I'll be jitterbugged
there's a lot of you
Once I settled on Buttondown as my Substack-alternative newsletter, I figured it would be many months (if not years) before I hit the first threshold of 100 subscribers. Hahahahaha, y'all surpassed it the first day I announced the move.
Wow. So... welcome! I don't really know what I'm doing yet, but maybe we can figure it out together.
A few days ago, I completed the final blog-to-book printing of my Very Mom posts (terrible awful grief edition) before archiving everything and turning the domain into a landing page with a silly little 404 error page for the people who still follow old Pinterest links.
Today I found myself typing up an answer to a "Help I have hives" bat signal and realized I could compile everything I've learned for anyone else slogging through the utter hellscape that is chronic urticaria. (You don't have to read it, it's long and there is gratuitous, but welt-covered nudity).
Haha, just kidding (kinda), but made you look?
One of the quack doctors I desperately turned to when dealing with my first bout of sudden-onset chronic urticaria in 2009 had a popular talk radio show in Utah (the first of many red flags). He promised he could cure my hives (second red flag) and asked me to send him photos (I was living in Idaho and had only had a phone consult). I censored naked photos Eric had taken of my welty hives (you know me, I like to document everything) with black bands in Photoshop and sent them off. The next day, I tuned into his radio show hoping for some kind of answer.
Instead, I got to listen to him talk about how he could tell I had just had a baby and how his elimination diet would 'fix that right up.' I remember the instant shame I felt and how the heat flooded my face. I told myself he was just talking about the hives. He definitely wasn't, but I still handed over fistfuls of money in the hopes that he might have a cure for my misery. (Spoiler: he did not.)
His elimination diet was extreme. I subsisted on little more than cantaloupe cubes for months. I lost an incredible amount of weight in a very short period, my hair fell out in chunks, and I couldn't walk to the bathroom without blacking out. My milk dried up and I had to prematurely wean my baby. Eric slept with Ben in the guest room for a week or two, helping him adjust to the new and confusing world of bottles. 💔
When I traveled to Utah to meet the doctor in person (still covered in hives), the very first thing he asked me (while looking me up and down) was, "So, how much weight did you lose?"
In reality, the doctor didn't know anything about urticaria or angioedema. But he did want to sell his expensive line of vitamins and cleanses, which, not at all coincidentally, also included a weight-loss line. Sigh.
I didn't set out to write the origin story for my eating disorder (the not yet officially recognized orthorexia*), but here we are.
* I'm doing much better these days.
I'd like to stuff this post into drafts and start over with something else tomorrow, but I think if I keep doing that, I won't ever publish anything. Back when I blogged for fun, I never planned out posts or proofread anything; it was just so marvelous to write and connect and comment. Somewhere along the line it became less fun and started feeling more like work (probably coinciding with the advent of blog advertising?). I'd take days to write and rewrite a post, sometimes never publishing or deleting it afterward.
It would be nice, I think, and maybe help break my long, grief-induced writer's block, if I could find my way back to that place where I wrote without all the real and imagined pressures---if I could just talk to you like we are friends having lunch somewhere.
I did that with my first test post here, the one that didn't go out to anyone because I didn't have any subscribers yet. It was silly and pointless and fun and I had a good (if weepy) time traversing memory lane.
I do think I'll miss having comments, but you can always hit reply and send me a note.
Thanks for being here, xo Jessica