jinxed
All that talk about my bed and sleep and how dreamy the whole thing was going to be last night and there I lay, flopping around like a fish on the wooden deck of a boat. All night.
Until about 3 years ago, I was a sleep guru. I swear I had magical powers of slumber. Then came ED, anxiety, Prozac, acid reflux (thanks to ED), a sleeping partner with nighttime PTSD flashbacks (which I may or may not have PTSD from), another sleeping partner who snored and smothered. The good sleep vibes come in spurts and seasons now, dependent on my emotional wellbeing, physical state and the alignment of the moons of jupiter. But even after several years of nocturnal challenges, I have an embarrassingly low threshold for frustration with insomnia. Case and point – when I checked the clock for the first of 13, 273 times last night – I could have sworn it was 4 am and I’d been flopping through the night. 10:50, I stand corrected. It seems I’d only flopped for about 8 minutes. Damn. And so began a night of restlessness and disappointent.
My “fix it” part went wild -
“maybe it’s too bright in here” – blinds secured, doors closed, towels tacked over the windows
“maybe I need the dog in bed with me so I don’t feel alone” – he was, not surprisingly, very willing to lend assistance
“maybe the dog is keeping me awake” – he reluctantly resumed his post on his plush doggie throne
“maybe this yucky taste in my mouth is keeping me awake” – brush, rinse, drink a glass of water, apply chap-stick, crawl back into bed CONFIDENT that this would do the trick
“maybe I need to pee” – grrrr
My calculating, obsessive part ticked through the endless data
“If I fall asleep in the next 3 minutes, I will be able to get 4 and a half hours of sleep.”
“If I reset my alarm for 15 minutes later and fall asleep in the next 45 seconds, I will get 3 solid hours.”
My blaming part chimed in
You shouldn’t have drunk that tea. Everyone knows tea has caffeine in it.
Why didn’t you go to bed an hour earlier?
Just relax, damn it. You are always so WOuND up!
While I’m tempted to wrap up this post with ooey gooey optimism about the next 6-8 hours of my life, I’ll refrain.
g’night.
Desperately seeking therapy
So much has shifted since last Thursday morning’s therapy appointment. Perhaps I should use a different word than shifted – which to me connotes positive movement, improvement, progress. So much has gone down the shitter since last Thursday. So much has spiraled out of control. Has overtaken me. Possessed me.
I don’t even know what to say tomorrow morning to Bree. Even me – therapy-loving, IFS-believing me puts up some initial boundaries and it takes at least 20 minutes of “work” before I ever feel like I’m being fully open. I wish I could just plop down on her cream-colored couch, pull a blanket up around me in the fetal position and cry. Really wail and sputter and gasp – the way I do with J sometimes. Respond to her “how are you?” not with a courteous “been better”, “not so great” or “hanging in there”, but with primal gutteral screams and full body convulsions. I am so far from “hanging in there” right now. I’ve had about three days in a row of dinstinct “fuck hanging in there” mentality. Wherever “there” is…I ain’t anywhere close to it and am catching the next bus to as far away from it as I can get on my limited savings.
J’s expressing some frustration again with ED. That he feels disconnected and like I have this thing that is mine and that I don’t let him in on. He brought up the blog thing again – “you won’t even let me read your blog”. Yes, dear but it doesn’t seem to have stopped you now, did it? Of course this beast is mine and he can’t have it – even a little piece of it. That’s probably one of the main reasons why it is here in my life. Because nothing else feels like my own – safe from the greedy paws of others. I mean I’m having freaking visual hallucinations of my father harvesting my organs – clearly I have some boundary issues. I am just so angry and admittedly hopeless. It’s one of those days (or two or three) where I don’t want to get married, know that there’s no possible way I could handle having a kid (let alone two or three), and generally want to retreat away to a cabin in the woods and puke and starve all the rest of the days of my life. Clearly, ED is speaking for me today.
I feel a little frustrated that I’m not able to post bright, shiny, sparkly thoughts today. Usually I don’t feel that way or feel the need to apologize for my negativity. I aim not to write for an audience but to write honestly what I’m feeling - but for some reason tonight I’m thinking of how regular readers might feel disppointed or not want to read more of the hopelessness and sickness and general depths of darkness. Then again, that’s what keeps me reading at least a third of my blogroll.
