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.
A threesome with ED
As most ED-ed people probably know, it’s very very very difficult to maintain a relationship while in the throes of disorderliness. Even our queen-size bed is a tight squeeze when it’s me, J and the thirty-three thousand voices in my head. Most days we get by without a whole lot of drama but yesterday apparently someone added baking soda to the vinegar .
How did it start? Well, not to put J in a bad light or anything but I gotta vent…and hopefully to my friends in blogland who likely have had similar struggles..it won’t sound as crazy as it does to him. J is more playful than he is sexual. He touches me and looks at me but it’s more in a “hee hee, you’re naked” way than a “come hither my vixen” way. Okay, so he does this thing where he grabs me in various areas and… well.. jiggles. It’s loving, it’s not meant to tease…there are no accompanying “hey fatty fatty” comments (other than those produced between my own two ears). I know he loves my ass. Men love asses. Fine. Slap it when we walk up the stairs – that feels okay with me. He slaps it and it sounds – tight and firm. But when he grabs and jiggles – ugh I just want to lop off my derriere with a kitchen knife. Okay, so there was much much much jiggling yesterday morning for some reason (in my head coinciding with the fact that eating monstrous amounts more successfully for a few days has added a few pounds. At one point he had both hands jiggling while he sang the Sir Mix-A-Lot favorite “I like big butts”. Okay – I have to say that any female probably wouldn’t relish this little display of, ahem, affection. So I raised my point. “It makes me feel really disgusting when you do that jiggle thing to me and grab my flabby parts.”
J is sensitive. I love him for it. It makes him a wonderfully compassionate partner and just generally insightful to talk to and observent of the world in a way that I admire. But he doesn’t take comments that begin with “I don’t like it when you….” or “I feel ____ when you….” very well. I am advocating for myself with an “I” statement and he hears, “you are a disgusting pig of a man. I am so disappointed in you that you would even consider doing something as offensive and abusive as that to me.” It seems we both have our own disordered filters for incoming information.
So that started the day off pretty strained. I also got skeevy about him watching me change in the bedroom. Usually this doesn’t bother me but with the jiggling and the weight gain and just general volume and intensity of ED voices in my head – it was uncomfortable. All this me feeling yucky about myself got to be too much for him and we plummetted into the conversation of medication again. He is a long-time dysthymic who depends on anti-depressants to function and has for decades. He’s in therapy but more for maintenance as far as I can tell.
His points:
-you are depressed. it feels like you are getting more depressed. it hurts me to see that.
-anti-depressants help people feel better.
-you were on anti-depressants when we met and you were happier.
-therefore, you need anti-depressants again.
My points:
-i hated being on meds and was “fake” happy.
-i have horrible starting and stopping side effects that render me unable to function and then continue to have such glorious side effects as insomnia, no sex drive, weight gain, tremors and panic attacks while on meds.
-meds dampen my emotions and will make the therapeutic process that I’m working on now and which I trust damn near impossible.
-I may seem more depressed but I’m making some progress (at least in my own view and according to my therapist).
-depression is not my primary issue. my sadness is not the same as your dysthymia.
Bonus Zingers he threw into the conversation:
-You’re just being stubborn and willful
-I was willing to take meds for you, why aren’t you willing to do the same for me?
-You can’t do this on your own. I know you’re trying your hardest but it’s not working.
-I want to be able to say what I want, touch you however I want and look at you whenever I want.
My points were not made until hours later when we revisited the topic. The initial interaction involved me laying on the bed face-down in a pillow while he went on and on, each sentence seeming to contain something more stinging and accusatory than the last. I went into shut-down mode where the sounds of my own self-hatred and desperation rendered my own speech paralyzed. When I shut-down like this (a sign that I am feeling extremely hurt), he gets very insulted that I’m not talking – deems it rude and hurtful. There is nothing quite like feeling like the powerless victim of hurtful comments for half an hour, not being able to speak to comment or defend myself and then being accused myself of being hurtful.
