zeptember

On Friday, Susie Collins over at The Canary Report, a site for those who suffer from Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, posted a video advertising for Invisible Illness Week from September 14-20.

I have Endometriosis, which is termed an Invisible Illness. I know of Susie Collins through Jeanne over at the Chronic Healing website. I found her while searching for other people blogging about endometriosis, and we have corresponded via email, chat and video chat. Jeanne insisted that I also get to know Susie. I love the work Susie’s doing over at The Canary Report.

I watched the video that Susie posted, and decided that despite seeing a Christian site mentioned in the ’sponsored by’ info at the end of the video, that I would go ahead and sign up for the list of bloggers writing for Invisible Illness Week.

It’s only been a day, so we shall see if my blog is even added. I’ve taken down the “contains explicit language’ tag on my blog, since over the last few months I’ve been editing out profanity as much as possible, anyway. I have decided that I can still be angry about how people with endo are treated, without using such fucking foul goddamned language.

If my blog is not picked up for Invisible Illness Week, I’ll understand. It’s a Christian site, after all, and some of the stuff I talk about on my blog is a bit TMI and too dark for many Christians.

I would be lying however if I did not mention that I’ve been triggered by the start - by even finding out that it’s a Christian-run website - and that if rejected as a guest blogger, I will be angry because I’m already on the defense due to being triggered.

I have a rejection complex that is easily traced back to being raised in a Baptist Fundamentalist family. No matter how good you are, no matter how hard you try, GAWD IS WATCHING AND HE KNOWS WHAT YOU REALLY THINK, and don’t you tell me you DIDN’T think this or that, because we are all born of EVE’S SIN, and we must all prove to GAWD that we really are capable of overcoming our sins and our guilt. ONLY IF GAWD CHOOSES, WILL YOU BE TRULY FORGIVEN. And the funny thing about that is that certain HUMANS are endowed with the ability to KNOW IF GAWD HAS FORGIVEN YOU. These people include televangeists, preachers, and your parents and family. They also include some self-righteous members of the cult church.

So no matter what I’ve ever done in life, I’m GUILTY! GUILTY! GUILTY! And no matter what I’ve tried to say in my defense, I’M NOT WORTHY of Gawd’s grace.

About eight or so years ago, my mother told me she’s sorry I’m going to burn in hell, but could I please go home to her house and claim the family belongings when The Rapture comes? Perhaps I could read her bible and make one last attempt at being saved, she mused.

About six or so years ago, my brother told me that it was ridiculous for our mother to continually tell me to just call out to Jesus to be accepted back into the fold, because it’s obvious I won’t be allowed back (i.e. rejection) because of all of the things I’ve done in my sinful life.
I thought about this for a second, and then I rehashed for my brother all of the things HE’S done: hitting our mother, doing drugs including cocaine, pot and LSD, selling those drugs to others including minors, melting down great aunt’s silverware to make amulets for the Necronomicon, busting open newspaper boxes to steal the money inside, being a member of a gang, stealing our mother’s handgun and partially filing off the serial number on the gun, using the gun in a drive-by shooting, causing our father to take out a new mortgage to get him out of a ten-year prison sentence after getting caught for all of this, knocking up a fifteen-year-old high school girl when he was nineteen, then trying to have friends talk her into an abortion, marrying that girl to make her honest when she refused said abortion, but continued drug and alcohol abuse, looking at porn on cable TV and on the Internet, calling porn hotlines, and getting caught by the wife doing all that because HELLO it shows on the monthly statements…

My brother replied simply that he’s asked Gawd to forgive him, and he was forgiven. He said it’s too complicated for me to ever understand.

I replied that by his logic of just asking to be forgiven, all I should be able to do is ask Gawd to forgive me, and call out in Jesus’ name, and I too should be forgiven.

My brother forcefully said NO! And told me that Gawd KNOWS I am NOT repentent, and WILL NOT forgive me, whereas my brother himself WILL ALWAYS be forgiven.

I said, “suppose you go and kill a man out of anger. But then you feel really bad about what you’ve done. If you pray to Gawd to ask his forgiveness, are you forgiven?”

My brother replied, “Yes.”