J just woke up and plopped on the couch and started trying to snuggle and ramble on about tell me about some dream he just had. For fuck’s sake, can I not even blog in peace at 4:30 in the morning??!! I didn’t post last evening because we were engaged in this talk about his feelings and my disorder and blah blah blah and I didn’t want to then throw it in his face by going and “confiding” in my not-so-secret blog. But here I sit, crack of dawn in a dark house, sipping my tea and typing away only to feel interrupted, pulled away from it, like I’m not being a good partner because all I really want to do right now is blog.
And on that note, it seems about time to try to muster a few more hours of restless, hungry sleep before hitting the gym. Here’s hoping that therapy will help.
I wish I could do it without rules
Yesterday was.start.to.finish.horrible. I had such grand plans for a great Snow Day. Turned out in addition to being a s’no work day, it was also a s’no food staying in my belly day, s’no way I can stand up without being dizzy day, s’no way I should be on this treadmill right now day. And honestly, the first day I worried about acute health repercussions to my purging and restricting.
Thursday I ingested some gluten and my sensitive Celiac gut reacted, well, with some GI distress (I’ll spare you the details). But this always means that I stop absorbing the food in my gut, make many trips to the el bano, and wind up very hungry and thirsty. And in the lovely land of Bulimia very hungry leads down a destructive road. Yesterday was another one of my purging lows, in frequency, in intensity, in wobbly after effects. And because I was snowed in, there wasn’t much I could do to distract (this is an exaggeration, there were things I could do but felt so much at the mercy of my disorder that I forgot about them). At some point in the afternoon I crawled into bed and vowed not to get out until J got home from work (4:00, usually). By 5:15 I was panicking and hungry again and praying that he would show up soon so we could go to my favorite restaurant and get a crepe for dinner and keep it down. I could NOT eat another meal alone in this god-forsaken apartment. Phone rings. J is working late – until 7:30. Groan. You can imagine how dinner went (other than alone and in this god-forsaken apartment).
But hang in there, it’s not all doom and gloom. The road may be curving a bit, mainly because I felt so fucking scared and sick yesterday. Possessed, in fact, by this disorder. I know on so many levels it feels like it gives control, but this is a myth (at least for me) and there are those rock-bottom moments when you realize you are completely controlled by IT. Yesterday I felt like the only way I am going to have control of my life is to not have my disorder in my life. If I allow it to be there, even in small doses (what I like to call “dabbling” in my behaviors) – I guarantee myself that I will have these days, weeks, (hopefully not but possibly) months where it is my master and I its slave. Days where the moment I see J’s face I am a puddle of blubbering tears. Days where all there is to do is take a valium and go to bed at 8:00.
That Valium induced sleep lasted until about 3 a.m. at which point I began hatching a plan. Just for today. I’m not going to worry about a week from now or a month from now. Today, Saturday December 13, I have a meal plan in writing and stuck on the fridge. At the bottom of the meals and snacks listed are some rules.
-No eating on the couch. Sit at the table.
-Only eating off plates, not out of packaging.
-No multi-tasking. Pay attention to eating and how you feel (emotionally and physically).
I’ve tried meal plans before – a few weeks ago I had a few good days as a result of planning what I’d eat and sticking to it. My major concern is that it is ME that created the plan. So I’m just trusting that it’s coming from the healthy/recovery me and not the restricting/want-to-lose-weight me. At my absolute lowest in ED behaviors I kept very rigid (and unhealthy) meal plans and obsessed about them. I went to a dietician post-diagnosis with Celiac (in her defense she had no idea that I had an eating disorder) and holy shit – it fueled the fire BIG time. Part of me is wondering, though, if it would help to have my diet planned by someone without an eating disorder. Probably. But I’m terrified of that. Maybe should talk to Bree about it.
Next to the meal plan on the refrigerator is a big sheet filled with “Things to Do Instead”. Including specific tasks related to housework, being outside, playing with my dog, connecting with others (email, christmas cards, phone calls and a list of all the people who ARE in my life and WOULD at least chat with me about bullshit and Christmas and anything besides purging), relaxing.
My goal: To have a “good day”. Translation: To eat what my body needs, not purge, exercise a reasonable amount. Bonus (but this may be setting the bar WAY too high): Not be excruciatingly anxious and difficult to be around.
