quiet night at the Moseberg’s
J has been sleeping since I got home from work at 5:30. It is now nearly 10 p.m. and I’m wrapping up my day and about to go to bed for the night. I can’t help but think that his slumber is fueled by avoidance and passive aggressiveness. It’s making me feel really really pissed off.
I purged my dinner. Fuck. I have grandiose schemes in my head of serious restricting over the holidays. Double fuck. Yesterday may have been a bit much for my system to handle without flaring up my ED/protector parts. I hate this. I hate this. I hate this. Dinner wasn’t anything more than I’ve eaten over the past few days without purging so I feel like that is a nice bit of empirical data that tells me so much of it has to do with emotions (wait, but I already knew that). Days like these I just want to run away from my life. Parts of me don’t want to marry this man. Parts of me don’t want to join his name and mine on a mortgage. Parts of me get hopeless and start thinking suicidal thoughts. Parts of me imagine planning a trip to NC to see my mom and just not returning. But those are just parts. They have their reasons.
Where did my Self go?
Soliciting medical advice from experts in the field…
no not the medical field. the eating disordered field. Alright, so this post is going to feel much different from my usual thoughts, feelings, daily goings on…
As I’m working on all the head games and emotional issues, one of the side effects has been a recurrence of my lovely “symptoms”. Restrict, eat (a perceived binge but not textbook classification), purge, cardio exercise 1-2 hours per day.
I usually don’t worry too much about the physical effects of my disordered behavior. However in the past week I’ve been increasingly concerned and am turning to those of you who’ve been through this for some advice…
I’ve had a few days of Celiac symptoms acting up – which means increased…well, bowel movements. I think that’s setting some of the stage for feeling physically like crap after purging. Usually when my Celiac gets flared up I don’t absorb my food as well because my gut is inflamed. So add to that repeated purging and I’m getting a little maternal towards this “temple” of my body.
The thing I’m really worried about are the electrolytes. I know, I know my dental enamel and esophagus are suffering too. But it’s collapse or heart issues that are scaring me right now. Should I be having my potassium levels monitored? How frequently? I’m purging 1-2x every day with occasional weekend days of 3-7x. Lately I’m feeling swirly and unsteady on my sea legs after my little bathroom olympics. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe you have to be purging in the double digits every day to worry about electrolytes. But I need some reassurance here.
I’m asking you guys because I’ve heard all the horror stories about medical professionals not being, well, sensitive to the plight of the eating disordered. But everyone in group tonight was talking about their experiences and I realized I have NEVER been under any medical care for my ED – only therapy. Should I be under some sort of supervision?
Also, aside from the obvious cosmetic drawbacks, any real danger to the swollen salivary glands?
I ask not for permission to carry on my merry way on the road of self-harm. Rather so that I can be as “safe” as possible while I’m battling this fucker.
thanks in advance! -nb
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.
oh the demons
they raise their voices in harmony. they drown out all the individual whispers of motivation. each tiny success, each step toward health and recovery raises the volume of the self-destructors. i think there may just be enough of the positive voices. why can’t they unify? they need a leader to orchestrate their efforts.
oh, don’t look at me. i know it’s the obvious answer to the division dilemma. i know my dear therapist would use the IFS framework to remind me that my self-energy can fill that role. but somehow that energy is drained. where did my self go?
Frustration is
-wanting to not eat a damn thing tomorrow, feeling hunger envelop me like a staticky, scratchy wool blanket on a cold night
-tears flowing in shavasana tonight at the end of group
-J having a horrible day of depression and shuffling around the house like an empty shell of the man I love
-not having the energy to fight today
-feeling alone no matter how many people are in the room
-realizing that relapse, recovery, sickness, relative health, quiet, noise, company of others, solitude all feel uncomfortable on some level
-losing hope that there is a comfortable place in the near future and if there is not having faith that I’m able to find it
-two more excruciating days until therapy when I really need it about 2x per day right now
-losing sight of the want to want to get better
-the up and down of it all, the cycles. the not being able to hold tight to an ounce of motivation and positivity for more than a few hours before it slips out of my hands like a flailing wet fish. the not being able to hold tight to the hopelessness and negativity either because the road keeps curving back to motivation.
blech. today was a void. December 15 was just a day on the calendar, empty of content. Like a place someone set for me at the table of a dinnerparty I just couldn’t bring myself to attend.
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.
The awkwardness of being human
J just had the most wonderful insight as we laid in bed chatting about our crazy families of origin and the possibility (albeit a terrifying one to both of us) of a family of our own.
“Everyone just walks around acting like everything’s normal. No one ever talks about the awkwardness of being human. It’s really weird to be a human.”
That, folks, is why I love that man.
