#working on wellness

Feeling Sick

Chronic nausea is something I have suffered from for about 11 years.

When I stopped being able to breathe, about 6 years ago, I was living in an apartment with two roommates. Over time my ability to…. well breathe was compromised so often that I ended up in the emergency room. Thinking I had developed some sort of lung issue or asthma of some sort I went in thinking I would find out and be cured- only to discover that the truth was I was having such intense panic at all times that my body had gone sort of into shock and wasn’t allowing me to breathe without other (usual) physical or emotional symptoms. The other thing they guessed was some sort of chronic heartburn causing me to be nauseous all the time, yet exacerbated by the stress of the panic.

After a while I got the breathing under control, a symptom that still comes in week or month long waves when my stress and anxiety levels reach their peak, but the nausea and heartburn is something that has always truly escaped me. When I started feeling this way I never thought it would go on for so long, yet looking back, obviously it has.

Being ill is never easy. It took me so long to understand how my body was reacting to my moods, emotions, and especially what I ate.

I do believe for myself everything is such a delicate balance- I walk a tightrope of medication, therapy, and diet to try to keep myself from falling off, but I fall often, and often hard.

Today I feel so incredibly sick. The nausea and bodily discomfort is so horribly intense that I will without a doubt have to sit propped up against a wall of pillows to sleep. I’ll have to make sure I stay far away from trigger foods for quite some time, and really put more work into reminding myself that I don’t like to feel this way.

Tomorrow I go back to work, to work on my art, my apprenticeship, and my career.

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