This summer I was told by a psychic that I was going to be pregnant soon. My startled and alarmed look made him laugh and he immediately added "metaphorically speaking, of course!" Phew. A month later I got a letter from an old friend, telling me she had had a prophetic dream in which I gave birth to an American baby boy. She was certain that the baby was American, and she also interpreted the dream figuratively. The month after that I had another friend talk to me about pregnancy in a spiritual sense and in Berlin I was told once again that I was pregnant.
Yesterday marked the beginning of the season of Advent - the season of waiting. And I realized that am indeed pregnant - metaphorically speaking - and have been for several months. I am spending a lot of time in retrospection of the crazy year I have had. Eight months ago, at the rainbow gathering, I had conceived the hope of a new life. The process of liberation from my abusive past had begun and I felt the beginnings of a new reality growing inside of me.
The dark night of the soul was starting to change into the dawn. I could see the light and even though I was still stumbling around in the semi-dark, I knew I was headed toward it, no matter how often I kept tripping and falling along the way. In Berlin I got a good look at the light I am going to live in. I also entered into my metaphorical third trimester and I really started to feel big and pregnant.
These last couple of months of literal pregnancy are daunting. It is no different with metaphorical pregnancy. I feel hindered in living my daily life because I am so full of expectations. It is hard to be in the here and now if all you want is to be in the there and then. I could spend all doing things mothers-to-be spend their days doing, like decorating baby rooms and going shopping and whatnot...
And I am annoyed with not being fully in the light yet. I know this not the dark night of the soul anymore. The dark night is over. This is the time of morning when the sun has already risen but the shades are still drawn and I drifted back to sleep - probably because I am so big and pregnant that I don't want to get out of bed. It is a time of semi-darkness, full of odd and senseless dreams, often confused and disturbed. Truth and reality penetrate into my sleeping mind but are distorted into blurry and often troublesome visions.
I want to draw the shades and let the light stream in, but the lattices are a tightly woven web of tensions within my family, dark emotions of guilt, depression, feelings of worthlessness, a parasitical consciousness that resents being sent out my body, and a daily uncertainty of the future. Each lattice seems to hold the others in place and sometimes I feel that if I could just pull one loose, the whole thing would come apart and the sun's rays would caress my face with eternal bliss.
If metaphorical pregnancies progress just like physical ones, my due date is in a little over a month. I often wish for that baby to come early, but I am not going to induce. I am going to have a natural birth. Oh God, I hope that baby is not going to be late! And yes, I am afraid of the birthing pains of moving once again, starting my life all over again - from scratch, but I know that it is all worth it, for soon I will give birth to my beautiful, precious new life.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Thursday, November 19, 2009
a year of food and emotions
I am drinking an odd super-drink concoction, looking out of my window at a gorgeous sunny November day and am commemorating the 1-year anniversary of the worst week of my life. It is very hard to believe that it has only been a year, it seems to me that ages have passed, a lifetime. I sit in silence, glance at the mirror, see my reflection, and smile. The name Annika comes from the Hebrew word for grace, and I feel that I have been aptly named. I love my name, and unlike a year ago, I am also beginning to love myself again.
I never know where to begin and always want to start with Adam and Eve - or in my case, Kim and Hanna, my parents - which is why I am writing The Gypsika Journals (www.gypsika.com). The past year will certainly be a major part of the 3rd Volume "Metamorphis of a Mystic". It tells of the spiritual transformation that started taking place when I dived into raw foods, cold turkey - or cold cucumber, for that matter. It tells of newfound hope and joy and a complete paradigm shift. But it also tells of the realization that I was suffering from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) which manifested itself through panic attacks, depression, anxiety, and even hallucinations.
In Summer of 2008 - after 6 months of an intense physical, emotional, and spiritual detoxification on a 100% raw food diet -there came a day that my husband referred to henceforth as "the day it died". It took me more than half a year to understand what that "it" was, and it will take several chapters of The Gypsika Journals to fully explain. What matters most, however, is how that day changed my life forever. "The day it died" my husband's mental health declined and he went through cycles of mania and depression coupled with loosing his sense of reality as well as various other expressions of psychosis.
Unaware of what had happened, I began living in an emotional hell. I listened to ramblings about how we were going to completely reshape and change our future and got dragged into the depths of hopelessness, all the while dealing with the symptoms of PTSD. I started to doubt my own sanity and considered checking myself into a mental hospital at various times, despite my aversion to school medicine, especially psychiatry. I could not understand what was happening and the more erratic his behavior became, the more I lost my own sense of reality and began clinging to him in my despair.
