TRANSFERENCE

Addiction is a bugger of a thing. If it was easy to kick compulsions to the curb, we’d all do it long before things got out of control.

For me, having compulsive food thoughts and an endless need to eat, is my way of avoiding depression and anxiety.

For most of my life I had no idea – and no recognition I experienced anxiety until a few years ago. That’s how effective my eating disorder was (is). As the eating disorder lessens, anxiety frequently overwhelms me and there’s a big temptation to isolate myself. Through years of psychological therapy, I’ve gained a lot of insight into myself and my behaviours. Some of it’s very confronting. Some of it’s an enormous relief. I’m in the early stages of recovery and trying desperately to stay on track. Aside from fearing relapse, I also fear transference.

Until I learn to effectively manage depression and anxiety, I’ll always have a problem.

I’ve mentioned my lap band before. Even prior to the surgery, I’d read articles on bariatric patients having increased incidences of new addictions – most commonly alcohol and shopping, but compulsions can end up anywhere. Sex, drugs, gambling, shoplifting, exercising, gaming – you  name it, someone’s obsessed with it. There’s a whole television show dedicated to weird and wonderful addictions. The bottom line is though, if the underlying issue is not dealt with, removing the symptom won’t cure the disease. We just transfer one problem to another.

To recover from any kind of compulsive behaviour requires an enormous amount of determination, hard work, and personal insight. More often than not it requires pharmaceutical and psychological support for the underlying issues – especially during those early stages. It also requires self-acceptance and self-compassion – two traits desperately lacking in most of us with addiction issues. But also the building blocks of recovery.

To avoid transference of addictions is not easy. We instinctively protect ourselves from emotional pain and distress, and while actively working to recover from a longstanding emotionally numbing behaviour, it’s easy to slip into other numbing behaviours without noticing. Anything to distract from the anxiety, depression, or other psychological distress.

This has seen me working hard to stop destructive self-harm and eating disorder behaviours, but finding myself with overwhelming, incessant, levels of anxiety. Which is very distressing. I want to binge-watch Netflix, download mind-numbing games on my iPhone, or spend hour after endless hour playing on the internet or working on other people’s problems.

Each time I find myself emotionally numbing, I need to acknowledge, accept, write about it, then delete the game from my phone or turn the television off. More importantly, I have to feel the anxiety – accept the pounding heart, shaking hands, and inexplicable sense of fear. Then practice the grounding techniques I’ve learned, get out in nature, connect with friends, and ride the emotional wave.

It’s not easy. Not even a little bit. And it often takes hindsight to recognise what I’m doing.

I have a long way to go before I call myself recovered, and the last thing I want is transferring one addiction to another. Progress not perfection. Recovery not replacement. Sanity and serenity. These are my long term goals.

ORGASM

Have I got your attention now?

[Apologies to my offspring. If you don’t want to suffer through details of your parents’ sex lives, probably best you stop reading now.]

Orgasm is defined in the Meriam-Webster online dictionary as: 

intense or paroxysmal excitement; especially: the rapid pleasurable release of neuromuscular tensions at the height of sexual arousal that is usually accompanied by the ejaculation of semen in the male and by vaginal contractions in the female

Honestly – they couldn’t make it sound less sexy if they tried. Do lexicographers actually have sex? The urban dictionary says:

The meaning of life. And… That awesome feeling between sex and having to go pee. Good sex leads to a good orgasm which makes you wanna go pee.

Clearly there are things this old duck still needs to learn. And apparently female orgasm is:

Often dismissed as a myth, much like the unicorn or healthy fast food, the female orgasm does in fact exist. It just takes a little skill and effort to make this elusive event appear, but most men (or women) just can’t put forth the effort.

Female orgasm = real
Three Toed Platypi = Myth

[In preparation for this blog post, I searched the internet for facts and became mesmerised by the things I don’t know about orgasm after all these years. If you want completely irrelevant and unexpected information about orgasm, try this TED talk. ]

Mystery, ignorance and a shroud of secrecy still accompanies many societal expectations of sex – a fundamental biological need in the animal kingdom. While sex without orgasm happens all the time, there’s an expectation frequently put on ourselves – or partners – that climax is essential. Which is why so many women fake it. If you ask the next woman you bump into about orgasm, a lively conversation may very well ensue.

