Endings and Beginnings

The last time I posted to Caterpillar Equals "n" was now over a year ago. At the beginning of 2014, one of the goals I set myself was to post here at least once a month. Obviously, I failed pretty hard at that.

But I'm posting again now, for what is possibly the last time.

I started this blog in 2011, when I was sixteen. It's crazy now to think it's been four years since then. At the time, I felt so old. Looking back now, at twenty, sixteen sounds crazy young. But for two years of my life, I was posting here regularly. I worked hard at the posts I created, and I loved doing it. Even though I didn't garner a huge following, I did have some pretty loyal fans who would read all my posts. A lot of people would tell me how my blog posts made them laugh, and every time I heard that, I found it amazing. And totally worth the hours of work I put into each one. 

A lot has happened in the past year. Originally I had intended to make a Caterpillar Equals "n" post explaining what had kept me from this blog for so long, but when I sat down at the end of the year to write one, I found that a humour blog with badly-drawn MSPaint illustrations was no longer the way I wanted to express myself. I don't want to say I've outgrown this style of blogging or anything like that. I'm still proud of everything I've created on here. And who knows - maybe one day I'll come back to this, or to something like it. Anything can happen. I like to think that, while sometimes it's necessary to close doors in life, not all doors have to stay closed forever. You get me? Was that too emotional and poetic and shit? I'll try to refrain from sappy metaphors for the rest of this post.

Anyway, the point is, in many ways I am no longer the person I was when I started this blog. And that's only natural. In four years, especially this early in life, anyone is bound to change. A lot. Which is why I've decided to stop the false hope from stretching out even further by saying that for now, Caterpillar Equals "n" is at an end.

But it's not all bad news! While it may be the end for this blog, I'm hoping it's just the beginning for me in terms of blogging.

If you are still interested in keeping up with me, or at the very least, finding out a bit more about why I haven't been posting on here with any kind of regularity in the past two years, I'm excited to say that I'm starting a new blog. It's going to be very different to this one, but I'd love it if you at least wandered over and had a look. You can check it out here:

https://itsironbeth.wordpress.com/2015/02/01/hello-universe/

(I know, I know. I'm a WordPress traitor. I'm sorry, Blogspot. You were a good friend to me. It's nothing personal, I promise. WordPress is just a whole lot prettier.)

To wrap things up on a good note, I would like to say a huge and very sincere thank you to everyone who read, commented, supported me online and in real life, and kept bugging me about when I'd be making a new post. This blog received messages from fans I had never met in real life who really loved what I was creating. Kids at school used to walk around wearing my caterpillar badges on their uniforms. My caffeine post was used by one of my former English teachers in her class at school (hi, Jo). All of that is amazing to me. You guys have been great. This experience has been great. And now it's on to the next one.

Love,

Beth

Irritating Bullshit

Be warned: this is not a funny post. This post is not going to be laden with badly-drawn MSPaint pictures. For most people it's probably going to be an incredibly dreary informative monologue on shit they really don't care about. I didn't originally write it for this blog, but I'm offering it here as a sort of explanation for why there have been altogether-too-few posts on Caterpillar Equals "n" of late. But maybe you can relate to this a little bit, so if you're at all interested, please read on.

A little over a year ago, I was the girl who was constantly hungry and famed for her appetite. I could quite happily consume a whole pizza in one sitting (or two generous-sized burgers, or a plate full of sandwiches, you get the picture) and still find room for dessert. Basically, I could eat you under the fucking table without breaking a sweat. And fortunately for me, I was blessed with a wicked fast metabolism which meant that no matter what or how much I ate, I didn’t have to worry about putting on weight.

Today, I basically have no appetite most of the time (apart from two weirdly specific times of the day: 11 in the morning and 11 at night). If I didn’t make a conscious effort to ensure my body kept getting the nutrients it needs, there would probably be days when I’d be quite happy to survive off of liquids alone. In fact, I’ve come dangerously close to doing that in the past. And even when I am hungry, I don’t have to eat much to feel quite full again. A lot of the time I find a normal person-sized dinner a struggle to get through.

This isn’t because of body issues or because I’ve stopped liking food (though the former is certainly a serious societal concern that needs to be addressed). I fucking love food, and that love will never die. I still spend unhealthy amounts of my life looking at pictures of food on the Internet and wishing they were inside me (beautifulfoodisamust.tumblr.com is a favourite of mine). But my relationship with food is a little more complicated these days. Sometimes the food I eat isn’t as thrilled about me as I am about it; sometimes when I eat my body just straight up goes ‘nope, what the fuck, what are you putting in me I am not okay with this’. And the reason for that is I developed a condition known as Irritable Bowel Syndrome, but which might more adequately be called Irritating BullShit. For convenience, we’ll call it IBS from now on.

