I really hate it when my weight fluctuates and everything gets too tight. It’s so uncomfortable. I love soft, stretchy materials because I can bloat several inches from eating the wrong food. Most food is the wrong food, sadly.
I think I’ve got SIBO (small intestine bacterial overgrowth), so I keep trying to chew my food more regularly and eat smaller meals but I eat too sporadically to be anything but a complete barbarian tearing into my meal like I’ve never eaten before. Maybe you do this, too.
My biggest hindrance is coffee. Since it’s an appetite suppressant, I forget to eat. It makes me sad to think I need to give it up because I love it so much. My first love in this life is my oldest cat quickly followed by a cup of Joe. I wish a man was in this picture, but the stars have not ordained such a thing. It’s okay; I’m a mess of a human being anyway right now.
I wish I could just make myself stop. The coffee addiction, that is. I can’t help myself. I love this Silk non-dairy creamer stuff. Only problem with it is that it has cane sugar in it. Cane sugar feeds SIBO. Lots of things feed SIBO, like potatoes and corn and carrots and croissants and so on and so forth.
The coffee is good, too. I get Purity coffee because it’s the only coffee Dr. Beth O’Hara recommends for mast cell activation syndrome sufferers. That’s MCAS for short. I developed this condition while doing the keto diet with my doctor. I quit keto and all my supplements and I got better. I’m still getting better.
I feel like an animal sometimes. I act like one, too, from time to time. I’m not proud of that. In fact, lately, I’m not proud of myself in any capacity. I just cannot get myself together. I can barely get out of bed most days, though I’m finding taking a B complex is helping with that. I need a multivitamin, too, I think, because there is so little food I can eat.
Mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS) sucks. I’m tired of it. For a while in 2020, I broke out in hives every time I ate anything.
I wonder if there’s a correlation between poor nutrition and my invisible tormentor.
I’ve been hearing things (in my head) that aren’t there for over a year now. Ever since I received the Kundalini level III attunement from my instructor. Other people do not have this issue at all, so I’m pretty sure it’s safe to get attuned. It just so happens that the Kundalini attunements are for increasing a shaman/priestess/reiki master’s personal energy channel by making it deeper and wider. It is also said to wake up the Kundalini dragon sleeping in the root chakra.
My dragon named itself Sansara.
I’m aware of my body at the cellular level much of the time, so I felt every bit of the attunement process very strongly. There are other accounts of it online if you search for it and desire to read it. I wrote about it during that phase, but it’s locked in another diary that is in encryption limbo from an encrypt/decrypt collision. That was pretty interesting. That company (Penzu) ought to make a check on the encrypt/decrypt process before allowing you to switch back and forth nilly willy.
My fun new invisible friend Tyrelle is to blame. Or maybe I should call him Jerome some more. He likes to tell me his name is this, that, or the other thing. Lately he is Devon, Donovan, and Donald.
Whatever his name is, I keep telling him to leave me alone. He’s not very observant of my boundaries and my limits. Today, he is violating my request for silence by escalating his lousy attempts to get my attention. He’s decided a man I used to know is going to murder me via telepathy and I’ll be swimming with the fishes soon enough.
I’m fed up, so I told him good! I want to die. Kill me already. Mercy kill my cats while you’re at it, psycho murderer. And my ancient ones, too, because without me they’re goners. That should wrap it all up, I would think!
Is this what schizophrenia paranoia is all about? I am sick of telling the voice inside my mind it does not know reality. It is a somewhat good guesser at times, like when trying to take me to the grocery store to stalk a kid de facto when all I want is groceries! He(?) keeps making me look over to where ‘Sir Deli Man’ is. That’s the name I thought up for the dude when I thought we were flirting. Now I know it’s nothing.
I shall never flirt again. I’m sick of this world. I died and nobody cares, not even the lawyer I called to see if I have a case against Dr. Death. My intuition — or maybe it’s this entity that’s not me again — has told me the doctor prescribed me something I’m allergic to, then failed to send me for allergy testing when I requested a referral so my insurance would pay for it.
Ain’t that some shit?
Anyway, that coupled with living in a house with green mold out the wazoo and a creep who invalidated my very existence constantly and stole my gorram friends from me killed me. She’s gone. The brilliant architect brain I cultivated is in shambles. I watch the glory of my former career crumble to dust. I am nothing.
That’s the problem with making one’s career into one’s identity, I discovered.
When the career dies, so do you.
I wish I wasn’t afflicted with crazy. It’d be so much easier to do anything and everything. I wouldn’t spend all my energy fighting with myself, presumably, and instead use it to clean the gorram house. I want to plant flowers and thin the grape vines and clean all the nicotine off all the surfaces since my ancient ones smoke indoors everywhere.
