As a practicing witch, I simultaneously welcome and dread the massive culmination of holidays that is Hallowe'en.
There are so many things wrapped up in the date that I, good little neurotic that I am, pin a hell of a lot more expectations on the date than any one day has rights to.
It is the end of the Witch's Calendar year, so it is my new year's.
This is a time for reflection on the theme and growth of the last year and a time to prepare and project for the new one. It is also the last harvest, so it is a time for feasting and celebration. I like to take inventory of my accomplishments, of what has come to fruition, and what I'd like to reset and refocus for in the coming quiet, fallow months of winter.
It is also the time at which our loved ancestors who have passed on are closest to mind and spirit. If there are messages to be received or sent between the veils, this is the best time to send them. I like to offer to do palmistry and card readings for my near and dear ones on this night because I consider the avenues to be clearest, and any way that I can help people communicate who wish to is part of my duty as a good little craft practitioner.
It is also a great night for nostalgia and parties!
I love seeing children trick or treat, decking out the house with decorations, baking up a storm of orange and black and pumpkin and bat themed delicacies. I love bobbing for apples, watching spooky movies, making toasts in the graveyard and taking wild whooping walks through the piles of leaves and howling at the moon at midnight.
That's a lot of pressure I put on one night.
It pales, however, in comparison to the amount of pressure I've been putting on myself.
Eating has been very difficult as of late.
Work is mad. October is the busiest time of year for any business in Salem, and we have been rocking it. I am also dealing with a completely green crew, many of whom have never worked in retail before, let alone booming, touristy, holiday retail. There is very little time spent in my bakery without me overseeing, retraining, explaining, trouble-shooting, fixing, petting, coaxing, planning, helping, and giving. Sadly, I get very little of that in return from customers, who deem it their right to take everything, my employers, who think that because I have informed them I plan on leaving in 9 months (that's nine months of notice people!) I am no longer contributing to their business and do not care about my job, and my crew, who don't realize how much work it is to take care of their needs on top of everybody else's.
On top of all this, i am also in the last three weeks of my first semester at grad school. I owe forty pages of writing, about half of which must be critical, and based upon almost one thousand pages of reading that needs to be done.
Most of the time I'm so busy I forget to eat, and then suddenly I'm furious or weeping for no reason, and I can't understand why I'm so miserable, except for-Oh Wait! I haven't eaten in thirteen hours! That's what it is!
On Saturday, I got up at 6am, so I could get dressed up like a phoenix for the halloween theme at work.
I walked my usual two and a half mile trek to the bakery, and immediately jumped into the fray.
We had wave after wave of people from the moment I arrived until four thirty, when I ushered the last, straggling tourist out the door and locked it.
After supervising enough of the clean up that I felt the staff could survive without me, I ran out the door to meet up with a good friend I hadn't seen since before I got married five years ago. Out of nowhere, he just decided to drive down to Salem and hunt me down for coffee. He's been out of the country for at least four years, and I was absolutely gob-smacked to see him.
We spent two hours strolling through the crazy streets of the city, catching up. There were lines and crowds of people around every corner, and eventually we sat on some grass near the ocean. It was nice, but I was starting to feel strange. After a good long hug with my friend, I began my commute home. Another two and a half miles back over the bridge to my apartment.
Somewhere around the top of the bridge, I put my hand in my pocket and discovered a small square of dark chocolate. When my fingers closed around it, I suddenly realized why I felt weird.
It was six o'clock at night, and I'd had one cup of coffee since I'd woke up all day.
There's a moment, before a binge, where I can see the green, furry monster of indulgence poke his head out of my subconscious. He has black horns, leather black paws and disgusting yellow eyes, and he pulls his head out of my routines and points a gleaming, onyx claw at me.
I'm coming for you. He says, and I feel my knees shake.
I'm getting better at recognizing him, so I stopped at a local shop and bought a super delicious, mega healthy spinach wrap, stuffed with falafel, veggies and hummus. I even paused at the corner store for a bottle of my favorite red wine, reasoning with myself that it was a treat that would pacify my demon.
I got home, and there was a new movie on netflix i wanted to see.
It sucked the the herrband wasn't able to be there. He had an all day photography job, and I missed him. With all the work I've been doing, we rarely get to hang out anymore, and any time we do get is in the evenings, since we don't have common days off right now.