What is IBS?

IBS is a bit of a tricky little fucker. When I first starting having IBS episodes, I thought I’d caught some nasty stomach bug that kept coming back to bite me on the ass. I felt off-colour, off my food and experienced nausea whenever I moved around. I went to several different doctors and had a raft of blood tests, pee tests and poo tests done to try and find out what the shit was going on with my gut. At one point I was even tested for STDs. As all the test results came back showing that nothing was wrong, it became clear that what I had was not salmonella or giardia. After four months of this shit, I came home from university and visited my GP in Hastings, where I finally got a diagnosis: I had IBS.

There are a whole raft of symptoms associated with IBS, and they can vary wildly between individuals. One friend of mine who also has it finds that he voms after eating too much of a certain food, but I’ve never experienced that problem. Another friend who has it finds that she can be fine for weeks on end but suddenly and for no apparent reason has times where she reacts badly to any food she eats. By contrast, my IBS is a pretty much constant factor in my life now.

In terms of symptoms, I’ve actually come off pretty lightly. When I was first diagnosed, I did a lot of reading on the subject and found myself confronted with scary phrases such as ‘explosive diarrhoea’ and horror stories of people who constantly had the shits or who never knew when they’d next need to rush to the toilet to have an unexpected vom. To those people, you have my utmost sympathy. I’ve experienced nothing of the kind: my main symptoms are a bloated tummy, discomfort in my general tummy/gut area and reduced appetite. However, when I’m having an episode, my appetite disappears altogether, even the thought of food can make me nauseous, and the discomfort in my gut can turn into pain. So far there doesn’t seem to be much of a pattern to my episodes – they can happen whenever they feel like it, and I just have to ride them out with all the grace and dignity of a person whose gut has given up on her.  

What the fuck even causes IBS, then?

In short: idek man, and neither does anyone else. While we are aware of the range of symptoms IBS causes, as well as many possible ways to treat or manage those symptoms, nobody really knows where the fuck IBS came from and what makes it do the shit it does. Our current understanding of the IBS situation is that it’s not a solely physical disorder nor a solely mental one – rather, both physical and mental factors seem to work together to make it all happen.

To give you a personal example, I’ve found that eating certain types of foods can set me off, and I try to avoid those types of food where I can. But I’ve also found that stress can have a huge impact on how happy (or not) my gut is, and of the two, stress certainly has the biggest impact. The fact that I’ve got both the mental and physical triggers going on makes it a bit difficult to pinpoint specific things that aggravate my IBS (i.e. did that BK just set me off, or am I just a bit stressed out today?). The same is true, I imagine, of most – if not all – IBS-sufferers. They probably just deal with it better than I do.

The good news is that, no matter how shit IBS makes you feel, you’re not ever actually in any danger of dying from it. IBS causes no permanent damage to your colon – yay! This means that when you’re on the crapper and feeling like you’re literally shitting your internal organs out – you’re not! It just feels like you are! Despite the somewhat sardonic tone of those last two sentences, this is actually really good news. IBS is not doing serious damage to your intestines, and that’s something to celebrate fo’ shizzle.

What can you do about IBS?

The personalized nature of IBS symptoms unfortunately requires a personalized approach to managing the symptoms, and unfortunately will probably mean a lot of trial and error until you find treatments that work for you. Here are some things that I’ve found work for me, maybe some of them will help you as well.

• ·         One of the first steps I took towards managing IBS was to eliminate foods from my diet that were upsetting my gut. These included caffeine, curried or highly spiced foods, beans, and shitty supermarket bread. This meant saying goodbye to my beloved morning coffees and Thai green curries, but it has been worth it. I’ve also been (mostly) gluten-free for about six months now. I’m not gluten-intolerant as far as I’m aware, but I have noticed that eating a lot of gluten at once has bad consequences for poor gutty. A little bit every now and then is okay.
• ·         Ginger is renowned for its stomach-settling abilities, and I find that on bad days, having a bit of ginger can help calm my gut down. You can drink ginger beer if you want, just check it’s actually got ginger in it before you buy it – the bubbles may help your tummy too. I tend to just keep some pickled ginger around that I can snack on when I need to.
• ·         On bad days, I also find it helps to take a medication called Gastrosoothe, which pretty much does what it says on the tin – soothes your gut. You can pop eight pills a day if you need to, and it’s available over-the-counter, though I do recommend getting a prescription as it shaves at least fifteen dollars off the cost.
• ·         It sounds painfully obvious, but getting up and exercising every day is often a huge help to my gut. There will be times when it does more harm than good, but most of the time being up and moving around is exactly what my gut needs. When I start the morning by getting up and being active, this takes my mind off my IBS, calms my gut down and even wakes my appetite up.
• ·         Eating lots of fruit and veges also sounds painfully obvious, but I find those are the things that upset me the least in terms of foods. Now I start my day with a healthy fruit and yoghurt smoothie with no added sweeteners, and I try to eat lots of fruit or veges with every meal.
• ·         A positive attitude helps more than most. Stress is the biggest factor in how bad my IBS gets, and so staying relaxed and positive about life is obviously going to help the most. Waking up with a fearless, ‘I can fucking do this’ attitude is the best thing for it, even on bad days. A lot of the time this is easier said than done, but I’ve done it before so I know I can do it again.