I had an extremely weird human experience tonight at the gym. Some sort of weird waking vision – like a dream, only on minute 18 on the Stairmaster. I got this imagery of my father doing surgery on me in our living room and harvesting my organs. It was so disturbing and vivid that I got very rattled. Unsure of whether to hop off the 814th floor of my imaginary building and head home, to cry while pounding away on the pedals or to open my book and pretend the whole thing never happened. I wound up spending the next 12 minutes pouring sweat into puddles on the floor directly below my elbows. I decided to stay with the image but was so uncomfortable that I cranked the machine up to level 20 and began sprinting. It felt strangely like whatever was coming up, bubbling up from the pool of yuck inside me and was somehow important. Probably very painful but valuable. I came home and later wrote about 3 paragraphs of it to get it out of my head. It is truly bizarre, a visual metaphor for my relationship with my father. It feels too fresh and twisted right now to share on the blog but that will likely happen soon. Just need to give the emotional dust a few days to settle. Need to talk about it in therapy Thursday.
Yoga was pretty solid for me tonight. I felt comfortable and present. Heavy through the soles of my feet (I guess that’s what they mean when they say “grounded”). Still purging but at least I feel like it’s for good reason – like some of the yuck is making its way up and of course I don’t know what to do with it. I do feel like I’m getting just a little bit closer to knowing. Like maybe I’m on the cusp of something. Maybe. Please, maybe.
Life as a prairie dog
I am a zoo-lover. A trip to the zoo was a key feature in most family trips and my grand total visits to the Toledo, OH zoo – just an hour from my grandparents house – must be in the double digits. Which makes me a zoo expert – if only in my own head. Tonight, I can firmly say “I feel like a prairie dog”.
I always felt bad for the praire dogs. Such a nervous species shouldn’t reside for the duration of their imprisoned lives in such an open enclosure a mere 10 feet from the outstretched, cotton-candied hands of six-year-olds. I’m sure that zoo designers aim for the least restrictive enclosure (from the perspective of zoo-goers, not of the catpives) and the fact that prairie dogs presumably cannot jump, leap or scale concrete walls allows them an open dirt field with only a short wall. They always struck me as terrified - scurrying in and out of their holes always with a few of them tensely teetering on their haunches at attention, scanning the crowds for potential invaders.
I feel like there are millions several parts of me that wish my enclosure was more fortified – perhaps with 4 inch thick plexiglass or at the very least some netting. I was already feeling this way tonight upon reading my dad’s letter (I KNOW, I KNOW – WHY DON’T I BURN IT, THROW IT AWAY, WIPE MY ASS WITH IT AND FLUSH IT, anything but READ IT….maybe I’ll touch on my theories on this topic later). But then J confessed that he had read my blog. Fuuuuuuuuuuck. Not that there is anything I’ve posted (I reread at least the past 20 or so posts) that is radically different from anything I’ve uttered aloud to him or made vague reference to in his presence. I even sort of understand his reasoning for checking it — he wicked panicked when I forgot to call immediately upon arriving in Brooklyn Friday night and my phone battery had died. After several hours of calling and emailing he checked the blog – and found that I had posted that very night and was alive and well (alright – well is subjective but I was definitely alive). The bottom line is – I’m not even mad at him per se. Just really sad about the situation. As the child of a Narcissist Borderline parent, boundaries (or lack of respect of them) is a hugely touchy issue. Overstepping boundaries and privacy is touchy like pouring Tobasco sauce on a paper cut for me. So with my dad somehow locating my home address and J reading the blog…all in the same weekend….I’m feeling like scampering into the nearest hole in the dirt. Anyone willing to stand guard?
As a consolation prize – my dad got the address wrong by 10 house numbers. Lucky for me our mailman is just THAT good that he caught the mistake and made sure I got this very important piece of mail. Thanks for going above and beyond, dude. Don’t expect a holiday fruitcake or anything for that little bit of excellent service. The good news is that if my dad does go bonkers achieve a new level of bonkerdom and decide to show up on my doorstep to (a) kill himself (b) break into my home and cry on my living room floor , or (c) hand-deliver the adorable new puppy he bought me … he’ll find himself at the neighbors 10 houses down the block – PHEW!
Okay – reasons why I read the letters:
-to remind myself of how insane and toxic my father is so that I don’t reconsider my decision to amputate him from my life (it was a very long and meticulous procedure with high risk of infection)
-out of curiousity of how fucked-up this one will be
-to hurt myself, to punish myself, to be mean to me.
-to amuse myself with my own inner monologue of bitingly sarcastic, inappropriate and downright hateful potential responses…of which there are typically dozens.
