sometimes i feel so alive it just about breaks my heart

I’ve been on a pretty rigorous eating schedule for a while, now. It’s getting easier to eat six or seven small meals and snacks throughout the day. I still struggle with motivation and remembering to stick to my schedule. I kept a food diary for four months earlier this year and now I’m starting to track my calories so I can get a clearer idea of whether I’m meeting my body’s needs.

I have to eat pretty continuously or my mood is severely affected. Five months of extensive experimentation seems to bear out the conclusion that most of my emotional distress stems from hunger. This is demonstrated by finding immediate relief from feelings of doom every time I eat. Or, at least, every time I eat the right foods in the proper quantity. I wake up having a hypoglycemic reaction, which subsides as soon as I eat breakfast. If I miss a snack, it’s only a matter of minutes before catastrophe takes hold in my soul. On the other hand, when I follow my schedule and eat all day, I am happy and bubbly and fun.

Articles on hypoglycemia and starvation (e.g. the Minnesota Starvation Experiment) list symptoms of hunger that align exactly with my own feelings of doom. Some of these include forgetfulness, difficulty concentrating, inner trembling, heart palpitations, weakness, lightheadedness, fatigue, headaches, nervousness, mood swings, anxiety, depression, crying spells, irrationality, insomnia, social withdrawal and isolation, and sensitivity to noise and light.

Having food poisoning for almost a week in early August helped me see clearly just how much of my anxiety is related to being hungry (answer: pretty much all of it). Every time I was able to eat, I felt fantastic, even if I got sick afterward. When I wasn’t able to eat for a day or two, I just cried and cried.

The girl says I can’t reach self-actualization because I keep falling off the pyramid (Maslow’s hierarchy of needs) by getting hungry. I think it’s fun that Maslow came up as part our dinner table humor.

Evolution betrayed me, I say. People get hungry multiple times per day! If everyone got suicidally depressed every time they missed snack time, humans would no longer exist on this planet.

Fortunately for me, evolution recognizes adaptation as a valid survival strategy.

And so I eat.

The image shows a plate of lamb curry and rice that I ate at Burma Superstar in San Francisco. Yum!

Still getting settled after my trip to San Francisco. Got to see “Wicked” at the Orpheum and went to the California Academy of Science, which was lots of fun for museum-deprived me.

Eating out was something of a nightmare, partly because people are unbelievably ignorant about what goes into the foods they cook or serve and partly because I’m still shy about asking.

Going to Burma Superstar was fantastic, of course. I love Burmese cuisine, and I got a fantastic lamb curry and shared the tea leaf salad with my companion. By a happy accident, we arrived before they opened and were the first to be seated as the line extended down the block.

For the most part, though, I’m still waiting for my body to recover. It’s a relief to be home where most of the food I eat is locally grown or raised and prepared in our own kitchen.

There’s a pool party roaring outside. We wandered down a bit ago. There was venison teriyaki, which I can’t have, salad that was already dressed, and ice cream cones.

Luckily for me, I live on Maui, so the homemade pineapple coconut ice cream was dairy-free and completely delicious. No cone for me, but that’s no problem.

Yummmm.

Slowly, day by day, I am training myself to mediate my anxiety with food.

This method is the reverse of conventional wisdom: we are taught not to eat when we’re upset. I’ve always been the type to lose my appetite when I’m stressed and, when I’m really stressed, to stop eating altogether. Being gluten- and lactose-intolerant (without realizing it) didn’t help matters: getting sick and losing energy after most meals meant not wanting to eat during the day. I thought eating itself was what made me feel awful, but I learned during my elimination diet that I can eat lots of things and feel fantastic…….just not wheat and dairy.

Several years ago, an ex-girlfriend would feed me when I started getting grumpy, and it helped, but I never realized how much my moods are connected to (not) eating until the last few months. Science doesn’t lie and the girl and boy have done extensive experiments with me to see what works and what doesn’t work with my body. The conclusion? I can keep a pretty even keel if I eat 5-7 times per day (approx. every two hours, beginning within an hour of waking). Missed meals lead to disaster: I get a headache, feel weak and exhausted, anxiety sets in, and pretty soon I am cranky and overwhelmed.

Even if I’d known how much of my anxiety was connected to hunger, I couldn’t have made these changes alone. Figuring out what to eat, acquiring and preparing food, avoiding foods that aren’t safe for me, and doing it all on schedule and on a budget is an immensely daunting task. Fortunately, I have tons of help every day.

My eating times are in the calendar, which pops up with an alarm on my phone to remind me. The girl does the meal planning and cooking every week, which is a huge gift for all of us. I get positive feedback when I follow my schedule.