Note that only one of the things on my list was a medicine. Most of the time you won’t need meds to cope with your IBS – you can make things easier for yourself just by looking after your diet and your state of mind.

Where to from here?

I am by no means an expert at sticking to the list I’ve made above. From the occasional cheeky pizza to feeling down and defeated to the days when I don’t leap out of bed in the morning even though I know it’s only going to help me, there are a lot of slip-ups. If you’re trying to manage your IBS, no doubt you’ll have slip-ups as well. Not every day is going to be golden, and that’s true whether or not you’ve got a shitty digestive system. The important thing is that you don’t beat yourself up about your mistakes, but rather, learn from them. You felt shitty today so you stayed in bed and watched television instead of getting up and getting active. That was bad, but one slap on the wrist is enough of a punishment. Instead of agonizing over how shit today was, say to yourself, ‘Okay, so I stayed in bed today, but I can learn from this and remember that next time I feel shit I’m going to get up and do shit anyway.’

I spent last year being terrified: terrified of having an episode, terrified of waking up and feeling bad, terrified that if I went out and did stuff with people I liked I’d have an episode and ruin the whole event for everyone else. And that fear turned me into a shitty person, and it meant that that was exactly what happened.

This year I don’t want to let IBS defeat me or define me. I am not IBS – I am a relatively normalish people who just happens to have a bit of a shitty body. But I am going to get up and go out and live my life fearlessly despite the fact that I have a shitty body, and my shitty body is just going to have to deal with that. Because the truth is, the worst shit is happening in my head, not in my gut, and my head is something I do have control over. Beth out. 

Where are all the blog posts?

Some of you may have noticed I haven’t updated my blog since January, which was an almost inexcusably long time ago. Truth be told, since then a lot of things have happened in my life which have kept me too busy to really sit down and make a decent post. However, I’m currently on mid-year break from university, and for the first time since before I left home I find myself with enough free time on my hands to write something for my blog. Hopefully this post will explain to you what I’ve been up to in the past six months that has been so important I’m only just now getting around to blogging about it.

First of all, I moved to a city approximately 300 kilometres away from home, into a hall of residence. This meant I was suddenly living with a bunch of people I’d never met before.

I started university, and found that it involved a lot of studying, despite the fact that I only had 15 hours of lectures and tutorials a week.

I quit caffeine again, partially because I no longer wanted to be dependent on a drug in order to function, and partially because the coffee at my hall tastes like shit. It was a fun week which followed this general pattern:

I found out that I have irritable bowel syndrome, or IBS. IBS is a fun little condition that makes me feel bloated all the time and rarely very hungry, and turns life into a bit of a daily struggle. Even better, doctors don’t know quite what causes IBS or how to treat it, as everyone who has it shows slightly different symptoms.

I broke up with my boyfriend of two years.

Unfortunately, living in a hall of residence meant that I wasn’t the only one who had to deal with the emotional nosedive I took in the wake of the break-up.

But I was incredibly fortunate to be surrounded by a group of wonderful, caring and patient people who have supported me through the emotional rollercoaster that has been the last few months of my life, including the stomach-lurching dips where all I want to do is lie on my bed and cry directly into a box of tissues. Or onto someone else’s t-shirt. While they’re wearing it. And I’m lying on their shoulder. And I’ll always be grateful for that support.

But it hasn’t been all bad news.

And although I can’t promise when the next blog post will be, I’m going to try my hardest to make the wait a little shorter than six months this time. Because no matter how many times life is determined to suckerpunch me to the ground, I’m determined to get back on my feet every time, and give it a good kick in the ass to boot.

Alright, life. You want me to climb shit mountain?

I’m going to make it to the top.