The next meal is around the corner

Someone suggested I write about what fears are holding me back from embracing the idea that the next meal is around the corner?  This is what I came up with.  What fears are holding you back?

This idea of “What if I get hungry?” or “What if there isn’t enough?” stems from early in my childhood when my dad decided to become a raw food vegetarian.  I don’t remember a lot about the kinds of food that we ate before the change, but I do know this – as a kid the ONLY vegetable I liked was broccoli, and let me make it very clear that it had to be COOKED broccoli. I do also remember that we at a lot of sugar cereals for breakfast such as Cap’n Crunch, Apple Jacks, Frosted Flakes, etc. 

So, for a young girl who loved her sugar, the whole raw food vegetarian lifestyle was very traumatic for me.  For breakfast we used to eat this stuff called puffed millet, which tasted kind of like tiny Styrofoam balls.  I’m sure I thought I was starving most of the time, because I was a picky eater before the change.  My mom would still take us out to eat for lunch quite often, and I remember always wanting her “last bite” which she would usually give away.  I think I developed a fear of never knowing when my next meal would be or where it would come from, because I probably only ate at school or when mom took us out to eat.

Fast forward 3 or 4 years to when my parents got divorced when I was 11.  My mom did not continue my dad’s new found passion for raw vegetables, so we started eating “regular” food again.  By that time, though, the damage had been done.  We had a house full of children who were afraid of not getting enough to eat, so my mom would cook huge meals, and we’d all fight over how much everyone took.  There was one person in the family, who if they got hold of the serving spoon first, would take half of whatever there was, leaving the other half for the remaining 4 people in the family.  The rest of the kids would erupt into opposition, and we soon learned not to put the food near that person when we brought it to the table.

To this day, especially when I’m eating out, and I know more food won’t be easily accessible, I still have a fear of not having enough and usually order much more than I actually need to satisfy my hunger.  So the fear holding me back from embracing the idea that the next meal is just around the corner is a deep seeded fear planted early in my life.

That fear is still active in my life today, even though I do have enough food, I can go get more, and it is unlikely that I will ever have to depend on someone else for my food again.  Right now, my refrigerator and freezer are packed with food, and I’m not even in town to eat it… but I still have enough food somewhere! 

I think it’s time to accept the possibility of being hungry.  Being hungry now means something VERY different than being hungry did when I was a kid.  Being hungry then meant insecurity, fear, uncertainty, and certain (at least in my mind) death.  Today being hungry means that I’m hungry.  There IS a next meal around the corner, and one after that, and one after that.  I don’t ever have to be afraid of not having enough again.

Who I am

I’ve started taking up meditation.  In addition I have continued to seek out and listen to videos and talks that have to do with connecting to myself.  Yesterday after meditating, I came away with the feeling that I don’t have to worry what people think of me at work.  I just accepted that I don’t have to be perfect to impress anyone.  It changed my whole day.  I felt like I got much more done and wasn’t as stressed about it.  In the past I have generally put so much pressure on myself to succeed that it actually cripples my performance. 

From as far back as I can remember I have had this unrelenting need to be perfect.   I remember one of the phrases that I hated most of all when I was growing up was “Just do your best.”   People would say that to me as a teenager, and it would make me angry.  “What a cop out!” I would think.  “’DO YOUR BEST’ is for people who can’t do any better.”  I would think.  “’DO YOUR BEST’ is just an excuse to not do something well.”  I would think.  (I know.  I see the irony.  One cannot do better than one’s best.)   There is technically nothing better than your best at any given moment, yet even to this day, I hold myself to this insane standard.  Even my favorite movie “The Sound of Music” has a song in which one of the lines says “Let them bring on all their problems I'll do better than my best.” Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks that’s a possibility.

Of course that type of thinking is “BLACK AND WHITE THINKING,” and no one can sustain that type of lifestyle, so the alternative is to give up or not try in the first place.  My life is full of examples and evidence of the many times I have given up because the alternative was unreachable.   This reminds me of a dream I had in college that I have never forgotten.  In the dream I was in the field house running around the track with some friends.  The staff came along and put a tarp over the top of the track and required all those running to run UNDERNEATH the tarp, thus having to lift the tarp up and over our heads as we ran.  My friends were there cheering me on, telling me that I could do it, but this was far too difficult for me in my dream, so I gave up and left my friends trailing behind me. 

