If People Were Meant to Pop Out of Bed, We'd All Sleep in Toasters

It is beyond amazing how much more I'm accomplishing now that my body clock is resetting itself.

For the past three years or so, I've been averaging about five hours of sleep a night, which I'm certain has completely eroded my immune system, my memory, my cognitive abilities...you name it. And I'm sure it doesn't help The Crazy at all. So about two weeks ago I decided I was going to actually get sleep. No matter what. I was exhausted anyway, so how hard could it be?

It turns out it was actually pretty hard to make myself sleep, and I wasn't prepared for that. Being the master worrier that I am, I usually use the hours of eight to midnight as a time for me to fret over possible life disasters that likely won't occur, ruminate over regrettable things from my past, think about how fat I must look sitting on my bed, berate myself for the mounds and mounds of lard and sugar I had ingested that evening, and so on. So when I started taking away that time from myself to just lie down and sleep, I realized I couldn't do it. It was a hard pattern to break.

When I finally managed to start going to bed at 10 and 11, I was pretty dismayed at how tired I still was even after seven or eight hours of sleep. I figured I'd just jump out of bed, sing to the assorted woodland critters gathering at my feet, whip up a perfect, nutritious breakfast, and flit out the door to work with ribbons in my hair and a spring in my step. (Okay, I would've been satisfied with time for a shower and a SlimFast) But it just wasn't happening. I was still pressing snooze four or five times every morning and on days when I didn't need my alarm, I was sleeping for 10-11 hours at a stretch. I totally went into, "Woe is me" mode, worrying that there would never, ever be enough sleep for me in the world to have energy to do anything except lie there.

I guess if I had been paying attention over the last two weeks, though, I would've realized that I WAS waking up more naturally, just in tiny increments, and that the amount of sleep I needed was starting to reduce each night. Today I woke up completely naturally at about 5:30 and I'm still not a bit tired (the triple espresso I made for myself probably isn't hurting).

There are just two things that bother me about being awake:

First, what do you DO with all this time? I've been up for almost five hours and I've still got like another twelve hours to go. If we weren't having a winter storm I'd go do stuff in the city, but alas. I don't have any hobbies, because for the last two years my hobby has been hating life and writing about hating life. I need to learn to needlepoint or something. I could make wardrobes for the cats.

Second, I'm not so good with being cheerful. It's not really my thing. I'm basically like the biggest, surliest, Gothiest teenager you could ever meet inside the body of a 27 year old woman who shops at Talbot's. Being happy makes me annoyed with myself, and if the goal of getting healthy is to promote the self-love process, how do you deal with the conundrum of simultaneously loving how you feel but also wanting to bitchslap yourself every time you actually embrace something pure and wholesome?

Also, does anyone know what the deal is with DailyPlate? I haven't been able to get on for the last three days.

I am so much better than before.

There were a lot of big changes in my life the past week and a half, none of which are really worth blogging about, but it's why I've been gone. I also was asked to take back my 2007 title of Miss Big Ball of Infectious Diseases this week because Miss BBID 2008 got caught with racy photos on her Facebook and had to step down, so I've been enjoying the pinkeye and sinus infections that come with my old position as royalty. Attractive.

Anyway, during my mid-February Period of Personal Tribulation (I tried to hire a man to follow me around and sing "Nobody Knows the Trouble I Seen" but all the good baritones are booked into barbershop quartet gigs around Valentine's Day) I started reading a book by Dave Pelzer called Heal Yourself. If you haven't heard of him, he's the guy from the book A Child Called It, which is an autobiography of his life primarily from birth to age 13, when California authorities took him out of his alcoholic, mentally deranged mother's home and put him in foster care. Pelzer was subjected to, and survived, what is believed to be the third worst abuse situation in California history, including being stabbed, poisoned by bleach and ammonia fumes, beaten, starved, isolated from his brothers and father, and forced to endure ritual humiliation every single day for eight years. His Help Yourself book still recounts some of those gruesome details, but also provides insight on how he survived those attacks simply by the force of his sheer will and determination to not die. It's pretty incredible stuff considering he was just a little kid.