From my own conversations with friends (and strangers) I’ve learned a lot of us are over sex, while others yearn for the deep emotional connection sexual encounters can offer. Not to mention the “intense or paroxysmal excitement” if you’re fortunate enough to have an orgasm. But I believe as we get older, the emotional connection is vastly more important for a lot of us, and it isn’t dependent on the final orgasmic hooray.

There are lots of reasons women – and men – might experience anorgasmia.

I’m only going to talk about one – because it’s the one that affects me. Medication. Specifically, SNRI anti-depressant medication. All medication has an effect – that’s why we prefer prescriptions to placebos. Side effects are unwanted consequences of medication and when we treat conditions pharmacologically, we weigh the pros and cons of our options. I’ve been on my current anti-depressant two years. At the lowest dose I struggled with orgasm, and at my current dose it is an impossibility.

[Before I go any further, I want to definitively state this has nothing to do with “technique” and isn’t about good or bad sex. It is categorically a side effect of medication.]

I won’t bamboozle anyone with how and why medications cause this particular effect, but it’s well researched and documented. Trust me. Orgasm has become a physical impossibility. In the same way a deaf person won’t complain about the volume of my teenager’s doof-doof music, my body doesn’t have the capacity to transmit the appropriate messages at the appropriate time and no amount of effort will get me over the line.

So is sex worth bothering about?

If I was single, I wouldn’t care. Without the big finale I can’t be bothered. But I’m not single. I’ve been married 25 years and there are two of us in this relationship. Sex is an important part of intimacy between couples but what constitutes healthy and normal varies for all of us.

Currently my husband and I have mismatched desires. Or to articulate that more clearly – he wants sex and I don’t. I recognise it’s an important part of our relationship so we set the time aside anyway. Regardless of sexual dysfunction, plenty of men and women have limited or non-existent libido – I’m no Robinson Crusoe here. There are also loads of people who never orgasm during sex, but can move the earth, moon and stars all by themselves. And they still enjoy sex despite the absence of a finale. I know this, because I’ve asked around. A lot. The frustration with anorgasmia, is climbing to the heady heights of swanky swirling and never dissolving into la petite mort. There’s no sating of the desire. And as my sex kitten days are now more like sex slug, finding desire is a monumental effort.

[To be perfectly honest, I’ve never been a sex kitten… Maybe a sex panda once upon a time.]

The mismatched sexual desires and detonations in our marriage, means I need to weigh the pros and cons of an anti-depressant versus my husband’s needs. We both agree at this stage my sanity is more important than firing my rockets. We could choose not to indulge in afternoon delights at all, but we also agree sex offers important intimacy for both of us. I have of course discussed this with medical professionals who look across their desks at me very sympathetically, then reassuringly say it’s common and might get better with time.

I’m currently trialing a new medication for insomnia, but is also touted as having the potential to counteract adverse sexual side effects. This new miracle drug is also an anti-depressant (and I can’t for the life of me establish which class of anti-depressant). The sedation effect is immediate but in order to discover if it will counter sexual dysfunction, I need to be on it at least a month for the appropriate changes in the brain to take place. I’ve now taken it four nights. The first three were wonderful – my body was completely relaxed, I didn’t wake at all during the night, slept solidly for 8-10 hours, and woke feeling rested. These things never happen for me. I was so happy! Last night my sleep was broken but not bad, but now I notice a tremor in my hands and manic moods during the day. It’s feasible this miracle will be short lived – countering the side effect of my first medication, but presenting more significant problems.

Which brings me back to weighing the pros and cons of which pills to pop.

For now, doing the deed remains an important part of our relationship, and we both accept I won’t be left quivering with the after delights of a raucous tsunami. Perhaps one day I’ll once again dip my toes into those tantalising waters, but sex is about so much more than a shuddering conclusion. For us, it’s about mutual respect and intimacy – not just oscillating the unmentionables.

