Now I’m crawling through the day, on my hands and knees. It’s suffocatingly hot outside—when I put my bag down after walking outside I feel the wet slick of sweat from the nape of my neck down to my belt. I woke up late, feeling slow, my body outraged. Yesterday I stuffed it with bread and sugar, carbohydrates which caused the black veins in my gut to shoot out copious poisons, tricking my immune system into thinking that I’ve encountered a virus. It is my doctor’s theory that I am imagining this change but it happens like clockwork when I overeat certain foods or when I exercise too much, no matter my mood. In fact exercise will often improve my mood, only for it to take a nosedive the next morning when I wake up in the haze of illness, real, imagined, or false positive. I know that if I think this is happening I should take steps to radically change my behaviours, to alter my life–and I’ve done this for stretches—but without a diagnosis it doesn’t seem real, like without grounding it is confined to the realm of imagination, something I could theoretically overcome with sheer force of will.