Pelzer's main point of the book, though, is to offer advice for people who find themselves, for whatever reason, unable to thrive and succeed in their own lives. For me, there were two chapters of the book that especially resonated. The first was that sometimes you just have to walk away from things and people that are hurting you, forgive them, love them if they need it, but not let the events eat away at your life. Pelzer cites seeing his mother at the last stages of her life, completely overtaken not only by her alcohol addiction, but also by the sheer amount of hurt and rage and hate she had for her own parents, her husband, her children, and anyone who ever crossed paths with her. She was pathologically angry, to the point it drove her insane before she died.

I don't know if I've ever been perpetually angry like her so much as a relentless Pollyanna instead (a fact that I know causes a lot of chagrin over at AFG, since AngryFatGirlzPlusOneGirlWho'sOnlyAngryAtHerselfForVariousDeepSeatedReasonsIncludingUnnecessarilyLowSelfEsteem
is just not a practical new URL possibility. So my thing that I can't let go is how disappointed I get with situations and people when they don't turn out to be good in the way I hoped they'd be. And moreso than any of the things that have transpired over the last year of my life, way more than the divorce, or the financial strain, or the not so stellar weight loss has been dealing with people and situations where I've been dying for some sort of happy closure or resolution and not getting it. It got so bad by this month that I would come home from work, go straight to bed and obsess over the problem, gorge and gorge myself with food until I couldn't move to get my mind off the problem, and then obsess about it again until the waves of nausea passed. The inertia and not moving thing I was having so much trouble with? I finally figured out it was really more because I couldn't stop ruminating on these couple of people and how to deal with them and their toxicity.

Yesterday after one of the more determined, spectacular binges in my personal history, while I was lying on my bed and gasping for air like a goldfish out of its bowl, feeling my stomach debate whether to accept all this food or to reject it right onto my lovely new sheets, and wishing I could just die from the shame and the stress and the physical and mental pain of it all, I finally finally FINALLY why I was doing this, and I decided to stop it right there. I contacted one of the people, asked one last time for a conversation where we could resolve the conversation, and I ended up getting what I wanted. Sort of. It wasn't the happy, friendly resolution I was looking for, and I was pretty disappointed how things turned out, but at the same time I knew there wasn't anything more I could do to change the person, the situation, or the closure to our relationship. I don't think I was in the wrong, people who know both of us don't think I was in the wrong, but even so, no amount of begging or demanding or sulking was going to get the apology I thought I had needed so desperately for so many months. I had done all I can. It was time to let the hurt, the disagreements, and the person go, because they were all toxic, and they were all seriously messing me up.

And you know when they say "a weight lifted off my shoulders"? I had never felt that before yesterday. It was really nice to feel it.

The second thing I took away from Pelzer's book was judging life by this one criterion: Is your life today better in some small way than it was yesterday?

I kind of puked in my mouth a little bit when reading that, because it was just SO Chicken Soup for the Soul and I'm just not down with touchy-feely optimistic things. But seriously, it's a good message, even though I like to rephrase it as "Does your life suck less today than it did yesterday?" Yesterday, prior to that conversation, while I was collapsed on my bed, using a pizza box like a pillow, hearing my cats crunch around on the box of Bran Buds I had accidentally spilled on the kitchen floor on Wednesday and still hadn't bothered to clean up, I decided I had reached a new rock bottom. (Even though I think I've reached rock bottom about 14 times at least in the last year) But this time was different; a new low, a new level of spiritual, emotional, and physical bankruptcy I didn't think I'd fix this time. But I did, at least part of it.

Things can and will get better for me. I think they'll get better for all of us, no matter what we're struggling with. I think we have to believe that, or what's the point in getting up in the morning? The other day I started an opening paragraph to what I guess was supposed to be a book on recovering from binge eating and depression, but I only wrote a few sentences before I realized I didn't have anything to write about. I was still too upset, and all I could see myself writing about was how shitty I felt each and every day until I died and then someone would fill in the epilogue with "And then she died, and her cats ate her eyeballs. The End."

But I don't know. I think, right now at least, it's doable to find at least one thing I can do to recover and feel better each day. I could start with picking up those Bran Buds, although I kind of like how stepping on Bran Buds is like popping whole grain bubble wrap with your feet.

