Okay…I’m easily irritated when I hear, “I’m just being realistic.” Not trying to be judgmental here. It’s just…limiting. It’s makes our world smaller. Our personal world, our universe is limitless in so many ways. Instead of ‘realistic’, what if we think ‘interesting’? “What an interesting idea!”  “Yes, that’s a possibility!” “Someone has to win the PowerBall.” The truth is if a person never buys a ticket, one thing’s for sure. She/he will never win the lottery. Of course we need balance in everything. Spending ridiculous amounts on money on tickets is not financially and emotionally healthy. But neither are the self-limiting words and thoughts we often feed our brain. We make ourselves inconsequential in our own minds, and that is how we translate ourselves to the world.

Almost all of my life I have been blessed with what some would call an unreasoning, maybe arrogant belief in myself. Part of this must have come from my parents who lifted themselves out of poverty in Tennessee and provided a comfortable childhood for me and my 3 younger siblings. The rest of the equation has to be from being a talented performer who got positive feedback from a year old that I was ‘special’ somehow. The absolute love of music that I inherited from my both my parents and their heritage instilled in me that sharing this talent was my life’s purpose. And it was for many, many years. I never thought, “I’m going to be a professional musician”, as much as I just sang and played piano everywhere I happened to be. At home, school, church and family gatherings, I found a joy that transcended personal circumstances. Finding a way to connect through music was my connection to the world.

Along the way I became very aware of opportunities to share my talents. Throughout those young years, I also began to understand that not every opportunity produced the desired result. But it rarely occurred to me that what I was aspiring to couldn’t be done. I just took the steps required to do it. This caused no small amount of performance anxiety which plagued me later in my career, but that sure never stopped me. My formative years were spent in cementing a belief in my ability to connect with my music which almost always produced sometimes unbelievable opportunities in what most find a very tough business.

So the ending to this story is glorious, right? Nope. I hit a snag that slowed me down to a halt for many years, and caused me to doubt my ability to connect, to thrive, to continue to be that person with no self-limiting beliefs. I became ill with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), or as it is now known, Systemic Exertion Intolerance Disease (SEID). What a horror that turned out to be.

The 1950’s was a great time to grow up in Knoxville, TN. We never locked our door, Mother let us play baseball in the front yard until someone knocked out a window, and in the summer we only came indoors to eat. While all kids get bug bites and blackberry bush scratches, mine seemed to often end up infected and were much worse than my siblings or the neighborhood kids. Girl Scout camping trips were a nightmare. I was always dealing with respiratory issues or being too uncomfortable to rest in a sleeping bag on the ground. And I was always the girl that mosquitoes and ticks loved. The outdoors became a minefield as I grew older.

But always I performed. As a small child, the sheer joy of tap dancing, twirling a baton, then later on singing, playing piano and guitar, or getting juicy roles in plays, musicals and operas carried me through. No matter what else happened, I could depend on my talent. The only caveat was a tendency to be a bit overweight. Not much, but just enough that our family doctor prescribed a new drug called amphetamines. Years later I learned they were also called Black Widows…speed. I was 12 years old when I took my first one, and in my 20’s before they became too difficult to get. In high school, however, I discovered a way to deal with the severe highs and lows of amphetamines. Alcohol became my new best friend.

Promo photo for the 1976 United Artists Album, “Almost Persuaded”

Throughout my high school and college years, on into the 1970’s, I knew exactly who I was, what I wanted to do, and how to make it happen. Then in 1979 after a decade of high stress as a recording artist with Columbia and United Artists Records, an emotionally charged confusing third contract offer with MCA, and a seriously failing marriage, I bit the dust. I mentally broke down. Functioning alcoholics don’t see themselves as addicts. In my world, alcohol wasn’t that much of a problem…until I used it to wash down a bottle of pills. “My mind is the problem” I kept repeating to myself. It was just mental. Couldn’t be because of a physical dependency, had to be mental. Although there was pressure on several fronts to continue in the Nashville music business, I chose to hunker down in the self-protective cocoon of religion.

