Giving in to the Madness of Christmas

I didn’t want to wish anyone on Twitter Happy Christmas (or happy holidays) this year. I had to force myself.

It’ s not that I don’t want them to be cheery. It’s just not how I’m feeling, politically speaking any way.

Christmas is always a strange time for the sanest of us, let alone those with an anxiety disorder or other condition.

As my doppelganger FCM I’ve had a Twitter account for a few months now. It consists mainly of links to articles about the terrible things going on in the world, with some interesting literary snippets thrown in.

In the lead-up to Christmas this year I felt such a strong need to stop the political hectoring, the calling out of bad behaviour, the keeping up to date with it all. Such an overwhelming desire to withdraw and to give in to the madness of Christmas.

Yet the world didn’t stop being messy and tragic. New tragedies kept happening. Some were human made, others less obviously so.

The unpredictably bizarre injustices of the Abbott government have had an effect on so many Australians this year. No-one likes Tony Abbott much, not even Liberal voters, and these days his Treasurer, Joe Hockey, is just as reviled.

On 22 December, just days before Christmas, Abbott announced that Scott Morrison, who as immigration minister removed the obligation that Australia follow the refugee convention, and set off a scale of death, torture and misery in the gulags  detention camps that put Australia to shame, will now be our Minister for Social Services.

To paranoid lefties like me this seemed a cruel joke, both in its substance and its timing.

Tragedy continued internationally. In Missouri yet another black teenager was shot by police. Hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated from their homes, and at least 24 killed, following massive flooding in Malaysia. A plane carrying 162 passengers from Indonesia to Singapore went missing mid-flight, and the wreckage has since been found with all passengers presumed dead. The international community has continued to ignore the plight of the more than 1 million refugees fleeing the conflict in Syria.

Yet the need to withdraw from the fray, at least partially, has continued. My Christmas depression this year was partly just a response to the hullabaloo of Christmas itself, which seems to be a little more disconnected from reality, a little more surreal, every year.

There is such a yawning gulf between the hectoring cheerfulness of the relentless carols and the mad spending of the crowds on the one hand and my own state of mind on the other that it produces an odd lurch into alienation.

But like birthday depression, I suspect much of what passes for Christmas depression is unacknowledged grief, which is rampant in our society. In A Life at Work, Thomas Moore talks about the difference between the human soul and the human spirit. The soul seeks the past, the familiar, and is rooted in the earth. The spirit seeks out the new, the unknown, creativity and challenge.

Christmas is a time in which the soul demands to be heard above the din. At Christmas, even more so than at birthdays in my experience, the soul longs for the certainties of the past. Over the last few weeks I’ve found myself driving past my old place, which I moved out of in May, several times. I realised that it was the first Christmas I’d spent away from the place for ten years, and my first Christmas at my current flat. My soul was yearning for that connection with past Christmases.

But perhaps notions of unacknowledged grief are just scratching the surface when it comes to the kinds of funk people experience on holidays, birthdays and anniversaries. I’m reading Horse Boy, an inspiring book about how an autistic boy was healed of many of his worst behaviours by a combination of horse riding and a series of gruelling healing rituals by Mongolian shamans.

This book has made me wonder whether my understanding of spirituality and its repression in the West has been incredibly shallow. The spirituality of the Mongolian shamans seems to allow them to harness powerful forces for healing that put our Western alternative healers to shame. The scale of what we have lost in modern life suddenly seems so much larger, and is perhaps the reason for all the mental illness we are experiencing.

Yet there’s no need to ditch the scientific method that has created such leaps and bounds. If science had an open enough mind to explore what was going on when the shamans healed Rowan Isaacson, whole new areas of study could be established.

They might include an expansion of human psychology. Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs was an important milestone but perhaps it should also include the need to connect with the forces of the Earth and to balance them within ourselves. No wonder even the sanest of us goes a bit mad at Christmas. (In fact there have been studies of shamanism in relation to Western notions of mental illness. However, my sense is that interest in shamanism is still considered flaky within the mainstream psychiatric community.)

