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.

 

News about me and my writing

I can ‘t really backtrack my entire thought processes this morning.  I thought a lot about the link I posted yesterday, or maybe it was earlier today, the You-Tube done by, I assume, a high school girl who had anorexia.  I started thinking a whole lot about this kid.  I guessed that she was sixteen.  I don’t know why, but sixteen strikes me as an extremely miserable age.

Sixteen was miserable for me, and I didn’t even have an illness.  I was just a confused kid.  I think all the kids were confused.  If you ask most people, they’ll talk about the “good times” they had at high school, and look on their times participating in clubs and teams as fun and exciting.  They’ll remember how fun it was to party with the other kids, and to get a little naughty.

Sixteen wasn’t like that for me.  None of high school was like that for me.  You’ll see this when you read This Hunger Is Secret.  The experiences I had in high school were more than unusual.  They were bizarre.  No, I was not mentally ill at the time.  I was involved in a very twisted, abusive friendship, and let me twist your arm a bit more and tell you that I was the one being abused.  Bullying?  I guess if you had to give it a name, any name, maybe it could be called that.

We’re talking about someone who called herself my best friend.  We were always, always together, she and I.  We were known for this.  Such pairings, these close friendships, are not unusual in high school, and on the surface it appeared that we were just another of those duos that are inseparable, occasionally to the point of getting on everyone’s nerves.

But I had a secret.  Actually, I was full of secrets.  This Hunger Is Secret was given that title for a reason.  In high school, I pasted a smile onto my face and made sure it stayed there all day long so no one would know that I felt like a complete fuck-up inside.  I hated being her slave and I hated that she ran my life and I hated that I didn’t have a life of my own.  I was so completely dominated by this girl that if I wanted to do something, I had to ask permission, and she knew my every move, all day long.  I had no privacy and no dignity.  I was allowed no other friends.  What friends I had previously watched her turn me into her robot, and she either stole my other friends and took them as her own, or rejected my prior friends, pushing me further into isolation.

Perhaps, if you have been in an abusive partnership, you can see stark similarities.  But we were thirteen years old when we met, freshmen in high school.  I had only started menstruating and wearing a bra the previous school year.  She was the same age.  We were children.

And no, this wasn’t a one-week experiment.  This lasted four years.  For four years, I pretended to be thrilled to have this really close friend.  I pretended to be having fun.  Pretending itself was fun and challenging.  I practiced my faces in the mirror.  As the abuse worsened, I challenged myself to see just how much I could take.  Problem was, it had already gone so far and so out of control that as a powerless child, there was nothing I could do to make it stop.

We met right away when freshman year started, in the high school band.  Come winter, my family got involved.  They invited her to come skiing with us.  Now, there were four kids: me, my two baby brothers, and my friend, who was also one of us kids, one of the family.  She was blonde and so were my brothers.  I have brown hair, so it looked like I was the friend and she and my brothers were the family.  She started calling my parents Mom and Dad.  They let her do this.  She started inviting herself to participate in family activities.  They let her do this.  My parents  encouraged and endorsed this friendship, saying it was the best thing that could have happened to me.  Do you see the trap I was in?  For the four years of high school it only got worse and worse.

She started bossing around my brothers.  They were very little, and didn’t know anything.  She bossed me around and hit me in front of my little brothers.  She started bossing around my parents.  They didn’t recognize that she was doing this.  Instead, they started doing things to try to please her.  But if you’d asked either of them, she was a faithful, generous friend to me and a wonderful addition to our family.  Our sick, sick family.

One of my brothers started acting up in school.  He got in trouble because of temper tantrums and bad behavior.  He got kicked out of a bunch of things and I guess you could say that at the time he had become a troubled kid.  He ended up having to see a shrink and we went to a family therapist as part of all this.  Family therapy was hopeless with my parents, the way they were, never really listening to us kids or to anyone for that matter.  We burned out three family therapists over a period of, I  guess, a year, probably less.  I was sixteen then.  My brother seems okay now, and is married and has kids and stuff.  We don’t talk about it.

I was sixteen then.  I didn’t have an illness, and I wasn’t messed up on drugs, but every day, I seriously considered taking my life.  Sometimes it seemed like the only way out.  I had no one to talk to.  Everyone thought I was happy.  If I had the guts to tell them what I thought and felt inside, and what I thought about my friend, they wouldn’t have believed me anyway.

