How to Poison Yourself: A Guide

My Dear Reader,

I know that I always say this, but sorry about the lack of recent posts. I've been trying to get back to my previous reliability, but I'm not there yet. Mostly because I really have not been up for writing lately.

And I haven't been up for writing because I've felt really, really awful.

I mean, I've just felt absolutely lousy. I've had horrible headaches and nausea with varying degrees of intensity, but mostly I've been drained all of my energy to the point where I wanted to do nothing but watch the entire series of Wings from start to finish.

Which I did.

And the funny thing was that for the majority of this period, I knew that I wasn't sick. I would occasionally feel fine, and then later the same day, go back to feeling like my brain was trying to escape through my ears. And really, when you already feel drained, and then you have to lead a normal life as if you weren't, you don't have the energy to try to figure out what's wrong. You just go to the internet and say, "Entertain me, for I am too tired to think."

Which, of course, means that I wasn't paying much attention to my health as much as I was just trying to get through another day.

I'm sure you're familiar with the idiom of putting something on the back burner. My life, especially now, seems like a stove with thousands of burners, each simmering one concoction or another. This stove contains everything I'm trying to work on, creatively, spiritually, financially, professionally, personally, psychologically, and so on. I'm trying to turn into an insurance agent, but I'm also trying to pay my bills, learn to play the ukulele, make new friends, train for a 5K, grow and sell flowers, edit a novel, write three other novels, keep in touch with my friends, do my laundry, read, deepen my commitment to my faith, eat, and about a million other things. All of them are contained in a pot on that metaphorical stove I've got. Unfortunately, all of these things require my attention, and it's hard to stir more than two pots at once. So some of them get neglected for a while.

But I'm not always the best at choosing which pot to stir when. The "watching Wings" pot, for example, has obviously gotten more than its fair share of attention lately, while my laundry pot hardly ever actually manages to get stirred.

And while in real life, pots on a stove are separate and contained, many of my metaphorical pots are connected. I want to pay my bills, so I've been growing marigolds on my windowsill* with the hope of selling them to make some extra cash. But growing things really needs a burner of its own, right? Because I have to figure out the how, what, when, and where of it. And I have to make sure that they stay alive.

I'm telling you; it's hard enough to keep myself alive these days.

And sometimes, these pots on all these burners have connections that you don't even realize until it almost destroys you.

For example, I had several ideas as to why my head and my stomach were staging a revolt, most of them involving a brain tumor. But it wasn't until last week that I had enough spare brain matter to realize that:

1. My symptoms were the worst during the early morning and late at night

2. These are the times when I'm usually in my room, or specifically, in bed

3. I happened to be growing dozens of marigolds on a windowsill right by my bed

4. Marigolds are a common allergen

Therefore:

5. I'm probably allergic to marigolds.

And:

6. If I wasn't aware that I had a marigold allergy, and the marigolds were developing slowly enough that it was hard to notice the gradual deterioration of my sanity, it could create a very uncomfortable situation.

I can tell you, it's weird when you realize that you have been accidentally poisoning yourself. I'm still not sure what to make of it. But I am sure that:

1. My health should probably be on one of the from burners

2. Those marigolds need to go on a different burner altogether. One that is not so close to my respiratory system.

Once that is taken care of, I'm hoping I'll have some energy to stir my other pots. Like the one for my blog posts.

Darn marigolds!

Regards, best wishes, and a breath of fresh air,

-Cecily Jane

*If you're curious, I'm pretty much doing the thing I wrote about here. Except this time, it's working, because I remember to water them.I know, right?