Because of his photo job, however, I wouldn't see the beard until almost midnight, so I plunked down on the couch with my sandwich and a glass of wine, and thought to myself, Ah yes, here is the reward for today.
By then it was after seven. I hadn't eaten in about twenty four solid hours, and my stomach had ceased even to make grumbly noises. It mewled like a wet cat.
In a trice the sandwich was gone.
I'd barely even tasted it.
Then I thought, well, I have blueberry muffin that I brought home for the herrband, but he didn't know I was bringing it, so it doesn't matter if I eat it.
Which I did.
Then a handful of halloween candy.
Then I remember the stollen experiment from work earlier that week, and (fully in the clutches of my green demon now) I pulled out the half loaf of thick, sweet, almondy, dried fruity, sugar laden bread, and devoured it. Piece by piece, with no mind to the now squeaking kitten that was my stomach, paralyzed under its weight of food, I polished off every last, rum soaked raisiny crumb.
The demon threw his hands up in the air and did his victory dance.
I had caved.
I was so full I felt ill. My poor body had no idea what to make of the situation. Denied for so long, it couldn't handle the amount of food that had crash landed like a ton of bricks, and I swayed with nausea.
Lucky for me, the demon has trained my body well, and I do not throw up. My gag reflex is under lock and key.
I finished watching my movie, then exhausted, ashamed, and defeated, I retreated to the bedroom, to lie on my back, and will my stomach into serenity. All the while praying that I can get through Sunday without a repeat performance.
Now I know this is a classic routine. The starvation followed by the binge.
It's a dance me and my demon have been doing off and on for ten years, but the self forgiveness thing is still damn near impossible.
Faced with the pain of the overindulgence, my body stays mad at me after these episodes.
I wake up with indigestion. I don't feel hungry until very late in the next day, and then it comes upon me in a rush, setting me up for another overindulgence unless I work incredibly hard to keep the binge demon locked in his cage. It is a very new rarity, that I succeed.
Still, I have succeeded more than once in the last year, and I have to count that among my victories.
The negative shame voices that fill my head are so natural they feel like an instinct I have no control over, and they set in with a spitefulness I feel to my core.
My websites help...It's like having people I can actually talk to about these foul ups and body betrayals. They forgive me when I simply can't, and I'm very grateful for their generators, because without them, I'd feel utterly alone.
I am trying to find my theme for 2015, for last year's was "What happens if you just say yes?"
And I would say that it worked quite well for me. Truly.
This year, I think my theme needs to be:
"Let go. If it's worth it, you don't have to hold on so hard for it to stay."
What do you think?
Can I let the wheel of the year turn, and in doing so, take with it this iron clad grasp i have on so much expectation, so much responsibility?
Can I just let go, and let the healing in?
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
Sunday, October 19, 2014
When Too Much Feels like Not Enough and Even Pages Stick in My Throat.
Times like these, it's difficult to remember how grown ups eat.
I read lots of books.
I am reading a book a week for school right now, and some of them are the type of fiction where the author describes the daily routines of the characters. They are grounded in reality. They wash dishes, forget to pick up the mail, eat breakfast too quickly, and find holes in their cardigans.
In the other kinds of books, nobody remembers to eat, everybody is too busy doing epic things, every word is a mysterious box that must be opened and its contents examined before moving on. There is no room for such frivolities as hair washing and toast. Each syllable has a purpose, a drive, and a subtext. Under every sentence a buried treasure waits.
I want my life to be like the second type of book, full of spectacle, art, and brilliance, but all too often it lolls along in the first type.
I do things like forget to eat until two in the afternoon, and then stuff my face ravenously with pumpkin spice hersheys kisses, which I think are revolting, and would never ordinarily eat except that there is very little in the house right now, and unless I want to cover a slab of bread in cream cheese and maple syrup.
Actually...
that sounds quite nice.
I'll be right back.
Times like these my rapacity terrifies me.
I feel as though I could eat the entire world and want seconds.
There is no pizza big enough, no ice cream container bottomless enough, no quantity of food satisfies me. I seek the binge like a drug addled boyfriend. I want to sink against something bigger and more fucked up than I am, blame it for all of my problems and then shrug off the obvious solutions.
I want to hit my stride, the peak of the binge where I'm halfway between hungry, full, and stuffed motionless, suspended between satiety and action, furiously snuffling for the next thing to devour.
