A year ago, I wrote about Tom turning 70. Now I'm 70 also.
I found out last week that my A1C is 6.5, so I am prediabetic. When the nurse from the doctor's office first called to tell me, I was really upset. I have neuromas in both feet, a pinched nerve in my neck from stenosis caused by osteoarthritis, and a hip that bothers me more days than not, also from arthritis. I felt, at first, that this sugar issue was just one more age-related problem that was going to make my life more difficult. I was pretty upset for a couple of hours.
Then I did some research, and realized that this is a potential problem that I can actually prevent if I address it now. I need to lose weight - it will help my hip and feet issues also. The nurse suggested that I "might want to lose some weight, so watch the carbs," but she didn't make a big issue out of it, and I didn't talk to the doctor. But I decided on my own that I want to try to lose weight. So I am trying to eat smaller portions, cut out some carbs, increase my walking, and avoid sweets. In the first 3 days, I lost 3 pounds.
I'm announcing it here, because I want public accountabiltiy. My plan is to use this blog as a journal, to encourage myself to lose weight, and also to journal about other things as well.
Like control. I've been feeling blue this winter, partly because of the feet and hip and neck pain, but also, I realize now, because those things seem so out of my control in many ways.
Control has been an issue for me since I was 15. That year, toward the end of the school year, my father announced that we would be moving from RI to IL. His company offered him a larger territory, potentially a lot more profitable. I was about to graduate from my grade school, which went from first through ninth grade. In RI I would have started high school, which starts in sophomore year there. In IL, high school starts with 9th grade freshman year. So I ended up as a transfer student in a situation where all the kids my age had already been together for a year, and they all knew the lay of the land. I had to leave the friends I had known all my life, and my cousins who lived across the street in RI. I was devastated by the move, and I had no control over any of the decisions being made around it.
In college I studied English and Psychology. I developed some ideas about how perceptions about our own ability to control situations in our lives impacts us. It starts in infancy, which is, of course, all about learning to control our bodies and the actions of people around us. The terrible twos happen when a child has mastered enough to be able to walk and communicate a little bit, and they want to control the world around them. We encourage some of their efforts, and tantrums ensue when they want to control something that we cannot allow them to control for many reasons, their safety as a paramount concern. Their perception seems to be that we are just thwarting their attempts to control things. This leads to some interesting battles between parents and children.
Throughout life, our actions and responses to events are the only things we actually can control. Most relationship issues are about control and compromise. Sometimes we excel at something or are given authority in a job that gives us the perception that we have some measure of control.
A perception that we have lost control or cannot exert it because of other people leads to feelings of anger or fear. Childhood has waves of anger and fear caused by our inablilty to control everything. The adolescent years are complicated by bodily urges which we are forced to reign in. The striving for independence that began in the first year of life becomes intense. Later teen years can become filled with strife if parents are not ready to relinquish more control to their maturing kids.
Control again becomes an issue when we perceive in mid-life that we actually have had very little control in life. Buying a long-wanted car or having an affair are things that we can control, and for many people the compulsion to do something like that becomes very hard to resist.
So here I am, at the threshold of old age, being impacted by my ability or inability to control things.
