Thursday, February 5, 2015
The Road to Self Acceptance is Closed Due to Inclement Weather
So let's talk about weight gain.
I am lucky.
It is very difficult to say that, because I do not feel lucky very often. Admitting that there is a genetic advantage contained within my fleshy coda is so outside the realm of my sarcastic, cynical, body dysmorphic self perception is LIKE REAL HARD.
But I am.
I hit puberty with a bang and blossomed fairly completely over the course of about a year or two. I was fourteen, one hundred and forty pounds, five foot eight, menstruating, and wearing a 34 B in the eighth grade.
For the most part, my weight leveled out there.
I got wicked sick at the end of the school year, and sick again as a freshman in high school and lost some weight, about ten pounds, but it came back by senior year, and I was fairly comfortable in that I knew what my body looked like in a mirror. I had a little belly. My legs were pretty long, and kind of naturally muscular. My arms were flab, my skin was pale and freckled. My shoulders and posture were straight and good.
When I went off to college I yo-yoed a bit.
I lost weight at first. I went out dancing a bunch, ate weird food that had never been in my house growing up, went on adventures with friends, and didn't pay too close attention to my body's looks.
Then I gained a bit of weight unexpectedly.
I cut off my hair, I kept dancing, but I just ate more. I don't recall eating anything in particular.
I do, however, recall going home for christmas break at the age of 19, and weighing in on the ancient, black, plastic scale my parents' owned at 152 pounds.
I was appalled.
I didn't recognize this number. It lashed across my mental battlefield like it had been written in fire. Suddenly, my body felt unacceptable: my tummy protuberant over the waist of my jeans, my legs rubbing together when I walked, clothes from high school I had meant to bring back with me to school were too tight across the bosom. I remember feeling like I had failed. Next stop: Whale City. I would turn into one of those women who rode rascal scooters in wal-mart on her way to buy powder pink sweatpants so large that one of my sisters could fit in each leg. I pictured rolls of fat over my jeans when i sat down turning into the dreaded fupa. I poked and prodded and pinched at my body with new, judgmental eyes. Where had I gone wrong?
I realize ten pounds is hardly something to stroke out over.
In the real world people gain twenty five pounds when they go to college. Some people gain seventy. Some people work hard to lose a hundred pounds in a year and then gain fifty back and are happier that way.
I had so little experience with the needle deviating more than five pounds above or below the 140 mark, that I could not stop thinking about it when I got back to school. I must be out of control and not know it, I concluded. I needed to tighten up ranks, get back in line, sort myself out.
The process, as you now know, lead me to develop anorexia the following year.
I remember coming home that next Christmas at the age of 20, getting on the scale and seeing my lowest weight, the lowest I had ever (and will ever) been. 115.
I had lost almost 40 pounds in one year.
I had also lost my period, two hours of sleep every morning to sit ups, leg lifts, and crunches, the ability to generate my own warmth, and any normal perception of food. It is twelve years later, and I have yet to regain the positive and healthy attitude toward food I possessed before my disorder.
Yesterday, I got on the glass scale my husband purchased a couple of years ago when he decided he wanted to lose weight. I was 154.
The last time I weighed myself, before Christmas I was 147.
I've been eating all over the place.
I know my relationship to food right now is not healthy. I get obsessed with the things in my cupboards. I get obsessed with the pastries I am surrounded by at the bakery. I do not trust myself around any of it, and so I eat uncontrollably, and miserably. I do not recall the last time I took in a mouthful of food without the thoughts,
"You don't deserve this. If you were stronger, you'd put this fork down. Don't you know how many people in the world are hungrier than you, needier than you, more worthy of this food than you, and they don't get it, but you do. You stuff yourself with this shit because you're weak. You're pathetic. You deserve to look like a fat, pale whale. You don't deserve love. You are disgusting."
I am in full fledged panic mode.
Food fills me with fear right now.
I hate feeling hungry, and I feel hungry all the time.
It is a very uncontrollable feeling, and it makes me feel unsafe. The thoughts are not confined just to food anymore. Anytime I am near food, feel full or un-full. When I am dreading a meal or an outing where food will be offered to me. I am constantly worried about it.
And I thought I was doing so well.
I know there is a part of me that is deeply unhappy with my job right now. In my work I rarely get to stand up for myself, and so I am almost always overlooked, taken for granted, and compromised. I know that these are the reasons I hate doing what I do, and I recognize that I need to move away from this job because the longer I am there the worse it will get.
Those trapped, immobilized feelings have amplified with the recent deposit of over three feet of snow on my town in the course of eight days.
They are further exacerbated by the trips everyone close to me have taken in the past two weeks.
My employers went to costa rica.
My youngest sister and father went to england. My sister stayed.
My second youngest sister went to the bahamas.
My best friend went to florida.
I mean COME ON!
Is it any wonder I feel like I might be fossilizing within my own flesh?
I find cold comfort in hideous synchronicities.
My husband has gained about twelve pounds since his miraculous weight loss of thirty five this summer.