I am asking you to believe me now.  When my memoir, This Hunger Is Secret: My Journeys Through Mental Illness and Wellness comes out, the truth will also come out.  My chapter, “Locker #47,” describes my high school years.  It is written in my voice, my voice at sixteen.  My memoir is already out as an e-book, but the paperback version will be out very, very soon and it will be worth the wait.  My story will be in print, on paper, as a book that people can hold, and turn the pages, and see what happened.  And this isn’t the only story in there, of course.  But with this publication happening within maybe a month, six weeks maybe, my life is going to change.  A lot.  The book isn’t just going to sit there.  I am going to publicize.  I want people to know what it’s like to have a mental illness.  I know it’s really hard to publicize and market a book, especially when you’re not the super aggressive pushy type, and not even sociable, but I’ve got a handful of ideas, and the burning desire to want my voice to be heard.

I was thinking all this while getting ready to take Puzzle out this morning, showering and brushing my teeth and the like, when I realized that today is January 20 already, about a year since I left McLean Hospital in 2011 and began The It Notebook, a journal that I kept while I was very ill.  I kept the journal for two months, then ended it.  I believe every entry can be found here at this blog.  I have not yet written the Introduction and Afterward of The It Notebook, which are the only two parts of the book that I will write in polished form.  The rest is written once, then left as is.  It is, after all, merely a journal.  I plan to print out maybe two dozen copies of this very short book, and sell them for cheap, a buck or two, at readings, to anyone who may be curious.  I consider this book to be a historical document of a very hard time of my life.  Much of it is written in verse.

But I asked myself, when I thought of The It Notebook, what I had done since.  What have I written?  I have not been involved in any project.  Not really.  I started a novel revision course but I didn’t have the mental capability to concentrate well enough or work consistently enough on it to follow through.  I am So Cold, and Hungry in My Soul, my fifth and favorite book, the novel I was trying to revise, remains in first draft form.  (Dang, I love that book.)  Besides this?

Besides this?  Besides this?  I have just turned 54 years old.  I have survived 53, the most hellish year anyone could possibly imagine, and for the entire year, every day, I came to the computer, and sat here for hours, blogging, writing about myself, yes, myself, telling the world exactly what I was experiencing, feeling and thinking.  I told the world about my suffering and misery.  I told the world things that I hadn’t told anyone before.   I wrote in my blog things I would never tell my therapist.  When I had no hope, I wrote about my hopelessness.  And when I felt that there was nothing left to live for, I said that, too.

I wrote so much about myself that I’d say that by now, I know myself very, very well.  I think I have so much understanding through my writing and so much will to share my words that it’s time to start writing a new memoir.

I started planning things out while walking Puzzle.  Chapters.  Topics.  What the heck I want this book to be about.  How I want to say it.  We came home.  I fed Puzzle, packed for the library, and left.  I stopped at the church on the way over and said hello to the minister.  He was the first to hear of my plans.  At the library, I wrote down notes longhand.  Just ideas.  Some came out as surprises.  Some were rather detailed.  Others came out in spurts.

But I had brought something with me that has never left the house.  It was my calories and weight notebook.  The secret notebook where I have written my food.  I began this notebook October 9, 2011.  The first page doesn’t contain any calories or food.  It has the letter “S” written on it.  S stands for starvation.  I didn’t want to write the whole word.  I was afraid, I guess, that someone might see it.  I read the entire notebook, from the beginning, in October, until now.  Then I wrote today’s entry.

“Friday, Jan 20, 2012
beginning my new book
My memoir about my anorexia
I did not eat today
Library.

Reading this entire notebook now
I have been so sick
I have put myself so close to death
Not just once or twice, but
every day that I have kept this notebook.  Begun Oct 9, 2011.

Not recorded: For a month at least, and ending mid-December, I bought 2 2L bottles diet soda, guzzled them @ night.  I stopped.

I still desire thinness and intend to continue starving myself.  This is how I survive.”

When the library closed, I walked over to CVS and bought a new notebook.  I decided to include the “S” notebook, along with last summer’s Starvation Spreadsheets, in my new memoir.  Somehow, I’ll figure out which parts need to be edited out.

