This Year

The past 18 months has been exceedingly strange and difficult.

Since it has been just over a year since my last post, I think an update is needed.

At the end of last year I was cocooning, hoping to rest and recover from burnout, only to find that as 2024 began my energy continued to slip away. By February I was spending much of my time in bed, doing very little, and this became the pattern for the first half of the year.

During that time I started seeing a naturopath who told me I had a thyroid issue. This turned out to be a valuable realisation, because within a few months I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease.

The naturopath’s dietary advice left a lot of be desired, however, and after losing weight and an only slight improvement in my condition, despite spending many hundreds of dollars on fancy supplements, I gave him the boot. (He was quite rude to me at my last appointment, so I knew I’d done the right thing.)

I re-read Medicine Woman by Lucy H. Pearce to remind myself of my ability to take my healing journey back into my own hands—even if that meant accepting the way things were for a while, with the bouts of depression and mood swings and lack of will or motivation to do anything.

From Medicine Woman by Lucy H. Pearce

After a while my energy did improve slightly, and I could sit in bed knitting madly, and listening to music or Manda Scott’s Boudica series on audiobook.

By July/August I was much improved from the deeply fatigued place where I had been. I started to see a dietitian, and to eat and regain weight.

I have also been voraciously re-reading books this year—When God was a Woman by Merlin Stone, The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner, Diving Deep and Surfacing by Carol P. Christ, and At the Root of this Longing by Carol Lee Flinders, and much more—and revisiting these feminist texts has been so enlivening. I also treated myself to a discounted bundle of four issues of THE RADICAL NOTION (since print issues will no longer be available), and I’ve been impressed with the quality of the writing and thought in the articles—perfect stimulation for my hungry, restless mind.

Though in spite of feeling better (though still far from my ‘best’), the last few months presented another diagnosis of possible thyroid cancer. Thus I had surgery at the beginning of December to remove part of my thyroid (which turned out to be far less traumatic than I thought it would be—virtually no pain!), and while the suspicious lump in question turned out to be benign, two small incidental cancerous lumps were found. There is, therefore, some chance that similar lumps might be found in what remains of my thyroid. So, decisions will have to be made in a couple of months about what to do next, which means this particular adventure with the medical system is not quite over yet.

While everything remains a bit uncertain, thyroid cancer is rarely life-threatening, so I am not particularly worried about it. I am even feeling better. Whether as a result of the surgery or just a happy blip, I don’t know. But I wanted to write here, when I haven’t wanted to write anything for a very long time.

I still have little desire to return to art-making, and writing will likely remain sporadic. Yet I am beginning to feel more animated and interested in engaging with people and the world. As yet I will probably continue my hiatus here, until I am more certain about how I am feeling and what my meagre energy permits. For now I am still most active on Instagram: @offeringsfromthewellspring and @the_wild_nun, and Facebook.