During one of my last sessions with my therapist in Denver, he gave me a handout to read titled something along the lines of “Tending to the Wounded Inner Child”. I, of course, never read it, because...what the hell? “Inner child”? If ever there was something that seemed as stereotypical therapist gobbledygook, it would be that. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.

When I arrived at treatment, I was thrilled to find that they had much of the therapy that I knew and had already experienced, such as Mindfulness, Somatics, and EMDR. As an adjunctive, my primary therapist decided that Somatics would be the best fit for me, to which I was also thrilled. But I never dreamed that it would help me to discover my own inner child. Much less three of them.

Don't get me wrong, I have anxiety with just about everything, but it wasn't until I was in the treatment center that I started to see just how limited my connections with other men could be.

As messed up as it is to hear myself say it now, I was taught (by example) that men don't show their emotions. They never cry in front of others, and......well, it's basically toxic masculinity.

This post (or rather me collating the data contained wherein) has been a long time coming. Really I should have started recording back at the beginning, but -as with many problems- at first it didn’t seem like it was a problem, and then it was too big of a problem to analyze. Now, in the future of the past, my goal is to keep it documented what I did and when. Every stupid thing I tried, every test and theory, every doctor and every supplement. In addition to this being the main crux of this blog (at least for the CFS third), collating all possible cures might prove useful to someone, somewhere in the future. That’s a very distant hope.

And while I refer to it as “Chronic Fatigue”, there are a lot of other weird, bizarre symptoms that may show up and then fade away. The main crux is oversleeping and never feeling rested, but there’s also a giant menagerie such as dizziness/drowsiness, lack of mental clarity, being nauseated and tired after eating, beaches and visual problems. Eventually I made a list of all these things to take to the doctor, but that’s getting ahead. In the beginning, it was just about being tired.