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.
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
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.
Saturday, December 6, 2014
Bereft
Probably not the place for this, but I have to put it somewhere.
Today would have been the due date for my baby.
It feels like a hoax, or a lie to call what I could not carry to fruition a baby.
Truth is, I saw it. When I miscarried, I looked, and I saw what left me, and it could never have been mistaken for a baby.
Logically I know that what happened was a frenzy of procreation that didn't go right.
Cells multiplied and divided. The climate of my body began to change to encourage the growth of the new inhabitant, but then something twigged in the system.
This was not viable.
What was growing was not going to develop into a life.
An evolutionary system override kicked into gear, and my body became toxic. It cut off the nourishment, the hormone supply, it efficiently rid my body of the bad investment in a matter of two days.
I can examine the evidence. I can see that my body was not ready. That this life was not viable. That it in no way diminishes my ability to carry a different pregnancy to term.
Grief, I am learning, is not a reasonable creature.
I was doing really well.
I'd not thought about it in almost a month. I knew the date was approaching in december, but it was November. I figured I had time.
Then, on thanksgiving, sitting on my sister's floor with a belly full of laughter and wine and with a room full of loving beloved people singing and carrying on around me, the black sorrow loomed up and swallowed me utterly, with no warning.
I jumped up as though electrocuted and barreled down the stairs to my own apartment. I put on some loud music and sobbed hard.
I remember the thought I'd had when the nurse on the phone set up my ultrasound and told me my due date was december 6th.
Congratulations, she said, and I'd been stunned.
Right.
I thought.
Congratulations, indeed! I was to be congratulated. I was knocked up, and it was wanted! The beard and I were going to rocket into parenthood like shooting stars of promise and adulthood.
We were terrified, but in a knee shaky, ready to climb onto the rollercoaster kind of way.
What we were was ready, and that was the scariest thing of all.
Over the brief time we knew I became a scientific observer of my body's changes.
My stomach rumbled incessantly. My tummy began to pouf a little. I was hungry at weird times and not interested in certain foods other times. I never once experienced nausea, and that was a good thing!
It was approaching Easter at the bakery, one of the bigger holidays in my business's world.
It was a happy and silly thing. I was going to show up at 5am to pack hot cross buns into boxes and frosted orange rum cakes into slices. I was going to wear bunny ears and serve coffee to all our regulars.
I toyed with the idea of telling one person...just as a treat. I knew it was still the first trimester, but I was almost at ten weeks. It couldn't hurt to tell someone.
Then there was pink.
I tried to ignore it. All the internet thingies said pink was normal.
I went to a brunch after work.
I left a bit early. I felt sort of peaked.
When I got home, pink turned to red.
I went to the hospital and had blood drawn, and they called me back that night to confirm what was happening.
I felt all the things. Beard felt them too.
It was hard.
Easter, right?
What a fucking joke.
Here it is the most exciting, fertile, treaty time of the goddamn year, and my body decides to kill the life inside it.
My sense of irony is truly incredible.
But time marches on.
The moments I was overwhelmed by sadness became fewer and further between.
I began to forget.
It was hardest when I got my period.
Not that I was ready to try again, but that it just reminded me of that process. The whole thing.
Then thanksgiving, and the free fall into unexpected sadness.
It feels so unreasonable. I think about the women who have stillborn children. Who have to go through the pain and emotional wreckage of that labor. I think about women who have a child and then have a miscarriage and then get pregnant again right away. As if they can somehow tape over the hole in their heart with this new creation. I suppose they can. I think about women who can't have children at all, and I wonder if I will join their ranks. It was my first pregnancy. I have had problems menstruating in the past. Perhaps this is a thing my body cannot do. I think about women who have children who die of SIDS or fever or women who can't stop smoking meth and give birth to hurt children. I think about women who drive their cars into lakes with their babies strapped into the back seat, and women who watch their children chase balls into the street never to return. I think about all the lost children and the devastation in their wake and where on the meter my own loss falls. How much value does it have? Am I allowed to feel the hurt as deeply as I do, or am I being indulgent and weak? Am I simply obsessing like I always do, and skipping on a tragedy like a needle in the warped groove of a record?