Both our dog and cat are ravenous constantly fighting each other to get to their food bowls and throwing fits if we don't feed them at exactly the same times each day.
Perhaps this is the season?
Deep down I want to believe that.
I want to think that I will leave my job, move away from these harsh new england winters, and suddenly be awash with self control and self love. I will shed those twelve extra pounds like magic, without running forty miles a week (Like I did last summer), or starving myself (like in college).
But if all else fails and this is just the next phase of my body. What I look like now at thirty two is 154 pounds and that is that?
What then?
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Adieu 2014
Dear 2014,
What can I say that I haven't already beaten bloody with my fists or hammered against a wall, throttled in a bathtub, or kicked to death in an alleyway at two o'clock in the morning with only a blind homeless man as witness?
You sucked.
You sucked in ways I had previous dreamed impossible.
You fostered in me a neurotic condition I have harbored all my life, but only under your tender care did it blossom into the full blown psychosis I am currently losing control of.
Because of you I stopped sleeping, and when I did, I had nightmares of such emotional power that upon waking, I would resist going back to sleep for fear of their waiting embrace.
I lost hope in you.
I was devastated in you.
You robbed me of time and enjoyment, resources and health, and you elicited from me more tears than a year has any right to.
But thanks anyway.
Thanks for sucking because without this year, I would not know what I can survive, and at what point I finally put my foot down and say, enough!
Goddamnit ENOUGH!
I held friends this year while they were scared and I told them what I couldn't tell myself.
I learned that you can miss someone so much when they're right in front of you that you can't wait until they move to the other side of the world, so you don't feel quite so bad about missing them anymore.
I learned I cannot eat my weight in anything anymore and feel okay the morning after.
I learned that as much as I hate 152 pounds, I don't die when I weigh this much. My man still thinks I'm sexy, and I can still make new friends, wear backless dresses, and take full length selfies.
I learned I can rock red lipstick with the best of them.
I learned that Boston Ballet is an experience everyone should have. It is spellbinding and magical, and I love my Mum so much, but goddammit they NEVER take you off their mailing list, and it is a BITCH.
I learned that I like getting tattooed so much more than I ever thought I would, and my toru kamei backpiece is a real thing that is going to happen.
I learned that I can still dance all night.
I learned how to make black bean brownies. They are delicious.
I learned to love my weird, greying hair, even as I am dyeing it, and especially once I stopped brushing it.
I learned I can do yoga for ten years, and still learn something new.
I learned I can start making a baby inside me, and that if something isn't right, my body can stop that process, and get rid of the evidence because it knows what it's doing, and always has.
I learned I am ready to be a mother.
I learned that I put everyone's needs, wants, and comforts before my own. Every time.
I learned that juicing is fun and pretty and awesome.
I learned how to kayak out on the open ocean.
I learned I could go back to school, and still not feel like part of the group, even ten years down the road, even as an adult, even in a program specifically designed for me, I can feel like an outsider.
I learned I can run the 15 miles between my front door and the singing beach after two months training, and a shit load of hard work.
I learned I can schedule the fuck out of my life when I need to.
I learned how to trade cookies for wine, and to feel even more at home in my weird little witchy city when it is overrun by tourists and trailers and buskers and shot callers.
I learned that I can't push myself too far without there being serious consequences, and that my body is not as young as it used to be. Sometimes you have to rest and be alone with your pain and that is when you are the most scared and possibly the worst company you ever had, but that you might learn the most from yourself.
I learned that as one of three sisters, we still possess extraordinary powers when together.
I learned how to read tarot for strangers, on a ship, as it plunges radically through jarring waves and freezing spray. I learned I am much better at it than I thought I was.
I learned I still have no self control when faced with halloween candy.
I learned there is so much for books yet to teach me.
I learned that sometimes the rockshow is better than church, but a rockstar is never a god, and it is important to grip his hand and thank him like a person, and then let go.
I learned that when something hurts, my instincts are still to bury it in food, and sometimes alcohol, but mostly company, and even when knee deep in all three, real grief will still find you and set you back in your place, and remind you how broken you are.
I learned that sometimes you need to review your year, step back, and let it go, let it all go...
The anger
the hurt
the disappointment
the worry
the pain
the sleepless nights
the guilt
the mistakes
the loneliness
were all lessons.
And now you have the opportunity to be the wiser of them, to take them, and journey forward.
To be free
and
begin
again.
What can I say that I haven't already beaten bloody with my fists or hammered against a wall, throttled in a bathtub, or kicked to death in an alleyway at two o'clock in the morning with only a blind homeless man as witness?
You sucked.
You sucked in ways I had previous dreamed impossible.
You fostered in me a neurotic condition I have harbored all my life, but only under your tender care did it blossom into the full blown psychosis I am currently losing control of.
Because of you I stopped sleeping, and when I did, I had nightmares of such emotional power that upon waking, I would resist going back to sleep for fear of their waiting embrace.
I lost hope in you.
I was devastated in you.