It's confusing, because I use words like 'should' and 'ought to' to describe my feelings of satisfaction.
___________'should' be enough.
___________'ought to' satisfy me.
But it doesn't.
I'm not starving anymore, not ravenous, aching with hunger, but just feeling comfortable isn't good enough. Why is that? Fear? The "well I've fucked it up so far, might as well go down like a prize fighter"mentality? Is it some terrible, internalized female inadequacy that holds me hostage and pries my fingers from around the novel and presses them around the handle of the fridge instead?
I wish I had the answers.
But that's not what this blog is for. I'm not here to tell you I've got it figured out because I don't.
I know that I am sitting here, and the roster of things I could be shoveling into my face is running through my head faster than a digital menu flashing across a screen at the movies.
I could finish the bag of hershey's kisses,
finish the box of almond cookies,
finish the cream cheese with however many slices of bread it takes,
pour the maple syrup over something, anything, pretend it's dessert, pretend it's a cake, soak my fingers in sugar and milk and cram whatever it is down my throat and into my stomach and pray that it's enough to silence the rumble throughout my being that cries for more more more!
More happiness!
More sleep!
More free time!
More adventures!
More indulgences!
All of the things that I don't have time for because of work, grad school, extra work, dogs, husbands, friends, and siblings getting ready to move overseas.
For all of the reasons i say, "someday i'll give myself enough", I feel I never am full, never not hungry, always lifting the clock like a plate to see if there's a crumb of time left for me.
Always shaking the book and running my sticky fingers through the cracks in the spine to see if there's an extra word left, just one more, the right one, that finally gets the rumble to quiet.
I read lots of books.
I am reading a book a week for school right now, and some of them are the type of fiction where the author describes the daily routines of the characters. They are grounded in reality. They wash dishes, forget to pick up the mail, eat breakfast too quickly, and find holes in their cardigans.
In the other kinds of books, nobody remembers to eat, everybody is too busy doing epic things, every word is a mysterious box that must be opened and its contents examined before moving on. There is no room for such frivolities as hair washing and toast. Each syllable has a purpose, a drive, and a subtext. Under every sentence a buried treasure waits.
I want my life to be like the second type of book, full of spectacle, art, and brilliance, but all too often it lolls along in the first type.
I do things like forget to eat until two in the afternoon, and then stuff my face ravenously with pumpkin spice hersheys kisses, which I think are revolting, and would never ordinarily eat except that there is very little in the house right now, and unless I want to cover a slab of bread in cream cheese and maple syrup.
Actually...
that sounds quite nice.
I'll be right back.
Times like these my rapacity terrifies me.
I feel as though I could eat the entire world and want seconds.
There is no pizza big enough, no ice cream container bottomless enough, no quantity of food satisfies me. I seek the binge like a drug addled boyfriend. I want to sink against something bigger and more fucked up than I am, blame it for all of my problems and then shrug off the obvious solutions.
I want to hit my stride, the peak of the binge where I'm halfway between hungry, full, and stuffed motionless, suspended between satiety and action, furiously snuffling for the next thing to devour.
It's confusing, because I use words like 'should' and 'ought to' to describe my feelings of satisfaction.
___________'should' be enough.
___________'ought to' satisfy me.
But it doesn't.
I'm not starving anymore, not ravenous, aching with hunger, but just feeling comfortable isn't good enough. Why is that? Fear? The "well I've fucked it up so far, might as well go down like a prize fighter"mentality? Is it some terrible, internalized female inadequacy that holds me hostage and pries my fingers from around the novel and presses them around the handle of the fridge instead?
I wish I had the answers.
But that's not what this blog is for. I'm not here to tell you I've got it figured out because I don't.
I know that I am sitting here, and the roster of things I could be shoveling into my face is running through my head faster than a digital menu flashing across a screen at the movies.
I could finish the bag of hershey's kisses,
finish the box of almond cookies,
finish the cream cheese with however many slices of bread it takes,
pour the maple syrup over something, anything, pretend it's dessert, pretend it's a cake, soak my fingers in sugar and milk and cram whatever it is down my throat and into my stomach and pray that it's enough to silence the rumble throughout my being that cries for more more more!
More happiness!
More sleep!
More free time!
More adventures!
More indulgences!
All of the things that I don't have time for because of work, grad school, extra work, dogs, husbands, friends, and siblings getting ready to move overseas.
