Stop And Start

I’ve run away.  Not very far though, and in reality there was no actual running involved.  I slung a bag of sweat pants, a stash of supplements, 9 cans of smoked herrings, and my laptop in the car, pointed the hood in a northerly direction and put my foot on the gas.  A little under 3 hours later I was gulping big breaths of bracing sea air and gleefully telling the exuberant young thing at check-in that I had escaped for 3 whole days to do nothing but write.  As she handed me the room key and parking pass, she excitedly started to share some fun things to do in the area.  I waited for the first opportunity to get a word in edge-ways and interjected, “I will not be leaving for 3 days, and if you should spot me attempting to sneak out of the building before noon on Sunday please redirect me back to my studio.”  She giggled like she thought I was kidding.

I am now lolling in my pjs in front of an open fire on a rather splendid jade green couch with brown leather arms, watching the telly and eating kippers.  BECAUSE I CAN.  It’s a tad nippy up here in Birch Bay tonight, as if I needed any further encouragement to fire up the logs and snuggle on a comfy sofa with a mug of herbal tea and a pair of fluffy socks.

Since I rolled back into town after my early October sojourn to Jellystone I’ve been trying to squeeze as much blog time into any nooks and crannies between day-job and dishes, laundry and leaf-blowing, naturopath visits and expeditions to find the cheapest place to buy grass-fed lamb.  (If you’re interested and live in Seattle, the answer is PCC.  Surprising but true.)  My brain has been buzzing with stuff to share from my journey out of exhaustion and WTF-is-wrong-with-me? that almost took me out a few short months back, and it’s taking altogether way too long to get it all written down.  I have this dream about getting caught up to the point where I can write a post about what’s happening in the moment instead of writing about what happened over the last 2 months.  Real time!  Now there’s a concept.

I realized that if I am going to get to that happy place I need to focus, and despite the fact that I do not cohabit with any other humans, there are plenty of other inanimate objects, furry four-legged beasts, and to-do lists all trying to inveigle me away from my intended purpose.  An early morning coffee can so easily morph into four hours of housecleaning once you open the trash to drop the coffee pod in and realize it needs taking out.  I know!  Let’s take out the recycling while I’m at it.  On the way out through the garage those Amazon boxes destined for the recycling may as well just get flattened right now.  Oh, look!  There’s the growing pile of stuff for Goodwill – I’ll just use some of those boxes to put it all in before I recycle the rest.  Oh my!  That gust of wind sure brought a pile of leaves in with it.  I’ll just sweep them up and drop them in the garden waste can while I’m trashing and recycling.  Won’t take a minute.  45 minutes later and I am doing a major garage re-organization and my now cold coffee is sat on the kitchen counter waiting for me to just take the trash out.  And so it goes.  It’s human nature to not want to do the hard things – even if – or especially if (?!) – they are the things that will cause us the greatest move forward.  We humans really are contrary creatures.

My nemesis over the last 4 months has been The Internet.  In my determination to finally solve the WTF-is-wrong-with-me? riddles once and for all I’ve been relentlessly seeking out brilliant people who knew things I didn’t, and while this has been exhilarating and revelatory in so many ways, I’ve fallen down more rabbit holes than I care to recall.  I have come to the conclusion that there are more dietary and nutrition rabbit holes to fall down than any other subject ON EARTH.  It’s no wonder we’re all so confused about what healthy really is or how to get there.  The last couple of weeks as I became increasingly frustrated at the tsunami of contradictory information out there I just wanted to throw my hands up and say, “Let’s call the whole thing off.  I’m just going to eat pizza.  At least my mouth will be happy.”  Then I remembered the revolt that my body would stage and I hastily reconsidered my position.

However hard this writing thing is it’s important that I share what I’ve learned so that I can {hopefully} make the path a little clearer and easier for any of you who are banging your head against the same virtual wall of misinformation, ignorance, and flawed science, plus the physical wall of inexplicable symptoms, weightless stalls, and conditions that traditional doctors only have band-aids for.

The perfectionist in me has been demanding that I don’t write anything until I completely understand it.  This week when I plummeted headlong into a ketogenic diet rabbit hole involving more chemical formulas than there are sheep in Wales and scientific gobbledegook that makes speaking Latin fluently seem like something any self-respecting 1st-grader would achieve in just two short semesters, I read a sentence that stopped me in my tracks: Dr. Peter Attia declared, “I don’t know.”  Well, hell.  If he doesn’t know then nobody knows, but that doesn’t mean that what he does know isn’t wildly, brilliantly helpful.

It dawned on me that at some point I have to stop reading and studying and researching and start writing.  So here I am under self-imposed studio arrest in Birch Bay, tapping away, writing what I do know.  Let’s see if I can get my WTF-is-wrong-with-me? story finished.

Happy weekend, folks!