In the beginning, it was hard. I would skip breakfast and snacks, especially on days off when my caloric requirements are less urgent. Then I’d get overwhelmed and have trouble putting food in my mouth because my pattern is that stress means not eating. It’s getting easier, though. I eat breakfast most days and am getting better at obeying my alarms. I try not to think about how much I’m eating or the fact that most of my life revolves around putting food in my mouth.

This morning was special because I never have Sundays off and the boy and I were going to sleep in. Unfortunately, I woke up at 4 a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep because of anxiety. Around 6 a.m., I remembered that I’m supposed to eat when I feel stressed, so I went to the kitchen, ate a bowl of cereal, and fell asleep as soon as I crawled back into the boy’s arms.

I think it will keep getting easier. I just have to stick with it and learn to trust that it really does work. Practice, practice.

Lots of changes over the last few months.

My new home is lovely. I am so happy here and I’m finding that I really enjoy living with people. I have a satisfying routine with plenty of structure, lots of loving and cuddles, good friends and a full social calendar.

Still working 45 hours/week on the farm, but I’ll be cutting down to 20 hours when school starts in September. I’m taking three core courses for my program on leadership and public policy. I’m so stoked about school.

My garden is gorgeous. I busted apart some container pallets to build a 3×6′ raised bed, installed a drip irrigation system on a timer, and planted my seeds and seedlings. The dwarf kale and chard are growing up so well and the lettuce exploded. Purple carrots and cabbage will take longer, but it’s so gratifying to watch.

Slowly making my way through Terry Pratchett’s, “The Wee Free Men,” with the girl and boy. I love the characters and the way Pratchett is so sharp about and accepting of human foibles. Reading aloud is a nice way to spend time together. I think Neil Gaiman’s, “The Graveyard Book,” should be next on our list.

I’m having a little more energy lately, so I’m hoping to post more often. I have my rss feeds on my iPhone and have been happily reading away every day, which is an enjoyable part of my life to have back since I’ve been spending so much less time on the computer.

Definitely enjoying my organized and efficient life. Yum.

So much has happened in the last few months. It’s thrilling and, now that things are finally settling, I’m exhausted.

The three biggest things are:
* I moved off the farm and in with the couple I have been dating since last July
* I applied to UMass Amherst’s University Without Walls continuing education program
* I get to start a vegetable garden!

I stayed up till 1 a.m. talking about art, medicine, and life with Ilana, who’s visiting from Santa Fe. I told her about my love of H.D. and Jon Piasecki (a landscape architect and stonemason). She told me about being an EMT, doing art, and showed me sandcastles that she and Luke made over the summer. Lovely.

I haven’t updated in a long time. I was really busy living and loving and trying not to turn on my computer more than necessary. That doesn’t mean I stayed off the internet, I just spent a lot of time using safari on my iPod touch or reading the New York Times on a friend’s laptop while lying around in bed. I think I need to start writing here again and I was able to register my old domain and I have the WP app, so let’s see if this will work.

Life has been delicious since I last posted. I’m smitten with some new folks and playing with them has been taking up most of my free time. It’s completely yummy and I feel embodied, radiant, comfortable, and cared about.

I was cleaning up goat shit yesterday, working hard and sweating in the sunshine, and I felt profoundly happy to be doing what I was doing. It pleases me to know that we put so much effort into maintaining clean, safe, and pleasant spaces for our animals. I like that my bosses care and that we care enough to be thorough and attentive.

A friend of mine’s father has two first fresheners from our farm. They are tremendously adorable and, for weeks, I went on about how sweet and peaceful they were. I relate so intensely to the goats, but I love our puppies, too, and the cats. Ramses comes out to feed with me on Saturday mornings–bounds in from the pastures to hang out while I scoop grain. It’s adorable to see the horde of yearlings rousing themselves from chewing cud to come get breakfast and there, among them, is a small gray cat moving as if he’s one of them. The puppies are growing into themselves. They love to play fight in front of the Golden Girls in the mornings. The boys wrestle on one side of the fence and all three girls stand on the other side, watching intently, stepping back if they get too close, completely focused on the performance.

I’m really happy.

Life is so tranquil, lately.

I have been seeing a lot of Gluten-Free Maui and her Nerd. They’ve had three parties in as many weeks, so I have been spending even more time in their fun company than usual. She is an amazing cook! Recently, her carrot-ginger soup with coconut roasted shrimp (Wednesday lunch) and sweet and sour chicken (Thursday dinner) blew me away.

