So much for easing back in

Today I semi got my stuff together. After a night of "insomnia" wherein I spent hours playing with my dance website TinaEdance.com I wound up in bed at 7 am. I got up by noon which was some amazing feat considering! I found myself newly inspired thinking of course I'm still a dancer why wouldn't I be. So this evening I jumped right in and worked about two hours on my choreography for Tribal Fest. I'm wanting to change quite a few things it seems. I was doing pretty well and enjoying myself but had a nagging ick feeling most of the time. It wasn't until I stopped that I realized just how horrible I was feeling. My head was pounding, and kind of balloon feeling and I was feeling pretty severely nauseated. I ate part of an apple, took a shower and lay on my bed waiting for dinner while hoping to be put out of my misery. I guess I forgot for a moment that I have had almost zero exercise for the last five months or so, and my body hasn't been doing too well lately anyway, add to that the lack of sufficient sleep and bam I'm a whimpering mess. It took a few hours but I finally started to feel better. Even with all that I feel pretty happy with the fact that I was able to drag my butt into the studio and move for a while. It's been too long. I am not looking forward to tomorrow. I was ever so gently reminded by the husbandtypecreature that I'm pretty much out of shape and what the hell did I expect? Gotta love him. Now it's 3 am and I'm going to go to bed and call this successfully going to be early! Hah hah.

Hope?

Wow, it's been a really long time since I updated this blog. That's not really anything new. It's kind of typical of my bi-polar personality to disappear for great lengths of time, then come back all of a sudden renewed and refreshed (manic?). This time I'm renewed in a different part of my life than dancing. I'm devoting a lot of my time and energy to creating Art Dolls and trying to get my business moving. I'm spending more time writing over at Night's Vision my Art Doll blog than here.

I wish I could say all of a sudden my urge to dance has come back, but it seems I'm not really there yet. The last time I really danced was in October. I believe by that time my health had gotten so out of control and I was so exhausted from so much training and the intensity (for me, other people are able to put so much more out there) of performances, that I just kind of hit a wall. I just completely stopped. I haven't even danced when I'm folding laundry! It's rather heartbreaking actually, to all of a sudden have lost the passion that has driven your life for a long time. The reason I have hope is that it's happened before. It's happened a few times actually all in the last five years since my step-father died. I hadn't taken a class and barely danced at home for a full year before I started dancing with Kitiera and the Modrom Dance Collective. So I have hope.

I have to have hope... I'm dancing at Tribal Fest in May! I am going to be performing my Sunshine piece again, but I am changing a few things. Now I just need to be able to get up off my butt and work on it! I know I will, but I feel time passing away.

The first thing I need to do is become aware of my health again. I was doing good for a while, but sometimes when I become immersed in something the way I have been with doll work lately, I forget all about the having to be diligent with the health. Today my blood sugar was 354 at one point. We're having a big salad for dinner!

Redwood Coast Bellydance Festival

Moving Pictures

That's what my head is full of these days.

At the end of September and the first week of October I did two major things for me. First I danced solo for the first time every at a Belly Dance Festival at Desert Dance Festival. Then a week later the ,first week of October, I did it again at Redwood Coast Belly Dance Festival in Arcata. I have danced at both of these festivals as part of a troupe and DDF more than one troupe over the years. I can honestly say I had so much fun doing these two things. Not only the dancing itself, the great workshops, and wonderful people, but the process of moving through fear becomes so exciting for me that it really is "fun". It is also a heady feeling to end a day knowing that you've broken through a personal barrier.

I can't tell you how many years I have sat in the audience at festivals and thought to myself "sometime soon I will get it together and do my first festival" Well, with life being what it is, it has taken me longer than I once anticipated to get to this point. I am honest to a fault about my difficulties with anxiety, fear and lack of confidence in myself at times so I don't see a point in not going there now. I was not afraid of the dancing. I didn't look at the stage and think oooo scary. No, I looked at the process, the paper work ,getting in on time, the checking in on time, the being ready such and such a head of time before your performance time, and the logistics of figuring out who you are supposed to be checking in with where you are supposed to be going and things along those lines...yup I looked at that stuff and my stomach would fall through the floor and panic would set in. These are of course all of the things that set me off in any part of my life because they are variables and unknowns, not really the friend of someone with anxiety/panic problems mixed with excruciating shyness. Though again as soon as I recognize a fear I know that there will be a day that I will move towards facing and conquering it. It is who I have learned to be. Does it make me a daredevil? Of course not, my fears are far too mundane for most people to see my small triumphs as anything beyond the normal scope of life, but to me, oh my to ME they are huge.

I owe so much of this to teachers I have had over time, but a lot must go to Kitiera for the last year I spent being a part of the Modrom Dance Collective and being right there with her most of the time to see how these things worked and to start to demystify them for myself.

Suddenly I am no longer afraid. I have plans now to send in an application for Tribal Fest, and to call in for Rakkasah. I have new choreography and costuming ideas swirling around in my brain. I have plans! Plans that excite me, not terrify me. I never thought a few weeks ago that all of a sudden I would feel so free!