For all of the reasons i say, "someday i'll give myself enough", I feel I never am full, never not hungry, always lifting the clock like a plate to see if there's a crumb of time left for me.
Always shaking the book and running my sticky fingers through the cracks in the spine to see if there's an extra word left, just one more, the right one, that finally gets the rumble to quiet.
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
Drowning in a Tea Cup and Other Fables of Hydration
The forming of new habits has been the bane of my existence.
My favorite habits (the unhealthy ones) form without me even noticing.
Grabbing a beer every single night when I get home from work seems to creep up during the summer out of nowhere.
Skipping a coffee date with a good friend turns into skipping the next and the next, until suddenly we just don't talk anymore.
Putting on my pjs and hopping into bed at a reasonable hour only to bugger about with my phone until one in the morning becomes a ritual before I can even blink.
It's the habits I WANT to pick up that are so tricky.
One habit I am trying to make stick is drinking a full 16oz glass of water first thing when I get up every morning.
You should probably know: I hate water.
It's genetic!
I swear it's not my fault!
My parents haven't had a glass of water between them since the late 80's.
One english and one Canadian, both baby boomers, they grew up during the coffee and tea revolution.
In my house growing up there was a pot of coffee on before my mother even knew she was out of bed and in the kitchen. Back when we were broke it was Chockful o' Nuts, which to this day still smells like stomach acid to me.
As soon as the second pot of coffee was gone, they switched to tea, and tea was drunk intermittently throughout the afternoon.
If you go into my parents house at this very moment, there is a pot of tea either boiling hot at my Dad's elbow, going tepid on a coaster as my mother turns the pages of a book, or stone cold and forgotten during its ninth reheating in the microwave.
At dinner, my mother drinks tea, and my father will spoil himself with a glass of lemonade, and then switch back to tea directly after the meal.
Their last physicals both put them at excellent health (ages 60 and 67) so perhaps they're onto something.
I never grew up drinking water.
I wanted to be a grown up so badly I begged to drink tea from the time I was six years old.
They refused and instead served me nursery tea, which was a cup of hot water from the third or fourth steeping of a tea bag, flooded with milk and honey. I treasured these white hot little drinks as my gateway into the adult world, so naturally, as soon as my parents deemed I had finished my growth spurts, I began trying to drink coffee.
I was sailing along merrily, drinking all the drinks except water until around college, when I first experimented with restricting and realized how many extra calories were in those drinks, so I cut them out, and began chugging the vile, flavorless beverage I had avoided my whole life.
After my recovery swung in the other direction, I all but abandoned it, and associated it (sadly like I do a number of things) with that time period.
Until I started working at the bakery about six years ago.
In the back of house, especially in the summer, the bakery would easily rest between eighty and a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. I was lifting hundreds of pounds of flour, hustling in front of a four hundred and fifty degree oven, and shaping countless loaves of bread for eight hours.
My coworker, the second night I was working, hurled a bottle of water at me and said, get this in your face, and nothing had ever tasted better. I became a devoted water drinker, beasting two or three bottles in a shift.
After I stopped working in the back of house and moved to the (while certainly not sedentary) less heated position of manager, I took up running, and for my seasons, I would reach for water as readily and handily as any athlete, something I marveled at: my renewed thirst!
This year I have had to end my season early thanks to my ankle injury, and I can feel bad habits gnawing at the borders of my brain. I want to sleep more, eat more, hide more, due both to the change in seasons and the slowing of my metabolism now that I'm not distance training.
My water intake plummeted.
About a month ago I went out for breakfast with my parents and jokingly asked them about their hereditary hydrophobia.
They laughed and dismissed it of any importance chatting happily away about how they revile the stuff and can't recall the last time they drank any.
My Dad leaned across the table very seriously and remarked, "but I have taken to having a large glass of cranberry juice in the mornings, darling," as if to set my mind at ease.
But JESS, WE'VE BEEN TOLD OUR WHOLE LIVES TO DRINK 8 GLASSES OF WATER A DAY OR WE'LL SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUST!!
That RDA about eight glasses is actually hogwash, you can read about it scientifically here:
http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-living/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/in-depth/water/art-20044256
and
You can read about it in a much more fun and down to earth way here:
http://butterbeliever.com/8-reasons-not-to-drink-8-glasses-of-water-a-day/
As part of my getting back to listening to my body thingy, I realized that nine nights out of ten, I don't drink anything after six in the evening. Weird right?
