A date with my dog
I have this amazing positive energy today. I want to bottle it up and stick a cork in it so that it’s dispensable on another day.
I bought bright white and orange new running shoes and laced up for a leisurely jog with my pup this afternoon. My ponytail flapping on my upper back, my sunglasses bouncing on my nose. Sam trotting along at my side, glancing up periodically with a panting grin.
I took a shower this evening and danced. I did a little striptease in the mirror to the sultry voice of Fiona Apple. I harmonized in the shower (and sounded damn good). I blowdried my hair all pretty and cranked up the music. Sung into my hairbrush. Sidestepped and sashayed in my slippers and a damp towel while Sam the dog looked on curiously.
I cleaned my house while Sam fished in his toy basket and dragged out every single item. He squeaked his squeakerball over and over and over. And for once, I wasn’t irritated. I patted him on the head and stole the ball, enticing him to chase me around the house.
I talked to him while I mixed up his special food mix (brown rice + pumpkin puree + kibble +herbal medicine for his tummy). I realized that being single means I can lavish my puppy with affection and praise. I can snuggle with him, spend as much money and time as I want on him and have Friday afternoon dates with him.
I’m not alone afterall.
Virtual Touch-down Dance
Hot damn! Boo-yah!
(spikes a ball of rolled up socks from Laundry Mountain on the couch next to me, gesticulates wildly and girates hips. scares dog in process.)
Score: Blue Cross Blue Shield Insurance – $2500 deductible
November Blue – $1251.32 and infinite satisfaction
The play-by-play: Because my therapist-extraordinaire is “out of network” (sorry for my British pals because non of this will probably make sense to you), I have to pay her out of pocket every week and then wait for my insurance to send me a reimbursement check (once I’ve met my deductible – which takes, oh, about 5 minutes for me to meet – seems I’m a frequent flyer in the health care system). Well there were some “glitches” in this system which led to me not being reimbursed consistently for the past 6 months. Finally I started feeling like it was adding up, so I did the math and – $1200! Twelve HUNDRED dollars was un-reimbursed. So I sat down and used my best writing skills (channelling both parents who are English professors) to craft a formal appeal letter. Fast forward 6 weeks and BAM! a check arrived in the mail yesterday.
Let this be proof to you, dear readers, that there is a higher power. And it, too, thinks fighting an eating disorder is more important that BCBS’s profit margins.
Happy Birthday, Sam the dog!
Things I love about my Sam:
-his eager offers of a paw to anyone giving him affection. however, he reserves “two paws” only for a select few favorite people in the world
-the size of his vocabulary (40+ words) (and also his keen ear for the sounds of specific people’s car engines outside)
-his dairy addiction. he ONLY steals food if it’s straight dairy (whole sticks of butter are his favorite but he’ll settle for yogurt, cream cheese, ice cream, shredded mozerella or sour cream)
-his VERY sensitive stomach and restricted, special diet (like his mama) **this diet does not include whole sticks of butter, for the record!
-his daily excitement to come to work with me and his supreme patience with rowdy kids with autism who don’t always respect his needs or wishes (I’ll spare you the gory details of the time a kid orally pleasured my dog … except to say that Sam did not seem to mind this particular affront! ew.)
-his ability to heel nicely for a 30 minute walk on the sidewalk but his instantaneous insanity when we walk through snow any more than 4 inches deep – he gallops, bucks, eats snow, sticks his head in snow and generally acts a fool
-the smiles I see in my rearview mirror when people behind me at a red light notice the giant brown face staring out the back windshield of my VW hatchback
-the look on his face when he caught a pigeon in his mouth on a sidewalk in Brooklyn. He immediately dropped the unharmed and wildly flapping fowl and shook the feathers from his lips.
-his cries outside the bathroom when I purge
-the neverending amusement of his responses to his own farts – either startling and bolting from the room in fear or sniffing towards his own rear end and then sheepishly relocating.
-the gratitude he evokes in me. I owe him my life. At my lowest points, I had convinced myself that he would be the only person to miss me if I was gone. But the thought of breaking his heart kept me here.
Happy Birthday to my onliest Sam. Here’s hoping that these 4 years are the first of 100. 
*in case anyone was curious – he’s a Rhodesion Ridgeback + Boxer
Inner stirrings of joy
I’m amassing a stockpile of journals and colored pencils and fantastic books and quotes and ammunition for a collage and pretty turquoise stationery on the kitchen table – a surface previously reserved for credit card bills and insurance EOB letters, for receipts and to do lists.