I'll try blogging about them here, so even if I don't have good news to report on the weight-ridding front, I'll at least have something else to write about. Prepare to get intimately familiar with my glowing revelations about disinfecting trash cans or not freaking out and kicking the bank building when the ATM cash mouth thing eats my money but doesn't deposit it.

Weiner Poopie

I am beyond distraught that we are getting dry-slotted for our third winter storm in a row here near KC, so I'm posting a video that makes life still worth living. Via Dooce:

211.2 and counting

Thanks everyone, again, for pulling my head out of the cyber-oven. Doctor Andy asked me last night if I felt encouraged to keep writing after all the wonderful comments, or if I was frustrated because I really wanted to quit and honestly, it encouraged me a lot. I kind of view this blog as just a chronology of what I'm feeling at the time, and sometimes the things in my head like, "I want to give up" are more just vocalized frustrations than actual wishes. Sometimes, though, things like, "I want to eat four peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and wash them down with a bottle of Hershey's syrup" ARE actual wishes and more often than not come true. Sometimes I'm afraid I'm too honest here; that the more I write about being upset and trying but failing over and over again, the more you'll think I'm crying wolf. But as whiny and ugly as my thoughts are at the time, they're really what I'm thinking and I learned during college and the course of my marriage that pretending I don't feel that way never helps the situation either.

I guess I haven't been doing as terribly as I thought, because I managed to lose a couple pounds in the course of all this wasting away in bed. I feel good about that, because I could tell there was something not right happening with my body when I was circling around 215-220 over the last couple of weeks. It just felt distended and toxic and wrong somehow, so it's nice to see the numbers came down when my body started feeling better again. I have had two straight days where I haven't eaten anything nasty--that fancy new grocery store with the fancy organic convenience food is really going to be a life saver, I think--and I'm heading up to the Bikram yoga studio to try out a class this afternoon. I wrote an email to the guy who owns the studio at the beginning of this week asking a few questions about whether the practice is too strenuous for really heavy people and whether I could maybe trade tuition for helping wash the mats or doing secretarial work and he wrote back IN ONE GIANT RUN-ON SENTENCE ABOUT HOW EVERYTHING WOULD BE JUST FINE AND I SHOULD DEFINITELY COME AND DON'T WORRY ABOUT A THING and I was like, "Dude. Whoa, dude. " and then I wiped the blood from my poor assaulted eyeballs and reread the message and it was very encouraging and nice, so I'm feeling pretty good about this afternoon. I hope I don't pass out and die in the room, because then when my parents come and clean out my apartment my mom will find the episode of Louis Theroux's Weird Weekend: Swingers I recorded off BBC America and I just couldn't bear the thought of her finding out her heroic efforts to avoid ever exposing me to the idea that people actually touch their bodies together for any other reason than to pass on the love of the Holy Spirit across the pews in church hadn't succeeded.

A lot of the reason I've been freaking out over the past month especially is because I'm kind of coming to this weird juncture in my life where I'm finally getting my shit together here, but I'm also trying to figure out what to do next. Like, on Tuesday, when I go down to my hometown to vote, my parents are also taking me out to dinner because I paid off all my debt this month. My mom said she was proud of me. She actually said she was...proud of me. That's really huge, because I think the last time my mom was proud of me was in 1997 (or maybe during Thanksgiving 2001 when I poured a glass of milk from a full gallon jug and didn't spill any of it on the counter, which had never happened before and has never again happened since). But at the same time that I'm pretty proud of having fixed my financial situation, there's the overriding sense of shame that I got myself into that mess in the first place and shouldn't have, and that I could very, very easily slip up and do it again. I applied for a credit card, at the advice of a friend who is really good with money, only because I know I need to have some sort of revolving debt to rebuild my credit, but I am beyond terrified of even activating it for fear that somehow just HAVING the card in my wallet will mean that I'll pass out and wake up the next morning somehow having purchased a Dyson vacuum, a Shetland pony, and $600 worth of lip gloss. You snicker, but I have empirical reason to be concerned.

