Category: sensitive girl

I’m All Out of Vices

A Tale of Involuntary Clean Living



Photo by Edward Howell on Unsplash

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February of 2020 proved to be the convergence of a lot of change. The big one we all know. That one is still impacting our lives over three years later.

But little did I know that would also be the final act of my monthly cycle. Yep, February 2020 was the official start of my menopause. Since menopause is defined by going a full year without a period, I could only know that February 2020 was the last one twelve months later. Had I known I might have lit a candle. Baked a cake. Held a Bon Voyage party.

What I also didn’t know in February 2020 was that it would be the last time my hairdresser and dear friend would put color in my hair. I began growing out my gray roots in those strange COVID times and just kept going. I’m still not sure I embrace my gray, but it’s mine.

Turns out February 2020 was a significant inflection point for the world and for me.

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My monthly cycles had always been at best uneasy and at worst downright awful. They were so regular I could set a watch by them, but in my early twenties I was diagnosed with mittleschmerz which is just a German way of saying ‘middle pain.’

This meant very painful ovulations in the middle of each cycle. This pain would last my entire adult life. Bonus? I always knew when I was ovulating. Downside? Every time I ovulated it made me hurt so bad I wanted to throw up.

In my thirties, I was also diagnosed with Premenstrual Dysmorphic Disorder, or PMDD. To call it a severe form of PMS is to call a tornado a severe form of wind. The PMDD was a 28-day mental, physical, and emotional roller coaster ride where I felt good for about four to five of those days.

I remember back then thinking how menopause was going to be great. I couldn’t wait to get rid of these awful monthly cycles of agony. Not having periods meant no more pain and the end of the hormonal nightmare, right? It’s cute that I thought having no period would be a cakewalk.

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My hormones had so many more surprises in store. With the change came incredible joint pain. Overwhelming fatigue. Brain fog so bad at times I am still certain I have early-onset dementia despite being assured by my medical team that all is well.

I have read and researched and looked for help and I have found many women telling me “It doesn’t have to be so bad.”

Well, yes and no.

Traditional medicine doesn’t have a lot to say. My regular doctor sent me to a menopause specialist who gave me antidepressants for the hot flashes that I told her I only rarely had. She had little to say about the fatigue and memory issues and sent me away saying, “I hear yoga helps?”

Next, I tried a naturopath who did really listen and offered quite a lot of help. Within six months, my situation considerably improved. I was starting to feel better, and as the fog and pain eased, it became clear to me that in my fifties, it was finally time for me to do a much better job of taking care of myself. Something I had ignored for quite some time.

So, back to the regular doctor. “I actually want to exercise,” I told her, and I meant it. I began to eat better. I finally admitted that my lactose intolerance wasn’t something I could pretend I didn’t have.

Also, I grudgingly acknowledged that every time I ate bread products that I craved so much and my stomach bloated up and hurt that maybe, just maybe, I needed to stop ignoring that too.

I ate more vegetables. I vastly reduced the amount of sugar I consumed even though sugar and sugary food is my comfort. And then, something happened that I never could have imagined.

I stopped drinking.

I have never been a big drinker, but boy did I love a couple of glasses of red wine or maybe some bourbon at the end of the week. In menopause, how my body metabolized alcohol changed and I had to stop drinking just to see if it made me feel better, and it did.

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So here I am, still working on myself.

I’ve never been a fan of tobacco and nicotine. I’ve tried multiple forms of pot and didn’t like it. Anything harder than that is off the table. I don’t drink. I don’t eat wheat. I rarely eat cheese. I eat sugar but in far smaller amounts. I once had a thing for binge shopping but even that isn’t interesting anymore.

These days I find myself, curiously, without vices. Me, the person who chased all kinds of vices and comforts and mind-numbing agents for the first fifty years of my life.

This is so unexpected.

I often ask myself, “what will I do when I have that really bad day and I want to sink into something that will dull my mind?” And honestly, I don’t know anymore. Yeah, okay, I can get out a pint of oat milk ice cream but come on, the decadence factor just isn’t there.

What do I use to celebrate big news? Non-alcoholic spirits seem to be having a moment. I did try the Seedlip brand, and while tasty, it’s just never going to be that same warm numb feeling as pouring a glass of amber liquor.

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This isn’t a complaint, I guess. I feel better than I have in years. Someone commented recently that my face has changed. I haven’t lost any weight, but I think I am less puffy. Less inflamed.

