migraines and headaches again

We had to replace Doug's ten-year-old Kindle last month, and the new one came with three free months of Kindle Unlimited, a program from Amazon that allows you to download books from a selected (huge) list for "free." I saw a book titled something along the lines of "the migraine diet," and in spite of my skepticism, I decided to see what she had to say. Which of course sent me down a rabbit hole of going from one book to another-- there are a surprising number of them out there-- trying to figure out if there were some things that might work for me. Several books referred back to a book called Heal Your Headache by David Buchholz, a professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins, originally published in 2002.

So I bought it and read it. He's part cheerleader, part snake-oil salesman, part common sense practitioner. His tone--which is of the "if you follow my plan, your headaches will be HEALED!" variety-- was a real turn off, tbh. But, on the other hand, he said some things I'd never heard before that made complete sense to me. (Other things made no sense at all.) 

I will spare you the blow-by-blow and skip ahead to this week, because one thing that seemed worth trying was inspired by his comments about "rebound" headaches. Rebound headaches are caused by the very medications you take to treat them. The idea is that you have a headache, so you take, say, two excedrin migraine, which helps for several hours, but then when it wears off, your headache comes right back (rebounds), maybe worse than it was before. 

I've known about rebound headaches forever, but I didn't think I had a problem with them until the past couple of years when I've taken so many meds (see the end of this post). The only way to get over them is to stop taking meds, which isn't exactly appealing. When am I going to stop taking meds? I have to be able to function. 

Then I made the mistake of  happened to actually look at my calendar and notice that after weeks of having company, traveling, volunteer commitments, etc-- I suddenly had two weeks with almost nothing on my calendar. Dang.

So I decided that I would do it: stop taking meds, all of them, over-the-counter and prescription, for two weeks. Fortunately for me, I was at the end of a cycle of headaches anyway--it had been two days since I'd taken my prescription meds when I started-- so the first three days were no problem. Today has been harder, but still not too bad. We'll see. 

(I did not stop my morning cup of black tea. Buchholz says caffeine should be the first thing to go, but I've had plenty of headache-free periods when I was drinking a morning cup of tea. I may try caffeine withdrawal in the future if I need it.)

After getting off meds, if I can stick with it, the next step in his plan is dealing with triggers. Migraine "triggers" are various things like chocolate or aged cheese that can result in a headache. I've known about triggers for decades, too, since they are one of the defining characteristics of migraine, but I've always thought of them as a direct response (eat the trigger food, get a migraine). In spite of numerous efforts, some focused and intentional, some half-assed, I've never been able to identify any triggers (other than wine, which I've told you about before).

But Buchholz's way of looking at triggers is a little different. He looks at everything that might cause a headache-- stress, motion sensitivity, bright lights, lack of sleep, skipping a meal, caffeine intake, alcohol, various foods, etc --  as migraine triggers. And instead of looking for a one-to-one correspondence like I have with wine (drink wine, get a migraine), he sees them like layers that pile up until you hit the point where a migraine happens.

He didn't use this analogy, but it's like your migraine threshold is a bucket, and all the individual possible triggers go in the bucket until it overflows, and then you get a migraine. So it's not just parmesan cheese (hypothetically), it's riding in the back seat of a car to get to a party, then there's loud music and smoke floating in from the patio, and then you have an appetizer with parmesan and there you go. Wine immediately overflows my bucket, but most other possible triggers aren't enough on their own to do it. 

Buchholz has a long list of food triggers that I will not reproduce here, but in addition to the usual (wine, chocolate, aged cheese), some of them surprised me. Almonds? Onions? Almonds are my main source of breakfast protein. His plan (I'm not looking at the book so this may not be exactly right) is that you spend a couple of weeks de-toxing from the meds, and then strictly avoid the foods on the list for four months. At that point, if you are consistently headache-free, you can experiment with adding some of them back in. 

I'm not doing that. Maybe because I've tried so many--so many-- elimination diets in the past. But I am willing to stop eating almonds and avoid onions for awhile, plus a few other things I've been suspicious about. 

Oddly, there are several things on the list that I already avoid, not because of headaches but because either they make my mouth itch (raw walnuts) or the taste lingers in my mouth for hours (raw onions). So it's easy to give those up.

I will report back in a few weeks. Originally I was going to have two quick items about this and then move on. As usual I have gone on and on and now I don't have time for anything more interesting. Maybe this will be helpful for someone else dealing with chronic headaches. And if you are, I wish you well in figuring them out.

Have a good weekend.

7ToF: a new conversation game and other vital matters

1. Here is a new conversation starter, if you need one: if your personality was a house or a building, what would it be? A cabin in the woods? A sleek apartment on the 40th floor of a high rise? An apartment in a library? Mine would be an unremarkable 1970s 3-bed/2-bath rancher above ground, and NORAD underneath. I think Doug's would be the house we live in now, which is a 1970s (hmmm, might be a theme) A-frame, with big windows facing the mountains and a walkout basement. 