I also am minorly freaking because I've finally settled here, and it's been a long time since I've been settled anywhere. My junior year of high school, we moved out of the house I was born in to a brand new house and ever since then I've been moving. I haven't lived in any one place longer than two years; this address is the first I can count as a permanent one since 1998. I have a coffee grinder, a 401K, a garage, and a lovely collection of cleaning supplies that make my house smell like an English garden. I'm very settled in my job right now. I have friends I can drink a beer with if I'm so inclined, and other than a few little dips into despair, I'm not really THAT depressed. Things could definitely be worse.

It's just that this isn't where I want to be settled, and so I'm looking for ways out. I'm going to take the LSAT in June, and I'm thinking very seriously about law school for 2009-2010. I went to St. Louis last weekend to visit some friends, and I loved the neighborhood around Washington University. I'm going to visit another friend in NYC for a week in March, and I'm going to check out Fordham and maybe Columbia. I could see myself in DC, too, or even Chicago after I start giving myself testosterone injections so I grow enough body hair to handle the winters. I have lots of possibilities. But as much as I'm excited about movin' on up and doing something challenging and intellectually stimulating in fabulous places like DC or New York, I am beyond terrified. How do I pack up four years of work and life and all this stuff and cram it into a studio apartment in Harlem? How do I even begin to afford a studio apartment in Harlem? What happens if the cats go insane from being cooped up in a single room for three years and I get evicted because they won't stop meowing? What happens if I go insane because there's a cockroach in my bathtub? I will move if I see a cockroach, I swear to God. What if I become a lawyer and realize I hate it way more than I ever disliked teaching? What if I don't even get into a decent law school and I'm stuck here for the rest of my life?

And I know, intellectually, that if I want a different life I have to start from ground zero to get there. I know I have to take a chance and just do it. I know moving to a different city with millions of cultural opportunities and where my friends are would be infinitely more rewarding than my life here in Asshole, Missouri where "cultural opportunity" means someone hired the remaining two members of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band to play on a trailer in the Wal-Mart parking lot for March of Dimes week. I also know that I'm creating my own perfect storm of anxiety and inertia by worrying about things that aren't even close to transpiring yet, and I should just be focusing on the things I can control now instead of pricing 5th floor walk-ups in Washington Heights that won't even be available in 2009.

I guess sometimes when I get this way I'd like to be able to put my head on someone's lap and tell them I'm really tired from working so hard to make everything better and not being sure what to do and then maybe that someone would just let me lie there for awhile and they'd even let me watch Ugly Betty while they played with my hair. So, in the absence of that, I put out my frustrations here and then I feel better and then I can go back to the really important things in life, like figuring out how to wash out the stench of gasoline and regurgitated Fruit Loops from my work shoes before tomorrow morning.

Are You There, God? It's Me, Erin.

I am very close to giving up and shutting down this blog.

And I don't want to quit, deep down, but I don't know how long I can string out more and more blog entries about dieting and losing weight and getting healthy when I'm not doing any of those things. I'm getting worse, losing momentum, and I just really want to pull the covers over my head and do the easy thing and just give up.

I know I'm setting myself up to fail. I realize this every single morning when I wake up too late to make breakfast so I grab a doughnut or an Egg McMuffin on the way to work. I know it's my fault whenever I succumb to my usual post-work malaise and burrow in my bed with some kind of junk food and stay there until it's time for to actually go to sleep. I know it's my fault that I don't exercise, and I don't try to make myself cook the food I buy. I know all this.

But I swear, if I COULD make myself do these things I would. I really would. I hate this inertia more than anything in my life. My body has been screaming with pain over the past few weeks because I haven't been moving it, but the idea of exercising or even standing for more than few minutes at a time is exhausting.

I've caught myself praying over this a couple times, and I don't really pray. It's more of a "Dude, help." kind of plea, and I don't know if Jesus or whoever even thinks that counts. But I also know that something has to be pretty bad for me to even subconsciously be praying about it, so that's telling me something has to change. I need something to change.

