when your brain tumor is making you morbidly obese (or, what's going on in the world is playing out in my body)

Hey Friends -

So I took my first trip in an ambulance to the emergency room on February 18th. Health issues have been really declining, and it’s been challenging on multiple levels.

But I’m super relieved and proud - because is was trial to deal with the American medical system to get to this point - as it seems like I’ve made a breakthrough in terms of figuring out the cause of the health issues I’ve been experiencing more acutely in the past 18 months or so…and it looks like it’s a pituitary adenoma, technically a brain tumor. All the labs point to this. I go in for a pituitary MRI on March 12th to confirm.

And when I say I’m proud of myself, I mean that I got this far in the face of continual gaslighting, malicious incompetence, and a real horror show at the local hospital where I am right now, OHSU in Portland…but more on that later. Like, the bad doctors and bureaucrats there are going to go to hell. It’s a terrible place, and they are consciously trying to make it that way.

But I learned that Massachusetts General has an excellent program for pituitary surgeries, and they’ve already replied to my extremely detailed email listing all my labs, imaging, and symptoms, and have agreed to take me on as a new patient. I feel like I’m 90% of the way through this challenging journey that I suspect goes back to at least my late 20s, and I also know deep in my bones that once this body is healed, that feeling of great depletion is going to leave Seeds too. It’ll be like a boulder weighing me down is removed, and that energy will channel through Seeds as well.

Upon reflection, I think I was exercising so much and on such restrictive diets for so long that it masked the symptoms I was experiencing for years. Then, when I went into eating disorder recovery full-on, the mask was ripped off.

A pituitary tumor can cause Cushing’s, which explains why I’m this fat, despite having not overeaten even by a couple bites in nearly two years as I’ve gone through eating disorder recovery, and despite maintaining a whole foods-based diet that I naturally want to maintain now because the ED really does seem to be gone.

I plan to make a video - the next episode of the Spiritual Crypto podcast - to share all about this, as it’s been a while. I’ll add it to this blog post once it’s up.

But the other big thing I’m working through is this strong sense of being hated when I speak. It’s coming up so hard that I’m finding it impossible to make videos without forcing myself, and I get that at this stage of the game, I’m not supposed to force myself to do things anymore. That’s a big part of the lesson my body is trying to teach me.

If you were around in late January for my annual The State of the Seeds address, you’d know that that’s the first video I’d made in some time. During that I shared thoughts about the state of the world, what’s going on with Seeds, and I ended with updates about my health. This included talking about an upcoming biopsy to make sure I don’t have cancer, and my first ever panic attack, brought on by a conversation I had with my mother in late December on the phone. Until very recently, I hadn’t spoken to her in 7 and a half years.

Anyway, to make a long story short for the blog, apparently my two brothers, who I did not even realize were aware of my YouTube account, neither of whom I had had any interaction with in nearly 8 years, save emailing one to ask about what appeared to be a shady real estate deal in which they convinced me to sell my share of a piece of property that I co-owned with my siblings to my mother - and he then ended up owning even more of it, for unclear reasons that were never communicated to me - watched The State of the Seeds video. They both commented on the video. It was some of the most hateful stuff I’ve ever read - and I am a woman on the internet, so I’ve seen a lot of horrible shit directed at me here. I hid their comments.

It’s like all masks are coming off right now.

It helped me to see how so little of whatever is triggering them has to do with me and my behavior…but it still stunted me. It reinforced this loop, that whenever I try to share anything, even when it’s about something like being tested for cancer, the people who were supposed to love me the most will be so awful that there aren’t words to describe what that is and how it makes me feel. And it makes creating things feel very hard. It was hard to write this blog post because it meant mentioning this.

I can see the meta picture - the hostile energies come at you the hardest because they can sense they’re about to die. But I’m not yet healed enough to not have been both blindsided - I so rarely expect to run into the energies that want to hurt me - and pretty emotionally debilitated by this.

But I’m so aware of how all of this - narcissistic abuse that I went through in my family structure, the deference to my brothers, who have grown into abusive men - is ALSO endemic to late-stage capitalism. I’m supposed to heal all of this, from within a global system that does this to us, from within a family that treated me like that, to literally within my physical body itself.

Because the feminine is not meant to be depleted, in any of us. And what I see is that, very soon, it isn’t going to be any longer.

I think this means a long, old, very difficult chapter - for me and for Seeds - is coming to a close, and I think there’s something even more wonderful than I can currently imagine on the other side.

I’ll keep you posted. 💗

xo,
Rachel