sarahntastic

I’d trade lots of shady-immoral-questionable things to be thin and without food issues.

I love one of my dogs a billion times more than the others.

Looking at shoes and jewelry reduces my blood pressure markedly.

I drink too much, and I like it.

I have the libido of a 16 year old boy.  Or a 37 year old woman.

I’m a mean fighter.

I could eat Jif Chunky every day and still never have enough.

I think I want a baby.

I lack patience for complaining.  That thing I do incessantly.

I am missing the gene for producing fake laughs.

I love so fast and hard, I am starting to wonder if I know what love is.

After seeing her for a few months years ago, I was well enough to start thinking about re-starting my life, this tiny, long-haired, nose-pierced, bright green toenail polished, Stanford educated M.D., Indian woman said, “Don’t complain about not having a boyfriend when you leave the house looking like THAT.”

Next she lectured on the “fact” that fat women make compromises in their mates, because they can’t snag a good looking man who also happens to be a good man.  She knows so, she said, because she sees it amongst her friends.  Perfectly smart, able, ambitious women–fat women–pairing up with men who, in every way, are inferior, but hey, that’s what fat gets you.  So can I please get over myself and do something about my weight?

I always wondered which Stanford class, exactly, she learned to be so bitchy forthright.  I liked it, though.  No bullshit.  I couldn’t pull my sob story for long with her.  She succeeded in properly medicating me so I was much better than when I dragged in months earlier having been in a fetal position on my couch for six months prior to that.

So when I needed to see her again, because the dark abyss of depression had crept up on me this year, after a few years of sanity and clear-headedness, I was running late.  I put on jeans, rather than yoga pants, knowing she would cringe.  But I didn’t put on makeup.  I didn’t dry my hair.  I really couldn’t.  Didn’t have the energy, physical or mental, to do much more.  But I knew she would have something to say about it.

I explained my descent back into near-severe depression the last six months, and my frustration and anger with myself that I just cannot make myself do anything.  She did her doctor thing.  She told me she would adjust meds.  She told me that I am depressed, duh, so no amount of self-pep talk is going to work until I’m moving out of the dark parts.  She suggested I try to do small things, allow myself accomplishments on a much smaller scale.

Call a friend back.

Clean off my desk.

Blow dry my hair one day.

And there it is, folks.  Psychiatric honesty at it’s finest.  For $250, no less (no, she doesn’t accept insurance).

I can’t wait to see her again in two weeks.  Needless to say I won’t dare show up makeup-less or with undone hair.

There was a time not too many years ago depression meant sleeping for days on end, no showers, binge eating, never getting dressed, going to the store dirty and smelly, wandering in a foggy haze to walk the dogs, feeling nothing, never crying, jumping at the sound of the phone because I would forget there was any sound other than silence.

And slowly I came away from that.  With help.  Some from friends and family, mostly thanks to medication.

And I’ve spent a significant amount of energy since then making sure I never fall into it again:  the darkness, the isolation, the irrational thoughts, being locked inside my head, being someone no one knows what to do with, yet causing pain and grief simply because I am so far away, so completely unreachable.

And recently I feel it coming back.  Not nearly as horrific.  Certainly I’m functioning, at least a bit.  But I’m not working.  I’m not doing anything.  Except for keeping my head above water.  It’s all I can do.  Simple things like try to exercise, walk the dogs, talk to friends, go to the store.  But I’m teetering.  Losing my balance, not feeling the strength to stay in the clear, instead stumbling into the very foggy place in my head that makes no sense.

And because I can feel everything now (before medication, I felt nothing but exhaustion), I’m crying a lot.  I’m confused and terrified and anxious and not sleeping.  Because  I’m obsessed with making sure I stay here with everyone else in the world.  And it takes a lot of energy.  And the days go by so quickly and without any sort of productivity.  Just today it took me many hours to exercise, then take a shower, and now I can’t figure out how to get dressed, or why I should.  I can only cry.

This is my ultimate fear.  That the depression will never go away.  That it will keep coming back like this, to eat up my life and take away huge chunks of time I will never get back.

I am coming undone.  Again.

“He’s been ill. He must have mistaken you for Grandma.  Just stay out of there.”

It was a perfectly reasonable explanation to me.  When I told my parents about what my Grandfather had been doing to me for as long as I could remember, I knew his behavior was wrong simply by the way my mom’s eyes nearly popped out of her head and my dad sunk down into the bed, his head falling into his hands.  But the explanation seemed reasonable.  He was a sick old man.  We never spoke of it again.  I was seven.  It was 1979.

But something seemingly irreparable was already set in place.  I worried about everything.  I tortured myself with thinking the simplest things through to horrible conclusions, even at a very young age.  I binged in secret.  I climbed into the pantry to find my parents’ treats so I could scarf them when my mom napped.  I refused to play outside.  I fought my dad every step of the way learning to ride a bike.  The air, the sun, the openness terrified me.  I wanted to be inside.  I only felt safe inside.