But as usual I’m getting ahead of myself. My challenge for Christmas this year was just to let go. Not try to change my rellies, or escape the boring bits, or get angry because our family never – I repeat never – gets around to eating lunch before 3 pm by which time my blood sugar is lower than Scott Morrison’s ethical standards. What else was there to do but play that daggy Christmas carols CD, break open the Christmas crackers, put on the tissue-paper hat that never fits properly and read out the dumb joke? I just let the whole circus roll.

Okay, so there was one conflict towards the end of the night but it arose from another family member’s angst, not mine. I’m not wearing it!

Happy new year to everyone out there in blog land.

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Allergies, FODMAPs and Food Confusion – Part 2

In my last entry I gave an update on my food intolerance and low blood sugar, and the sometimes contradictory diets that are out there to deal with these kinds of problems. 

This time I’m writing about the treatment that’s available – and why I don’t take advantage of it.

There’s a clinic in Melbourne’s outer east that orders faecal tests (too much information?) and then sells tailored probiotics depending on the results. I’ve wondered for years whether this was the optimum solution for me, and instinctively mistrusted the bog-standard (sorry) probiotics you see in health food stores.

And I’ve hated myself for not choosing the faecal test option, assuming the problem was self-defeating stinginess. But now that I know myself better, and can reflect on my experiences, I think I understand the reasons for my reluctance.

It boils down to this: the fact that mainstream medicine has so few answers leads to another problem -- beware the ones who do.

Beware them because they can see the miles-long queue and they have prepared for it. Their doctors are in demand and very important! They have their neat little administrative systems and payment schedules you have to fit into, and you’d better fit in if you want help.

Not only that but they want to flog you all the supplements they recommend you take. There’s a conflict of interest right there: rather than being designed for you as a whole person – your budget, your condition, your needs – they will squeeze you into one of their categories so they can sell you the maximum amount and make big dollars.

And they charge like wounded bulls because they know their patients have few alternatives. Actually, it’s not just their fault that the out-of-pocket expenses are so outrageous. Medicare doesn’t cover the battery of tests they will order, or the extended consultations, or the supplements.

But these clinics then add insult to injury by charging for stuff like supplying medical records. There’s none of that old-fashioned genuine relationship between even the busy GPs and their patients. These clinics are money-making factories.

They’re like the psychiatrists who are obsessed with your symptoms but don’t give a flying fruitcake about you – the person.

There’s an irony in this situation. If you have obscure ailments that come and go you will search around for individualised treatment because mainstream doctors haven’t a clue about your dietary problems.

Then you find yourself within a depersonalised system that has already decided what’s wrong with you and what the remedies are before the doctor has even seen you.

This is not dissimilar to the way some specialists behave. I won’t go into details about the arrogance of a certain derm I used to see, but at least he was always very punctual – he had his own strict rules as well as imposing them on his patients.

I haven’t been to one of these allergy doctors for decades but I tried a few in my twenties and early thirties as well as naturopath–homeopaths and Chinese doctors. Over those years, I probably spent thousands on a cure. These days I have zilch faith in homeopathy and I am sure herbs help some conditions, but not mine.

I could afford to pay for the treatment in the allergy clinic in outer Melbourne. I just don’t want to take the risk. Yet I admit to myself that if I had unlimited money I would probably try it. It’s the fear of throwing away good money on yet another phoney cure that haunts me.

You might also like: Heroes and Villains: Food Intolerance, Hypoglycaemia Candida and the Failsafe Diet.

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Allergies, FODMAPs and Food Confusion – Part 1

Sometimes my whole karma seems to be about having conditions that are obscure, invisible, not recognised by mainstream medicine and difficult if not impossible to treat. I’ve never felt I fitted into the patient paradigm for any of my ills, and when I’ve tried to squeeze myself in, it hasn’t always worked – which isn’t to say I haven’t received some valuable advice over the years.

