Changing myself and the world

On one hand, I wrote this today:

“March 10, 2012

Disgusted with waist size increase ___ and only ___ weight loss.  Just so gross.  Legs are disgusting.  So ashamed of my fat chubby face.  I feel dead inside.”

Here in my blog, I tell it like it is, and this is what I wrote, like it or not.  This is how I live my life from day to day.  I can and will change this but right now, this is the reality of what I live with and right now these are my feelings.

On the other hand, I am making some very positive changes in my life.  I decided to change therapists.  I have an excellent therapist for whom I have a lot of admiration but this is not working.  I went sharply downhill when I started seeing her (the end of November 2010, right after National Novel Writing Month) and life has been shit this whole time.

My feelings are mixed about the future of therapy.  Quitting entirely is the route I had originally thought I would go, but decided to try someone else.  I have decided, though, not to drag things on and on with my current therapist and to end as quickly as possible.  Of course I have no one lined up to replace her next week but as of today am sending out e-mails, and will be phoning people Monday.   I am taking advantage of free introductory sessions.  I am looking into anything out of the ordinary.  One of these is acupuncture.  I am contacting a couple of nutritionists as well, but I am not interested in nutritionists who talk out of textbooks and prescribe traditional “meal plans” that I am supposed to follow like a mindless robot that has no brain.  I am flat out doing away with these weekly “weight-checks” and will no longer tolerate this outright humiliation.  I have tried 12-step four times.  I have mixed feelings about it all.  Just mixed.  I will look into it and will also look into Smart Recovery and get a bunch of books on different approaches.  I have a list of books I want to read.

I am anything but a mindless robot with no brain.

I now see through my T’s reasoning in getting me hooked up with DMH.  It was not for the purpose of “help” like I had originally thought.  My T was actually thinking ahead and in her mind (so I speculate) thinking that if I had DMH, it would be easier on the paperwork to force me to give up my apartment and move into a group home!  This would mean losing Puzzle!  Right now, actually, during Thursday’s session, she again threatened that if I starve myself again, she’d send me to the state hospital.   DMH involvement makes it a lot easier for this hospital admission to take place.  This was her plan all along!  Oh my god!  Now I’m stuck with this useless, irresponsible DMH person who is a complete appendage to me, and an “easy in” to the state hospital system.  Oh, shit.

Positive:  My contact person at Chipmunkapublishing has written to me to tell me that he’ll be sending me a big file, the proof of my paperback, on Tuesday.  I’m sure he’ll be e-mailing me with more information on this as well.  I was so pleased to meet him when I was in London in November.

Positive: After a lengthy search, I finally found a decent deal on plane tix to London in July.  I booked flight and lodgings both and will again be seeing my publisher.

I will be flat out broke and in serious debt for a long time.  It will get paid off.  It will get paid off.  It will get paid off.  And debt cannot harm me physically so long as I have a roof over my head and food on the table.  I do have low-income housing and I do have food stamps and there are food pantries.

I have a lot to do today.  I feel positive. I am looking toward the future.  My eyes are placed on my head in such a way that they face forward, not back, always looking in the direction that my body is headed.  I think this is telling me something.

 

Milk and bones, part one

I am only 54 years old and I am able to speak, walk on my feet unaided, manage money, find my way in the streets around town, use a computer and the Internet, use the telephone and a cellular telephone, use public transportation, read a book or magazine, take a taxi, administer my oral medications on my own responsibly and fill my prescriptions, keep my appointments, keep a reasonably clean home, attend to daily hygiene and cleanliness, pay my rent and utilities, let us not forget I make a damn good cup of coffee….

And yes, I did just last November travel to London and back all by myself on an airplane.   I found and purchased the ticket and booked the hotel online myself.   I decided to do this entirely on my own.  No one held my hand.

Now I have been told that there is no other mental patient in the entire DMH program that I am enrolled in that has these capabilities.

