How do you like them apples?!

Here's something funny for those of you who are like me and enjoy finding the humor and irony in eating disorders every once in a while: Last week and the week before that I binged a lot upstairs in my room while switching off between watching episodes of Robin Hood on my laptop and reading The Once and Future King by T.H. White under the covers. I don't like putting the empty candy wrappers and ice cream cartons in my trash can because then when people come into my room they see all the trash and they'll know I'm having a behavior. So instead of throwing them away, I hide them in places like under my bed or in the empty drawers of my bedside table. This would be acceptable I guess... if it was only a temporary spot. But then tomorrow comes and I'm like, "I don't wanna touch those melty ice cream boxes! Gross! I'll do it later." Before you know it a week has gone by and there are fruit flies in my room. So here I am, camped out on the floor of my closet, on the opposite side of the room from my bed because I can't bear the stench of horrible rotten binge detritus.

On a happier and more hygienic note, I've been feeling surprisingly more stable and in control of my urges ever since last week ended. My job at Angora Ice keeps me busy and distracted, which honestly, is pretty much 95% of what it takes for me to get back on track after a week of behaviors. I think that's true for a lot of us though, right? Routine. Routine is key.

When it comes to food I'm just feeling much... smarter. Smarter? That doesn't sound like the right word to use because intelligence has very little to do with normal eating. I guess by smarter I mean more wise-minded. Today when I got home from work I was STARVING. My shift started at noon and ended at five so I didn't have time to eat lunch and by the time I got home my stomach was eating itself. I sort of dove into a bunch of cheese and crackers, not really caring whether it was portioned because I was just so hungry and I didn't even care if it turned into a binge. The weird thing is, after like five minutes, I felt satisfied and stopped without even really having to FORCE my self to stop. How cool is that?!! I was already in a good mood from having made the perfect smoothie at work so I felt like shouting it from the rooftops: "I JUST HAD A NORMALIZED EXPERIENCE WITH FOOD!"

In addition to having more structure during the day though, I think A LOT of it has to do with meds. I upped the dosage on my anti-depressants last week after the binges, and since then I feel like skipping instead of walking, singing instead of talking, beeping instead of bopping!

I've got the autumnal blues

Fall is here, and today it finally hit me. I'm about to talk about my feelings now, so gear up for some shallow body image laments and painful reminiscences of last year.

At this time last year I was at college in New York. I was super skinny, enjoying French, theatre, and Psych classes, living with the best roommate ever, and for the first time in years I felt like I was worth something. Fall is my favorite season, and October my second favorite month (after December- Christmas, people!) so the pretty leaves and pumpkin heads made me feel all the more special. I still had issues despite looking awesome. I was homesick and withdrawn, the highlight of my day was the gym... but I had my appearance to fall back on, you know? Every time I was feeling like shit I could just look in the mirror and remind myself that I'd been striving my whole young adult life to look like this and now I FINALLY had. Anyways, I've told this story a hundred times- the one about me losing a ton of weight and feeling great, then all of a sudden taking this cataclysmic U-turn over to binge eating disorder. I won't tell it again, but in fact remembering it has helped me draw a seriously groundbreaking conclusion about why I can't seem to stick to a meal plan and eat normally. Here's why: See, if I had always been a binge eater, and had always been trying to go on diets and lose weight, and never had any bouts of severe weight loss through restriction, I would TOTALLY go for the idea of balanced meals and portioned exchanges. But since I know what it's like to have such fast and controlled weight loss through restriction, I can't help but hold out hope that maybe someday I can regain that ability. Does this make any sense? I feel like I'm not making sense. Obviously the thinking is unhealthy and warped, but my point makes sense right? I feel like it is so important for this to make sense because it explains why I have been constantly swinging back and forth between binges and crash diets- because I'm just that desperate to feel anorexic again.

Anyways, the only reason I'm feeling so unhinged by all these thoughts is because it's October, and I spend all three other seasons looking forward to fall, but I can't enjoy it because I'm just so sad about how much better I felt last year.

My lips are chapped

Well, tis the end of a very long and productive day. Right now I'm sitting on the floor of my ever so messy room playing the Georgia game. It's super fun and you don't necessarily need to have a guinea pig named Georgia in order to play... just a bunch of awesome tunes to sing along to and a willing person or animal to have their name put in the lyrics. Here are some of my greatest hits:

-Georgia in the U.S.A.
-Walking on Georgia
-Rockin' around the Georgia Tree
-Georgia Looks Like a Lady
-Oh, I Just Can't Wait to be Georgia
-It's Still Rock n' Roll to Georgia

I got a bunch more but you get the idea. I'm in a goofy mood :)

Anyways, my second day of training for work at Angora didn't have me quite as panic stricken as yesterday, but I'm still having trouble making the frozen yogurts nice and swirly, and don't even get me started on the espresso machine. My supervisor though, Tulan, she is the sweetest lady since sliced pumpkin bread. She's from Turkey, and since she only moved here a couple years ago her English is still kind of choppy. Back home she was an engineer, but I guess she wanted to start a business instead and she moved to the U.S. I'm lucky to have someone as patient as she is to train me. I'm such a screw up and always missing important details about things, but Tulan doesn't yell or get frustrated.

I've been asked to taste the ice creams a few times, which puts me in a bit of an awkward position. I'm not one of those people who can just sit down and have a nice little bowl of rocky road, let alone a spoonful. Ice cream has become such a major binge food for me that I wouldn't dare attempt to eat it on "real" days.