After I got home, I read the entire “S” notebook again, and cried.  I’ll share some of it with you sometime.  Maybe.  Or maybe you’ll just have to wait for the paperback.

Step by Step on Saturday Night

Weird things are happening that I’m not sure I want to get into.  I’ve been looking up my meds and side effects and such and will soon make a decision about tonight…which ones I will leave out…it’s not like I want to stop meds altogether but being on meds is scary to me right now….

I am finally free of the sickness I had.  Or at least I don’t seem to have a fever anymore or diarrhea.  But the edema remains.  My legs look awful.  My ankles are round and my legs are stocky but my stomach is a little flatter.   No one has to see my ugly legs.  I keep them covered.  Still, they make me feel horrible about myself.

I stopped diet soda days ago.  Tomorrow, no caffeine.   I wrote that down.

I read today about the impact of Karen Carpenter’s death.  Just a short article.  What struck me was that the article mentioned that when Karen was found dead, she was lying naked right next to her clothes wardrobe.

I have been reading one heck of a lot about dead bodies and ways that people die lately.  Unusual deaths and controversial deaths.  Suicides and why people commit suicide.  Lotsa You-Tubes.  There are whole websites on the topic of death and its varieties.

Humans disappoint me.  It has been one thing after another.

On Thursday, my publisher wrote that he is going to contact me this coming week regarding my paperback, and we will be getting it out in the new year.  That is not too long away.

That is not too long away.  It will be cold tonight.  Tomorrow is Sunday.

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.

Coping with my eating disorder while Hurricane Irene bears down

I am a person with anorexia nervosa who was recently hospitalized for severe malnutrition and dehydration.  When I went in I was in pretty bad shape.  I was in a medical ward for ten days and spent a few days “upstairs where I *belonged*” in the psychiatric ward, which was hell for me.  I was then released and spent eight days on the worst streak of binge eating I have ever experienced.  I went back in voluntarily, spent 24 amazing hours in the psych emergency room, where I did a lot of healing, then went “upstairs” again for a few days, and was released.

I have been pretty much okay.  I am delighted to be out.  Hearing of the storm was just another challenge for me.  In New England we’re due for something I’ve never experienced before.  I’ve seen bad rain, sure.  I think everyone living in the East has.  It can come down in pellets even in the heat of the summer.  It can be dry and hot one moment, and then, 20 seconds before the bus arrives, the sky can open up, and I’m soaked by the time I get on.  Sometimes, an umbrella is just the thing to bring on a bus trip into Boston.  Other times, an umbrella isn’t quite enough because it’s either too windy, and the umbrella turns inside-out (grrr) or the rain is so thick that nothing will protect against it.  On those days, it’s best to leave your laptop and electronics at home.  Some insist that they only need a hood to protect themselves against the rain.  I have never understood this thinking.  My little Puzzle wears one of the 17 or 18 (lost count) wool sweaters I have knit for her.  These are naturally waterproof.  Her fur isn’t.  I, in turn, wear one of her matching wool  hats and we go in style, even in the middle of summer.

But this will be different.  It’s like those winter emergencies we have all the time here in Boston, only it’s summer and we don’t get emergency weather in the summer except for a couple of days when it’s a bit hot out.  I have never been evacuated from my home.  Being a person with a psychiatric disability, that is, I do not have a mobility problem, but what some people call a “brain disorder,” I still end up spending a lot of time at home even though a physical problem isn’t what’s keeping me here.  My home is my home and because I’m here a lot, I cherish it more (I think) than someone who just finds it a place to sleep at night and store food in the fridge.  I haven’t had what folks think of as a “job” for a long, long time.  When I had “jobs,” they didn’t agree with me.  I guess when you think of things you value, “job” isn’t one of them for me.  Work is.

They say mental illness can’t be seen.  Sometimes, on public transportation (here in Boston called the “T”, which, by the way, will be closed Sunday and Monday) you see posters of smiling faces and on the poster is says, “What does autism look like?” or, “What does schizophrenia look like?”  Actually, anorexia nervosa is often a very visible illness because of the person’s extreme thinness.  But you don’t see that on the posters, just in the fashion ads in magazines.

I got online and read all the experts’ advice on how to prepare for the storm.  I’ve done what I can within reason.  Also, I have my own brand of common sense.  There are things they don’t tell you about that you just have to figure out for yourself.  They tell you to stock up on diapers, but they don’t say anything about toilet paper or “feminine” supplies.

