Well, really, more some PCOS talk. I read yesterday over at Jezebel about this study in Sweden that links exercise and electro-acupuncture to a fixing of PCOS.
And, y’all, it made me very angry.
Not the good self-righteous anger where you know you’re right and the world is wrong and god damn it, folks had better start listening to you–you know the kind of anger that drives good blog posts. But just a kind of ill-defined anger.
I thought at first that it was like the anger I sometimes still feel when I think about how sick I was that Fall of 2000 and no one could figure out what was wrong with me and I had to endure the lecture from that nutjub gyneocologist about how God does not like to give children to fat women.
I thought at first maybe it was like the anger I feel when I think about how, my whole life, I have been told I need to lose weight if I want to find a man or have any kind of life, over and over, by family and doctors, some who saw what I ate and how it wasn’t any more than what anyone else in my family ate (and was, for a while, much much less), and others who just assumed I was lying.
I thought it was like that anger, but now I think it is that same anger.
I know it’s not what the study says, but I feel like it’s more of this “if only you had tried harder, exercised more, stuck pins in the right places, you wouldn’t be in this position and you wouldn’t need medication.” In other words, I still read that as “this is not something you have, but evidence of how you have fundimentally fucked up running your life.”
Like being on medication is somehow an indication that I have failed to handle it myself.
And again, I know that’s not what it’s saying, but just how I feel.
I don’t know. I know I don’t talk about it much, but basically because, for me, there’s not that much to say. I mean, it goes without saying that I’m tickled to not have debilitating cramps or three week long periods after three months of nothing. I’m really kind of enjoying how I feel, how exercise now just makes me tired and sore and doesn’t make me feel like I want to throw up and then die and then throw up again. I like that, if I’m late eating, I just feel a little woozy, but not grouchy and sick.
It’s hard to explain, but I feel like my body just works differently.
But the thing I’m struggling with the most is still that old fairytale of “If only I tried hard enough and did all the right things, I’d be rewarded with a thin body.” That’s not happening. And I have really kind of enjoyed the last year, since the diganosis and the medication, of feeling like “eh, well, there never was/is going to be any ‘trying hard enough’ because there’s something wrong with me.”
It’s been kind of nice, like this truce with my body.
But I read stuff like this and it just makes me feel like it’s wrong for me to declare a truce.
It’s funny, you know. I can’t breathe. I never have been able to, from the time I was very little. I’ve had pneumonia six times. I can hear a little unhappiness now when I breathe from all the smoke this weekend.
But I never feel like my shitty lungs are a reflection on my worth as a human being.
It just is what it is. Maybe there just wasn’t enough time between bouts when I was little to ever let them heal properly. Maybe I was breathing something in my environment that aggrevated them. Who knows? Who cares? You know? Having shitty lungs does not make you a shitty person.
And I know that having this body does not make me a shitty person, but frankly, I feel really angry that I have to remind myself of that as often as I do.
Tiny Cat Pants 