Midlife Wellness Report Facebook ad: “Feel Like Yourself Again”

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**I bought the same teapot twice** I bought myself the exact same teapot I already owned, and when my daughter asked why, I told her the old one had finally worn out. That was a lie. Clay teapots don’t wear out. They outlive the people who pour from them. The new one arrived on a Thursday evening in July. I unpacked it at the kitchen table after Walt went up to bed, and I set it on the blue towel next to the old one, and I sat there looking at the two of them for a long time. They are the same pot. Same shop, same shape, same little vent hole in the lid. But the old one is dark as a chestnut from twenty years of evenings, and the new one is the color of a flowerpot, and seeing them side by side did something to me that I was not prepared for. I took a picture of them sitting there together. It’s the picture at the top of this post. Claire texted me the next morning asking if the new pot was “the retirement fund kicking in early,” and I told her the old one wore out, and she believed me, and I have not corrected her yet. I don’t entirely know why. Let me back up. My name is Annette. I’m 49. I’ve been the librarian at an elementary school on the west side of Ann Arbor for 21 years. My husband Walt fixes furnaces and does the crossword in pen, which tells you most of what you need to know about him. Claire is our only one. She’s 23 and lives in Chicago and thinks Michigan is “a lot,” which I choose not to take personally. I bought the first teapot in 2005 at a little import shop in Kerrytown that is now, I’m sorry to report, a phone repair store. It cost more than I wanted to admit to Walt at the time. The woman who sold it to me said you never wash it with soap, you just rinse it, and the tea itself seasons the clay, and every year of use makes the next pot taste better. She was right. For almost twenty years, that pot was my hour. Dinner, dishes, and then the kettle, and then me in the brown chair by the window with a pot of tea and whatever I’d brought home from the returns cart. Walt used to call it my second shift. The cat sat on the radiator. That was the whole event. That was the point. So when I tell you that pot has spent the last five years at the back of a shelf, you’ll understand it wasn’t a small thing. And the reason it ended up back there is the same reason I lied to Claire about the new one. I’m working up to it. I want to tell you when it stopped, but the honest answer is that I can’t, because it didn’t stop. It leaked away. Somewhere around 44, my body changed the terms on me. By late afternoon most days I was so swollen and heavy through the middle that sitting still with a pot of tea felt like a punishment. Evenings stopped being the reward at the end of the day and started being the part of the day I had to get through. I told Walt I was walking after dinner instead. Some nights I did walk. Most nights I did the dishes slowly and went up early and lay on my left side and waited. I adapted the way women adapt. I kept a cardigan on the back of my desk chair at school year-round, even in June, because it covered what my waistband was doing by two o’clock. I stopped signing up for the Friday staff potlucks. I bought pants with give in them and told myself it was a comfort thing. And the teapot moved from the counter to the shelf, and then from the front of the shelf to the back of it, and I never once made a decision about that. It just happened, the way a garden goes over. I tried things. Lord, did I try things. January of 2019 I did a Whole30 with my sister over the phone. I made it fourteen days. I still have the matching containers. Spring of 2020, when the whole world was home, I juiced celery every morning for six weeks because a woman on the internet with excellent kitchen lighting told me it would reset something. It reset my grocery bill. There was a probiotic subscription, $34 a month, that I kept forgetting to cancel. It ran seven months past the point I’d stopped believing in it. I did the math once and then chose never to do it again. There was the gut protocol I bought from a wellness account in Scottsdale for $780, which came as a PDF. A PDF, Annette. I printed it at the library like a coward, on my own paper, so nobody would see the header. There was the functional medicine office in the fall of 2023. The intake alone was $1,250, and they had me keep a nine-page food diary, and I have never felt more studied and less helped in my life. There was magnesium in two different forms whose names I could recite in my sleep. There was the footstool my sister mailed me as a joke that we both knew was not a joke. There was a tea called Smooth Move, which worked the way a fire alarm works, which is to say it was not a lifestyle. I want to be fair. I also went to my regular doctor, who I like, twice about this. She ran the usual things and everything came back fine, and she said what they say, which is that things shift for women at this age, more fiber, more water, watch the stress. She was kind about it. Being told you’re fine when you know you are not fine is its own particular loneliness, but I don’t believe for one second she was hiding anything from me. You can’t hand a person what you were never handed. The bottom, when it came, was