You robbed me of time and enjoyment, resources and health, and you elicited from me more tears than a year has any right to.
But thanks anyway.
Thanks for sucking because without this year, I would not know what I can survive, and at what point I finally put my foot down and say, enough!
Goddamnit ENOUGH!
I held friends this year while they were scared and I told them what I couldn't tell myself.
I learned that you can miss someone so much when they're right in front of you that you can't wait until they move to the other side of the world, so you don't feel quite so bad about missing them anymore.
I learned I cannot eat my weight in anything anymore and feel okay the morning after.
I learned that as much as I hate 152 pounds, I don't die when I weigh this much. My man still thinks I'm sexy, and I can still make new friends, wear backless dresses, and take full length selfies.
I learned I can rock red lipstick with the best of them.
I learned that Boston Ballet is an experience everyone should have. It is spellbinding and magical, and I love my Mum so much, but goddammit they NEVER take you off their mailing list, and it is a BITCH.
I learned that I like getting tattooed so much more than I ever thought I would, and my toru kamei backpiece is a real thing that is going to happen.
I learned that I can still dance all night.
I learned how to make black bean brownies. They are delicious.
I learned to love my weird, greying hair, even as I am dyeing it, and especially once I stopped brushing it.
I learned I can do yoga for ten years, and still learn something new.
I learned I can start making a baby inside me, and that if something isn't right, my body can stop that process, and get rid of the evidence because it knows what it's doing, and always has.
I learned I am ready to be a mother.
I learned that I put everyone's needs, wants, and comforts before my own. Every time.
I learned that juicing is fun and pretty and awesome.
I learned how to kayak out on the open ocean.
I learned I could go back to school, and still not feel like part of the group, even ten years down the road, even as an adult, even in a program specifically designed for me, I can feel like an outsider.
I learned I can run the 15 miles between my front door and the singing beach after two months training, and a shit load of hard work.
I learned I can schedule the fuck out of my life when I need to.
I learned how to trade cookies for wine, and to feel even more at home in my weird little witchy city when it is overrun by tourists and trailers and buskers and shot callers.
I learned that I can't push myself too far without there being serious consequences, and that my body is not as young as it used to be. Sometimes you have to rest and be alone with your pain and that is when you are the most scared and possibly the worst company you ever had, but that you might learn the most from yourself.
I learned that as one of three sisters, we still possess extraordinary powers when together.
I learned how to read tarot for strangers, on a ship, as it plunges radically through jarring waves and freezing spray. I learned I am much better at it than I thought I was.
I learned I still have no self control when faced with halloween candy.
I learned there is so much for books yet to teach me.
I learned that sometimes the rockshow is better than church, but a rockstar is never a god, and it is important to grip his hand and thank him like a person, and then let go.
I learned that when something hurts, my instincts are still to bury it in food, and sometimes alcohol, but mostly company, and even when knee deep in all three, real grief will still find you and set you back in your place, and remind you how broken you are.
I learned that sometimes you need to review your year, step back, and let it go, let it all go...
The anger
the hurt
the disappointment
the worry
the pain
the sleepless nights
the guilt
the mistakes
the loneliness
were all lessons.
And now you have the opportunity to be the wiser of them, to take them, and journey forward.
To be free
and
begin
again.
Friday, December 26, 2014
A good story
I just finished reading Helen Oyeyemi's Mr. Fox, and all I can think about is the last part. A strange tale about a woman who saves a fox she was originally sent to kill.
The fox learns to read to thank her, and finally, when he finds her, he lays words he has chewed out of newspapers at her feet.
Change me
he asks.
Change you to what?
she replies.
Not want to be fox anymore.
I haven't the skill,
she answers.
Love between men and women is as such.
A man sees his salvation in the capacity of a woman to spare him the consequences he earns with his wicked deeds.
He sees her as his savior and safety, and she becomes intoxicated on this elevation of stature.
She leaves him after the introduction, and it is he who follows her and makes the grand gesture.
Make me not wicked anymore.
For you I want to be redeemed.
In you I see my own redemption.
And the woman cannot help herself.
She is so enamored of her idealization as saint and savior, she agrees.
And the transformation breaks them both.
She must give up all that makes her worthy of his redemption.
And he must give up everything about himself that is worth destroying.
They meet in the middle at death.
Their deconstruction
and complete acceptance that love is what has become of their initial agreement.
That love is never what you envisioned, and you hardly recognize the creature it makes you before it is done.
He may become less the savage, but she becomes less the saint.
And in the end, they are neither the things they began as nor the desires they'd designed.
And their dignified imaginations
corrupt and bloom with disappointment and acceptance and a depth of love never before experienced until you break your own heart to see someone else happy and they tell you it's not enough, but take it anyway.
And love reminds you life will always be a tragedy worth telling.
The fox learns to read to thank her, and finally, when he finds her, he lays words he has chewed out of newspapers at her feet.
Change me
he asks.
Change you to what?
she replies.
Not want to be fox anymore.
I haven't the skill,
she answers.
Love between men and women is as such.