Speaking of food and grossness and being fat and having a soul sucking eating disorder, I have totally failed in my homework for Dr. Gordon this week. After my string of binge episodes last week, she asked me to fill out diary cards of all my exchanges for the next seven days, making sure to stick to the meal plan I had in program, and keeping track of any urges or feelings I had around meals or snacks. Ummm... not only have I not gotten around to finding where I put all my blank diary cards, but I haven't been eating full meals either- due to my appetite being dashed every time I look at my enormous thighs. Lunch is usually a peanut butter Clif bar, and salad for dinner. Once the weekend is over and I've had some distance from the week of behaviors I'll probably be able to stomach some real meals, but until then I'm just trying to keep my mind off of it.

Short one

I am so tired right now I can't even think, and considering I didn't roll out of bed until 1:30 today, that is saying something. However, for the past few hours I've been training at Angora Ice. Yes, I got a job! HOooray for me! I'm finally starting to get my shit back together. It's about freaking time.

That being said, I am now feeling depressed, hungry (despite eating dinner), sore from being on my feet, and ever so exhausted. Tomorrow I go in again for training at noon. Hopefully, my frozen yogurt pumping skills will have improved and I won't drop any more ice cream cones on the floor.

Good night.

Rock bottom

I'm sitting here wondering why and how things went so downhill this week. I've had like five binge days in row now, and after being so good! I'm tempted to say it's because I missed a couple days of my meds, but I know that's not the whole reason. Maybe I'm also about to get my period? That would be awesome if that were the reason why...

Last night I couldn't fall asleep so I started rooting through my closet and found a box of these ancient videos I used to watch when I was little. The Land Before Time was one of my favorites. Anybody heard of or remember Land Before Time? It's about these kids who are dinosaurs and they're all different species but at the same time best friends forever. In the first Land Before Time there's an earth quake and the kids get separated from their herds. The rest of the movie is all about them coming together and finding a new and safe place to live, even though some of their parents were killed in the quake or by other dinosaurs. It's heavy stuff! Anyways, right around the part where Littlefoot sees a cloud in the sky shaped like his mother, I just lost it. It made me not only painfully nostalgic for my childhood, but also saddened and ashamed by how much of my teenage and adult life has been spent as a slave to destructive behaviors- not just ED behaviors either. I'm talking about the isolation, self-injury, anxiety, negative self talk... I wish there was a way for me to just put my foot down and say, "No more! It ends today!" But I've done that so many times only to find myself right back at square one the next day. I'm just totally trapped and I have no idea how to regain control over myself.

Dr. Gordon says I need to let go of the weight loss obsession first. That's what needs to happen before anything else can be accomplished. As much as I've tried to convince her and myself that I can recover and lose the binge weight at the same time, it's just not possible for me.

So I need to get rid of that scale I found a couple weeks ago. I wish I didn't have to throw it away but I know if I don't remove it from the house entirely I'll just dig it out again in a week, so it needs to go.

Mope

As of October the 1st (couple of days ago), I have decided to slip into a permanent state of catatonic depression. The decision was a tough one to make... after all, it takes a lot of work to be depressed and there are many things you can't do anymore once you've committed to it. Here are some of them: No more singing, no more laughing (except cynical chuckling), no more listening to music (unless it is a pre-approved emo artist), no more bathing, no more reading fantasy novels, no more using my binoculars while driving, no more chocolate chips, no more dinosaur stickers, no more sunshine, no more happiness, no more hope. There are a bunch more but you get the idea.

My goal here is to try and stay gloomy as long as possible so that by the time things get less shitty I will feel that much better. Does this make sense? Don't answer that, actually. It makes sense to me.

On a more uplifting note, I may have landed a job! Disappointed but also galvanized by my rejection at Rosie's Bakery, I decided to apply to work at Angora, the ice cream shop next door to it. I got an e-mail from the manager saying that she had some shifts for me so I sent her my resume and cell phone number and now all we have to do is wait to hear back...

Grass is greener

I do not feel much like writing, but not because the past two days have been uneventful. I'm just feeling bogged down and lackluster by the rainy weather. I'm riding tomorrow so hopefully the weather will be nicer.

I cleaned half of my room- the less messy side. I would have cleaned all of it but I've sort of created a nest of notecards, books, unfinished friendship bracelets, and towels next to my bed that seems a shame to pull apart. Oh man. I can totally see myself in 60 years, living alone in a smelly little house with shag rugs and cats and empty ice cream cartons strewn all over the furniture. It's basically how I'm living now, actually...

I was thinking about this DBT skill that I picked up when I was in program. I think it's called the Comfort by Comparison skill... not sure though. Anyways, the idea is, when you are feeling really awful about yourself or the way you look or the way you ate, you just think of people who are in worse situations and then you feel slightly less like shit. You think about the orphans in Haiti, the greasy pelicans living in the oil spill, the woman who was murdered and dismembered in Randolph, Massachusetts. And toll booth workers... they all have it much worse than me.

The pros of this skill are:

-puts things in perspective
-gives you some hope
-keeps you distracted from own problems

The cons:

-reading about tragedies can make you more depressed, thus sinking even further into gloom
-might make you feel somehow invalidated by saying that your problems are small and thus not real problems
-can make you so guilty you'll want to self sabotage and then engage in behaviors

This skill has been on my mind since this morning. My dad keeps an enormous black leather case under his desk which he's always said has important historical documents in it, but I've never asked any further. Today I opened it up and found a pretty impressive collection of front page stories, some dating back to the 1960's. He's got newspapers from 9/11, Neil Armstrong on the Moon, Red Sox series win in 2004, the Leakey's discovery of Lucy the hominid, Princess Diana's accident, Kennedy's assassination, Martin Luther King's too... some happy historical moments but mostly sad stuff that just made me think about how little I've actually experienced. What's an eating disorder compared to stuff like world wars?