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

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**I paid four dollars for a mirror with no mirror in it** I paid four dollars for a mirror with no mirror in it, and when my friend Paula asked me why, I said the first fully true thing I’d said out loud in about three years. I said, “Because this one can’t see me.” Paula laughed. Then she stopped laughing and looked at me, and that look is the reason I’m writing this. The mirror is the picture at the top of this post. Silver back, mother-of-pearl handle, little engraved cats on the frame, glass long gone. The man at the flea market had it in a shoebox with some belt buckles and he wanted five and took four. It’s a beautiful thing. It shows you nothing. At the time, that was the whole appeal. Let me back up. My name is Marcy. I’m 47. I’m a court stenographer in Green Bay, Wisconsin, which means my entire job is writing down exactly what people say, word for word, at 225 words a minute, and it means I can tell you Paula’s sentences in this story are accurate, because remembering sentences is the one thing I’m built for. My husband is Dave. He coaches JV baseball and believes brats can be a breakfast food. Paula and I have done the flea markets together for eleven years. Second Saturday, fairgrounds, coffee from the church stand, home by one. It survived when everything else on my calendar didn’t, and there’s a reason it survived that I never told her: the fairgrounds run on a loose schedule and I know where every bathroom on that property is. You can leave a flea market whenever you want. Nobody asks questions at a flea market. Because here’s what the last four years have actually looked like, behind the jokes. Somewhere around 43, my body changed the deal on me. Mornings fine, afternoons a slow inflation. By four o’clock most days I’d be so swollen through the middle that the waistband I’d buttoned at seven had become a hostage negotiation. I got asked when I was due twice in one year, once at the courthouse, by an attorney, into a live record, and I typed my own humiliation at 225 words a minute because that is literally my job. And my coping mechanism, my great talent, was jokes. I called my stomach “the afternoon guest.” I called dresses “tents with ambition.” I had a whole bit about seasonal bloat like it was weather. If I said it funny first, nobody could say it sad about me later. Paula heard three years of that material and laughed every time, because that’s what I was asking her to do. The four-dollar mirror was just the joke going somewhere honest by accident. I tried everything a woman with a Discover card can try, and I want to itemize it, because the itemizing matters. The 21-day sugar detox with the workbook. Finished it. Nothing. The gut-reset powder from a podcast, $89 a month, tasted like a candle. Four months. Low-FODMAP printouts on the fridge until Dave asked if onions had personally wronged me. Five months of that, some quieter days, no different afternoons. A $400 food-sensitivity mail-in test that came back saying I was sensitive to, among other things, almonds, green beans, and whitefish, which in Wisconsin is a hate crime. I cut all of it. Nothing changed. Apple cider vinegar gummies. Peppermint capsules. A $67 pelvic floor yoga course I did in the living room with the blinds shut. A probiotic rotation I ran like a science fair, $50 to $70 a bottle, three brands, a notebook. And my doctor, twice, who ran the panels and told me everything looked good, that things shift for women in their forties, fiber, water, stress. She was pleasant and quick and I left both times feeling like a form that had been filled out correctly. I don’t think she was hiding a thing from me. I think her hallway is exactly as long as somebody built it. The bottom was the third Saturday in June, and it wasn’t at a flea market. It was at my own house, at Dave’s birthday cookout, at seven in the evening, when the guest arrived on schedule and I went upstairs “to grab the citronella candles” and lay down on our bed instead, on my left side, listening to my own party through the window screen. Somebody had brought a bluegrass playlist. Dave was laughing at something. I stayed up there for forty minutes. The question I finally let myself write down, and I did write it down, in steno, in a notebook, where nobody else on earth could read it: when did comfortable become the entire ambition of my life? The mirror came two Saturdays later. Four dollars. “Because this one can’t see me.” And Paula’s look. She didn’t say anything that day. Paula’s not an ambusher. She waited two weeks, and then in line at the food truck, holding her coffee, standing next to a crate of doorknobs, she said, “Marce. The mirror thing. I know why it was funny, because I made that exact kind of joke for two years.” I looked at her. Eleven years of Saturdays and I had no idea what she was talking about. That’s the part that got me, and gets me still. We had both been doing it. Two women, best friends, each running her own private weather report, each laughing at the other one’s jokes as cover for her own. She’d been through the whole thing, the afternoons, the wardrobe engineering, the trying everything, starting about two years before me, and she’d hidden it as well as I had, which is to say completely. And then Paula told me what ended hers. Her cousin, a nurse over in Appleton, had asked her one question after Easter dinner two years ago. Whether anyone had ever checked her for a methane overgrowth in her gut. An organism thing. Paula had never heard of it either. And then she said the sentence I have replayed verbatim more than any testimony I’ve ever taken. She said, “You don’t fix a cold house by plugging in more space heaters, Marce. Somebody has to go look at the thermostat.” I asked her what thermostat. We were still standing next to the doorknobs. So she told me what her cousin had told her, and then she did the best thing a friend has ever done for me, which is that she didn’t summarize. She said, “Go read it yourself. You transcribe things for a living. Transcribe this.” I went home and transcribed it. Kitchen table, Tuesday night, Dave at practice. I’ll be honest about my limits: I can spell any word you say to me and understand maybe sixty percent of what I read at a first pass, and there’s an organism at the center of this whose name I can spell perfectly and will not attempt to say. But I know the difference between somebody selling and somebody publishing. This wasn’t podcast-powder material. It was hospital research, plural, with dates on it, sitting in public the entire time I was mailing my spit to a food-sensitivity company. Here is my understanding, from a woman whose expertise is typing fast. There’s a kind of organism that can overgrow in the gut. Not a bacteria. Something older and different, which is why the bacteria-shaped remedies never touch it. It gives off a gas, and the gas turns the gut’s muscle down. Slower muscle means everything sits longer, and everything sitting longer means more for the organism to live on. The setting feeds itself. A thermostat. Something got into the house and turned the dial down, and every single thing I had bought for four years was a space heater. The detox was a space heater. The powder was a space heater. The $400 spit test was a very expensive space heater. Some of them even worked for a while, the way space heaters do, one room at a time, while the whole house stayed cold, because not one of them ever touched the dial. Nobody, in four years and I truly don’t want to total the receipts, had ever said the word thermostat to me. Paula said it next to a crate of doorknobs. 