I am told that I am a “special case.”  Extremely well-educated.  Independent.  But really what’s shocking is that I can use a computer.

But you know, late last July, I was phoning into this blog from my hospital sick bed while hooked up to a heart monitor and IV.  I was too weak to get out of bed.  I was severely malnourished and dehydrated.  My pulse was under 35 beats per minute, probably dropping under 30 while I was asleep.  I fucking should have been dead.

This happened because I did not eat.

Things like this continue to me because I do not eat.  Now, it is my brain.  My mind.  My brain, body, mind.  There was a point at which I got a bit more advanced in my starvation techniques, sometime in December, and I accelerated the process some.  I did this not to destroy myself but because I believed that starvation was glorious and thinness was to be pursued to uphold that glory, whether I was alive or not.

In other words, I turned my back on the world.  I completely lost my faith in humans.  I don’t know the exact date so I don’t know how long it’s been.  But I haven’t reversed my steps.  I keep walking.

I keep thinking that there are good people in the world, there is good in life.  I find reasons.  Joy, even.  But the process is there, like an undercurrent.

I wrote up a document about the undercurrent and put it on my refrigerator.  What could be a more obvious place?  Someone will find it.

This Hunger Is Secret Paperback News

I am happy to say that as of just now, I have sent the file of This Hunger Is Secret: My Journeys Through Mental Illness and Wellness to Will Kettle at Chipmunkapublishing in London.  Will has been patiently waiting for this file for a long, long time.  I had hoped to have it ready before my trip, but I was in too much of a rush.  I got the file done two days ago and today was able to do the last five minutes of this and that on it and sent it off just a moment ago.

It is now 11pm in London and Will is most likely asleep or watching the telly or doing anything but checking his work e-mail.

I am very proud of the work I did on this book.  It was a hard book to write.  It was tough the whole way through.  This Hunger Is Secret is my master’s thesis.  Doing graduate school was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.  This memoir is representative of that work…and beyond.  The toughest semester was my final semester at school, when my eating disorder really began to take hold on me.  I worked so, so hard on my thesis, poured everything I had into it.  I lived at the library during the day, and then brought my work home with me and worked more on my thesis into the night.  I remember sometimes I had pages of my thesis all over my living room, chapters lined up in different orders, then changing my mind and re-ordering pages and pages.  I remember lying in bed and then coming upon an idea just as I was falling asleep, hopping out of bed and scribbling it down.  And I was starving myself the whole time.

Everything was electrical and exciting and magical then.  And you know, traveling to London last month brought back some of that electricity and excitement and magic to my life…as it does now.   On Tuesday I threw aside everything and delved into the file and got it done.  I must have made a zillion decisions about punctuation that day.  Technicalities….at the last minute, the file refused to attach (of course).  No, it did not go corrupt, and yes, I had it backed up in a zillion places.

I guess Christmastime is a time for magic and excitement and electricity and sparkles and snowflakes, too.  I have a Christmas tree now.  I bought it for eight bucks at CVS.  I haven’t had a Christmas tree for years.  I trekked to the Stop&Shop for it, thinking they would have a good selection, but it turned out that the CVS next door had just what I wanted.  This one is eighteen inches high and has its own lights.  The tree is a little lopsided but I am a Jew so I can’t complain.   The whole time I was lugging it home via the shortcut over the Charles River on the footpath where I probably shouldn’t have been cuz it was already very dark out, I was telling myself I would need to beat my heart very hard next Yom Kippur and attone for the sin of having shamelessly bought a Christmas tree and trafficked it over the Charles River, and erected it in my home, and then placed upon said tree an ornament from my church–yes, church not synagogue.  The ornament is round and white and upon it is a drawing of the First Parish Church of Watertown that a member of the congregation drew.  That is my Christmas tree.  Dad would have my head.

