Complete and Total Meltdown: Day 42

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I think, briefly, I capitulated to the great despair.   I am not sure if I am still on my knees before it, but I think, perhaps, I will not be long down.

I gave myself an inch and that inch became a hundred miles.  I feel tired and bad and like a devil just has been awoken from the tranquilizer dart I thought would see me through to safety.

I was thinking about Valentine’s Day and how nicely nebulous the dark space is where my heart is seated in my chest.  I was thinking about my mother and how I don’t like how the chemo seems to be using her in the way you would imagine the cancer would if it had its way.  Exhausting, wizening, enervating.  She’s upbeat, she knows what’s up, but I have to overwrite the story in my head.  I am not seeing her enough so every time feels a bit surprising.  I’m not seeing her because I want to hold everything at status quo in my mind.   I want everything to push forward for me without doing a dang thing, and I want everything to stay steady for her without doing a dang thing.

Meanwhile, at work, we learn about a little boy who has benefited from the things we make.  A bajillion heart defects and issues and surgeries and problems and finally – we do a thing and he is free to be a little boy.    I mean, I don’t do it, but I answer phones for people who make ads for people who do it.   Or something inexactly, but legitimately related.

So I haven’t lost any weight, despite a non-zero effort.  The kitchen’s a nightmare, I don’t want to cook in it.  My car suddenly turned on a low tire pressure sign halfway through the drive this morning, causing an inadvertent panic.  They’re asking me to do things I don’t know how to do.  It’s fine, but I’m unsure.  Tired.  The activation energy over the past few days – I know what I need to do. I just do not do it.

So I ordered a pizza and have sickened myself on it and it’s here next to me and I’m contemplating which is the greater evil – to eat it and swallow the shame of having bought it and blown yet more money on one-off food fixes, or to toss it and blow that money and risk constantly daydreaming about wasted pizza and use that to justify another wave of carb-tasia.

It’s not good.  It’s just not.  I am thinking about how I didn’t even think or care about my goals.  How I didn’t feel qualms about breaking the plan.  How I know how this feels and I know how it feels to string yourself out on guilt aftershocks after the initial binge.  I know and I know that I don’t know if anything is going to be different even though there’s a thousand and one reasons to make this time the time.

Why can’t we make this time the time?

Lazy Arse: Day 41

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  • Clear desk  (added some cups to it)
  • 2+ loads of laundry (did 1, half of which is still in the dryer)
  • Make crack slaw (Nope)
  • Prep oncoming week. (Got my email checked and nobody’s murdered or murdering.  Have an idea of what to wear tomorrow.  If I swap out my toothbrush head, maybe we’ll have something.)
  • Read 5+ pages of something good  (what are books?)
  • Start outline for Sela (damnit, no)

I did one load of laundry and wrote    That’s about it.  Ate more of my edge of impossibly bad low-carb meal choices.  Am feeling like a huge failure, in a manageable way.  I mean, I might want to go get Starbucks tomorrow because I’m such a horrible failure.  But I have been running hard and fast and I suppose sometimes this is just how I am going to do.

I think I checked my weight and was not pleased and that probably started the spiral.   Sure.  And J. saying some things.

I am always so sad when I get to the trip and I haven’t done the work.    Gotta get my shit up on this.

Plastic Love: Day 40

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I have to turn off the light on the dryer.  As soon as I hit five hundred words, I will do that.

Too many cut corners and you end up not knowing where you are.  So tonight, even though I am tired, and there’s technically only 30 minutes left in the day to do it, I am going to buckle down and write my five hundred words.

I had a good day, actually, dear diary.  I did a few things that mildly improved my lot.  I am thinking about all the books I read about cleaning and organization and the one thing that truly helps me is getting things into containers.  Containers actually do force me to visualize how much of a thing I should have rather than believing I have at least as much air as is in my house to cram random shit in.  No,  I have two bookcases and that is sufficient for the number  of books I need to treasure and own.  The rest can live at the library or online.  I now have dividers for the socks and underthings (sorry internet for informing you I own underthings) and I already feel as though I have so much room.  I am trying to kind of Unfondo?  Sort a combination of my own making of Unfuck Your Habitat and Marie Kondo teachings.  Seeing what makes me feel good and glad to have in about 20 minute bursts.  In my case, I have a lot of things I know I want to get rid of, but what holds me back is the idea that I have to do the whole house at once or in one process.  I will never get to that stage.  Probably ever, ever.   So instead, to whirl around and say, shit, I have 5-6 misshapen and useless sports bras that I dig through every time to find the one I like and still wear, along with a huge armful of tights that have runs in strategic places where you could still wear them if they stayed exactly where they should.  Mostly this never happens, but I keep the tights because you’d have to think about yourself as an inordinate destroyer of tights and an overall bad person were you to grant them to the garbage pile.  I have tried to avoid such determinations, but perhaps, in the end, that is exactly what I am.

The dear cat is very unwell, and back to the vet she went today to get IV’d and have fluids put under her skin because she was refusing to drink or eat.  Now she’s perked up a bit, a very little bit, and her eye is all sorts of gross, but I’m hopeful about that.