Just a picture

One of these days when I get a minute I have some stuff to write. In the meantime, I have a picture from my performance at Desert Dance Festival taken by Carl Sermon. I had a lot of fun.

Although it's never a good idea to write a post in the middle of the night when I surely should be sleeping rather than sitting on the computer, here I am doing it anyway.

I'm don't even have enough energy lately to have the kind of artistic crisis I want to. I want to feel horrible and depressed that I am not dancing and I just really don't. Right now I just don't care very much and really that terrifies me. I wonder will I ever care again? Is this the time I give in to the body and mind turmoil and just quit? I am so freaking tired lately I can't even begin to explain. I'm sure there will be time when energy returns and maybe I'll get back on track, but I'm scared.

I am scared that perhaps I have my priorities messed up and I should spend more time taking care of myself. Maybe I should be spending time with other art. Maybe I should be napping when I feel like it. Maybe I don't need to be a "dancer". I'm scared that I won't be because I know I still love it.

I'm going to dance at Desert Dance Festival on September 26th and Redwood Coast Belly dance Festival on October 2nd. I can't make the piece that I'm dancing what I wanted it to be because I feel sick every time I practice for a little bit. I'm trying to relax and give myself permission to be a little bit bad because this is technically a new beginning and we're always bad in the beginning. Yet it's killing me that it's worked out like this because I really was so excited and I wanted it to be so much more. Right now it just looks like the triumph will be in the fact that I'm doing it at all.

So it's Monday and I should be having Jazz nerves or something, but I'm not because I am not going to class tonight. I'm not going to class tonight because I am really really freaking tired. I'm really really freaking tired because my body has decided to go haywire on me again.

Twelve or so years ago at the age of 23 I was first diagnosed as Type 2 diabetic with familial hyperlipdimia. The diagnosis came after a horrible case of eruptive xanthoma (literally fat deposits pushing up through the skin). I was really sick at the time. My lipid panel showed a cholesteral or 600 my triglycerides were 5600 and my glucose level was bad ,though I don't remember how high it wasn't all THAT bad. This all came only about a year after I was finally diagnosed with bi-polar II after all the years of agoraphobia, anxiety panic disorder and blah blah blah. So I've been fighting pretty much non stop all these years to keep the delicate balance of all these things going. There are lots of pills and lots of injections and lots of doctors appointments and more blah blah blah. I work hard at it because someone once told me it was possible I wouldn't make it to 30 and if I did I was surely going to have had my first coranary event by then. I'm 35 now and none of those things have come to pass. I am in no way perfect but I try. Sometimes things get a little off and I don't try that hard.

This year has been kind of sucky for my health. Last year around this time I had a nice bout of asthmatic bronchitis that required breathing treatments and a shot of prednisone.(I have asthma history That was a new one for me, I'd always been given oral steroids in the past. At the beginning of this year I caught Cyd's stupid cold and although I was rundown and stuffed up I didn't think too much of it until the night I suddenly started feeling as if someone was shoving an icepick in my ear. (I have ear history too). When I finally got to the doctor the next morning I founf out that both my ears were horribly infected and that the left eardrum had perforated. We were in the middle of Rakkasah rehersals at the time. It was lovely. Spaced in between have been stomach incidents and random vomitting and woooo hoo.

A few months ago I was afraid I was having ear problems again and went in to see a doctor who was not my normal primary care. He said my ears were fine but it seemed that I probably had tmj. I happened to mention the all over body pain that I was having that had been particularly intense around then and he questioned me a bit about it poking me in various places and seeming really suprised that it ALL hurt. "You walk around like this all the time?" he asked. I told him yup I was just kind of used to it by now. He ordered the typical arthrits and lupus tests that always come back negative on me but also wanted to check my vitamin D on a hunch. When the results of the Vitamin D came back it turned out my level was 7 (30 is low). So I took a three month course of 50,000 units of D a week. The pain started dissapating a bit.

So now here we are in the last month or so. Recently the normal ache I have in my hands has turned to something completely different. For weeks many times when I grab something with the tips of my fingers (drawer pulls, keys, door knobs just to name a few) I often get this piercing pain that feels quite like someone has just cut the tip of my finger off! I never know when it's going to happen so often I am standing there shocked and shuddering as the pain runs through my hold body going wtf? About two weeks ago I started getting numbness in my fingers. So I made an appointment to see my doctor. I went and had my fasting lipids, A1C etc done before I saw her.

When the results started coming into my e-mail box I was even more WTF! My cholesteral is 353 my triglycerides are back up to 1878 and my A1C is 8.2 (that one is my fault I know). There is not apparant reason for these things to have all of a sudden gone crazy again other than the fact that maybe a medication has stopped working. I eat rather well and I excercise a TON. The most bizarre result was my vitamin D, it is now 5. Yeah it went down!

And my hands? Beginnings of diabetic neuropathy of course!

So it's all back to fiddling with meds, trying this and that and attempting to get myself back on track. So apparently there will be days like this and it's OK. I have to remember that, because my body may be a broke down bitch sometimes but my mind is a drill sergent who finds it unacceptable to rest. They need to learn to work together because feeling guilty for not dancing some days will get me nowhere.

I know this was an extremely boring entry. Sorry apparently I'm tired all over.