(It strikes me that one day I’ll die, and presumably of something recognisable by medical science! Now I have the image of a confused doctor trying to work out how I kicked the bucket.)

I have written in this blog before about my low blood sugar and food intolerance problem, and how it doesn’t fit into any of the definitions or recognised treatments. Actually these days that’s not quite true but treatment remains complicated. Let me walk you through it ...

I have functional hypoglycaemia, a condition that most doctors know little about despite the fact that it’s a precursor to diabetes. I’m so sensitive to carbohydrates that even brown rice makes me tired. Low blood sugar is often sheeted home to the overgrowth of a bacteria that lives in the gut, Candida albicans, leading to a syndrome known as ‘leaky gut’.

Mainstream medicine has never recognised Candida overgrowth or leaky gut as legitimate medical conditions. Another possible reason for hypoglycaemia is adrenal exhaustion, but mainstream medicine doesn’t recognise this either.

However, there are people who do – and they are mainly, in Melbourne at least, naturopaths. And one of the things they sell for adrenal exhaustion is bioidentical hormones. Some pharmacists sell them also. The one actual doctor I could find who flogs them in Melbourne had some truly appalling comments written about her standards of service on a doctor review website.

Apparently it is a loophole in the law that allows the unregulated sale of these hormones, which can actually raise levels of the hormone in the blood to dangerous heights – this article was enough to put me off (it's eight years old but the situation appears to be unchanged). So I crossed that possible treatment off my list.

It’s a bit rich for mainstream medicine to complain about underqualified practitioners flogging unregulated substances when it has shown itself thoroughly uninterested in conditions such as LBS and glandular problems that don’t appear on standard blood tests.

A swag of fairly recent diets – all very distinctive and contradicting each other – do provide some help.

The Failsafe diet is designed for those with sensitivities to common chemicals found in foods, especially salicylates and amines. It’s been particularly useful for conditions such as ADD and poor behaviour and school performance in children. It recognises that additional intolerances, such as sensitivity to gluten, fructose and lactose, may also exist. 

Unfortunately this diet refuses to believe that Candida and related sugar sensitivity exist – so if a kid reacts to soft drink, it’s always just the dodgy food colouring and never the sugar. I just don’t believe that’s true for every single kid (and certainly not for me). I’ve written about this elsewhere.

Then there’s the notorious paleo diet. Truth to tell I hadn’t been thinking about that much lately until I watched a program that talked about how harmful high-carb diets were for those with diabetes – even if they were supposedly ‘good carbs’. Protein is good for low blood sugar also, and I do need to eat more – just not from cows or sheep.

Finally there is the FODMAPs diet. This is a mainstream diet that has scientific legitimacy, designed for those with irritable bowel syndrome. The premise is that some foods contain a collection of molecules (Fermentable Oligosaccharides, Disaccharides, Monosaccharides and Polyols) – no wonder they abbreviated it to FODMAPs – that some people can’t digest. They ferment in the bowel after being guzzled by the resident bacteria.

it basically boils down to fructose and fructans, galactans, lactose, and sugar alcohols like sorbitol. These carbs are found in a large number of fruits, vegetables, legumes, grains and other foods. The actual diet is highly tailored to each individual and should be devised in consultation with a dietician. It starts with a strict elimination diet followed by slowly introducing food types into the diet to test them out.

Interestingly, this may solve a mystery that has hovered around allergy medicine for years – why some folk claim to be intolerant of gluten even though they don’t have coeliac disease. Wheat and rye products contain fructans, one of the FODMAPs carbohydrates.

At first blush FODMAPs looks similar to the anti-Candida diet. In fact it’s anything but. You can apparently eat sucrose – white sugar – on FODMAPs, an absolute no-no for low blood sugar and Candida. Traditional sour dough is okay on FODMAPs too as long as the grain is allowed, while any sort of fermentation is out in the Candida diet. And hard cheeses are better than soft cheeses on FODMAPs because the former contain less lactose – the only allowed cheese in the Candida diet is cottage.