A man sees his salvation in the capacity of a woman to spare him the consequences he earns with his wicked deeds.
He sees her as his savior and safety, and she becomes intoxicated on this elevation of stature.
She leaves him after the introduction, and it is he who follows her and makes the grand gesture.
Make me not wicked anymore.
For you I want to be redeemed.
In you I see my own redemption.
And the woman cannot help herself.
She is so enamored of her idealization as saint and savior, she agrees.
And the transformation breaks them both.
She must give up all that makes her worthy of his redemption.
And he must give up everything about himself that is worth destroying.
They meet in the middle at death.
Their deconstruction
and complete acceptance that love is what has become of their initial agreement.
That love is never what you envisioned, and you hardly recognize the creature it makes you before it is done.
He may become less the savage, but she becomes less the saint.
And in the end, they are neither the things they began as nor the desires they'd designed.
And their dignified imaginations
corrupt and bloom with disappointment and acceptance and a depth of love never before experienced until you break your own heart to see someone else happy and they tell you it's not enough, but take it anyway.
And love reminds you life will always be a tragedy worth telling.
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
Ship Wrecked
My period is three days late.
I took a pregnancy test, one of the 'detects five days before your missed period' ones.
It was negative.
There is only one chance that it happened...one chance from this whole month.
That's how unapproachable I've made myself.
I still fantasize about the test being wrong.
I feel guilty any time I want a glass of wine.
Guiltier when I have one.
I feel a small shiver every time my stomach is noisy, or when I'm hungry in the morning and the thrill of nausea passes through my throat.
When anything that my memory can associate with that brief time period that I knew I was pregnant happens my brain is all too eager to jam a mental pencil down so hard to connect the dots.
I hate it.
I wish there was some way I could disengage the part of my memory that hates me back.
It knows how badly I want to be able to live my life like I did before.
Before Bob and I even decided to try this year.
I wanted to smoke a cigarette so badly today.
I smoked one a week ago when I hurt my back at work. It was a reserve clove I stashed away for a bad day.
And I hadn't even thought about wanting it until that afternoon.
But that's the way addiction works.
And I am addicted to hurting myself.
It's why I wake up in the middle of the night with nightmares once a week now.
I dream that bob is furious with me.
So angry he can't look at me. In the dream it's justified. I did something god awful. I kissed someone, fucked someone, or didn't show up when I promised I would.
I dream I stashed meat away in Kim's apartment where I'm catsitting right now.
She's a vegetarian.
In my dream I just filled her fridge with shiny pink chicken cutlets and stuffed her cupboard with raw hamburger. Porkchops slithered over each other to fall out of the cupboards I'd hidden so many of them there.
She showed up with the vegetarian police. In mirrored aviators and everything.
They found every last piece of raw meat, and they forced me to eat it.
Long strings of sausages, pasty with coagulated animal fat, ground beef turning from rosy to grey in earthworm shaped squiggles, jamming them into my mouth until I gagged.
When I wake up from the dreams I lie awake twisting the ice cold blade of guilt in my guts. In the dark, it is impossible to fully emerge from the cage of awful feelings. I don't fight my way out. I don't feel like I deserve to.
At least I feel like smoking is a pain I can control.
Binging is my own choice.
Drinking and carousing and behaving like a moron so that the next day I hate every moment of the night before is a way of controlling the burning pain of being in this place where I am so completely left out of the decisions that are made about what I get to have and what is ripped away from me.
I want to push every good thing out of my life and fess up to the monster I am:
The barren wasteland of a human being who has never held anything but death between her legs.
I want to go out to the desert and light a fire and sit inside it and wait for the stars to come to me or me to go to them.
There is nothing more lonely than this place of no control, no knowledge, and no justice.
The world is a wicked place and cruelty is rewarded while kindness is punished with humiliation.
I want to be locked inside a chest and dropped into the bottom of the ocean.
I want to be buried alive with the seed of a tree in my stomach that grows into a great oak while I writhe beneath and its roots choke me to sleep.
I want to be a great wooden ship marooned on a sand dune surrounded by lightening struck trees. A place of desolation where it is so dry, your eyes cannot produce tears.
I took a pregnancy test, one of the 'detects five days before your missed period' ones.
It was negative.
There is only one chance that it happened...one chance from this whole month.
That's how unapproachable I've made myself.
I still fantasize about the test being wrong.
I feel guilty any time I want a glass of wine.
Guiltier when I have one.
I feel a small shiver every time my stomach is noisy, or when I'm hungry in the morning and the thrill of nausea passes through my throat.
When anything that my memory can associate with that brief time period that I knew I was pregnant happens my brain is all too eager to jam a mental pencil down so hard to connect the dots.
I hate it.
I wish there was some way I could disengage the part of my memory that hates me back.
It knows how badly I want to be able to live my life like I did before.
Before Bob and I even decided to try this year.
I wanted to smoke a cigarette so badly today.
I smoked one a week ago when I hurt my back at work. It was a reserve clove I stashed away for a bad day.
