New Page on this site: My Way of Life

I just added a new page to this site describing the way I try to live my life or want to live my life or am living my life.  Go up to the “pages” part of the blog (in its current format, these are the tabs at the top of the page) and there is my My Way of Life page.

Here’s part of what’s on it:

I am different.

They say everyone is unique.  I have a history of being persecuted because I am different.  Either I stand out in a crowd or others find reason to single me out for a difference that is merely perceived.  Over the years, I have made efforts to blend in and be like everyone else.  I did this in order to avoid being teased, bullied, discriminated against, excluded, labeled, stereotyped, imprisoned, censored, brainwashed, enslaved, and assaulted by my peers.

I am considered to be very short in stature.  I walk with my feet turned out slightly, and carry myself a certain way,  mostly because of the way my body is made, but also to avoid falling and out of habit.   For this reason many people have said they can spot me from afar.  As a child I was considered to be a poor athlete because I ran slowly, had difficulty hitting a ball with a bat, and when I tried to kick a soccer ball, I missed.

From the beginning, I always spoke much more slowly than others.   This made me appear unintelligent, and I found difficulty asserting myself because my speech was slow.  It is easy to interrupt me mid-sentence.  In my thirties, my speech became slurred because of certain medications I took, but this was a temporary condition.   Over the past year my way of speaking has changed dramatically.  This is most likely connected to the vocal tic I developed.

For whatever reason, I was born with far above average intelligence, for which I was persecuted.  All my life, I tried to hide my intelligence, disguise it, lie about it, or eradicate it to be like other people.

The way I think is different from the way most people think.  My father recognized this in me when I was very young.  He wondered if I would become a great scientist.  When I told him I preferred to compose music, he was disappointed at first, but then accepted my wish.  At school, teachers observed that I day dreamed often, and noticed that I thought differently from others.  Some disciplined me, some sent me to the guidance counselor or sent notices home to my parents, but many teachers enjoyed talking to me.

I tried to dress in clothing that was like other people’s clothing.  I tried to act confident during times that I was pretending I was someone I was not, but it was difficult.  Every time that I have held a position of employment, I felt like a fake.  It was extremely difficult to keep up the act.  I tried desperately to fit in, and was usually fired because my efforts failed.  I am not surprised that at the few jobs I held, I wore make-up on my face.  Make-up is not becoming on me.  This act of “doing one’s face,” which comes naturally to many, was for me an act of desperation.

Because I was persecuted for being different, I learned to hide myself and keep secrets.  When the pain became too much, I turned to the mental health system.  The mental health system tried to fix my pain by making me more normal.  Mostly, they tried to change my thinking, which they considered “sick,” by doing therapy on me and giving me pills.  The mental health system often uses the word “normalize.”  Now, I understand why.

In the process of all the efforts to make me just like everyone else, the mental health system, its institutions and personnel teased me, bullied me, and discriminated against me.  I was labeled, stereotyped, imprisoned, censored, brainwashed, enslaved, and assaulted.  I was often excluded from care because I had become poor, and also because I had grown older and more worn out.  Eventually, I excluded myself, and declared myself free of the system.

Today, I enjoy being different.  I don’t want to be like everyone else.  One drawback to not hiding or disguising my difference is that I face severe discrimination on a daily basis.  Most people don’t want to associate with me because of who I am.  I try to accept this, and move on.

“Bad grammar, hideous colors”

Hey,

Someone sent in a comment saying my site had “hideous colors and that my posts used bad grammar.”  Unfortunately, Askimet (the filter) alerted me that this was a spam comment.  Sometimes, Askimet messes up, so I double-checked on this, and yes, it was a spammer.  I can’t allow their posts to show up here and infiltrate my site.  There are actually very few that have even bothered to post comments here, so deleting them has never been an issue.  I just go through  them  and x them out every now and then.

It’s really unfortunate.  I very much looked forward to putting this one through as legit, and allowing it to post.  I wanted to respond to it by saying, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

Hmm…would this be a copyright violation? Naw, it’s just one line, commonly known.  Might even be in the public domain.  Hell if I know.

You can stretch this.  Like posting links to sites that tend to allow posters to violate copyright law, not that I had any clue, but the article in the link itself is original?  Very sticky business.  You just have to pick this one apart and pick it apart and decide if linking to a domain is sustaining it by providing more hits.  I guess it depends on whether the hits bring in money to sustain the domain.

I was “policed.”  It was done automatically by computer.  I have thoughts on this one.  Not that I need therapy and pills to correct these passionate notions or thoughts deemed “wrong” because I am a little kooky in the head.

Kookiness gets policed, sectioned twelved, put on “checks.”  Weekly weight checks.  Protest marchers get rounded up.  I’ve been rounded up all my life and sent to the back of the class for speaking out.  It was kinda nice, though, because you can hide that book you’re secretly reading behind some mimeographed worksheets, and no one will know.