FODMAPs also contradicts the Failsafe diet with its list of allowed vegetables – there is some overlap but also many differences between it and the list of low-salicylate vegetables.

Confusing huh?

Next week: my options for better health, and why I don't take them up.

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I Capture the Castle

It’s now five months since I moved to my new flat, on the first floor of a modest block about eight minutes drive from the beach – and I can finally declare the experiment a success.

The whole thing was so rushed that for many weeks it felt as if I was living on faith in the future alone. I can now report that the future is starting to come through.

For the first time in years, I chose a place using my gut feeling. I chose a place that felt right even though I could have found a million reasons to turn my back on it and continue my search.

At 51, the moving process was so wrenching that there were countless times when I convinced myself I’d made the wrong decision. And times when, if I’m frank, I lost the plot completely. As the flat revealed its myriad small faults, it seemed like I’d jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. But I was wrong.

The other day I met the owner of the flat opposite, doing some basic renovation before selling it. She lived in her flat before my time and seems to have partnered since. The family who were renting that flat when I moved in had moved downstairs to the flat below it a few months ago; since then she’s been unable to get tenants and has decided to sell (I couldn’t help wondering how much rent she was asking).

She invited me in to take a quick sticky beak inside her place to see the differences and similarities and for the first time I was able to talk to someone about how great this area is. We both gushed about its many hidden delights, and how astonishing it is that the masses haven’t yet discovered it. For her this now translates into worrying that she won’t get a good enough price for her place; for me it’s affirmation I made the right decision to move here.

‘I used to walk to the beach’, she told me. ‘And to the Elsternwick shopping centre.’ She used to study in a tiny postage stamp sized park which is around the corner, a sweet little triangle of land that features a summer house.

There’s also another park just over the main road, in the neighbouring suburb of Brighton. I’ve only just visited it during the day in the last week, although I’d walked past it on an evening stroll. She used to go there too, she said.

Being able to escape to the beach, even though it’s a bayside beach with industrial elements in the distance, is magical. In the last decade or so the various councils have put money into their foreshores and there are some lovely native grass plantings and inviting timber benches along the walkways. Sometimes I just drive to the shore, get out of the car and stare at the sea for five minutes. Other times I go for walks along it that surprise me with their length – the sea air seems to give me energy. The beach has become my sanity, my touch point.

After our chat I appreciated my place even more. My living room looks out onto two huge trees in the yard of the tenants below me. It’s a lovely view on sunny afternoons when the sun makes patterns on the opposite wall; later as the sun sets I’ll be able to see its orange aura sinking in the west. There’s so much light in this place and it is several degrees warmer than the old place so that I am saving a fortune in heating bills.

I’m so unused to feeling lucky in my life. My constant mantra is a sense of being hard done by – a classic victim mentality. It is unusual for me to feel the emotions of triumph and mastery. Perhaps I perceive these emotions as dangerous, even politically incorrect. When I ‘win’ and something good happens, there is a fear that someone else ‘loses’. It’s creepy to think that one of the hidden self-destructive ideas that I may have taken from my Catholic childhood is that it is fairer on everybody else if I take the dregs of life and don’t strive too hard to gain an advantage. Of course, things can go too far the other way – there is a balance to be struck when it comes to self-interest and perhaps I’m finding it for the first time.

Soon after I moved in to this place, one of the flats downstairs got sold to a brash thirty-something man who, without bothering to inform anyone, started to renovate the bejesus out it (this is the flat my upstairs family of neighbours would later move into, probably for the small yard). One morning suddenly the place was alive with buzz saws, crashes and bangs, and labourers chucking out fixtures and throwing them onto the skip out the front.

In the coming weeks our shared lobby would see an endless stream of noise and activity. But the owner never put drop sheets down. Workmen traipsed back and forth across the carpet and the square terracotta tiles. The tiled area starts inside the lobby, then continues outside, forming a walkway to the front entrance of the block.