Now is the time to think about what “things” I value most and might want to protect from harm at this time, or bring with me if Puzzle and I are evacuated.  Some things that immediately came to mind were my degree certificates, some of the best sweaters that I knitted for Puzzle (I can’t bring all of them), and a few of my old handwritten journals I have from years past (there are over 20 of these and I’m just going to have to pick a few to bring) that will be lost forever if I don’t take them with me.  As a memoirist, I find journals an important tool for writing and remembering.  I also find them useful when I want to learn about my life years ago, and about the onset of my eating disorder.  I have maybe 700 books here, some are quite expensive reference books, that would be destroyed if this place flooded.  There’s nothing I can do about that.  My friend recently gave me a wall quilt she made for me, that is quite lovely and easily packable in a suitcase.

I asked myself: If I have to go to a shelter, I won’t be able to weigh myself, what do I do…I might fly into a panic!  I dared myself to pack the scale.  No, I am not really packing, just packing mentally, but I dared myself anyway.  Instead, I took the scale off the floor, wrapped it in plastic in case this place floods later on Sunday (it’s Sunday already on the East Coast) and put it in the closet. Now, I will see how long I can leave it there, even after the storm is gone and left us, till I take it out again, step up on it, and admonish myself for not being as thin and starved as I’d like to be.

They told us to stock up on food and water.  I have water.  Food, that’s another story.  It’s a tough thing for someone with an eating disorder to deal with food, natural disaster or not.  Even when faced with a life-and-death situation, food is an issue…why?  Because eating disorders, for you idiots out there that don’t know, are fatal illnesses, that is, you can die of them.  Anorexia nervosa has the highest mortality rate of all the mental illnesses including bipolar disorder and major depression, both of which carry suicide risk.  It’s not just about being skinny and it’s not about vanity.  If it was vanity, I’d toss it aside in a natural disaster.  Let’s say I’d be capable of putting it on the back burner while Irene passed through.

But I couldn’t.  I did heed the experts’ advice, though.  I bought a couple of cans of stuff.  I bought things that felt safe for me.  For the most part yesterday, I didn’t eat much.  But then I started in on the diet soda, and I couldn’t stop drinking it.  I don’t know what got into me.  I just started drinking it and drinking it.  It tasted pretty good, actually.  I drank some water and some milk, and more diet soda.  It was easily two gallons.  Suddenly, I was very, very full.  And scared.  I am not supposed to be doing this.  It’s dangerous, very dangerous.  It can screw up your electrolytes and it can screw up your kidneys.  I was scared because since I have had this disorder for a long time, my system has kind of slowed down, and I know I’m not necessarily peeing right.  I sat there with my belly sloshing around wondering why I had done this dumb thing.  Nothing was coming out.  I figured I’d either pee real soon or throw it all up.  Nothing.  So I waited around.  Nothing.  My stomach kind of hurt.  I lay down and tried to think of other things.  I thought that what I had put into myself had to come out somehow.

Yeah, it did.  A bit later, I was shitting my brains out into the toilet.  I feel much better now.  I could feel better but letting go of it felt kind of liberating.  My stomach doesn’t hurt anymore–well, it does, but I can think straight and not be distracted by it, anyway.

I am 53 years old, no longer in my 20′s.  I can’t do this at my age.  No more mucking around with dangerous stuff.  You can die of this.  You can die of anorexia nervosa.  You can die anyway but it’s stupid to do mean things to your body.  I guess that’s one essential part of eating disorders that’s hard to overcome, the self-meanness part.  It’s kind of built in.

This on the eve of Hurricane Irene’s strike on Boston.  In 12 hours, winds will exceed 30 miles per hour, maybe 40 miles per hour, and at that point, vehicle travel is just plain unsafe.  If you’re going to have a medical emergency, forget it, you’re on your own.  Or that is what I heard.  So now, of all times, is not a nice time to be mucking around with my electrolytes.  Now or anytime.  Ever.

You know something?  I’m thirsty.  I don’t understand why.  I just am.  Maybe deep down inside, I thirst for something else, and can’t put a finger on what it is, and that is why I feel so empty inside, and why life seems to have no meaning to it.  I’m going to go have a drink of water at this point because I know it won’t satisfy or fill that longing even though my physical sensation is very real, my body’s sleight of hand, I guess.

