Hashimoto’s

Today I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder. My immune system is attacking my thyroid, likely due to chronic inflammation from food sensitivities, environmental toxins, infection, stress, or some combination. If left untreated, my thyroid will stop producing the hormones I need to survive. The news landed on me like a death. There was the moment of disbelief – of trying to stick my foot in a door that was closing so I might just be able to slip back into the life I had been living. In the same way that I don’t want to admit someone I have shared every day of my life with for years is gone, I don’t want to admit that much of how I have lived my life is about to change – the way I eat, exercise, spend money, socialize, and enjoy my leisure time. I feel angry at myself for all the signs I brushed aside as simply emotional, mental, or spiritual challenges or short-comings. And I feel heart-broken over all the projects, relationships, and dreams that have fallen by the wayside over the years because of my fatigue, anxiety, and depression.

And yet also like my experiences with grieving a physical death, there is an odd sense of relief, of deepening, that comes from encountering something undeniably, unavoidably real. We all know in the midst of any love affair that it will end one day, and we struggle to nurture and sustain it despite that knowledge, however unconscious. When facing that moment of reckoning there is such sorrow and helplessness, but also awe and humility. It is profoundly sobering to stand at the foot of Mystery; to stand face-to-face with an indisputable reality, and all the thoughts and feelings that engenders, with dignity. My beloved is dead. I have autoimmunity. I am mortally bound to every other creature with a body and heart.

I wanted to dive into action: researching, developing a treatment plan, reorganizing my life. But my apprenticeship to grief has made me wiser than that. I knew I needed to feel. And I knew it was too big for me to hold alone. Luckily my dear friend answered her phone. My shock, grief, anger, and relief were all witnessed and held with gentle reverence, just as I would have held them myself if I were left alone. And in that space my story, the narrative of my life, began to shift to accommodate this new revelation. Without the support from Overeaters Anonymous to finally give up sugar, I wouldn’t have realized the depth of the fatigue and depression I had been self-medicating, or become determined to explore physical causes of my bingeing. And as much as I have been challenged with my job over the past year, it has surfaced as a life-saver. It was a functional medicine lab panel recommended by my boss that revealed this auto-immunity other labs had missed. And through him, I have easy access to expert testing, advice, and treatment that others have spent years and thousands of dollars to find. I have neglected to take my symptoms seriously enough for years. And I have also been gifted all the resources – inner and outer – I now need to take my condition, and my long-term recovery, seriously.

Then my friend asked, in her gentle and incisive way, “You say your body, your immune system, is attacking itself. Do you feel like you have also been attacking yourself?” I had to pause to let the impact of her words take me from my body into my mind and heart. “Yes,” I replied. “Yes, I have.” Only in the last few months have I begun to really connect with a sense of affection for myself; to look myself in the eyes and speak words of kindness without it feeling fake or uncomfortable, to better prioritize good food, rest, and company, to start to question whether what other people say about me is really true and whether I want to reveal or share myself with them. Before now, my focus has been on how to get others to love me, I have been reckless with my physical needs, and I have compromised myself for others’ approval and good opinion. The most tender, vulnerable parts of me have lived at the mercy of the cutting shame of my inner critic, run ragged as my adrenals and worn thin as my leaky gut. Only now is that tension slowly starting to ease. Only now is my growing commitment to gentleness and reverence in relationship to myself showing me that I am willing and able to do whatever it takes to regain my health.

These thoughts led me to wonder about the connection between my Inner Critic and my immune system. Both of them are warriors, sentinels. They stand guard at the threshold between me and the world, keep vigilant watch for invaders, sound the alarm, and launch the attack. Only just like my immune system, my Inner Critic has mis-identified the threat. They aren’t attacking the invaders any more, they are attacking what they had vowed to protect. After years of inflammation due to choice and circumstance, my immune system no longer accurately identifies the pathogen, allergen, or toxin, and is now targeting my healthy tissue. And after years of living with unpredictable, sarcastic, negligent, and shaming relationships, the fiery part of my psyche that was meant to uphold my wholeness, brilliance, and inherent worthiness turned against me.

It makes sense. Even the most powerful warriors can be overwhelmed. They cannot change their instinct to fight and so they go after the easy target, the part that is outcast and most vulnerable. My Inner Critic knows exactly what weak spots to exploit every time I find something I really love and a way to welcome and nourish it. And I find it no coincidence that my immune system is attaching what lives in my throat when I have denied, withheld, and mistrusted the living, breathing sound of own wisdom for so many years. I can lay it all out on the page just fine, but to shout it out, sing it to the hills, speak it without a stutter so that it can actually demolish and build is a whole other matter entirely. The rekindling of my dragon power aligned with the unearthing of all the subterranean damage so that I have a compelling vision of what I am relaying a foundation to sustain.

I do not experience this in isolation. This isn’t just about my own body and my own psyche attacking me. This is happening in my interior because the world I am living in is attacking itself. We are attacking ourselves. How else would I have learned to turn my fire inward, to silence my own voice, unless I was raised by a family, especially a mother, who could not tolerate who I really was and what I had to say about what was happening? They didn’t defend me from the bullies or validate my unfolding. They blamed, shamed, and ignored me. And how is my body to defend itself when marinating in synthetic food, pollution, and toxic competition? Our culture no longer defends life-affirming elements of art, mythology, ritual, and reverence for Mystery. It attacks the very things it needs to survive: interpersonal vulnerability and collaboration, cultural diversity, localized economies, wild ecosystems, imagination and authentic self- actualization.

I return to my cushion, in front of my laptop, in my familiar room vibrating with the soft vitality of my books, collages, altar, half-scribbled verses. I feel the familiar ache in my muscles, heavy fatigue in my body, unease in my belly in a new way. This isn’t just life. This is how it feels after a lifetime of attacking myself. I am ready to stop. I am ready to embrace a profoundly moving sense of awe and respect for how far and how long I have carried my burdens. I am ready to show myself the tenderness and reverence I deserve by giving myself permission to put it all down. I need to stop being the woman who raised me, the woman who found my every illness, pain, and heart-break an irritating inconvenience, and be the mother who will put everything aside to do everything she can to make sure I feel safe, comfortable, and loved. I could write a book about all the ways I got sick. But what matters now is that I accept the truth and do everything I can to get better – not cutting financial corners, not denying treatment, not pushing myself beyond my limits. This includes discerning the real me, identifying the real threat, and reorienting my defenses to protect me from what will alienate me from myself.

Today, I was diagnosed with an auto-immune disorder. Today is the day I start treating myself the way I should have been all along.

Nancy

Autoimmunity: A misdirected immune response that occurs when the immune system goes awry and attacks the body’s own normal, healthy components, producing disease or functional changes.