I became increasingly dependent on him. And he grew more and more abusive although I did not see it at that time. He went through days of crying uncontrollably and then blaming me for his suffering. Next he'd apologize and promise a brilliant future for us both. As the weeks passed he grew more and more cruel towards me. But he immediately denied saying hurtful things and uttering spiteful accusations. I had become so disconnected from myself, I didn't trust my own perception and memory anymore. I believed that I really was the awful person he was telling me I was.
By late summer of last year I was hating myself, thinking I was a terrible wife, an accident of nature, a burden to mankind, and should have never been born. I became more and more withdrawn, spent less time with friends, and lived with one purpose only: to try and reduce the anger outbreaks of my husband and somehow ease his suffering and please him. In September he came close to beating me. Then he told me that he was being abusive toward me in order to get me to leave him because then he could be rid of me and blame ME for leaving. After a while he broke down crying, apologized, and told me he did not want this to happen but that I needed to leave for a while so he could "heal". He sent me to Germany to stay with my parents "in order to save our marriage."
On September 11th 2008, exactly seven years after the collapse of the twin towers and with them an era of American history, my world collapsed as I was cast out of my own home. I arrived in Germany an emotional wreck, inwardly flinched when spoken to, rarely slept at night and spent half my days crying. But I kept in touch with my husband, through email and I even called him a few times. The worse I felt, the more I clung to our relationship and wanted to save our marriage. But day after day he grew colder towards me and once told me he had "earned the right" to be with other women. I was heartbroken and felt like some cast-aside mail order bride that had been rejected as "not good enough" for the market. Eventually I booked a flight back to the US for mid-October even though he wanted me to stay away.
During that time I started combating the pain with every distraction I could think of, including a return to cooked foods, primarily Nutella bread. I gained a few pounds and my husband told if I lost weight he'd "do anything" for me. I struggled to eat healthy and actually managed to keep some sort of balance between Nutella bread and other cooked foods and a massive amount of dandelion and other wild green juices. I managed to shed a few extra pounds and proudly returned to the US after he had said he was willing to try and "work things out".
The next few weeks were pure hell and I got to experience the man I had once thought of as warm and loving as my living nightmare. At one point I spent an entire night screaming in pain, clawing at the bedpost until my hands were sore and my arms cramped up, exhausting myself to the point where I literally could not get out of bed for several days. I crawled to the bathroom and didn't have enough strength to procure any food while he left me in that state and went out to party. During that time, a year ago, I did not think I would ever find happiness in life again, nor did I feel like there was any reason to keep on living. It was only the burden of guilt, the thought of how my suicide would torment my family, that kept me alive during those days.
Then a friend recommended a book on verbal abuse, and although I saw no correlation to my own situation, I decided to read it, having always been an avid reader interested in psychology. Somewhere around the first week of November a bomb exploded in my mind as I came to understand abuse. It was as if someone had turned on all the lights at once and I was stung by their blinding brightness. I could have beat any stoner in a contest of sitting on a couch staring at nothing for hours. I neither slept nor ate for two days while devouring one book after another on the subject of abuse.
And then came that week exactly a year ago where I put him to the test. Once I stood up to him and refused to accept a false accusation a new dangerous flickering entered into his eyes. As soon as his fist swung toward my face I knew it was way past time to leave. I immediately started playing submissive on the outside and I believe that is what saved me from getting beaten. But inside of me everything was starting to change.
I started to eat again, but since the two of us had gotten into raw foods together, I couldn't bear the thought of eating those foods anymore. I only realized it months later, but from that time on my diet consisted primarily of the foods he hated: arugula, goat cheese, green-tea soy ice cream, licorice, sweet potato chips, and ridiculous amounts of sushi. I literally ate nothing else until we flew to a gig in Portland, Oregon together.
We had lived in Portland for 5 years and I reconnected with my past, which was a powerful healing experience. Recently I had had people in Florida tell me that I was a shy, withdrawn, quiet person that was very hard to get to know. My friends in Portland thought I was joking since they all knew me as the exact opposite. We went out to all of our favorite restaurants from years past and I subconsciously used those foods to rebel against my husband.