But that would be overcomplicating matters.
The truth is today was always going to be sad.
I was told, seven months ago, that I would be meeting my baby today.
It's a full moon, and I would have gone into labor tonight. I know it.
I would have delivered exactly when I was supposed to.
Tonight, Beard would have sat with me until the contractions were down to five minutes apart, and then we would have hopped into the car and driven to the hospital. We would have called my parents, my employers, our nearest and dearest friends.
People would have come to the hospital to sit in the waiting room for updates. They would ask if we needed anything on their way over. They would watch videos on their phones to kill time.
I would be doing some of the hardest work of my life, and sometime in the late hours of december sixth, possibly the early hours of december 7th, we would have met our baby.
Here is where my dream pops like a bubble.
I can imagine all the circumstances.
I did during that couple of weeks in April. I pictured how big I would be at thanksgiving. I imagined how I would have to leave work, and how I would probably be just well enough to drive up to my parents place at Christmas with the newborn, and it would be our first holiday as a family.
My parents would meet their first grandchild.
Yet somehow, I cannot accurately picture the child itself.
This is where the expanse of my imagination simply stops.
Call it self preservation, or merely the simple cramp of the human ego not allowing me to see further than my own experience, but I am not able to imagine holding the warm new bundle. I can't fathom it's face, whether it would have hair or a snub nose or ears that stick out. I can't even decide whether it would have been a boy or a girl.
I guess the saddest part about this grief of mine is not that I am mourning the loss of a baby, but that I am mourning the loss of an idea.
The idea of all this joy.
The idea of how exciting it would be to share this with my beardly one.
The idea of the love I would feel for it.
The idea of the entire course of my life being repurposed for this new avenue of motherhood.
It was terrifying to confront as a prospect.
But I was ready.
It is bone achingly sad to review my catalogue of hope and know that none of these things are true.
And yes, logically, I know there is a high statistically chance that I will experience everything I looked forward to in April at a later time in my life.
but that doesn't change the fact that grief is unreasonable by nature, and so I will sit here, inside it.
For a little while longer.
I am permitted that.
At least.
Today would have been the due date for my baby.
It feels like a hoax, or a lie to call what I could not carry to fruition a baby.
Truth is, I saw it. When I miscarried, I looked, and I saw what left me, and it could never have been mistaken for a baby.
Logically I know that what happened was a frenzy of procreation that didn't go right.
Cells multiplied and divided. The climate of my body began to change to encourage the growth of the new inhabitant, but then something twigged in the system.
This was not viable.
What was growing was not going to develop into a life.
An evolutionary system override kicked into gear, and my body became toxic. It cut off the nourishment, the hormone supply, it efficiently rid my body of the bad investment in a matter of two days.
I can examine the evidence. I can see that my body was not ready. That this life was not viable. That it in no way diminishes my ability to carry a different pregnancy to term.
Grief, I am learning, is not a reasonable creature.
I was doing really well.
I'd not thought about it in almost a month. I knew the date was approaching in december, but it was November. I figured I had time.
Then, on thanksgiving, sitting on my sister's floor with a belly full of laughter and wine and with a room full of loving beloved people singing and carrying on around me, the black sorrow loomed up and swallowed me utterly, with no warning.
I jumped up as though electrocuted and barreled down the stairs to my own apartment. I put on some loud music and sobbed hard.
I remember the thought I'd had when the nurse on the phone set up my ultrasound and told me my due date was december 6th.
Congratulations, she said, and I'd been stunned.
Right.
I thought.
Congratulations, indeed! I was to be congratulated. I was knocked up, and it was wanted! The beard and I were going to rocket into parenthood like shooting stars of promise and adulthood.
We were terrified, but in a knee shaky, ready to climb onto the rollercoaster kind of way.
What we were was ready, and that was the scariest thing of all.
Over the brief time we knew I became a scientific observer of my body's changes.
My stomach rumbled incessantly. My tummy began to pouf a little. I was hungry at weird times and not interested in certain foods other times. I never once experienced nausea, and that was a good thing!
It was approaching Easter at the bakery, one of the bigger holidays in my business's world.