Less inflammation means less joint pain. Less joint pain makes me rather content.

I have always been the type to seek food and drink and other mild to moderately addictive behavior as a way to comfort the aches and pains of everyday life. The past three years of my life have been filled with change and loss and grief.

So now, during what is arguably the most painful time of my life, no one is more surprised than me to find I no longer want to find ways to forget but rather I seek ways to stay present. To feel what I feel and figure out how to cope with that.

Huh. I’m evolving. It’s the weirdest (and most beautiful) damn thing. Who knew menopause would make me a better person?

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This post was originally published on Medium and more of my work can be found over there @karenfayeth.

Ella Knew Before We Did

Yesterday the masterful local DJ Miles Green served up a Zoom session that brought both hope and healing.

The theme of the day was optimism with music from mostly female artists to honor Women’s History Month.

Miles opened the set by saying, “We gotta get off this Zoom and get back together.”

Too right.

Interwoven with amazing rump-shaking throwback songs, from out of nowhere that singular voice of Ms. Ella Fitzgerald glided into the mix.

She sang the lyrics:

Zoom zoom zoom zoom
The world is in a mess
With politics and taxes
And people grinding axes
There’s no happiness

I almost came out of my chair. What did I just hear?

Wasn’t I lamenting Zoom fatigue just two days ago?

That’s right, friends. Ella knew it before we did.

Written by the Gershwin brothers, their recommendation from 1937 to slap that bass as a path to feeling better remains solid. And valid.

Slap that bass
Slap it till its dizzy
Slap that bass
Keep the rhythm busy
Zoom zoom zoom
Misery, you’ve got to go

So zoom zoom, my work-from-home weary friends.


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Ella Fitzgerald – “Slap That Bass”




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This item can also be found on Medium, and you can see more of my work @karenfayeth over there

Save the Ears, Save the Girl

Learning to manage my audiophobia

 

Photo by Jaee Kim and found on Unsplash

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I remember following my mother into a large department store in the Winrock Shopping Mall in Albuquerque, New Mexico. As the doors opened, I winced before stepping inside. I shuddered and pulled at my mom’s hand. There was a high-pitched noise and it hurt my ears. I mean really hurt.

My mom didn’t know what was going on with me on that particular day, but after it kept happening, she figured out that the security alarm in the store gave off a noise that most people couldn’t hear, but I could.

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I’ve always had sensitive ears. I like to blame it on the fact that I had a lot of ear infections when I was a baby and toddler, but maybe that is counterintuitive. As an adult, I had some ear issues and when an ENT looked deep into my ears they reported that I had a small scar on one of my eardrums. Likely due to all of those ear infections.

Then the doctor looked at my hearing test and commented that I have strange hearing. I hear very well at the very high end and at the very low end, beyond to so-called normal range, but my hearing in the mid-range is far less acute.

This personal auditory feature was endlessly annoying to the musician I once dated. I would pump up the bass and treble on my cheap aftermarket car stereo and drop the midrange. It sounded better to me. He was constantly fiddling with the equalizer to suit his ears dulled by years of standing in front of a guitar amp turned up to eleven. As soon as he exited my car I’d set it back.

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So to put it blunt terms, I have weird ears. I always have. I figured I would lose hearing capacity as I aged, and I do think that has happened some, but I still have ears like bat. At my, ahem, advanced age I can still hear those so called “mosquito” tones aimed at shooing away teenagers.

This also means that I have to manage my ears, which has come to my mind lately due to working from home every day and spending four to eight hours a day using Zoom. I share a space with my partner, so I have been using a good pair of in-ear headphones for the many, many Zoom meetings I attend each day. Those in-ear devices fit right up in there. Piping the sounds of Zoom very efficiently and forcefully to my eardrums.

At the end of last week I hit an audiophobic wall. After participating in a lot of work meetings it felt like my head and nerves were jangled. I found it hard to concentrate. I found myself restless. I found it hard to understand and respond to simple questions asked by my partner.

My immediate reaction was to chalk it up to stress, anxiety, and fatigue. And that is not completely wrong, but there was something more going on. I realized that my ears, my tender little ears, were overstimulated. I had hosted my coworker’s voices all up in my head all week long and I couldn’t stand one more sound agitating the cilia. Not one more.

Going outside and sitting in the sun for a little while helped. My neighborhood was gracious in its momentary silence, providing a sliver of peace. I could hear the birds in the trees. I could hear the unmistakable “toot toot” of a BART train in the distance. And I could hear no human voices. It was nice. More than nice, it helped me regain some sanity.