I just forget...usually because I'm in the midst of some food drama related brain melt, but sometimes because I do get locked into the bad habit of a glass of wine after work is very very nice, and then I get sleepy, and well...you know the rest.
So I have been successfully getting my ass out of bed every morning, and while I walk the dog, I drink a 16oz bottle of water.
At some point in the afternoon I usually reach for another, and then, if I am thirsty later I base my agua needs on how I feel in the moment.
Do I want a water?
Or do I want that giant lemonade?
Or am I just going to give in and make a pot of tea?
You can guess which one wins more often than not, and in the mean time, I'm still getting up in the mornings and feeling good about the first thing I do, so that's something.
My favorite habits (the unhealthy ones) form without me even noticing.
Grabbing a beer every single night when I get home from work seems to creep up during the summer out of nowhere.
Skipping a coffee date with a good friend turns into skipping the next and the next, until suddenly we just don't talk anymore.
Putting on my pjs and hopping into bed at a reasonable hour only to bugger about with my phone until one in the morning becomes a ritual before I can even blink.
It's the habits I WANT to pick up that are so tricky.
One habit I am trying to make stick is drinking a full 16oz glass of water first thing when I get up every morning.
You should probably know: I hate water.
It's genetic!
I swear it's not my fault!
My parents haven't had a glass of water between them since the late 80's.
One english and one Canadian, both baby boomers, they grew up during the coffee and tea revolution.
In my house growing up there was a pot of coffee on before my mother even knew she was out of bed and in the kitchen. Back when we were broke it was Chockful o' Nuts, which to this day still smells like stomach acid to me.
As soon as the second pot of coffee was gone, they switched to tea, and tea was drunk intermittently throughout the afternoon.
If you go into my parents house at this very moment, there is a pot of tea either boiling hot at my Dad's elbow, going tepid on a coaster as my mother turns the pages of a book, or stone cold and forgotten during its ninth reheating in the microwave.
At dinner, my mother drinks tea, and my father will spoil himself with a glass of lemonade, and then switch back to tea directly after the meal.
Their last physicals both put them at excellent health (ages 60 and 67) so perhaps they're onto something.
I never grew up drinking water.
I wanted to be a grown up so badly I begged to drink tea from the time I was six years old.
They refused and instead served me nursery tea, which was a cup of hot water from the third or fourth steeping of a tea bag, flooded with milk and honey. I treasured these white hot little drinks as my gateway into the adult world, so naturally, as soon as my parents deemed I had finished my growth spurts, I began trying to drink coffee.
I was sailing along merrily, drinking all the drinks except water until around college, when I first experimented with restricting and realized how many extra calories were in those drinks, so I cut them out, and began chugging the vile, flavorless beverage I had avoided my whole life.
After my recovery swung in the other direction, I all but abandoned it, and associated it (sadly like I do a number of things) with that time period.
Until I started working at the bakery about six years ago.
In the back of house, especially in the summer, the bakery would easily rest between eighty and a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. I was lifting hundreds of pounds of flour, hustling in front of a four hundred and fifty degree oven, and shaping countless loaves of bread for eight hours.
My coworker, the second night I was working, hurled a bottle of water at me and said, get this in your face, and nothing had ever tasted better. I became a devoted water drinker, beasting two or three bottles in a shift.
After I stopped working in the back of house and moved to the (while certainly not sedentary) less heated position of manager, I took up running, and for my seasons, I would reach for water as readily and handily as any athlete, something I marveled at: my renewed thirst!
This year I have had to end my season early thanks to my ankle injury, and I can feel bad habits gnawing at the borders of my brain. I want to sleep more, eat more, hide more, due both to the change in seasons and the slowing of my metabolism now that I'm not distance training.
My water intake plummeted.
About a month ago I went out for breakfast with my parents and jokingly asked them about their hereditary hydrophobia.
They laughed and dismissed it of any importance chatting happily away about how they revile the stuff and can't recall the last time they drank any.
My Dad leaned across the table very seriously and remarked, "but I have taken to having a large glass of cranberry juice in the mornings, darling," as if to set my mind at ease.
But JESS, WE'VE BEEN TOLD OUR WHOLE LIVES TO DRINK 8 GLASSES OF WATER A DAY OR WE'LL SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUST!!