My suggestion to all you nicotine users everywhere: GO OUTSIDE. Second suggestion: QUIT, YOU ARE JUST DEPOSITING THAT SHIT OUTSIDE.
I mean, personally, I’d recommend a hookah for smoking tobacco. First off, they don’t add 200+ different chemicals to keep the tobacco mold-free for a million years. It’s just tobacco + molasses + flavorings. In fact, I’ve made my own once. In fact, I might go find my hookah so I can do it outside and enjoy what a beautiful day it is. I’m just thrown by Sir Deli Man, the man I’m supposedly stalking.
You know, funny thing about stalking… first, Tyrelle says the man doesn’t have a car. There’s no way I’m following a dude on foot home in my car. Secondly, all you have to do to shake me is fail to stop at a yellow light or drive faster than the speed limit. Third, my car is covered in art right now. I’m more likely to be followed home than I am to ever follow anyone else home.
He’s cute, but he’s not jail cute.
The part that gets me most about this entity talking to me — cuz it’s not me, I know that for sure — is that he has no respect for a lady. Here I am, trying to get my life back together, and he makes me go to the store every day to gawk at the boy I’m not stalking but happen to run into frequently enough. The thing is, Tyrelle, I learned my lesson!
HE DOES NOT CONSENT!
I gave up! I’m done.
If he consented to receiving my attention, he’d have spoken to me by now. I’m a fricking unicorn that frolics through the store like clockwork. I enter the store, hit up produce, walk through the deli (because I’m claustrophobic, I’ve come to understand, and the deli is the least claustrophobic area), I cut through the wines to the bread and the meat, I take a left at vegan lady central to try to buy shit that I can tolerate that’s not just produce or meat — you know, like faux cheese — and then I hang a right to wander to the nuts or the cereal or the sunbutter or the creamer. (Did I mention I’m addicted to java? I go through a container of creamer every week by myself, spank you very much.) Then I hang a left for water and cat sundries, and if I’m feeling adventurous, I go to the frozen foods area and stare longingly at the ice cream before I try to find something dairy free and gluten free in that stupid freezer. (It turns out, that’s mostly vegetables and fruits. Nothing that tastes like ICE CREAM!)
Then I LEAVE.
I’ve done this over 300 times.
If he wanted to talk to me, we’d have talked, yo.
I’m glad we had this talk about consent, though. Because Tyrelle insists to me that I’ve got plenty of wannabe stalker friends. I’m so pretty, he tells me, supposedly giving me feedback of every man, woman, and child around me. Today, I look like a nurse or a doctor or maybe a librarian or a teacher.
WOULD YOU ALL STOP TRYING TO CHECK MY ASS OUT, OR MY TITS, OR MY LEGS. You’re allowed to look at my tattoo, though.
I’m not flirting. Trust me, if I was flirting, you’d know. I’d make it so obvious, you’d never question again if a girl was flirting with you. I’d say something lewd randomly to pique your interest and it’d involve body parts. Which ones, well, that’s random and based on my mood, but trust me… You’d know I was flirting with you.
In fact, I was an admin on a multi-user dungeon (MUD), which is a text-based role-playing game. I flirted with pretty much everyone. In my opinion, flirting makes people feel good about themselves. It builds them up subtly. I didn’t sleep with all of them, obviously, if any; but they knew they were special somehow and I didn’t let them wander around wondering how they fit inside this world.
What I’m trying to tell you folks is: JUST FLIRT. If the person doesn’t respond in a way that looks like they want to flirt, then just stop. It’s that simple! No more of this, ‘Excuse me!’ in the store, getting me to turn around to look at you as you walk past me, obviously never even coming close to colliding with me or my cart, obviously on a trajectory to the soda instead of the fucking coffee creamer. (Get out of my way, broad! I want the coffee now, not in an hour from now!)
Okay, maybe I’m a little too focused on coffee. If I am stalking anything, it’s Silk non-dairy vanilla coffee creamer. They just changed the recipe, too. It used to come in a blue container and now it comes in a white container. And I think it has a gum in it now whereas before it did not. (Or the gum changed from guar to xanthan.) Now I have to find another non-dairy creamer that I like. This irritates me, it’s so hard to find anything without cane sugar, milk, and gums. Gums gum me up. (Hyuk.)
I cannot eat xanthan gum without gaining weight, y’all. I posit this is a food additive we need to kill. Run away if you can!
