Archive for the ‘unhealth and weller-being’ Category

A few weeks ago, as I do, I started running again. The Couch to 5K, that old reliable standby which removes your buttocks from the couch and sets you bouncing and cursing down the road towards ultimate health and total fitness, or at least the ability to run for 3 miles without passing out and then dying in a ditch and then being eaten by wild moose who have trampled down off the mountains when they heard that there was a buffet.

Jennette was my inspiration—she announced, I am going train for the 5K! Oh boy, that was totally easy! she said. And I thought, holy crap, it’s totally easy! I can do it too! And then I might have totally blamed her for leading me astray when, after rising bright and early for a vigorous dawn run, I staggered home and crawled into bed, safely out of range of mooses, and pretty much slept like the biggest Wuss in Wusstown, population me,  for the rest of the day.

I like happy endings. It’s why I read romance novels for so long—I want the romantic kiss and the sunset and the ever-after where the music surges joyfully and has got harmonicas in it and everything is swell and nothing will ever be sad, not ever again.

The problem with happy endings, though, is figuring out where the ending is. Sometimes, it is very very easy. The hero and the heroine kiss, that’s one. The family torn apart is reunited, there’s another. The small, wiry kid wins the national boating championship despite all odds and is hoisted up on his teammates’ shoulders and there is cheering.

Weight loss stories are supposed to have very definitive endings—you reach your goal! You have triumphed! There go the harmonicas, and here comes the hero of our story, wearing a slinky dress in size whatever, newly proud of herself and her accomplishments and her rockin’ bod, and there she goes off over the horizon and into the setting sun that is as hot as she suddenly believes she is and then the credits roll and you are dabbing away a little tear and pressing your fist to your heart because it is throbbing with the beauty of it all, so hard it might just thump right out of your chest.

It happened with a quickness that is still a little puzzling to me, and makes me think that it was some extended practical joke that was broadcast live somewhere in a European country where smoking is still considered sexy. Things were rough, for a bit—a crazy man and threats of having my dog put down, and money woes, always the money woes, and endless, neverending, eternal fucking winter—but there was Mexico! Sunshine! Sunshine in Mexico! I will be cured! And for a week I was the happiest thing in the land.

And then I came back to a happy cat and my clean apartment and was glad to be home, except that things started to feel inexplicably bad, and badder, and the worst, until a week or so later I was up out of my bed and googling “painless suicide” in my underwear.

Googling “painless suicide” will make you feel a little bit like a dipshit; it will also, probably usefully but not in the way that you hope at three in the morning in your underwear, not provide you with the answers you’re looking for.

Since around 2001, I’ve had a online journal, which means that since 2001, I’ve chronicled the majority of my depressive cycles, sometimes in breathtaking detail, and sometimes just with one meaningful post heavy on the choking/drowning/black hole/night sky metaphors that really, you know, capture the feeling of a severe bout of depression and or despair.

Sometimes the post was to explain away an absence of posts for days or weeks or months and sometimes it was to round-about apologize to the friends in the audience who may or may not have been reading who may or may not have even been my friends any more, to say—I’m sorry I’ve been flaking. But it is hard to put on pants when you are choking in a black hole under a night sky that is drowning in sorrow, am I right? Except without the danger of possible embarrassment and potential ridicule and or doubt and or skepticism that might arise if I actually was brave enough to resurface and apologize in person.

I like to think of myself as a happy-go-lucky kind of gal, spontaneous and full of fun, up for any excitement, flexible, inventive, turn-on-a-dime and ready to go. It’s a vibrant and dynamic way to be, to be always poised for something good and ready to take advantage of it; it’s the way I want to be. It’s a way I try to be, and in my off time, on a weekend when the hours stretch ahead lazily like a cat, it is both a good way to be and something I am good at. Let’s go take over the world! I shout. And we do. Sometimes we stay in a dark room and play EverQuest, but that’s okay too.

As it turns out, however, I’m not always good at it. When I am faced with many tasks all of them due at once, sometimes all of them due at once three days ago or before I was born, all of them huge, all of them daunting, all of them starting to throb and throw up steam and tick like they are going to explode if I don’t attend to them immediately, with some slightly less-urgent but no less important tasks scrabbling in between, making impatient squawking noises and spinning round like whirligigs, I shut down.

For the great majority of my life, I was a fat girl who didn’t see anything beautiful or positive about her body, her size, her shape, whose only purpose and goal in life was to lose every one of those excess pounds because they were the only thing holding her back from being happy, fulfilled, and loved by everyone around her. Each individual pound could be traced back to a very specific unhappiness, and as that pound vanished from her body, so too would that problem. An inch from her hips meant no more anxiety problems, and each incremental reduction in the circumference of her thighs meant boyfriend, boyfriend, girlfriend, one night stand, marriage and babies forever and ever. Losing weight was, in other words, the end all, the be all, my body and its raging, enraging imperfection was the thing on the top of my mind at all times, and I knew exactly what had to be done–I had been told over and over.

After all the ennui that has been plaguing me like rats in an unsanitary medieval town, I had big plans. They were such big plans I ought to initial cap them to signal their Bigness and Planniness . I pulled out my notebook, put together a short but do-able to-do list that would make a satisfying dent in my giant life to-do list that includes things along the lines of “learn to fly a helicopter in combat” and “appreciate the morning dew,” and went to bed at a sort-of reasonable hour with great fortitude and hope in my heart.

Then I woke up at a reasonable hour and laid there. I opened my laptop and poked around on it, and then put the laptop away and looked at the ceiling and sighed and put a pillow on my head and dozed and dozed and dozed and dozed.

Every year I make resolutions, because I like the idea of a fresh start, a definitive place to start, a moment you can point to and say yes, there. That is the starting line, and here is where we’ll begin. Every year about this time, I look back at the resolutions I had made (because I have a memory like a drunken sieve) and I think oh, those were good ideas! Too bad I didn’t actually, you know, work on any of that stuff. Too bad this year was exactly like last year which was exactly like the year before, in terms of Self-Improvement.

In terms of everything else, this year, and last year, and the year before have been amazing rollery coaster kinds of adventures, during which, if we have to be honest and fair, I haven’t had much time to think about esoteric improvement schemes.