[Thanks to Thought Catalog for all the entertaining euphemisms. I’m sure the journalist in charge had a Schnoodlypoopingtime with that article.] 

THE DAY AFTER

I can hear the inside of my head.

There’s a low pulsing hum, pitched at G below middle C (196 Hz). And a high pitched wash of chitter-chatter, like a sea of crickets catching up on the day’s news. There’s pressure, but no pain. The inside of my head is bursting at the seams, trying to push its way through the veins in my temple.

It’s the day after a migraine.

Yesterday was the worst in a very long time. It was once suggested I “write into” a migraine – stop whatever I’m doing and write about how I feel. I assume that person never had a migraine  – writing is the last thing on earth I do when my eyes can barely open. Usually I take medication when I feel a migraine coming on, then a few hours later I’m spacey but pain free. Not so this time.

It started with a sore head – classic migraine with pain on the left side, immediately behind my left eye. But I have places to be and things to do, so I defer medication until noon so I can drive my car. Bad move.

By midday the nausea is overwhelming. The pain is intense and throbbing and spreading from the top of my head to my left shoulder blade. My left eye is almost squished shut. The world around me hiding behind a veil, as bright colours become washed out and hazy. I see little flashes of light everywhere and looking  makes my head hurt more. When I close my eyes, I see light flashing and grey spots swirling through the black. Sound is amplified. Touch is intensified. The nausea accompanying the slightest whiff of anything, means my sense of taste would leave me vomiting if I was foolish enough to eat – my eating schedule goes out the window. I bravely swallow two migraine tablets begging all the ominiscient and omnipotent beings to let my wobbly stomach keep them down. I go to bed and hope for the best.

The feel of my beautiful sheets with lots of lovely thread count, becomes scratchy and uncomfortable.

Anything touching me hurts. I’m cold all over and no amount of fluffy blankets can take the chill from my bones. I’m clammy and sticky at the same time. The curtains can’t block out enough daylight, so I arrange a tent of pillows over my head, creating a dark space without touching my head. I can’t eliminate noise – my heart rate is fast and furious and sounds like a jet plane. The blood pulsing through my swollen temple is whooshing like a cascade of rushing white water. There is no relief. There is nothing to do but wait it out.

Three hours pass and I feel worse. I start humming at a deep frequency that vibrates the bones in my skull, which somehow offers momentary reprise from the ten out of ten on the pain scale. But my breath only lasts so long before I stop to inhale and wait for the pain to flood back in. Ommmmm. Ommmmm. Ommmmm. So I take two more migraine tablets. What is the proper dosage and how frequently should I take them? No idea. Don’t give a fuck. Make the pain go away.

I have to make egg sandwiches for a little party I have no intention of attending. The thought of standing up, walking downstairs, putting my glasses on, opening the fridge, putting ingredients on the kitchen bench. Smelling the hard boiled eggs… It’s too overwhelming. I can’t possibly make egg sandwiches like this.

I don’t know what to do.

So I get in a scalding hot shower, hoping the heat will alleviate pain until the second dose of medication kicks in. My legs turn to jelly so I lie down on the floor of the shower. Curled up in a foetal position. My head pressed firmly into the cold, white tile, stopping the pain just in that spot. The hot water pouring onto my back offering a gentle massage. I keep ommmmm-ing and drift into a bit of a trance. After a few days (hours? minutes?) the water has formed a swimming pool between my arms so I gently wiggle them to let it wash down the drain. It stays as a little pool – almost covering my arms. I lift my weary head and look around. The bathmat is soaking wet. The big beige round mat I inherited from my mother is filled with water. There’s water running out the door. I can see the carpet is wet. Fuck.

I don’t know what to do.

I can’t collect thoughts in a coherent sequence. I need to turn the shower off. I wrap an aqua blue towel around my scalding hot, dripping wet, naked body. Go on the hunt for every towel we own and throw them on the floor, creating a very soggy, ugly patchwork quilt of towels over the bathroom floor and the hallway carpet.

I don’t know what to do.

