All Mixed Up

A few weeks ago, I had a major mishap with my blog. As a result, most of the almost 600 posts were temporarily taken down and reposted. The blog is now all jumbled up and most posts have lost their photos. I'm sorry to all of you who may have recieved alerts erroneously, and thanks to those of you for the well wishes (the horse mishap was back in 2020 and the ocular shingles incident was in 2021!)

I was in a panic at the time it happened, but like most things that first appear as a fire to fight but are not actual fires, I quickly came to see the size of the problem. No one was hurt, or died, and nothing of real value lost. This event has given way to ease, and I can see that it has been helpful and important, for nothing else would have made me go back and look at all those old posts! I can see through the lens of my writing how my life and perspectives have shifted, over these some fifteen years.

In its infancy, this blog began as a way to help me make sense of my mind. You see, back in 2011, it had been muddied through a serious case of encepholitis (inflammation of the brain), brought on by food poisoning that proved to be a life threatening assault to an ailing liver. We were on a family trip to Belgium for my brother-in-law's wedding where I ate a few mussels, triggering several days of mind-blowing vomiting, dehydration, and ultimately blood poisoning and brain inflammation. This left me in a state of confusion and lunacy. I was not making sense, and mixing up objects, like baby's passifier with a hair clip; a banana for toast. I could not dress myself and vasciallated between hysteria and panic from one moment to the next. I even convinced the nurse at the Belgian hospital, where I was admitted with some urgency, to draw blood from my ankle vein. That was painful. I eventually was transferred by Eurostar to the Royal Free Hospital in London, where I stayed for several days, as my mind settled into a less jumbled state. I was left with a deep mistrust of my words and thoughts, of my brain and body. The idea to write a blog, came as a way to help my mind create comprehensible sentences and to have at least and audience of one, who could help me keep track of my cognition.

Once the blog got started, I relied heavily on my yoga practice as a place of reflection and inspiration for content. I reported on the classes I was teaching and attending, commented on the Sutras, the Gita, and other yogic texts that were helping me to make sense of the world, and myself.

Then, came liver failure. It was my blog that acted as a catalyst for me to communicate the burden I was carrying to students and friends alike. I had been living with Ulcerative Colitis for decades, and this led to secondary illness, called Primary Schlerosing Cholangitis, which resulted in liver cirrosis. This diagnosis carred a great deal of shame and embarrassment for me, from the time I was three, right up until I wrote about it on this blog. I largely had kept my conditiona a secret up to that point, and as scary as it was to write about needing a liver transplant, there was a freedom in it, too. It too me courage it took me to write that post. It came with many tears, and the realisation of what was happening in my body, and what survival would entail. For the better part of the next year, most of my posts were from a hospital bed, where I wrote on my mobile phone, as it was the days before widespreat WiFi. The blog became my link to the outside world, my mechanism for unravelling emotions such as shame, anger and sadness, and a key to seeing my illness as something bigger - as a teacher that might help me, and others. I wrote about temporality, illness, uncertainty, and also the mystery and beauty of life.

Over the years, as my life hit twists and turns, and my blog entries changed, too. As I notice myself aging, I am less open to sharing everything going on with my health, and am more careful sticking to the things I know to be true, rather than ideas that may have come from someone else. I see how I relate to my work, and my clients differently, and acutely aware of how my environment has played a role in that. On top of this, I am more aware of a continuous change cycle, and am excited about travelling down a new path, with the teachings of Peter Levine through Somatic Experiencing. Life is on a continuum, with peaks and valley that we can choose to navigate in any given way. My illness has played a role both in the landscape I traverse, and the choices I have made, helping and times, and hindering me at others, on my onward passage.

Whether you are new to this blog, or have been reading it for some time, thank you for your attention, and for your patience as I sort out the writings of the past. Thank you for sharing in my life experience. All theses years later, I still write for the same reason, to check in on myself. To see If I'm making sense. Though maybe the Talking Heads were right, maybe its time to stop.