I said, “suppose I go and kill a man out of anger. But then I feel really bad about what I’ve done. If I pray to Gawd to ask his forgiveness, am I forgiven?”

My brother replied, “No.”

At this point, I stopped trying to be logical with my brother. We talked a bit more, with me trying to change the subject, then I told him I had to go.

I try not to engage in religious talk with my family - you cannot rationalise with a Fundamentalist. It’s not possible. They will always win because they cannot see their own web of lies, contradictions and hypocrisy. Being a Christian Fundamentalist is the very definition of severe mental illness, in my opinion.

But the real point of all this, you might ask, is what does my family and my experience have to do with a Christian-operated website?!?

I am cognitively aware that Christian does not equal Fundamentalist.

However, being scarred by cultists calling themselves Christians has had an unfortunate side effect for me, emotionally. Every time I hear or see the word Christian, the FIRST thing that leaps to my mind is an association of Fundamentalists. The second thing that happens for me emotionally is that of guilt and rejection combined.

It may take me the rest of my life to separate the semantics of the words ‘Christian’ and ‘Fundamentalist’. Knowing the difference on a rational, logical level is one thing. Believing and understanding it on an emotional level, especially after having been harmed emotionally, is quite another.

I will end this post to say that while journaling about this, the people over at Invisible Illness Week sent a reply to me, saying, “All of us at Rest Ministries & Invisible Illness week thank you for sharing your personal journey. I have a family member who also struggled with endometriosis & infertitily. Gratefully she had a positive outcome, but not everyone is as fortunate. Your positive attitude is a testimony to your strength & resolve. Best wishes!”

The “best wishes” ending to the email read to me like REJECTION, heh.

I went over to their bloggers unite site to see if my blog had been added, and it has not been added, yet.

Every day is awareness day for me on my blog. My blog is listed on other endo-related blog sites. But to get my blog out to even more people is always a goal. If I don’t pass muster on the Invisible Illness Week website, that’s got to be okay. I have to remember to not take it personally. I have to remember that these people are not my family who have judged and hurt me so.

That’s the real lesson for me, here.

For the past six months, since working close to home and not having a daily commute anymore, I have not listened to the news on the radio.

I don’t have regular television to watch news - we only have DVD and VCR hookup - we don’t have cable or satellite TV.

I don’t watch the news in online video feeds.

Every now and then, I’ll google national and world news to see what’s going on, or I’ll see news via posts made in LiveJournal, Facebook or Twitter.

But I have to say, overall I’ve been a much more sane person since cutting two things out of my life:

• working for the computer industry
• listening/reading the news every day

For the past couple of days, I’ve been full on checking the news again, because of the school and health care speeches that President Obama has given, and everything surrounding what’s going on with those speeches - mostly right-wing nut jobs (check it out here, here and here). Since I was paying attention to who said what about the President’s speeches, I thought I’d also check in on national and world news as well.

I’m seriously depressed, now. It’s been no more than 36 hours all told I think, checking the news a few times, and I’m a mess. This world pisses me off. This is why I had stopped paying attention in the first place - I don’t have the energy or health reserves to be absorbing world news and politics.
It wasn’t any one thing - it was all of it: right-wing nut jobs, several child abuse stories, continued horrors of vets returning from war when I know I still have extended family in the military, all kinds of stuff on The Canary Report by a fellow blogger-acquaintance, unemployment stats, continued heat waves, local homophobia, and other news.

I have a daily job that makes me work really hard for eleven effing dollars an hour. I come home exhausted. For up to two weeks out of each month, I am incapacitated in some form by endometriosis, culminating with being bedridden for 1-3 days. I don’t have time outside of my own home life and health issues for much else. I NEED to focus on me and not on the rest of the world. So when I do pay attention to the news, it leaves me emotionally bitter and depressed. And when I’m left like that, I don’t have the extra spoons on reserve to also handle what’s going on in my own life, or my family and friends’ lives. I certainly don’t have the stamina to catch up on my own blog, which captures and reposts the latest news and research surrounding finding a cause and cure for endometriosis.