I find my phone and glasses and slump to the floor. Do I need a plumber? Insurance agent? Friend? Miracle? My children are at university. My husband is three hours away on a field trip. My friends are at work. I lie on the soggy carpet like a stunned aqua blue mullet, forcing slow thoughts to coalesce into common sense. Then I hear the drip, drip, drip of water downstairs. My head hurts even more.

Drag weary, naked carcass downstairs and throw more towels around. Place bucket under the drip, drip, drip. Go back upstairs and lie on the floor with my phone, dial one of my boys and put it on speaker.

“I don’t know what to do,” I say. Filled with abject self pity. “I’m really unwell and I fell asleep in the shower on top of the drain and I flooded the bathroom. It’s dripping downstairs. I have to make egg sandwiches. I don’t know what to do.”

He can’t help. He’s at work, has no car, and no driver’s licence. I ring my friend and tell her the same pathetic story. She doesn’t know what to do either but says, “Don’t worry about the egg sandwiches.” I’m unbelievably relieved. Egg sandwiches are my biggest concern. Now I have ten hard boiled eggs and two loaves of fresh bread we don’t need. But at least I don’t have to smell eggs and find the inhuman strength to squish them with a fork.

I ring my husband who’s still three hours away but reassures me there’s nothing I can do. I’m so relieved. I lie naked on the floor with the towel vaguely draped across the wrong bits and stare at the spreading dampness through the old green carpet. Listening to the drip, drip, drip into the bucket downstairs. The drip is slowing.

Pain is unrelenting. No better. No worse. The nausea has lessened. The medication is holding things at bay but hasn’t fully worked. There’s still a sledge hammer in my head. I’m too tired to move but too cold to stay on the floor, so I don my floral silk nightie and soft pink cardigan and go back to bed. I am freezing.

My friend comes over a couple of hours later to check on me and help with the flooding.

In my incoherent state I’ve made it sound like the whole stairwell is filled with running water. Not so – it has merely run under the upstairs carpet and found a spot to drip at the foot of the stairwell. There’s nothing to be done.

My husband comes home, expecting the stairwell to be sodden and the whole of upstairs flooded. Not so. He deconstructs my soggy patchwork quilt of towels and puts a load of washing on. There’s nothing else to be done.

By 7pm the pain is halved. The throbbing is still there. The pressure intense. A light sense of nausea. The world is still behind a veil. But pain is going and I no longer need to ommmm my way through it. I can open my eyes with the lights on and not feel like I’ve been slammed into a wall. I can hear normally. I can touch normally. I don’t quite want to eat yet, but by 8pm I’m willing to try something. I have half a curried egg sandwich for dinner.

Today I woke without pain. But the drug haze makes me floppy as a wet fish and I still feel the migraine. The inside of my head is bursting at the seams, trying to push its way through the veins in my temple. There’s pressure, but no pain. And a high pitched wash of chitter chatter, like a sea of crickets catching up on the day’s news. There’s a low pulsing hum, pitched at G below middle C.

I can hear the inside of my head.

PROGRESS: NOT PERFECTION

I’ve recently returned from a seven day, self-imposed, writing retreat for one. It was awesome.

I stayed at a friend’s cottage by the beach for a week and wrote, wrote, wrote. I also spent a lot of time reading old journal entries and it really hits home how far I’ve come. I’ve spent three years hitting this recovery gig hard, and looking over those journals shows what a dark place I’ve been in, but also articulates so clearly the long recovery road. Which I’m still traversing but oh my gosh – I’m so far along now. Three years ago I couldn’t imagine being where I am now.

In 2015 I fell apart.

I challenge anyone not to collapse to some degree under all the stress I experienced. The grief and trauma of losing my mother and sister, as well as my grandfather, both my in-laws and a handful of aunts and cousins – eight deaths in six years. Dealing with my teenage son running off the rails and looking dangerously ill, and taking in my adult nephew with all his issues after losing his mother. Our marriage in utter turmoil. My grandmother’s decreasing health and cognition requiring constant care and demands from me. Ending over three decades of performing and teaching music. Losing my identity as my children left home, my career was gone, and my youth was a distant past. It was a lot to deal with.

