Last night I slept on the futon because my back has been hurting for several months and I’ve been wondering if the mattress I’ve been sleeping on since moving in with my parents is to blame. As my dad said, “It’s only a hundred years old.” Honestly, the futon is pretty old too, but just like I’ve been squirting garlic water and everything else up my nose to try to rid myself of a sinus infection, I’ve decided I have to try something. I don’t think it’s a completely off-base idea, since my back didn’t hurt for the two weeks I was traveling and not sleeping on the hundred-year-old mattress. So we’ll see how it goes. Tonight I’m planning to rotate to the waterbed I slept in growing up (which wasn’t warm enough to sleep in last night). Considering it’s a twin-size and I’m more of a full-size boy (well, some would say a queen), I’ll probably be blogging about it tomorrow.

So get excited.

This afternoon I went to a coffee shop to work on a friend’s blog, but I spent most my time thinking about that fact that I was drinking green tea instead of a cheeseburger and fries. This is one of the things I hate about being on a diet–even though I started the diet to help my body heal and not to drop pounds, calories and weight still become a mental obsession. What’s worse, despite the fact that I’ve spent the last year eating pretty much whatever the hell I’ve wanted, for the last few days, whenever I’ve seen someone drinking a mocha or eating something with cheese wrapped in a white tortilla, I’ve instantly assumed the moral high ground. How could they? That’s SO bad for you. I’m guessing all this will get better as the diet becomes more routine and I learn to not take myself so freaking seriously.

A big positive to the diet, however, is that after only four days, I already feel better. Maybe it’s the garlic-up-my-nose thing or a combination of the two strategies, but I’ve stopped coughing up dark mucus and blood every morning, which I’m taking as a sign of improvement. Plus, you know how you take your health for granted? Like, when you feel well you don’t spend all day thinking, God, I feel like a million dollars–I just love breathing! But when you’re sick you can’t think of anything else; every thought from sunup to sundown is just one big ain’t-it-awful. Well, after a few hours at the coffee shop today, I realized I hadn’t thought about being sick one time. So maybe I’m on the mend.

Maybe.

In the middle of my work, a lady asked if it would bother me if she and her friends convened nearby. Imaging they wouldn’t make much noise, I said, “Why, are you having a dance party?”

“No,” she said, “but sometimes we can be a little loud.”

That’s considerate, I thought.

Well.

A LITTLE LOUD? Y’all, it was like they were at Chippendale’s–a bunch of middle-aged women hooping and hollering. Cackling. (Cackling is actually the word I was looking for.) It was obnoxious. That being said, I just gave up carbohydrates, so everything is obnoxious. Anyway, I put my headphones in for a while, then eventually moved to a different area.

A little loud. Sheesh.

When I finished working on my friend’s blog, I spent about an hour reading a book my friend Amber loaned me–The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. It’s about–well–ways to happier, and the author suggests making a list of hallmarks by which to live your life, pithy things like, “Be Marcus!” or “Stop taking yourself so freaking seriously.” So today I wrote down several from the book to “try on for size,” but my favorite was, “People give what they have to give.” This reminds me of the sentiment, “People are doing the best they can,” but I like it better because to me it’s more compassionate. Whenever I hear someone is doing the best they can, I always think, Yeah, but they SHOULD be doing better. I always picture Mr. Holland in Mr. Holland’s Opus screaming, “Your best is not good enough!” But people giving what they have to give reminds me that if someone is passing out something I don’t like (rudeness, nasty looks, uh, cackling), it may be because that’s all they have to give. Put another way, even if they’re being a total shit, it’s probably because that’s the best they’ve been given.

I guess we all do the best with what we’ve got. I mean, if I really knew a better way to heal my sinuses, be on a diet, or not get irritated with a bunch of middle-aged ladies, I’d do it. Maybe one day I will. For now, things are the way the are. Still, I continue to experiment in various ways, like moving myself from bed to bed hoping something will make a difference for my back. Perhaps we all experiment like this, trying everything under the sun to fix our problems until either something works and we feel better or we give up. Answers are nice, of course, but I’m learning that even trying to heal is an act in self-care and self-compassion. And I’m starting to believe that being on the mend has less to do with what’s going on in your external world and more to do with what’s going on in your internal one. This, of course, is where true healing happens, the place we learn first to give to ourselves, then later give to others.