Poison

Sigh.

My body hurts, aches with a dull knotted insistent pain. My eyes are sensitive to light, and focusing is more difficult than normal. My sleep is unsettled, and I wake feeling unrested, regardless of how long I "slept." I feel like there's a fog in my head, a dull edge scraping everything, and I can't think straight or focus fully. My short-term memory is fizzling away again. My skin is angry, and it shows on my face. My GI tract is gurgley and painful, and I've essentially lost my appetite for appetite, because it's so unpleasant to digest right now. Not to mention that no matter what I eat, I feel like I'm eating wrong, like my body's not getting what it needs regardless. I'm emotionally on edge, super sensitive and worryable. And I don't know how to deal with people - I don't have the energy or clarity to handle social interactions, so all I feel like doing is hiding, but I don't have the concentration to read (mostly - except for that one book, from which, unfortunately, pieces are already missing in my memory) so I stick a mindless movie in my computer or just sit on my bed staring into space and muttering to myself.

Add all this up? Yup, I'm poisoned. I think it's been the slow boil - trace and ubertrace amounts adding up over the past few weeks to the point where my body is just plain ticked and I feel awful. I don't think it's been any of my food, per se - I think everything I've bought and eaten has been safe. I'm getting super careful about that. I think it's the crumbs all over my kitchen, the things on the burners and stovetops, my dishes getting used, or washed by someone who may or may not have used the correct sponge (and who's to say - perhaps my sponge got used on the normal dishes and is now contaminating everything it touches?!) or didn't wash their hands after touching bread or other dirty dishes, or maybe the sink needs thorough cleaning, as does the stove, or the bags of bread sitting in our hallways spewing crumbs, and of course the table, oh, and anything with gluten MUST stay away from my food in the fridge! It could be, and probably is, any number of things, all added together to equal badness 10,000. Stupid gluten, how I hate thee!

I love this house. I REALLY want to keep living here. But if I can't work out a way to keep safe, I'll have to move. I can't live here if I'll be poisoned all the time. I want it to not matter, I want people to not have to learn new habits, to learn to be more careful, to be able to do and eat and make whatever they want and not have to worry about keeping it away from me & my dishes or having to clean up immediately so that I don't have to avoid the kitchen. I hate this. I hate the inconvenience. I hate how anti-social it is, how picky, how authoritative I'm afraid I'll have to be to get it through people's heads. BUT. (There's always a but.) I hate how I feel even more. I can feel it destroying me. Literally. I hate what gluten does to me enough that I'll do whatever needs to be done to avoid it.

Even if that means leaving all my friends here and finding a new place to live.