Couple that with a lifetime of unacknowledged high anxiety and low depression, and a strong history of disordered eating, and it was clear I was ill equipped to deal with the hand I was dealt.

I found a most excellent psychologist and began the work of recovery. The more she dug into my story, the more she realised how much was going on. Over the course of a year, I got worse – not because she was a terrible therapist (she is outstanding) – but because stressors were still there, more grief and loss was on it’s way, and my 50 years of non-existent coping strategies was never going to be a quick fix.

In 2016 I sunk to my lowest depths – my annus horribilis.

I was completely suicidal, self-harming multiple times per day, and not eating at all. I spent a month in a mental health clinic where I was kept safe, rested, fed, protected from everyday stresses, given pharmaceutical support, and finally grieved for my sister. I left the clinic and continued the hard work. And it was a lot of hard work.

Depression and anxiety is not easily fixed. It takes a lot of acknowledgment and acceptance – from myself, loved ones, and professional support. Self harm, suicidality and disordered eating are symptoms – coping mechanisms – of depression and anxiety. The rest of 2016 saw a moderate improvement in my mental health, and in 2017 I settled into a much safer place.

This year I finally had the strength to face the eating disorder head on.

It was the symptom with the most longevity and the most difficult to deal with. I spent nearly two months in a dedicated eating disorder clinic and haven’t looked back since. It wasn’t a magic cure – and it was absolutely not fun – but after three years of actively seeking every piece of my recovery puzzle, I finally put it all together.

Depression is extremely well managed with pharmaceutical support. Anxiety is an eternal issue but I’m alleviating it as much as possible through writing, talking rather than ruminating, using grounding techniques, acceptance, and attempts at mindfulness (where my efforts will be focused next).

Suicidality is no longer a pressing issue. I don’t actively pursue options to end my life and – most importantly – I’ve found hope and purpose for the future. I still lack natural protective forces for my well being, which seems inherent in other people, but this may always be the case.

Self-harm is no longer a problem. I picture a future where I never self-harm again. I’ve occasionally slipped – always due to high anxiety – but they are few and far between and when the urges come I have little problem surfing that urge, using distraction techniques, and looking at the root cause of the desire and dealing with that instead.

The eating disorder is my last battle ground. I’m still in the battle but it’s looking good. Since leaving the clinic I’ve maintained my daily eating schedule. I’ve ceased all compensatory behaviours (purging, restriction, self-harm). I’m focusing on anything but eating. I’ve lost the desire to purge. I’m still working on binging and restricting desires. I check in with my support team every single week. I talk about things with family and friends. I’ve created a safe environment at home by carefully stacking the fridge and pantry. I’ve sought support and guidance from my husband who ensures I eat when I’m supposed to eat.

Things aren’t perfect – but only four months ago, I was losing hope for recovery. Now I know it’s not only possible, but happening. I picture a future free from disordered eating.

I couldn’t have come to this place without professional support – but I had to find the right support (I’ve sacked a few personnel along the way).

I couldn’t have come to this place without personal support – accepting the love and wisdom of friends and family when the voice of insanity screams loudly in my head.

I couldn’t have come to this place without a dogged determination to seek out more tools, more options, more things to try. Everything I did was useful, but no single thing “cured” me – I need all the tools, all the support, all the options. I continue to need all those things.

And why am I writing this post? Because I want those who’ve supported me to know how grateful I am for their patience and love. I want those struggling to know there is hope, never give up. And I want to remind myself when the lights were out in those very dark places, I had to hang on until the warm glow of hope started appearing in the distance. Things aren’t perfect, but progress is life changing. My life is coming back.

LITTLE THINGS

I cleaned the toilet today.

There was a time when it wasn’t a big deal. Now it is. Now it signals the state of my mental health and indicates where my energy is at. Now it embodies how I’m feeling about myself on a given day.

It has been a long time since I cleaned the toilet.

When I first moved into a house with my (future) husband, we were a bit feral.  Not much housework was done at all – primarily because of a silent argument about whose responsibility everything was. We both felt the other wasn’t doing their share, so in mutual passive-aggressive agreement, neither of us did anything.

