Opportunity and Struggle

My dear friend Julie (that I talked about in the previous post) has been recovering so well. She has been learning to speak, read, and write again. Her husband, Jacob, scanned some of her writing onto facebook for her friends and family to see. It made me so happy! She had written, "Tell my babies I love them." Her twin boys are only 2 months old and I know she must miss them so much. Jacob has been so strong through this. He has been so focused. He's a rock!

Julie, I'm making a cd for you and I'll mail it soon. And, sweetie, I wish I could have taken all of it for you and felt it all for you. I know I can't. All I can do is stand here and watch in amazement as you are so strong. I wish I could have come to see you by now. I will soon. I'm sorry. I wish I could have "left my house, left my clothes, door wide open" and come out to you to join forces. You are worth it. You're worth anything and everything. *hugs* (quote from a song by Ellie Goulding)

I've been writing some more. :) I've also been planning things for John and I to do together during his block leave. He'll have a couple of weeks off before he deploys and it will be very nice to just be the two of us. I was going to try to go to Utah during this time and see my Julie-friend but the plan just catches in my throat. If it weren't Afghanistan or if it weren't for a year... I feel like an awful friend. But, I just need to be with him. Thankfully Jacob made the decision easier and said to wait until after Johnny leaves. So, of course, I looked up the Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives map online. Hahaha. I'd like to visit a couple before he leaves. I've also been jotting down other cool places nearby. Like the Ava Gardner museum, an aquarium, and a bird sanctuary. :) We also plan on reading together a lot - especially from my Geology and Chemistry text books. We loves our science. (I have some books about minerals, ocean life, space, and spiders on the amazon wish list for future reading.) It would also be fun if we could finally make it to the beach. I didn't expect to miss seagulls, but I really do! However, I don't want to overplan and suck the fun out of it. (I tend to do that...)

I'm really not looking forward to goodbye again. It's that kind of breathless jarring pain like having a tooth pulled. But inside your soul. And not long after, a strange calm arrives and the pain dulls. But there's a hole there that's going to bug you and make nothing feel quite normal. This time I know the secret: it never stops hurting, it never feels better. You just get better at functioning with that gap there. For that time I plan on writing a lot, exercising a lot, running errands, Ellen watching, cooking, cleaning, keeping busy. I might get a job, I might take a class. It's nice not to have to choose at the moment. Honestly, all this education has trained me for nothing. Hahaha! And, while getting a job at a local fast food joint and becoming employee of the month sounds just thrilling, that might not be what is best for me. I have a pretty cool opportunity before me that not many people get. I get to really choose what I really want to do. And, weirdly, something Jay-Z said in an interview really impacted me. He said he always has learned a lot from failing but that he hasn't figured out how to really learn from success yet. His words swept away some of those fluttering fears about failure I've had. That hadn't ever occurred to me. The road to success is the best part. :) The struggle is the whole point. Excellent.

In the meantime, I guess I'll just enjoy my boy while I can. :)

Get well soon.

I was determined to make my next post really positive and happy after my last one.

My dear, dear friend Julie (jilesthegreat that comments sometimes from the blog The Insanity That Is Me in my sidebar) has really had it rough lately. After a long wait, she has at last been able to have children - twin boys - and I am so happy for her and her sweet husband. But, then she got sick and it went into bronchitis and then pneumonia. On Sunday she suffered a major stroke. She is recovering and from what her husband has let me know so far, she is walking but she will probably need to learn how to read and how to speak again. All I want to do is fly to her and hug her and help her relearn and be there for her. I'm sure her family and other friends feel the same way.

I met Julie in kindergarten. I recognized some kind of sameness between the two of us and walked up and asked her if she wanted to be my friend and she said yes. :) We were best friends all through elementary school. We had some very dramatic spats in 5th and 6th grade but made up when I had to move a few cities away. We got together a couple of times and wrote letters, but things drifted. And then a year or so ago I joined facebook and we found each other again and became super close again just like we used to be. We'd get coffees together or go out for mac and cheese at Cracker Barrel. We also shared great love for Ghost Hunters and Alvin & the Chipmunks. xD

When Johnny transferred to the army and we were posted to North Carolina, Julie and I made a pact we would visit each other. (Especially to make a trip to Rhode Island so we could stalk the Ghost Hunters. Hahaha.) But she has so happily been able to have her darling babies, so we postponed all stalking plans. I've wanted to go back to Utah to visit but it just keeps being put off and our savings keep getting used up by different needs. I ache to visit now. I don't want to make more stress for her, though, so I'm waiting to see what her husband thinks is best.