I had always considered this to be a depiction of my need to be perfect or not to do it at all.  My earliest recollection of needing to be perfect was when I was in second grade.  Up until that point, my name was spelled “DeeDee” with two capital Ds.  Once I started learning cursive, try as I might, I could not make both of my Ds look alike, and that was not acceptable to me, so I started spelling my name with a lowercase “d” in the middle.  That way, they didn't HAVE to look alike.  My name changed from DeeDee to Deedee simply to curb that need to be perfect,  and that is how I write my name to this day.  At 7 years old, I was already putting that kind of pressure on myself.   A much more acceptable phrase for me has always been “Do it right, or don’t do it at all.”  Somehow that statement felt much more true and attainable to me than “Just do your best.” 

But what happens when I change the phrase again to “Just do?” or better yet "Just BE."  What if I take out all of the judgment, all of the expectations, and all of the emotions?   What if I just accept that what I do, how hard I work, how many deadlines I meet doesn’t change my value?  What If I accept that my intrinsic value remains the same regardless of my performance at work, regardless of the number of friends I have, regardless of the number of pounds I weigh?  Even writing this is giving me anxiety.  Am I still a valuable employee if I don’t stress about timelines and productivity?  The truth is, YES!  I’m actually a better employee because that part of my attention that usually worries about my productivity-based-value is now free to focus on the job at hand.

Does my value remain the same if I don’t worry about how many people love me and accept me for who I am?  Of course it does.   If I could stop worrying about what other people think of me, then I could allow myself to love myself for who I am.  I have lived my life believing that “WHO I AM IS WHAT YOU THINK OF ME,” but that is simply not true.  Who I am is who I am.  Who I am has nothing to do with who or what you think I am.

And now the question that we have all been waiting for: does my value remain the same no matter how much I weigh, no matter what my body looks like?  If I woke up tomorrow and weighed 140 pounds instead of 380 pounds, would I have more value?  Would I really be worth more as a human being if I weighed a different amount, if my body was smaller?  Sadly, I know people, even in my own family, who would say YES.  I would be able to do more with my body, so it could ADD value to my life, but would it really add value to my soul? If who I am is NOT what you think of me, then WHO I AM is not HOW MUCH I WEIGH!   WHO I AM is not WHAT YOU SEE ON THE OUTSIDE!  WHO I AM IS STILL WHO I AM.  No amount of productivity, pretending or hiding will change that.  I am who I am, and accepting that makes the whole world a different place for me.

Depression Sucks

My depression has been kicking my butt as of late. I was in a car accident at the end of July and since then my depression has been getting worse and worse. Dealing with doctors, attorneys, car repairs, etc. has sent me over the edge. The other day I was at the chiropractor, and I pretty much cried through the whole visit. By the end, I was convinced that he doesn't listen to me, and he doesn't know what he's doing, so I decided that I would never go back there and cancelled my remaining appointments. The next day I went to an appointment for Lasik eye surgery and ended up crying there too. Their administrator spent more time talking to me about depression than she did about Lasik. Everything makes me cry. I was driving home the other day and I saw a sign on the freeway that said "You are Loved. Buckle up." I started to cry about the thought of being loved. You know when you start crying over a billboard, that you are really scraping the bottom of the barrel. Today I was talking to a friend about how unfulfilling my life has become. Because I am also extremely overweight (morbidly obese would be more accurate, but those words seem so awful that I can't bear to use them in reference to myself), I have gotten to the point where I really don't do anything enjoyable in life. Why would anyone want to prolong a life where every action you take, even one as small as taking a shower, feels like the most difficult thing you have ever done. I'm not feeling suicidal right now, which is a good thing, but I'm definitely feeling like I can't handle life. This morning I read an article about how exercise helps depression, so I decided that I was going to exercise. I decided that I would ride my exercise bike for at least 10 minutes. I cranked up the 80's tunes and rode for 14 minutes. I've got to look at exercise not as a way to lose weight, but as a way to keep my depression under check. I have read multiple times and places that exercise helps depression. It is also one of the 8 therapeutic lifestyle changes recommended for depression. I'm going to have to look those up again, because when I was doing them last year, they helped my depression immensely! I keep thinking it was the medication that was making the difference, but what if it was mostly the lifestyle changes? If that is the case, I could be feeling much better and hopeful about life simply by doing the things I love to do anyway. I'll discuss those in future posts.

Will this ever end???

