Having a bad time of it

So...
Stress.

I am fully aware that i am a bit of a control freak.
When I was younger (read: unmarried and done with school), I would challenge myself to do wild things, shake up my schedule, be impulsive, all in the name of proving to myself that I wouldn't die if things weren't planned out to the minute.
Some of the most magical things of my life happened because of these impetuous choices, also some of the stupidest things...
Now that I am a grown up in all of the trappings of adulthood (read: I pay my bills on time, totes married, committed to my job, also a full time grad school student), my options to be impulsive are incredibly limited.
Tuesdays and Wednesdays are my days off, and to the rest of the world, they're just two more days getting in the way of Friday. To me, they are my venus and apollo, my days to spend all morning in my pajamas finishing a pot of coffee while catching up on the internet and world news, read books in bars at three in the afternoon, to shop for clothes, get laundry done, buy groceries, take long walks through crispy leaves, try new recipes, and get in some extended yoga practice.
All
by
myself.
Truthfully, I'm in a wicked weird place right  now. Most of my friends are done with their grad degrees, they're no longer working stupid retail jobs. Not even my husband has the same days off as me right now, so I spend the majority of my days off alone.

A sort of natural rhythm worked itself out.
Monday nights I would attempt to jam something social into my week.
Five o clock drinks with friends at the beginning of their work week, or a movie night with my herrband to remind him he does actually live with a woman and isn't being haunted by a loving poltergeist.
Tuesday morning after sleeping in to the obscene hour of 8am, get cracking on my work, and by the afternoon, some kind of seeping damp loneliness would begin to set into me.
I'd check the clock, it would be two or so, and I'd need to get some fresh air.
In summer I'd trot down to the beach for a swim. I always find it difficult to be lonely at the ocean, and I'd people watch, jump in the waves, and maybe work through some tricky plot or thesis I was trying to navigate.
The herrband would get home shortly after I made it back to the house. I'd pick up groceries on the way back from my walk, beach or not, and we'd eat dinner together. Then he'd pack himself off to bed at a reasonable hour, and I'd be left to my own devices to finish an assignment and then slump in front of the television, telling myself it was a reward for all the stuff I'd accomplished.
It was never enough though.
Sure enough, as soon as my partner's tail disappeared into the bedroom the seeping loneliness returned, and with it the cooing indulgent voice that alway necessitates the binge.
You've worked so hard
You're all alone
Nobody to judge you
What else is going to make you feel better instantly?
A bath?
A tv show?

Weakly my will power would argue tepid points about hard work being its own reward, long term goals, and how crappy I would feel if I gave in, but not once did those work.
Not.
Once.
As the stress of the semester increased, so did the frequency of the binges.
I'd worked so hard for the first half of the year to get them down to once every two weeks, and here they were creeping up on me, at first, only ever tuesday night, then mondays became a binge night too, and as the end of the semester approached, sundays joined them.

Now my semester is done. This is the first weekend (tuesday and wednesday) I have not had a HUGE deadline hanging over my head in five and a half months, and the need to binge WAS STILL THERE.
The loneliness was still there.
The sadness.
But now I don't even have the excuse that I can let my will power slip because I was doing so much other stuff it was too much to have to keep tabs on my disordered eating on top of everything else.

I read an article last week that was all about the in between land of 'disordered eating'. Never diagnosed as textbook anorexics or bulimics, people who fall into this grey area are never given serious treatment for their problems because their physical health never gets to the brink of disaster.
Here! I thought finally.
Here is where I dwell! On the borders of the disorder with the other halfway marks.
We're miserable, we obsess, we fall into unhealthy patterns of behavior, we are trapped in compulsions and behavioral loops, and staggering amounts of shame, but because we don't either tip the scale to the point of deadly obesity or break our friend's hearts with our ribs sagging through our skin, we go unnoticed, untreated, and fretfully, unhappily, unwell.

Here is a link to the article I read.
It reminded me of how trapping the mentality of disordered eating is.
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/nov/08/feel-guilty-but-hate-my-body-feminist-confesses

Not only do we get stuck in these loops, because we fly under the radar, we are secretly congratulating ourselves for not getting caught. I'm not as sick as her, we think to ourselves looking at the girl who picks at her lunch in front of her coworkers, terrified of people seeing her eat.
BUT WE ARE.
I am just as sick as her.
When people watch me eat, I make deliberate, healthy decisions. I eat until I'm satisfied, 'an elegant sufficiency' as my father would say, and then I set down my knife and fork as though the urge to pick them up again won't even cross my mind.
It's all a terrible act.
Here's the scary scary truth.
When a girl with an eating disorder declares that she isn't hungry,
When she selects the caesar salad with the dressing on the side and the chicken breast, and she only eats half of it,
When she shakes her head and says thanks but no thanks to the homemade cookies at the break table,
When she declares widely and openly that she had SUCH a big breakfast and she couldn't possibly do lunch,
SHE IS A LIAR.

