I’m having a bit of a crummy, overwhelmed sort of day today.
Nothing really major happened, really. I’m going to the doctor later this afternoon because I have this sub-dermal skin infection that’s been going on for about two weeks now despite having antibiotic pills and ointment from the convenient care doctor. He said that if it didn’t clear up, that I’d need to see my primary care doctor and have her check my sugars. Because of this, Ashe helped me check my blood sugar at home with a glucose meter that they had and by blood sugar levels were elevated.
So now I get to go into the doctor this afternoon to get screened for diabetes – fun. It really shouldn’t be a surprise to me. My dad has diabetes so bad that he’s getting diabetic ulcers on his toes and my maternal grandmother has been dealing with diabetes for as long as I’ve been alive. I definitely had a genetic predisposition for this and my sedentary, hedonistic lifestyle probably isn’t helping any. I’m better than I used to be, certainly, but I still love food and don’t exercise nearly as much as I want to.
I know it’s not all my fault. This society is very good at putting your entire life behind a computer or TV screen and the focus on productivity to make money leaves people with very little energy and time to pursue personal health and wellness. But it’s hard not to feel disappointed in myself for how I choose to use the personal time allotted to me and for not making better personal choices about diet and exercise when I can.
The truth is, though, that I’m still struggling in a lot of areas of my life and I feel really pinned down by it all. I know that I need to slow way down to improve my health, but there’s still so much that I want and need to do. I’ve got a bunch of home maintenance that should have been done a long time ago, seeds that need planting, plants that need transplanting, a garage needing an organizational overhaul of epic proportions, growing areas that need expanding, mulch and compost to spread, garden areas to clean up and make ready for this year, garden structures that need to be built, taxes that need to be done – the list goes on and on.
Sure, there are things that I can take off my plate and I really need to sit down and figure out what they are. Maybe for the garden, we’ll just have to focus on what we’ve already got planted until we get things a little more settled elsewhere. That’s a real bummer because I wanted to start getting more of our food from our garden this year and I’m excited for the other plants that we had planned. We’re still doing a lot better this year than last year and I know we’ll be able to build on our successes this year, especially if I’m focusing on organization and building out infrastructure. I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t still bummed though.
Working a full time computer job and having to try and fit my life around that job doesn’t really help matters either. I’ve been dreaming of trying to get a job that is more physical or at least has me on my feet doing stuff but the prospect of moving from one career to another is daunting, especially after I’ve reached where I have in the technical customer support industry. It’s going to take a while to build up the resources to allow me to feel comfortable making that jump even though we’ve just paid off the house (which I’ll talk about in a different blog entry since that’s exciting news and deserves to be acknowledged in its own space.)
For the meantime, I just need to get through this day and see what the doctor has to say. Even if I am diabetic and need to go on insulin, it isn’t the end of the world. It might mean some lifestyle changes but Ashe is already helping me get back to doing yoga more often and helping me to eat a diet that’s lower in starches and sugars again. Hopefully, these improvements will give me some more energy as they did when Wren and I went on the GAPS diet while we were living in Evanston. That diet was so hard but it definitely gave me so much more energy than I was used to. If it weren’t for the expense and the desire to eat less meat for ethical reasons, I would absolutely go on it again and I would try to experiment further to make the meals less boring. There’s no reason that the GAPS diet has to be such bland white people food, especially when there are so many other cultures that do really interesting things with food and spices.
Rose East 