I want to just flirt with that deli guy, but now I can’t because Tyrelle made me ultra nervous telling me that the employees there think I’m a stalker! So now I try to forget about him, but what happens? Today I go at an irregular time and there he is, dumping soup from one place to another. I walked away as fast as I could as soon as I remembered I’m supposedly a stalker. I would never stalk anyone, and not even because it’s illegal… it’s because I’m a sensitive soul. If I hurt other people, I will hurt from it in turn. I don’t ever want to hurt anyone, ever, for any reason. I’m sure I do anyway, and many times I will figure it out and try to make it right, but sometimes people don’t forgive.
Holding a grudge is such a waste of energy and time. I don’t know why people do it. Hanging onto that anger or disappointment or hatred is literally your only blocker to happiness. You are blocking yourself from the happy path in life. YOU do it. Nobody else makes you do it. YOU do it. If you just forgive yourself for being tricked, fooled, cheated on, momentarily inept, momentarily blind, momentarily lacking judgment… if you just forgive yourself in general… you can move on without being unhappy and sour.
It’s an art, looking for the silver lining in the storm cloud. I’ve kind of perfected it because my life is such a shit show… I don’t even know where to begin. However, I try to share this perspective with other people. I learned to create a new perspective to life altogether. A happy-go-lucky perspective that is far too Pollyanna at first for everyone new I meet, then they get around to realizing that’s just how I am. I just like being happy. It’s the best drug on the planet, you should try it.
It’s free, too.
That is, if you give up your ego. You have to understand you’re a flawed creature. You were made in some image (or evolved into this image we have) and we are constantly battling nature versus nurture. We are constantly trying to rise above the animal we began as at birth into the humane creatures we are told we should be by society. We yearn to fit into the pattern and be part of the greater good, the greater whole. That is, unless you are denigrated, raped, and tortured.
If you have been, my heart goes out to you. It hurts. I know it hurts. It doesn’t just go away, either. It takes hours and hours, weeks, years of time to understand what’s happened to you. Let me put you in fast forward mode so you can embrace that happy path, though. Let me try to give you insight to my perspective.
The Path of Happiness
Because you are flawed and limited by nature, you should forgive yourself for making mistakes. You know mistakes are bound to happen. So, when a mistake does happen, what you should do is apologize to the other party, admit your limitation, and ask them if there is anything you can do to make it right.
Usually, a person who has been wronged will demand more than their fair share of reparations from you based on feeling hurt, vulnerable, guilty, or whatever it is they feel. Tell them why the mistake happened. Let them know there is a reason — not an excuse. Don’t ask for forgiveness; that is theirs to give and theirs alone.
After you hear their demands, give whatever you are willing to give to make it right, and then you just wait. Wait for them to decide if they can forgive the mistake. Allow them to come to the conclusion that you’re trying your best and that it was just a mere human limitation at fault.
More importantly, when you approach life and mistakes made in this manner, other people will start to do it, too. Hanlon’s razor is an adage or rule of thumb that states ‘never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.’ I like to replace stupidity with innocence, though. (Does that make it Sansara’s razor?)
Walking the Path Isn’t Easy
To walk this path successfully, your ego has to go into a suitcase and be left by the door. You have to compartmentalize your self-importance. You have to try to open your mind to the fact that we’re all flawed. We’re all the same underneath all the mud and filth others heaped onto us out of either jealousy or some other negativity that has no place on this path. If it occurs, kindly tell it to return to its corner on time out and resume trying your best to be a harmonious part of society.
Normal people want to get along. Psychopaths don’t, but normal people will strive to meet you halfway if you offer the olive branch first. That’s why you have to apologize or at least admit your error with humility. You might be wondering about examples of this.
Hmmm…
Right now, I’m working on cleaning up a house that has no clear successor within the family. The ancient ones who own the house have willed it to me, but I suspect one of my siblings might want to move into the place. Technically, this dwelling is mine because I have been renovating it with my blood, sweat, and tears to the best of my ability while sick as a dog.
One might say I ‘deserve’ the house.
My first inclination of compromise is inviting my sibling to live with me, if that’s the case. We can share the resource and I wouldn’t mind as long as I don’t have to both work and clean up after them to boot. I love a clean place and I usually clean like a fiend. In fact, there’s nicotine on everything, so I have to scrub extra hard because it’s something like… ten years of nicotine, so it’s taking me longer than I’d hoped for… (Those ancient ones should know better than to smoke inside, but it is what it is.) I’m totally willing to clean and organize and tidy up for everyone in lieu of having a job. However, if I have to have a job in order to eat, I’m going to make them go halfsies on a weekly or twice a week maid service call because I do not want to spend the entirety of my life working as hard as I can.
I bet a lot of working house wives are reading this right now going THIS!!!!!