I am so depressed and have been for weeks. I barely function, meaning getting out of bed is the hardest thing I do every day. I haven't even opened the curtains in my house for days. My main source of interaction is the television. I am sad that I don't have kids. I am sad that I live alone. I am sad that I have to get out of bed in the morning. I recently started exercising only to injure my foot, so now I'm in pain whenever I walk and I think I've put exercise on hold. Partly because of my foot, but partly because I just can't make myself get out of bed to go to the gym. My life is so miserable that I feel as if I would just be better off dead. Today I was filling out some paperwork for long term disability from work and just filling out the paperwork was so overwhelming that I started to cry. It's not like I didn't know the answers, but I just felt like I was filling out a job application. What in the world does my job from 15 years ago have to do with getting disability today? Fifteen years ago, I had a crappy job that paid nothing and I wasn't even depressed then. Of course everything makes me cry, so why should disability paperwork be any different? I thought I was starting to get better before I went back to work part time, but since then I have just gone down hill. I was getting to the point where I could think about the thoughts I was having and turn them around. Now it's like that skill is completely gone. All I can focus on is how miserable I am and how I see no end to the misery. Most of the time I don't even recognize that all I would have to do is change the way I am thinking and I would feel better. Instead of getting rid of the stories, I dive into them head first. I just want to go back to bed and pretend like life doesn't even exist. How am I ever going to get to the point where I can work full time? Right now, I'm wishing I could stop working again. I don't know what to do to change this depressed life of mine. I was driving down the street today when the train was going by. I found myself trying to figure out how fast it was going. I think it was going about 50 MPH. Is that fast enough to kill a person or just make their life suck even more. I don't know. I guess I better try to focus on what's good in my life before I go try to find out... I have a house. I have money in savings. I have family and friends who love me. Oh, boy, it's really hard to think of good things today.

Seriously???

Today I was at the pharmacy buying prescriptions when my debit card was declined.  I couldn't imagine what was wrong because I should have had plenty of money in the bank and I also have an overdraft account.  Well, after going to the bank, researching it online and looking through statements, I realized that not only had a merchant billed my account for $588 instead of $49, but my last paycheck had not posted to my account and now the bill that wasn't going to be paid was my mortgage payment.  I spent all afternoon on the phone trying to get things worked out.  It's still not resolved.  So, what did I do?
I sat down with a big bowl of ice cream and ate the whole thing.  Then I started thinking about how if I can't even handle something as simple as a mix up in my bank account, how am I going to handle going back to work, which I am planning on doing week after next.  I became more and more depressed until all I could think about was dying.  I cried and wished I were dead.
I was about to go to bed at 5:30pm, but decided to do some yoga instead.  After a few minutes of Yoga, I was calmed down and thinking more clearly.  I realized that if/when I get stressed out with work, I just need to step back and focus on something else for a while.
If someone else were telling me that I can't do it and that they wished I would die, I would just walk out of the room, so why not do that with myself.  I can't really leave my mind in another room, but I can get it focused on something else so I don't have to listen to that kind of thinking.  Turned out to be a very enlightening experience.  Just because those thoughts of failure, death, and discouragement come into my head doesn't mean that I have to entertain them!

What the... ???

Today in IOP, as is the case everyday, I filled out a form asking about my feelings, how I slept, etc.  One of the questions on the daily form that we fill out is "Have you abused any legal or illegal substances in the past 24 hours?"  "If so, what?"  I answered yes and that I had used food.  The counselor read that out loud and then everyone started laughing.  I don't get what is so funny about that.  I weighed in this morning at 358 pounds.  I don't see anything funny about the fact that I am a food addict and use food to dull the pain of life.  If someone had said that they had used drugs or alcohol, I'm sure everyone in the room wouldn't have laughed at that.  So how can a whole group of people actually look at me and think it's funny that I abuse food?  I'm failing to find the humor in this situation.  Maybe they thought I put that down as a joke, but I was serious.  I've talked about it before in group.  They all know that I eat to keep from feeling, so why the laughter?  I feel embarrassed.  I feel rejected.  I feel invalidated.  I feel ashamed.  I feel misunderstood. I feel humiliated.
Sometimes I wonder if my life will ever change.  I wake up every morning thinking that today will be the beginning of a new life.  One in which I don't over eat.  One in which I will begin to lose weight and be able live life the way I want to.  And every night I go to bed discouraged because I caved yet again.  I gave into the urge to overeat again.  I was weak again.  It's the same cycle day after day, and on days like today, I just wish it would all be over.  I wish I could just die in my sleep tonight and never have to deal with it again?  I feel so H.O.P.E.L.E.S.S.