These are the liferafts in the dark sea of emptiness, the arctic waters of lonliness. Where once I wallowed and panicked, I can create and explore. Without expectation of quality or quantity of performance, I merely intend to invite some joy and contentment.
Magic Eraser
I love New Year’s. Clarification: my managerial parts LOVE New Year’s. It feels like such nice closure on things past. A clean slate – at least before I begin to frantically fill it with new goals and expectations of myself. A new list of things that will finally “make me happy”. If I could just….I’d feel better. But this year feels different. I feel so wrapped up in a hurricane of change and growth and struggle and progress and challenge and success and failure that I can hardly even pretend to put a period at the end of 2008, clearly defining the beginning of ‘09. So this year I think the two will blend together in a much less instantly gratifying wash of process. I’m just IN it right now. Everything’s been tossed up in the air and I can’t even fake knowing how it’ll look when it lands. This acceptance is not without intense anxiety, nor without the near-constant voices urging me to just make it a goal not to purge anymore. Just make the resolution to stop drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. Draw the line in the sand and make a fresh fucking start with unrealistic expectations. But I have an answer for that voice – my new and improved, kinder gentler resolutions:
1 – drink tea. not everyday. not even every week. just sometimes when the mood strikes me.
2 – be as well as I can at any given moment. no pressure to be as well as my best day ever or even as well as the day before. just let it be what it is and do whatever I feel able in that moment to be well. (note: no definition of well. it’s totally up to my own interpretation in that moment).
3- not pretend to be a fortune teller. remind myself that nothing in this world for anyone in this world is a sure thing. make decisions from my gut and not from a place of fear of what the future might hold or from a place of discomfort with uncertainty (unless making decisions from these places constitutes “being as well as I can at any given moment” – see resolution 2).
4. love my dog with all my heart and receive his love daily
5. Notice the natural world I live in. Not every day. Not even every week. Just when the mood strikes me.
6. Live simply. Just that. Open fully to interpretation.
7. Remind myself that I am connected to others.
8. Take baths. Sometimes. Whenever.
9. Live an extraordinarily rich life.
10. Know, at my core, that I am a whole person. I exist no matter who or what is in my life. No struggle, illness, hardship, love, loss, pain or lonliness erases me. I do not need others in order to feel whole. I am not just a body, two thighs, blonde hair, a lover, a daughter, a friend. There is a Me in this body. It will be with me until the day I die. I can count on it, trust it, rely on it and know that it is the one constant.
Unfortunately, these resolutions don’t lend themselves to data collection on Excel spreadsheets. They’re intentionally designed so that I can’t fail, I can’t beat myself up for my lack of progress towards them. All I can do is remind myself of them. Notice them. And feel okay.
Happy New Years to all!
I know better
I know that restricting does the following:
-fogs my thinking
-makes me anxious and irritable
-depresses me
-sets the stage for a perceived binge (chocolate covered almonds after dinner, for example)
-sets the stage for a purge (grrr)
-makes ANY morsel of food that enters my belly elicit bloating and discomfort
So why do I do it??!! Partly I’ve been restricting all week as an effort to stave off any purging (which it hasn’t entirely but has certainly decreased it). Partly it’s because of the emotional demands on me right now and the side effect of needing some sense of control (so ED cliche’ed but true). Partly the pain feels good. But I got some “bars” at the grocery today that feel like an acceptable breakfast/lunch or snack to give a whirl tomorrow. I know I can do it – it just requires talking myself down from that disordered place. Compromising with my parts.
I’m starting to visit friends here at home and to accept the phone calls that are incoming. My mom and I saw “Marley and Me” today and I got a perfect excuse to let some tears out in a safe space (no one but me had to know that it wasn’t because of the plot-line).
And, brace yourselves for a shocker, I got some good advice today from my mom. I fully expected her advice to be just to end my relationship. To give up and move on. As if it’s that easy. But she just told me that she thinks I should go back to Vermont and start living the life I want. If it fits with J’s, great. If he resents me taking time and energy for my own self-care, to make a social network, to seek out some sort of meaningful spiritual community or any host of other things I know I need in order to be healthy….then the relationship will naturally end. She thinks that I’m putting too much energy into talking about my needs rather than just living my life according to them. I know that this approach may sound totally negligent of my partner’s needs. But he has, to date, been unable to (1) understand the concept of needs – he even says that he doesn’t understand, (2) articulate any needs himself, (3) demonstrate any needs other than for me to have no needs of my own. I have to tend to agree with my mom’s advice – if only because the talking doesn’t seem to be getting me anywhere. Maybe this will be a more effective way of eliciting change in J than talking about it.
