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.

It could have also been the fact that I did not eat before I went out, and I forgot to bring my water bottle, and my iPod conked out so I tried to time my intervals in my head but kept losing count and erring on the side of “I will jog for an extra twenty, thirty hours just to be safe.” But it is easier to blame Jennette, really, because then I get to demand recompense. I prefer it in the form of cookies.

The next time I went, I did not make those mistakes. I made lots of different, interesting ones, but not those ones, and when I finished up my run with my shoelaces untied and my iPod cord tangled around my head and my sweat jacket trailing along the path behind me and the sun burning my eyes and a long trail of spilled water all the way down my front and somewhat unsure where my keys were, I felt absolutely fucking fantastic. I felt like a goddess. A damp, sweaty, squinty, total mess of a goddess who had just jogged, very slowly and with poor form, probably an entire total of 100 feet, and was absolutely and entirely, absurdly proud of herself.

I jogged! Outside! I was wearing spandex and a sports bra, in public, under the great big blue sky where anyone and god could see me, and I ran and ran and ran until it was time to stop and I wanted to do it again and again and again.

I managed to do it three times more before a trip out of town got in the way. I packed my running clothes and my shoes and I had very determined plans and yet somehow, ended up at a breakfast buffet, face down in a pile of waffles and fresh cream and ripe strawberries instead of on a treadmill in the bowels of a hotel in Vegas. Weird. But I missed it! I’d start again on Monday! Except I was sick on Monday, and tired on Wednesday, and on Friday I had missed both Monday and Wednesday so what was the point?

The point is that I miss it. I have never run outside, not on a treadmill before, and it was spectacularly awesome. It was fresh air and changing scenery, trees and grass and dogs passing by (I am a fan of all these things) and running through the shade and out into the sun and alongside the river all the way up to the dinosaur park  and back and it was just about one of the best things ever, and I am saying that about exercise, I want you to understand, and I miss it.

image by Today is a good day

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.

I keep waiting for the credits to roll, I think, and that is my problem. After the credits roll, I can stop thinking about my body, and what I eat and what I drink and if my intestines are going to be difficult that day. I can stop worrying about how I look in jeans and that my belly is still sort of poochy and I can stop hating my boobs and I can just go on and live my life the way life is supposed to be lived, after a happy ending—completely off-screen, without a director’s commentary, without wondering what’s next.

As I understand it, that happens pretty often when you reach a goal. You plant your flag, you look around, and you go “huh. Well. That’s done.” And you realize that there’s nowhere to go but right back down. Here’s where the mountain stops, and it looked pretty high when you were down at the bottom, but now that you’re up there, it looks pretty boring.

I’ve lost all the weight, I’ve gotten the high fives, I’ve gone woo! And now I am waiting for the flourish of trumpets to let me know that I can stop waiting–well, for the flourish of trumpets. Now I am just kind of torn between relaxing into just giving up and forgetting all about it (this is who I am, now, and this is how it’s going to be and things are easy-peasy, from here on out) and fading undramatically into black, and being very disappointed that there’s not more to it, getting mad that there’s nothing left.

Things were so exciting when I was losing the weight. Things were dynamic, ever-changing, and it was a Thrilling Adventure, Full of Spills, Chills, and extra, additional Thrills.  And now things are not exciting. Things require work. Pushups and running and vitamins and being healthy without the immediate reward of five pounds down and a compliment every time I see someone I haven’t seen in ten to fifteen minutes.

A few weeks ago I visited San Francisco—my incredibly talented friend Josh Mohr was having his book release party for his (awesomely best-selling, completely amazing) novel Some Things That Meant the World to Me. He was in my grad program; people and instructors from the grad program showed up, and over and over they gasped, and hardly-recognized-me, and told me I looked wonderful and asked how I was and it was startling, to be in that place again, where it was all new and fresh and completely astonishing, how much weight I had lost and how different I look and how awesome everything in the world was and how totally I rule.

I missed that, I realized. I’ve been just ordinary for a long time, and sort of coasting along, waiting for someone to tell me that things were over and done with, and I missed the rush of it. The validation. The high fives and the wows and the holy, holy that comes when you do something dramatic and people recognize how very dramatic it is. I had forgotten, a little bit, where I used to be and what I used to look like, and how I had passed through the gates of paradise and had been issued my passel of virgins and my portion of olive oil and grapes and been warned that this was the way it was going to be, from now on. It crept up so slowly, the complacency and the odd, ungrateful boredom.