Once we had kids and I worked a lot less outside the home, I happily took on the role of traditional housewife – looking after the house and kids. So I cleaned the toilets. Regularly. When you have three small children learning the basics of what goes where and how you do it, toilets need a lot of cleaning. As does the floor. Once the kids were old enough (as soon as they hit double digits was a good benchmark) they started doing chores – and cleaning a toilet is a pretty basic and easy chore. Albeit not a pleasant one. By the time they were all teenagers, they were adept at cleaning. Not willing… But competent. So rosters were drawn up and the house cleaned regularly. A lot of arguments accompanied the cleaning but it was done.

Fast forward a few more years, and I had a nervous breakdown. Nervous breakdowns don’t happen overnight or in isolation. It is a slow deterioration of mental health. For me, a gradual increase in depression, anxiety and disordered eating, until I was barely functional.

My housekeeping ability evaporated with my mental health.

I just didn’t care – about me, the house, or the future. I had no energy. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t do anything. I have no idea if the toilets were cleaned at all. My husband was helplessly watching me deteriorate and gradually picking up all the pieces as I dropped them, so I imagine he did all the cleaning.

Over the past three years my mental state has varied in its’ health. After completely breaking apart, I have just been slowly – ever so slowly – getting better. It’s not a straight line – sometimes I went backwards – but if I look back at the overall trajectory, I can see I am a long way from where I was three years ago.

How many times have I cleaned the toilet in the past three or four years? I confess, not many. I went through small periods of cleaning for a day or two, but cleaning requires energy and a sense of purpose. So with the scarcity of housework I’ve done in recent years, the habit of cleaning was lost. My energy is still frequently low, and when I was working last year, I had nothing left to give outside of work (even the measly 20 hours per week I was doing).

Today however, I am excited. I still don’t have a lot of energy – it waxes and wanes on a regular basis – but I feel purposeful. More hopeful. My stay in the clinic earlier this year changed me. A lot. Even when I completely fuck up my eating, I don’t return to compensatory behaviours. I have ideas for the future.

I can picture a future.

I still experience high levels of anxiety, unintentionally numbing it away with one thing or another. My mood is for the most part extremely good – I’ve found a really good dose of medication for now.

Yesterday I saw my psychologist and discussed my procrastination issues. I don’t have a huge amount of things to do to be brutally honest. I go to gym, have appointments with my support team, write, and visit people. I don’t work. I don’t do anything useful. I have time to clean – and yet my husband has been doing it all (resentfully) while also preparing all the meals (so I will eat).

After my long chat yesterday I realise how significant cleaning the toilet is. I detest mess. I hate dirt. It makes me feel uncomfortable in my own home. I feel uneasy when I know things need to be done. But somehow I couldn’t bring myself to do anything. Writing made me feel guilty (including blog writing) because the housework wasn’t done. Housework was something I’d stare at and put off – endlessly. Housework represents normality. Functionality. Purpose. A sharing of the load with my husband. A sense of being independent again in a way I haven’t felt for a long time.

Housework represents recovery.

So today, after a long lie in, I got up, made my bed, cleaned the kitchen, then scrubbed not one, but two toilets, and the bathroom sinks. It didn’t take long – toilets never do – but I felt successful. I felt a lessening of the endless guilt weighing me down. I felt a move towards a future I can still barely glimpse (I mean really – how many of us can actually glimpse the future anyway?) I felt another small rip as the eating disorder is torn further away. My mood is lighter. It is such a small thing – basic, simple tasks I taught my young boys when they were ten years old. It is normality returning to my life. I look at my clean toilets and think, “I’m in recovery.”

FEEDING TIME

It’s easy to know when your body needs food – physical cues are given out. We all know what they are (even when some of use choose to ignore those cues), and we know drinking a glass of water doesn’t make them go away. So feeding physical hunger is easy. As my writing mentor said so beautifully in the title of her memoir, When Hungry, Eat. (A fantastic read when next you’re looking for a book).

And yet I do not stand alone when it comes to yearning for food regardless of physical hunger.