The more I think about this, the more I'm starting to become convinced that all the problems in my life...my eating disorder, the almost comatose state I go into when I get home, the depression, the anger...they're not the problems. I really think they're just symptoms of some sort of enormous spiritual deficit that I haven't ever identified before. I feel empty. I think I eat and eat and eat because there's a hole inside me that I try to fill in all the wrong ways. I feel like I need more. I just don't know what that "more" is.

Sometimes, even though I'm really cynical about it, I think there is a God that watches over me. I believe this for purely circumstantial and silly reasons, like the time in college when I had thirteen cents in my checking account, and I owed $225.00 in rent by the end of the week and then I received a random profit sharing check from a summer job for $226.00. Things like that tend to happen to me enough that I think there's more than just coincidence to it, although that really doesn't seem to be much of a basis for religious faith. If I wanted to be so precious as to say that God's answered my prayers for help yet again, I guess I should mention that a huge grocery/health food store opened up about ten miles from my house, which means I'd only have to drive 15 minutes to get decent food instead of 30. I also noticed a Bikram Yoga studio had opened up in the same area, which also means I could drive there in 15 minutes instead of 45 or an hour. I don't know why I think those are my only chances to fix this, but right now I do. The yoga classes are hideously expensive; $150 a month, which I cannot afford at all right now, but feel like I need to purchase anyway. I emailed the man who runs the studio and he said he might be able to cut a work study scholarship deal with me if I would commit to going for awhile. I am terrified that yoga will end up just like tango, or aerobics classes, or Jazzercise or the old yoga classes, and when faced with the site of my enormous bulk in the studio mirror, I will leave after the first class and never come back. It'll be another opportunity I couldn't sustain because of the cost, or the driving, or because of my own stupid insecurities. It'll be another disappointment and if it ends up that way I'm just giving up.

Every night when I get home from work and I lie here on this goddamned bed with my laptop and my phone and I slip in and out of a fitful all-night nap before bed I think "This can't get worse. You will never be more emotionally bankrupt than you are tonight. Tomorrow will be better." And then tomorrow's worse. Something has to change. I need to figure out what that something is. Jesus, if you've got me on your Google Reader, I could use a little help. Thanks.

213.5 and Food Debacles

So last week, in my endeavors to continually pinch the penny (that phrase always reminds me of pooping, which tells me I probably shouldn't have ever been entrusted with the education of young children), I decided to make two giant, inexpensive casseroles and eat them for lunch and dinner, three days each. This attempt to both simplify and budget my life was, of course, an unequivocal disaster. But it's cool.

The first casserole I made wasn't horrible. It just wasn't that great. I got both of these off Aimee's Adventures, and I need to take a moment to say that I don't believe the nastiness of last week's food was in any way the fault of her or her recipes. I'm just a sucky cook, for various reasons. Anyway, I started off the week with this casserole, which from this picture kind of looks like a glistening square of grasshopper abdomens and maybe some postnasal drip but I promise looked pretty awesome when actually prepared. You can click on the picture for the recipe if you want to try it on your own (and then send me some in individually portioned containers so I don't have to cook next week):


It was mostly just kind of bland, probably because of the fat free cheese and the whole wheat rotini that tends to make everything else in casseroles taste like whole wheat rotini, and also because I accidentally grabbed a cream of celery instead of cream of chicken, but in general I it was not completely horrible and I dutifully ate my six servings of it.

Then came this:

And this, my friends, was simply pure evil in a crockpot. I do not know what the shit I did to it, but when I woke up the next morning the chicken chunks had turned kind of a grey-brown, and the squash and the parsnips had kind of congealed into this burnt sienna colored blob. The only things I really recognized were the carrots, and they were just kind of bobbing there in the sea of mush, numbed by the indignity of having to spend an evening in a crockpot with the rest of it. I didn't have anything else to eat, though, so I scooped some into my Gladware container and gamely tried it out for lunch that day. And seriously, when the first glob of it passed over my tongue, I swore out loud. I've eaten food I didn't like, and I've tasted things I'd rather not taste again, but I've never actually eat food that tasted BAD until now. And I know probably 105% of it was because I Rachael Ray-ed the portions and kind of played fast and loose with the seasonings, but still, there was just something unholy about it that a mere human couldn't have caused. That casserole just twarn't right.

