My Diabetes Avoidance Blog- Relapse; family; latent consciousness; Freud, Jung, Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Emily Dean.

Yesterday, I ate 2 bountys, 2 crunchies, a donut and a banana with cream.

It was a major relapse. I feel I have let you all down. But mostly I’ve let myself down.

Writers; people who write continuously, will know and relate when I say when I write it became a habit to eat biscuits; I chose to use the word “became” here because it isn’t a habit anymore. When I started this diet a couple of months ago, I stopped buying the biscuits; I started paying attention to how much sugar was in my food and decreasing my intake dramatically. In 2 months there has only been one occasion when I have added demerara sugar to my diet, In spite of the fact that I used to add it when I pleased.

Since I am still paying attention, I can tell you that I was in a low mood There is a very good reason for this, but it would be breaking a code to share it with the world. I do have a socially acceptable reason for feeling low; you see I have lost 3 fathers in 3 years. It feels as though someone is clearing a path; but what is it for?

I am still practising being grateful; something I haven’t written about in this blog. Being thankful and grateful lifts your vibration, helps you to engage more truthfully with the world, stops your focus on the things which hold you back and constrain and frustrate you, and elevates your mind, to quote a famous song lyric that I adore and sometimes play very loud in complete opposition to my introvert status.

Apart from my low mood, I could blame my poor self care on my environment, were I not taking responsibility for it. I didn’t buy the donuts or the chocolates; I did go out and buy the banana and cream at 8 pm to attempt to mitigate the binge. The chocolates, I told you in April, were a birthday present from my 17 year old daughter; the donuts a habit of my partner’s he never kicked ( I used to buy donuts but I stopped when I was raising a family transferring all my love to them, buying them occasional weekly treats at the bakers, and the ingredients for rich sweet cakes, and trifles, forgoing them for myself, except for the occasional relapse when I bought them Easter eggs for Easter, consumed the lot and had to go out and buy them again.) I am not attempting to draw myself in a better light than my partner here. The truth is that every weekend he buys me a coffee and forgoes the pleasure himself; occasionally I buy him a green tea; I knows he likes it; it is good for him and was his choice of beverage on the day we met.

My diabetes avoidance has had a positive effect on my partner; he came to me on Saturday and told me he hadn’t eaten a single sweet snack between meals; I congratulated him, because lately I’ve been asking him to have a blood test (he has a sweet tooth), and then laughed because he then went straight into the fridge to locate the trifle he had bought and found I had eaten two thirds of it; this was the first day of my relapse.

Perhaps we both need to go on a sugar boot camp.

Another habit I had to forgo this week is my regular bike ride as the weather has been so inclement. It has rained almost all day almost every day. Since cycling long distances usually lifts my mood, I am sure this has also had an impact on my current mood.

My relapse was precipitated by a wonderful day with one of my daughters where she paid back all the nurturing I had done for her as a young child by feeding me lovely fresh and healthy salad and side dishes with lashings of vitamin B12 ( I have a cold sore); but I noticed I was laughing maniacally towards the afternoon, after a couple of very long conversations with my other two children who rang me up after the death of a close family member.

Deaths, funerals, like weddings, have a way of causing people to confront things they may have been avoiding. You cannot plan for them. They happen and you have to accommodate them, and the sudden feelings they bring to the surface.

Freud understood, as many literary writers do, the problem of latent consciousness. Jung wrote convincingly about a certain psychic wound created by the denials we construct when we follow religious doctrine and obscure our true feelings.

Yet life has a sometimes cruel way of insisting we live it so that we can eat and stay afloat and housed, which sometimes means that difficult feelings or conversations are avoided, and pushed into our subconscious as we attempt to lead “normal” lives.

I was reading Emily Dean’s, Everybody Died so I got a Dog; a wonderfully cathartic book about families. All families are difficult, even the ones who pretend they had the perfect family life; I once read somewhere that those that say that their childhoods were perfect are in denial. Never admit to the perfect family life. You’ll get caught out.

I have come to the conclusion that the only way to lead the perfect family life, is to lock yourself away with your children and not allow them to have relationships with other relatives; some people do this of course, but to what end? This behaviour seems to me to be guided by fear. My motto has always been to allow all relationships that are withing reasonable boundaries and to state that I disagree when I am in the presence of others and behaviour I find goes against the bounds of decency is exhibited. I once made the mistake of telling my son, when he was a teenager and going through a difficult time, to not say anything unless he had looked it up and knew what it meant. He then made a habit of looking words up and once or twice told me what words that I had no clue about meant; so that will teach me.

Perhaps I was guilty of this behaviour (the hiding away to achieve perfection), for a few years myself, but I realised when my children were babies that they need other people in order to become what they were meant to be; they need to be influenced by other cultures, relationships, tastes, music, comedy and even love. It is wonderful when our children end up enjoying the same things as us, theatre, art, books, music, food, gardening, psychology, biology,….but it is equally wonderful when they spread their wings and blossom into their talents which are uniquely theirs.

I once read a book called Jonathan Livingston Seagull. It is a remarkable short story about leaving old friends behind in order to travel on the path you were made to travel. It is a wonderful read for anyone whose friends or children appear to have “deserted” them.

All my love,

Hermione Laake