I do always have this fear that someday I’ll wake up and my site will disappear off the map.  I do back it up.  Contrary to popular belief, I’m not dumb.

Julie Greene is back: Never fear, I am always here

My blog disappeared.  Wow.  I received an e-mail from a friend letting me know and asking me if I was okay.  It was a good thing cuz I was able to straighten out the whole thing very quickly and get back to my same  ole online presence loud and clear and big-mouthed as ever.  It was an automatic computer thingy that wordpress dot com does that I don’t want to mull over.  Well, I do.  But I want to let you know that I’m back.

I do not shut up.

I made up my mind quite some time back that if I see something that is flat out wrong, along the lines of social injustice, I’m not going to waste time getting therapized as a way to fix the social injustice.

You do not make applesauce by putting a chicken in the oven.  Cuz no matter how well you spice the chicken, you will never, ever end up with applesauce.

(Oh, by the way, mention of specific foods  is “triggering” to people, or so I’ve been told.  I’m not going to delete my metaphor.  Deal with your entriggerment any healthy or unhealthy way you want.  I haven’t actually stuck chicken and applesauce on a table and demanded that you eat it, have I?)

If I, personally, take a pill to dull my passion about this social injustice.

If I am going to sit in a group and talk about it, it’s not going to be a group that teaches me to cope with passion.  It’s not going to be a group that teaches me to correct my thinking patterns.  My thinking patterns are wonderful.  My thinking is what makes me who I am.  If I write something that isn’t fresh and special, if it says nothing new, there’s no reason to put it out there or expect that anyone will consider reading or listening.  This goes for all writers.  Treasure your uniqueness and let it take you to a place where no one has ever, ever been.  Tread unbroken ground.  This is the revolution.

If I am to be part of a group of human beings, we will make change.  We will plan, and act.  We will compare ideas.  We will consider possibilities and dreams and hopes.

We will rethink our own backyards and cultivate them a new way.  This is the beginning of change.

I have a personal stake in this.  Of course, I didn’t need to say that, because it is redundant.  This is change.  The personal and the political are inseparable.  I knew it all along, well before I stumbled into my eating disorder, and then, year after year, walked the path of the downtrodden, the misunderstood, the invisible.

I am blessed because of this mission.  So few have this opportunity.  I have the strength, the ability, the courage, the gift, the driven nature within me, and the dire necessity to do this.  Is it my duty?  I don’t see life that way.  Maybe it’s because I’ve never been a parent.  I do this because it’s my only option, my only way out.  To survive I must continue to strive toward change.

I made a sister site.  It’s in the workings, barely started.

Here’s the link:

adreamforus.wordpress.com  The one post I made describes what the site will be about.  I love you folks so much.

A new page with a photo of me

I have finally decided once and for all.  The world needs to know the reality of binge eating, that it is dangerous and deadly.  I need to put this photo up for the world to see, just in case I myself die while binge eating.  It can indeed happen and it very well may.

It doesn’t matter what you weigh.  The danger of binge eating has nothing to do with being overweight.  You will see this in my photo.  I am underweight.

No, I do not throw up.  Throwing up has its dangers.  NOT THROWING UP HAS ITS DANGERS, TOO.  Why?  Because you walk around with all that crap in you…see my photo…not for ten minutes…but for hours…in my case, for a day, or longer.  People who have suffered long-term starvation, as I have, have slowed peristalsis.  This means their digestion is slow, slow, slow.  Crap sits in my stomach forever before it goes anywhere, then moves, inch by inch, down my intestinal tract.

I have eaten, and seen the food in my belly.  When you are very skinny, you can see food in there.  Then I have watched it go down, inch by inch, each day.  Yes, it is that slow, and yes, most Western doctors laugh at me when I tell them this.

I have a 32-year history of binge eating.  Each time your stomach is over-stretched, blood circulation is cut off, killing stomach cells.  Dead stomach cells don’t stretch.  They snap, and break.  Get what I’m saying?  Has anyone ever taken a look in there?  Of course not.  I don’t know how I’m going to get them to do an autopsy of me to prove that this has happened.  Autopsies, I’ll bet, are expensive.  It’s a mental patient’s word against their’s.   And I’m just faking it, right?  Making a mountain out of a molehill, right?  Crying wolf, right?  Of course, if I had Blue Cross and Blue Shield, it would be a whole different ball game.

So, anyway, I finally put the binge-belly photo into my computer.  It’s ready to be posted onto a page.  I’m going to password-protect the page, and I’ll give you the password on a separate page.  I want people to COME TO MY SITE to view the photo and not just see it in passing on Google.  This plus I don’t want the press to see it after my paperback comes out, so if you Google Julie Greene, this binge-belly photo won’t pop up, ha ha.