A huge loud part of me says that you shouldn’t want or need your partner to change. That love is about acceptance and compromise. But I’m being completely honest with myself that there are other parts that are speaking up that there are several things within our relationship that simply cannot continue. I’m trying to remember myself when I was healthy (including when I met J) and to begin a path back towards those values.
In my ongoing reading of the IFS relationship book, I was jolted into an upright and alert state by the following excerpt related to abandonment anxiety:
“Whenever we fall in love, the other person always appears rich with a superabundant life…extraordinarily beautiful and extraordinarily alive, an animal whose nature is not to be docile but rebellious, not weak but strong…which is free and liberating, but also unforeseeable and frightening. That is why the person who is more frightened imposes on the other a great many restrictions, a great many small sacrifices, all of which are basically intended to make her gentle, safe and innocuous. And the other person gradually accepts them. To avoid upsetting her lover, she imperceptibly eradicates everything that may have that effect. She makes many small renunciations , none of which is serious…gladly makes them because she wants her lover to be happy, and she tries to become what he wants her to be. Gradually, she becomes domestic, available, always ready, always grateful. In this way, the marvelous wild beast is reduced to a domestic pet; the tropical flower, plucked from its environment, droops in a little vase by the window. And the lover who asked her to become like this because he wanted to be reassured, because he was frightened by the new experience, winds up misisng in her what he had previously sought and found. The person who stands before him is not the same one he had fallen in love with….he asked her to moderl herself on his fears, and now he faces the result of those fears – her nothingness.”
-quoted in the IFS book from sociologist Francisco Alberoni
I want so fucking desperately to be rich with superabundant life. Not in a false way to make others feel good. I genuinely want to feel extraordinarily alive and strong. It doesn’t fit nicely into a measurable outcome but THAT is my supreme goal for 2009. Without descriptors of whether that is in a relationship with J or on my own.
I feel exactly like…
Jabba the Hutt right now. I KNOW that this is merely a reaction to a day which challenged many of my eating disordered parts. There is no possible way that I went from being a normal sized human being to a contestant on the next season of The Biggest Loser as a result of a veggie and egg crepe at dinner. I am just really having that “uncomfortable in my own skin feeling”. What is that? What is the meaning, the psychological significance of it? It feels so physical, so real – how can it really be all in my head. Which part is responsible for convincing me that I have jowels like John McCain? Which part is convinced that I outgrew my jeans in the past 45 minutes. And what the fuck are those parts trying to tell me???!!!
Okay. So perhaps yelling and cursing at those parts won’t make them want to share. I think that at least one of the “you make Rosie O’Donnell look svelte” parts is pissed off that my actions today are a detour from it’s path to sickville. And it’s using fear tactics and bullying in an attempt to redirect me back on course tomorrow. But that puts me right back at the question I find myself asking a lot, “What is it that makes being sick so great?” And at the top of the list at this moment is – ATTENTION from other people. Alright, that makes sense given the fact that I felt neglected and unimportant today.
I’ve read so many recovery blogs and find it interesting to read about the different approaches we all take in our battles. While many seem to find benefit in identifying the negatives and cons of their eating disorders, I’ve found strength in doing just the opposite. On a day when I have some perspective and at least a smidge of distance from my disordered brain (such as today), what helps is trying my damnedest to figure out what are the advantages, the pro’s, the perks of my eating disorder. Not to fuel the fire, merely to figure out how to get those needs met in another way. I know this beast didn’t pick me arbitrarily – it developed slowly with years of soil rich with pain and attempts to emotionally survive. And I can’t just ignore or push it away. I don’t have the strength to force it, against its will, out of my life. I have to know what it needs and why it’s here. I know it has a purpose and is trying to tell me something.
Reminds me of a little analogy I heard once about transporting a beach ball from one side of a swimming pool to the other. The person who insists on submerging the ball and pushing it under the water will have a much more difficult time than the one who allows it to float as they push it across the water’s surface. The second swimmer has figured out that the ball needs to float – it is by it’s nature bouyant. By accepting these facts, the swimmer can still meet their goal and the ball’s needs. No struggle. No fight.
