is hereditary?

What role does leaky gut play in reactive hypoglycemia?

Can food intolerance co-exist with a reactive hypoglycemia problem?

Is there a connection between fructose intolerance and leaky gut?

To what extent is food addiction a symptom of hypoglycemia?

If food intolerance can mimic hypoglycemia rather than causing it, as Dengate suggests, can that mimicking itself cause sugar addiction?

Are processed foods inherently more physically addictive than non-processed foods, targetting the reward centres in the brain? Can concentrated sweetness have this effect too, regardless of the chemical make-up of the sweetness (eg Diet Coke)?

What connections are there between the development of food intolerance and the overeating of processed foods?

And when will Blogger enable users to easily insert bullet points? Surely it can't be that hard? (Sorry, may be slightly off topic!)

And, for good measure, here are some useful links on food intolerance and related issues:

SalicylateSensitivity.com

Plant Poisons and Rotten Stuff Community

Environmental Illness Resource

(but this website doesn’t seem to have any info on Failsafe and amine/salicylate intolerance)

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Farewell to the park?

It’s been hard to write a blog entry lately because things have been in such a state of flux. A cold flattened me over Christmas, striking me down as a I struggled to finish editing a stubborn report (I always seem to get colds when I have big editing jobs to finish).

The cold was a convenient excuse for not worrying about not having enough social events to go to over Christmas. But it also presented an existential dilemma: I surveyed the coming year, and the perceived failures of the previous one, through a prism of exhaustion, which in turn made me feel helpless. Even present wrapping was tiring.

The cold took two weeks to work its way through my nasal passages, leaving me worrying about the state of my immune system. Thank God for the internet and Google – I’ve decided that the reason I get two colds a year is not because of lowered immunity but simply my plethora of nieces and nephews and our frequent family birthday celebrations (an excuse for seeing less of my family in 2010?).

A particular situation that’s been in my face for the last couple of weeks is still very much unresolved. For the moment I’m no longer walking Jordan, a mainly cocker spaniel who belongs to my elder sister, Andrea, and her husband Richard. I’ve been doing this three times a week for the past two years and it’s come to a temporary halt, with the final outcome still unknown.

Richard and I were bound to clash sooner or later. We’re both equally bloody minded. I in my pursuit of animal (Jordan’s) welfare, and he in his determination to look after Jordan in his own way.

Never would I let Richard and Andrea forget that I thought they weren’t treating Jordan properly. Apart from the occasional walk down the street to the shops, or taking the kids to school (normally a drive) they’d virtually stopped taking him for walks, relying entirely on my thrice-weekly trips to the park.

He badly needed a clip and a bath, and had knots of hair on his bum that needed shaving. I’d even offered at one point to come around and bath him – I didn’t get to do that, but my home clipping job was certainly not the best. (Although you’d never know it, Richard is extremely wealthy and could easily afford professional grooming for Jordan, even if only, say, twice a year.)

The thing that I wouldn’t let up on – that I continued to nag them about – was that they wouldn’t bring Jordan to family gatherings at mum and dad’s. If I am perfectly honest about this, my normally kind dad is inexplicably hostile to dogs. A former secondary teacher, he seems to view them as juvenile delinquents so evil they’re beyond saving.

In contrast, my mum, despite her disabling osteoporosis and concern for the domestic environment, is okay with having Jordan around. And my sister Therese and her husband Tony sometimes bring their ridgeback-cross Sarah (also a neglected dog, but in a different way to Jordan) to family gatherings. But Andrea and Richard can’t be bothered taking him in the car with them, even at those times he’d have a playmate in Sarah to keep him out of mischief.

So every time I’d turn up at mum and dad’s to find Richard and Andrea in the kitchen and Sarah in the backyard slobbering contentedly, knowing that Jordan was stuck behind his wooden fence half a kilometre away, I’d call them on it. ‘Where’s Jordan?’ I’d ask. Each time, they dug their heels in even further. Recently, Richard had been fixing me with a rather malevolent stare he’s perfected and saying in a crisp tone: ‘I’ll look after Jordan. He’s ours. He’s not your problem’.

I’ve clashed with Richard a lot in recent years. It took me many years to realise he wasn’t the brother-in-law from heaven I’d originally thought he was. He’s a charming man with a sly, subtle sense of humour and excellent social skills, and the extended family think he’s great. But he can also be a bully – he’s been dominating Andrea for years – and I heard a story recently about him that shocked me.