To try to correct the damage I’ve caused myself over the past couple of days, this evening I took a dose of Happy News. It’s sort of like a news anti-depressant if you will.

I’m not trying to sing LA LA LA! while plugging my ears and pretend nothing’s going on in the world around me. I know there’s a lot of bad and serious shit going down in the world, in the U.S., in the Bay Area, in my town.

I just not the right person to talk to about these things - if I get involved in any way in matters which I feel are completely beyond my control, it will literally take me down emotionally and physically. And I’m too self-preserving to let that happen.

After reading some happy news, I remembered I should be attending a meeting to help get the word out to say NO to a recall of three of my town’s school board members. I panicked a bit, wondered if I should bother now that I was late, but in the end, I bit the bullet of social phobia and walked to the event. I only wanted to bolt from the meeting a few times, but I stayed in my seat. Two of my friends were in the row in front of me but that didn’t stop the social anxiety.
After the meeting, I met and shook hands with one of the board members and got her business card. Wouldn’t you know it? One of her kids used to go to the school I now teach at. Connections are a great thing.

After the meeting, I went to the grocery store and spent an hour trying to figure out the best groceries for me and my food allergies. I still eat a lot of processed foods - still not prepping most of my dishes by hand. Need to work on that. Food prep is calming.

Tonight’s outings more than pass me on the homework I was assigned by my shrink, which was to walk alone around the block as a step in facing my social anxiety.
I know my therapist will be proud of me. The thing is, I know she means well, but she really just doesn’t understand what I go through, and how intermittent it can be, and how debilitating it can be. She may say I’m on the road to recovery but she has no idea. At least, that’s how I feel right now. She’ll view me going out as a huge success, but down the road, it could be a day, a week, a month…I’ll have another social phobia freakout and/or drink myself to blackout again in order to deal with the anxiety. It’s hit and miss.

*sigh* anyway…

Now it’s nearly 11pm and I need to be in bed but for the past three nights, I’ve not been able to fully wind down.

Hot shower, here I come.

I took my male cat to the vet today for blood work. I noticed a couple of months ago that his breath was REALLY bad. When I took him in for his annual checkup and shots, I had the vet look at his teeth. Sure enough, quite a bit of plaque had built up on his back teeth, which unfortunately could not be picked off by the vet. I was told he’d have to be put under anesthesia and they’d use a special tool to get the gunk off. They’d have to do some bloodwork before he could go under, to make sure his system was up for it.

So today was his bloodwork. Tomorrow I get the results. Last year, he had high kidney enzymes. If he still has high kidney enzymes, he cannot go under anesthetic cuz it could kill him. I’ve been pretty nervous about this whole thing anyway, cuz my first male cat died under anesthesia back in 1994.

[enter back story and general memory lane...]
I’d been in a serious car accident on February 11, 1994. A month later, my mom’s cat Stinky had a litter. I was able to pluck two beautiful black kittens for my very own in April, 1994, while still recovering from the accident. I named them Siva and Noir. They were 7 months old when I took them in to the Humane Society get neutered and spayed.

Noir survived the surgery, Siva did not.

An autopsy revealed a heart defect. I sobbed for three days straight and was an emotional wreck for over a month because of his death. I’d had him since he was 6 weeks old. I buried Siva in the neighbor’s backyard, next to the garage. We held a little ceremony for him and I lit Sandlewood incense to help carry his spirit to the afterlife.

The next 12 months were really hard on me - I was in my last year of college, I had left a horrible relationship and moved in with my father, leaving my cat Noir to my ex boyfriend because I couldn’t take her with me.

In March, 1996, I moved into my very first solo apartment, after my father kicked me out of his house (his girlfriend was trying to get into the marriage bed and wanted her thirteen-year-old son to live with them, but I was a bad influence what with my negative attitude and goth lifestyle. She’d overheard me talking to friends on the phone about having gotten my nipples pierced, and that was that - my father called me in for a meeting and kicked me out, saying I was a disappointment because I’d not gotten a REAL job after having graduated college 10 months earlier. At the time, I was working full time as a toddler teacher in a daycare - the same job I’d had for the past five years, with only a short break away from that job to try working two jobs - in a factory and nightclub - which didn’t pan out. So bugger the fact that this was the same job I’d had for 5 years and bugger the fact that I’d gone to college and gotten a minor in Education to support my job, and bugger the fact that I’d been trying for the Assistant Director position at that job - I didn’t have a REAL job.