My mom's would be a mid-size brick house similar to the ones in the "nice part of town" in the town where I went to high school, with enormous azaleas and hydrangeas out front and no basement at all, and one of those doorbells that sounds like chimes when you ring it. (That was how I knew oooh, these people have CLASS when I lived there.) Also, the azaleas and hydrangeas would always be in bloom.

2. Rabbit hole: I googled NORAD to see what it actually means, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it does not mean what I thought it meant. I was thinking of the super-secret underground military command center in Independence Day or a dozen other movies, an enormous, 20-stories deep complex of labs and archives and mainframe computers. Apparently that is actually the Cheyenne Mountain command center, built during the cold war and currently on "standby," whatever that means. NORAD is the North American defense alliance between Canada and the US that is currently housed at Peterson AFB in Colorado Springs. But hopefully and ungrammatically you got what I meant in #1. (This is actually a pretty interesting rabbit hole if you are so inclined.)

3. In a column in the NYT, fashion editor Vanessa Friedman answered a question from a reader about how short a skirt can be in a professional environment. I thought her response was unusually thoughtful, especially from a fashion editor (which is on me for having assumptions about how a fashion editor would think). Here is a gift link. "If you are constantly worrying that your skirts are too short, they probably are, not because of any immutable rule but because thinking about what other people think is occupying too much of your brain." 

4. Which eventually circles back to my current thing, about how different people are just wired differently. It takes no extra energy for someone with a more flamboyant personality to dress to be noticed--it probably gives them energy. For me, it would drain me dry. I do not want to think about my clothes after I put them on, and certainly not about people's reaction to them. Yet in our worst moments, probably the "loud" dresser looks down on me as drab, and I look down on her for being superficial. I've been really working on this, on being able to support people around me in being their own best selves, without judgment from me, even when they're very different from me with very different priorities. And you know what? It's really hard and I'm not great at it. 

5. We keep wanting to find "our people," but eventually you realize everybody is just dang different. Is that why we suddenly all feel alone? How many women my age have I heard in the past year say they don't have any friends? (not many, honestly, but given that it's not something people usually confess to, a few is probably indicative of a lot more.) Fifty years ago, we were all in a forced community of proximity. Your neighbors were your people. You might have been a jock or a theater kid or a cool kid, but everybody you knew was right there. We didn't know what people in Helena or Greensboro or Reno (or Tokyo or Lagos or Bern) thought because we didn't have access to them. Now we have this false sense that if we just look hard enough, we could find the people who love the same books as us, vote the same, agree on what’s important, have the same work ethic. And sometimes you can. But maybe I shouldn’t let that be a substitute for reaching out to the person next door. 

6. Written in mid-July, and promptly forgotten: In my post about the diet books, I really had not intended to bring up dieting. I was just looking for a segue into the "late night thoughts" at the end. The bit with my friends and the Whole30 book was three (four?) years ago, and I've barely thought about it since. But once that post was up, I ended up face-to-face with my own ambivalence about dieting. 

There are a million reasons why diet culture is bad, bad, bad. You don't need me to tell you, I hope. We all know that. It's a negative mindset that will eat you up from the inside and take away all your enjoyment of food. It reinforces unrealistic, unhealthy, stereotypes about how women "should" look. But on the other hand, I have let myself get too heavy for the clothes I have, and for the activity level I want to have. I'm only about ten pounds over where I want to be, but I'm 40-ish pounds over my pre-kid weight. I'll never lose all of it. I am just fine with never being pre-kid thin again. But the last 10-15 pounds are, uh, weighing heavy on me (sorry).

7. Written last week, having completely forgotten that I wrote that last month: I did not circle back around to losing my winter "fluff"-- the 5-10 pounds I seem to gain every winter--because I hate thinking about weight. It's such a triggering issue (for sure for me, and probably for most women), that I will warn you in advance, if you are male, never bring it up. Never. 

But I must have lost the winter weight somehow, because I pulled out a pair of capris that I haven't worn in at least two years thinking I would throw them in with the stuff I was taking to goodwill. I figured there was no way they would still fit. But I tried them on, and they fit perfectly. And it suddenly occurred to me: maybe this is just the size my body is now. Maybe I'm not a bad person because I've added a little padding over the years. Maybe I haven't "let myself go" -- which is a comment that makes me laugh because I spend triple the amount of time on my appearance now than I did when I was 30. Maybe I should quit feeling guilty and ashamed about my 63-year-old pudginess and just enjoy having a relatively healthy body. Go, me. 

Have a good weekend.

7ToF: ok, maybe I have "a few" more thoughts about that list

I spent too much time thinking about the Best Books of the 21st Century list, far more time than it deserved--hence, this post. Feel free to skip, this whole damn thing is about that list. 