It was a happy and silly thing. I was going to show up at 5am to pack hot cross buns into boxes and frosted orange rum cakes into slices. I was going to wear bunny ears and serve coffee to all our regulars.
I toyed with the idea of telling one person...just as a treat. I knew it was still the first trimester, but I was almost at ten weeks. It couldn't hurt to tell someone.
Then there was pink.
I tried to ignore it. All the internet thingies said pink was normal.
I went to a brunch after work.
I left a bit early. I felt sort of peaked.
When I got home, pink turned to red.
I went to the hospital and had blood drawn, and they called me back that night to confirm what was happening.
I felt all the things. Beard felt them too.
It was hard.
Easter, right?
What a fucking joke.
Here it is the most exciting, fertile, treaty time of the goddamn year, and my body decides to kill the life inside it.
My sense of irony is truly incredible.
But time marches on.
The moments I was overwhelmed by sadness became fewer and further between.
I began to forget.
It was hardest when I got my period.
Not that I was ready to try again, but that it just reminded me of that process. The whole thing.
Then thanksgiving, and the free fall into unexpected sadness.
It feels so unreasonable. I think about the women who have stillborn children. Who have to go through the pain and emotional wreckage of that labor. I think about women who have a child and then have a miscarriage and then get pregnant again right away. As if they can somehow tape over the hole in their heart with this new creation. I suppose they can. I think about women who can't have children at all, and I wonder if I will join their ranks. It was my first pregnancy. I have had problems menstruating in the past. Perhaps this is a thing my body cannot do. I think about women who have children who die of SIDS or fever or women who can't stop smoking meth and give birth to hurt children. I think about women who drive their cars into lakes with their babies strapped into the back seat, and women who watch their children chase balls into the street never to return. I think about all the lost children and the devastation in their wake and where on the meter my own loss falls. How much value does it have? Am I allowed to feel the hurt as deeply as I do, or am I being indulgent and weak? Am I simply obsessing like I always do, and skipping on a tragedy like a needle in the warped groove of a record?
But that would be overcomplicating matters.
The truth is today was always going to be sad.
I was told, seven months ago, that I would be meeting my baby today.
It's a full moon, and I would have gone into labor tonight. I know it.
I would have delivered exactly when I was supposed to.
Tonight, Beard would have sat with me until the contractions were down to five minutes apart, and then we would have hopped into the car and driven to the hospital. We would have called my parents, my employers, our nearest and dearest friends.
People would have come to the hospital to sit in the waiting room for updates. They would ask if we needed anything on their way over. They would watch videos on their phones to kill time.
I would be doing some of the hardest work of my life, and sometime in the late hours of december sixth, possibly the early hours of december 7th, we would have met our baby.
Here is where my dream pops like a bubble.
I can imagine all the circumstances.
I did during that couple of weeks in April. I pictured how big I would be at thanksgiving. I imagined how I would have to leave work, and how I would probably be just well enough to drive up to my parents place at Christmas with the newborn, and it would be our first holiday as a family.
My parents would meet their first grandchild.
Yet somehow, I cannot accurately picture the child itself.
This is where the expanse of my imagination simply stops.
Call it self preservation, or merely the simple cramp of the human ego not allowing me to see further than my own experience, but I am not able to imagine holding the warm new bundle. I can't fathom it's face, whether it would have hair or a snub nose or ears that stick out. I can't even decide whether it would have been a boy or a girl.
I guess the saddest part about this grief of mine is not that I am mourning the loss of a baby, but that I am mourning the loss of an idea.
The idea of all this joy.
The idea of how exciting it would be to share this with my beardly one.
The idea of the love I would feel for it.
The idea of the entire course of my life being repurposed for this new avenue of motherhood.
It was terrifying to confront as a prospect.
But I was ready.
It is bone achingly sad to review my catalogue of hope and know that none of these things are true.
And yes, logically, I know there is a high statistically chance that I will experience everything I looked forward to in April at a later time in my life.
but that doesn't change the fact that grief is unreasonable by nature, and so I will sit here, inside it.
For a little while longer.
I am permitted that.
At least.
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