There’s plenty I can do—I can declare that my next goal is Ultimate Fitness. My next goal can be a marathon. My next goal can be a six pack. My next goal can be buttocks which can crack a walnut. My next goal can be a triathlon. My next goal can be curing cancer and finding missing children and rehabilitating abused hamsters and looking for the face of god and brokering peace in places that are broken. My next goal ought to be accepting that I had a happy ending, even if I can’t reach out and place my finger directly on the moment where that happened—maybe as far back as when I saw the scale drop below 200 pounds, or the first time I walked up a flight of stairs without dying, or the time I realized that I was worth something, that I had been worth something all along, that I would always be worth something, and I took the batteries out of the scale and gave it away, cue the triumphant kazoo.

I’m done losing weight, and I have been for so long, and probably it is long, so long past time to stop being vaguely dissatisfied, maybe, and figure out what’s next.  Cue the extra-triumphant entire band of kazoos.

image by LunaDiRimmel

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. Which will also make you feel Even More Alone and really totally unclear about what to do next.

I’ve been depressed before, terribly so, can’t-get-out-of-bed depressed, wishing-it-would-all-go-away depressed, endless-fits-of-utterly-prone-and-snotty-weeping depressed, but I have never hit that sweet spot before, where you’re depressed to the very specific degree that you want to die, and can also still function adequately enough to make that magic happen.

Usually I am far too weighted down with woe to do anything about it. This active, go-getter kind of despair was a new one on me, and having the possibility, the option of a way out, was, luckily, flummoxing enough that I wasn’t entirely clear what to do with it. You mean I really could just, you know—stop? Quit? Flip over the board and storm off? Take my ball and go home?

(No one would miss me, and no one would care, and people would probably even be better off and why shouldn’t I? What’s stopping me? I was talking myself into it, even if it would hurt. It would hurt for just a second, right? Unless I fucked that up, too. Oh, look, a rabbit hole, back around the way we came, and two, and three, and four.)

The idea was appealing, and the appealingness of the idea was terrifying, and I spent a lot of time terrified of myself and what I could end up doing, if that makes any sense. I’ve done stupid shit before, in fits of impulsiveness. I could do the ultimate stupid thing from which there is no handy Ctrl-Z.

Luckily I am no good under pressure, froze up, and waited it out quietly. A flurry of wretchedness, of isolation, of something that felt like perfect clarity but was as muddled as simple arithmetic after a jug of vodka. Keeping a secret, keeping it all secret because I felt like a ridiculous teenager.

Eventually confessing to E. I am alone, and lonely, and isolated, and scared of what I could do. And the look on his face was like a punch in the gut. Sometimes you need the punch in the gut.

Clawing my way back, every step careful, conscious, calculated. Add in: vitamins. A walk. More water. A protein shake. Start answering the email that’s piled up. Send out a short story. Finish my book proposal, send it out; start writing again, even just the tiniest bit. And think oh, hey. That’s what hope feels like. Interesting.

Enough measured, deliberate mimicry of human behaviors, and eventually you become a human being again. Eventually you feel human enough to count, to take up space in the world and not feel like you’re wasting it. Eventually you’re the person you think of as you, again, and not the heaped-up pile of mistakes and errors and trash you started to feel like, instead. I can hang on for a little while longer. Especially if spring comes soon.

photo by Kruggg6.

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.

Sometimes the post was to purge, and to say, hey, things are hard and I am sad and I just wanted to say that. My biology is messed up, my headology is a wreck and I never learned any useful coping mechanisms and here we go again. I’ve been aware of the endless cyclical cycling and I have always had the feeling if I were to look at a wide-angle shot of all the things I’ve ever written over the course of my online life, a very clear pattern would emerge and then I’d have to go cry into some pudding.

I’m pretty tired of documenting my bouts of depression. I’m tired of them occurring, and I’m tired of them hanging around, eating all my cold cuts and drinking all my beer and leaving crumbs on my couch and thumbprints on my mirrors. I’m tired of giving in to depressions and accepting the idea that occurs to me, that I cannot function and always I will be sad. I’m tired of saying that I’m tired of it.

I’ve been doing this a long time, and trying to cope with it for about as long. There’s not a lot left for me to do, besides  electroshock therapy. Medicines, doctors. Going for a brisk walk! Buying myself flowers. Making lists that include the items “get out of bed” and “take shower.” Aerobics. Sunlamps and heat lamps and changes of scenery. Just giving into the lying in bed and crying until I am all cried out. They help; they don’t cure. What I want is a cure. What I want is to never again have to write a post full of metaphors about being smothered under wet blankets/frozen in an icy sea/beaten with flannel-wrapped hammers, accompanied by an acknowledgement that I have a great life and am very lucky and I don’t mean to be ungrateful and I’m really sorry, I am, I am.

photo by loop_oh

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. I completely and utterly close up, close off, turn my back and lower my head (probably so they won’t notice me slinking away) and I ditch, if I give myself half a chance.