I got your back, ladies. And lads who are house husbands.
I posit if you can live life on one income so one person can make the home, do it. If you can’t, budge that maid service already. It’s $25.00 an hour. You’d be surprised how fast a home gets cleaned when you have a pro do it weekly. That’s $100.00 a month. That’s like eating out twice for two at a really nice restaurant. Can you sacrifice that to get the maid? You’ll be ever so happy after having a maid clean up after you, I promise you that. Also, great mother’s day gift, HINT HINT HINT.
My second thought is to just give my brother the house. I can go back to work some day, I’m pretty sure, and I figured out enough life hacks to make it and own my own little place. In fact, I still have a house in St. Louis right now.
When I was married, I worked a full time job, I did all the driving — including taking my husband to his job and picking him up every day, and I cleaned house for forty hours a week because my roommates were slobs. Right, I had roommates because we couldn’t really afford the house. (Or could we? Debatable. I spent a lot of money on community food.)
It wasn’t fair that I’d be the one picking up the tab on cleanliness. Eventually, I stopped enjoying my husband entirely because of it. He got angry once because after a cleaning binge of four hours, I sat down to finally watch some Netflix, and I asked him to get me a glass of water. He accused me of never being grateful. I told him that I always say thank you and he stfu and walked away, but it hurt.
I cleaned and cleaned and cleaned to raise the place to my standards and the ungrateful dick tells me that I’m not grateful.
I divorced him, ultimately, for being a child. A child who wanted children. Everyone around me told me he’d grow up with babies and I just looked at them with the death stare. It’s my ‘get away from me’ look. That man couldn’t scoop cat litter without retching and sounding like he was going to vomit. CAT LITTER is a lot easier than BABY DIARRHEA.
In fact, he made out like he couldn’t do jack or shit. That boy weaseled his way out of chores like a pro. Sorry, I’m vulgar. I’m going to stop pretending I’m not vulgar. I use it to show you how angry I am, to be honest. I don’t like raising my voice or yelling, so my vulgarity and profanity takes off like a rocket ship to the moon instead.
That boy would hand wash dishes and do the spaghetti pot first. Tomato is notorious for being greasy and messy, so it deposited an orange-red film over everything else he washed. Instead of asking me how to fix it, he told me he was unable to do the dishes. I told him he should do that pot last. He did not think to just add more soap or wash the sponge out, of course. He was 25 years old. I’m pretty sure by that point, he’d washed some dishes by hand once or twice, maybe even held a dish washing job at Saleem’s.
Yup, you don’t know how to wash dishes, bro. Did you do that to your second wife, too? Did she buy it?
I was glad he got remarried, to be honest. To the girl he tried to get me to hook up with because he thought that my misery was due to bisexuality. (What, you want more tips on how to be happy? Keep reading, this is relevant.)
Bottom line, my misery wasn’t due to being a bisexual. In fact, I’m not actually bisexual. I’m a straight cisgender woman who was open to bisexuality in my youth. That’s it. My misery was because some dude who asked me to marry him 22 times without an ounce of romance couldn’t figure out I’m a romantic at heart and act accordingly. He thought treating me like a guy was going to work out. (Dude, you’re GAY!)
Silver lining? Yes, there is one. There are many. He helped me learn how to drive. He helped me grow to be an incredibly responsible human being. He helped me grow so well, I grew right out of that relationship into a relationship with myself. (But not my hand, you perv.)
I didn’t need a man anymore. I did all the work for two and it was less work without two. It cost almost the same for two, aside from the food, I have to admit. He could have made about $500 a month after taxes and it would’ve been enough. He’s the reason I’m homeless. He lost his job and for six months and wouldn’t take any job because he was too good for fast food work, y’all. He put us into debt, which we could ill afford. I split with him, offering him the car and the house both so I could move into an apartment next to my long term contract jobbo. Instead, he flipped around and gave the house to me.
And the car.
Turns out, I lost that job a few months later and needed a new one, so it was convenient… but I could have gone to live with my parents again. The thing is… Anthony isn’t a monster. He knew he was saving me from a terrible situation the whole time. I was raped in the house I came from, the ‘home’ I exited to be with him. He carefully considered my options, which were potentially to go back there or stay in St. Louis and he chose to be the bigger person and give me that house and the car.
He never asked me why I left. Everyone thinks it’s just the lack of chore division, but there’s a lot more to it. I always have a bunch of reasons for monumental actions. Other reasons included: not wanting children. I never did and he knew it and he changed his mind for dear old mum. He tried to make me change mine. I DO NOT CONSENT.