On the day of the recent byelection in our electorate, Andrea was working and hadn’t voted in advance, so risked getting a $20 fine. Apparently Richard and Andrea asked one of my younger sisters, Therese, to fraudulently vote on Andrea’s behalf. Therese refused, and Richard tried to make her feel guilty. ‘We’d do the same for you if you asked’, he said. Therese was furious at him for trying to manipulate her into breaking the law, but she didn’t give in.

On Christmas Day, the predictable happened and Jordan wasn’t brought to the celebrations. I made my usual protests and Richard got predictably annoyed. But the next day when I rang to arrange the usual Monday walk, he answered the phone, and said in the same annoyed tone that he’d look after Jordan while he was on holidays.

At that point I think I realised what I was up against, and I stopped fighting. My arrangement with Jordan’s family has been based on the false assumption that I and they share enough common beliefs to maintain the regular contact that is inevitable when you walk someone else’s dog. But we don’t, and my differences with my family don't start with Richard -- they’re as old as the hills, and the basis of the majority of my problems. How did I think I could skate over them so easily?

I considered at that point that perhaps it was time to give up walking Jordan. Truth to tell, I needed some kind of break. In the last two years, seeing the reality of Jordan’s life up close and feeling helpless to improve it had led to periodic depressions characterised by a deep sense of sadness.

And my whole park venture seemed to be coming to a close anyway. Jordan was a skinny, shivery, smell-crazy puppy when I decided to start walking him regularly. This arrangement would be partly for Jordan’s benefit and partly for mine, to help me deal with my social anxiety.

It seemed to be working okay, despite the occasional social disaster. But increasingly there were periods when I’d be convinced that a quiet park meant people were staying away because of me. I know this is distorted thinking – a friend of mine, who has a lot of knowledge about anxious and depressed thought patterns, shouted down the idea and called it totally whacky. But I think my paranoia was based on a deeper truth – that I didn’t really fit in with the wealthy milieu of many of those who frequented the park, despite the fact that they were ‘dog people’, and mostly friendly.

Also, a couple of people who were my anchors and as addicted to the park as I was had had their elderly, statesman-like dogs die in the last year, and although I still saw them sometimes, their visits to the park were much less frequent.

At the moment, the future of my relationship with Jordan is still an open question. Perhaps I’ll be able to come to some arrangement with Andrea and Richard, and perhaps I won’t – time will tell. If I don’t, then it will probably be better if I don’t see Jordan at all, because I won’t want to be reminded of my abandonment of him.

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Tripping myself up again -- a work and anxiety setback

I've been away from this blog for a little while because of broadband issues (all fixed) and work busyness (ongoing, although workwise I'm in a state of suspended animation at the moment.) But while I haven't been writing the blog I've been dreaming up possible blog posts. And every time I think I have one ready to write, something in my life changes and I have to rethink what I was going to say.

The most recent change was a little 'setback' I had in a work context recently. And this has made me take a fresh look at how I approach my life in general. Even as I'm writing this I'm not sure how to change. I just know I have to.

When I have a setback such as the one that occurred (perhaps later I'll be able to describe it in more detail, but it's too close at the moment), a familiar process follows. I go through a a day and night of utter self-loathing and despair. I become a dual personality -- the 'naughty', shamed child who sabotaged a combined parent-and-adult figure, and the angry parent-adult who sees the child's 'misdemeanour' from the point of view of a shocked, judgmental world. The 'parent' feels the shame but has to somehow bear it, and try to mediate the consequences of the sabotage.

As I write this, I understand that the anger of the 'parent' is part of the problem. I also know that the 'child' badly wants attention. But how do I square my psychodrama with the need to appear adult to the outside world? I know I'm supposed to love my inner child, but what does that actually mean when it has an embarrassing 'tanty' that appears to threaten my already limited professional life (and certainly my image)?

What baffles me is that, despite all the self-growth I've undertaken over 25 years, this dynamic -- a neurotic need for attention that becomes a sabotage -- hasn't changed all that much. (I think this blog entry itself is becoming a bit of a tanty!)