The only way to stop it, to rein myself in, to keep myself from running until I hit the edge of the world and go plummeting over, my eyes wide and full of stars and my heart full of relief that I will never have to meet a deadline ever again, is to make an extensive, exhaustive, comprehensive to-do list. And by extensive, exhaustive and comprehensive, I mean “schedule ever single moment of the day, all the way through bedtime.” It’s not a list of items in any order as they occur to me, which I can check off as I complete it–no, it is a schedule, an itinerary, a list of commands from me to me, and somehow I almost always manage to obey.

It’s embarrassing, though–I used to have to write “wake up at 7; breakfast; take vitamins; take crazy pill; start chapter 4; upload; start chapter 5;etcetera, etcetera .” Eventually, I could leave off the “wake up at 7″ as understood. Eventually. If I leave off the vitamins, the crazy pill, the breakfast, it is 1 in the morning and I haven’t eaten for days and the cat starts to appear to me as a succulent turkey. The to-do list is vital, it is essential, it is, I know for a fact, now, non-negotiable.

Yesterday, I slept over at E’s, got a slightly late start, decided to check a few things and hang out with the dog for awhile before I went home and started my to-do list, and by 11 p.m., I was disheveled,unshowered , starving, wild-eyed, and had accomplished nothing at all, all day. I have so much to do, so little time in which to do it, so many projects that are so important and had been so carefully broken down into their component steps and mapped out for accomplishing in good time all through the future up until then. Up until then, I had sat down the night before and sketched out the next day. The night before yesterday I skipped that step, and now I am a day behind and feeling every one of those hours, coated in guilt and spiky self-recrimination, neither of which is delicious and chocolate-coated.

I would like to think I just need to sort out my very complicated head, get everything on paper as a way of visualizing my tasks and making my responsibilities concrete, but what I really need is to be taken by the hand and guided down the path of justice. What I need is someone standing over me at every moment, telling me exactly what I need to do, what I am doing, and what comes next, even if that person is just the me in my head that sits behind my eyes and leans on the horn a lot and sighs and throws up her hands and wishes desperately she chain smoked. And that’s fine. If that’s what I need to do, even if it is embarrassing and part of me really wishes I didn’t have to, I’ll do it. And then I’ll to-do it.

photo © Susie Ghahremani / boygirlparty ®, awesome to-do list that makes any chore less sucky for sale at etsy.

The idea of nutrition and aerobics became inextricably entwined with the idea of losing weight and getting thin. The only reason on earth anyone would eat well was to become thin; the only reason anyone in their right mind would strap on shoes and get out there in the world and sweat was to lose weight. If you were skinny, you sat around and ate cheeseburgers and the only exercise you ever got was breathing in and then breathing back out. That’s at least a couple of calories a day, and really all that can be expected of you. What is the point? There is no point in the world to any of it, except for fat people who didn’t want to be fat anymore and people who thought they were fat and it was a bad thing.

So I got weight loss surgery, and now I am skinny, and my doctor has told me I should be exercising–aerobic, anaerobic. The doctor told me I should be eating properly–lean meats, fresh vegetables, whole grains. And this entire time, the whole of the time since the moment I looked into the mirror and thought okay, I’m not fat any more. Would you look at that? I have been resisting the idea. Primarily because I am a lazy, lazy, intensely lazy human being whose fantasies of independent wealth may sometimes include hiring someone to do everything for her, up to and including putting her socks on and brushing her teeth. But also because the idea of exercise and losing weight is absolutely inextricable, in my head.

We were at Body Worlds yesterday, and here in Salt Lake it is called Body Worlds & The Story of the Heart. The story of the heart was told over a series of plaques on the wall. It talked mostly about the poetry of the human heart, its allegorical and spiritual significance. But then I came across a very flatly scientific sign–a picture of a running man, the text that said something along the lines of Your heart is a muscle. Like any other muscle, lack of use will cause it to wither. A shrivelled, raisin-like heart is going to kill you, asshole.

Oh. Right, then.

I can feel my heart in my chest, now, and it feels shrunken and leathery, weak and pathetic. It could cough and sputter and die at any moment, taking me along with it, because I am so myopic. I really thought, back when I decided to get weight loss surgery, that losing weight meant I would be out of this game, finally–that somehow with the weight loss I’d also lose all those weird and wrong associations and misapprehensions and stupid ideas. That I’d become smart, savvy, wise and sane about my body and health and fitness and self-image. It is the strangest thing, how they’ve somehow managed to follow me and keep clotheslining me in the most ridiculous ways. But maybe this is how the process works–I get clotheslined, I go, oh yeah! and another myth or wrong idea orstupidness collapses in a puff of cheese doodle dust and I am that one step closer to being all-around fit, healthy, happy, sane. That’s all I can really hope for, right? The alternative is too terrible.