Oh, by the way, if I binge every day, I look like that permanently.  Like, I look like that RIGHT NOW.  I have looked like that for days.  I wake up with that belly and have it all day long.  I live with it.  It doesn’t freaking go away.

Now do you get it?

Within two hours, the photo, and all the links, will be up.

******************

Click on this link, here, and enter the password, Linkpage.

There is a problem….

I just lost a bunch of work….I’m not sure if the problem is with WordPress dot com, or with my library Internet connection….I can’t save drafts….I lost about two hours of work on the post I’ve promised you….Sorry folks I’ll rewrite….

Worst Case Scenario: Having Fun with the Power of Negativity

I had a little fun with a decision I had to make today.   Walk, or cab?  When you figure that cabs cost a fortune, walking is the obvious choice…or is it?

I recently discovered that it isn’t all that far to walk to my primary care physician’s office.  It’s about 40 minutes if I walk fast but not ridiculously fast, that is, not walking and constantly reminding myself, “Gotta get a move on!” but walking while listening to loud, raucous rock music and not really giving a shit about anything or anybody.  It took 20 minutes to get to the bike shop and the other 20 to get up a steep hill to Dr. K’s office.  Yeah, I timed myself.

But today the weather……..let me put it mildly: sucked.  This was the pits.  I can take rain, snow, sleet, thunderstorms (Puzzle would disagree), blazing heat I happen to love, sub-zero even (believe it or not), but this?  No way.  Today was miserable.  It was cold…and windy.  I hate windy weather.  We’re talking a biting wind that gets into your shoes, bites your face, goes through your hat and bites your earlobes, and goes up your sleeves and jeans.  The worst of the worst windy weather, for me, is the kind of windy weather that blows the sand on the street and the salt onto my glasses and then I can’t see.  It wasn’t that bad today but this wind put me in a wicked sour mood.  I mean wicked.  My doctor even asked me why my face looked “tan.”  Well geez.  I told her the damn cold, biting wind has been on it all day long.  And today, it got colder, and colder, and colder.  It started out above 50.  Trust me, it didn’t even feel close to that.  Then it dropped, and dropped and dropped.  Within a couple of hours, it had dropped 20 degrees.  I was not a pleasant person to be around.  Thankfully, no one was around me.

So my appointment was at 1pm.  When I got home from walking Puzzle I was faced with this question of cab or walking, which at this point was up for debate, given that I already knew about the afternoon’s predicted temperature drop and continuing sadistic winds.  I remembered the lively speculation I’d enjoyed while on our walk.  I had let my mind wander around, thinking of the Worst Case Scenario.

Say I walked to Dr. K’s office and froze my butt off.  I’d have frostbit toes, of course.  I’d be shivering and never really warm up, even though that building where her office is located is heated okay enough.  Then what happens?  I have to take my clothes off?  Dang!  So I go through all this examination rigamarole, and she isn’t too pleased to see me in such a shitty, negative mood.  I go home to my freezing cold apartment, and the only way I have at my disposal to warm up is to take a shower.  Of course the hot water isn’t working.  Now, the Housing Authority has decided to heat the hallway this year.  They have it heated plenty.  Why can’t they heat my apartment the way they heat the hallway?  I decide to do what I always do to warm this place up: I put ice on the thermostat.  I drop the ice on my foot.

That’s about as far as I got with the Worst Case Scenario.  Puzzle and I arrived back at my building, where I threw out Puzzle’s poops, and soon forgot about it all and stopped my silliness.  I’m only remembering it now.  But it was all this speculation that influenced my decision to break the bank and take a cab.  It is a five minute drive, depending on whether you make it through this certain traffic light before it turns red.  Whatever.

I’ll tell you my logic in all this.  Being in a wicked, wicked sour mood, and coming home and still being in a wicked sour mood, would make for a lousy day and a lousy night and might carry over into tomorrow.  It could rub off onto other people.  Not that I’m ever around anyone, but you never know.  Just vibes.  You know, negativity.

The cab ride was nine bucks.  That was super expensive, I must say, that plus I tipped, I think, another four or five bucks but I don’t really remember for sure.  Was it worth it?  Yep.  I stayed warm.  It was a little tough getting home, but there were no waits for buses.  I had a bit of a walk, but I stopped everywhere I could, like at the library and a couple of stores along the way, like, you know, window shopping, etc, just to stay warm, and I made it back.  And yes, I put ice on the thermostat for a bit.  Things could be worse.  Winter doesn’t last forever.  And I think the hot water is actually working tonight.