We filed for divorce in December and I flew to Germany with my cat and two suitcases and nothing else to my name. He had spent all of our savings prior and kept almost everything of financial worth. I hardly cared anymore, I just wanted to get away. I decided I needed a break from dealing with trauma and emotional pain and was going to enjoy christmas as much as possible. So I consciously chose foods that would suppress my memory and my emotions. And of course I was in the perfect place, as Germany is cookie and baked-good Nirvana during christmas time.
My mom cooked for me and graciously adapted to making vegetarian food, often even vegan. In the beginning of 2009 I moderated my diet and ate a lot of traditional cooked German dishes, but less sugar and more raw foods. And the memories came. One after another I was bombarded by scenes from my past, abuse situations I had "forgotten" and for the next months I was cleaning house emotionally, spending a lot of time crying and being revisited by memories I did not I know I had.
By spring I was sick of dealing with so much pain all the time and tried to accelerate the process by going on a juice fast. I was flooded with emotions, especially depression. My family was very unhappy about the idea of a juice fast, often commenting on how I was too skinny even though I had gained more than 10 pounds. While I was still dealing with emotional issues from the abuse and divorce, I was now also faced with disapproval from my family. Since Germany had had a particularly harsh winter there were no wild greens yet and the cost buying everything at grocery stores was unsustainable. To my family's delight and my dismay I had to break the fast sooner than I had planned.
Late spring and early summer was yo-yo time. I'd go whole stretches of eating all raw foods again and started feeling great while processing more memories. Eventually the feelings of guilt for not eating my mom's cooked meals started to accumulate again. I felt isolated and frustrated and sensed a growing disconnection from my family. My mom is an excellent cook and soon the smells of dishes from my childhood would get to me. I've never been able to do the part raw part cooked thing. Once I'd have "just a little bit" of the cheese-covered potato casserole and "a tiny slice" of cake for dessert, "cheating" on being vegan "just that one time", I found myself back in the kitchen an hour later getting seconds, thirds, and Nutella bread to top it all off.
By summer I had managed to be all raw again during the week and eat cooked food with my family on the weekends. I noticed a tremendous difference in the way I felt, sinking into depression with great regularity by monday, feeling good again toward the end of the week, and getting worse again over the weekend. I had a flare-up of Candida, a systemic problem I thought I had more or less conquered by now. I remembered all of those passionate raw foodists in Florida who advocated an 80% fruit diet and spent most of the summer eating the 80-10-10 diet. Naturally, the Candida problem got worse and so did my mental health - or lack thereof.
I am incredibly grateful for what happened next. I was constantly on the lookout for raw food events in Germany but since I had not been able to find work, finances were always an issue. I found the Wurzelkongress in Berlin and asked if I could come as a volunteer translator. I was told that there was a translator already, but that they could use a second translator and I was in! Years of abuse had run down my self-esteem and coupled with an emotionally unbalancing fruitarian diet I started panicking, thinking I wasn't good enough as a translator. But once I heard the speaker was David Wolfe, I gained a new sense of determination, and started reading his books in English and in German to prepare myself.
I had turned 30 in May and my dad gave me and my brother a very special birthday present: a trip to the US! In August we flew to Portland, Oregon, where I had lived for 5 years, and then down to the bay area in California. I very consciously planned the trip to help me process memories. I spent time with the two other band member of my ex-husband and I used to have. Now it was just the three of us - and my brother (who was called by my ex-husband's name by accident more than once). I also went to the place where I had gotten married 9 years prior, a place I had not been to since the wedding. And I decided I was going to incorporate food as part of the emotional processing. So I ate at every restaurant that had special meaning to me, favorite places of my ex-husband's, the place we ate at right after our wedding, etc. It was memory processing in overdrive, exactly what I had been hoping for.
When I came back to Germany in September I was certain of two things: I was going to move back to the US, I had felt home the moment I stepped out on the street in Portland. Also, I knew that I was done with cooked food. I transitioned back into an all raw diet more slowly this time. I knew now that the 80-10-10 had had a disastrous effect on my health and started eliminating sugars from my diet, including fruit, in order to cleanse from Candida. I started eating Maca and Cacao over the summer and now added more superfoods and anti-Candida foods and supplements. By October 1st I had transitioned into a 100% raw and superfood diet and felt terrific about it.