1. It's, obviously, heavy on intellectual books, books that you could include in a grad school syllabus with no embarrassment. It is not a list meant to include all readers, a list to pull you in and get you excited about reading-- or at least, it wasn't for me. It seemed to me that it was a list about proving who is reading capital-W Worthy Books. I don't know why I expected anything different. Intellectualism is not about including everybody, it's about making distinctions--well, yes, that book is fine, but it's not one of the best books. The real problem with my beef with the list is not the list itself, it's that I was excitedly expecting--as they released another twenty books each day-- something different.

(for the record, throughout this post I've limited myself to the books and/or authors I've actually read, which is 26 books--I've finished Detransition, Baby since that last post--and another handful of authors I've read but not the book that was picked (Chabon, Kazuo Ishiguro, Toni Morrison, and Colson Whitehead, and how did he only have one on the list, if they were going to do multiples?))

2. By the night before the top twenty came out, I was disappointed enough that I was sure they were going to pick The Corrections as the #1 book, but thank God at least they didn't do that. It's a great book--I've read it twice due to book clubs-- and if we'd been allowed to vote for 20, it probably would have made my list. But it would have been so predictable. 

Anyway. There were some way down the list that I thought should have been a lot higher (The Fifth Season, The Friend, The Tenth of December, Exit West), some that should have been at least a bit higher (Bel Canto, Station Eleven). There were a few at the top of the list that I would have put further down (Wolf Hall, The Year of Magical Thinking, The Overstory, and Gilead, the only book I'll mention that I haven't read, because I did try it), and a handful that I would have left out entirely (Lincoln in the Bardo, H is for Hawk, Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (which I enjoyed, but it's not that great, certainly not better than many that were left out)).   

3. I heard that their argument for why they included so many multiple books (by the same author) was that they were choosing the best books, not the best writers, and first of all I want to say, do you think that's helping your case here? but also, they undermined that by choosing at least a couple of books that were not the author's best work, but were published after 2000--for example, Didion. She is an icon, a brilliant writer, a true literary treasure, but is Year of Magical Thinking really in the top twelve best books of the past 25 years? It seems to me her best work was in the twentieth century, and that her book was picked because she is a great writer. I liked Year, and her writing is always good, but I had forgotten about it before I saw it on the list.

4. And what about George Saunders? I've heard he is a writer's writer, and although I didn't put it in my own top ten, I thought Tenth of December was brilliant. But Lincoln in the Bardo just seemed like an oddity (I haven't read Pastoralia). The fact that he had three books on the list made me wonder about the geographical distribution of the people who voted-- were they mostly east coast? Saunders teaches at Syracuse, he seems like a writer who is irrelevant to me here in the mountain west.

If there were a preponderance of east coast voters, that might explain why, of the books by US authors, so many midwest writers (Louise Erdrich, J. Ryan Stradal, Jane Hamilton) and western writers (Jess Walter, Peter Heller, Annie Proulx, Ivan Doig, Tommy Orange, ...believe me, I could go on) were left out. It might also explain how in the world Lauren Groff was omitted. (she lives in Florida, but you know...Florida. It's not exactly a hive of intellectualism, not like *awed voice* New England, or New York City!) 

5. Besides the ones I'd read, there were about a dozen books that I'd been meaning to read for years (Kavalier and Clay, Pachinko, Never Let Me Go, for starters), and Trust and Stay True were already in my library queue, but other than those, there were very few books out of the remaining 60-ish that I thought with excitement, ooooh, I want to read that!

I wanted it to be a list that got me excited about reading, but instead it was a list that made me think, why do I care what they think? They obviously have an entirely different set of criteria for picking best books. I wanted a list I could read with delighted surprise; my snarky, cynical self says they wanted a list that makes them look smart. Honestly, sometimes I get exactly why conservatives are always rolling their eyes at the so-called coastal elites, because that seems like exactly where this list comes from. omg, my inner mom is telling me if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything. So why do I keep going?

But also-- I did read a handful of reactions on Threads from people who were surprised and delighted by the list, so what do I know? (clearly, not much)

Yeah, that's my sour grapes about the Best Books list. Why do I care so much? And that is an excellent question.  

6. You know, this is too grumpy. I should probably edit it to make it less critical (believe it or not, I did tone it down a bit). They admitted that they tweaked the list, so I assumed that meant they basically massaged it to showcase the books they picked, but maybe it really is just the way the votes fell. I'm enough of a snob that it's hard for me to believe that a book I've never heard of (like Austerlitz, or Outline) got that many votes, but on the other hand, I'm clearly not an east coast intellectual. Wait, that's still snarky. I'm probably just out of it.

7. OK, what they got right, in my obviously-not-so-humble opinion: The ones that seemed to me to be in about exactly the right place, give or take a few: The Road, Americanah, The Cloud Atlas, Detransition, Baby (again, I'm limiting that to the ones I've read). And their top two choices were, tbh, a pleasant surprise. I haven't read the Ferrante books because the only person I know who has read and loved them is someone whose taste is very different than mine, so I've been assuming I wouldn't like them. So now I will probably give them a try. And I super-admired Isabel Wilkerson's more recent book Caste (it was in my top 10!), so now I'm looking forward to trying Warmth. And getting #1 and #2 right is no small thing.  