-because, in this instance, I had WAAAAY to much time to ponder the contents of the envelope before I opened it and in that time my brain had concocted a totally plausible scenario in which my father reports in the letter that his new wife is pregnant with a little girl – so (1) I was going to have a sister and (2) he would have a new replacement daughter. hmm. should probably talk to Bree about this.
In the history of my eating disorder, I’ve had those days that are just downright shocking -even to me- with how far I’m willing to go to purge. Let’s just say that there are several rest station bathrooms between NYC and Albany that I’m quite familiar with now. Jeeze, that’s disGUSTING. So in the aftermath of that…I’m trying to figure out what were the precipitating events or feelings and how I could have done things differently so that I could have felt better this weekend. My brother and sister in law got some sort of stomach bug and last night my brother was hurling in the bathroom. And then proceeded to talk about it all this morning. I’m not sure if this was triggering for me or just felt insensitive or ignorant or what… I just felt really uncomfortable. Especially with a weird combination of guilt, shame and glee that he wasn’t the only one who’d used his toilet for those purposes this weekend. Ugh. Too many toilet references in this post. It’s even grossing ME out.
Way too much has gone on emotionally for me this weekend. Time to turn off the light, close the laptop and give myself a break for not coming up with a way to tie together the praire dog theme here at the end. sleep now.
The Tailhook Effect
Tuesday and Wednesday of this week I was strapped tightly into the cockpit of a supersonic stealth jet. The deafening engine noises were exhilerating, the powerful acceleration energizing me and the sheer speed of the familiar sights of the world whizzing by at unfamiliar angles thrilled me to the core. I was fully aware, however, that the ride was both temporary and fueled by the need to escape. And I touched down in what I hoped would be a gentle and precise landing, I realized this that the destination of my mission was an aircraft carrier. The G-forces as the tailhook snatched me snapped my head forward and nearly pulled my heart out of my chest. So much for a graceful end to my little joyride.
As the tears flowed freely tonight I told J that I just feel all “stormy” inside. The avoidance, denial, distraction and overall false sense of power of my crazed business and over-achieverdom over the past few days were not lost on me. I watched myself complete a gym workout, two hours of errands and an hour of cleaning house all BEFORE going to work and sighed with full knowledge that I was trying to push something out of my life by not making time for it (or sleep, or food). In therapy this morning when I sat, closed my eyes and tried to find my breath I could feel my brain sloshing rhythmically from side to side, crashing into the left, then the right, then the left sides of my inner skull. It reminded me of one of those desk top “art” pieces with bright blue oil in a clear plastic rectangle that rocks on a fulcrum. Crash, boom, crash, boom. It was dizzying and a bit terrifying at first. But the session went well and at the end I felt much more present in my body and a bit more stable in the head.
I felt slower throughout the day. Still a bit restless but distinctly fatigued. Tonight in group I had a good yoga practice and found myself unintentionally closing my eyes a lot. Was I trying to tune out my surroundings? Another effort to escape? Or a chance to deepen and bring more presence to my practice? Or merely sleepiness settling in? During check-in in the group session, I realized how fucking uncomfortable I am with big emotions. One girl was pissed of and her rage spewed out of her in a torrent of obscenities and negativity spoken with a harsh and biting tone, seeming to splash on the floor a bit too close to my chair for comfort. Then the girl just next to me burst into tears – not gentle ones soft on her cheeks easily sniffled and wiped away – but big chest sobs with grimaced expression. The sadness poured onto the floor and oozed towards my feet. Run. Hide. Get a towel. Pull yourselves together! The strange thing was that somehow the physical proximity of these two individuals made the experience more intense for me. I wanted to be further away, across the room, maybe on the other side of a screen door, perhaps backing away in slow, sneaky steps all the while nodding with false empathy. I was so uncomfortable that I began to figdet and squirm and wound up with the sleeve of my fleece sweater pressed tightly to my mouth and chin. Stay up. Don’t let the corners of your mouth get pulled down. Don’t let your chin start to quiver. In general it was a good group and I was a somewhat involved participant but I could feel my insides churning. Upon arriving home, anxiety about my weekend trip to my brother’s house set in, gloominess once again settled in my chest and the pressure of stifled tears made the top of my skull throb. 24 hours ago I was buzzing with anticipation of all the things I would get done today and feeling quite proud of myself for the accomplishments of my day. Now, my mouth tastes of vomit and I’m once again feeling defeated.
Will try to post from my brother’s this weekend – if only for my sanity.
Knitting??
Could knitting energize me? Pull me out of the depths of hell depression? Give me something to obsess over?
Eh…probably not. It was a good thought, though. I’m looking for the silver bullet here folks that’s gonna help the turnaround.
I’ll continue the search.