I’ve watched a lot of Abroad in Japan, for a bit of culture.  There’s certainly more on offer in every respect, things to do, things to read, things to worry about tomorrow.  I’m feeling positive, generally, mostly because the alternative feels so exhausting and there’s boxes out there to put all your bobby pins in so…stay calm.

Kritish Bitties: Day 38

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I am positive.  I am continuing my war, losing a few stray battles that are more about perfectionism than long term damage.

I am taking a breath, friends.  No rush.  I want to record my boss smiling and complimenting and making a joke after I’ve been so clenched and worried the past few days.  That my effort is being noticed, that I am somewhat respected, that things in that sphere are not wholly off the rails.

I want to record the sublime peace of a morning ride into work in the snow when you’re not petrified

Tomorrow is Friday as has so oft been said.  A small park bench to sit and hold the world still for inspection.  I have to leave  some time for sleep, and to gather the water I left behind in the bathroom.  So I’ll pluck at some story and that will be that.

Snowblind: Day 37

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I am feeling positive this morning.  Not entirely sure why given the fact that right behind me is a veritable whiteout situation.  I don’t have to immediately leave work, which is the only way that I think I’m not flipping out.  I will, I suppose, have to eventually leave work.  I’m deciding on the bus, but it’s a matter of whether or not I’m driving myself to the bus station or no.  I’ve got boots in the car, at least.  There is an element of peace working here where I know, on these days like this, crap flying from the heavens upon us, I don’t have to necessarily find the huge well of resources within to sort out how I’m going to sleep at my house tonight.  How, in this 1-3 inches, I will endure?

Maybe it’s the activation energy! Which I announced with an exclamation point as I got myself upright relatively quickly this morning for an early meeting.  Up I rose, careening into the heavy, extensive fog.  It didn’t feel impossible.  Days with an hour later start and I am on the constant edge of death.

For now, at my desk, with a charger possibly in my car, possibly not, typing away as I eat my salad.  I do not violently hate the fact that I have to eat this salad on Day 6 of episode 900000 and 1 of my weight loss “journey.”   It could definitely be a worse salad than it is.  It’s mostly fresh and the dressing only had 3 carbs, and sure, this is the sort of content that brings all the kids and their milkshakes and their music to my lawn.
Spent the evening working on some writing. Not happy with it, but it’ll do for what it needs to be.
Counting that towards my total.  Happy I saw Dimash on my CBS TV.  Feeling decent save for the snow.  Shoulda grabbed those boots yesterday!

Habitland: Day 36

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Start early. Get the window rocking in its pane, just ever so slightly, so you can pop through it when you must.

I would like to write on what I would like to write on. Just mark it down under the long, long, interminable list of things that are out of my hands.

Lunch today was bacon-wrapped meatloaf and a salad which I definitely need to make some time next week for myself. That could make a good number of meals. Alexa, I would say, if my electronic overlord had access to me here, remember the meatloaf. I’d also have more control over the random wheat carbs that were in it because it’s institutional meatloaf and institutional mushroom gravy and everything needs a little sawdust to puff it up for another 100 mouths. It’s a good idea.
There’s something nice, settling, relaxing, protective about the realization that it doesn’t really matter in the end if I do low-carb, or low-cal, or keto, or some pickle soup diet. It is never about the exact restrictions or the exact ideology or scientific benefit. What matters is that I feel it working and I stoke that feeling and that belief and that discipline long enough to see a difference. Then, I’m standing with enough elevation to decide something. From down here, from the place of the same 5-20 lbs, nothing really changes or hooks. The habit is simply a habit. But you can’t get to the whole “lifestyle change” garbage/personal heaven without passing through habitland. You have to walk in the direction of your dream, regardless of how you’re thinking about it, so the muscle memory.
So I don’t want to frighten anyone, but my goal, I think is to change enough to frighten people. Not in terms of being unhealthy looking, not in terms of having so much control over this that I lose control and become mostly skin and bones.  A walking sack.  No, that’s not the vision at all.  The goal is to make people realize how much I can do when I settle in and dig down and put my mind to it.  To make the discipline that dances in and out of my life so permanent, so powerful, that I can’t be seen as I was before.  That I get all the power and praise that comes from effectuating that level of change.
That I get that moment where everyone understands an inside the same as an outside.
Fuck, it feels very trite, save for the fact that when you haven’t had a moment like this, ever…and you’ve lived through eons of cycles pretending you don’t mind, you don’t care, you can be ignored and forgotten and made to be secret and unnamed…maybe I need to accept what my trigger actually is. What actually motivates me rather than what is supposed to.  Good health, body security, ability to not get fluttery over hills.  Yes, to all of that.
But maybe part of good health is a good body image. And maybe a good body image can happen when you accept that you have a body – one you want to carry your skull around and show off your genius.  Maybe having someone tell you something good might interrupt the sonic shell of bad news.  Maybe it’s alright to feel like you could get a compliment and it wouldn’t be about anything more than that.
Maybe!