Yeah, I can't believe I wasted this much time on it, either. In case you didn't see the list, here is a gift link. I've heard that those expire after 7 days, so get to it. I'm back-dating this because I feel inexplicably bad about how negative it is. If I had a wider audience, I would never publish it.

Les Vacances

You know, for the past couple of years my life has usually been one of two states, my own private semiconductor: me, alone and absorbed in something interesting and (relatively) happy, OR me, in some social situation, wishing I was alone. 

But the past ten days or so have been the opposite— I’ve had a lot of family around (summer is one long round of company when you live in Montana), and that has been mostly fabulous, interspersed with some really lovely times with friends. But the inside of my head has been a shit show. Not frighteningly so, but enough that I’m thinking I need to figure some things out. I need to get my head on straight, as we used to say back in the— when was it? Eighties? Nineties? Lord knows. I never manage to stay gone long. Have a good weekend.

Edited to add: one of the best things about having a long-term blog is that you can go back and read it later and sometimes you get a bit of advice from your previous self that is surprisingly still relevant.  

A few last thoughts on that list

Of course they get to put whatever books they want on their list, and since I’m not an intellectual, there’s no reason to expect that my reading tastes will line up with theirs. But what I don’t get is the multiples. Three by George Saunders and none by James McBride? Two by Hilary Mantel and none by Louise Erdrich? Two by Elena Ferrante, Jesmyn Ward, and Alice Munro, but none by Lauren Groff, Kevin Wilson, or Bryan Washington? Unless you count Jemisin, was there any genre fiction at all? not even Stephen King. I don’t read horror so the only novel I’ve read of his is the Kennedy one, but even I would have pushed for something of his to be on the list. I ended up with 25 that I’d read, maybe another ten authors that I’d read but a different book. But only two suggestions for books that I want to read that weren’t already on my TBR list, which is disappointing. Weirdly disappointing. 

And p.s. this was written with only one scroll-through of the entire list, so if Lauren Groff or any of the others I mentioned are on there and I missed it, apologies. 

7ToF: appropriately enough for the dog days of summer, I'm trying to bore you to death

1. We have reached a new milestone of senior citizenship: we went to see a movie this week and we both fell asleep DURING THE PREVIEWS. Not gonna lie, that's a little scary, but we were both tired from a busy day, so maybe not really a surprise. We woke up for the movie, fortunately. It was Inside Out 2, which was good--if you liked the first one, you'll like this one, too. It's a kids' movie, but it's also a decent approximation of how our brains work, so it's kind of fascinating. The first Inside Out was about a little girl who has to move away from her friends and her hockey team, the sequel is about her transition to being a teenager. Thumbs up from us.

2. I'm still trying (not always successfully) to cut down on plastic use, so I am happy that we've found an alternative to the big orange bottle of laundry detergent. I've been loyally using Tide since Melanie was a baby and it was the only thing that would get the formula stains out of her clothes in one go. But those big orange bottles were becoming more and more disturbing to me. I tried some Earth Breeze detergent sheets once a couple of years ago and they left some kind of residue on the clothes, so I gave up on that. 

But then over the winter I read that no matter what it says on the package, if you're going to use detergent sheets, you have to dissolve them first because they don't have enough time in water to dissolve during a normal wash cycle. 

So, in case you want to try it, here's my method: I keep an empty salsa jar by the washing machine, fill it about 2/3 full with warm tap water, tear up a detergent sheet and drop it in, put on the lid, shake it up, and let it sit for at least ten or fifteen minutes. Then pour the mixture straight into the bottom of the washing machine and proceed as usual, but with no detergent in the dispenser. 

It works great. And of course, once you get in the habit, you can go ahead and refill the salsa jar right after you empty it, so then by the time you get to your next load, it's ready to go. Other than a couple of times I needed to remove some grease stains, I haven't used Tide in months. I'm still using Earth Breeze, I haven't tried any of the other brands since these seem to work just fine.

4. So in my reading report post last week, I started off with a description of how bad my taste is. I was mainly just making myself laugh, but also trying to defuse the whole I AM A TASTEMAKER thing, because it just seems so pretentious. I don't know what I'd write about if I didn't tell you what I've been reading, but it also seems kind of presumptuous to assume you want to know. 

What I didn't notice until after it was published was that it was kind of a backhanded insult to the books I then said I loved-- hey, I have terrible taste, and these are the books I like. I’m kind of an idiot.

5. Which brings us around to the #top10books thing that has exploded on Bookstagram this week (and probably Threads and X, too, I'm just not on those platforms anymore). The New York Times polled a bunch of TASTEMAKERS and now they're publishing their list of the Top 100 Books of the Twenty-First Century, and since you already know I am sideways making fun of the whole book snob thing, you may be unsurprised that I rolled my eyes so hard when I saw the article. Also, they're posting them twenty at a time every day this week, and I just....... *shrugs* It just seems like such blatant click bait for book nerds and wannabes, and also for people who feel guilty that they're not reading the "right" books or enough books or whatever. Like you're supposed to create a checklist and read all the books "they" have determined are the best ones to read. (I just sound grumpy, don't I.)