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I realize that Zoom meetings aren’t going away any time soon, and my ears aren’t changing anytime soon either. Better managing these adorable little audio problems on the sides of my head is going to be key.

A new set of over ear and noise cancelling headphones has arrived. Switching the types and timing of using each kind of headphone is being considered. Finding time to rest my ears at the end of the day is also being planned.

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Next, I need to figure out these hips joints that are tired and cranky from sitting in a not terrible chair in front of a Zoom screen all day long.

I love working from home, but it is not without some costs. Zoom fatigue is real.

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This item can also be found on Medium, and you can see more of my work @karenfayeth over there

My Fear of Flying

It never goes away, it can only be managed


Photo by Lucas Ludwig on Unsplash

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“I love to travel, I just don’t like what it takes to get there.” — Me, before every trip

Last week I was delighted to pack by bags and head out on a business trip on behalf of my employer. My job gives me the opportunity to travel once or twice a year and I am happy to get out of the office and on the road. I really do love to travel. Anywhere. Large, small, domestic, international, if there is travel to be done, I’m in.

Over my life I have traveled a lot, not the “gold status for a lifetime” kind of amount, more like 3–4 trips a year, sometimes more. I’ve seen quite a few countries, with a whole lot more to go.

My first plane ride was at seven years old. My mom, sister and I traveled to Oregon to visit my mom’s family. We flew to Salt Lake City, changed planes, then on to Portland. I remember the excitement, the thrill of the ride, the joy at seeing how lush and green Oregon was in comparison to Albuquerque.

I love seeing places I have never seen before, just as much as I love going back to a place I know and remembering all the things I like about it.

One thing that hasn’t changed over a lifetime of traveling: I’m moderately terrified of airplanes. Okay, to be fair, I am not a nervous flyer gripping the armrest like a life raft, but I do have trepidation every time I board a plane.

I’m usually cool as a cucumber getting to and through the airport, but once boarding is called and I am on the jetway, the reality of what I am about to do takes hold. To cope, I have to run through a well-practiced serious of thoughts to calm myself down enough so I don’t turn around and sprint back off the plane.

What I am saying is most of the time I do just fine. I’ve gotten used to your average passenger plane, three seats on each side, air safety is pretty good, all of that. But it’s still a hard thing for me to give up all control of my fate, pack my ample curves into an narrow and uncomfortable seat, accept being sealed inside a tin can, and allow one human being to pilot me and my fellow passengers high into the air.

Every once in a while, my travels throw me a curveball. A few years ago I was beyond excited to be asked to travel to Porto, Portugal. I think I said yes so fast I broke the time-space continuum and said yes before my boss even asked the question.

However, when the day of travel arrived what I found waiting at the airport gate was the largest passenger plane I had ever seen in my life. I actually started laughing out loud. “I am not getting on that thing,” I said to nobody but myself.

A plane so large it needed a special gate at the airport to load. Called an Airbus A380–800, it’s occasionally referred to as a whale. This plane has two floors. It has an actual staircase inside. I mean, come on now.

Airbus A380 on MAKS 2011. Image from Wikipedia and used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

 

I had to sit down and really, really ask myself if I was going to willingly get on that plane and ride for the eleven hours needed to get to Frankfurt. On the logical side of my brain, I reminded myself of watching loaded C-130s take off from a nearby military airfield, so I knew this plane was possible. The dimensions of the thing were just more than my brain could take.

Well, this past week, I had the opposite problem. After flying from San Francisco to Houston, I was to board a small regional plane that would get me over to Knoxville. I have flown very small planes before, including one bumpy ride on a terribly noisy turboprop, but for some reason I was not prepared for the plane that awaited me at the gate.

An Embraer Air ERJ-145, new, shiny, sleek, and terrifying. I texted my husband this photo with the caption “aw, shit.”

Photo by the author, ©2019 Karen Fayeth

I knew I was going to be flying a small plane to Knoxville, I’d even made a joke a few weeks back about “Flying on a La Bamba plane.” When faced with the reality of the situation, the joke just wasn’t funny anymore.

When the glass door opened and I stepped out onto the tarmac, I began to run through my usual mental roll call of thoughts: “You are going to be fine, you don’t have to get on this plane if you don’t want to, these are professionals who do this every day, planes are very safe, you are safe, but you have choices.” And so on like that.