Last Friday, we all went hiking at Twin Falls, which was the perfect amount of exercise and soaking-in of the scenery. I confess that when I hiked the Waihe’e Ridge Trail a few weeks ago, I sat for ages on the bench at the first switchback, just staring out over the valley and listening to the forest. It’s a five-mile hike, so one of these days I’m gonna go back and finish it, but even sitting can be enough.

I love the ambiance of the outdoors more than I enjoy the exercise. I like to imagine that I’m the kind of person who hikes 12 miles just to get warmed up, or that I ride my bike 40 miles just for a relaxing day at the beach (I know someone who does this–she has very nice legs), or even that I will get up at 5 a.m. and go for a run. In fact, I abhor exercise. I shun exercise in favor of sleeping. I do, actually, wake up at 5 a.m. most days, but I prefer to lie in bed with my eyes closed for as long as possible. The work I do is pretty physical, but only in a certain range of movements, and my back has been bothering me lately. Starting up yoga again would be the smart choice. I think about going to Spreckelsville’s baby beach with my yoga mat at night and stretching as the sun goes down. I’ve done it and it was glorious. Unfortunately, I may be too lazy to ever do it regularly. Self-discipline: I lack it.

This past Saturday, I left the farm early in the morning to go to Kihei. I txted my friend who lives in Maui Meadows and we ended up meeting for breakfast and then going to Makena under the pretense of watching the skim board competition. The surf wasn’t really up, so the heats were somewhat nonexistent, but we swam a little and it was nice. While I was on the South side, I made the final payment on my car, which felt good. I love having a vehicle.

This coming weekend, I’m going to drag my lazy self out of bed early to go watch the sunrise from the top of Haleakala.

Sometimes, it’s still hard to remember that I’m not on the mainland, that this is Maui, that life is safe and sane and slow here.  It’s nice.

Life has been busy since I last updated.

Monday, one of our goats with CAE, had her disgustingly cute kid on April 24th. Prior to birth, Monday looked like a C-141 ready to take off and we placed bets on how many kids she was going to pop out. Most of us figured at least four, but then she went into labor and had one scrawny little boy, featured in the photo. To prevent transmission of the disease, we took the kid away immediately and hand-raised him and oh hell! I fell in love. Of all the kids we’ve had this year, Colt is definitely my boy. Sure, Funny still remembers my smell from when I slept in the barn stall with her when she was sick, but Colt would come running when he heard my voice. He followed me all over the farm and we could spend whole afternoons just chilling in the shade somewhere–me reading, him chewing on my book and napping with his head on my lap. Now he’s all grown up, gonna be a stud and get all the ladies. I wish I had a zillion photos and videos of him at all different stages of his life and our relationship. He’s my baby and I’m so proud of his gentle disposition. Lately, he’s been living with kids a month younger than he is & he hasn’t been a bully at all. They chew on his ears and climb on him and, sure, sometimes he pushes them away, but mostly he tolerates them.

Eight of our nine yearlings had their kids toward the end of last month. For a while, they were just a pain in the butt because they are still teenagers and knew nothing about being milked. One really cute thing was when Tsunami would drink her own milk–she’s small enough that she could just reach back and suck her own teats and the thrill that went across her face when she discovered this was hilarious and sweet. Used to be that I dreaded milking the yearlings because they balked and kicked and didn’t know where to put their heads, but lately I find myself appreciating how adorable they are. They’re so little, still, and kind of stupid and precious.

We decided to hand-raise the yearlings’ kids because the moms weren’t doing so well. What’s really funny is that a couple of the kids–one in particular, still–look like victims of famine. One girl is so tiny and her eyes just bulge out of her head and are pink all around. Her belly is always full, she just has the appearance of a starving creature. And one of the boys refused to drink out of the bowl for weeks, so we bottle-fed him and it was insanely cute. He was such a good drinker and his tail would just get going, and then our little Rosebud with wattles discovered that she could push him off the bottle and drink it herself and we kinda encouraged that because it was so cute. Now everything’s business as usual. Easy. Everybody’s growing up.

I’ve been trying to go hiking on my days off.  This has been met with limited success.  I went to Twin Falls and Waihe’e Ridge so far, and I’ve been at it for three weeks.  My social schedule kind of interferes.  I want to be the kind of person who goes hiking, the kind of person who goes to the beach and gets some sun.  I do go to the beach from time to time.  This weekend was the Maui Film Festival and I volunteered, went to some shows at the Celestial Cinema.  I was kind of disappointed by the lineup this year, but it was fun anyway.  Life is busy.