6. AND IT WORKED, because probably all book lovers, including me, love book lists, and I am following avidly. The first twenty included a bunch that I'd never heard of, but that's actually a good thing because they're including books besides the American prize winners and bestsellers that we already know about. I'm writing this on Wednesday, so the first sixty are out. I've read exactly thirteen of them, which seems a little sad, plus a few more that I've read by one of the authors, but not the particular one on the list (like Wolf Hall instead of Bring Up the Bodies). Three more of them were already on my TBR list for this summer.  

See? I'm doing it. I sound like the kid in the front row of English class, trying to prove that I'm a good reader because hey, I've read some of these books!!! I really have!!! Now I'm rolling my eyes at myself.

7. So of course, *she says sheepishly* I made my own list. They asked over 500 people involved in writing and publishing to give them their top 10 books published since 2000, and then created their list from that. Here are my top 10, in no particular order, with the caveat that I can just about guarantee that by the time their list is finished, I will remember some others that I will wish I had chosen. In fact, this is already slightly different than the list I posted on Instagram. So maybe next week I will update. Or maybe not. How much (virtual) ink has been spilled on this already?

Deacon King Kong by James McBride
Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton
Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
All Systems Red by Martha Wells
The House in The Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune
A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

I'm tempted to list the ones I almost included but lucky for you my inner editor is yelling no! just stop! (but they're Less, Station Eleven, and The Great Believers). I'm reading Americanah right now and it very well could bump one of the others off my list, but I still have over 300 pages to go, so hard to say. 

I'm so curious to see if Harry Potter is included in the NYT list (the first couple of books were published in the 90s, but all the rest in the 2000s), because I almost included Goblet of Fire in mine, and certainly that series permanently changed the shape of publishing. JKRowling has earned a lot of enemies over the past few years, but just about all the young families I know (in person, not online) are still reading them with their kids.

Yeah, I know, sometimes I even bore myself. This is so long, I deleted #3, did you notice? It was about brownies. Not kidding. 

Have a good weekend. We're headed to central Montana to see the grandbaby, so I'm writing this early and scheduling it. Stay cool. At 8pm, it's still 91 degrees here. *gasp*

some brief thoughts about healing from childhood sexual abuse

TRIGGER ALERT: please take care of yourself if conversations around childhood sexual abuse are triggering for you. It's a hard, complicated topic, and you get to handle it however you want. Any time the topic comes up in the news, you have the right to turn it off, avoid it, and refuse to engage. This post is about my own way of handling it, but my way or anyone else's way doesn't need to be your way.

I was already thinking about editing and republishing  a post I wrote back in 2014 --about my response, as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, to the news cycle around the person I called FFD in the post (famous film director, it was Woody Allen). Then yesterday I saw the news about Alice Munro's daughter's public statement about her abuser, Alice's second husband, and it seemed like a sign. 

This is not in any way intended to be a commentary or response to Andrea's news. Her story in many ways is similar to mine, and I am entirely on her side. I just want to support all victims in finding their own way to respond. When someone goes public with their story, as Andrea has--and if it helps her heal, it is the right choice for her-- there can be enormous pressure on people who have chosen not to go public. 

So I just want to state something that doesn't always get said: you get to handle your response however you choose to do so. Don't let anyone, not a concerned family member, not an outraged friend or spouse, not even your therapist, tell you that you must do certain things in order to heal. Sometimes their response is about their need to be angry on your behalf, not about what is best for you.

----edited version of 2014 post below, to read the original, click here

If you've been around awhile, you may remember that I wrote a post a couple of years ago about what it was like to be a survivor of sexual abuse while all of that mess at UPenn was happening, and how difficult it was to have it thrown in your face all the time. Guess what? Thank you, Woody Allen, it's happening again (and now again with the Munro family).

But there are a few parallels between Dylan Farrow's story and my own history, so I've been re-thinking some of my own decisions. Is it necessary to go public to heal? My abuser was also a public person, although on a minor, local scale compared to Woody Allen. It's a difficult call to make. 

If you say nothing, then (obviously) no one knows. There is a feeling that the perp is getting away with it. Or that you are letting your fear of confrontation slow down your healing. 

But on the other hand, if you're a private person, making a public statement and causing a public scandal is its own kind of trauma. I'm a very private person, so I decided long ago that I would rather deal with my healing in private than make a big public statement about my abuse.

As Dylan has stated, it is enormously difficult to maintain your trust in your own perceptions, your own experience, when that experience is being denied again and again by the people around you, people who have no idea what happened, but who respect and admire the perpetrator. 