And I hadn't even thought about wanting it until that afternoon.
But that's the way addiction works.
And I am addicted to hurting myself.
It's why I wake up in the middle of the night with nightmares once a week now.
I dream that bob is furious with me.
So angry he can't look at me. In the dream it's justified. I did something god awful. I kissed someone, fucked someone, or didn't show up when I promised I would.
I dream I stashed meat away in Kim's apartment where I'm catsitting right now.
She's a vegetarian.
In my dream I just filled her fridge with shiny pink chicken cutlets and stuffed her cupboard with raw hamburger. Porkchops slithered over each other to fall out of the cupboards I'd hidden so many of them there.
She showed up with the vegetarian police. In mirrored aviators and everything.
They found every last piece of raw meat, and they forced me to eat it.
Long strings of sausages, pasty with coagulated animal fat, ground beef turning from rosy to grey in earthworm shaped squiggles, jamming them into my mouth until I gagged.
When I wake up from the dreams I lie awake twisting the ice cold blade of guilt in my guts. In the dark, it is impossible to fully emerge from the cage of awful feelings. I don't fight my way out. I don't feel like I deserve to.
At least I feel like smoking is a pain I can control.
Binging is my own choice.
Drinking and carousing and behaving like a moron so that the next day I hate every moment of the night before is a way of controlling the burning pain of being in this place where I am so completely left out of the decisions that are made about what I get to have and what is ripped away from me.
I want to push every good thing out of my life and fess up to the monster I am:
The barren wasteland of a human being who has never held anything but death between her legs.
I want to go out to the desert and light a fire and sit inside it and wait for the stars to come to me or me to go to them.
There is nothing more lonely than this place of no control, no knowledge, and no justice.
The world is a wicked place and cruelty is rewarded while kindness is punished with humiliation.
I want to be locked inside a chest and dropped into the bottom of the ocean.
I want to be buried alive with the seed of a tree in my stomach that grows into a great oak while I writhe beneath and its roots choke me to sleep.
I want to be a great wooden ship marooned on a sand dune surrounded by lightening struck trees. A place of desolation where it is so dry, your eyes cannot produce tears.
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
Sky Red at Morning Sailors take Warning
Pink.
Fruit.
As I write this, I am taking bites of grapefruit.
It is 9:35am and I have not had a cup of coffee yet.
I am not at work.
It is still raining.
I am not dead.
These are good things.
At least, I'm in a better place than I was last night, and I can look at them that way now.
I don't remember the last time I ate before ten in the morning.
I ALWAYS skip breakfast.
I OFTEN skip lunch.
I USUALLY don't eat until after three or four in the afternoon on my days off.
At work, since I'm up earlier, I give in to hunger pangs by one.
Ten years ago, when I restricted, I used to eat breakfast every day.
The same thing.
A quarter of a cup of grapenuts.
A teaspoon of jam.
6 ounces of hot soy milk poured over.
A small apple.
It amounted to about 275-300 calories.
I ate it at 8am every morning, by myself in the cafeteria at school. I read while I ate, but I took at least a half an hour to chew, swallow, masticate, and breathe.
My best habits somehow thrown in and slathered up with my worst.
I then wouldn't eat again until five in the evening.
I took a coffee at 2pm. It was a soy latte with no sugar.
At five, my stomach had already been groaning audibly for an hour.
I would race to the dining hall and fill a bowl with raw veggies and cubes of cold, gelatinous tofu.
I dumped salt and pepper and balsamic vinegar over the whole thing until it was barely recognizable. Then I went to the toaster and got a single slice of multigrain bread, which I toasted, and ate dry.
The whole thing usually amounted to about 300-400 calories.
Then I would allow myself a small portion of whatever the cafeteria was serving for dessert.
It didn't matter what it was, just a small serving, I told myself, to keep from feeling like I was denied the finer things.
At the end of the day, I clocked in between 900-1100 calories.
I called those good days.
On bad days, I would give in to my rumbling stomach at 9pm. I would eat fistfuls of popcorn, chocolate, and nuts until my stomach hurt.
I would then punish myself with horrendous hateful self talk.
I would refuse to eat any single thing until five o clock the next evening, when I would allow myself my regular dinner, and somehow, that allowed me to be forgiven, to assume that I was okay, and still in control.
Since I stopped being anorexic, I have never gotten the balance right.
I feel like any time I eat I am binging. I feel that way especially if I eat after eight at night.
For that reason, for ten years, I have started every single day punishing myself.
No breakfast.
You don't deserve it.
You fucked up last night.
No matter what I had done. Even on the days that I was re-triggered and didn't eat at all for an entire day (and I had three of those this spring), I would not allow myself to eat breakfast.
Breakfast eaters are weak, I told myself.
They're also more deserving than you.
They didn't inhale a whole container of cashews last night.
So today, after the darkest night I've had in a very long while, I wake up. I do some back friendly yoga to slowly, hopefully recuperate from this gnarly injury, and I cut up a grapefruit.
I am eating it slowly, savoring it, the gem like segments with their sweet and sour bright pink juice.