The fact is, I'm extremely high maintenance, and I do try to lead a balanced life, but I probably need to manage things better. This is what I think I'm struggling with. I've been avoiding starting to meditate for months now, and even do a very relaxing mindfulness exercise instead, but there's no substitute. With my many problems, meditation helps me on so many levels. Not doing it is part of a more subtle self-sabotage.

Blood sugar is also an issue. It affects me not just by increasing anxiety, but lowering my self-esteem when I'm vague and forgetful because of it. My diet is limited but I put little if any effort into trying to make it strict but interesting, rarely cook anything remotely appetising, and I've been getting a bit slack lately with the kinds of foods I eat. So it's time to take stock, literally, and start looking after myself in that department. What I've been avoiding, I think, is the realisation that I probably need to eat more meat. As an animal lover I don't like the fact that I have to eat meat at all, but I have more energy and focus when I do.

The other things to do -- and these are the hardest -- are: refuse to beat myself up; talk to myself kindly; and be nice to myself.

I'm sorry that this entry is so self-obsessed. I have planned and half-written entries on other issues. But sometimes I'm shocked into the realisation of my vulnerability, and at such times I need to remind myself of the need to ramp up my self-care -- again!

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Dark of the moon

A time of creeping statis. I don’t want to do anything. I could happily crawl into bed and stay there all day, basking in sleepiness.

It’s the dark of the moon. At this time it seems to me that everything active, yang, and exterior wants to come to a halt. The energies for change, action and movement are low. It’s a good time for withdrawing, for contemplation.

But I’m feeling things beyond that.

Not depression exactly. Grief, partly. The loss of two extended family members in the space of weeks. One sudden and shocking, the other, sadly anticipated, to some extent for years.

I’m also getting over ten days of extreme editing. (‘Extreme Editing’ might make a good business name – why haven’t I thought about it before?) I was asked to edit a long, complex report on a topic I had some familiarity with.

A cold slowly hatched itself, invading my brain with a sullen, quiet exhaustion. The report came in two parts, the first part unfinished while I was editing the second. I was too cottonballed to stress about it.

I hunkered down for a long stretch of concentrated thinking. I don’t know where I drew the energy from to carry on. I’m a low energy person at the best of times, and here I was with a full-blown cold and a tight deadline.

The cold was a textbook one – not, I kept telling myself, the infamous swine flu. First utter exhaustion without other symptoms, then a violent persistent cough that got worse at night (by the third night I had learned to cough in my sleep). Then a hopelessly runny nose for three days. And the horrific body image problems, looking in the mirror at the red rimmed eyes and nostrils, the swollen cheeks, the unwashed hair, and thinking I had never looked so ugly.

Struggling to finish editing the report, I didn’t get beyond the front and back yards of my flat for six days. Towards the end I was running out of vegetables, meat and fish. The last morning I breakfasted on brown rice.

It wasn’t that drastic in terms of actual hours -- I didn’t slave away till 1 in the morning, as I had on previous jobs in the long ago, enthusiastic days when I still believed I could make it as a full time editor. In fact, I got quite good at intuitively knowing when I had done enough for one day. It’s just that, even resting, I didn’t have enough energy in those last few days to get properly dressed and drive to the supermarket.

At times like this that I am confronted by the reality of not having a partner, and the huge practical difference that makes. Ideally, partners can support each other’s careers at different times in reciprocal ways, leveraging the partnership so that both have a better chance of success. I fantasised during this busy time of someone humming away in the background, cheerfully asking me if I was hungry as I slaved away, and what time would I like dinner? Instead, dinner was often fried eggs or a bowl of cooked chickpeas!

My body and mind are now claiming their payment. They demand rest. I want nothing but to stare into space, even though aimlessness terrifies me.

One thing that struck me was how magical, glossy, and delightful were the simple actions of washing my hair, dressing carefully and putting makeup on to take that much-needed trip to the supermarket after I’d finally uploaded the edited report. Bringing treats back home for lunch, and eating slowly as I read the newspaper. I can’t describe the feeling of freedom of those simple actions.

The next day I spent almost three hours swanning around the Chadstone shopping mall. Happily surrounded by the anonymous crowd. Wonderful to freewheel, to luxuriate in unstructured time.

Until the next big job of course. I like doing lots of small editing jobs but let’s hope the next major project is at least weeks away.

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