The tiles and carpet would never be the same again. I surmised that all the flats in the block must be owned by investors – none of the owners seemed to know or care about the damage to the common property. At one stage the owner had a contraption set up on the patch of grass outside the security door, where the new kitchen and bathroom tiles he was installing would be dipped in cement and then taken into the flat. Drip, drip, drip on the terracotta tiles, not to mention that patch of grass turning into mud although moss and grass have since grown back.

The terracotta tiles now have cement stains and skid marks. The ones on the walkway from the street have new cracks and chips.

But the whole thing did get cleaned up. One day the daggy coronet carpet no longer had plaster flecks all over it. Same with the tiles, although to this day they’ve never been mopped. Inside the flat, though I never got a proper look, I glimpsed a beautifully renovated place with meticulously chosen fittings.

And since that day my mind has turned  the damaged terracotta and the neat but faded patch of carpet outside the front door of the renovated flat – carpet that now has a pale layer of ground-in dirt – into a metaphor.

That transformation mirrors my experience of moving house. The lack of method, the speed of it, the sense of being thrown out of one place and into another. I paid a high price for that speediness, but the end result was good.

For the first weeks there was psychic and physical exhaustion. With all the packing and lifting of boxes I’d damaged tendons in both arms, and for the first two or three months lived in terror I would lose the ability to do basic things. The damage was then worsened by RSI. Both arms are a lot better now. But even while I was most worried about them I thought of them as war injuries sustained in the process of my hero’s journey.

The roughness of things, their natural decay. I will damage this house, I accept that now. My kitchen and bathroom both have white ceramic tiles on the floor. There were already cracks on them and I dutifully photographed these when I first moved in. But I have noticed small chips since then and wondered if I did them and if so how. Why worry? Life is wear and tear. 

Things get damaged. My tendons got strained, and I escaped my dungeon.

In my twelve-step peer support group we are urged to ‘accept disorder in lesser things’ while recovering from mental illness. For many weeks I accepted a surface disorder while I was improving the underlying order of my life.

I certainly don’t want to discount the shortcomings of this place. The main one that I haven’t solved yet is sleep. There are two things interfering with this: the excessive light in my bedroom that the venetians don’t cut out and the fact that the soundproofing is absolutely non-existent – Victorian soundproofing standards became incredibly lax in the seventies, when these flats were built.

It’s not just the degree of noise I fear but its unpredictability. The neighbours are mostly quiet daring the week but every and now then it sounds as if someone’s clomping around the bedroom below mine on stilts. I was letting myself get very unsettled by this and it got to a point of crisis.

Then I realised I had to start changing my thinking about it. I had to stop telling myself how terrible it was and accept that sleep was hard for me, but insomnia wouldn’t kill me. I still sleep badly but I accept that now, and am getting better at sleeping without ear plugs. I can always catch up during the day if I have to. I know that’s bad sleep hygiene but sometimes 

I’ve just been too tired to function without a nap.

If life can get worse, I am discovering, it can also get better. I’ve still got a long way to go but moving house has definitely been a step forward for me.

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Book Review: Shy: A Memoir by Sian Prior

An attractive, forty-something woman peers around a gallery, trying vainly to find her partner in the buzzing party crowd. ‘A familiar sensation was sweeping through my body’, Sian Prior writes. ‘It was as if someone had spiked my drink so that instead of sparkling mineral water I was now sipping a kind of effervescent cement’. Unable to spot a familiar face, she starts to sweat and her stomach churns. Alight with panic she flees the party, not even recognising the ‘calm, confident blonde woman’ she glimpses in a mirror on the way out.

Prior, a successful arts journalist, choir master, public speaker and media consultant, suffers from crippling shyness. But this Renaissance woman is also a published author and writing teacher, and the incident jolts her into an exploration of the paradox of her life – that someone so comfortable in the public spotlight could also be felled by terror in unstructured social situations.

That paradox makes this book unique. Its author was born to tell her own story of shyness because her professional persona is the perfect vehicle for spreading the message.