I am doing this because I need to make some changes to how I live my life right now, how I eat and breathe and work and sleep.
Because I am making myself miserable, and it has been going on for too long.
Fruit.
As I write this, I am taking bites of grapefruit.
It is 9:35am and I have not had a cup of coffee yet.
I am not at work.
It is still raining.
I am not dead.
These are good things.
At least, I'm in a better place than I was last night, and I can look at them that way now.
I don't remember the last time I ate before ten in the morning.
I ALWAYS skip breakfast.
I OFTEN skip lunch.
I USUALLY don't eat until after three or four in the afternoon on my days off.
At work, since I'm up earlier, I give in to hunger pangs by one.
Ten years ago, when I restricted, I used to eat breakfast every day.
The same thing.
A quarter of a cup of grapenuts.
A teaspoon of jam.
6 ounces of hot soy milk poured over.
A small apple.
It amounted to about 275-300 calories.
I ate it at 8am every morning, by myself in the cafeteria at school. I read while I ate, but I took at least a half an hour to chew, swallow, masticate, and breathe.
My best habits somehow thrown in and slathered up with my worst.
I then wouldn't eat again until five in the evening.
I took a coffee at 2pm. It was a soy latte with no sugar.
At five, my stomach had already been groaning audibly for an hour.
I would race to the dining hall and fill a bowl with raw veggies and cubes of cold, gelatinous tofu.
I dumped salt and pepper and balsamic vinegar over the whole thing until it was barely recognizable. Then I went to the toaster and got a single slice of multigrain bread, which I toasted, and ate dry.
The whole thing usually amounted to about 300-400 calories.
Then I would allow myself a small portion of whatever the cafeteria was serving for dessert.
It didn't matter what it was, just a small serving, I told myself, to keep from feeling like I was denied the finer things.
At the end of the day, I clocked in between 900-1100 calories.
I called those good days.
On bad days, I would give in to my rumbling stomach at 9pm. I would eat fistfuls of popcorn, chocolate, and nuts until my stomach hurt.
I would then punish myself with horrendous hateful self talk.
I would refuse to eat any single thing until five o clock the next evening, when I would allow myself my regular dinner, and somehow, that allowed me to be forgiven, to assume that I was okay, and still in control.
Since I stopped being anorexic, I have never gotten the balance right.
I feel like any time I eat I am binging. I feel that way especially if I eat after eight at night.
For that reason, for ten years, I have started every single day punishing myself.
No breakfast.
You don't deserve it.
You fucked up last night.
No matter what I had done. Even on the days that I was re-triggered and didn't eat at all for an entire day (and I had three of those this spring), I would not allow myself to eat breakfast.
Breakfast eaters are weak, I told myself.
They're also more deserving than you.
They didn't inhale a whole container of cashews last night.
So today, after the darkest night I've had in a very long while, I wake up. I do some back friendly yoga to slowly, hopefully recuperate from this gnarly injury, and I cut up a grapefruit.
I am eating it slowly, savoring it, the gem like segments with their sweet and sour bright pink juice.
I am doing this because I need to make some changes to how I live my life right now, how I eat and breathe and work and sleep.
Because I am making myself miserable, and it has been going on for too long.
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
Dark Place
When does it feel better?
Today was the first in my two days off.
I woke up to pouring rain.
It has rained relentlessly all day.
It's the kind of rain that soaks you as soon as you walk out the door. Your jacket can be watertight, your boots can be knee high, but you're still soaked within in 90 seconds of stepping out from under the front porch.
My back is still fucked up.
I can't do yoga.
The rain is so thick and awful that I couldn't go for a walk or a run or anyplace.
I managed to get to the store. It's a 1.4 mile trip round trip.
I bought kale and pears and oranges.
I bought molasses cookie mix and apple cinnamon rice cakes and plain yoghurt.
I drank an entire pot of coffee by myself, and I tried to christmas shop online.
I bought a few trinkets.
I'd had these great plans to take the train into boston and go shopping around the pru. I was going to get coffee at a place I'd never been before and buy marzipan at cardulo's.
The weather was too disgusting to even think of that.
I wished it was snowing instead. Then at least I'd be able to walk about in the quiet beauty of slow motion snow flakes falling by the ocean instead of water sluicing through my eyes and my nose and my mouth.
I came home from the store and unpacked my groceries.
I turned on christmas music and baked the cookies.
I texted a friend to come visit, and she stopped in.
We drank a beer, and she tested some of the cookies. She asked me how I was doing, and I honestly told her, pretty bad.
She asked if she could help, which is all anyone can do when faced with that response, and I shrugged.
'There's nothing for you to do other than to ask,' I said because it's true.
I tried to boil my christmas puddings.
One leaked into the water.
The other one boiled dry and then overflowed into the water and burned.
I got more sad.
I ate the whole package of rice cakes.
2 pears.
4 cookies.
a cup of yoghurt.
some mincemeat from a jar.
My stomach doubled me over in cramps immediately after.
