Updates

I'm horrible at keeping up with this but...

1. I finally accepted that food was the root cause of my health problems - I had gotten sicker being vegan (again, it's been a pattern - being veg*n relies on foods I can't handle, especially when one is short on time), but this time my bloodwork was near immediate crisis. I knew that I got sicker every time I went veg*n (especially vegan), and I knew I had some level of problems with gluten and soy - I just hadn't been strict enough to find out how much. After some experimentation, I have a severe gluten intolerance (to the extent that going back on to determine whether it's celiac or non-celiac isn't worth it - even a very small amount of gluten would have me sick for days - so it's 100% avoidance) - what looked like fibromyalgia, chronic complex migraines, chronic sinusitis, horrible skin, IBS, and even the bouts of what looked like systemic inflammatory arthritis were all gluten, and all were gone within a week. There's a moderate soy intolerance in there as well, and a bit to corn. My GI system definitely didn't like any legumes at the time, but who knows what would happen if I tried them again (I'm not eager to). 
2. I was becoming pretty rapidly insulin resistant on a vegan diet (blood glucose was fine, but triglycerides through the roof and energy fluctuations all over the place), so I pretty much had to break the carb addiction. Needless to say, with all that going on, to even get in the ballpark with a healthy diet, I'm eating animals. Six months into that, and three months into cutting out all grains, legumes, and (except on exceedingly rare occasions) dairy, I'm still dealing with eating them everyday on some level.
3. This is the healthiest I've been in about two decades.
4. I finished the RN portion of my program the end of July, and took and passed the NCLEX in early September.
5. I'm now in the MSN portion of my program. This semester is brutal, as in the family specialty, we have almost no clinical (6 hours of newborn assessment, and 6 hours of geriatric assessment), just endless hours of class. We make up for it by overloading on clinical in the spring and next year.
6. I'm also TAing Medical-Surgical Nursing. I feel like I'm making positive contributions to my school, but it's stressful.
7. Weight started to melt off with the change in diet, and being not in constant pain and not dealing with a various degree of debilitation everyday for the first time in two decades, I'm back in the gym. I took up Aikido (specifically Yoseikan Budo). Rather than having to constantly work around my body for what I can do with weights, I'm able to really work on getting good at the full olympic lifts. I can also do a lot of mixed modality workouts. It's pretty great.
8. I realized, gender-wise, I was hiding a lot behind the weight - being that heavy made my body look more genderless. Also, even if my body was still viewed as female, being butch didn't offend as much because I was "unattractive", anyway. And there's a certain harder edge to my body now. There's a whole post on gender to be made.
9. I also realized that I was hiding my internalized shit with my own gender non-conformance behind "they"- clearly, with butch as the central part of my gender, I'm never going to move through the world unnoticed...in a way that is always genderqueer. But to steal how Kelli Dunham talks about it, it's more "woman or whatever". In other words, "she" stopped hurting when I accepted I wasn't a failure at being a woman.