That RDA about eight glasses is actually hogwash, you can read about it scientifically here:
http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-living/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/in-depth/water/art-20044256
and
You can read about it in a much more fun and down to earth way here:
http://butterbeliever.com/8-reasons-not-to-drink-8-glasses-of-water-a-day/
As part of my getting back to listening to my body thingy, I realized that nine nights out of ten, I don't drink anything after six in the evening. Weird right?
I just forget...usually because I'm in the midst of some food drama related brain melt, but sometimes because I do get locked into the bad habit of a glass of wine after work is very very nice, and then I get sleepy, and well...you know the rest.
So I have been successfully getting my ass out of bed every morning, and while I walk the dog, I drink a 16oz bottle of water.
At some point in the afternoon I usually reach for another, and then, if I am thirsty later I base my agua needs on how I feel in the moment.
Do I want a water?
Or do I want that giant lemonade?
Or am I just going to give in and make a pot of tea?
You can guess which one wins more often than not, and in the mean time, I'm still getting up in the mornings and feeling good about the first thing I do, so that's something.
Tuesday, October 7, 2014
Who Doesn't Want to be a Phoenix?
The best experiences are often born from fear.
It has taken me a very long time to admit how much of my life my eating disorder controls.
I am creating this blog as a means to my final and lasting recovery.
The fear part is that the blog is public, which means anybody can know my failures and successes.
There is a lot of trepidation that comes along with knowing all you have to do is read this blog to know very personal, very embarrassing facts about me, but part of my recovery is that I must be honest and forthright.
In the ED community it is a well known fact that these disorders flourish in darkness. They thrive on secrecy and shame, and are most successful when feeding into themselves the wicked cycle of fear/anxiety/coping/disordered behavior/self shame/secrecy/fear.
I look at that cycle and I feel cold. There is something so lonely about the ways we abuse ourselves be it drug addiction, food addiction, restriction, self harm, etc. The disorder loves its solitude. It knows that when we are surrounded by a loving and supportive community, it has much less control over both our mental and our physical compulsions.
I will not use this first entry to tell you my full story. It will reveal itself over the course of this blog, as I struggle to maintain a healthy lifestyle free from obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors.
All you need to know is this:
My name is Jess.
I am thirty two years old, and I have been struggling with disordered eating in various manifestations since I was nineteen. Thirteen is a lucky number to me, so I think thirteen years is too long for this to have played such a consuming part of my life. I am creating this blog to share my struggles both through recovery, and the traumas of my past, that still feed into the hold these behaviors have over my life.
I do not feel like sharing my stats with the blog at this time, but I may change my mind in the future.
Suffice to say, I am five foot eight, and I identify as female. I am married to a gorgeous, spooky, wonderful man, and we have no children as of yet, although we would like to begin our family at some point in the next couple of years.
I work full time managing the retail staff of an artisan bakery.
I am also a full time grad student working on my MFA in Creative Writing through a prestigious low residency program. I am currently halfway through my first semester of four.
I see no reason for religion to take up any space on this blog, and I have no desire to discuss my theological beliefs here, but I reserve the right to reference holidays as they pertain to my experiences, and any rituals, attendances, or experiences I have of a religious nature as they affect my journey through recovery.
I make these two promises:
Nothing will be omitted.
Everything I write will be true.
Only by documenting my truth will I be able to build a pyre of the old, negative energies which have fed this disorder for so many years.
Help me set a match to this kindling by only sharing supportive, positive, and helpful stories and information here.
Shaming, critical, or bullying commentary will be immediately deleted and contributors of such will be banned.
I want everyone to feel safe here.
Finally, I want to share a short list of blogs that I go to almost once a day every day, for supportive stories, rants, articles, and movements by incredibly talented and awesome women with their own experiences with disordered eating.
http://www.themilitantbaker.com/
http://brittanyherself.com/
http://www.hungryrunnergirl.com/
http://margaretcho.com/2003/11/06/the-fuck-it-diet/
http://www.virgietovar.com/
http://sadienardini.com/
I should probably warn you that this will not be your typical well thought out, incredibly edited, fancy-type blog.
I am definitely going to say "fuck" a lot.
I am probably going to post recipes that I like, along with weird connected feelings I have to those recipes.
There will probably be some triggering posts at one point or another, but I promise to warn you ahead of time, so you can decide for yourself if you want to come down the rabbit hole with me.
