Hello again!
It’s been two months since I last blogged – a far greater stretch of time than I had ever wanted to let pass between posts, but at least I didn’t let things slide as badly as I did the last time I had to write a post like this.
It turned out that making the move from wordpress.com to a self-hosted Siteground blog resulted in a loss of steam I didn’t actively do anything to compensate for. I don’t mean to deter anyone from making the jump, as it’s worthwhile to do if you want to pursue blogging as more than just a casual hobby; but in my case, I underestimated how much brain fog I had to fight through to research how to do everything properly, and then got caught between thinking “It’s time to write a new blog post,” and “There’s still something I need to finish on the back-end of my website.”
Bouncing back and forth between those two thoughts meant that ultimately nothing got done, besides a guest post I wrote about The Upsides of Social Media over on The Bipolar Writer Blog.
So where am I at these days?
The cynical side of me wants to answer, “Back to where I was at the start of 2018: riddled with intense brain fog, still not making enough money to support myself, and plagued with uncertainty over what to do in the present in order to get to a better future.”
The more optimistic side I am attempting to cultivate for myself wants to answer, “In the mindspace to resume the healthy routines that were working for me before I took a break.”
Whereas I would have characterized the first 5.5 months of 2018 as having a slow but steady upward incline in my health, the month and a half afterwards became sidetracked with emotional stress and a loss of self-discipline.
Most notably, I let go of dietary restrictions (no gluten, sugar, or processed foods) and ended up back on the standard American diet. Whether this has a causal relationship with my downward slide I have yet to determine, but intellectually I have convinced myself to return to my paleo diet as it makes sense to go back to nourishing my body with better food.
I have also convinced myself to get back to updating my blog. One major upside to having started one months ago is that in low times like this, I can take a look back at my posts and reconnect with my words from a former time. When you have cognitive dysfunction (specifically, the sense of depersonalization and general disorientation I’ve had resurface in the past couple weeks), it’s easy to feel absolutely lost and forget when things were going better; by rereading words from times past that came straight from my own mind, it makes it seem more plausible that my renewed efforts to focus on my health can amount to a real difference. In addition, my site is something tangible that I have to show for for the first half of this year, and a modest reminder that in the not-too-distant past I have managed to do something constructive with the challenges I’ve faced.
In more concrete health terms, I am still under the care of Dr. Kaufman (formerly of the Open Medicine Institute; now practicing out of the Center for Complex Disease in Mountain View, California) and the latest piece of the puzzle we’re attacking is small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO). Fingers crossed that the 14-course of Rifaximin (Xifaxan) and Vancomycyin (Vancocin) I am currently on, together with a regimen to repair leaky gut, will result in improvements to my cognitive functioning!
All in all: I just wanted to give a personal update on where I’m at, start with a less structured post to get back into the groove of blogging, and asseverate my return to writing here on a regular basis. I’ve missed interacting with many of you and hope that you’ll say hi in the comments below! What have you been up to?