Peel me off this velcro seat
There’s been so much I haven’t related about my struggles with food of late. I’ve been coming to resent my blogs more and more, and let’s be honest, the division between yeswehavenobananas and masterkidderminster was always more of an ADD whim than a reasoned division, something that has allowed a lot of the food-related problems I have to run into the broader diaries in Unforgiving Minutes and the like. Quite aside from the blogs, I have come to resent too, more and more, the role that food plays in my life and the amount of energy it takes to try to cook the food I need to stay as well as I can be. When I am not moving forward with my cooking, I resent it, and since I am such a perfectionist and since I am limited in my choice of ingredients and condiments, my cooking abilities often depress me more than they console me (and all cooking should be consoling). The fact, too, that no matter how hard I try, my efforts don’t bring me any closer to [long reveries, confrontations with the boss on the subject of being articulate, or not, being the last of a long series] being healthy, and coping, whilst every single slip counts immediately. [further morning meeting reveries involving berating my colleagues for a lack of willingness].Ok, so there’s so much to recount that deserves a post of its own, but realistically it’s not going to get done, so I’ll have to give a very quick and utterly inadequate overview now.
[afternoon training denunciation]
[morning meeting speech]
I saw the NHS dietitian and followed the exclusion diet. I never saw the same person twice and once booked the day off work to attend an appointment only to find they had no note of it and the dietitian hadn’t turned in. Such diets need close monitoring and the results were less than satisfactory. Each dietitian was a disappointment. They needed to look up things themselves from the same sources I was using myself. After one session in which they agreed I should speak to my doctor about Candida and ask for antifungals before telling me to contact them if I needed to, I decided not to consult them further once again falling into the angry mindset that if you want a job doing well, you’ve got to do it yourself.
I saw the doctor. It was the doctor at my practice I had always considered to be the more approachable. He poo pooed the whole idea that Candida could cause the kind of symptoms I had described. He dismissed too the the off-white marks on my toes as not being a fungal infection. This annoyed me since this was the very same off-white discolouration I had had for years and years (since indeed my real problems had began) and which had began to grow out when I began taking an anti-fungal for it. (The doctor had, I think, sent off a sample that time to confirm, something which I believe to be routine, though the doctor had this time dismissed it with a glance.) I had discontinued the medication when I went to Prague with a handful of tablets left. Looking back later on reading about Candida (never accurate, I know), I was sure my symptoms had began to clear up around that time.* I got angry. I may or may not have downgraded Candida once again in my list of theories. I may or may not have relapsed as a result.
Certainly I didn’t follow the candida diet consistenty until recently.
When, going to see the doctor for a cold for which, uncharacteristically, I had taken time off (my boss, suffering himself, had told me to do so, and I felt obliged, though I thought at the time I was turning the corner). A pretty bad cold had been doing the rounds but I am pretty sure now, because of the repetition of a significant part of my malaise afterwards, notably achy and tingly legs with a feeling that I had walked over Snowdon with a heavy backpack, that my illness had had more to do with my taking of antifungals, specifically raw garlic, and the ensuing die-off reactions. [00:24 14/03/08]
Eventually, last week I saw a guy who works at our place. A nutritionist who does massage on the side, or vice versa. I had talked to the nurse at work and spoke to him a year or so ago when I was first seeing my idiot psychiatrist and getting annoyed by his ignorant dismissal of nutrition as a factor in my malady. I spoke to him for a few minutes, catching him on one of his breaks between sessions of massage. We talked about Candida and my medical history. He gave me a questionnaire about nutrition. It was lengthy and comprehensive, and I found this reassuring. In wanting to fill it out completely, though, and knowing how important it was in terms of the Candida to know about any times I had taken full-spectrum antibiotics, I wanted first to see my medical records. It was one of those things that remained on my To Do list for a full year. The Questionaire, meanwhile, got lost undisturbed in my White Pages book of guitar tablature, something that tumbled down my To Do list. Additionally, this nutritionist was sidelined in my mind, bizarrely enough, guilty by association, when he danced with the misanthroposophical lot (those who believe in fairies but not evolution) at an interminable works line dancing gig. This was a time when I was agonisingly agnostic about Candida, struggling to see it as a tangible entity. It was too associated in my mind with claptrap. Even the Candida support group website, under the search for expertise section of their Clinics page, offer links to practises I consider to be nonsense.
He was good. We had a long consultation, and I suppose that being able to talk about something after so long feels so good. I have a lot of questions about his practice, though, since he talks about anthroposophical medicine and homeopathy far more than I would like, since he has a few questionable books on his shelves (principally those with which I detect an overlap with those line dancers) and since he used iridology to contribute to his diagnosis, sketching my irises. Anyway, he will be sending off a shit sample to a German lab to have me checked out.
Which takes me, eventually, to my shit sample. Attentive readers (ha) will note that I have numerous times been wrongfooted by my devious unconscious into eating foods I know to be bad for me. This happens for so many reasons that it is impossible to anticipate all of the logical slips, the logical understeer and oversteer that leads to them. Typically, it relates to, for example, prioritising a version of the Candida diet that states that gluten may be ok, so long as it be ingested as, for example, wholewheat, given that this is easier to follow and therefore less likely to lead to the more damaging slips onto sugar etc., or it involves telling myself I need to reintroduce a food to convince myself once and for all that it is bad for me. This time, an injunction that I must not take antifungals for a week before the test has led me to slip back to eating everything in the purported belief that this would be necessary to get a positive result that would then allow me to focus once and for all. Consequently I have now slipped back a great deal in my mental state.