quiet. A Friday evening in March I was filling a box for the church rummage sale, and I took the teapot off the shelf to wrap it in newspaper, and I sat down on the kitchen floor with it in my lap instead. The cat came and looked at me. I sat there until the floor got cold thinking a thought I had never let myself finish before. I’d worn “what is wrong with me” smooth years ago. This was a different thought. The thought was: I am 49 years old, and I am packing up the evidence that I used to have evenings. Who exactly signed off on that? The box went in the trunk of the Subaru. It stayed there. You’ll see why that matters. Monday afternoon at the library desk, Ruthanne came in with her returns. Ruthanne is one of my regulars, 71, reads two mysteries a week, carries a canvas tote with a loon on it. Before she retired she spent thirty years as a nurse on a digestive floor at a hospital in Ypsilanti, a fact I knew the way you know things about your regulars, without ever thinking about it. She asked if I had plans for spring break and I heard myself say I was mostly clearing clutter, donating things, there was a teapot in my trunk right now. And she asked why on earth I was donating a teapot, and the whole story came out of me right there at the circulation desk, quiet, between patrons. The tea. The evenings. The four years. Ruthanne set her books down and looked at me for a second. Then she said the thing I have thought about every day since. She said, “Honey, twenty years of evenings don’t just wear out. Something’s been living off them.” She asked me a question none of the offices had asked. She asked whether anyone had ever checked me for a methane problem in my gut. I said, a what. She told me that on her floor, near the end of her career, the younger doctors had started talking about a thing most offices still don’t look for. That she’d had her own stretch of trouble after she retired, and a colleague of hers who’d moved to a motility clinic walked her through it. And then she said, “You might have a tenant.” I said, what tenant. She said she’d write some things down for me, and she did, on the back of a hold slip, in beautiful nurse’s handwriting, and she tapped the desk twice and told me to go be a librarian about it. So I went and was a librarian about it. Tuesday night, 9 p.m., kitchen table, laptop, fourteen tabs. I find things for a living, and I want it on record that I understood maybe half of what I found. There is an organism involved that I still cannot pronounce with confidence. Ar-KEE-uh. Ar-KAY-uh. I’ve heard it both ways in videos and I’ve decided it’s not my business. But here is what I could follow, and I checked it more than once, because I’ve been burned by kitchen-lighting women before and my trust was down to fumes. This wasn’t coming from wellness accounts. It was coming from research hospitals, in papers with dates on them older than my daughter. The kind of thing I’d help a patron find and then wonder why nobody famous had made a fuss about it. Somewhere past eleven, reading with my chin in my hand, it clicked, and I actually sat back in my chair. Because if what I was reading was right, then I had been right. All those years of feeling like the standard answers were aimed somewhere to the left of my actual life. Nothing I had tried was foolish. All of it was aimed at the wrong thing. Here is my understanding, and remember your source is a school librarian. There’s a kind of organism that can settle in and overgrow in the gut. It isn’t a bacteria, which matters, because most of what we throw at gut trouble is built for bacteria. This one is older and different, and it gives off a gas, and the gas slows the muscle of the gut down. And the slower things move, the more there is for it to live on. Round and round. Ruthanne’s word for it turned out to be the exact right word. A tenant. Something moved in, changed the pace of the whole house, and has been keeping itself comfortable on your groceries. My gut hadn’t forgotten how to work. It had a tenant slowing it down, and everything I’d bought for five years had been cleaning up after the tenant instead of dealing with the tenant. Nobody, in five years and I don’t want to count how many dollars, had ever said the word tenant to me. What the reading kept coming back to was three plant compounds, taken together. One that handles the bacteria side of the mess. One from garlic, prepared a specific cold way, which is the piece that can reach the organism itself. And a black pepper compound, because the first one mostly doesn’t survive the trip through your stomach without it. Together, the idea isn’t to force anything. It’s to clear the tenant out and let your own pace come back. I found one formula that had all three, in the amounts the reading pointed to, in one capsule. It’s called Berbino. I’ll be honest about the deciding, because the deciding took me four days. I am a careful person with money. I reread the Scottsdale PDF episode to myself as a warning. What tipped me was the guarantee: ninety days, money back, even if you’ve used it up. I checked the policy twice, the way I check a due date. I thought, I have given seven months of $34 to a company I didn’t believe in. I can give ninety days to one that lets me take it all back. I ordered it on a Sunday night at 11:40 with the cat judging me