Anyway, while I was trying to figure out what to eat for this week, Anne posted this awesome book summary on AFG over the weekend. It got me inspired to see if I could stay within my budget, but also make sure I had a good variety of entrees to choose from, interesting snacks (one of my downfalls last week was not to budget any extra food beyond meal preparation), and as much organic and natural stuff as I could get. No fat free, no lite, no Splenda, no high fructose corn syrup. It takes longer to shop that way, and people give you funny looks when you're holding a canister of bread crumbs up to to the light to read its ingredients, but I've found that it seriously reduces the number of impulse buys I make, and because I'm generally a lot happier with my food I don't go out to eat as often. Here's the weekly grocery list and food plan.

And since I manage to screw up other people's recipes last week, I decided to try screwing up one of my own this week instead. There is a restaurant in Kansas City called Eden Alley, and if you're ever near the Plaza you should definitely go eat there, because it's incredible even if you're not a hippie. The food there is beyond delicious and everything's reasonably priced and you get a ton of it and it's just great. When I was there last time, I had a mushroom and spinach loaf that made me forget ever missing real meatloaf in the first place, and it seems straightforward enough to make so I'm going to try it. There are surprisingly no closely related recipes online for this, so I kind of cobbled a recipe based on Eden Alley's picture and description and some similar tofu loaves on the Interweb. I'm going to make it tomorrow night and I'll let you know how it turns out. The idea of combining natural, simple foods into a recipe seems, to me, to follow the logic of eating simple foods by themselves: it's really hard to mess it up if you're sticking to the basics, right?

But as I figured out with Satan's Savory Squash Stew, the road to Hell is often paid with good intentions, so we shall see.

I Will Never Blog About This Again

I've been sans blog because I've been really struggling with this entry, but can't quite find the appropriate words to finish. My other entries about the recipes and sundry other thoughts have had to take a number, so they're on deck and will be posted throughout the next week. This is a very long, badly organized, rambling blog. Get a stiff drink and a sherpa before you begin reading:

I had another conversation about weight loss, specifically my lack of it, with The Friend the other day. Yeah, that same friend from this entry. You'd think I'd have learned my lesson at this point, huh?

And I need to preface all of this by saying I'm not writing this for sympathy, and I love you all for how supportive and wonderful you are and how some of you emailed in and offered to gather up an angry mob with pitchforks the first time I wrote about this, but for this entry I just want everyone to kind of think about this, because I'm seriously sort of stuck on what to believe.

It doesn't matter how the friend and I landed on the weight conversation again, but the gist of what he said is distilled down to the following:

1) Losing weight is absolutely nothing more than a matter of burning more energy than consuming it. There's nothing hard about calories in vs. calories out, and people who say it's not that easy are whining.

2) Anorexia and bulimia are real diseases but addictive behaviors like binge eating (or alcoholism, drug addiction, etc.) aren't, because we make the choice to eat the food, or start drinking the alcohol. Likewise, depression or other mental illnesses don't count as a disease, or as legitimate reasons for overeating and gaining weight, because the choice is always there to improve the depression, and therefore the weight.

3) The fact that I've lost about 25 lbs. only means that I've gone from morbidly obese to slightly less morbidly obese (with the subtext of that statement being I crow about it like I've won Biggest Loser, when I haven't really done shit)

4) He doesn't believe I'll ever really lose enough weight to be normal sized.

And finally...

5) I make a hobby out of being fat. That if I seriously ever tried to lose weight, and I got thin and healthy I wouldn't have anything to bitch about, and so wouldn't have this blog, or these people who read it, or anything to say about myself or my life. So I don't lose weight, because if I did no one would feel sorry for me.