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, made a specific cold way, which is the piece that can actually reach the organism. And a black pepper compound, because the first one mostly doesn’t survive the stomach on its own, and the pepper is what gets it where it’s going. The idea of the three together is not another heater. It’s setting the dial back and letting the house warm itself. The formula I found with all three in one capsule, at the amounts the reading pointed at, is called Berbino. It’s also what Paula’s cousin had pointed her to, which I only found out after I’d landed on it myself, and which I took the way a stenographer takes two witnesses telling the same story. About the deciding. I make my living on the record, so here’s the record: I read the guarantee the way I proof a transcript, line by line, twice. Ninety days. Money back. Even on empty bottles. No deposition required. And I thought about the $400 spit kit, purchased on no guarantee except vibes, and I ordered the capsules that night and felt, for once, like the careful one. The timeline, verbatim, no polish: Weeks one and two: statistically nothing. I kept a log because of course I kept a log. What the log shows is that by day 12 the evenings were quieter. The four o’clock inflation still came, but softer, later. I wrote “placebo?” in the margin because I am my own hostile witness. Week three: the afternoon guest started missing appointments. Not gone. Unreliable, for the first time in four years, and unreliable was the best news I’d had in years. And my own systems, in the mornings, started running on their own schedule again, which is all the detail the record requires. Week four: I wore a dress with a fixed waist to the courthouse. Buttoned at seven, still buttoned at five. Nobody noticed. That was the point. Nobody had anything to notice. Day 50ish: my niece’s wedding is in October and the dress I bought for it in a fit of optimism zipped, in July, in the afternoon. I sat down on the closet floor for a minute. Dave thought I’d lost something. I told him I’d found it, which was obnoxious, and true. Day 70: Dave’s make-up cookout, the one I threw for his birthday since I’d ghosted the first one from upstairs. I stayed at my own party until the citronella burned out. I told him the truth about June that night, the bedroom, the window screen, all of it. He was quiet, and then he said, “I looked for you that night, you know.” I know. He’s getting the long version now. Day 90, second Saturday: the fairgrounds, Paula, coffee from the church stand. I walked that flea market for four hours and thought about the bathrooms zero times. On the way out I stopped at the belt-buckle man’s table. He didn’t remember me. Why would he. At my physical in September my doctor read my file, asked what changed, and got the whole story, doorknobs and all. She wrote the name down and said, “It’s not my area, but keep doing what you’re doing.” I’ll take honest over fluent every time. Her hallway was narrow. Somebody built it that way long before she got there, and one question from a cousin in Appleton did what four years of appointments couldn’t. The mirror is the end of the story, so here it is. I took it to the glass shop on Military Avenue in August and had a new mirror cut for it. Four dollars for the frame, eleven for the glass. It hangs by our front door now, and I look in it every day on my way out, on purpose, which is a sentence I could not have typed in June. The joke was that it couldn’t see me. It sees me now. Both of us are fine with it. If you have a repertoire, that’s what I want to ask you about. The bits, the nicknames, the afternoon-guest material. If you say it funny first so nobody can say it sad. If your calendar has quietly become a map of loose schedules and known bathrooms. If your best friend has her own repertoire and you’ve been laughing at each other’s cover stories for years. I can’t promise you my ending. I type other people’s testimony, I don’t hand out verdicts, and I’m nobody’s doctor. What I can tell you, on the record, is that nobody ever mentioned the thermostat to me, and four years of space heaters cost me more than money, and the person who finally said it was standing next to a crate of doorknobs holding church coffee. Berbino is what I took. The ninety-day guarantee reads clean, I proofed it twice like a transcript, and it is the only reason I spent the money after the spit-kit fiasco. If nothing changes, every cent comes back, and you’re out nothing but one more season of jokes. https://berbino.com P.S. The engraved cats on the mirror frame, I finally looked at them properly once the glass was in. One of them is knocking something off a shelf. Whoever made that mirror a hundred years ago knew exactly what cats are. Some things don’t need fixing. P.P.S. The guarantee, for the record: ninety days, empty bottles covered, no cross-examination. I read it twice, line by line, which is how I read everything that matters. It’s plainer than most things I transcribe. https://berbino.com P.P.P.S. If weeks one and two give you nothing, do not adjourn. My log says day 12 before anything and week three before it mattered. Paula’s took to week five. Four years of space heaters can wait three weeks for the dial. P.P.P.P.S. If you have a Paula, a friend whose jokes about her stomach are a little too well-rehearsed, send her this. Just the link. She’ll recognize the material by the third paragraph. Mine did. Ask me how I know. P.P.P.P.P.S. Paula. Second Saturday, church-stand coffee, my treat, forever. You waited two weeks to say one sentence and it turned my dial. I got it all down verbatim. I always do.

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Feel Like Yourself Again

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