The Wurzelkongress in October was amazing and accelerated my emotional cleansing journey by helping me release many false negative thoughts about myself. I came back feeling better than I have had in a decade, both physically and emotionally. I have been slowly adding more superfoods to my diet and am noticing changes almost on a daily basis. I started to realize in October that my vision had improved. I didn't really acknowledge it at first since I have never had eye problems, never needed glasses. But I went from having good eyes to having fantastic eye-sight. I don't know how many times I have asked myself if the fall foliage has always been this colorful and why the grass is so much greener than it has ever been before. I am still not used to this change and continue to be amazed at the sharpness of objects and the clarity of things.
I am also still releasing emotions and detoxifying from mercury fillings that I had removed recently by a dentist who was not careful about it. Mercury is also one of many factors in chronic Candida. At this point I am experimenting with different foods and superfoods, finding the balance between getting plenty of nourishment but not detoxifying too quickly. A year ago I suffered from muscle weakness so severe that I could barely walk. Only a few months ago I needed a minimum of 10 hours of sleep per night. At this point I am pretty much back to normal and I am having to remind myself to be patient and gracious with myself for not having returned to the level of fitness I once had.
Last year I would have estimated my age to be somewhere in the 50s if I hadn't known my birthday. Now I am starting to feel my age again, but am getting glimpses of feeling even younger. I am sleeping less again, sometimes even less than the 8-9 hours I have needed since I was a teenager. I also have more mental clarity and focus most of the time. I am impatient about really getting into shape again, being able to exercise and hike and do all of the things I love, but I am thankful that I have come this far in just one year. And most of all I have gained something I thought I'd never have again a year ago: unbelievable gratefulness and a very strong desire to get out there and LIVE!
I never know where to begin and always want to start with Adam and Eve - or in my case, Kim and Hanna, my parents - which is why I am writing The Gypsika Journals (www.gypsika.com). The past year will certainly be a major part of the 3rd Volume "Metamorphis of a Mystic". It tells of the spiritual transformation that started taking place when I dived into raw foods, cold turkey - or cold cucumber, for that matter. It tells of newfound hope and joy and a complete paradigm shift. But it also tells of the realization that I was suffering from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) which manifested itself through panic attacks, depression, anxiety, and even hallucinations.
In Summer of 2008 - after 6 months of an intense physical, emotional, and spiritual detoxification on a 100% raw food diet -there came a day that my husband referred to henceforth as "the day it died". It took me more than half a year to understand what that "it" was, and it will take several chapters of The Gypsika Journals to fully explain. What matters most, however, is how that day changed my life forever. "The day it died" my husband's mental health declined and he went through cycles of mania and depression coupled with loosing his sense of reality as well as various other expressions of psychosis.
Unaware of what had happened, I began living in an emotional hell. I listened to ramblings about how we were going to completely reshape and change our future and got dragged into the depths of hopelessness, all the while dealing with the symptoms of PTSD. I started to doubt my own sanity and considered checking myself into a mental hospital at various times, despite my aversion to school medicine, especially psychiatry. I could not understand what was happening and the more erratic his behavior became, the more I lost my own sense of reality and began clinging to him in my despair.
I became increasingly dependent on him. And he grew more and more abusive although I did not see it at that time. He went through days of crying uncontrollably and then blaming me for his suffering. Next he'd apologize and promise a brilliant future for us both. As the weeks passed he grew more and more cruel towards me. But he immediately denied saying hurtful things and uttering spiteful accusations. I had become so disconnected from myself, I didn't trust my own perception and memory anymore. I believed that I really was the awful person he was telling me I was.
By late summer of last year I was hating myself, thinking I was a terrible wife, an accident of nature, a burden to mankind, and should have never been born. I became more and more withdrawn, spent less time with friends, and lived with one purpose only: to try and reduce the anger outbreaks of my husband and somehow ease his suffering and please him. In September he came close to beating me. Then he told me that he was being abusive toward me in order to get me to leave him because then he could be rid of me and blame ME for leaving. After a while he broke down crying, apologized, and told me he did not want this to happen but that I needed to leave for a while so he could "heal". He sent me to Germany to stay with my parents "in order to save our marriage."
On September 11th 2008, exactly seven years after the collapse of the twin towers and with them an era of American history, my world collapsed as I was cast out of my own home. I arrived in Germany an emotional wreck, inwardly flinched when spoken to, rarely slept at night and spent half my days crying. But I kept in touch with my husband, through email and I even called him a few times. The worse I felt, the more I clung to our relationship and wanted to save our marriage. But day after day he grew colder towards me and once told me he had "earned the right" to be with other women. I was heartbroken and felt like some cast-aside mail order bride that had been rejected as "not good enough" for the market. Eventually I booked a flight back to the US for mid-October even though he wanted me to stay away.
