Life by the numbers

It's amazing how much my perception of myself has to do with external factors -- a lesson driven home in the last week by the failure of technology.

The first thing to go wacky was my scale: remember how I said I'd lost 20 pounds? Well I'm not sure I have: in the course of one day last week the scale was reading anywhere from 122 to 135. That's when I realized my scale was broken, or maybe it was just a manifestation of cosmic consciousness with a wicked sense of humor. So how much do I weigh? I have no idea. I do know I've lost lots of weight since becoming raw but I have no idea how much, because if the recent numbers are wrong, who's to say my starting numbers weren't in error too?

The next thing to go berserk was my glucose monitor. This morning my reading seemed oddly high: my fasting blood sugar was 109 -- which seemed off since I've been soundly in the 74-85 range for quite a while. So I immediately retested, twice, and the readings came out 187 and 117. What the?

That's when I realized that I have been letting these numbers determine my perception of myself without paying enough attention to how I actually feel. If I examine myself more closely, I know that since going raw I feel so much better: lighter (physically and mentally) and clearer, and that I haven't had a single hypoglycemic episode since I began. I also realized that given how happy I was when the scale numbers seemed down, I do really want to release more weight -- something I think I was afraid to admit to myself because some part of me felt it wasn't possible after being heavier than my college weight for so long. Somewhere within I was afraid I was setting myself up for disappointment. So I come away from this with a determination to become more aware of what I am experiencing physically and emotionally rather than waiting for external numbers to determine that for me, to be more honest with myself, and to not put any limitations on what I can achieve.

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On another note, my husband just bought me my own juicer. It's not something I would have ever thought to buy right now given we're trying to save money on my reduced sabbatical income, but bless him, he saw how much I was juicing and how I was having trouble juicing leafy greens in the borrowed centrifugal juicer, so when he got in some ad revenue on one of his sites, he offered to buy me one. I got the Omega 8003, and it's utterly wonderful.

Not only does it do leafy greens, it's even easier to clean than the centrifugal juicer! Even more amazing, yesterday I discovered that I can put frozen bananas in it with a blank plate and get out an ice cream that is to die for out the other end. It's so much better than making ice cream in my ancient Vitamix: instead of coming out like melty ice cream, it stays frozen and has the consistency of premium gelato: dense and smooth. Even if I should grow to hate juice (unfathomable), this was worth the price alone. Thanks so much honey!

Sunday Morning

My chrome and glass french press pot, brought out of storage for guests who'd brought their own grounds, sat gleaming on the table, catching the light. There was a Sunday Times folded haphazardly on the corner. I'd made pancakes for C & D even though I wouldn't be eating any. The kids played boisterously in the other room, but the kitchen nook where we sat still seemed quiet, radiating soft sunshine through the shades that illuminated the green room with warmth and ease.

Warmth and ease wasn't something we'd been used to. C & I were on sabbatical. For six and a half years we had been struggling with the tenure process and it had worn us down. Of the four of us in our cohort, C had gotten Lupus, I had been diagnosed with pre-diabetes, and another had gotten divorced. Those were the big signposts -- there were other more minor symptoms, from sleeplessness to recurrent colds. In some ways that isn't anything about tenure, but about life in your 30s and 40s. In other ways, while the whole process of tenure couldn't be called a cause of any of these things, the stress it put on our bodies and souls certainly didn't help.

C and I have chatted before about how most people don't understand what it means to be a faculty member. It's one of those jobs that invades every area of your life. Teaching, Research, Service -- get it done, do more of it, or lose your job and your reputation at the end of six years. I'm certain there are more stressful jobs, but the difference I think is that from the outside it seems so peachy: most people think we wander onto campus a few days out of the week, babble on to our classes, and go home.

So this sabbatical is more than about having the time to do projects put on hold for six years, it is about having the time to refresh our bodies and souls from the inside out. For me, that means cleansing with whole, raw vegan foods. It means juicing with the juicer C&D brought me that weekend. It means being creative again -- returning to a side of my professional life that I'd all but forgotten. It means, just maybe, feeling the light and ease return.