To that end, I choose not to “challenge” my thoughts. Rather, I’m willing to honor them and strive to understand why they are what they are. I know that a long history of feeling neglected and unimportant can make the perceived rejection of friends today feel enormous. It awoke a very young me that feels invisible. It activated a protective response to want to do anything to be seen and tended to. But that wasn’t the whole story of my day:
I was really important to J tonight. We went on a date and were more snuggly and sweet than usual (probably because I have zero desire to cuddle or kiss when I’ve purged that day). He even thanked me for being so affectionate and said he had fun tonight. I wonder if that part that feels invisible was even available to feel that love. I wonder if it was able to open to that love if it wouldn’t feel so much like getting sick for attention. I wonder if that part, even just a teeny tiny bit, felt that love and its protectors relaxed enough that I didn’t purge today.
I could analyze until the cows come home but it’s even beginning to bore me. And I’ll likely never know all the factors of psychology and environment and stars being aligned that contributed to a day of eating and not purging. But I did it. And I as I penguin-waddle my gelatinous self down a hallway that suddenly feels too narrow, deep down under my imagined fat rolls there is a part that’s proud.
A front is moving through
I wish I didn’t have such a tendancy to blanket-statement label days, weeks, months as “good”, “bad”, “healthy”, “sick”, etc. Not only is it over-simplifying but I know from my IFS therapy that it dismisses the fact that even on a “bad” day, there are some really important parts of me present and trying to be heard. Yesterday morning I wound up spending an hour and a half at the gym while my stomach was eating itself with hunger – and this brought several parts of me immense satisfaction and would be deemed a “bad” and “disordered” way to start to my day. But I downloaded a dharma talk by Sylvia Boorstein before I went and listened to it twice just to soak in the reassuring energy of it, which would be deemed “good” and “healthy”. In the talk, she compares our internal states to weather conditions, always shifting and changing often unpredictably. We pride ourselves on our ability to forecast, quantify them and report elaborately the details of their effects. But all this is just thin veneer over the fact that we cannot control them. She encouraged us to merely observe the weather patterns as a way to bring presence. In all honesty – this sounds good in the abstract (especially coming from a Buddhist dharma teacher) but the reality is that when I pause to observe the weather all these parts jump in, screaming “oh shit, it’s a storm. what if it brings a tornado. what if it gets as bad as the twister of ‘99. what’s the plan. batton down the hatches. alarm alarm.” Admittedly, I have some work to do in quieting my mind and reaching that calm observing state.
So my weather patterns are changing really rapidly lately. The past 48 hours have brought moments of tropical bliss followed by hailstorms and gale-force winds. I don’t even know that I’d call it mood swings as much as dramatic shifts in my perspective. Or a rapid “changing of the guards” of which parts are steering my ship. I’m feeling a little distance from them at this very moment. I’m much better at identifying in the past tense what parts I’m blended with. Still struggling to have that self-energy in the moment when maybe I need it most. I extrapolated tonight that Bree’s advice to “stay in the bathroom” is probably just taking into consideration that at this point in my therapeutic work, it may be setting the bar too high to gain awareness of being blended with my strongest protector parts before they act out. I know that this is the goal. The skill that I need – real-time ability to perceive subtle shifts in my parts and meet their needs before they start getting dramatic and blended. But for right now – I need to aim for the post-game wrap-up rather than the play-by-play.
I was just reading a book by the therapist who developed Internal Family Systems Therapy, which probably explains why I’m throwing the terminology around so much. Spending time either doing the IFS work in therapy, on my own or reading about it is the one thing that can calm me down and pull me out of extreme thinking. The fact that there is even ONE thing is a huge step in the right direction.
I’ll share this poem by Derek Walcott, which when I first read it felt like an enormouse inhalation of fresh air:
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you have ignored for another…
Things that help:
1. Really obnoxious horde of teenagers loitering in the restaurant bathroom last night who foiled my plans to undo dinner.
2. Wine to mellow the static electricity of anxiety while said dinner was digesting in my tummy while I was at a holiday get together at a friend’s.
3. Waking up to a sweet mom email and encouraging comments on my blog. Positive energy REALLY helps wake up the part of me that starts to get sleepy and give up when ED barges into my brain. I beg you to leave comments – they mean more than you know and a single one can sometimes tip me back to the motivated side of the recovery/relapse continuum.