Anyway, I moved into my first real place and had two friends help me make rent on it. Coinciding with my March, 1996 move to my own place was the birth of yet two more litters of cats at my Ma’s house. My first cat Noir had by this time been turned out by my ex as an outdoor cat at his grandmother’s house, which is right next door to my Ma’s house. In my opinion, Noir was ruined for ever being a proper house cat again. I just didn’t want to try forcing her to be an indoor cat.

I examined the litter of kittens and claimed a baby girl, who was an only child. Her mother, Baloo, still a kitten herself, had abandoned her. Baloo was the daughter of Stinky, who had also given birth the same week. Stinky took in Baloo’s daughter as her own, while Baloo herself took off outside once more.
When the baby girl was four weeks old, my Ma became more insistent that people take the kittens away. So I took the baby girl home. It soon became apparent that she’d not been weaned enough, and she screamed bloody murder. I’d never heard a four-week-old cat scream so loud and with such panic before. So I brought her back to my Ma’s house, but my Ma wouldn’t take her, saying the kitten had been weaned enough. So I chose a mate for my girl kitten - a boy - to balance it out and prevent fighting (girls can get pretty mean with each other).
It worked, and for a week I had two kittens tearing through my apartment at all hours of the day and night. Once I felt the girl kitteh had adjusted, I took the boy kitteh back to my Ma’s house.

Well, ma did NOT want that kitten back, either! I reminded her that he was only a mate to help my kitty adjust, but she wouldn’t have it. Ugh. So I took him back home and that’s how I got two cats in my life once again.

It took weeks to name them. I had a baby book which I used for writing recreationally, and so I went through the book calling out random girl and boy names from around the world, waiting for the kittens to perk up and look at me when I called out a name. I think Kijika (Kee-yee-kah, nicknamed Kiki) told me his name, first. Then Zenaide (Zeh-nigh-ed, but I just say ‘Zeh-nigh-duh) chose her name not long after. You can see pix of them through the years here.

When my kittens were six months old, I took them to an actual veterinarian rather than the Humane Society this time, as I was still convinvced that the Humane Society had killed my first boy cat. I barely had the money for it, but refused to go through the Humane Society again.
Both cats survived their surgeries this time.

A year later, my cats moved across country with me. Very stressful on all of us! They cried all night in the hotels and refused to eat, drink or use the litter box by day. I had to force feed them capfuls of water from my water bottle the whole ride out, which took four days. But as soon as we landed and got some of our belongings in our new home and turned the cats loose, they were fine, tails up in the air, exploring.

I’ve taken Kiki and Zenaide to the vet nearly every year for checkups and shots, missing their appointments only twice. They have been outdoors a few times, be it by leash, me holding them, or them escaping out the front door, but never long enough to get a REAL taste of the outdoors.

They are 13 years old, now.

Kiki’s mom Stinky lived to be about 17 years old before dying at home after suffering myriad health problems and being escorted to her final resting place in a most regrettable way.

My chosen sister’s cat Kimba, a son of Stinky, lived to be 16 years old before taking his final sleep at home, without warning or health complications. Just curled up on my niece’s floor and went out.

There’s still Solomon and Bear - Bear is from the same litter as Kiki. Not sure if Solomon was, too. And of course Noir is still kickin it, but has been having a lot of diarrhea as of last week, just like Stinky was doing right before she died. I talked to my Ma today - she said Noir was basking in the sun in her driveway earlier today, so that warmed my heart. She’s not dead, yet!
The only pictures I have of Noir are from when she was a kitten. When I visited my Ma’s house in June, 2004, Noir was in the neighbor’s yard and I called to her. She ran right over to me, tail up!
[exit memory lane]

So anyway, even if Kiki’s blood work comes back stellar, I’m still not sure I want to let him go under. It’s been 13 years. He’s an old man, now. I am afraid of losing him before his time. He’s my baby.