I do remember feeling this way at the onset of my illness, that I’d lost something and was desperately searching for it, and that it was so lost and so deep-seated that I had lost sight of what it in fact was or that it even existed or had existed for me.  I just felt this void, and a deep hunger.  Whatever I had had, I wanted back.  Desperately.

I don’t think you get back things you had when you were 18, or 21, when you’re in your 50′s.  It’s over 30 years later, and life doesn’t work that way.  Maybe I’m wrong.  I’m not going to find it, whatever it was, now.  Whatever I find now, though, was unreachable then, because I was only 21.  So I should consider myself fortunate that I have lived this long.

I want to wish everyone peace during this hurricane.  Just take a moment during your preparations to remember loved ones who have passed, to enjoy cherished memories, to care for your children, to feed and hold your pets nearby.

I am managing as best as I can.  Later, I will call a friend in a different time zone, zone out, and sleep I hope.  I had my modem replaced today (for free).  That’s communication, after all.  Faster.  Better.  More efficient.  Wow.  I should be writing this at lightning speed, maybe running the Marathon next year.  Since getting out of the hospital, I’ve realized that soon, National Novel Month will be approaching, and I would like to get the ball rolling on my paperback preparations and get all that done by the end of next month.  So you will have a bit of hard copy to read next year I hope.

Irene, Irene, Irene.  I think I will share a bit of my chapter, “A Forgotten Line,” from my memoir, which focuses on the character, Irene, in a coming post.  See you then.

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.

Progress with yesterday’s injury

This is what turned out:

I think the injury isn’t my old ankle sprain, but a foot injury–something separate.  The pain seems to be in my foot, lower down.  That is where I am icing, at any rate.  I iced first thing this morning, and took Ibuprofen.  I have had it wrapped most of the day.  I experience mild pain while walking.  The pain is on the distal side of my foot under the ankle only, but slightly toward my toes, and not on the bottom of my foot, nor on the medial side, heel, or anywhere else.  While not putting weight on my foot, I can circle it in all directions without any pain or weird sensation.  I don’t have to be anywhere today.  I took Puzzle out into the yard earlier, and once walked down the hall to pay my rent, and that’s it.  I consider myself fortunate.

I have been spending my time writing.  I plan to do some knitting as well.  I have written a couple of e-mails, and farted around at my desk.

I’m glad I have a desk.  Now, I can fart around.

This Hunger Is Secret: My Journeys Through Mental Illness and Wellness to come out in paperback this year

My memoir, This Hunger Is Secret: My Journeys Through Mental Illness and Wellness will be coming out in paperback sometime this year.  You will be able to order it from Amazon or a variety of online booksellers, from your local bookstore, or from Chipmunkapublishers.   It is now available in e-book form only, downloadable as a .pdf from Chipmunkapubishers.com or wirelessly for the Amazon Kindle.  (See my sidebar on how to acquire the e-book.)

Once the paperback comes out, I plan to do a bit of publicizing.  I plan to contact the local papers.  I will also send an “update” about myself and what I’ve been doing to the alumni publications of three colleges I’ve attended (Bennington, Emerson, and Goddard) which would include the mention of my memoir.  I’m going to look around at other ways that I can publicize.  I wanted to wait until there was something tangible that people could hold, an actual paper book, before starting to let the world know that I exist.

Check out my website www.juliegreene.name for excerpts from the book and more information about it.

Excerpts from This Hunger Is Secret pubished online

Quay Journal has published two excerpts from This Hunger Is Secret: My Journeys Through Mental Illness and Wellness.

Here’s the link:

http://www.quayjournal.org/

Quay Journal also comes out in hard copy.

The first excerpt, “2008/1997/Going Back” is the epilogue.  It makes me cry every time I read it, for reasons I can never put a finger on.  The second is an excerpt from my chapter, “Locker #47.”  Why the chapter is called this…well, you’ll have to read the book!  This excerpt was actually my graduation reading!

Meanwhile, when I submitted these chapters, it was well before the book was published.  There were changes and edits I made in the rewrites.  I tried to catch them all.  Apologies if I did not.  As you know, I have been very ill.

Here’s the link to the publisher’s website where you can purchase my book:

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

You may purchase it in e-book form now, or wait for the paperback to come out.