What Does it Take?

I'm trying to understand what it takes for people to get to where they get to. It seems to be important to me these days. How much of whatever grief pain joy or happiness is required for doors in the mind to open and ideas to be understood and directions altered? And is that always what it takes for lives to change and commitments to be made?

For example; gluten free bread. Odd segue, but work with me. I lived 44, just shy of 45 years eating bread made with wheat flour. That is what bread is after all. In the dictionary, if it does not already say so, after the word bread should be the definition "A base of active yeast, wheat flour and water". Anything lacking wheat flour should not be called bread in my estimation. Wheat flour and yeast were put on this planet to be together. They were made for each other, and apart neither can do anything of true significance. Well, unless you like beer I guess. Their chemical dance is an awesome thing to behold, to initiate, to use to craft lovely foods.

So then we have gluten free bread which is made essentially from ANYTHING BUT wheat flour. I've seen all manner of flour from tapioca to bean flour used in gluten free breads, and they have all produced the same sorry results. Now I keep hearing other gluten intolerant people screaming the praises of this store bought gluten free bread or that new recipe. Then I try whatever it is and find myself profoundly disappointed. Which leads me to wonder; is it that they've been so long without wheat bread that they've forgotten and this stuff actually taste good to them, or do they simply have no sense of taste and discernment, or is it all a happy happy facade they throw up to let the world know how unbothered they are by never being able to eat real bread again? Or maybe they've just decided to settle for what they can get. Will I one day miss bread so badly that I'll eat a piece of tapioca bread and swoon?

I know now how inappropriate wheat barley rye and oats are in my diet. I fully understand that my body was not born to eat these things. True bread is a part of that whole culture of grain we've got going on in the western world. Isn't substitute bread as bad in it's own way somehow? If the primary offender to a GF person is bread, why on earth would you try and find a poor substitute for it? I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm just pissed because I can't have wheat bread. Will there ever be a point where I won't miss what I can't have?

And this is all kind of rhetorical really. It is what it is. I could not bring myself to knowingly eat anything with gluten in it now. I've crossed too many lines to ever go back. I know what the results will be. I don't want to be sick. My desire to be healthy and happy is way stronger than my desire to eat bread. Having never been addicted to anything I don't know if that is the way it works. Does an addict finally give up whatever it is that's killing them because the desire to be healthy is stronger than the desire to be unhealthy? Do they hear a click in their brain and suddenly they see the error of their ways? Or is it just physical, which it is with me as well. I know if I eat gluten I will be in pain for hours if not days after. Do you reach a point where whatever good you were getting out of the addiction is overwhelmed by the bad side of it?

The odd thing is that I always knew I'd make a choice at some point to live a healthier life. I have this odd ability. Call it whatever you want. But I know things sometimes. It's always been like that. I have this game I play sometimes when I'm not sure which road to take, or what the outcome of something will be. I ask myself if I can imagine things turning out a certain way. If I can't imagine it, I know that is not what is supposed to be. If I can imagine the alternative then that is what will happen. This works even for things I have no control over like other people's choices and world affairs. I knew long ago that I'd hear this click in my head some way some how and what I ate would then change. I've just been waiting for it. Well, IT'S HERE!

This is not what I had in mind though. I think I imagined I'd suddenly find the energy to eat fruits and vegetables or go on a diet or walk twenty miles a day. I didn't imagine not being able to eat things because they'd make me sick, and the subsequent chaos that would create in my life. But I also now realize that this mechanism probably fits me better than any other. I needed to make the connection between being sick and what I was eating to stop eating it, and then be led down the discovery path by that knowledge to realize how toxic so much of what I've eaten all my life was. There was never going to be a dawning light, pfftthhhhhh. I should have realized. I don't do dawning light. I need to be clubbed over the head and scared shitless. That I ever thought "enlightenment" would come any other way is pretty funny now with 20/20, eh or in my case 20/200 hindsight.