Of course it embarrassed me to read those things, especially because I was reading them in a Panera in Johnson County (it's the 90210 of the Midwest, if that helps) during last Saturday's brunch rush, sitting in a huge, overstuffed leather armchair, and wiping big, rolling tears off my cheeks while a table of college girls in North Face jackets and Dior sunglasses gave me funny looks in between sips of their I.C. Cappuccino Chips. But for a week, I tried to be really, really objective about what he said, because I think there's at least a little truth in it. I don't know if I use my size as an excuse, but I know I DO use it for things. I know Pasta Queen's talked about this in an entry before; I use being fat as a litmus test to sort out the kind people from the unkind, and the shallow from the worthwhile. I use it to be invisible, so I can watch how people really are when there's not a pretty girl around to distract them. And yeah, a huge portion of my entries in this blog are about what it's like to be fat, instead of always what it's like to be losing weight. I write them because I feel them every single day, and I write them because I see other fat people going through the same thing, and I read that some of you go through it, too. I write about it because what happens to people as they lose or gain weight is not right. Society wouldn't fathom of telling someone to be a little less Methodist, or a little more white, but our fat, or our lack of it, is everyone's business; the skinny girls get told to go eat a sandwich, and the fat ones are told how much prettier they'd be if they'd just TRY a little harder.

I've been overweight since time immemorial...this part of my life has become my identity, my struggle, and it has colored my view of the world in a way that a normal person simply couldn't understand. I don't expect to be able to tell my friend that I'm scared of abandoning that identity for a new one, because I don't think he'd ever understand it.

I say these things not as reasons for why I'm not currently losing my 2.5 lbs. per week, but because I didn't know before last Saturday that normal people feel contempt for obese people who try and don't do so well. I wondered if maybe there was some sort of fundamental "go get 'em" characteristic that most thin, active people have and most overweight people don't. I know The Friend would call it laziness or self-pity, but I also know I am not a lazy person. I'm a workaholic, and a to-do listaholic, and, well, I'm not the lazy sack of shit he seems to think I am. I know plenty of obese people who run circles around their skinny counterparts during the day, with their families and their careers and their lifestyles. It's not laziness, dude.

So, what is it? I keep calling it the lack of a "Rudy gene" in my head; that ability to take criticism or adversity and just plow through it no matter what. I know in the past when The Friend has goaded me about my weight, he did so with the intention of inspiring me to get up off my ass and exercise, or to remember it as I made a choice between a healthy lunch and an indulgent one. I don't know if he was planning the same thing when he said he felt disdain for me and "all my excuses for not slimming down". I don't know if he wanted me to pull a Bridget Jones and say "Fuck you!" and then spend hours pedalling a workout bike while Chaka Khan blares in the background. I know I didn't; I sank back into the Panera armchair and took another bite from my bagel and chewed and considered what he had to say. I didn't really expect myself to...I've always been one of those people who take the criticism and store it away to beat myself up with it later, rather than using it as an impetus for change. That part IS a character flaw, I know.

So, this is what I've been trying to figure out for the past week: What is it that causes me to be this ambitionless? Why do I get little ten minute flashes of inspiration and then they die out just as quickly as they started? What characteristic causes me to get motivated to make changes in my body, my career, my relationships for about a day and then I'm sucked back into that same feeling of inertia when the day is over? Why have I allowed that inertia to control my entire life, in everything from from choosing a college to choosing a husband, when I know that ultimately it's really messing me up?

I landed on depression, obviously. When I hear teachers or parents berate a kid at school for being lazy or listless or uncaring, I am never surprised to hear that two or three months later the kid's been evaluated and diagnosed with depression. Because depression isn't that kid's personality, it's what's drowning it. I know it's been drowning me for at least twenty years.

And this is where yesterday, at the conclusion of the week-long series of conversations between The Friend and me, that my jaw hit the floor. Number one, as I listed above, was that he believes depression isn't really a disease, and that it can be fixed by making the choice to get better. The Friend used his own case of depression as an example; that it simply was a mental disorder he improved by giving it the good ol' college try, manning up, and overcoming the same way he'd climb a rock wall, or negotiate a business deal, or make a particularly difficult pasta sauce or something. This is where our conversation sort of broke down, because I got all high school debatey and pulled out sections of the DSM-IV where the doctors say depression IS a disease, one that essentially starts out with a badly mixed cocktail of brain chemicals that ultimately erode your brain's structure and ability to cope with stressors or even with the day-to-day trivialities of life. The Friend said he didn't agree with the research, because it just didn't "feel right", I may have said something nasty about the lack of med school diplomas on his wall, and we both threw our hands up to one another and said goodnight.