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. Then I got out of bed and was promptly extremely ill, and I have to tell you, my very first thought–possibly my second or fourth after a string of curses and a little bit of wailing and the gnashing of teeth was relief and happiness and the sensation of a heavy object, possibly boulder-shaped or with boulder-like qualities, certainly weighty, lifted off my shoulders and heaved right into the atmosphere.

It wasn’t a mental deficiency, a state of emotional retardedness, it wasn’t me being broken or dealing poorly with the world and the demands upon me which it places. It wasn’t me being stupid, or scared or weird or messed up or silly or lazy or a combination of any or all of these things in varying degrees and to a variety of extents–it was because I was sick, or getting there. Some small portion of the back of my head recognized the signals that my body was sending and said whoa there, missy! We’re just going to take it a little easy right now, because otherwise you will be experiencing an episode of explosive embarrassment right in the middle of the canned goods aisle, if you know what I mean. Oh, body, I think I do.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that I am not, in fact, mentally deficient, emotional retarded, broken, or unable to deal with the world and its demands. It is still entirely likely that if I hadn’t turned out to be horribly sick, my underlying laziness and rabbity terror would have been revealed, panting and naked and trapped, bug-eyed with its heart shivering so hard you can see it through the practically translucent skin of its chest. Because in my head I look a little bit like Gollum having a massive coronary episode.

But I don’t have to deal with that quite yet. Right now I can just drink tea and shuffle around wrapped in blankets that I pull over my head and sigh deep and feel crappy and put off having to deal with my to-do list and my obligations for one more day or a few more days, with a clear conscience and a little less shame, a smidge less self-flagellation. If I contract some kind of long-term slightly uncomfortable, debilitating-but-not-fatal disease I may never have to accomplish anything ever again!

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. Mostly I’ve been trying to catch my breath and stay more or less upright and moving forward, wide-eyed, wide-awake, hoping not to fail. I keep saying that I think things were going really well for me until everything went to hell, and it kind of feels that way. The first ten months were nothing short of–well, really hard, for awhile there. Adjustments after my move, adjustments in my relationship, feeling isolated, worrying that I had made the wrong decision, that I wasn’t cut out for any of this, or maybe anything at all.

There are some beliefs I hold that I have never considered myself gullible for believing, though. Stuff like “A poinsettia will kill your cat dead, so do not have one,” and “All the heat goes out the top of your head, so wear a hat!” and “Drinking a lot of water and eating McDonald’s breakfast will fix the night after a whole barrel full of eggnog.” As it turns out, these things are not true, and neither are the truths that so many people had previously held to be so self-evident, that sugar will make you crazy-nutball banging off the walls, and if you eat after, say, 7:00 p.m., you will get very fat and then die, possibly of suicide around the holidays, which is when everyone rushes to knock themselves off, you know.

Plus, it’s a busy season, full of busy-ness and many things to do, so probably making an actual list of the doing that needs to be done (instead of having a vague and amorphous Plan in my head that amounts, in the end, to me drinking a lot of eggnog and wondering if there’s some place I was supposed to have been right now) would be a smart and useful thing to do, am I right? I am so right.

1. Remain right. This one’s easy! I’m always right, and I like to win.

2. The Giving Tree. My office is organizing a massive charitable giving extravaganza; I have plucked five stars off the tree, each of which represents a child’s wish (and some of them are depressing as hell: 11-year-old boy, package of underwear); I will follow through awesomely, though rather less extravagantly than I would have liked, which is very sad.

3. Holiday cards! They will celebrate Festivus, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, the Carol of the Bells, the Solstice, the New Year, the Love in My Heart For All Mankind, and they will go out to remind everyone I love that I love them. I think I need your address, please.

4. A tree, a tree, a tree with many lights, a tree. I have to go to the tree place and pick out a tree and haul it up the stairs and decorate it. OTHERWISE CHRISTMAS WILL BE CANCELLED. Or I will be sad. Either or. I will set up my pink and sparkly tree in the dining room, the smelly happy goodtime tree in the living room, and I will be so overcome with holiday cheer I will begin to crap tinsel and tiny, toy-making elves.

5. Sort through my closet and follow-through on my plan to Pay it Forward. Need clothes? Need to give away clothes? Check out The Great Clothing Swap and comment, contact commenters, get the fashion flowing just like the spice. That was a nerd joke, and I apologize for it.

There. Those are reasonable goals that will make me feel fulfilled and happy and like a good person who is, additionally, happy and fulfilled. And that’s really all anyone can ask for, am I right? Besides your very own space shuttle.