The Christmas tree, with its new ornament, is a tree that a week ago, or a month ago, or a year or two years ago I could never have predicted would be standing where it is now.  A year ago today I was preparing for my first 5k race.  Doing the race was an incredible accomplishment but immediately after I crashed.  What followed was 2011 and it has been a hellish year.  Two years ago I was about to enter treatment at the ED hospital for the first time.  I made the call to the admitting department on the day of my fifty-second birthday.  They told me to get packing.  I will keep this Christmas tree up until my fifty-fourth birthday in the beginning of January.  Then I think it will be good and ready to be taken down.  Meanwhile, it lights up the room nicely at night so I don’t have to leave a light on while I sleep.

Mind the Gap!

Those of you who live in or around London can have a good chuckle at my mishap.  I’m sure I’m not the only one who has had this misadventure.

After purchasing my Oyster Card, the London equivalent of Boston’s Charlie Card (transportation computer chip card that you can put money on), I set out to find the Tube, or Underground, at Heathrow Airport Terminal 5.  Someone pointed the way.  It wasn’t too difficult, as there were signs all over the place.  The line leading into London proper is called the Piccadilly Line.  I have always thought that this was a funny-sounding name.  London has 13 different lines, which include the “Overground” as well, the “Docklands Light Rail” (DLR).  There are also some faster trains, which are more expensive.  The Oyster Card will pay for the Tube (Underground and Overground) and buses, but not the faster trains.  One of these trains is called the Heathrow Express.  Everyone was asking me why I wasn’t taking this train, which would get me into the center of London in twenty minutes.  It costs one heck of a lot more, that’s why, and taking the Tube would be far more interesting, and the trip would take only an hour.  I had plenty of time to kill.  The world, in London, was mine.

I sat across from a woman who had also just left the airport.  I assumed that she was headed home, because she seemed relaxed and wasn’t looking at a map or glancing out the window every time we came to a stop.  She explained many things to me about the Tube, and we got into a friendly conversation.  One thing I remember asking her was whether the stop announcements were accurate.  These announcements were automated, as they are on Boston’s MBTA subways.  The subway automated announcements are always messing up.  “No,” she said, “they are always right on.”

But I didn’t ask her what “Mind the gap” meant.  This was repeatedly announced at most stops.  I assumed it meant to stand away from the edge of the platform when the tube arrived, so you wouldn’t get hit by it.  They sometimes announce that in the Boston subways.

I was to find out otherwise.

It came time for my stop.  Out I ran.  Fast.  Too fast.  How was I to know?

I found out, then, what the “gap” was.  Boom!  Suddenly, I was down on the floor of the Tube station, my feet in the Tube, the rest of me on the concrete, my rolling suitcase god knows where.

This is what the “gap” is: It is a huge step.  The step is either up or down.  You never know, but the step is there, coming out of the Tube and onto the platform.  Yes, I had fallen on a huge step–the gap.  This is what Mind the Gap means.

WTF?!  Why can’t they have them level?  This is one of the true mysteries of London that I will never be able to solve.

Luckily, the kind woman with whom I had been speaking gently helped me up, explaining that I had attempted to get off at the wrong stop to begin with!  Others helped as well, and I got settled back in.  Two stops later was the correct stop.  I got off very, very carefully, and proceeded to the Circle Line.  From then on, I minded the gap very, very well.

Now, back home in the US, I’ve got a few bumps and bruises to remind me of the occasion.  It’s been over a week now since I’ve been back, and the bumps are fading, but my memory of the London Tube, the way the system looks like spaghetti on a map, its cleanliness and efficiency, the smartly-dressed people that ride it, and most of all, the Gap, will stay with me for a long, long time.

The Bathroom Sink

I didn’t clean the bathroom sink for a long time and it was filthy.  Every time I looked at it, I felt disgusted with myself.  I looked at the sink and then at my face in the mirror.  The face I saw wasn’t mine.  It was someone else’s.  I said to that face, “You are a fat, ugly, lazy slob,” and I hated that face, that person in there, that me that wasn’t me.