Here's the thing: there is the kind of depression that comes from losing a job, or breaking up with a girlfriend, or of course being overweight, and then there is the kind of depression that starts for no reason at all when you're a child. I've had the latter since I was about five. I've spent more than one of my own birthday parties locked in a bathroom crying uncontrollably, my seventh because I couldn't stop thinking about all the children in orphanages or old people in nursing homes who didn't have anyone to celebrate their birthday with, my ninth because my mom got irritated at me when I told her I wanted a different Cabbage Patch than I'd received and she said I was ungrateful and I decided I WAS ungrateful and I had ruined my birthday for her, and a couple other ones in recent years for various twentysomething angst reasons. I was carried out of Epcot Center when I was 10 because a week of hearing my parents fighting in our hotel room and throwing up in the bathroom every night from the stress of it all finally wore me down until I decided the Laser Light Display was a nuclear bomb attack and I went beserk. I've spent entire days in bed, not sleeping, not really thinking...just unable to move because the sadness in my body weighed a million pounds and held me there. I was labeled a "high strung child" and a "neurotic teenager", and the thought of depression never crossed anyone in my family's mind until my mother found me collapsed on the floor of our kitchen one day during a Christmas break home from college, unable to do much more than laugh and cry hysterically. She called a local psychiatrist, and started referring to my depression as "my little problem" from that point on. For the past two weeks, "my little problem" has manifested itself in half of my brain, very calmly, urging me to eat at least 4,000 calories a day so I wouldn't give The Friend the satisfaction of seeing I lost weight after our conversation. It's funny, because the normal part of my brain shrieks out the warnings while the crazy part encourages me to eat, and by the end of the 4,000 calories I've been so preoccupied with the Wagnerian chorus of insanity in my head, I haven't tasted one bite of my binge. Don't expect a loss on Monday, by the way. :)

I'm not writing these things to shock you, or to garner sympathy. I'm writing them because I want The Friend, and other people who might read this and not get me and why I sort of fritter around at all this, to understand that sometimes depression is not a choice. Sometimes, you take your medicine and go to you therapy and do quite well for awhile, and then one chemical decides to take the day off and suddenly you're right back to where you started. And in the course of battling through the depression...of getting your head back above water for the 3,679th time in your life...you realize some things, weight loss for instance, have to take a backseat until you do. You're just happy when you eat poorly like a normal person would, instead of binging your life away.

I'm writing this, finally, because anyone who thinks it's a choice to live a life like this; to be that unstable for decades of your life, to have to admit to your parents why you haven't paid bills or cleaned your house for a couple weeks, to walk into work without a shower or makeup because you couldn't make yourself just do it, to be a hundred pounds overweight not because you're not really trying, but because the messed up part of your head won't LET you, to dutifully take your meds and go to therapy and do all the homework and the journaling and the roleplaying and the self-affirmations until you practically have a psychology degree of your own and still you haven't quite found the right combination to keep you happy for more than a few days at a time...to anyone who would seriously think that I, or anyone else like me, MADE THE CHOICE to live like this? You're welcome to go fuck yourself. Seriously.

I'm done talking about this now. I promise I won't ever write why I'm not losing weight again, unless it has something to do with finding out that a grocery store prankster somehow managed to fill up all the fat free yogurt cartons with Ben & Jerry's or whatever. I'll post the exercise logs, and the food journals and the recipes and the product reviews, and maybe if I go through a stretch where getting out of bed seems as unattainable as base jumping off the Chrysler Building, I'll write about other things, like how the front entryway of the Wal-Mart always smells like farts, or how I can't find a vase big enough to sit by my fireplace that doesn't cost a thousand dollars. I'm through trying to justify something that I barely understand myself to a person who doesn't care to even try to understand. My meds feel like they've kicked back in again, because I see the silver eye floaties and that's always a good sign. I'm getting more sleep, and that means more energy down the road, and since I've figured out I'm a wretched cook, I'm going to go back to the original plan of getting entrees and salads from restaurants and splitting them up throughout the week. I have a plan. I stumbled, but I'm getting better. I'm TRYING. And now I'm done bitching.