She is the person outside my family that has known me the longest. We've been sending each other cds and presents since I moved away. We message each other on facebook frequently. She's so so precious to me.

Jiles, I'm sending all the energy I've got to you. All my thoughts, prayers, if I have any magic that's coming your way, too. I love you so so much. You have helped me become so much stronger. I'm here no matter what you need. Whatever it is, I'll do it. I'm just so happy that you are safe and alright. I'm here, babe.

Ghost

The funny thing about anorexia is that it follows you around. When you've broken free of its control and killed it, it's ghost hangs about you, threatening to re-materialize with every morsel. It's hoping that you will become overconfident so it can slip behind the driver's seat when you aren't looking. Counting calories has been like erecting a staircase from it to me. Always the whispering at me, "Less. Less." 1400 calories a day kept feeling like a starting point and that of course it would diminish more and more and that hopefully I, then, would diminish as well. You see, an eating disorder eats you bite by bite, slowly making you smaller and smaller under its control. The weight of the person affected by it is irrelevant. Because, you see, when afflicted you act out in rebellion and eat in its sight, an act of pure defiance. And then, riddled by guilt, you relent again to its wise control, despising your own lack of control for eating and for what you ate. Sometimes you don't buy certain foods at all so there is no risk. And others you haughtily send it down the grocery belt because you consider yourself strong enough to have it around and to only have a bite of it now and then. Until the container is empty and you are shamed by it because for a few minutes you gave in to the taste, the texture, the freedom, the ability not to care. The promises to yourself how long it will be until you eat again to pay for this misdeed. The constant fear, the constant pinching at the fat on your body in disgust, the long looks of loathing in the mirror as you picture in your mind how you should look and what a pathetic being you are because you can't make yourself look that way when it is obviously so easy for some others to do so. Counting calories walked me back to that place. "It's just math, I am in control." However, I wasn't following the meal plan anymore. I went back to two meals a day. I knew that would slow down my metabolism, like Denise Austin talked about, but it felt good. The hunger pains were deserved because of my weakness. Portia de Rossi's book, Unbearable Lightness, was such a comfort to me - she had lived in that place. That world of not allowing yourself to eat something unless you no longer wanted to so desperately. That other voice that inhabits your mind and counts everything. The voice that wakes you up in the night demanding what you ate and ordering out of bed and onto the floor to exercise it away. Life being focused about when you ate last and when and what you need to eat next. Knowing that your metabolism had slowed to the point that if you start eating normally again you will definitely gain weight immediately because your body feels it must hold on to everything it is given.

I can think of no torture worse than what it felt like to gain weight so quickly and constantly while I was taking the anti-depressants from hell. To be helpless to it no matter how little I ate or how much I exercised, the ghost screaming and sobbing from the pain of it. All the hard work and discipline that got me to the point that I was actually beginning to like my body was for nothing. I hate to move at all because I can feel that fat all around me. The feeling of hopelessness encasing me, feeling like the only place to turn is to that trusted ghost that helped me before. That ghost that knows best how to fix this problem. How to make me become myself again. I've wanted to give myself back to it so much. To just shed this horrible fat, to run away from that word overweight. Diets are for the gullible, eating is for the weak. Anorexia is how I become the master of myself, how I force my body to bend to my will. I refuse its pleas of hunger, I enjoy the pain and dizziness and shaking, I laugh at food, only I control what I eat and no one else can tell me what or how to do that. I became very angry at Denise for trying to control me, for introducing me to all these numbers that mix up in my brain. Numbers on the scale, numbers on the package, numbers on the measuring cups and spoons, numbers on my clothes announcing my fat fat size to the world and showing them how much less I need to be to be beautiful, to be acceptable, to be sexy. I have been ashamed and afraid to go out in public because others can see it. I want the starvation back. I want that reliable constant hunger and pain to help me feel better and feel in control and silence my worries because soon I will be less. Soon I'll be skinnier than the others. They'll see how strong I am and how much pain I can take to get where I want to be. My goals have always been clear: size 0 and 100 pounds. And now there's the number of calories for each day that I have the power to make smaller and smaller.

But I won't. I eat. And I refuse to count anymore. I will not count anymore. I will exercise and run, run away from the ghost and hope it never catches me. I know I can do it because Portia did it. She broke away. She no longer "diets and exercises." She eats and is active and enjoys her life and has fun. The voice asked her what she ate and she said to it what someday I will be able to say to that voice: Go to hell.