During that time I started combating the pain with every distraction I could think of, including a return to cooked foods, primarily Nutella bread. I gained a few pounds and my husband told if I lost weight he'd "do anything" for me. I struggled to eat healthy and actually managed to keep some sort of balance between Nutella bread and other cooked foods and a massive amount of dandelion and other wild green juices. I managed to shed a few extra pounds and proudly returned to the US after he had said he was willing to try and "work things out".
The next few weeks were pure hell and I got to experience the man I had once thought of as warm and loving as my living nightmare. At one point I spent an entire night screaming in pain, clawing at the bedpost until my hands were sore and my arms cramped up, exhausting myself to the point where I literally could not get out of bed for several days. I crawled to the bathroom and didn't have enough strength to procure any food while he left me in that state and went out to party. During that time, a year ago, I did not think I would ever find happiness in life again, nor did I feel like there was any reason to keep on living. It was only the burden of guilt, the thought of how my suicide would torment my family, that kept me alive during those days.
Then a friend recommended a book on verbal abuse, and although I saw no correlation to my own situation, I decided to read it, having always been an avid reader interested in psychology. Somewhere around the first week of November a bomb exploded in my mind as I came to understand abuse. It was as if someone had turned on all the lights at once and I was stung by their blinding brightness. I could have beat any stoner in a contest of sitting on a couch staring at nothing for hours. I neither slept nor ate for two days while devouring one book after another on the subject of abuse.
And then came that week exactly a year ago where I put him to the test. Once I stood up to him and refused to accept a false accusation a new dangerous flickering entered into his eyes. As soon as his fist swung toward my face I knew it was way past time to leave. I immediately started playing submissive on the outside and I believe that is what saved me from getting beaten. But inside of me everything was starting to change.
I started to eat again, but since the two of us had gotten into raw foods together, I couldn't bear the thought of eating those foods anymore. I only realized it months later, but from that time on my diet consisted primarily of the foods he hated: arugula, goat cheese, green-tea soy ice cream, licorice, sweet potato chips, and ridiculous amounts of sushi. I literally ate nothing else until we flew to a gig in Portland, Oregon together.
We had lived in Portland for 5 years and I reconnected with my past, which was a powerful healing experience. Recently I had had people in Florida tell me that I was a shy, withdrawn, quiet person that was very hard to get to know. My friends in Portland thought I was joking since they all knew me as the exact opposite. We went out to all of our favorite restaurants from years past and I subconsciously used those foods to rebel against my husband.
We filed for divorce in December and I flew to Germany with my cat and two suitcases and nothing else to my name. He had spent all of our savings prior and kept almost everything of financial worth. I hardly cared anymore, I just wanted to get away. I decided I needed a break from dealing with trauma and emotional pain and was going to enjoy christmas as much as possible. So I consciously chose foods that would suppress my memory and my emotions. And of course I was in the perfect place, as Germany is cookie and baked-good Nirvana during christmas time.
My mom cooked for me and graciously adapted to making vegetarian food, often even vegan. In the beginning of 2009 I moderated my diet and ate a lot of traditional cooked German dishes, but less sugar and more raw foods. And the memories came. One after another I was bombarded by scenes from my past, abuse situations I had "forgotten" and for the next months I was cleaning house emotionally, spending a lot of time crying and being revisited by memories I did not I know I had.
By spring I was sick of dealing with so much pain all the time and tried to accelerate the process by going on a juice fast. I was flooded with emotions, especially depression. My family was very unhappy about the idea of a juice fast, often commenting on how I was too skinny even though I had gained more than 10 pounds. While I was still dealing with emotional issues from the abuse and divorce, I was now also faced with disapproval from my family. Since Germany had had a particularly harsh winter there were no wild greens yet and the cost buying everything at grocery stores was unsustainable. To my family's delight and my dismay I had to break the fast sooner than I had planned.
