Nananananananananananananana

Last week, my manager went on vacation.  This was kind of cool for me because I got to do (or at least help with) all the service calls.  I was also completely in chare of scheduling the service trips and I was responsible for ther service van (affectionately called the rape van.  Yes, I know it is despicable of me to support rape culture by making light of the subject, but this van is so very creepy/shady looking).  Responsible for it while at work and then responsible for driving it  home in the evening.

Now, I was told this the Friday before.  That meant I had all weekend to stew about how it would ruin my normal walking routine.

You may or may not be aware, but walking is the cornerstone of my self care.  I was relying on walking before I  even understood self care, and if you ask me what I do, I would call myself a walker before I call myself a breather.  I use it to transition into and out of work mode, also to reduce stress when I feel dismorphic. And it fits into my schedule as transportation, so I don't obsessively escalate it the way I often do with exercise.  I felt robbed and angry  to be told I had to drive, that my walking time was simply dismissed for seven days.  After all, you don't just knock the Prozac bottle out of the hands of someone with depression, do you?

All weekend it pressed on me.  I tried to talk to Boyfriend, but it was frustrating.  Attempts to calm me felt like being told not to feel how I feel.  And I was too upset to be on board with the effort it would take to explain myself clearly.  That Sunday I felt so trapped I had a binge purge episode.

Monday I came clean to Sean about the ED incident via text while scheduling and making calls.  And it wasn't so bad.  Yoga filled in the walking slot, and since an ED episode had been my biggest fear, I knew nothing else could go that badly.  Tuesday was also fine, and Wednesday morning my other boss told me I could leave the van at work and resume my walks.  Yaaaaay!

So what did I learn?

• My worst problem was my own fear and defeated attitude.  If I had believed it would be OK, I would have been proven right. 
• I may be obsessing about walking in a different way than with other exercise.  A week without anything (besides food and water and such) is not as big a deal as all that.

I'm gonna sit with that for a bit to see what I think I can do about it. 

 

Journal

This journal entry feels like significant progress to me.  I was going to describe it, but I think I'd rather just show it. If it is something that is going to speak to you, you'll hear it most clearly this way.

...

Why am I so scared and what am I scared of?
I am afraid of gaining weight.  OK.  Why is that frightening?

• I will look bad
• People will judge me
• I will be unfit

But in themselves, separately and objectively, those things don't rate the fear I carry.

• People of any weight can look good or bad
• People who judge me that way aren't worth my tine
• Fitness is not a function of size, and overly thin is more unfit than overweight but thinness doesn't carry the same fear

It seems that my fear is not springing from the things I attach it to.  So I have to ask again, deeper this time, what am I afraid of?

Am I afraid that if I gain weight I will become again the girl I was? Am I afraid that the feelings I will have will destroy me?

Am I afraid the feelings I have now will destroy me?
 
I did well when my depression was all consuming.  Being so very sad squeezes it (ED) out.  So whatever I'm covering with food is more intrinsic to me than that.  It's being alone, unoccupied that is most risky, and thoughts of abandoning my ED make it cling more.

Maybe I need to direct towards ED self more love and support.  I've tried to incorporate self love, but always with an idea that ED separate from inner child self.  That's not really true.

ED self needs a name and an image.  I can care for her better that way.  She's not a problem to be fixed or monster to fight.  She's a sad, scared girl.  I've learned a lot of skills and strength and flexibility over my recovery, and I think that's opened up a rift between her and me.  I need to reach across and help her catch up.

Can't I Just Kill it With Fire?

I think one of the reasons why a lot of us find our feelings hard to deal with is that we incorrectly categorize them.  Because they happen inside our heads and hearts we tend to think of them as a sort of wordless thought, but in reality feelings have a lot more in common with the senses. 

Thoughts can happen fast, but a thought progression is also under our control.  We can rewind, check our logic, reevaluate ethics, even revisit an entire chain of thoughts step by step.  On the other hand, though a feeling (especially one that is being repressed or not appropriately dealt with) can last a long while, it is hard to recall a feeling with the same force without being exposed to the stimulus that first provoked that feeling.  So, for example, I can think "I like cats." and think about all the reasons I like cats to confirm that conclusion of my own volition.  But while having my cat on my lap makes me feel happy, I can't just will myself to be happy because I was happy that time there was a cat on my lap. 

Similarly, with unpleasant emotions, we can't just will ourselves to not have them.  We can learn to stop thinking harmful thoughts, but emotions arise in response to stimuli. We can't stop ourselves feeling scared any more than we can stop from seeing a bear in front of us.  Both the feelings and the sight of the bear are a warning that there is danger nearby.  Now, many of us want to stop feeling certain feelings, but that is as risky as shutting our eyes to the sight of the bear.  The bear is still there, all you're doing is removing your early warning system.

So the real task is not to stop having difficult feelings, but to use them to alert us to the bears in our lives. 

The Perfectionist in Me is Screaming "It's Been TOO LONG to Go Back Now!"

How long has it been?  I could check, but I won't because it would only inspire self recrimination and make me feel like the comeback post should be way more amazing than it probably will be.  I mean, it'll be moderately amazing, if you are easily amazed or just love to the point of no reason.  But don't expect total amazement.  You will be let down.