Feelings

I have been on medical leave from work for my depression since the middle of May.  I started going to IOP (intensive out-patient therapy) last week.  We have been talking about how we need to stop listening to stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves and focus on what is happening in life now.  Part of that is learning to feel the feelings that come up instead of pushing them away.  This is not a new concept for me; but I sure do have a hard time doing it.  Like most addicts, who push their feelings away with drugs, alcohol, gambling, etc, I too thwart the feeling process.  I am an addict.  I am addicted to food.  Food is what I use when I want to avoid feeling something.
Our therapist, Tammy, always talks about how we need to feel our feelings and then they go away.  Today I tried that.  I realized that I have been really irritable for the past few months and when I got thinking about why, I realized that I was feeling angry, so I just let myself be angry.  Sure enough, just as Tammy promised, the feeling went away and the next thing I knew, I was singing as I was driving to IOP.  After IOP, I went to lunch and was actually able to stop eating and throw away the rest of my food when I got full.  I was actually able to throw away my safety net (food) because I didn't need it.  There was no feeling to be pushed down at the moment, so I just stopped eating when my body was satisfied.  For those who are not addicts, I'm sure that just seems like common sense, but for me not using extra food is a big deal, and throwing it away is even a bigger deal.
This evening, I am feeling sad.  I think.  Sometimes I have a hard time identifying feelings because I am so used to ignoring them.  I just feel like crying.  I don't know why, and I'm not sure it matters.  I just need to sit with it until it goes away, otherwise, I'll turn on the TV, sit down with a plate of nachos and a bowl of ice cream and drown my sorrow... until, of course, it comes bobbing back to the surface, because my feelings seem to have the worlds strongest life jacket and they come back with a vengeance as soon as I'm not stuffing them down.
So... sadness.  I feel like crying, yet at the same time, I feel like feeling this will kill me.  It is so tempting to just grab some food and stuff the sadness down, yet it is screaming to be felt, to be acknowledged, to be free.  I'm sad because I don't want to be alone.  I don't want to be overweight.  I don't want to...  I guess I'm mourning the loss of things I don't have.  I want to have a family of my own.  I want to be thin and healthy so I can enjoy life, so I can bike and hike and have fun.  I'm sad that my whole life, my dad told me that no one would love me if I was overweight, so like a self fulfilling prophecy, I became more and more overweight the lonelier I got and I became more and more lonely the more overweight I got.  This vicious cycle has plagued my life.  I'm sad and angry and frustrated and disappointed.  Yes.  That's what I'm feeling.

Tammy made the comment today that "You don't know who you are if you don't know how you feel."  Today I am a daughter of God, who feels angry and sad and frustrated and joyful and excited and happy, and annoyed and disgusted and silly and hopeless and helpless and hopeful and confident and grateful and loving and accepting.  The point is, that we were meant to feel our feelings, or God never would have made us capable of feeling them in the first place.  Today, I choose to feel.  I choose to be me!

Last Friday I went to a new doctor who prescribed Zyprexa for my depression.  2.5mg plus 40mg of prozac. 
Saturday I was ornery and irritable.  I was afraid that the new drug might have been causing it, because I have been irritable on other drugs.  Since then, my mood has been getting increasingly better.  Today, I actually cleaned my kitchen.  You can see my kitchen counters for the first time since November.  I then started a project of painting a picture frame to match my living room, put pictures in it, and cleaned up the mess from my project.  A week ago I would have just looked at the frame and thought it would be nice to paint it and then walk by without any intention of doing so.  How thankful I am that I am feeling better.  I never would have imagined a week ago that I would even start such a project, let a lone finish it.  Odd how depression sucks the life out of a person.  It makes you not even imagine that you can do such things let alone actually do them.
I never thought I would be grateful for anti-depressants, but after this last brutal winter and depressive episode, I can only think that I must be grateful... or I might have been dead.

What is it really?

WHAT NON-DEPRESSED PEOPLE THINK ABOUT DEPRESSION:

• Depressed people are sad all the time.
• Depressed people are too sad to get out of bed.
• You'd feel better if you exercised.
• If you'd clean your house, you'd feel better.
• You just need to focus on the good things in your life.
• Depressed people just need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps.

