March 14th, 2008
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]. More
November 18th, 2007
I’m angry, restless, irritable. I picked up M____ in the car some time back and driving there I was thinking the end has to come soon. I have been so aware of being around her unable to think of anything to say, and today cleaning my room and counting down the time until I would have to pick her up I was so angry at the time I am wasting to her being around. Driving back too, she told me it would be a hard week because I would have to drop her off most mornings, including tomorrow, though she normally lets me off weekends (she is ill), and I thought about how that means that she won’t be working in the evenings and I will feel compelled to be with her, saying nothing and aware of my own failings, and that I will be unable to get down to anything productive.
Maybe it’s the Capryllic acid I’m taking at the moment. Maybe its ‘die off reactions’ but I feel awful, and can’t cope with this. I need my life back. This relationship is giving me so little compares to what it seems to take away. I have nothing to say to M____ and all I’m doing is forcing myself to be sociable so much. I can’t deal with it. I don’t want to let her down, but it shouldn’t be such a big deal. It’s only because she can’t cope on her own that I feel so guilty about thinking this.
But it’s late, and I have to be up in the morning!
August 13th, 2007
I was getting increasingly stressed and had the feeling I wasn’t coping at all in the weeks before I saw a dietician for the first time on the 6th of August. I was going in to work telling myself I must see the nurse, even making notes to self in my phone to do so and not getting round to it. I was having reveries of telling my boss to fuck off and stick his job and they seemed to be becoming increasingly regular or increasingly intrusive. I was angry all the time, and increasingly aware that I wasn’t taken seriously at work nor respected, and that things weren’t going so well outside of work. We had moved house, and I was doing all the cooking and trying to wort a few things out, buy things for the place and kit it out, and I wasn’t having time for writing at all. I was snappy and didn’t want to be around people.
It was a terrible bloody day. I had been keeping a food diary for a couple of weeks, on paper, because we haven’t had the internet installed yet and my dietician would need a paper copy which I wouldn’t have got round to if I had first written it down on paper or onto my blog, and I had been counting up the days I hadn’t drank any alcohol, nor caffeine, and so on. Doing so made it very clear how important these things are for me, not drinking caffeine, and avoiding alcohol. I had slipped a couple of times with caffeine, and once with alcohol, having a pint at lunchtime at work with some people I rarely see, and both times it had really knocked me about for a couple of days. Suffice to say I hadn’t really drank much alcohol for a good few weeks, just a pint or a half here and there. And then we had a barbecue. It was my turn to be host - and it must be said that as anti-social as I am, I enjoy being a host, not exactly being the centre of attention but kind of setting the pace and keeping myself busy, especially with a barbecue. Predictably, I didn’t manage to stay off the alcohol, and convinced myself, once again, that vodka would be ok. In a way it was for a good while, until once everyone had gone (at least, I think I lasted that long) and it really all hit me at once.
M____’s mum was over. It was a barbecue for her, but also a housewarming. Only her Polish friends hadn’t come over, letting her down despite knowing a month in advance that her mum would be over.
In any case, the next day I had the worst possible hangover, and was barely able to move. I did little but look at page3.com and drive my boss about a couple of times all day. Except that lunchtime dietician’s appointment.
I turned up in the carpark, my car smelling of partly composted grass from the load of bags full of the stuff I had offered to take to the tip, and worried that I recognised the car in the corner as belonging to one of the women at work who I’ve had a few reveries about and had bitched about that day as being both condescending and hypersensitive - she, after all, has a number of food intolerances. It was one of these complexes with several anonymous buildings fenced off and notes on doors saying to use other door, door round corner etc.
I finally found the place and sat down trying to hold back the reveries about seeing supercilious medicos and finding they don’t listen at all, getting angry and walking out and the like. I picked Bleak House out of my bag but of course couldn’t read more than a sentence or two.
Finally, she called me through.
She listened. I introduced myself and said that, though I have not been diagnosed, I consider that I satisfy all the diagnostic criteria of both ADD and Asperger’s syndrome. And she agreed with me that my psychiatrist is wrong to say that if I was ADD I would have been diagnosed at school.
I found I was talking quickly, just like I always do sat in front of my shrink.
She then talked me through an exclusion diet. I would be excluding a lot of things of course to confirm first of all that food affects my symptoms. It would be a restricted diet that could not in any way be recommended as a permanent solution. Following this, foods would be reintroduced one after another for a three day period in order to check whether they triggered any symptoms. If they did they would be rechecked after all the others had been checked or eliminated.
In addition to being gluten free and dairy free, I would not be allowed onions, potatoes, beans and pulses, nuts and corn.
I wondered about a couple of things. First of all the fact that I would be allowed any quantity of any kind of fresh fruit seemed to exclude this being a diet which could check for candida. Secondly, I had read that there are food families, and that should, say, potato be excluded then aubergine should as well.
Nonetheless, it seemed a positive thing. I would have a structured diet, and an incentive to follow it for a set period of time. I hoped, and I hope, that this will help me to better conform to those aspect of the diet that I was already trying, mainly unsuccessfully, to follow, and to those additional aspects of it.
Thus far I have not began the diet. I have indeed conformed to the no alcohol, no caffeine, no gluten nor dairy part of the deal, but in using up some old frozen meals and making a couple of things I had bought ingredients for, and indeed in conforming to this part of the diet to a fuller extent in transition to the exclusion diet, but have figured that I need a little more preparation yet to make the full switch.
Over the last few days, on my own in the new house with M____ flying back to Poland with her Mum, I have worried that though diet is a large contributory factor to my problems, however well I eat it will be no panacea. I have been eating pretty well, with perhaps medium-high GI dishes (lovely vegetable curries with gram flour pancakes, for example) but still finding that I’m having pretty intrusive and often angry reveries. More than once I have needed to go and do some vigorous exercise, some shadow boxing and the like to try and get it out of my system. In fact today or yesterday I started to worry, comparing myself to J D Salinger who I have always believed to have a temperament very similar to my own (granted every adolescent believes this, but I do tend to feel that carefull exegesis of certain passages in Catcher and elsewhere in his oevre demonstrates a tendency towards ADD and perhaps Asperger’s to a degree little less than the evidence Kay Redfield Jamison amasses in Touched with Fire demonstrates the bipolarity of the personalities she discusses). Salinger is of course a famous recluse, and in articles I will soon post elsewhere, I will discuss my own tendencies in this regard. He also is prone, according to some reports, to be attracted to many and varied methods of healing, many of which it is safe to say, have not been submitted to peer review. I have always been subject to crises of confidence regarding my diets, mainly perhaps due to the blank faces, scepticism and suspicion I meet when I describe my problems those few times I trust people enough to bother to do so at all, and this was one such.
Still, it is fantastic to have somebody simply listen.
On leaving, she even told me about a friend of hers who has been diagnosed as Aspergic in his late thirties. This guy had been very academic, getting a clutch of A-levels and the like and going into computers. Only his employers referred him to a counsellor for problems he was having at work. Bingo.
We chatted for a little while in fact before I left. All in all it was a good day. M____ rang to ask how it had went. I thnk she was glad finally to hear something positive, that something had gone well.
So, fingers crossed!