I really wish I could do it without rules. I wish I could just wake up, smile at the sunshine glinting off the snow and go along my merry way of normalcy today. Just set the intention and have it all pan out. But I just know that, right now, that doesn’t work. It did when I was 4 months into recovery. But not the day after one of my worst days ever. I need the structure. I think about the stories I’ve heard of residential treatment. It’s not like you walk in, they pat you on the back and congratulate you for making the commitment to recover and then send on your way to figure out what to do all day. They schedule your day and plan your food and keep you busy and take a lot of the choices and decision-making off your back (at least in the beginning, from what I hear). So I guess what I’m doing is somewhat aligned with that. I have the best intentions for today and it feels like it is ME and not my disorder choosing this path.
Off to shovel snow with a slice of toast with PB and a little smoothie in my belly. Off to shovel snow with a little bit of pride that I did it – one meal of the day. Off to shovel snow with the fear of disappointment if this day takes a turn for the worse.
*one last observation. That last line about fear of disappointment – it makes me want to beg, plead, bargain, pray with some power in the universe (not necessarily spiritual) not to let the disorder take over today. But acknowledging that feels like it’s taking the power away from ME to keep today on track. So is it better to rely on myself (thereby putting pressure on myself) to battle this today or to turn it over to the universe to keep the disorder at bay. Or maybe a bit of both – I’ll do my part today and hope the universe can give me a break?!
“I’m killin’ myself thinking, I fallen like the leaves”
Today. today. Began with the incessant piercing yaps of the downstairs white trash neighbors’ Pug through my Benadryl fog at 10 am. Or did it begin with a rainy, non-linear stagger with my own whining pooch at 8 am, bottoms of my low slung pajama pants dragging in puddles and depositing a smudge of wet filth from the street directly back to the white sheets of our bed without a care. Or at 2:30 when I ingested said Benadryl and sat with J while he ate scarfed a bowl of cereal. “MMmmmm, this is good”, he relished as stewed in bitterness that I can’t have cereal (1) because I’m restricting right now and it would instantly undo all my hard work over the past week, and (2) because I have Celiac and a gargantuan bowl of shredded wheat would bring illness the likes of which the world hasn’t seen since the flesh-eating virus. Or did today begin with the hours of restless flopping between the twisted sheets, feeling a general discomfort in my body. Chest tight, stomach knotted, brain flitting from thought to thought like a pollinating bee in April.
Today has much in store, some of which I viewed previously this week as actually motivating and exciting, but somehow the brown faux-suede of the couch has absorbed me and I’m feeling quite stuck. Inertia has enveloped me and coffee, my only friend, hasn’t taken effect yet. I have vowed to take a day off of recreational and pharmaceutical drugs. No wine, no pot, no Valium not even benadryl. My mood has been concerningly poor and J even pleaded with me last night to consider going back on meds. Hmmmmm….NO, thank you. But my reasoning felt stingingly hypocritical – “It blahs me out and I don’t feel anything.” Eyes dart to the parade of empty wine bottles in the recycling bin, the blister packs of over the counter drowsy-inducing medications of various names. The pipe. The iodine-brown color of the prescription pill containers, a color only found in prescription pill containers and unable to be captured in a name. Crayola ommitted this color from the box as no one would come up with a name. Yes, well, I see where my argument doesn’t hold up given the mounting evidence that all I’ve been trying to do lately is blah out and not feel anything.
Around lunchtime, J and I have an appointment to look at custom wedding bands. Seems like something a girl should be thrilled about, yeah? Shopping, jewelry and weddings – ooh la la. Or harumph, if you’re me. Don’t wanna go. Don’t wanna think about weddings. Would rather have a tantrum on the couch about how hard life is. Wahh wahh wahh – complete with fisted hands and sock-less frigid feet thumping on the couch cushions. But I can suck it up and pretend it’s thrilling.
After this magical event we’ll have a few hours of “downtime” which I have yet to decide if I will spend reading or listening to pod-casts (this is what my recovery brain is advocating for) or running at the gym (you can guess who’s lobbying for this option). Perhaps a long walk with Sam and my iPod would be a nice compromise (patting myself on the back for thinking in the grey, all the while knowing full well that this is not likely to happen and I’ll just beat myself up for not following through on it as my sneakers pound the treadmill).
Tonight we’ll venture to Randolph-middle-of-nowhere, Vermont to see the Avett Brothers perform. My all-time-favorite band. The loves of my life. This will be Avett show #8 for me and the previous 7 have each brought me two-and-a-half hours of pure dancing jubilance. Not a care in the world. Bliss. Oblivious that the world might be watching me jump and thrash seizure-like to bluegrass music. Might be thinking or judging. There is only me and the kickdrum and Seth and Scott harmonies. No attention to jiggling body parts as I move, no cares about what food may or may not be digesting in my stomach. Recovery just might be following them around on tour. When Bree asks me to take a moment to think about a time when I felt comfortable in my own skin and truly “me” – it’s always rockin’ with the Brothers. My blog title is a reference to the brothers, as is today’s post title. So tonight has some good potential for healing vibes.