By bedtime we had at least come to a place of less tension, maybe a touch more understanding from both of us. I think he understands that I don’t want him to stop touching me or looking at me but that I need the space to speak up if, on a particular day, Sir Mix-A-Lot serenades aren’t feeling okay.
But it’s hard. Being in a relationship when an ED is in the mix is fucking tough – on him and on me. The “poor, pitiful him” part has to be tempered with the “have a little sympathy for yourself too” part. I’m sure I’m not the only one with these challenges.
Any suggestions or thoughts from either experience or merely from viewing things (told completely subjectively by me) from a different vantage point?
Contract, Relax, Contract, Relax
All I wanted to do was eat my dinner in peace. In a little refuge far far away from the voices that whisper about how excessive and wholly unnecessary my evening meal is. Respite from the inner argument about whether or not I had “earned” a quarter of a dollop of sour cream on my baked potato. Let this meal move passively through the digestive system uninterrupted. Take a bath after and feel warm and content on this snowy day. Admittedly a lofty goal, seemingly unacheivable, but I was quite proud of my aspirations.
Then J had to go talking about how he felt light-headed and sick because he didn’t eat all day (restrict/binge is his normal eating pattern – he’ll head off to work with a towering travel mug of diesel fuel coffee and a pack of smokes and coast through his day on adrenaline, come home and devour an entire pizza in just under 29 seconds, pat his bloated belly and smile easily). But sometimes this plan backfires, leaving him sluggish and dizzy. I’m sure that in some way this conversation was viewed in his head as a way to connect, to relate. But of course it was, instead, triggering. As my fork delivered that quarter-dollop of sour cream topped potato to my mouth he rambled, “Eating is different for me than it is for you. It’s an annoyance and a bother. I wish I could just take a pill and never eat again.” Somehow in the two feet of airspace between his mouth and my ear it got twisted into “I don’t like to eat and have such restraint. You, on the other hand, LOVE eating. I mean, really relish it and indulge in it far too frequently. You might as well bathe in a tub of sour cream and eat your way out – you love eating so much.”
All I said was, “Honey, can we change the subject?”
Thus began a prolonged discussion (mainly him talking, calmly venting) about my eating disorder and its effect on our relationship. Among the predictable topics (recurring themes) that arose: to medicate or not to medicate, how it’s unfair, how he doesn’t know how not to enable while at the same time not policing, that he felt like he has to walk on eggshells, that it seems to sudden a change, that he doesn’t understand. Let’s just say he’s got very valid points and there wasn’t much argument or response from me. I just listened. I’ve heard it all before – whether from a past boyfriend, a family member, a friend.
It was a somewhat productive conversation – even if the only functional outcome was that he felt like he’d gotten some things off his chest and been heard. I’m not sure what I got out of it, other than the very loud part of me (whose voice sounds startlingly like my mother’s) scoffing, “See, this is why I always tell you not to try to speak up and protect yourself.” I know that’s just a part with its agenda making all sorts of unhelpful noise in my head. But it speaks to the truth that all I was trying to do was advocate for myself – try to impose some sanctity around my one meal of the day. Trying to protect myself from triggers during a vulnerable hour of my day. Not sure I feel encouraged to attempt that stunt again any time soon.
In other news, the hospital called me yesterday about the second job I had applied for there (ahem, only three weeks after I submitted the application). I spoke with the woman a bit about the position and agreed that the best way to learn more is to speak to the OT and observe. I feel curious yet unpressured about it – something bordering on apathetic. But somehow that feels like a much healthier place to come from when it comes to a job. I worked myself up into a frenzy of nerves and imagined pressure about the other positions and the whole process over the last month. I was mapping out driving routes for the daily commute to jobs I hadn’t even interviewed for. Laying awake at night wondering what my desk would look like for positions I knew nothing about. And it was detrimental to my sleep, health and well-being.
At least in my experience, things in my life crop up at odd times for a reason. So I’m playing along with this one. I’ll investigate – not dive-in head first – but cautiously learn more about this position and feel some time and space to think about it, me , the timing of it all. We’ll wait and see. And as cliche’ed as that sounds (and boy, does it!), it feels like a bit of progress to be able to have that outlook.
