Five days

It's been five days since I got my diagnosis. Not even a full week, and yet it feels like it's been forever. In some ways, that is.

I've been fighting these symptoms for years. I am in the process of looking back, cataloging, reliving. I am in the process of piecing together what turns out to be a very clear path to this diagnosis, including all the little off-shoots of doctor dismissal, distraction, and dissuasion. I am a bit mortified, really, and angry with myself for accepting for so long that I didn't know my body best. It's long been my tendency to turn my body over to others whom I thought knew better than I did about how my body responds. I accepted direction regarding what I should look like, what I should weigh, how I should wear makeup, how I should dress, how I should exercise, when I should rest. I accepted that whatever I was eating, even if I wasn't actually eating anything at that precise moment, was bad for me and something I should never consume again, and I should rightly follow the direction of other people because they knew better than I did.

I followed low fat. I followed low calorie. I followed manic cardio. I followed conventional wisdom, even when it was painfully obvious that my body responded well to precisely none of it. Even when, if I had been honest with myself and accepted what my body was trying desperately to communicate to me, it was very apparent that my body was actually deteriorating under what I was trying to force it to become. I labored under the delusion that other people knew best, and I was just not applying myself diligently enough. It's appalling to me, looking back, that I accepted so much outside interference in what should be our most deeply personal, private experience. And I've paid for that interference with years of self doubt and deteriorating health that have brought me here.

"Here" feels at once triumphant and overwhelming. I knew something was wrong. I knew the numbers didn't add up, and as diligently as I tried to apply all the advice and suggestions I should have been getting much more of a response out of my body. I knew, as a clinician trained in gathering and interpreting physical response data, that something wasn't adding up. And yet the amount of time I spent trying to "try harder" has dug me further into the hole, and I'm so deep in that I can barely see the light of the sky far above me. The task of unearthing myself seems huge, no pun intended. It seems like too much. Too many steps, too many change. Nothing one person can do.