Why, then, does this couch feel so appealing?
Verbal diarrhea
I blurted it. It fell right out of my mouth in the middle of staff meeting. My head swirled a bit as it tumbled out. I hadn’t planned on it. I never thought the words would have come – expecially not in front of five sets of female eyes. But I just felt so flustered and pressured about my schedule. I was in the midst of trying to explain that I have to come to work late one morning a week and now leave early two days a week for these “things” which, until yesterday could not be mentioned. I felt like such a worthless employee. I had discussed scheduling options a month ago to see if the eating disorders group would fit into my work schedule (love that disordered prioritizing), insinuating that there was this ongoing “thing” that I really wanted to do that would require me leaving early if there was any way that it would work. Guilt was already thick on Thursdays when I show up to work at noon. And technically, yes, I could scoot into work at 10:45 on Thursday mornings after zooming across town, checking mascara in the mirror and quickly re-stuffing all those feelings brought up in therapy back into this skinny suit. But the whole reason Bree and I switched to Thursday mornings was so that I had some space – a few hours before I had to report to work in the caregiver role. Therapy used to be on my lunch break and it didn’t feel like a good time to open up. So Thursday mornings are supposed to offer time to walk, take a bath, take a nap, have a good cry. And there’s certainly no way to explain THAT in a staff meeting. “Well, what time is your ‘thing’ over in the morning?” “Well how long will the evening ‘thing’ last – is it a 6 or 8 week thing?” “Oh, are you taking that ‘class’ you wanted to take about a month ago?” That last inquiry was from annoying co-worker and for the record, I never called it a class. The fact that it now felt insinuated that I was skipping out on my work responsibilities for Kickboxing or lessons in conversational French was just too fucking much.
“No, it’s a year of eating disorder treatment. 5 hours a week.”
Cue the sound of screeching tires, the needle violently wrenched from a spinning record, the slapping of a wet fishtail on the tiles of the office floor. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I felt faint as the words forced their way out. A seltzer bottle, shaken and shaken, the plastic finally giving way at a point of weakness.
Oh shit. Oh shit. What have I done. Run away. Can I fit under this chair. Can we end staff meeting early. Must purge. Must punish self for what I have said and done.
I have no idea what was said for the hour following that comment. There was no dramatic reaction – an “oh, okay” at the most. But my mind skipped off to some distant land of shame.
Annoying co-worker (luckily, there’s only one) later asked some painfully naive and awkward questions so I fluffed some over-generalized answers in what I hoped was a blatant “get the fuck away from me”, but more likely was received as polite, tactful responses with an air of “thanks for the compassion, my warm and fuzzy friend.” I hate that so much of the time my words deceive others.
Once I maneuvered my way out of my 3 foot by 4 foot windowless office now homebase to the Spanish inquisition of eating disorder curiosity, I resumed the rest of my day as if nothing had ever happened. But it all exploded within 3 minutes of entering the back door to find James innocently washing dishes. I snotted on his shirt and blubbered while he stood there looking simultaneously surprised, devastated and empathetic – as if he’d just run over my dog.
I also spoke to my brother last night who I confided in this weekend at a moment of devastatingly poor mood and desperation that I was relapsing and needed to come visit him. More blubbering, wallowing and general misery while brother offered genuine love and support and an invitation (hardly spontanteous and embarrassingly imposed) to visit.
I am reaching out and being more vulnerable about this whole stinking disorder. Selective in who I request emotional support from but owning my issues a bit more. Terrifying. Embarrassing. Triggering in the fact that now I feel the penetrating scrutiny (probably largely imagined) of the eyes of those who I tell, painful glances – probably harmless – feel like they’re scraping my skin off.
This is progress, right? Then why does it fucking hurt so much? And when do you get the magic answer key that tells you whether your abysmal mood and insomnia are due to not eating enough and midnight bouts of acid reflux or to a larger picture of neurochemical goulash? It’s a bit difficult to whole-heartedly get on with the “poor pitiful me” inner monologue when the fact is that these symptoms may, in part, be self-inflicted. Grrr.