Once I did finally tell my therapist about it, I was obsessed with my recovery for two or three years. I needed to be. That's how you work through it. There was a long time when I thought that the fact that I had been sexually abused as a child was the most important thing about me, the defining thing that made me who I am. But eventually as I worked with a therapist, attended a support group, and read and read and wrote and wrote, I began to heal.

At some point when I was in my late 30s, I realized one day that I hadn't thought about my abuse in weeks. It made me so happy. It still comes up --here I am, you know, typing this-- and every once in awhile it gives me a few really bad hours or even days. But it doesn't consume me anymore, and it sure as hell doesn't define who I am.

Besides my support group and my therapist, I did tell some people about it, but other than my immediate family, I never told anyone who knows my abuser. I was fairly sure I was his only victim. I was dealing with this as an adult, so I could rationally think through the fact that most abusers have a pattern, and the pattern of behavior he exhibited with me was something that almost certainly couldn't have happened with anyone else--and that's all I'm going to say about that. If I'd been worried that he was still abusing other people, maybe I would have decided differently. 

I'm not sure I buy parts of the conversation about what it takes to heal from abuse, and I certainly don't buy "if you don't say anything, it means he got away with it." Someone who abuses a child is dealing with demons the rest of us can't even imagine--I know that because I could feel them. He didn't get away with anything.

For what it's worth, I did eventually confront him, and he absolutely, categorically denied that anything had ever happened between us. The confrontation was an enormously difficult thing to do, and it was entirely unsatisfying. My word against his word, my hazy memories against his firm denial. 

If I had it to do over again knowing how it would have turned out, I'm not sure I would do it again. I guess the one benefit is that now I know what he would say--before I confronted him, I had no idea how he would respond. A part of me secretly hoped that he would break down, confess all, and feel terrible about it. But that didn't happen.

I think there is a script among some therapists: You need to do x, y and z to heal. You must confront your abuser, you must publicly speak your truth. But you know, that puts a lot of burden on the victim, especially if the victim is a private, introverted person. It makes you vulnerable to hate and backlash from people who have no idea what's going on, and it sets you up to be ridiculed and accused-in-return by your abuser. It also requires a big public exposure, which is in itself a form of punishment for an introverted person.

For me what has been more important is to learn to trust my own experience, my own knowledge of what happened to me. And to learn to send a silent, mental FUCK YOU to him whenever it comes up. I'm leaving justice and karma to someone else. That was difficult early on, but 2024 me can tell you: I almost never think about it any more. It comes up maybe once or twice a year--and that's not nothing, of course. It made a huge difference when he died several years ago. I am often glad he's gone, and maybe that's my own form of revenge.

If you're going through this, I hope you have help and good support, and someone you can talk to. And also I hope you feel empowered to heal in your own way, in whatever way seems good to you. Take your time deciding. You can always change your mind and go public later, but once you've done it, you can't go back.

Reading Report: April-May-June 2024, and just how bad my bad taste is

1. I have epically bad taste. I know that supposedly there's no such thing as bad taste anymore, but I claim it anyway. I loved Barry Manilow and ABBA and the BeeGees, Def Leppard and Celine Dion, Coldplay and I love that Creed song and even a couple Nickelback songs. My favorite movies are (not necessarily in this order) Galaxy Quest, While You Were Sleeping, LOTR, Howl's Moving Castle, and a bunch of Marvel movies. I watched Independence Day this week.

I'm just letting you know before you take any reading recommendations from me.

2. I've always been a re-reader. When I was a kid, I must have read the Narnia books a dozen times each. It might have started because most of our books were library books, and the Narnia books were some of the few children's books we owned copies of. I'm not sure. But at any given moment, I'm usually reading a fiction book, a non-fiction book, and I'm re-reading something I loved. My favorite books for re-reads are ones that give me the warm fuzzies, but are complex enough that you discover something new every time you read them. That's not to say nothing bad ever happens, or that the characters are all sweet and kind, they just have to be flawed in a lovable way. Or something like that.

3. Martha Wells has frequently kept me sane over the past couple of years, going back to lockdown. Most of my current favorite re-reads are by her--the Murderbot books, the Raksura books, and Witch King, which came out last summer, and I have already read three and a half times. In terms of reading experience, I prefer her shorter stuff (mainly the Murderbot novellas, but I've also read some of her Raksura short stories). Her full-length novels tend to be a little dense on the details of world-building for my taste. But the characters she creates are in my heart forever, no matter how cliché'd that sounds. She writes characters that make me want to hug the book when I finish. At this moment in my so-called reading life, few things make me happier than re-visiting Moon, Stone, and Chime (the Raksura), or Sec Unit, Dr. Mensah, and Pin-Lee (Murderbot), or Kai, Ziede, and Bashasa (Witch King). And if you're re-reading, you can skim right over anything you want.

