Dispatches from my recent crash out

Going back to work this past week I felt pretty decent. I didn’t even have the end of break scaries! I really did feel ready to go back after two weeks of relative down time.

As the days wore on I started to feel overwhelmed. By Wednesday I felt like there was a weight pushing down on me, mentally and emotionally. By Thursday I was kind of spiraling and by Friday evening I officially “crashed out,” as my 15yo would say. I even wrote half of a Five on Friday post yesterday that I titled, Burning up upon re-entry. Mellow dramatic much?

Today, on the bus ride home from the dojo, I was reading an article about the insanity that is the second year of Trump 2.0 and I realized that part of my spiral and subsequent crash out was due, in part, to the desperate nature of the news lately, to the terror Trump’s administration is wreaking both at home and abroad. Just recognizing that the recent news stories were affecting me deeply helped calm my nerves a little. It also helped me identify other things that feel out of control lately in my own life.

I hurt my shoulder on Tuesday, or better said I aggravated a previous injury (my AC joint). I’m not sure how I reinjured it, I don’t think it was a specific moment but more of an overuse injury. I went to the dojo on Wednesday, assuming I could avoid making it worse but I did the opposite and it really hurt on Thursday. I was mad at myself both for causing the injury in the first place, and not giving it time to heal.

My perioral dermatitis has been flaring for over two months now. I’ve done a lot of research and the big recommendation is to avoid triggers. Well, I don’t wear make up and I’ve stopped using my normal face wash and only use Cetaphil now. But I can’t stop using fluoridated toothpaste (my teeth are HORRIBLE and will immediately fall out of my mouth if I’m not fortifying them with fluoride) so… I guess I’m screwed? I do think the sun is a big trigger (but so is sunscreen, so I see many floppy hats in my future) and also the wind (or cold air, or maybe even the changes in air temperature you get in the winter when there is heat running inside). So basically, I cannot fully avoid my triggers maybe having a red scaly rash around my mouth and nose is just what I have to look forward to for half the year. I did email my doctor requesting a new prescription topical treatment, but I don’t have a lot of hope that it will help.

{And yes, I know it is vain of me to be so bummed out by my skin. But I am vain! And I am aware enough of the constant, steady changes in my skin everywhere else to know I don’t have many years left before I’m going to hate my skin for a whole new host of reasons, and I think that makes me especially bitter that I’m missing out on these last years I have left of 40 year-old skin. Again it’s vain, and I own that.}

Maybe the biggest of the stressors making things feel out of control, are some symptoms that remind me A LOT of how I felt before my thyroid condition was treated. I’ve had some troubling GI issues, which mirror what I was dealing with in March almost exactly, and I’ve also felt insatiable, which was how I felt when my metabolism was running amok. I did recently reduce my thyroid medication (at my doctor’s direction), but only from 2 to 1.5 pills daily. And my heart rate does not suggest an overactive thyroid so I’m not sure what is going on. I think mostly I just feel like I felt when I was sick, and it’s causing me a very mild PTSD-like stress response, especially since I know that later this year I’ll be stopping my medication entirely to see if I’m in remission and if I’m not I’ll have to make hard choices about how to take out my thyroid completely. And this will cause more fluctuations in weight and those are hard for me. I have a history of disordered eating and these weight fluctuations require a lot of my mental and emotional energy to work through. I don’t love admitting that at 45, but it’s absolutely true.

{I hope to write about all this more, because I do think about it quite a bit and some of my insights are probably worth sharing… but that feels like fodder for another post.}

I do think I identified an important cycle, which is that I feel really hungry and then I make poor food choices and then those poor food choices cause GI distress. So this week I’m going to identify options I think will be less catastrophic for my intestinal health and see if I can at least rid myself of one of these troublesome issues. (I really think refined sugar and I do not get along. Which is honestly not horrible because I crave savory foods more, but when I eat more sugar I want more sugar and then I eat more sugar and so on, and then my system breaks down and I feel miserable. So yeah, now that the holidays are over I hope it will be a lot easier for me avoid sugar moving forward).

So yeah, I’m dealing with an injury, and and unsure how much rest I should be requiring of myself, or what kinds of exercise will promote healing instead of hindering it. My face looks like a red, blotchy mess and wearing make up to cover it will make it worse. And I’m dealing with some health issues that mirror a previous low point in my health and the subsequent diagnosis of an autoimmune disease I’ll be managing for life, so yeah. Oh, and our country is a dumpster fire that is intent on killing its citizens with impunity and spreading its dumpster fire self to the rest of the world. I think I can give myself a little grace for my recent crash out.