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.
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.
A Not-so-Brief History
I’ll be honest in admitting that the past 2-3 weeks have been more “eating disordered” than any in the past year-plus. But they’ve felt different. So now is as good a time as any to venture down memory lane. As an aside, I have far more readers than commenters so maybe this story will resonate and someone with more ED experience than me can chime in with their thoughts.
My eating disorder history is complicated by what has now been diagnosed as Celiac disease. I think the largest part this played revolves around anxiety around food, hunger and my stomach in general. I used to feel like my stomach (the actual organ….not a “belly”) took up 95% of my being. I was STARVING all the time and ate large meals or snacks every 1.5 – 2 hours. I was horrendously embarrassed by this because obviously it doesn’t fit nicely into teenage girl culture to be worried about where your next hamburger was coming from. I was always thin, at times in high school concerningly so. People commented, doctors investigated and parents were involved (each in their own unhelpful and fucked up way), and I basically got a lot of attention.
Fast forward about 10 years and I was confirmed to have Celiac disease – an autoimmune disorder that manifests as an allergy to the wheat protein gluten). During those 10 years, my mentally ill father (undiagnosed and untreated) proceeded to get more and more, well, crazy. I was a perfectionist overachiever with lofty prospects for schools, careers, relationships, etc. I was going to grad school and making solid A’s, had a boyfriend who I loved and hoped to spend the rest of forever happily ever after with and took up running. When grad school ended, the relationship ended and the running increased – as did a recreational interest in dieting. Over the next year and a half the running increased, the dieting became true restricing and I started a relationship with a Navy SEAL. The significance of this is hard to put into words – I don’t think that outside of the ED community you can find a more overachieving, self-punishing, controlling and compulsively exercising people than that crowd. What was once a “normal” SELF magazine reading, fat-free eating runner overnight became addicted to purging. Seriously, it was an instant take. I have NO idea what spurred the idea to do it the first time but I think my life was pretty ED-ridden at that point and I was left alone for the millionth time while he was overseas. I was hooked. Unlike a true bulimic, I wasn’t binging and purging. Restricting and purging was my M.O. Merely eating a meal a day and purging. And compulsively exercising. So, needless to say, the weight came off my already small frame fast. That was a year and a half ago. Onset at the age of 26. Which I gather is kind of late. I think my disordered thoughts before then could be chalked up to “normal” female obsession with weight, etc.
Anxiety, which has plagued me for a long time, also ramped up at this point. I was checking obsessively and grew increasingly rigid about time, numbers in general (i.e. tracking heart rate data, calories in and out, hours of sleep, etc.), and visual appearances (things lining up or “looking right”). I couldn’t think straight, obsessively cleaned, rewrote Post-It notes at work because my handwriting wasn’t perfect and had Excel spreadsheets of nutrition facts for all foods in my pantry for data keeping purposed.
Within 2 weeks of beginning to purge, I sought help. I was terrified. What the fuck was I doing – it was gross and totally “crazy” in my book. But I was still doing it. I was sent to a “specialist” who I saw 2x a week for CBT. Her husband was my prescribing doc and put me on Prozac. My dose went from 20 mg to 40 to 80 within a few weeks. I had tremors, insomnia and general yuckiness but the obsessions decreased, and my general pace of thinking slowed down with less “hooking” thoughts.
After about 4 months of ED, I moved to Vermont with Navy SEAL boy and found out that my dad (one of my major triggers to begin with) had cancer. Somehow that pushed me from one extreme to the other – from sickness into recovery. Sounds great, right?? But in retrospect I’m not sure it was an authentic recovery. More of a “new” set of rules. I didn’t purge the day I found out my dad was sick. I had a panic attack and my then-boyfriend found me in the cemetary across from our house with an empty bottle of wine and a half-smoked pack of Parliaments. I didn’t purge for about 8 months straight. SEAL exited the scene within weeks of the cemetary incident. I was alone but manic – I threw myself into yoga. I met J. I was totally on-board with recovery – blogging on my old site about how great life was and about how spiritually grounded I was. I went off Prozac in June. I began making huge gains in therapy after meds were out of the picture.
Enter ED, stage left. I’m not sure how or why. But I do know that it feels different this time. I’ve been honest about this with my therapist… this time around feels less compulsive, less “but I can’t help it”, less about the numbers. As I told Bree, I don’t need Excel spreadsheets to tell me whether I’ve eaten enough. It feels more depressed and hopeless. It feels more like a white flag of surrender to life. I adore J and on some days can see us happy forever with kids … (“I dream of children. Watch ‘em run around in the front yard…from the front porch of our home” – from my favorite song of The Avett Brothers). But lately I just don’t know if I can fight this every day forever. I don’t know if it’ll get better. I worried aloud to J tonight (after watching him snuggle with his 15 month-old nephew again) that I don’t know how my ED brain would react to a pregnant body.
I tried to explain it to J last night on our ride home from dinner (he’s now totally monitoring everything I eat, or more accurately – don’t eat… I can tell) – “it’s not like a fat person trying to lose weight. it doesn’t take effort. it is the absence of effort. if I stop the effort, I just relax into the weight loss. it’s so easy and powerful.”
So that’s it… in a nutshell… where I’ve been…. where I am. I’m scared. I know I’m not okay. I think I’m doing what I need to by joining group, by having honest dialogues with J about things, and by generally being aware. But I’m scared that it’s not enough. It really sucks when the thing you are most scared of is entirely in your own brain. I’m in my first relapse. Sure, I’m in my late twenties but I’m a newbie by most standards to the world of ED. I had a rapid onset, a sudden recovery and now it’s back. Maybe I should get back on meds. But that feels like a band-aid. When I was on meds I wasn’t able to access those really dismal, hopeless sad parts of me that are currently benefitting from therapy. I was numbed out. Nice, but not productive in the long term.
Here I am. Not knowing what to do. I start something new Monday – a therapy group based heavily in Yoga and Internal Family Systems Therapy. Maybe that’s enough newness and I should just abondon the whole job thing for awhile. Stay with what I know. Maybe I should go to part-time for awhile at work to focus on recovery. Maybe I’m not ready for recovery again – need a break from it.
Maybe I need insight from others.