from the radiator. It came Wednesday. Two capsules with breakfast. And now I’m going to tell you the true version of the timeline, not the shiny one. Weeks one and two, nearly nothing. I’d catch myself doing inventory at red lights. Anything? Nothing. What there was, was small: by the end of week two my evenings were quieter in the middle. Less of the balloon feeling after dinner. I decided I was imagining it, because I wanted it so badly. Week three, on a Tuesday, things happened the way they used to happen, on their own, no assistance from anything in a box. I’m a librarian and there are things I will not put in print, so that is all the detail you get. I stood in the bathroom afterward and put my hand flat on the wall. Week four, I noticed the cardigan was still on the hook at two in the afternoon. I taught a whole third-grade class about the Dewey system with my shirt tucked in. Nobody else on earth would have noticed. I noticed. Day 45, give or take: I put my name on the potluck sheet in the staff room. Deviled eggs. Karen from the front office said, “Look who’s back,” and meant nothing by it, and I had to go stand in the stacks for a minute anyway. Day 60ish: the jeans from the back of the closet. I’m not going to make a speech about the jeans. The jeans went on. And somewhere in there, on an ordinary Saturday, I opened the trunk of the Subaru to load groceries and the rummage box was still sitting there. The teapot had ridden along with me the entire time, wrapped in newspaper, through all of it. I carried it back inside and rinsed it and made a pot that night, and Walt, unprompted, brought his crossword to the kitchen table and sat with me while I drank it. He didn’t say anything about it. He’s not a saying-something man. But he’s been back at that table most evenings since, and that, more than anything with a date on it, is how I knew something had actually changed. At my physical in June, my doctor went over everything and said things looked good, asked what I’d changed. I told her the whole story, Ruthanne and the hold slip and all of it. She wrote the name down. She said she wasn’t going to pretend it was her area, and then she said, “Whatever you’re doing, it agrees with you. Keep doing it.” I like her more, not less, for the honesty. The conversation most of us have been getting about this is just narrow. There’s a hallway neither of us had ever been shown. Around day 88, I ordered the second teapot. Claire thinks it was because the old one wore out. Here’s the actual reason. The dark pot is twenty years of evenings, and I got those back. The new pot is empty. It’s the next twenty, starting from zero, and I intend to season it myself, one evening at a time, until it’s darker than the first one. That’s what I was looking at on the blue towel that Thursday night. A before and an after, side by side on the same towel, and I get to be the after. I still haven’t told her the truth of it. Maybe at Thanksgiving. Maybe I’ll just show her this. If you’re reading this at the end of a long afternoon with a waistband that’s been arguing with you since two o’clock. If there’s a cardigan doing a job a cardigan shouldn’t have to do. If there’s something on a shelf in your house, a pot, a bike, a sewing machine, that used to be an hour of yours and quietly stopped being anything. If you’ve spent real money being told you’re fine. I can’t promise you my ending. I’m one woman and I’m not a doctor and I won’t pretend otherwise. What I can tell you is that nobody ever mentioned the tenant to me, and I lost five years of evenings to that silence, and the only reason I ever found out was a retired nurse with a loon on her bag and a free minute at my desk. Berbino is what I took. The ninety-day guarantee is real, I checked it like a due date, and it’s the only reason a careful woman like me ever clicked the button. If it does nothing for you, you take your money back and you’ve lost nothing but a season you were going to spend waiting anyway. https://berbino.com P.S. The two pots live side by side on the counter now, in front of the shelf, where the first one should have been all along. The dark one still makes the better tea. The woman at the shop was right. Twenty years is twenty years. P.P.S. About the guarantee, since it’s what decided me: it’s ninety days, it covers you even if the bottles are empty, and you don’t have to argue with anyone. I checked before I ordered because I’ve been burned by fine print. It’s plain. That’s worth something to a person who prints out PDFs at her own library so nobody sees. https://berbino.com P.P.P.S. If you try it and week one gives you nothing, keep going. I got nothing for two weeks and nearly quit. It was week three for me. Ruthanne says some women are week five or six. However long it took to lose your evenings, it can have three weeks. P.P.P.P.S. If you have a sister, a friend, a Karen-from-the-front-office who keeps a cardigan on her chair in June, send her this. Just the link. She’ll know in the first three sentences whether it’s for her. P.P.P.P.P.S. Ruthanne, if you ever read this: it was overdue, and you never once charged me the fine. The first pot from the new teapot is yours whenever you want it.

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Feel Like Yourself Again

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