WHAT DEPRESSION REALLY IS:

• Depressed people are not always sad.
• Your mood is not the only thing that is depressed.
• Your body heals more slowly than normal.
• your concentration is diminished.
• You don't stay in bed because you're too sad to face life, you stay in bed because your body is so tired you can't imagine doing anything else.
• Sometimes depressed people do have energy, but sometimes that energy only lasts a few minutes.  Sometimes I wake up ready to face the day, and by the time I have gone to the bathroom and walked back to my bedroom, I'm too tired to do anything else but lay back down in bed.
• depression sucks the energy and the life out of you.
• Depressed people would love to get outside and exercise if only they still had energy left after they've gotten dressed and put their shoes on.
• Pleasure doesn't last when you are depressed.  You can do something that brings joy to your life, but once you stop, the pleasure is gone.  Normal people do things they enjoy and it makes their life fulfilling.  Depressed people do things they enjoy and the moment the pleasurable activity is over, so is the joy.
• Things that you can normally handle, will send you over the edge when you are depressed.
• Niceties are lost along the way.  Even when you are normally kind, when you are depressed, you find yourself saying things, or not saying thing, the way you normally would.  I forget the little stuff like "please" and "thank you" and "good job" when I'm depressed.
• Depression is physically painful.  I'm not sure if it causes pain or if pain is just more noticeable and less tolerable when your depressed, but there physical pain.
• Depression makes you feel empty.

My Two Battles

I have two main battles in my life right now.  The first one has been a losing battle since I was 12.  What is it? In a word - WEIGHT.  As of the writing of this post, my body weighs 341 pounds.  Wow.  I really don't like that number when its written down.  My body weighs 200 pounds more than it should.  No wonder everything always hurts.

The second battle that is raging in my downward spiraling life is DEPRESSION.  I can barely handle the things that come my way in my every day life.  Right now, my house is so dirty that I am only enduring the aweful smell coming from my kitchen because I don't have the energy or desire to get up and take out the trash.  This afternoon I opened my fridge and it smelled so bad that I almost gagged.  I took out everything I could see that I thought might be smelling it up, so now whatever that was is sitting in my kitchen garbage, wafting into my nostrils in the living room.  Perhaps I'll post a picture of the current state of my kitchen just to show how badly I am really feeling.  If there is one room in my house that I hate having messy, it's my kitchen, so it is a telling sign of my mental state when all the dishes I own are spilling over the sink onto the counters.

Today I went to an appointment with a new doctor whom I have been waiting for over a month to see, only to find out that she called in sick today and I can't get another appointment until the middle of April.  I walked out of the office in tears, and by the time I was a block down the street, I was crying almost hysterically.  I came home, laid on my bed, and sobbed.  This week has been super hard not only because of the depression but also because my back has been hurting.  I don't know how much more I can take.  It's hard enough being depressed when I don't have any physical ailments.

There have been a couple times this week when I was SO tired that I actually felt sick to my stomach.  Depression rears it's head in many different ways, but fatigue is a big one for me.  Of course, my body also carries an extra 200 pounds with it everywhere it goes, so who's to say that my fatigue doesn't have something to do with that too.

Unfortunately, I think my two biggest battles feed off of each other.  It's usually more difficult to control what I eat when I am not feeling happy, and it's equally difficult to be happy when my body weight keeps going up.  Depression sucks!  I think often of death and dying.  I wish that I could just stop the pain.  Stop the misery.  I live a block away from the train tracks and that is always in the back of my mind as my final way out.  I would rather just go to sleep and never wake up.  I've learned over the years that it takes a lot of guts to actually knock ones self off.  I've heard it said that suicide is the cowards way out, but anyone who has ever toyed with the idea knows that it is a very scary alternative to living out your life.  I've been in high rise buildings contemplating the possibility of jumping, and I can say that it is a very scary thought.  I think often of walking down the block and jumping in front of that train.  What if it doesn't kill me?  What if I am merely crippled for life?  Would my weight buffer the impact enough to render me incapacitated but not dead?  I've never really thought of offing myself with a gun because I wouldn't have the slightest clue how to go about getting one.  ...No, suicide is a scary thing.  There doesn't seem to be an easy way to do it.  You hear stories of people who take pills and never wake up, but you also hear stories of people who take pills, wake up, and spend the remainder of their lives as vegetables.  Not for me, thank you.  If I ever do decide to do it, I will do it "right."  End it.  Get it over with.  Finito!

The Dregs of Depression. Take 1.

I have been thinking of starting a blog for quite sometime, not sure if I wanted my most personal thoughts and feelings to be out there for the whole world to see, but, alas, I want a place where I can go to record all of my feelings, thoughts, and rantings.  I am starting with a private blog only for myself.  If I ever decide to open it up to the world, fine.  If not, it will just be a place for me to come and vent my innermost ideas.