I might post the odd picture. I'm still very new at this whole blog-o-shpiel so it could take a while before this blog looks like anything other than the rambling scribbles of an over-sharer.
All I can say is thank you for being here.
Thanks for showing up and throwing down your old, dried up, no longer useful fear and worry and anxiety because we're gonna throw it on the fire. We're gonna feed it to the flames.
We're gonna scream and whoop and possibly dance naked (yes...I am the naked friend, everybody has one, and I know it's me), and we are going to get this poison out of our systems because we deserve to live and love and laugh with wild abandon!
I am ready to rise.
Come with me.
It has taken me a very long time to admit how much of my life my eating disorder controls.
I am creating this blog as a means to my final and lasting recovery.
The fear part is that the blog is public, which means anybody can know my failures and successes.
There is a lot of trepidation that comes along with knowing all you have to do is read this blog to know very personal, very embarrassing facts about me, but part of my recovery is that I must be honest and forthright.
In the ED community it is a well known fact that these disorders flourish in darkness. They thrive on secrecy and shame, and are most successful when feeding into themselves the wicked cycle of fear/anxiety/coping/disordered behavior/self shame/secrecy/fear.
I look at that cycle and I feel cold. There is something so lonely about the ways we abuse ourselves be it drug addiction, food addiction, restriction, self harm, etc. The disorder loves its solitude. It knows that when we are surrounded by a loving and supportive community, it has much less control over both our mental and our physical compulsions.
I will not use this first entry to tell you my full story. It will reveal itself over the course of this blog, as I struggle to maintain a healthy lifestyle free from obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors.
All you need to know is this:
My name is Jess.
I am thirty two years old, and I have been struggling with disordered eating in various manifestations since I was nineteen. Thirteen is a lucky number to me, so I think thirteen years is too long for this to have played such a consuming part of my life. I am creating this blog to share my struggles both through recovery, and the traumas of my past, that still feed into the hold these behaviors have over my life.
I do not feel like sharing my stats with the blog at this time, but I may change my mind in the future.
Suffice to say, I am five foot eight, and I identify as female. I am married to a gorgeous, spooky, wonderful man, and we have no children as of yet, although we would like to begin our family at some point in the next couple of years.
I work full time managing the retail staff of an artisan bakery.
I am also a full time grad student working on my MFA in Creative Writing through a prestigious low residency program. I am currently halfway through my first semester of four.
I see no reason for religion to take up any space on this blog, and I have no desire to discuss my theological beliefs here, but I reserve the right to reference holidays as they pertain to my experiences, and any rituals, attendances, or experiences I have of a religious nature as they affect my journey through recovery.
I make these two promises:
Nothing will be omitted.
Everything I write will be true.
Only by documenting my truth will I be able to build a pyre of the old, negative energies which have fed this disorder for so many years.
Help me set a match to this kindling by only sharing supportive, positive, and helpful stories and information here.
Shaming, critical, or bullying commentary will be immediately deleted and contributors of such will be banned.
I want everyone to feel safe here.
Finally, I want to share a short list of blogs that I go to almost once a day every day, for supportive stories, rants, articles, and movements by incredibly talented and awesome women with their own experiences with disordered eating.
http://www.themilitantbaker.com/
http://brittanyherself.com/
http://www.hungryrunnergirl.com/
http://margaretcho.com/2003/11/06/the-fuck-it-diet/
http://www.virgietovar.com/
http://sadienardini.com/
I should probably warn you that this will not be your typical well thought out, incredibly edited, fancy-type blog.
I am definitely going to say "fuck" a lot.
I am probably going to post recipes that I like, along with weird connected feelings I have to those recipes.
There will probably be some triggering posts at one point or another, but I promise to warn you ahead of time, so you can decide for yourself if you want to come down the rabbit hole with me.
I might post the odd picture. I'm still very new at this whole blog-o-shpiel so it could take a while before this blog looks like anything other than the rambling scribbles of an over-sharer.
All I can say is thank you for being here.
Thanks for showing up and throwing down your old, dried up, no longer useful fear and worry and anxiety because we're gonna throw it on the fire. We're gonna feed it to the flames.
We're gonna scream and whoop and possibly dance naked (yes...I am the naked friend, everybody has one, and I know it's me), and we are going to get this poison out of our systems because we deserve to live and love and laugh with wild abandon!
I am ready to rise.
Come with me.
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