She is lying so hard to herself, and she knows it.
She is counting on knowing it.
Whether she is lying because she hasn't eaten anything in twenty four hours and won't allow herself to for another twelve because she promised her diary she'd do a 36 hour fast-
Whether she is lying because she ate an entire tub of frozen cookie dough from her freezer last night, and feels sick to her stomach this morning and can't even fathom a drop of coffee wedging into her stomach-
Whether she tried her pants on this morning and they were just a little too tight-
Whether her loved one remarked casually that it looked like she might need a new bra because her boobs were getting a little too luscious-

That girl is hurting.
That girl is me.
I am lonely.
I am so lonely that I have to drown the loneliness in these fast or dare games I play by myself all alone.
Don't eat anything for twelve hours. Get a crumb of self esteem.
Manage not to binge for five days. Get a drop of forgiveness.
Succeed in leaving half the chicken caesar salad on my plate. Actually attempt to seduce husband and try not to think about what gut looks like mid-coitus.

This is the terrible reasoning of the disordered eating loop, and I live there. Like one of those matchbox cars traveling endlessly on a self-propelling plastic track, I drive around and around with the same creeping, awful, lonely games of atonement, restriction, hunger, failure, and shame.
I am so afraid of my hunger.
That it is bigger than I am.
That nothing will ever be enough.
That EVERYTHING isn't enough.
That I will one day get caught in the middle of a binge and disgust someone so much they never speak to me again.
That I will lost what little control I have and explode into a seething, revolting, control-less mass mess.

I want to forget this more than anything else.
I wish I believed it was still possible for me to do that.

The middle of the night monsters, and their sugar fiends.

Is it okay?
At what age does it stop being all right to give in to bad habits?
Tantrums?
Over indulgence?
Recklessness?
Selfishness?
Impulsivity?

I might have made up that last one. It might be impulsiveness.
I don't know that I care.
It's two days after halloween.
My stress levels are through the roof.
I've eaten at least a bag of halloween candy, and I am wired to the max on sugar.
I know I should be sleeping,
that I'll feel like an utter horrorshow tomorrow, but for some reason (anxiety), I can't settle down.

It used to be, when I was a teenager, when I got stressed out, I couldn't eat.
Food just didn't interest me.
I was too preoccupied with feeling all of my feels.
Now, when I am the most stressed out is when all of the cupcakes and wine disappear.
My skin gets gnarly, my hips get wide, and my fury at my lack of will power threatens to topple all the hard anti-negativity work I have done.

It's so ridiculously difficult to be a woman and deal with your stress healthfully.
We are told repeatedly to be more available, stronger, wiser, more capable, more resilient.
We are held up on pedestals one moment and torn down from them the next for the same behavior.
Many of us are struggling with serious issues, and it seems perfectly acceptable for the whole world to continued to demand demand demand the impossible, until we break.

I am in the final three weeks of my first semester of grad school, and it is really putting me through my paces.
I've put down 30,000 words of a novel, read 12 books since july, and written fifteen three page papers.
I have three more books, three more papers, and a thousand more words to put down before November 20th.
I am also working full time managing the bakery, and we only just surfaced from the impossibly crazy October Halloween Salem tourism gamut.
We have two weeks to gather our wagons, and then the same week that I send off my final papers for school, I begin an eleven day work week that includes the twelve hour work day before thanksgiving.
On top of this is my husband's birthday, which is the 20th of the month, and the preparation for our own wee little turkey day celebration.

I can't handle it.
I am so crispy I might snap in half.
But instead, I stay up late and look at the stars and stuff miniature sized candy bars in my face and wonder if I'll ever feel normal again. What normal even looks like.
Does normal wake up at six in the morning?
Does it do a half hour of yoga, shower, and then walk three miles to work?
Does it talk bakers out of recipe snarl ups?
Does it count money, help customers, run errands, call vendors, print invoices, field emails, solve customer situations, resolve scheduling conflicts, and jump on bar to make two dozen drinks when the barista suddenly flips her contact and has to run squealing to the bathroom?
Does it walk three more miles home, stopping at the grocery store to buy components for dinner?
Does it make dinner, read fifty pages, write more words, put in a squeak of effort with its partner, and then realize it's still ravenous and ugly and exhausted and doesn't know when it gets to finally let go and relax?
Does it cry on the floor of the bathroom because it just wants something to stop?

Somehow I don't think so.
What does your normal look like?
Is your normal heroic, tragic, humorous, wild, boring, child-filled, work filled, school filled, significant other filled, or something else entirely?
Is it empty?
Are you alone staring at the stars and wondering how in the flying fuck it can dare snow two days into November?
Are you up far too late on a Sunday night, lonely and wondering if you just tore out the front door and ran and ran and ran and never looked back would it be any better?

Me too.