It feels horribly absurd to say, "Have a sweet new year" right now, when everything is the opposite of sweet. I have a story about the last time I felt that way.
After spending two years getting sicker and sicker and losing more and more weight, while utterly failing to convince any doctors that I had a problem that was not psychosomatic, anxiety, hypochondria, or anorexia, I made a Hail Mary and flew to Bulgaria to get some tests done that doctors wouldn't do here, because they thought the problem was my head and I thought it was somewhere in my abdomen.
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eglantiere had offered to put me up for a couple weeks while I got the tests done. But once I got there, things got complicated, and I ended up staying in her bedroom for three months. Possibly the single lowest point of my entire life was waking up after surgery and being informed that Leonard Cohen had died, my cat had died, Trump was now President, and the surgeon showing me an abnormal growth he'd removed, then saying, "But I don't think it could have caused all your symptoms, so clearly it's all in your head. You should see a psychiatrist."
In the middle of all this, Rosh Hashanah happened. I honestly don't think I'd have even remembered it, let alone cared, but I got sat down in the kitchen and fed apples and honey. I weighed eighty pounds - I'd lost a third of my starting body weight by then, enough to make doctors stop telling me I wasn't actually underweight and start accusing me of having an eating disorder I was refusing to cop to. I ate a slice or two thinking how utterly, horribly absurd it was to say, "L'shanah Tovah" - "Have a sweet year" when I was absolutely not going to have a sweet year, ever again.
What happened in the next year is a long, complicated story. But, more or less as a result of the data from the Bulgaria trip,mildred_of_midgard got an idea for a medication I might try, one for inflammatory bowel disease - which is what the Bulgarian scans suggested I had, even though the doctors later said that actually, they showed I had a head problem.
And it worked.
And it's still working.
The doctors still mostly believe I'm delusional and the fact that an IBD medication makes my symptoms vanish is proof of the placebo effect. I now avoid doctors as much as possible, and in my case I think that's the better of two evils.
So I did have a sweet new year after all, or at least a year with sweet parts, which was something I hadn't had for two years. And the next year was sweeter still. And I went back to Bulgaria, sixty pounds heavier and a thousand pounds of misery lighter, and stayed witheglantiere and swam and explored and ate and had a wonderful time. It was very, very sweet.
Even this year, which has been objectively horrible in every way, has had a lot of sweet parts for me personally. When your point of comparison is "the years that I was dying in agony and kept getting abused by authority figures who had the power to help me but refused to because they thought I was an obnoxious lunatic," a lot of objectively bad things look good in comparison.
I did Passover over Zoom and it was depressing. Jewish holidays shouldn't be celebrated alone. But I've formed a bubble with Halle, so I'm going to her place to eat and drink (heavily, for me anyway) and celebrate and watch the Emmys and wish each other a sweet new year.
I've been thinking of my horrible Rosh Hashanah in Bulgaria all day, because it was so bitter at the time and even imagining anything getting better felt like a cruel lie. It feels the same way today, though then the stakes were very small and personal (one life, my own) and now they're very big and communal (one nation, maybe one world).
I don't know what's going to happen, but because of those sad apples a few years ago, I now know: I don't know what's going to happen. Maybe there will be surprising sweetness to come. It's no less impossible than me surviving and being happy again.
L'Shanah Tovah! May you have a sweet New Year.
After spending two years getting sicker and sicker and losing more and more weight, while utterly failing to convince any doctors that I had a problem that was not psychosomatic, anxiety, hypochondria, or anorexia, I made a Hail Mary and flew to Bulgaria to get some tests done that doctors wouldn't do here, because they thought the problem was my head and I thought it was somewhere in my abdomen.
eglantiere had offered to put me up for a couple weeks while I got the tests done. But once I got there, things got complicated, and I ended up staying in her bedroom for three months. Possibly the single lowest point of my entire life was waking up after surgery and being informed that Leonard Cohen had died, my cat had died, Trump was now President, and the surgeon showing me an abnormal growth he'd removed, then saying, "But I don't think it could have caused all your symptoms, so clearly it's all in your head. You should see a psychiatrist."In the middle of all this, Rosh Hashanah happened. I honestly don't think I'd have even remembered it, let alone cared, but I got sat down in the kitchen and fed apples and honey. I weighed eighty pounds - I'd lost a third of my starting body weight by then, enough to make doctors stop telling me I wasn't actually underweight and start accusing me of having an eating disorder I was refusing to cop to. I ate a slice or two thinking how utterly, horribly absurd it was to say, "L'shanah Tovah" - "Have a sweet year" when I was absolutely not going to have a sweet year, ever again.
What happened in the next year is a long, complicated story. But, more or less as a result of the data from the Bulgaria trip,
mildred_of_midgard got an idea for a medication I might try, one for inflammatory bowel disease - which is what the Bulgarian scans suggested I had, even though the doctors later said that actually, they showed I had a head problem. And it worked.
And it's still working.
The doctors still mostly believe I'm delusional and the fact that an IBD medication makes my symptoms vanish is proof of the placebo effect. I now avoid doctors as much as possible, and in my case I think that's the better of two evils.
So I did have a sweet new year after all, or at least a year with sweet parts, which was something I hadn't had for two years. And the next year was sweeter still. And I went back to Bulgaria, sixty pounds heavier and a thousand pounds of misery lighter, and stayed with
eglantiere and swam and explored and ate and had a wonderful time. It was very, very sweet.Even this year, which has been objectively horrible in every way, has had a lot of sweet parts for me personally. When your point of comparison is "the years that I was dying in agony and kept getting abused by authority figures who had the power to help me but refused to because they thought I was an obnoxious lunatic," a lot of objectively bad things look good in comparison.
I did Passover over Zoom and it was depressing. Jewish holidays shouldn't be celebrated alone. But I've formed a bubble with Halle, so I'm going to her place to eat and drink (heavily, for me anyway) and celebrate and watch the Emmys and wish each other a sweet new year.
I've been thinking of my horrible Rosh Hashanah in Bulgaria all day, because it was so bitter at the time and even imagining anything getting better felt like a cruel lie. It feels the same way today, though then the stakes were very small and personal (one life, my own) and now they're very big and communal (one nation, maybe one world).
I don't know what's going to happen, but because of those sad apples a few years ago, I now know: I don't know what's going to happen. Maybe there will be surprising sweetness to come. It's no less impossible than me surviving and being happy again.
L'Shanah Tovah! May you have a sweet New Year.