Fatigue

That’s common. I’m sure many of us feed fatigue with food – especially high-carbs. It even works – for a brief moment in time – but isn’t a solution. To paraphrase my mentor, When Fatigued, Rest. So logical. The trouble with resting is thinking we don’t have the time. It feels slothful. Lazy. A waste of the day. In our modern world we push ourselves to the brink of exhaustion then eat and drink to feed that exhaustion. Maybe not everyone… But I know I’ve fed a lot of fatigue with cheese and crackers over the years. It didn’t help. Not once.

Emotions

Emotional eating is not exclusive to those of us with eating disorders. We’re just exceptionally good at it – taking it to extremes. But much like feeding fatigue, it doesn’t help – not even for a brief moment. If you eat in a frenzied binge you may experience the numbing effects of overeating (I don’t recommend it). But one way or another, emotional eating leads to guilt more often than it ever leads to a solution. Once the eating is over, the emotions are still there. Still neglected. And unless you want to spend the rest of your days eating, it’s best to acknowledge, embrace, work through, and move on. At least I’ve heard that’s a good way to manage emotions – from the smallest irritation to the most profound grief. It all has to be lived and felt.

Stress

It’s not the same as emotions. Although stress can lead us to experience all parts of the emotion wheel. Some people head to the pantry when stressed, and some can’t go near it. I am not in the latter category. I’ve had friends say they’re too stressed to eat – a phrase that never escaped my lips. So perhaps stress-eating is not as common as the previous two, but I expect many can relate. Much like emotional eating though, it’s an avoidance tactic. Once the pantry is bare, the stress is still there. The only way through is through. There are loads of healthy coping mechanisms for stress (eliminating stress is unfortunately not a reality). And which mechanisms you use are dependent on the type of stress and your personality. Going for a long walk in fresh air does wonders for me. Especially if that air is blowing straight off the ocean. But don’t send me to a yoga class – I’ll feel doubly stressed at the fact I can’t do it properly… The solution for stress is as individual as the situation. This is one of those figure it out yourself times. No one size fits all.

Procrastination

Common practice for me. I imagine most of us procrastinate from time to time, but we don’t universally feed procrastination with food. I’ve known people who procrastinate by doing housework. I would love to be one of those people. If that happened I’d be able to find the vacuum cleaner and surprise my husband. But – like everything else – I feed my time-wasting with food. I put off things I want to do, but I’m scared to do, by opening the fridge and looking in it. (Sometimes I notice the fridge needs a clean, but rarely succumb to that urge). The trouble with walking to the fridge instead of the task, is the guilt. The task is still waiting, but now I have less time to do it, I’m more stressed about it, and those sneaky emotions are getting to me. So feeding procrastination with food leads to a round robin of things I want to feed. A more intelligent way of handling procrastination would be to put on my big girl socks and start. Because if there is one thing I  learned in my 52 years, it’s that starting is the tricky bit. Once you start the procrastinated-thing, it’s usually okay. Just do it.

Politeness

This might be a Simone thing. I don’t know. If I’m offered food I have to eat it – to be polite. If I’m invited out, I’m letting people down if I don’t go. And once I’m there, it’s weird not to eat. I have noticed my normal-eating friends have no trouble going to a social occasion and eating nothing at all if they don’t feel like it. Eating is a communal activity humans have participated in for millennia and apparently there is a lot of joy to be had from dining with people you like. But I’ve also heard you can spend time with these lovely people and not eat – even if they are. This is a practice I have not yet mastered. Although I confess, eating on a schedule has helped.

So friends, why have I written all these little anecdotes? It’s because the past few days I’ve felt wobbly in recovery. I want to eat despite the schedule – in addition to, as well as the schedule. Not because I’m being rebellious and wanting to break the rules (perhaps that’s another reason people eat?), but because I’ve been tired, stressed, emotional, procrastinated, and been polite. And it’s annoying how quickly and easily I return to former ways. The solution? Stop dishing out advice and start taking it. Eat on the damn schedule – no more, no less.

When I want to feed the hole in my soul, feed it with rest, nurture, friendship and fresh air – not toast.