Late spring and early summer was yo-yo time. I'd go whole stretches of eating all raw foods again and started feeling great while processing more memories. Eventually the feelings of guilt for not eating my mom's cooked meals started to accumulate again. I felt isolated and frustrated and sensed a growing disconnection from my family. My mom is an excellent cook and soon the smells of dishes from my childhood would get to me. I've never been able to do the part raw part cooked thing. Once I'd have "just a little bit" of the cheese-covered potato casserole and "a tiny slice" of cake for dessert, "cheating" on being vegan "just that one time", I found myself back in the kitchen an hour later getting seconds, thirds, and Nutella bread to top it all off.
By summer I had managed to be all raw again during the week and eat cooked food with my family on the weekends. I noticed a tremendous difference in the way I felt, sinking into depression with great regularity by monday, feeling good again toward the end of the week, and getting worse again over the weekend. I had a flare-up of Candida, a systemic problem I thought I had more or less conquered by now. I remembered all of those passionate raw foodists in Florida who advocated an 80% fruit diet and spent most of the summer eating the 80-10-10 diet. Naturally, the Candida problem got worse and so did my mental health - or lack thereof.
I am incredibly grateful for what happened next. I was constantly on the lookout for raw food events in Germany but since I had not been able to find work, finances were always an issue. I found the Wurzelkongress in Berlin and asked if I could come as a volunteer translator. I was told that there was a translator already, but that they could use a second translator and I was in! Years of abuse had run down my self-esteem and coupled with an emotionally unbalancing fruitarian diet I started panicking, thinking I wasn't good enough as a translator. But once I heard the speaker was David Wolfe, I gained a new sense of determination, and started reading his books in English and in German to prepare myself.
I had turned 30 in May and my dad gave me and my brother a very special birthday present: a trip to the US! In August we flew to Portland, Oregon, where I had lived for 5 years, and then down to the bay area in California. I very consciously planned the trip to help me process memories. I spent time with the two other band member of my ex-husband and I used to have. Now it was just the three of us - and my brother (who was called by my ex-husband's name by accident more than once). I also went to the place where I had gotten married 9 years prior, a place I had not been to since the wedding. And I decided I was going to incorporate food as part of the emotional processing. So I ate at every restaurant that had special meaning to me, favorite places of my ex-husband's, the place we ate at right after our wedding, etc. It was memory processing in overdrive, exactly what I had been hoping for.
When I came back to Germany in September I was certain of two things: I was going to move back to the US, I had felt home the moment I stepped out on the street in Portland. Also, I knew that I was done with cooked food. I transitioned back into an all raw diet more slowly this time. I knew now that the 80-10-10 had had a disastrous effect on my health and started eliminating sugars from my diet, including fruit, in order to cleanse from Candida. I started eating Maca and Cacao over the summer and now added more superfoods and anti-Candida foods and supplements. By October 1st I had transitioned into a 100% raw and superfood diet and felt terrific about it.
The Wurzelkongress in October was amazing and accelerated my emotional cleansing journey by helping me release many false negative thoughts about myself. I came back feeling better than I have had in a decade, both physically and emotionally. I have been slowly adding more superfoods to my diet and am noticing changes almost on a daily basis. I started to realize in October that my vision had improved. I didn't really acknowledge it at first since I have never had eye problems, never needed glasses. But I went from having good eyes to having fantastic eye-sight. I don't know how many times I have asked myself if the fall foliage has always been this colorful and why the grass is so much greener than it has ever been before. I am still not used to this change and continue to be amazed at the sharpness of objects and the clarity of things.
I am also still releasing emotions and detoxifying from mercury fillings that I had removed recently by a dentist who was not careful about it. Mercury is also one of many factors in chronic Candida. At this point I am experimenting with different foods and superfoods, finding the balance between getting plenty of nourishment but not detoxifying too quickly. A year ago I suffered from muscle weakness so severe that I could barely walk. Only a few months ago I needed a minimum of 10 hours of sleep per night. At this point I am pretty much back to normal and I am having to remind myself to be patient and gracious with myself for not having returned to the level of fitness I once had.
Last year I would have estimated my age to be somewhere in the 50s if I hadn't known my birthday. Now I am starting to feel my age again, but am getting glimpses of feeling even younger. I am sleeping less again, sometimes even less than the 8-9 hours I have needed since I was a teenager. I also have more mental clarity and focus most of the time. I am impatient about really getting into shape again, being able to exercise and hike and do all of the things I love, but I am thankful that I have come this far in just one year. And most of all I have gained something I thought I'd never have again a year ago: unbelievable gratefulness and a very strong desire to get out there and LIVE!
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