In May, I crashed. To describe it: crushing fatigue, POTS, many debilitating symptoms. You can’t function.

In July, I collapsed one night at the bathroom sink. I lay on the floor wondering if I was passing out. Everything slowed, I sweated. After a few minutes, I crawled to bed alerting my husband. I dared not even raise my head through the night.

In early August I ordered a potty chair for downstairs. In later August I gave up going downstairs to the couch during the day.

I did not come down again til shortly before Thanksgiving. That was three months in my bed.

Sometimes I tried relocating to a mattress in another room across the hall for a bit. Sometimes that made me ill because of too much sun there.

I was trying virtual therapy to help me be mentally able to travel to my son’s wedding in a few months. During the sessions, I would sit up a little, semi upright on my wedge pillow. But before the session ended, I had to get flat. It made me worse to slightly raise myself. Not to mention, getting through that length of session interacting and talking was too much.

Long story short, I missed my son’s wedding. 

I tried to start knitting because it was a craft I could do laying down. The next day my upper body hurt and I had crashing fatigue.

Keeping clean was worst of all. I could not stand up to shower. I could not lay in the tub. Either made me so ill. For awhile, I tried washing zones of myself at a time at the sink. For a time, I sat on the tub side and washed somewhat.

Finally, we devised a system. That other mattress on the floor across the hall was covered in a plastic case. I washed myself there with a series of plastic tubs.

But the hair! My inability to wash my hair was demoralizing. It really brought home to me that I was an invalid. I put it off as long as possible, then used our basin system, washing my hair lying down. I thought about shaving my head very seriously.

This was months of rolling crashes. Once, earlier than August,  I cleaned up my bureau top. I crashed. Being upset made me crash. Temps over 73 made me crash. Moving too much made me crash.

Lying in bed all day, I was crashing.

I couldn’t tolerate people coming in to talk with me for very long. I couldn’t tolerate my beautiful sweet granddaughter running in the hall. Interaction was too much.

I would pray sincerely that I could go to the bathroom and get back and be OK. The bathroom is right next to my room. We moved the potty into my room! 

I would pray to begin feeling alright when I was just lying there; that was a major GOAL. Because I could be lying in bed 24/7 and keeping quiet, and feel dreadful, so ill.

It seemed an impossible dream that I could reach a state where I could be up puttering around my house again. I prayed for that , after a long time praying for the next tiny thing.

So I can map the trajectory of that crash. I became ill in late May, after several triggers together.

I continued to DECLINE for two months, until I almost passed out in the bathroom. I further continued to decline until I think I bottomed out in late August. I gave up and stayed in bed. I struggled to just maintain while experiencing multiple rolling crashes. 

I thought a lot about how it had been in earlier long term crashes. And I realized that there are different states. There’s the state of rolling crashes, in which EVERYTHING you do spends money you don’t have, so you make yourself sicker just being.

Then there is a state of stability. It may take months of dedicated rest, but you may reach a place where mere existing doesn’t cost you. You notice that:

 1.  lying there feels OK, and 

2.   you can exert yourself slightly…without crashing. 

You can rest, then carefully DO. Then rest. Pace yourself.

So sometime in the fall, I reached stability. It was shaky, and not totally linear. I came downstairs about a week before Thanksgiving. It was weird and scary to be down there. But I was downstairs during the day again, though still living on the couch.

I managed to decorate for Christmas, slowly, in little bursts. I attended Christmas dinner,  which I did not cook, in the adjoining room, but I had to lay down on the couch mid-meal. Christmas Eve had been almost normal for me, but I paid for it next day, resting between Christmas morning and coming down for our guests in the afternoon. My kids went to my sister’s house for Part 2 but we watched a movie at home, feet up.

I missed my daughter’s baby shower, though it was five minutes away by car. This was in late March.

My son’s wedding wasn’t until April. I could in no way travel there, nor tolerate the event. 

My granddaughter’s second birthday party was the last thing I went to, the last place I went before crashing. The next place I went, the first thing I went to after my Crash, was the same granddaughter’s third birthday. Her birthday is early May.

So it was a year.

I still had a long slow road to functionality after that. I walk a tightrope every day.

View sta

Lower your cortisol levels.

For every waking minute from 1985 til 2018 I was mentally aware of the location and condition of six children. Now I should …just…relax.

Oh ok.

If you are vocal on social media,

and today,

you have anything at all to say about Musk

or coups

but nothing at all to say about Shiri, Ariel and Kfir

on this day of all days,

you need to shut down your social media

it has betrayed you.

And be ashamed.

If you can look at Yarden Bibas, freed from captivity, and not see a demonstration of pure inhumanity, you are in a cult which romanticizes terrorism.

This man has been freed BEFORE his wife and two toddlers, not knowing their condition dead or alive. He is unable to speak about them for fear. The terrorists are dangling the possibility of his family’s return before him, using his hopes as their leverage.

Do you understand now? They are using the hostages still in captivity against, using them to torture, the ones who they are forced to let go.

We are all running the awful possibilities over in our minds, and hoping for a good one. At least those of us with an ounce of simple humanity are. That’s manipulation of the whole world. It’s a demonstration of peak cruelty.

And we are seeing that they are not afraid to play this evil tactic.
If you won’t wake up now, you never will.

I am a woman. Everywhere, from everywhere, I see the complaints that a woman is dismissed and discredited. That we still have to fight for equal validation to men.

I know it’s sometimes true. And I see young women become man haters, simply said, as a consequence.

But here is the hard truth from my own experience. The invalidation I receive is from feminist women. They deny me full personhood. They do not allow that I am a whole person, with their permission to freely express my thoughts or to act upon them.

It’s feminists who shut me down.

I have written and published my thoughts for many years, but now I must remain silent, and culpable for my silence when speaking out is really needed.

It’s 9am and I have already been told, “Fuck you, FUCK YOU” by someone who, in the same post, declares they have always been for empathy and others.

There are 2 items. If you cannot find the simple will to condemn them, I have no responsibility to respect your moral standing on anything else.

— the legal killing of unborn children

—the violent sexual torture—to the point of death—of civilian women and children because of their ethnicity/faith

These are basic. You don’t get points for defending someone less needy than these until you care about these.

If you are rationalizing, excusing or whatabouting these unjust and cruel acts, you are morally irrational and no one is obligated to listen to you.

Why you ask

did he require blood and death?

Sacrifice?

The abuse of his child?

What you have to understand is this:

The innocent love

Humans took him and accused him, punished him, 

tortured hated killed

And buried him.

Put him away from us.

Why, you ask.

Because what we did

shows what we are

and what we made of his world.

What we do to love

Innocence

Kindness

Good.

Not some hooligans

But the best people.

Institutional humanity.

That’s why.

That’s who we are

Who he is

Why it has to be this way.

Because of us.