School was easy for me.  Socializing was not.  I had few friends.  I trusted everyone and was always shocked when I inevitably found out everyone wasn’t trustworthy.  I liked boys but mostly stayed away from them.  I was in love with a couple but always made sure to be their best friend while they had girlfriends.  I lived with a never-ending sense of worthlessness and depression, no matter my grades, my kindness, my generosity, my creativity.  I never tracked any of this back to sexual abuse.  I actually rarely thought of my grandfather after he died a couple years after my revelation.  I was still under the impression my parents knew best.  Their explanation still held for me.  By this time I was overweight, and that was the source of all my problems.  Unsure why, just that I was.  Being fat meant I was unworthy of love, of a normal teenager’s life.  Instead I worked, bought things, took my brothers where they needed to go, stayed mostly at home.

I married way too early, under the mistaken assumption the first boy who showed interest in me I should cling to forever more.  I had no role model other than my parents, now married 40 years and mostly happy that whole time, married when they were nineteen.  Thankfully my marriage ended after not too many years.  Around the same time my beloved grandmother became ill.  Heart surgery at UCSF brought all of us together-and apparently brought out everyone’s need for gut-spilling.  My aunt revealed my grandfather molested her until she was fourteen.  And then did the same to her daughter, my cousin, just one year older than me.  My cousin who still now battles drug addiction and has never held a job or left her parents’ home to live on her own, suffered the same abuse as me but manifested her pain in a much more destructive way than I.

Suddenly my mother wanted to discuss the day fifteen years earlier I told her my secret.  I hadn’t thought of it in so many years, it seemed foreign to me, detached from my life, no longer part of me.  She felt guilty, she wanted to make things right.  But really, there is no making right what a child’s psyche does to protect itself.

I never had the anger, the confrontation, the hate-your-abuser phases some people go through.  It just didn’t happen for me.  I went to therapy.  I couldn’t conjure the anger therapists wanted me to.  Even now, realizing the indelible mark of worthlessness that the abuse left on me, that this is the legacy of my abuse, still I cannot be angry.  I just want to fix it.

Because here I am, still, fifteen more years on, learning, making mistakes, massive and small.  Self-loathing ruling my life, fat ruling my life, poor choices ruling my life.  But I choose this, right?  I have always told myself that it’s my doing, my choices.  But is that more self-hate?  Blaming myself for things I happen to not have the skills to do well?

There is no happy ending here, yet.  There is still more learning.  And I must say, I get tired of the lessons.  But there is no other way.

I lost a lot of weight.  I stopped losing weight.  I gained 20 pounds.  NO ONE is more disappointed, sad, depressed, horrified, terrifed than I am.  I don’t need you to look at me, comment toward me, or otherwise spend any energy on me and my fat.  Because, rest assured, I think of little else.  One doesn’t get fat without obsession and addiction.  And the obsession and addiction doesn’t just stop with food.  Anger, shame, disgust, self-hate, worthlessness are all things I am plenty skilled at feeling-obsessing on-being addicted to feeling all on my own.  If I could replay the tape that is on loop in my head 24/7 you couldn’t handle it.  Because it’s horrifying.  How much I hate myself.  So, thanks, but no, I don’t need you.  I’m already plenty fucked in the head about this.  You? I just want to beat the shit out of with all my fat.

I’m over it.  Entertaining myself at night with a buzz.  I never used to do that.  I never used to have alcohol in the house.  I’d certainly have drinking nights out but until this last year, never did I entertain myself in the evenings with drinking.  I used to do things like read, and write, and simply be bored if I was bored.  Drinking feels like shit.  And has stunted my weight loss.  And makes me feel like a complete idiot.

So, I just poured out 2 bottles of vodka and 4 bottles of wine.  Peace out, party of one.

Depression is excrutiating.

So, I was wrong.

I thought I figured out how to not be obsessed with, and controlled by food over the last few years having fairly easily lost nearly 100 pounds and starting a decent work-out routine after doing neither in my life before.  But, it turns out, 2009 was a huge piece of shit.  And not big piles of shit, but various and many smaller piles of shit that I didn’t always notice until I realized the fetid smell following me was not going away.

I am more and more bogged down and depressed as time passes.  More later on the deep fear I have of  another depressive episode.  I’ll leave it at this:  it can’t happen again.  I won’t survive it, I am sure.  And not in the suicide-type of survival way, but the simple emotional-type survival way.

Food.  My greatest love, and my worst enemy.  My sustenance both physical and emotional.  My hobby and my joy.  My poison and my torment.