I had a professor at Fredonia whom I absolutely loved.  At the start of a semester he would usually begin his classes explaining that we'd be sort of spiraling around the subject matter, visiting it, moving to other topics, then revisiting it more deeply with new information and insight.  He said this was the way to approach literature, because it reflects life and in life you return to things with new eyes and new experience over and over again.  Those of you who have read Eating By the Light of the Moon know that the chapter headings all have a labyrinth symbol, because recovery and life are like a labyrinth, a cycle revisiting the same areas again and again but always moving deeper in. 

Over the past six months or so, my recovery had gotten increasingly more fragile.  I was having binge purge episodes that would come in patches and then I'd regain control after a few weeks, but always feeling less powerful than ever.  At the same time, my relationship with my boyfriend was moving from new and fun but a bit superficial to something more meaningful. 

He'd known from the beginning about my bulimia, but there's a wide range of knowing and he had some misconceptions about my use of recovery.  And I can be evasive when I'm feeling ashamed, so for a long time, I knew he was getting to know only parts of me, and that my ED self, and the self that is devoted to recovering (a huge part of me, two and a half years' worth of me) was still hidden.  The thing is, though, that felt normal to me.  Nobody knows those parts.  Some of my very serious friends see the most of it, but that's through the reassuring portal of text.  Internet connections count, but they often lack the immediacy of a face to face daily interaction.  A lot of my friends know that I have been in recovery, but there's very little interest expressed.  Nobody wants to pry, or feel uncomfortable, or make me uncomfortable.

I've said it to my friends who are also working on recovery a million times: ED's thrive in secrecy, make connections and share your experience.  But I was living that advice only very shallowly.

Until I gave my boyfriend my copy of Bulimia: a Guide to Recovery.  I'd realized that I can be too easily discouraged and too evasive to be able to explain myself fully.  So I gave him the book that first explained me to me.  My intent was just to help him understand, so that if and when I broke down and lacked the words to fully explain what was happening, we'd have to common experience of the book to refer to.

I was not counting on this boy's pair of brass social bullocks.  Having read through much of the book, he sits me straight down and asks me questions, nobody does that.  And he follows up.  Now I have to be accountable for my behaviors to someone besides myself because every few days he's going to aske me how I'm doing.

It is so much easier to deflect the urge to binge when you know that someone besides you will know about it.  People with ED's are used to feeling like we've let ourselves down, but we hate it when we disappoint our loved ones.  That tendency to please is usually a factor in our ED development to start with.  It's about damn time it helps out with recovery. 

So this is me, revisiting one point of recovery and realizing I was still half in shadow, but am now stepping further into the open.

Something Even Harder

...for people who experience it is the tendency towards theft than sometimes accompanies an ED.  I think (not sure, too lazy to check now) that there's a higher incidence of this with bulimia and binge types than with restrictive types of ED's. 

Essentially what's going on here is that we try to fill an emotional emptiness with food.  And sometimes we try to fill it with things.  Things that we take.  The rush of the theft is momentarily distracting the same way that a binge is, and sometimes the two get mixed together and then we're shoplifting the food we will binge on. 

Thing is, ED people are usually pretty convinced that they're no good.  And compulsive theft just underscores that feeling.  We're obviously bad, we think, because bad people steal.  So if you have experienced this phenomenon, understand that it's not you being bad.  It's that you're reaching out for anything at all that will shove away your feelings for a second or two.  And understand that you are not alone.  This is a really common thing, it's just even harder to talk about than all the rest of it which we already know is damn hard to talk about. 

Personal Blog Established!

There will be some crossover, still, since a lot of my personal stuff is ED related.  But thisiswhereiblogthings.blogspot.com is where I shall be putting more general stuff I feel like sharing.  Goodenougheddiscussion.blogspot.com will be pretty much just for ED talk and related talk.

Feel free to scoot over to This is Where I Blog Things to bask in the very first post there.  It has stick figures ;)

Well, I won't have the internet for very long, so I thought I would just toss out some things.  I like vegetables.  People from the ghetto look at you funny when you tell them you don't weigh yourself.  Mental contamination happens when one thing is associated in your mind with something bad and it takes on the bad feelings even though there is nothing bad about that first thing other than it's proximity to the second thing.  Writing with carpal tunnel is hard, but it distracts from self criticism.  I miss my fingertips, though.  Paragraph breaks make things easier to read.

Sometimes I wonder if my occasional breakthrough binge/purge behaviors occur (in part at least) because so much of my identity is based on my ED experience and recovery and I am afraid to be totally without it.  The bites all over my legs are healing up, so I feel less like a leper.  But I am so afraid of bedbugs now that I spend half the time convinced that my awesome new place has got them, too.  And then I wonder, am I being paranoid, or are my fears legit.  Since I am much more of an anxious person than I used to think, it's hard for me to know exactly how much credence to give my fears.  I bought new shoes from a guy selling them on the corner (oh, the ghetto!) and I love them.

Tonight I am buying a vacuum.  Chores are easier and more fun in a house that it just mine because it's not work, it's making things how I like them.  When I was younger, I had a big cackly laugh.  It went away for a while, but seems to be coming back.  My friend is making another upswing of progress against his depression and alcohol dependence and somehow that makes me feel a bit useless.  I get the feeling this blog is going to be trending towards personal entries.  Or maybe I should make a personal blog and keep this one for ED topics only?  Thoughts, oh nine followers?  Ha!  You're like the Fellowship and I must be the One Ring.