I just looked at the clock on my computer.  In a minute, my site blackout, protesting Internet censorship, will end, at 8pm.  The lights will come on again.  You will see me and read me again.  Maybe I, too, will see things in a new, different light.  Maybe it’s good to see things from all angles, positive and negative.  Maybe it’s good to see all possibilities and scenarios.

It is indeed possible that I may recover from my illness, anorexia nervosa.  I have read about people with all sorts of mental illnesses, deemed hopeless cases, either locked in back wards or on their death beds, who ended up making huge strides eventually against all odds and contrary to all predictions by not only “experts” but by everyone that knew them.

The thing about anorexia, and in the case of certain other mental illnesses, is that the sufferer doesn’t necessarily want to recover.  This is not due to selfishness or stupidity or because the person is “doing it to themselves,” but because of the nature of the illness, and if you think otherwise, then you are not educated about anorexia nervosa.  Schizophrenia can be this way at times.  Mania can be this way.  A person who is depressed, on the other hand, is often aware that he or she is depressed (but not always), and this awareness can be painful, as is, of course, depression itself.  Most people who are depressed wish to rid themselves of depression and be happy again.  I think this is a fair guess.  But you can’t say this of anorexia, because of the simple fact that the person with anorexia fears weight gain, and probably wants to lose more weight.  It’s as simple as that.

While in the shower this morning, I thought about the fact that I hadn’t weighed myself for…let’s see…simple math here…ten days.  I’m not about to break that record.  I can tell when I’m over x or under x.  I am just over.  I can determine this rather quickly.  I was able to guess within a pound what I weighed today, and I discovered that was absolutely correct in my estimate when I stepped on Dr. K’s scale.

My weight is okay.  I’m not going to freak.  My clothes fit and I can wear them just fine.  And I’d better wear my clothes.  The biting wind might be dying down, but it’s getting down to 14 degrees tonight and I sure as heck can’t go out there naked.

Readership of this blog has more than doubled in the past year

Readership of this blog has more than doubled in the past year.  First of all, I have my subscribers who receive my entries via e-mail.  Then there are people who drop in out of cyberspace either daily or, more likely, once every few days, to see what I’m up to.  I suspect there are 50 to 100 of these people.  There are people who are directed here from other sites such as sites that list interesting blogs to check out.  There is a site that lists one of my dog sweater patterns among other dog sweater patterns to check out.

However, many readers Google me!  The topic that brings in readers daily is dog sweaters.  Some people have contacted me to tell me that they came here to look at the dog sweaters, then got interested in the other things here, and stuck around.  Other topics Googled include refeeding edema, which brings in readers daily, my sprained ankle saga, my trileptal ordeal, my knee injury, tardive dyskinesia, and of course, many eating disorders issues.  If you want to read the story about my anorexia/eating disorders history, click here for the page.

As the time approaches, I will be discussing the release of my memoir in paperback form.  The timing of this depends on how quickly I’m able to get my act together and do the necessary work that the publisher (Chipmunkapublishers) requires me to do before the paperback is processed.  Right now, I’m dealing with so many problems with my anorexia that it’s really difficult to get this work done.  I get to the library to work about every ten days or so.  However, when I get there, I get lots of work done.  So things in that area are progressing.

Welcome to my blog, readers.  I hope you are continuing to enjoy yourselves.

Julie

I updated most of my “pages”

I updated most of my pages.  These are the things you click on up on top, where it says “Julie Greene’s Blog” and then there are a bunch of buttons, “Home,” “Welcome,” “About My Knitting,” etc.

Unfortunately, most of the pages reflect a certain amount of the hopelessness I’ve been feeling.  For instance, on the page on anorexia, instead of saying I’m committed to recovery, it says how hopeless I am that I’ll ever recover, and that I’m not committed.  On the knitting page, it says that I used to knit all the time, but now I wish I knitted more.  The running page mentions my current injury.  The pages about my book stated that the paperback would come out by May.  I’m way behind on my work on the paperback, and of course, once I’m done, the publisher and I will be spending a bit of time on it together, plus the cover has to get proofed, so there will be quite a bit of delay.  I put, “late in 2011,” but really, it’ll be 2012 I think.

Yeah, maybe I’m in a negative mood, and maybe I should have waited…until I feel…positive when I do these pages?  But I never feel positive anymore.  Never.

Sorry.  I just don’t.

New Improvements to juliegreene.name

I fixed it up!  Go check it out!  I also made the site more accessible to search engines.

http://www.juliegreene.name

I’ve made some changes to www.juliegreene.name – check it out!

I’ve made some changes to www.juliegreene.name!  I want to make more.  Mostly, I updated the pages, stating that the book was currently available, and provided more links to the Chipmunka website where you can download the book.  It was a lot of work to do this.  Here’s the book download link again:

http://chipmunkapublishing.co.uk/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=1709

Have a nice day!