I locked up pretty good, but given my stubborn nature, I refused to let myself balk. I gamely walked up the ramp, got my stuff stowed, and crammed into the seat. I texted my husband, “I’m in my seat. I think I’m now wearing this airplane,” as it certainly felt snug about the hips.

This plane has two seats on one side and one seat on the other but is fairly comfortable. I was lucky to be on the one seat side, enjoying both a window and the aisle.

Once the doors were shut, I immersed myself in my book and did my best not to think too much about it.

If my trip to Frankfurt was riding a whale, to Knoxville I rode a sardine, and in both instances got there safely, on time, and no worse for the wear.

Look, fears and anxieties aren’t always rational, that’s kind of the point. I know flying is very safe, but my mind still has an awful lot of questions about the wisdom of being 30,000 feet above the surface of sweet, sweet Mother Earth.

One upside? The Sardine had nice big windows, all the better to capture a Tennessee sunset above the clouds.


Photo by the author, ©2019 Karen Fayeth

Taking Myself Way Too Seriously

What follows is me working out some “stuff” up there in the ol’ brain pan. A bit indulgent to do this publicly, but maybe putting it out there helps someone else. Or makes me accountable for my own crap. Either way.

So here it is… I have been taking part in a Flickr group that challenges its members to do a new macro photo every week based on a theme the moderators choose.

I started participating on December 4th with this photo:



©2018 Karen Fayeth

I felt clever. Sassy. Like my photo was more creative and of better quality than the others in the group. Go me! I was rewarded with well over one hundred faves in the first day. Hey, fun!

So I kept going. Each week working hard and having fun doing these weekly photo challenges. Creating a new image every week. Some weeks I worked really hard (or agonized) over executing my idea.

Other weeks it came easy to me, I snapped a photo that was exactly what I wanted and went on about my day.

But always having fun and not taking it too seriously.

Until two weeks ago. Two weeks ago I stopped having fun and got deadly (overly) serious about my weekly photo entry.

Let me back up. This Flickr group is huge, over 13,000 members. Each Monday between 800 to 1,200 photos are posted for the theme. This means in order to function, the group must be tightly moderated. And it is. Tightly.

I both like and respect that there are heavily enforced rules for the group. But I also HATE it because I’m an *artist* and The Muse can’t be contained by your silly rules. I should be able to break them because MY work is the best.

Yeah, okay. I own it. I got weird. I hate it when I get weird.

The week’s theme was monochromatic, and I turned this one in:



©2018 Karen Fayeth

I really like this photo. I worked hard on it and felt really good about it. I feel like I did something worthwhile. Artistic.

Less than ten minutes after adding it to the group, a moderator pulled it, telling me “This is not monochromatic, I can see both brown and green.”

I seethed. I stewed. I started looking at other photos in the group and found SEVERAL that also had tiny bits of another color that made it through the moderator’s net.

I bellowed about how unfair it was. I started making a list of all the other photos that were let through. I prepared to launch my vitriol on anyone who would listen and demand answers for my mistreatment. How could they hate my photo so much!?!?! (I know, I know)

Then I went to talk to The Good Man, and as I detailed all the ways I had been wronged, I heard myself. I listened to my words and realized…aw damn…I’d stopped having fun. I was this worked up over a photo on Flickr in a group where the only prize is some eyes seeing the photo and some faves.

Yeah. I hit the wall pretty hard. This came just a day after struggling with a story for a writing contest that just would not gel for me. I hadn’t given myself enough time to work on it and the story would not come together no matter how hard I tried. I tried to shotgun it and I failed hard. I did still turn in the story but I know it’s not good.

You see, I wasn’t mad at that stupid unfair moderator. I was mad at me.

And that’s no way to create. That is the antithesis of creativity. This dampens The Muse.

So I went all the way there and now I’m reeling myself back in. I swear. I sat my Muse and my brain down and we had a talk. Feelings were felt and admonitions were issued. Promises to be better. To loosen up. To remember why I do any of my creative work…to have fun. To let the creativity out. To create something.

And I’m better. I am. The following week I swore I wasn’t going to participate in the Flickr group again, but that was EXACTLY why I needed to get back in the game. So I made a photo based on the theme “in a bottle.”

Here’s my Valentine to myself. Green like the Hulk who gets very, very mad. Sweet like the victory of turning out a piece of art and something I really like. It also met the rules and made it past the moderators.



©2018 Karen Fayeth

Lesson learned. Scars formed. Exterior just a little bit tougher.

And this week? Try, try again.