bitterfig

When I was 22 and 23 years old (in 1994 and 1995) I lost over 100 pounds.  I've managed to keep most of that weight off (though at a tremendous cost-- the time and energy I devote to keeping my weight down has pretty much crippled me in a lot of other areas.  For instance, I don't exactly have a social life or a career.)

While I was at my parents house last week I was looking through some of my things and found some pictures of myself from when I was college age.  Photos of me from this time are fairly rare, I was very reluctant to pose because I thought I was so disgusting.  Looking at them however I can't help but think that I wasn't quite as bad as I thought.  In all honesty the first thing that strikes me when looking at them isn't my size but  my glasses.  They're hideous.  I really should have gotten smaller frames but that wasn't the sort of thing I'd have  ever considered doing at the time because all I could think of was that I was fat and I had to fix that before I could even consider anything else.  I guess I've always had tunnel vision where my weight is concerned. 

Pa-daddy was in town from Thursday until Monday night. I had to work most of the time but I did have Saturday off and was able to attend my nephew Minya’s 6th Birthday party. It was quite an event. They rented out the Portage Theater, a big old-fashioned movie theater on Milwaukee Avenue, and were showing cartoons on the big screen. In the lobby (which was about as big as the average multiplex theater) there was cake and a table with toys and one that had stuff to color with. There were a ton of kids, they invited Minya’s entire kindergarten class plus some kids they know from outside of the class and friends of my three year old niece Kitten.

It was all pretty neat though I find it hard to get my head around the fact that Minya is already a six year old. I can still remember in vivid detail when I came out to visit the week before he was born, what the weather was like (sunny and cold then gray, drizzling and cold), the movies I watched (all horror movies—Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural, The Witch’s Mirror, Daughters of the Darkness), I even remember going to the Whole Foods where I work now for groceries. It doesn’t seem possible that it was six whole years ago.

I had been hoping to go out to dinner with Pa while he was visiting but in the end I just couldn’t. I feel really bad about my body and my weight right now, almost to the point of hallucination—when I look at my body I see the shape of a Hottentot Venus, huge distended stomach and jutting buttocks. I feel like I let my father down but I honestly don’t want to go out in public these days much less eat in public. The thought of going to a restaurant where I wouldn’t have any idea how many calories I was eating freaked me the hell out. We did take a couple of walks together which was nice. He seems to be fairly happy. He’s preaching again at a small church and very involved with the parishioners. He also has his business buying, selling and refinishing antiques and does a lot for my grandmother.

It was good to see him yet part of me feels dissatisfied. It just seems like no one in my family—not just my father but also my sister and her husband-- seems particularly concerned about me. I’ve been having a really hard time lately. I’ve had serious depression that I nearly had to the emergency room over. I’ve had incidents of cutting, they’ve had to give me a medical leave of absence at work, and most of the time I can hardly stand myself. I feel like I’m a complete mess and that no one even notices or if they do notice they’re used to it. Maybe I’ve been crazy so long my latest crisis hardly makes a blip on the radar.

I know this is passive aggressive but I kept saying stuff about how I felt like I was over weight and how uncomfortable I was with my weight and how I felt like I needed to lose weight and eat less. No one told me I looked fine or that I was okay where I was which was sort of what I wanted. Maybe I’m asking too much. I know I shouldn’t try to manipulate people into giving me validation and I’m sure it makes them uncomfortable when I start harping on how much I weigh or how unhappy I’ve been. 

Being sick has gotten me back down to around 140 pounds.

Or maybe I should say getting back down to around 140 pounds has gotten me sick.

I’m going back to work tomorrow no matter if I’m still sick or not.  I can’t take being isolated like this any more.  Last night I really thought I was going to lose my mind.  I was watching the movie Grey Gardens which is a documentary about relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy’s, a mother and a daughter, who sort of declined into eccentricity and wound up living in squalor in a mansion in the East Hamptons. 

I was watching this and I felt like I was going to fail and end up going back to New York and being trapped living with my mother and I couldn’t stop crying and just felt like my life was over and there was nothing left and that I should just take all my medication and get it over with.  I knew my brain was just recycling things like the articles I’ve recently read on Heath Ledger’s death and the misuse of prescription drugs but when I get really emotionally despondent I worry that I’ll actually act on these thoughts so I ended up going to the emergency room. 

I didn’t stay or actually see anyone. As soon as I got there I decided what I needed to do was go home to bed, which I did.  I slept for about 10 hours straight and I’ve been in control of myself today but I am going back to work tomorrow.  I’d rather rough things out physically than deal with being alone in my own head.

I went to the doctor’s yesterday. I was a year overdue on my annual physical (on account of not having insurance last year) so it was probably good to get that taken care of. However I was a bit disappointed in that no solution for my recent problems was forthcoming. While my doctor suggested the possibility of adding wellbutrain to my medication because I’m close to maximum dosage of Effexor RX there’s a chance of side effects and she felt I ought to see a psychiatrist before any medication changes were made. I called the psychiatrist she recommended but they didn’t have any openings till February, which frankly doesn’t do me a whole hell of a lot of good.

In the meantime I’m put in a call to my therapist asking if she might know of a psychiatrist, maybe affiliated with the clinic I go to. Beyond that I was advised to go to the emergency room if it gets too bad. Elizabeth Wurtzel does it all the time in her books, but I’m a bit lower key than her. Showing up at an emergency room seems like an awfully grand gesture, which of course is followed by about four hours of mind-numbing boredom waiting to be seen. If I’m going to sit around doing nothing I’d rather be home watching movies.

As part of my physical I was weighted and I was rather distressed at the results. My weight has gone up, I’m at about 150 pounds, 10 pounds higher than what I deem acceptable. I’d known I was over, but I thought it was closer to 5 pounds. The question is what to do about it—start restricting and take it off or just accept it and be heavier. 150 pounds at 5’8 sounds awfully high in a world where the ideal seems to be 5’ll and 110 pounds but I’m actually still fairly thin even at this high weight. I think a lot of it is from muscle mass, and I do like being strong. I take a secret delight in the fact that at the market I’m the only girl who carries the bales of paper bags by myself instead of using a cart.

Still, I think I could do with eating a little less. I sort of upped my food intake when I was recovering from my bike accident but I’d spent the whole month prior to that riding nearly 10 miles a day. I’m not doing that anymore so really I don’t need as many calories. Of course I don’t want to mess up my metabolism by cutting back to dramatically. I think that’s what I did when I cut back by several hundred calories a day in February. That might actually be the reason I’ve gone out of my “safe” weight range (140 thru 145 pounds) to begin with, I’m not eating any more calories per day than I was a year ago.

I’ll have to figure it out. In the meantime as the whole psychiatrist situation doesn’t look like it’s going to be resolving itself in the near future I’ve taken the step of replacing the light bulbs in my apartment with broad-spectrum “natural light” bulbs. Maybe that will help and I doubt it will hurt.