The ’80’s brought another marriage, a gorgeous baby girl via C-Section, and a new career. But with each life event, I started feeling worse and worse. My alcohol use was sporadic, not everyday. More like a binge of days, weeks or months, then none at all for a time. But by now, I knew I had a problem, an addiction. Then after more surgeries, mono at 38 years old in which the Epstein-Barr virus really escalated in my body, and a devastating diagnosis of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, my previously unfailing belief in myself started to falter. CFS caused my doctors to recommend psychiatric treatment. It’s all they knew to suggest. The medical establishment hadn’t effectively connected Epstein-Barr to CFS and still hasn’t. Without the internet, finding obscure info about a little known virus was impossible, and my intuition concerning EBV and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome fell on completely deaf ears. So my health quickly spiraled down, and over the next 20 or so years I became more and more at the mercy of every drug out there for clinical depression, bi-polar disorder, anxiety, panic attacks, and PTSD. Along with these drugs were those to treat heart disease, COPD, asthma, GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease), type 2 diabetes, fluid retention, high blood pressure and a few I’ve forgotten. The upside of it, I thought, was that I no longer used jugs of wine to manage my stress. Actually I had just transferred my alcohol addiction to the forever (or so I was told) world of psych drugs.

In December 2002 I had emergency heart bypass surgery. That was truly the event that cost me the life I had built for myself and my 17 year old daughter. My strong self-belief was almost non-existent after that. Getting out of bed to get dressed was about all I could manage. I could no longer work, and the mind that had been so active and fluid in adapting to any circumstance started to fail me. I was living in a drug-veiled world able to peer through just enough to understand the impending horror of gradually losing my sense of self altogether. But I awoke from the nightmare in August of 2012.

My psychiatrist at the time felt that further treatment for pain and psychiatric disorders was impossible with all the drugs in my system. The only answer was to enter the hospital and go through a guided detox in the Pain Management Unit using Suboxone, a drug used to treat opioid addiction. I was taking Vicodin for migraine but certainly not everyday. It was the psych drugs that were the most troublesome. He wanted to get rid of most of the drugs and start all over again. That’s what every psychiatrist had done for over 20 years. But that is not what happened.

I thankfully couldn’t tolerate Suboxone. It gave me Parkinson’s symptoms that unfortunately persisted for a few weeks. So after puking my guts out on day 3, the good doc sent me for a lumbar puncture. Could my illness be MS? I was terrified! Afterwards, my body again reacted…but this time in a miraculous way. Instead of getting the awful headache that everyone usually gets after the procedure, I felt fine. In fact, I felt positively incredible! For the first time in many years, I had no headache! The persistent migraines and “everyday headache” (yes, that was a diagnosis) that I’d been living with had vanished…and NO ONE could offer an explanation. I now believe that the lumber puncture could have possibly interrupted pain signals to my brain via my vagus nerve. But I have never been able to confirm that hypothesis.

The euphoria lasted for a month punctuated by a couple of migraines, but long enough to propel me forward to keep chasing that headache-free ‘high’. My psychiatrist kept giving me meds, but I began to refuse and taper off them because I was more lucid now and beginning to understand that there was an answer that didn’t involve drugs. It was food! I also began to relearn to believe in myself. I didn’t have to wander off to la-la land like Mother did. In fact, I began to discern why she had symptoms of dementia in her 40’s. Bit by bit the tools I needed to become healthier so that my future could again be hopeful began to emerge. My life changed. I changed!  The ‘how’ is a story for later.

What I know for sure is that my alcohol use was part of an enormous sugar addiction which no longer plagues me after eliminating processed foods and sugar. Other persistent CFS symptoms from mercury and other heavy metals, food poisoned by our foolish societal use of industrial pesticides and pollutants, as well as those toxins we use in our homes and apply to our bodies also fuel Epstein-Barr and other viruses which can be passed on from parents to children and person to person. The answers for healing are in a revealing book called Medical Medium by Anthony William. The information in this book has been an epiphany of healing for me. It’s worth every minute you could ever spend reading and re-reading it.

Today I’m more productive than I have been in many years. I measure success differently now. Every week I have less pain, less brain fog, more restorative sleep, more ways to effectively manage stress, more gratitude for the blessings in my life. That’s success!

Nothing is impossible unless we make it so. We may have to tweak our path, adjust the activities of our day, meditate to block out the noise of the toxic people around us, make an extra effort to chop those veggies to provide our bodies with the fuel to create health, but if you believe it, you WILL see it. You are the sum of every single thing you do, say or think. The possibilities are limitless!

“Life’s A Journey” ©2006 Purple Garage Publishing (Words/Music/Performance by Sherry King)

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