4. A friend over for tea and lunch. A friend who knows what I’m struggling with, even if she can’t relate. A friend who I didn’t have to take the mealplan off the fridge for.
5. Realizing that even though I just scarfed a handful of cookies (NOT on meal plan), it was not an inordinate amount and I can just sub that for my planned snack. I’m okay. I’m okay. Breathe – just a normal serving of cookies. Not equivalent to 5 pounds gained. I’m about to go to the gym anyway so I’ll work it out then (I know…this is partly ED talking but 20 extra minutes of exercise feels less destructive than yacking).
6. Waking J up so I wasn’t alone this morning and making him go to church with me – got us out of the house, got us in a room full of singing people and killed an hour of an otherwise unstructured Sunday.
7. Smoking cigarettes – Oh no. I’m gonna get in trouble for this one I’m sure…BUT hear me out – just personal experience here, not encouraging others. As an on-again-off-again smoker for years, I sometimes “dabble” in this less than healthy behavior. But it can feel like a good substitute after eating to do something that elicits some neurochemical release and some of the familiar thoughts of “oh I shouldn’t be doing this”, “this is bad for me”, “i really should stop doing this”. Yet, my food stays in my belly. I’m in risk management mode right now – I think that’s what they call it in social work when you might bargain for “less” destructive behaviors in the relative scheme of things.
With these powers combined….so far so good today. I’m sure I’ll post again before it’s all over. One thing I’d like to explore is this: I don’t think it’s coincidental that just when the emotional shit started to get heavy and dark and dad imagery started bubbling up from the yuck, I flipped the switch to managing “behaviors” and focus on food/mealplans/etc. Maybe managing my spiraling out of control purging is a means to distract.
What if today was a little bit normal?
What if I just ate breakfast because my stomach is growling. And then a snack the next time my stomach growls. What if I just didn’t purge and had a reasonable amount of exercise. How would my mood and outlook on life change if my body was feeling nourished today? I could do this. I know I could. Just for one day. Then tomorrow I could decide what to do with tomorrow’s body. I want want want to do that for myself today. But it would mean missing out on that feeling of pride when I eat my first morsel of the day at noon. When my stomach is growling on my 5 mile run on the treadmill tonight. What does that feeling mean to me? Why do I prize it so much? Where else is there a source of that feeling that I could access?
Beginning last night, I felt I was teetering on the edge of some sort of mini-breakthrough. Primarily emotionally but that always spills over into the ED behaviors’ territory. I’ve read Lola’s lastest post three times now trying to draw from the positive vibes. I’ve squinted and strained to decipher Lee’s letter to her ED. I want so badly for momentum to be on my side and for this consideration of a day of normalcy to tip the scales toward a few days of normalcy. But I’m scared. I don’t want to lose the ground I’ve made. Don’t want to be normal and unspecial as so many who deal day in and day out with these disorders report. A part of me is desperate to be sick sick sick. I don’t lose weight to look “good”. I lose weight to look “sick”. To elicit concern. How can I compromise with this part of me that needs concern and attention? How can I get it what it so desperately needs without the harm to myself.
Important questions are coming up. Not questions of coping strategies or distraction techniques. The big shit. The big WHAT IF’s that will help me in the long run. What if I could get these needs met from a source other than disordered self-torture? I really believe it’s got to be out there. Do I wait for it to come to me, find its way into my life? Do I “work” and “search” for it? How far away is it? Will I need help from others to find it or, once it’s in sight, to reach it?
One thing I am becoming acutely, painfully aware of is how alone I feel on the social front. I really really need some good friends. Relationships that are maintained weekly. Dependable folks to call and have coffee with. People who I feel safe to delve below the surface with and who do the same for me. People who allow the space for words like “scared”, “hurt”, “alone”, “suffering”. That’s why I love the Buddha – who unfortunately is not available for coffee any time soon. Because the first thing he wants to talk about is the suffering. The yuck. The pain. The darkness. He knows that acknowledging that shit is a prerequisite for getting to the good stuff. The hope and the meaning. I need friendships like that. That are based on the honest acknowlegement that life is suffering. And then that lead me around to the flip side – that life has value. Again – do I wait for these people to come to me, entering my life serendipitously? Do I seek them out and work at it?
For all those who’ve taken the curve today – around the bend of despair and are starting to see signs of life and normalcy and meaning up ahead – please share this energy. I really think I’m in an open space to receive it today and want it in bulk.
