It's Just An Update.

Well, I keep hoping I’m BACK, but it’s beginning to seem like I’ll only ever be about ten percent here at all.  It's been over a year and a half since I've updated this site.  Or, really, anything.  I have not done any art, any modeling, I've only survived.

So much has happened and I am finally ready to come back and take a whole new crack at everything. 

…and then I have a bad day or a bad week.

For five years I was diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and I was left to wonder how IBS could be so bad that I was as sick as I was.  I just kept losing weight, and got to the point where I could not do anything.  Medications did not help.  Severely adjusting and finally restricting my diet helped only just enough to notice any difference, and even then, only for periods of time. I kept adding things to the list of foods I could not eat without misery ensuing.

In fall of 2019 - just weeks after my last post in this blog - after about four years existing in a sort of slow-motion full blown breakdown, I finally packed it in.  I was living in Brooklyn, NY and just doing everything possible to survive.  My last post here went into the sudden death of my best friend in August of that year, which was essentially the last straw.  When I learned of his death, I had plane tickets for the following week to visit my father and stepmother in their new home on Lookout Mountain in Alabama.  My son and I came down to visit and he stayed on a few days while I abbreviated my trip to fly back up for my friend's funeral.  Then, with help from family I came BACK down to spend another week of peace and tranquility in what would soon become my new home.  I looked at houses with an eye towards buying, but I wasn't able to do so.  I asked them right then and there to find me a place to live in their new town and before six weeks had passed, they let me know they had found a house for rent.  It was one of the houses I had looked at several weeks before!  I spent the month of October feverishly packing, put my things on a moving truck, rented a car to drive down with my son (taking a day to stop along the beautiful Blue Ridge Parkway for the sake of building great memories of our big move) and arrived in our new home just before Halloween.

Over the course of the next year, things were supposed to get much better. Instead they did quite the opposite - in all ways but one really massive one, but that needs a-whole-'nother post, not just a mention. My weight, and my ability to eat food at all, went up and down. My memory, and my reading comprehension, reached an all-time low, driving me to tears on a regular basis. Then, COVID happened. I tried different diets and got better and then worse and then better, and then worse, until by August I was basically living in the bathroom. I will spare you the details; it was very unpleasant. Last summer, I was finally diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis which, I learned, means I have an autoimmune disorder where my body attacks my own intestines!

The road of recovery has not been straight since then. Honestly, sometimes I’m not sure if I’m recovering or just barely managing this thing. I am still trying to figure out what, if anything, I can eat without making it worse. I am still very tired and achy most of the time, easily confused, super forgetful. I’m not sure if those will get better or if this is just the new normal, now. I’ve put off writing this post for over a year, because it has been too difficult to know what to say, whether I’m really back, or it’s going to be just another short burst followed by several weeks of being too out of it to do anything at all.

What’s the conclusion of this post? I’m not sure, and I don’t like it.

I’m not sure what the plan is or how to close this up, but I am happy to be alive.

Although not usually very happy to be living in a body, these days.