It's been an hour now, and the cramps haven't gone away.
My back still hurts too much for me to do anything.
I feel like the most pathetic, ugly, non-contributing member of society.
I feel worthless and parasitic.
I feel like my body hates me, and wants me to fail.
I feel sabotaged by everything I am.
Nobody would miss me. Not really. They say they would but they'd only miss what I did for them. They wouldn't actually miss the person I am.
They'd only miss the conveniences I gave them.
Fuck.
Today was the first in my two days off.
I woke up to pouring rain.
It has rained relentlessly all day.
It's the kind of rain that soaks you as soon as you walk out the door. Your jacket can be watertight, your boots can be knee high, but you're still soaked within in 90 seconds of stepping out from under the front porch.
My back is still fucked up.
I can't do yoga.
The rain is so thick and awful that I couldn't go for a walk or a run or anyplace.
I managed to get to the store. It's a 1.4 mile trip round trip.
I bought kale and pears and oranges.
I bought molasses cookie mix and apple cinnamon rice cakes and plain yoghurt.
I drank an entire pot of coffee by myself, and I tried to christmas shop online.
I bought a few trinkets.
I'd had these great plans to take the train into boston and go shopping around the pru. I was going to get coffee at a place I'd never been before and buy marzipan at cardulo's.
The weather was too disgusting to even think of that.
I wished it was snowing instead. Then at least I'd be able to walk about in the quiet beauty of slow motion snow flakes falling by the ocean instead of water sluicing through my eyes and my nose and my mouth.
I came home from the store and unpacked my groceries.
I turned on christmas music and baked the cookies.
I texted a friend to come visit, and she stopped in.
We drank a beer, and she tested some of the cookies. She asked me how I was doing, and I honestly told her, pretty bad.
She asked if she could help, which is all anyone can do when faced with that response, and I shrugged.
'There's nothing for you to do other than to ask,' I said because it's true.
I tried to boil my christmas puddings.
One leaked into the water.
The other one boiled dry and then overflowed into the water and burned.
I got more sad.
I ate the whole package of rice cakes.
2 pears.
4 cookies.
a cup of yoghurt.
some mincemeat from a jar.
My stomach doubled me over in cramps immediately after.
It's been an hour now, and the cramps haven't gone away.
My back still hurts too much for me to do anything.
I feel like the most pathetic, ugly, non-contributing member of society.
I feel worthless and parasitic.
I feel like my body hates me, and wants me to fail.
I feel sabotaged by everything I am.
Nobody would miss me. Not really. They say they would but they'd only miss what I did for them. They wouldn't actually miss the person I am.
They'd only miss the conveniences I gave them.
Fuck.
Monday, December 8, 2014
Sick Like Me
I am thirty two years old.
I am thirty two years old, and I am married.
I am thirty two years old. I am married. I have health insurance. I am paying down my debt. I can afford to buy groceries and pay my utilities. I have a dog and a cat.
Why then?
Why the fuck is it so hard to feed myself like a grown up?
Beard and I have completely off schedules right now, and, since I depend so heavily on other people's schedules to regulate meal times and the way that I manage my disordered eating, I have been left to my own devices for so long the way I eat has completely flown off the rails.
Today I got up with an outrageous back pain. I did something yesterday that tweaked it entirely the wrong way, and I barely slept all night.
I had a terrible dream.
I woke up and waited for the alarm to go off.
My morning routine is usually as follows:
6:00am get up.
6:10am thirty minutes of yoga
6:45am shower, get dressed, chug 16oz of water.
7:30am leave the house
walk the 2.7 miles to work.
8:15 arrive at work.
9am first coffee of the day
Right now my coffee is a three shot americano with an ounce of skim milk and about half an ounce of the super treaty eggnog we're getting from the dairy one town over. I don't need sugar thanks to this treaty thing, but I get all kinds of liberal with the cinnamon and nutmeg.
Usually I don't have time to eat until 1pm, but today I was ravenous at 11am.
It was slow, so I put together a salad: greens, cukes, about a cup of roasted cherry tomatoes, olives, and balsamic dressing, a couple of slices of mozzarella.
I ate it in about fifteen minutes.
Two hours later, still ravenous, I ate a sourdough olive roll. It was singed at the edges, and the salad had been a little acidic for my stomach, so eating the bread settled it which was nice.
I was then able to take a couple of pain pills for my back, which was feeling pretty wretched at that point.
Normally, I stay until a little after four in the afternoon, but the medicine barely touched my back pain, so I took off at three instead. Normally, also, I walk the 2.7 miles home again, but luckily Beard had the day off, so he came to pick me up.
If I left work like I usually do on Mondays, I would have stopped at the store on the way home and bought the makings for our dinner, and I wouldn't have gotten in until 5:30pm. I would have taken the dog out, made dinner, and been ready to eat with the man when he got home at 6:30.
Today i boiled the kettle and made a pot of tea. Then I lay on the floor while watching a terrible movie and rolled a tennis ball in the knot in my back.
