Health Gazelle: From Affluenza to Asceticism

From Affluenza to Asceticism

At one point, my husband and I and our two sons lived in a 2200 sq. ft. house with attached garage, two cars and all the usual trappings of North American Affluenza: multiple TV's, two couches, king-sized beds (yes: two of them), and more junk than we could possibly keep track of. From there, we downsized somewhat when we moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. It was there that I lived for 5 years in an icky apartment which was much worse than I knew at the time.

The people who lived there before me had 6 kids in a 1000 sq. ft., 2 bedroom, 1 bath apartment. They were evicted and the place was so bad that some environmental agency was involved in the clean up. They apparently smoked as well: when I would boil water or take hot baths, the steam would cause brown goo to run down the walls and it smelled strongly like cigarettes. Because we had come from a much larger home, in spite of having four yard sales before moving, this tiny apartment was filled to the gills with too much stuff, including tons of books. We also acquired a lot of lovely, upscale-looking furniture from Bombay while we lived there. Much to my horror, I later realized that most things from Bombay are not real wood but are medium density fiberboard (MDF -- aka upscale particle board, and probably with more chemicals).

I eventually discovered that the poor air circulation in the apartment combined with lots of steamy baths and too much stuff had created a severe mold problem in my bedroom and that this was the source of my insomnia. I realized that I wasn't sleeping on the pull-out sofa in the dining room to avoid my husband. I was doing so to avoid the mold. I tried to clean up the mess and salvage my expensive bedroom furniture that I knew I could not afford to replace because I was facing a divorce. My best friend kept irritatingly nagging me to throw out the mattress. One day, after 3 or 4 months of this, I finally woke up with bleeding cracks at the sides of my mouth, noted that I was always -- without fail -- completely miserable when I first woke up and concluded she was right: The mattress had to go.

My sons promptly hauled it out to the dumpster, along with the boxspring. It took much, much longer to conclude that the bedroom furniture also belonged in the dumpster.

With this revelation, my sons and I then began a "smoke and mirrors" campaign to throw stuff out without making it look like we had less. My husband and I legally separated and I insisted that some of his stuff go in storage. We gradually took more of his stuff over there. To make things easier on all of us, my husband accepted all the travel he could with his job and he was very often gone. When he was out of town, my sons and I were methodically emptying the cupboards, kitchen cabinets, shed, etc. There was lots of stuff sitting around out in the open and the place looked overwhelmingly cluttered. This prevented my husband from trying to "be generous" and leave us with more stuff. (It also prevented me from becoming frozen in my tracks and unable to move forward. I was terrified and overwhelmed by what we were really doing. I used lots of psychological tricks to make it possible for me to keep to the course.) We generously gave him all the toxic MDF furniture from Bombay, which he loved.

He eventually moved out and I arranged to move to another apartment the following month. Many things never made it on the moving truck. They went to the dumpster instead. Some things came off the moving truck at the other end and never made it up the stairs to our new apartment and, instead, went to the dumpster there. We spent the summer methodically getting rid of most of what was left. I initially replaced some stuff with glass and metal pieces. The place was pretty spartan (but not compared to how we live now). I told my oldest son "I am much sicker than you. Your sense of smell is better than mine. And the toxins interfere with my thinking. Do NOT let my nostalgia interfere with getting rid of whatever we need to get rid of in order to get well." Getting rid of things like photographs was the hardest for me but nostalgia of that sort is alien to my very aspie sons and they can be quite ruthless in pursuing a goal.

I did not know that everything would need to go. I had no way to know that. But it was all so toxic and smelled so musty -- no, not merely musty. The apartment we had lived in had been a toxic stew of many problems.

I eventually left California, abandoning that second apartment in a manner that looks pretty flighty to many people. I paid the apartment complex hundreds of dollars to trash the rest of our belongings and thousands to break the lease. I stayed with relatives so I could pay that, while job hunting and so forth. I also ordered new birth certificates and the like -- a process I am not 100% finished with. I still have a very small bag in the shed of toxic papers from California.

I now have a new job, new car, and a nearly empty apartment, with six pieces of furniture where my sons and I choose to sleep on the floor. Almost everything we have was acquired in recent months. I continue to heal. I take a lot of supplements and we have removed all kinds of problem items from our lives. We have a lot of practices to keep the papers and such to a minimum so we don't re-create a similar situation in the future.

Some people cannot understand why I would choose to live without so many things. It's simple: Yes, I live without a couch, a bed and many of the other comforts and conveniences that many people take for granted. I also live without the eight prescription drugs I used to take, without the nebulizers I used to have, without the constant excruciating pain I once suffered, without the nightmarish insomnia I endured for years, without prescription digestive enzymes, without the hole I used to have in my left lung, and without many other forms of suffering which added up to many years of my own personal hell, throughout which I often felt that death would be a blessing.

I can live with the trade-off.

10 February 2007

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