He stopped looking at me like I was a lovely lady as I gained weight eating his diet. Ladies and gents, do you feel like you only lose weight when you eat solo? It’s because your partner eats something your body is rejecting.
[Boom]
How dare a man stop looking at his wife with love. If you’re not loving, you’re hating. ‘I ain’t got no room for haters,’ says my younger inner self from the Bronx. If you aren’t acting with love, you are spreading hate, my friends.
You want to be happy? You want to find that silver lining? Find a way to love everyone and everything. Find a way to spread love. A welcoming smile, a compliment (I like your hair! I love your self-expression today! Nice jacket! I LOVE THOSE BOOTS!), a random act of kindness such as escorting an ancient one across the street, or even giving to charity. (Choose your charity WISELY… most of that money goes to sycophants.)
Love the sunshine. Love the rain. Love the fog and the snow and tidal waves alike. Understand that nature is amazing and you are observing it and if today is not like yesterday, it’s so your day is less the same as yesterday. Without natural ups and downs, dips and crests, your life becomes 100% same-ish and you have nothing standing out to latch onto to show you progress forward in life and in time.
Because of this, I recommend doing something life-enriching once a month at the bare minimum. Go on a hike, go to the zoo (although we should frown on animals in captivity), go to the museum. Just go absorb art or life being alive somewhere. Paint something, draw a picture, read Lao Tzu quotes or the I Te Ching, read any inspirational quotes, really. Read a poem or a book. STOP THE ENDLESS SCROLLING.
Yeah, I said it.
You’re miserable because your entire life becomes reading snippets of someone else’s life, probably someone doing all these things I just described. (Notice I didn’t say go out and eat?) Eating is normal and everyone’s diet is special; nobody has a body that can digest everything on planet Earth. We just think we do.
Have you ever bought something at the grocery store then failed to eat it and you tossed it out because it rotted away? Chances are it is or has an ingredient you can’t have, my friend. I can’t eat mustard, for example, so when I buy mustard greens they just rot. (This is how I caught on, by the way.)
You might be able to tolerate small portions of it, but you generally won’t be able to eat unlimited amounts. If you want to torture your body and stay fat, fine — eat it when you eat out. But when you eat at home, stick to the stuff easy to digest.
My stab in the dark as to what people should eat is based on their genetic makeup. If you are predominantly any one ethnicity, eat that food. (Mexican –> Mexican food, Polish –> Polish food.) I’m screwed because I’m predominantly Native American and I cannot find anything describing the actual diet of the Iroquois, for example. I have no idea how many tribes are in me or how they interact genetically to express the me that I am, because I can’t eat beans, corn, or squash. Surely they ate more than three vegetables in addition to all the game they caught.
Stop eating anything that makes you cranky. If you eat something and notice within 30 minutes you are feeling tired, lethargic, or if your throat is itchy, or if your nose is runny… you can’t eat that shit, give it up. Give it a proper funeral, say your goodbyes with a really nice eulogy, and throw it in the fucking trash. It’s poison.
It doesn’t matter how good that poison tastes. You are hurting your body and then ignoring the consequences thereof on a flavor quest extraordinaire. (Believe me, I know as a fellow foodie.) Just stop before you do so much damage you can’t eat anything at all.
I cannot eat tomato or paprika, for example. My digestion slows down substantially with either one or I puke. This is what your body is supposed to do. Purge the toxins so that you can live.
Problem is, we are all taking these great supplements for health, amirite?
They bypass your body’s natural defense mechanisms and go straight to the small intestine, my friend. Once it passes the stomach, it does real harm. I’m pretty sure this is how I got mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), actually. And leaky gut syndrome.
My father puked the other day, he told me, after consuming day old milk. He didn’t leave it out… Tyrelle was a bastard and kept me arguing with him in the car for 30 minutes after I got home and I think it spoiled the milk a touch. It was only a half-gallon. I felt bad, of course, and dumped the milk out and bought more… but my father didn’t dump that milk out. He left it up to someone else because in his books, food is immortal. If it isn’t, he might starve to death.
He figured out he’s the only one drinking milk in his household after two years of being the only one drinking milk in his household.
He’s a narcissist, you’d think he would have noticed sooner.
He makes sure that he has exactly what he needs for his body. My mother? Chopped liver. She buys what he eats out of habit and just eats it, too. She weighs about 300 pounds now and he’s a Skinny Minnie.
I tried to tell her that’s her problem… She’s too lazy to change, though, because she doesn’t get energy from his diet. It makes her too tired and sore. This is NOT the norm, people. Food is meant to make you energetic. It’s meant to refuel you and give you replenishment. If food is making you tired, it’s POISON.
Angel-Sansara 