I drank three huge cups of tea with milk and honey.
The last one I dribbled a little bit of baileys into, and then didn't finish it because it just didn't taste good.
Around five I got hungry.
Of course there was nothing to eat, so I did some scrounging.
I ended up eating 2 morning star farms vegetarian corndogs and half a bag of cape cod potato chips.
Craving something sweet, I pawed through the contents of the fridge, but there was nothing appealing, so I tried my hand at a mug cake.
I mashed up an overripe banana with a spoonful of brown sugar, an egg white, some vanilla, cinnamon, and a couple of spoonfuls of flour. I nuked the sucker for three minutes, and broke up a cube of dark chocolate over the top when it came out of the microwave. When the chocolate melted I drizzled a spoonful of milk over the top, and took a spoon to the bitch.
I forced myself to drink another glass and a half of water.
Now I feel full...
Not overfull, but my brain keeps telling me that I overate. That I am a pig, and my appetite is out of control.
I don't know anymore.
Writing it down here, it doesn't look that bad. I certainly feel like there are plenty of people who eat more than that on a regular basis, but i also don't have the slightest clue if it was good for me.
I'm sure the chips were not a good choice.
...
Maybe we'll document a few more of these days, since nobody reads this anyway, I have nothing to be ashamed of, and perhaps I can examine the evidence and figure out a way back from this fucked up mindset of disordered control and eating chaos.
I am thirty two years old, and I am married.
I am thirty two years old. I am married. I have health insurance. I am paying down my debt. I can afford to buy groceries and pay my utilities. I have a dog and a cat.
Why then?
Why the fuck is it so hard to feed myself like a grown up?
Beard and I have completely off schedules right now, and, since I depend so heavily on other people's schedules to regulate meal times and the way that I manage my disordered eating, I have been left to my own devices for so long the way I eat has completely flown off the rails.
Today I got up with an outrageous back pain. I did something yesterday that tweaked it entirely the wrong way, and I barely slept all night.
I had a terrible dream.
I woke up and waited for the alarm to go off.
My morning routine is usually as follows:
6:00am get up.
6:10am thirty minutes of yoga
6:45am shower, get dressed, chug 16oz of water.
7:30am leave the house
walk the 2.7 miles to work.
8:15 arrive at work.
9am first coffee of the day
Right now my coffee is a three shot americano with an ounce of skim milk and about half an ounce of the super treaty eggnog we're getting from the dairy one town over. I don't need sugar thanks to this treaty thing, but I get all kinds of liberal with the cinnamon and nutmeg.
Usually I don't have time to eat until 1pm, but today I was ravenous at 11am.
It was slow, so I put together a salad: greens, cukes, about a cup of roasted cherry tomatoes, olives, and balsamic dressing, a couple of slices of mozzarella.
I ate it in about fifteen minutes.
Two hours later, still ravenous, I ate a sourdough olive roll. It was singed at the edges, and the salad had been a little acidic for my stomach, so eating the bread settled it which was nice.
I was then able to take a couple of pain pills for my back, which was feeling pretty wretched at that point.
Normally, I stay until a little after four in the afternoon, but the medicine barely touched my back pain, so I took off at three instead. Normally, also, I walk the 2.7 miles home again, but luckily Beard had the day off, so he came to pick me up.
If I left work like I usually do on Mondays, I would have stopped at the store on the way home and bought the makings for our dinner, and I wouldn't have gotten in until 5:30pm. I would have taken the dog out, made dinner, and been ready to eat with the man when he got home at 6:30.
Today i boiled the kettle and made a pot of tea. Then I lay on the floor while watching a terrible movie and rolled a tennis ball in the knot in my back.
I drank three huge cups of tea with milk and honey.
The last one I dribbled a little bit of baileys into, and then didn't finish it because it just didn't taste good.
Around five I got hungry.
Of course there was nothing to eat, so I did some scrounging.
I ended up eating 2 morning star farms vegetarian corndogs and half a bag of cape cod potato chips.
Craving something sweet, I pawed through the contents of the fridge, but there was nothing appealing, so I tried my hand at a mug cake.
I mashed up an overripe banana with a spoonful of brown sugar, an egg white, some vanilla, cinnamon, and a couple of spoonfuls of flour. I nuked the sucker for three minutes, and broke up a cube of dark chocolate over the top when it came out of the microwave. When the chocolate melted I drizzled a spoonful of milk over the top, and took a spoon to the bitch.
I forced myself to drink another glass and a half of water.
Now I feel full...
Not overfull, but my brain keeps telling me that I overate. That I am a pig, and my appetite is out of control.
I don't know anymore.
Writing it down here, it doesn't look that bad. I certainly feel like there are plenty of people who eat more than that on a regular basis, but i also don't have the slightest clue if it was good for me.
I'm sure the chips were not a good choice.
...
Maybe we'll document a few more of these days, since nobody reads this anyway, I have nothing to be ashamed of, and perhaps I can examine the evidence and figure out a way back from this fucked up mindset of disordered control and eating chaos.
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