4. The Death of the Necromancer (1998), an older book but the most recent one I read by Wells, is similar. The story is a little too dense with detail for my taste. In fact, when I originally reached (about) page 50, I decided I didn't have the patience for her world-building at this particular moment and skipped ahead to read the last 50 pages. (I know, I know, but my reading faults are a different post.) I should have known better. I was so intrigued by some things that happened at the end, and by Nicholas and Madeline, that I ended up going back and reading the whole thing anyway. It is so rare to read about a couple in a book that absolutely is not a romance novel--they are already together when the story starts, the word love is never mentioned, and there are only a handful of scenes with the two of them alone, none of them amorous-- but they are necessary to each other, even when they're apart or fighting. I loved them, and also Arisilde, Reynard, Crack, and all the rest. If you like fantasy, and especially if you like ornate world-building, highly recommended. It's a heist/revenge plot, which is not usually my thing-- but again, the characters. <3

5. The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control by Katherine Morgan Schafler. This is a weird book. That's not to say you shouldn't read it, because she has some great insights. How am I not going to love a book that says, about the interior life of a perfectionist, a personality type that is almost universally reviled, "all your most complex needs, longings, desires--all those lush, rolling, verdant, dewdrop-dotted hills of wanderlust inside you, all your curiosities big and small..." I mean, this woman loves perfectionists, and thinks that if our power is unleashed, we can change the world. I kind of love that. She sees anti-perfectionism, the continual advice to scale yourself back, to lower your expectations, to be more "realistic" and accepting of imperfection, as a not-so-hidden attempt to curb women's ambition and drive. She also makes a distinction between adaptive (healthy) perfectionism and maladaptive (unhealthy) perfectionism that is helpful.

But on the other hand, her writing style is all over the place, and about every third thought is not completed. It's maddening to read. By her definition, I think I am more of an idealist than a perfectionist, but I have my moments, and I've been known to ratchet up my expectations to spectacular heights from which I then crash in a sobbing heap (in private, later). So I'm not exactly her target audience, but I'm learning enough that I keep reading. I checked it out from our library's website, but I might actually break down and buy it, because I'm not going to finish it in two weeks (I have 3 days left and I'm about halfway through).

6. Here are some others. This isn't all of them because this post is already too long.
* Tribe by Sebastian Junger- 5 stars (it's less than 200 pages and everyone should read it)
* Lit by Mary Karr- 4.5 stars. The third of her three (so far) memoirs, this one is about getting sober. Fabulous writing, tough going at first while she is still drinking. Her struggle with acknowledging a "higher power" is especially relatable. I might need to re-read this one.
* Easy Beauty by Chloe Cooper Jones 4 stars- A philosophy professor who is physically disabled talks about life and philosophy and motherhood.
* Heaven & Earth Grocery Store (not as good as Deacon King Kong but still 5 stars from me)
* Goodbye, Vitamin (Khong) 5 stars- loved this story of a young woman returning home to help care for her beloved, flawed father who is in the early stages of dementia
* Funny Story- Emily Henry's annual romcom 3.5-4ish stars, there's a little too much armchair therapy in Henry's novels for my taste, but I read and enjoy them every year.
* A Painted House, 5 stars- my first Grisham novel since I don't usually read thrillers. I believe it's semi-autobiographical fiction (ie, not a thriller), about a boy who lives on a cotton farm and his family and the itinerant workers who pick their cotton. It was a book club book or I would prob not have picked it up. Ended up really liking it.
* The Centre (Siddiqi) 4 stars- really great unlikable-yet-lovable narrator, but the last third or so kind of flails around. Worth it for the first two thirds.
* Over My Dead Body (Evans) 4.5 stars- just for something fun, an over-achieving surgeon finds herself hanging around after she is murdered in order to right some wrongs, a few of which she is responsible for.
* The Great Divide (Henriquez) 4 stars- interesting historical fiction about the building of the Panama Canal. Actually manages to stay historical, which was refreshing, but that means you know at the end that nothing good is ahead for some of the characters.

7. My decision to stop writing Goodreads reviews lasted all of a month. When I went back to work on this post, I couldn't remember the books because I hadn't written anything about them. I think it was nice to take a break, anyway. 

That's all from me, maybe too much from me. Have a great weekend.

What a long, strange trip it's been

We got back from our annual visit with Doug's family last Sunday. Traveling always gives me lots of time to think, and I came home with a fistful of new ideas for blog posts. But I'm having trouble wrestling them into anything coherent, so I'll just tell you briefly about our fortieth anniversary, which was a month ago (by the time you're reading this).

Forty (forty!) is a long time. I wrote a post about long marriages back in 2015, and at one point I had planned on writing an update and passing along whatever wisdom I have learned in the 9 years since. But it's a month later and I still haven't written it, because I'm not sure what to say. 

We had to go through a major transition when Doug cut back to half-time and started working mostly from home. Since we moved here in 1992, he had been going to work by at least 7:30am and getting home at 6:30 or 7pm four days a week, and sometimes he would get home much later than that, and sometimes he would work for as many as ten or twelve days in a row. 