Shy is no conventional memoir, but nor is it a self-help book. Prior ditches a chronological account of her life and replaces it with a panoply of elements – interviews with psychologists (including her own mother, Margot) and her own research; playful lists; play-offs between incidents from her past and theories of shyness – to present a frank account that is often funny, sometimes poignant and always engaging.

Although the result can feel anarchic at times, it works beautifully; experience and vivid recollection step in where the research evidence is simplistic, suggesting both the strengths and weaknesses of scientific definitions.

To cope with the shyness she has battled all along, Prior developed a persona she calls ‘Professional Sian’ – a confident, polished performer who knows how to fake it till she makes it.

But ‘Shy Sian’ surfaces when there is no script, no structure. And for Prior this has meant a lifetime of lost social and romantic opportunities  – from Sally, the school friend round the corner who the young Sian is too scared to visit, to ‘the beautiful dark-eyed boy glimpsed in the stairwell of my first high school’. She has missed out not just on sex but ‘the subtle semaphore of attraction’.

For Prior, shyness is as much about fearful thoughts – what she calls the ‘what ifs’ – as it is about the intensely discomfiting physical symptoms: ‘armpits drenched, throat clenched, locked in battle with myself’. While travelling in Europe in her twenties, Prior develops a stubborn throat lump: ‘Lying on my hostel bunk in the night I would feel it resting there, nuzzling at my vocal cords’.

There is a central narrative here that anchors Prior’s account to the recent past. For ten years she lived with the musician Paul Kelly (whom Prior calls Tom in the book) – an Australia folk hero, one of our national bards. She reveals their slow-burning courtship, which blossomed into a shared life, and the cocooning effect of this relationship on her sense of self.

Her relationship with Tom and other life experiences are held up to the light to examine what shyness isn’t as much as what it is. Is it genetic? What is its relationship to social phobia? Is it the same as introversion, or can a shy person be an extrovert? How does Tom’s fame relate to Prior’s own contradictory stance towards being in the spotlight? Is shyness related to hypersensitivity? She explores the positive character traits that go with shyness, like empathy, conscientiousness and a willingness to listen.

Then the unthinkable happens and Tom announces he is leaving. Suddenly the very rejection that all shy people fear has come to pass.

Upheaval follows, but it is viewed in the light of a formative childhood event – deepening the examination of the origins of shyness in ways that take it far beyond the biological.

Prior’s writing is fresh, visual, funny. She has a sharp recall of the quotidian detail but also the insight and hard-won wisdom of someone who has battled to live a socially and emotionally fulfilling life in the midst of a sometimes crippling fear.

Yet there is something implicit in this book that Prior herself doesn’t pay much attention to. Given the rise of positive psychology, I looked for the protective factors that enabled Prior to seek out significant relationships and pursue professional success.

Without diminishing her pain, I was also interested in the class aspects of her success – her psychologist mother is an obvious factor, as is her immersion in the world of classical music and love affair with the clarinet. But what about schooling – was a private school, with its small class sizes and individualised attention, a strengthening influence?

Prior, intent on exploring a trait that has been hidden and denied in her public life, seems mostly oblivious to these broader questions, although two things stand out that will be useful to anyone who is shy. ‘Professional Sian’ first came into being because Prior was able to find, in a high-profile environmental job, a cause far larger than her own insecurities. She also singles out a passionate curiosity about other people and the world as an incentive to push past her fears.

In public appearances since writing the book, Prior has discussed how risky it felt to break the illusion of her professional competence by publishing Shy. While her discoveries did not lead to the cure she originally hoped for, they have enabled a new-found acceptance, and Prior claims she is no longer embarrassed to be shy.

While Prior’s level of professional success may seem out of reach to many of us shy people, I found this encouraging rather than dispiriting. I suspect most of us have our own version of Professional Sian, and although she may not be as reliable or fearless as Prior’s version, this writer offers a bold role model for risk taking and a path to self-acceptance that many readers will benefit from.

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