I’ve gained nearly 20 pounds this year, most of which piled on in the last few months–the hardest months I’ve had in a long time.  When I binge, I know intellectually I am hurting, and bandaging with food.  I hover above myself, watching the preparation of snacks and meals comprised of ingredients that have not, until recently, even crossed the threshold of my front door for years:  peanut butter, butter, chips, tortillas, cookies, candy, half and half.  I used to allow myself a dinner out for these trigger foods, and the results were fine.  However, I’ve talked myself into believing I somehow have control over these things, so I’ve brought them into the house.  But of course, that’s a huge lie.  I’ve brought them into the house for bandaging and love and support.

Funny thing about medicating with food.  It has the opposite affect of what you want.  It’s the same as any addiction.  Goddam, I feel good right in the minute.  The tastes, the smells, the textures, the sensual memories.  And then.  It ends quickly.  The high is gone.  Maybe it doesn’t come at all depending on how much I’m hurting, how deep the hole is that day.  Sometimes I graze forever.  Sometimes I have the strength to sit on my hands as it were.  Most of the time I don’t.

I have no answers here.  I carry my pain and fear in a constant lump in my throat, on the verge of tears most minutes of the day; in my folds of flesh that reveal my weakness and hurt to the world; in my chest that is always tight; in my head that always aches.  Today serves as a day of forcing honesty.  Reminding myself I’m fooling no one, least of all me.  I need to somehow get back to the high I got from losing weight, getting into the next smaller size jeans, people noticing my confidence and happiness and lightness–and not the size kind.  Because I’m not sure how my mind twists from knowing how good it feels to lose weight and being in control to bingeing on food and false control.

I have a temper, but I never really get angry.  If I throw a fit, it’s to protect myself, argue a position, or bitch about someone I don’t know, but never do I get angry at someone close to me, even when they hurt me.  I question myself, where I went wrong, how I can fix it, again, even if it’s their shit that caused them to emotionally sucker punch me.  I’m a dweller, a ruminator, an obsessor.  I can’t let things go.  And not in a grudge sort of way, just in the “OMGICAN’TBELIEVETHATHAPPENEDHOWCANIFIXITISWEARI’MNOTANASSHOLE” sort of way.

Right now—and for the last four months—I’ve been obsessing about He Who Shall Remain Nameless.  We were together for many years.  I loved him way more than he loved me.  He left me.  But all this isn’t the problem.  It’s been years since we’ve been together.  He’s moved on, has a new wife, has a baby.  But we have always stayed in touch and in fact, he promised he would repay me tens of thousands of dollars over a few years to help with bills and my investment in our company that is now closed.  And he kept that promise.  He gave me money when he could and started a new business that is likely to make a ton of money.  He has always been generous, and actually, money was the one thing we never fought about.  Until four months ago.

I’m unemployed but wanted to figure out how to start my own business, and I could afford to figure things out with money he gave me around the time I was laid off.  He knew this was my plan, he said he’d keep putting money in the account, he helped me edit our old business plan for my new business idea.   Then he decided he could make some money day trading with my little nest egg.  I let him.  I had no reason not to trust him.  He made a killing day trading several years ago, he knows what he’s doing, and he knew I needed the money accessible.

It started when I asked him for some of the money.   He made excuses about time and too much work but that he would get to it.  Then he stopped answering my emails, stopped taking my calls.  I knew something bad was going down, but I didn’t want to believe it.  Fast forward to the end of the month when the statement came in the mail:  Balance $2.97.

So for the first time in 12 years, I am out of touch with the person I wanted to be with forever.  And, he stole nearly ten thousand dollars from me.  And I’m scared and having anxiety attacks, and sleeping to much or too little, and eating too much, and crying too much.  And I even have a little hope (I know, I know!) he’s just trying to get the money together and he will pay me back.  But I’m not angry.  Why can’t I get angry?  I’m hurt, that is all.

I went to San Diego to visit my brother, hike, eat cupcakes, and get energized to come home and finally get my act together.  Instead it was far more emotionally challenging than I was prepared for.  That is, because I wasn’t prepared for it to be emotionally challenging at all.

I don’t know if my melancholy and sleepiness today is because of this or because I’m back to reality.  I do know that I didn’t jump out of bed today with my shit together.  In fact, I didn’t jump at all.  I haven’t done anything I promised myself I would do, and as the day rolls on, I become more sad, more defeated, more sluggish, more sad.  I just walked the dogs sobbing, for chrissakes.  I haven’t showered or even put on a bra—yes, this means I’ve walked the dogs three times today without a bra on.

It did not help that I had a dream about visiting my ex.  He said “I had no idea you’ve been trying to contact me for FOUR MONTHS, and no, I didn’t steal nearly TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS from you, you just have the account number wrong.”  Waking up realizing this dream isn’t going to come true did nothing to start my day off well.

I’ve read blog posts, books about motivation, books about successful women in business, sought out successful women to network with, and still, here I am, weeping and melodramatic.

I need something, something, something.  Because I’m really sick of this being stuck bullshit.