Am I depressed or in a flare? Am I flaring or suffering from depression? How, after all these years, damn near two decades of living with these conditions, can I not know the difference? A flare comes with insomnia and pain. Depression comes with a situational helplessness it doesn't seem will ever alleviate. A pressing down of my person into a flatness the three dimensions of life cannot reside in. A flare feels chemical, internal, an entity inside my body that has taken over control. So am I saying depression is a choice? Because anyone whose ever been there knows it sure as hell is not. I ..read more

I've struggled with carrying extra weight since childhood. As a third-grader, I remember racing home from school to eat an entire package of Top Ramen every day, which I have since learned is packed with calories and fat and makes me wonder what my mother was thinking??? Getting braces in seventh grade helped me drop a few pounds, since my mouth was frequently too sore for me to eat for a few days after the orthodontist would tighten them up. By tenth grade I had discovered boys and partying and food was the last thing I cared about. Then I went to college and gained the freshmen fifteen or ..read more

I've stopped writing. Like everything. I'm still banging out short book reviews for my bookstagram page, and actually got a job as a freelance book critic which is awesome, but as far as the "Leah Tyler the Writer" concept goes, I feel like a fraud. I finished my book a while back. My writer's group is receiving the last few chapters and then it will be 100% workshopped. It's past time to start shopping for an agent and publication. I even started to write a short story but never finished it. I feel like my writing just sucks. The thought of composing a second book seems inconceivable to me ..read more

A few years ago my husband was studying for a licensing exam and had to devote the majority of his non-working hours to cramming. He works best at the coffee shop, so after work and both days on the weekends, that's where he went. I was already living a solitary life and losing contact with the one person I saw on a regular basis hit hard. This was during the middle of my big relapse and I was quite depressed. The isolation compounded my desolation. I acutely remember walking my dogs on Saturday mornings and crying because I was the only person who was alone on the street. Everyone else was ..read more

It was a Sunday evening in early November. I was lying on the sofa watching TV and my body was aching far more than it usually does. Shooting pains pinging against my flesh, my clothes hurt my skin and eyeballs ached. I had a gross taste in my mouth. And I was really cold. Probably a bad flare, I thought, while reluctantly pushing myself off the couch. I went into the bathroom to rummage around for the thermometer. I'd been relying heavily on that thermometer since March. Ever since covid happened, each time I felt crummy I'd take my temperature to decipher if my symptoms were a flare or if ..read more

The cook who doesn't eat, the dog trainer who's never owned a dog, the marriage counselor who has yet to be married. I mean honestly, how effective can one be? Yet for a number of years I fell into the aforementioned category. I was a writer who didn't read. I could list my litany of excuses but that's not the point. What matters is my apathy was rewarded quite painfully. I spent years writing a novel. Then I had some people read it and realized I had made an excessive amount of mistakes and needed to rewrite it. So I did, then I tried to find an agent and my manuscript garnered absolutely n ..read more

Well hello there. It's been nearly a year since I last posted a blog. Is it too dramatic to say that between February 7, 2020 (my last post) and today, the world has pretty much flipped on its head? I don't think it is. The break did me good. It's not like I haven't wanted to write in all this time. I just haven't known how to keep writing a blog centered solely around having fibromyalgia. Back in the day when I started blogging I was a very sick girl. Sick was the only way I knew how to relate to the world. My days were spent in a defensive huddle trying to fend off everything life hurled ..read more

The Super Bowl commercials this year were dumb. Usually they're funny, or poignant, or heart-tugging. This year exactly two of them made me laugh and two of them made me tear up. That's it. Everyone's been raving about The Irishman. All the billboards told me it got 9 Academy Award nominations for best picture! I watched it and was furious I wasted three-and-a-half hours of my life on such a pointless journey. Aside from Al Pacino's acting, I was not impressed. I'm sorry, were the women even invited to speak? Yet this is the stuff everyone thinks is groundbreaking... I'm constantly on my own ..read more

I've always wondered if nutritional supplements work. I started on them in 2006, the year I was diagnosed, and have tried pretty much everything under the sun since. There's no way to really know if anything is doing anything. I don't know what's malfunctioning in my body, giving me fibro in the first place. So how could I possibly know if a specific herb is helping a specific problem caused by I don't know what? My pre-surgery experience gave me some answers. My doctor instructed me to lay off herbs and fish oil for two weeks prior to my surgery. Science doesn't know how they impact bleedin ..read more

I'm on a mission of self-improvement. The life I'm living isn't one I want to keep investing in. Instead of continuing to make excuses for myself, all the while growing increasingly more miserable, I'm determined to do something about it. Concurrently I have a chronic illness that kind of does what it wants regardless of how well I take care of myself. Which these days isn't all that great. The result is my life is pretty much a joke. What can I do but try? This is a good example that kinda sums up my reality. It concerns my lack of regular exercise. I used to be in shape and while I'm not a ..read more