Six Months In Review

It is six months from the beginning of this year.  I was feeling the march of change; I was hearing the kick-ass jump rope theme of Rocky and I felt sure that this year was going to be the one in which I would finally start losing the tremendous amount of weight I have gained over the past four years.  I was feeling the fight and the courage to face the future, to shed the past and to reclaim myself from my deep apologies to the world at large for being such a wildly imperfect being.  I was going to expunge all apology from my vocabulary.  I was going to find myself again, unearth my beating heart from the soil it has been buried under.

If I was to do a six month review of the year as it has so far unfolded I would have to say that it has been heavier, harder, harsher, and darker than the preceding four years have been.  I would have to give myself a complete fail for all of my intentions.  There is good in this, surprising good, but the bad is foul and I'm not sure how I'm going to recover properly from it.

So in review:

• Instead of losing the cumbersome shameful weight I have accumulated in the past few years, I have actually gained more.  More.  More.  It's like a train I can't stop.  It's repulsive and degrading and has deteriorated whatever confidence I had in myself and left me with nothing but discomfort and disgust of myself.

• My son has finally been diagnosed with both ADD and OCD.  We really aren't surprised.  But we can't afford as much therapy as would truly benefit him.

• I can't afford a new psychological assessment.  I really need it.  I have graduated from "shadings of OCD" to actual OCD.  My depression is constant and while not of the dire suicidal kind it has resumed its insidious role of destroying my ability to rally, to move in better directions and is, at least in part, responsible for my continued weight gain.

• It has become painfully clear that I need to go back on antidepressants.  It is painfully clear (again!) that I cannot navigate this life healthily or well without the support of proper medication and anti-anxiety medication isn't enough. 

• The lack of proper antidepressant medications has turned me from a mere lush to a fat alcoholic.*  You are not allowed to comment on this, lecture, suggest AA (because I did that for smoking which made me want to smoke more) or tell me "helpfully" that I should just love myself more.  This is complicated and will only be helped by the proper mental help.  Period.  I will never stop drinking completely so anyone tempted to suggest this may go and stuff their mouths full of cayenne pepper.  I need to find my way back to moderation.  Won't happen without proper meds.

• We have gone bankrupt and the perfect credit we have cherished for years is now completely destroyed.

• In spite of the fact that in June I drank a lot less beer, ate more healthily, and worked out at the gym 15 days out of 30, I gained weight instead of lost it.  (Yes, I've had my thyroid tested, back when I had medical insurance.)

• Instead of simplifying my life I have complicated it by having a tremendous breakthrough with writing and am writing a fictional novel.  Which may kill me.  It is dreadfully painfully personal and it speaks the things I have never had the guts to speak here or in my everyday life.  It is taking all of my energy and my emotional life to write it and it's exciting.  It has rendered me a worse mother than I ever was before.  It has made me look inwards at ghosts and I have been setting them free but it isn't without cost.  You may yet hear that I was found face down in a pool of metaphoric ink, drunk on the power of words, until I expired with the toll it takes to say the truth.

And maybe, maybe it will all turn out to be a giant pile of crap and I will die inside because I have never given any piece of writing so much of myself- so much blood and so much of my heart.  If it's crap then I will, by extention, also be crap.  The end.  This is why I have feared this book writing thing for so long.  I've tried and couldn't muster the guts to go for it because I could tell that if I was ready for it it was going to ask me to give everything I have with no assurance that it would do anything but kill me.

I don't know what to make of this six month review.  I am so deeply ashamed of my body and hateful and I have entered the obese stage of things.  Typical American: obese, broke, and full of fizz.

The book has opened so many old battle wounds.  So many scars lay open to your eyes.  The most well meaning of people don't know how to swallow this shit.  I think I would like to vaporize myself.  Become invisible.  All this goes on while I keep such a cheerful face, and try not to mind all the things I constantly mind.  If I lie to you, it isn't out of malice or a wish to decieve.  Wait, yes it is.  I want you to keep going, to keep moving, to keep loving, to keep hoping.

I look at myself today and what I see is hideous.  Just a strange bloated version of who I really am.  I am so much more than this giant blown up body that has become mishapen and yet I can't believe any more that anything I can do will alter it.  I can't see my way back any more.  This isn't charmingly chubby anymore.  I am now a thing I despise.  I want to retch when I see myself in any mirror because I have become enormous and not myself.

Not myself.

I take so many self portraits of my face because even though I'm beginning to sport jowls like my Grandfather, I can still take a picture to enhance my face.  I am photogenic.  It isn't a virtue, some of us are, some of us aren't.  Some of the most beautiful people I have ever met don't photograph well.  I do and I think part of it is that I have a theatrical sensibility, while always being the most rotten actress on the planet.

So this is my curse right now.  That all the things we've gone through have etched themselves in me so that I have become repuslive to myself.  It's a crisis of sorts.  But not an urgent one. 

What will the next six months bring?  I have no guesses.  I have no thoughts except that I hope I won't lose my job.  I hope my friends in CA won't be really shocked and horrified at what I have become, yet why wouldn't they?  This worry hangs in the air like a spider web I can't quite get around.  When will this spell be broken?  We've been stripped of so much in the past few years.  I would like, now, to lose the weight, to clear my head, to regain the self confidence I've worked so hard to accumulate but which dissolves like aluminum in hydrochloric acid.

I know that this is all how it's meant to play out.  I just wish I knew how long I need to be obese to learn whatever it is I'm supposed to learn.  Because obviously I haven't learned it yet.  Or I would feel the grip loosening on me. 

Being fat is so much worse than just being an alcoholic or a crazy person.  Being fat hurts.  It is so uncomfortable.  So degrading.

So this year isn't turning out at all how I had imagined it would.

I just hope that the next six months are about healing and not about dredging.









*I think it's important for my dignity to mention that I am never drunk.  I NEVER drink while working.  I have a very high tolerance and I think the proper term to apply here is a "maintenance" alcoholic.  The fact remains that I drink a lot of beer, that is the point.  I don't drink hard stuff.  I never lose control.  I'm not a drunk.  Just a person who has looked to beer to sooth and needs meds to do it instead.