Then, I got on an airplane to London.  I walked around on the London streets, where many elegant people were hurrying to their jobs.  I was shabbily dressed, with my folded-up Google Maps directions to guide me.  The people walked swiftly past me, and I thought about how smart they looked, in their business suits.  I have never owned such formal clothes, or worked a fancy nine to five job.  But the London people probably had bathroom sinks, too, and ghosts of their own they saw in their mirrors.

I went back to my little room at the hotel.  The little room had not one but two mirrors.  I looked in neither of them.  Who, after all, can trust a mirror in a country where the people talk funny and drive on the wrong side of the road?  But the whole room was clean–the bathroom, the towels, and the bed.  I slept.

I got on an airplane and came home to find the same mess that I’d left behind: dishes in the kitchen, papers everywhere, and three weeks’ worth of laundry to do.  I went to take a shower and saw my demon, the bathroom sink, that looked as filthy as it ever had been, ever.

I didn’t have to look in the mirror.  I knew that the person I’d see in there still wasn’t me.  But it didn’t matter anymore whether I hated her or not because the bathroom mirror was steamed up from the shower.  I knew then what I had to do.  I found some Ajax and a couple of paper towels.  I thought it would take hours, but it took only a minute or two.  I cleaned the bathroom sink.

I’m back!

I’m back from London!  I’ll give a full report sometime in the next few days.  I had a great time.  I didn’t get lost in the Tube and the plane ended up in the right country.  I found out the hard way what “Mind the Gap” means.  For those of you who live in London, and also for those of you who already know what “Mind the Gap” means, you are probably having a good chuckle right now, at my expense.  Needless to say, I am in one piece and nothing is broken.  For those of you who don’t know…just wait and I’ll tell you!

Getting ready to see Dr. P

I feel a little better today.  I have more energy.  I did something with my hair.  It was less of a project trying to get myself into the shower, brush my teeth, and dress myself.  I’m a little less overwhelmed thinking about all the things I have to do before taking off on my trip Monday.  Actually, there is very little left to do, when I think about it.

I did a bit of sleeping this morning, for an hour or so, then decided that I needed to stay put for a while and that since I’m headed off for church tomorrow anyway, I would wait till then, and stay home today until it’s time to see Dr. P.

I took 125 mgs of Imipramine last night, as Dr. P instructed.  This is the maximum dose for this bottle that she called in.  I was concerned because those pills are so tiny.  How could a tiny pill possibly do anything?  Obviously, they’re doing something, or metabolizing at least.  I know this because I’m experiencing a nasty side effect: dry mouth.  I have a nasty taste in my mouth.  Brushing my teeth frequently helps, but the effect wears off very quickly.  I’m going to try carrying a sip bottle of water around with me and sipping on it, or carrying Tic-Tacs around with me.  The latter might be a good solution for traveling on the airplane.  I would bring a sip bottle and fill it at the airport.  I don’t believe in buying water when you can just as easily get it from the tap.  At airports, a bottle of water costs over $3.  That plus it’s a waste of plastic.  Anyway, the Imipramine is indeed getting into my system.  I seem to be sleeping a little deeper.  The problem is that I still have many interruptions during the night, generally averaging once an hour.  I wish that sleep provided a relief from my depression.  It doesn’t.  When I wake up in the night, I feel intensely depressed, and I feel the urge to smash something.

My friend called today, saying she was very worried about my traveling to another country in the state that I’m in, especially given the tightened security policies and the fact that I will be alone and know no one in London.  I guess a lot of people feel this way when it comes to travel.  I assured her that I’ll be fine.  At the time of our conversation, I felt kind of weird inside.  I didn’t exactly know what to say.

The more I think about it as the day progresses, the more I know I’ll be okay.  My confidence is continuing to grow.  Today’s annoyances aren’t annoying me too much.  I am dealing with them.

I just hope this lasts.