There is a deal of sense in this line I sold myself. If the test were to come back negative, possibly as a result of the great strides I have been making since coming back from what may have been my first tai chi class with a recollection of a comment my friend had made about the teacher he had recommended me, that he eats four cloves of raw garlic with raw onion when he is feeling like he is coming down with something. This allowed me to see that it would be a nonsense to deny myself what may be a good form of treatment if only for the reason that I might smell of garlic and have people see me as weirder than they already do (though it is true that I often think that others’ perceptions of those with mental disorders can be the bulk of the problem and not a mere adjunct). On the garlic, which I took as, essentially, a shot, chopped up finely with flaxseed oil and lemon juice. A negative result would also mean that my parents would take it all less seriously again, and I need them on side.
But here I am with this post, which I now resent enormously. And since the time I began eating badly again, I have had no motivation, my concentration is worse than it has been for a long while, and it is a real chore to write this.
* Interestingly, this theory (which is one of these I generally rule inadmissable by the way, and introduce experimentally in order to see what affect it would have on my thinking as a whole), would explain something I have had occasion to wonder about of late. M is fond of pointing out that she never experienced me as being particularly restless or irritable in Prague. This is something that I feel can be put down to several causes. Firstly, being away from home, in a high-stimulation environment (any environment that is substantially new is high-stimulation for an ADDer), I had less reason to be restless. Secondly, learning a new language, and a language, at that, which presents a real linguistical challenge such as harnesses my aspergic nature, possessed me to such an extent that I was able to make a conscious effort to back off on the writing; this obsession, of course, entailed me being far more sociable than I would have been had I been solely writing since everyday conversation was one of the better ways of making progress on this obsession. Thirdly and most obviously, a new relationship is fresher and you needn’t be ADD to find it easier to spend time with the new person in your life. And this is not to mention the fact that my relationships up until that point had been short and dysfunctional - the last relationship I had had prior to meeting M had been with a girl I had took an extreme dislike to on first meeting her, and, looking back, my feelings didn’t change greatly the whole time we were together when I had tried to force tenderness knowing that I judged people harshly and found it difficult to be with anyone. I had always been so aware of my problems with people, problems I had always put down to manic depression, that I tried to counter them, adjusting consciously for what I thought was the skewed mental logic of depression, with what I thought of as techniques of cognitive behavioural theapy: “what a superficial mare, talking about how she is in love with her phone”, “no, no, that’s how people are and you need to be more accepting, these are the things people talk about, these are the ways people speak”, “and what an irritating droning voice, a tone designed so that Londoners can whinge about things that don’t matter, I can’t stand it” “yes, but you feel this about everyone, and it’s this thinking you must combat if you are not to become a perennially clinically depressed recluse” “It comes naturally to not be around people, and especially if people must be so superficial. I don’t understand this set.” “But you must try. That’s the depression speaking and it will only feed itself.” I was at war with myself, something that informed one of my great lost works, Mall Quart D’Heur (lost, that is, in my mind, not on paper since it only made it to the notes stage on a few envelopes). I was trying so hard to force myself to be normal to prevent an ever-impending mental collapse, to pretend to people that everything was ok, to build up relationships, and relationships especially with women. How I used to congratulate myself on putting the phone down with a girl I’d spoken to for over an hour, looking at the clock, though I had enjoyed perhaps none of the exchange! Women were the panacea. And so I then found a new girl who was innocent and virgin to all the social phenomenon I so passionately hated as an aspergic lad immune to so much. This when it was so important to find a girl who was not corrupted by these guys who were so familiar with the anathematised ways of the world. I had seen her in the library. I had seen her reading on the down escalator of Staromestka. She had been reading William Trevor, in English! She loved climbing (she had been a few times. I don’t think she has been once in the time we have been going out, though we spoke of it a few times in Prague). Only gradually did it all become so routine and the CBT came back in a different form. Not, ‘you’re depressed, you’re not fit to judge’ but, ‘of course you’re bored in the relationship, of course you don’t like spending much time with her, you’re ADD and you have Asperger’s, but it’s keeping you on an even keel.’ This is my explanation. But [reverie about speaking the truth to some of the managers at work] the antifungal theory also fits, since if the Candida theory (and, optionally, by extension, the opiod-excess theory of autism) is true, then antifungals would have killed the candida which is most exposed to the drug in the intestinal lining, but the candida would have had a chance to grow back (those sweet probiotic yoghurts, those sweetened vitamin tablets one of which, left efforvescing throughout the day, attracted thousands of ants, all that beer, those dumplings, those cheesy baguettes I loved so much and the almond whirls; those two-tone shits that sat on those Germanic toilet pans for those first months while my gut adjusted to the vegetable-free diet). It may have reestablished itself gradually, and indeed, it was those very last weeks in Prague that I was scratching around my crotch and had Canisten on my To Do list for weeks, finally buying it from a pharmacy by, I think, I P Pavlova metro, or indeed, no, was it Muzeum. Adding this theory in tentatively, speculatively, like a film director or a theatre stage manager framing a scene and having the stage hands carry in and out a certain prop, I can see that it fits, that it need carry little if any weight, since the bulk is held by all the other features, all the other arguments, but that, logically, it fits well, it is internally consistent and functions synergistically.
