Fasting slow

It's 2008 and I feel full. Like I've just eaten a satisfying meal. The truth is I have been fasting/cleansing since yesterday. I needed a fresh start. To feel like I went nakedly into a new year and a new time of my life. I am using the Neera master cleanse diet which is a combination of lemon juice, palm syrup, cayenne pepper and water. I need to reconnect with myself.

My Senior year of high school and freshman year of college were incredibly hard times for me. I'm not sure what sparked it, maybe just the idea of so much change and so many decisions to make, but my Senior year I became quite depressed. It's possible that I was merely experiencing what's completely normal to feel at such a strange time in life when your entire world is about to shift into one that's unfamiliar. I saw a doctor who asked me two questions, literally two, and then put me on 100 mg of Zoloft. I had friends that had been diagnosed as bipolar and were only taking 25 mg.

I consider that my lost year of life. I remember it in a fuzzy way, like I was under anesthesia. I turned into a zombie. Where before I was breaking down into hysterics over very little, I now was unable to have a truly emotional response to anything. I slept constantly and felt tired ever still. We returned to the doctor and he lowered the dosage, I believe to 50 mg, though I cannot remember now. I continued to respond the way I had before as I went off to college.

The first several months of college were even more tumultuous for me than had been the previous months. My brother had supposedly impregnated a woman from a bar the previous year and we had taken her in as if she was going to bore the child that would be our relation. He was born and I considered him my nephew for the first three months of his life. My mother in particular grew very close to him. After three months my brother decided to take a paternity test as his relations with Colin's mother were not spectacular. It turned out that he was not the father. The legitimate father was Colin's mother's ex-boyfriend and he immediately entered their life and took on that role. He and Colin's mother quickly became engaged and all seemed to be going well. Then a tragic thing happened. My mother called me with the news that Colin had been abused by his father and was in the hospital in critical condition with Shaken Baby Syndrome. It was the sort of thing you never think you'll actually have to witness. The story you read in the paper and say, "how sad, how terrible", but never the story you tell as your own.

On top of that atrocity my father entered into rehab for alcoholism for a 90 day period. Of course that was not a truly negative thing but his absence was noticeable.

The first month I was at school I met a boy that I dated and fell for, lost my virginity to, and within a week he was dating another girl. I was crushed. A few months later I came home from college for winter break and saw an ex-boyfriend from high school. We had been on bad terms but he said some nice things to me so I decided to forgive him and accept the idea that maybe he'd changed as I had. I went to his house for a get together, got so intoxicated that I blacked out completely and was sexually assaulted by him. Afterwards I felt disgusting and I blamed myself. It took years and a therapist's insistence of it to say that I had been assaulted. I had lost so much. My innocence, my naivety, all my ideas about sex, love, relationships. I still struggle with knowing how to respect myself emotionally and physically and what to accept from men. I still expect and demand much less than I deserve. Mostly I think it is out of fear.

Girl Interrupted is one of my favorite films. I think it expresses in magnificent beauty what I was feeling at that time. When I was undergoing all that hardship I considered suicide. I didn't know where I belonged. "I know what it's like to want to die. How it hurts to smile. How you try to fit in but you can't. How you hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside."

The world seemed too big and distorted to me. I was different for giving a shit. Maybe even unpopular. I didn't want to see more or know more about the misery and ignorance, or feel the overwhelming helplessness. I wanted to just float away.

So, I am telling this sorted history of 4 years ago because it is important to how I feel lately. That zombie feeling of disconnectedness is alive in me again. Since I came home from Africa I have experienced it. I wonder if it is a long-term side effect of the medications I took during that year or if I have lost touch with something. During that time in my life I was religious, which was strange because I had questioned religion since I was very young. It only lasted a short time but when it ended it went completely. I still researched religions, took classes about them, and found them fascinating but I no longer practiced any form of one myself.

Now I'm looking to connect that disconnect with myself with the disconnect I've had with my spirituality. I always associated spirituality with religion but lately I have been reconsidering that concept. I heard a very intriguing person on the radio who talked about energies and eastern thought and made me very curious about ideas out there that I should be taking in. I do believe that we are all made up of energies and that we need to be really in tuned with the environment and the Earth and how that relates to ourselves. I believe that we are pulled in certain directions, not by a being but by a magnetic force. I also saw a report by two prominent doctors stating that prayer actually does have health benefits. Not that God is up there listening and granting people's wishes, but that the actual act of prayer releases things in our brains that help to generate good results for our well being.

I recently quit eating meat for a variety of reasons and I've been slowly coming into my own. I'm learning what is important to me and what I really believe in and becoming bolder in expressing it openly. I feel tremendous happiness. I've literally gotten nearly everything I've ever wanted and I'm only 22. I have my education, I have traveled and seen more of the world than many if not most people do in a lifetime, I live in a city that I love, and I have a great start in the career field that I most want to be in. My life is all I want it to be practically. Yet, there's something missing. Some contentment I'm lacking. Perhaps the happiness simply has no outlet or I don't know how to connect it to the actual everyday life I lead. Whatever it is, I feel the need to investigate spiritual possibilities for myself. New angles and ways of looking at life, people, relationships, and emotions. I want to be focused on my health more both physically and mentally and to do something about this awful room I've been living in.

I am also reading a book about money and what it means in our culture and how connected it is to our livelihoods. It's gotten me thinking about a lot of things. I am glad that my ideas of success from an early age were not related to wealth and materialism but I do have a lot of ideas about money that may not be right. For instance, I have had this overriding idea that money is simply bad, the root of all evil. My new job as a fundraiser for an organization using money for good is leading me to reconsider those concepts. Money certainly can be evil and unfortunately probably is more often than not, as it consumes so many people whole but at the same time it can be the root of good deeds in the world. It can finance the best of our intentions and values. It can represent and make alive the best of humanity, the core of our souls. It's tremendously powerful in its capacity to work both for and against us.

All these new ideas I've been thinking about have thus led me into this spiritual journey, which includes this fast I'm doing. I'm hoping to do it for at least 10 days as they claim that helps to reach the greatest depths of the cleanse and I hope that I will manage to keep up with writing about the entire paradigm shift I am undergoing as well. For now I must rest, however. Good night.