And then suddenly, he was just home. All the time. It drove me nuts. So after several months, we actually went back to do some marriage counseling last fall. We learned a lot. We're doing better. Even when you've been married forty years, you still have things to learn. 

Every marriage is different. Don't ever think you know what is going on inside someone else's marriage. By the same token, I can't see how our marriage looks from the outside or how we might look to you. So there's no point in me trying to give you some kind of advice, or tell you nine secrets for going the distance or 7 tips to staying together forever or whatever. 

I can just tell you that he knows me better than anyone on the planet, and he still stays with me. Even when we've been through rough times, even when I'm not sure if we're going to survive, he's been my rock, my safe shelter. I'm keeping him.

And also: I love his family. We had so much fun last week. 

Hug your loved ones close and have a great weekend.

too many diet books later, plus more late night thoughts

I've told you before that I have long been anti-diet, but on the other hand, it seems that every winter I gain a few pounds, and unless I want to buy all new clothes, I have to figure out how to get rid of the fluff. 

So a few years ago, when several of my friends were all excited about the Whole 30 diet, I decided to read the book to see if it might be useful for me. Researching it turned out to be the wrong thing to do-- if you read the rationale behind it, it makes, uh, no sense. 

But that got me curious about other eating plans, and I started reading. And reading. I checked out keto, paleo, vegetarian, and vegan, to name a few. (Enneagram fives-- we do research! and if we can keep researching and put off actually doing something, so much the better!) 

If you've ever read a diet book, you know they all follow the same basic outline. They start with all the reasons why the way you are currently eating is bad--maybe it's even killing you-- and all the reasons, frequently backed up by data and research and studies, that their way of eating is going to be the ultimate solution, not just for losing weight but for vibrant health, overflowing energy, better skin, hair, and nails.

Then there will be anecdotes about people who stopped eating the SAD diet (Standard American Diet), started eating the (insert diet name here) diet, and now they've lost 50 pounds and they bounce out of bed in the morning and have clear eyes and good skin.

If you just read one, it's super convincing. If you read a bunch in a row, it starts sounding like propaganda. Really, they're sales people. They're selling you a better life, and all you have to do is a) buy the book(s) and b) do the thing, and you will be saved. 

And weirdly, even though they use pseudo-scientific language and what seems to be irrefutable logic, they frequently make directly opposite claims. Don't eat meat or any animal products, says one book. You can only eat meat and tubers, says another book. Only eat these specific foods, says another. You can eat anything, just don't eat very much of it, says yet another. Did you know that fasting and restricting your calorie intake might help you live longer? Why would you want to live longer if you can't eat good food? 

I'm no expert, so I'm not going to give you any diet advice, and if I did, you shouldn't take it because I am not thin. I'm just telling you what I observed from reading too many diet books. Unfortunately, as with so many things, you just have to figure it out for yourself. For myself, I keep coming back to something I read online somewhere-- if you don't want to diet, you can at least starting eating the way you would if you'd already lost the weight (to use the language of the diet books, skip ahead to the maintenance phase).

Or whatever works for you. People are different, which is what makes life so damn complicated. One of my sisters and one of my dear friends can tell within a couple of hours if they've eaten gluten. I've tried being gluten-free a couple of times and it didn't make any difference at all to me. What works for someone else may not work for you, and vice versa. The friends I mentioned above still think Whole 30 is great.

I just deleted a whole bunch more on that topic, you're welcome. 

Here is another, slightly related, hypothetical thing to think about, though, another half-formed idea that probably isn't worth a full post. 

The whole rationale behind the so-called paleo diet is that our digestive systems developed over millennia while our ancestors were hunter-gatherers. After our ancestors began to farm (relatively recently), we added grains, dairy products, sugar, etc. The theory is that our digestive systems have not evolved as quickly as our diets have changed. So we will feel healthier if we go back to the hunter-gatherer diet: heavy on meat, with fruits and vegetables on the side; no grain, no sugar.

Because I think too much, I wonder if there's a similar situation with our spiritual selves. Human beings weren't capable of a scientific outlook until a few centuries ago. Before that, belief in a god or goddess or deities of some kind was assumed, because there had to be some way to explain the weather and the movement of the stars and the way the world is. 

What if the human psyche evolved to center around belief in god(s)? What if stripping gods/goddesses out of the center of our psyche leaves us with unstable mental health? Sure there are people who have left religion behind and never missed it, and of course religion can be its own source of psychosis, but I think there are a solid percentage of people, maybe even a majority of people, who need to believe in God, or at least in a stable higher order, in order to function in a healthy way in the world. It would explain a lot. 

Maybe the intellectual basis for religious belief isn't proof of the existence of a divine being, but a matter of pragmatism: I will function better if I find a belief system I can use as a structure, a support system, for life in this crazy world. 

Maybe. I have exactly no credentials to make a statement like that, but I think about it quite a bit.

p.s. I accidentally published this early, apologies if you saw that early, unedited version. We will be out of town next week so probably no post from me.