DESERVED
This is my cat. Isn’t he lovely? He spends most of his days soaking up the suns’ rays, looking content, waiting to be adored. He deserves it.
This is my cat standing at the catflap waiting to go outside. At 3:30am. He is of the misguided opinion he deserves to be outside at 3:30am. The expectancy displayed and the whining that can be heard are all testament to this erroneous belief.
The amount of pride and satisfaction displayed in the courageous act of killing (and consuming) a fly trapped behind window furnishings is a testament to the fact that great hunting prowess has long been bred out of his inbred furry butt. Still, I refuse to let him roam the streets before the sun gets up – just in case his primal instinct accidentally coincides with a small living thing being too inept to get out of the way of a very bad hunter.
This is a photo of a bowl of cereal. I am of the erroneous belief I deserve it. It’s 3:30am. What I actually deserve is a good night’s sleep.
My cereal is difficult to see in this light – because I am ashamed of it. Who eats cereal at 3:30am? (Shift workers I guess… but I’m not a shift worker.) When sleep eludes me I feel like I deserve a bowl of cereal. Sometimes I think I wake up purely because being awake means I deserve this bowl of cereal. The voice in my head convinces me that not only do I deserve this cereal but calories don’t count during the hours of midnight and 5am.
I do actually know that isn’t true. I still made the bowl of cereal. And ate it. The pattern of eating for today is now set – I ate the wrong food at the wrong time therefore I shouldn’t eat for the rest of the day as punishment for believing I deserved such a stupid thing.
There are so many things we all deserve in life – freedom, clean water, safety, free speech, education. A good night’s sleep. The United Nations considers these things so important they wrote a whole article about it. (Side note – I added the bit about the good night’s sleep…) But I don’t feel deserving of basic rights – I haven’t earned them.
Disordered thinking has created a whole new charter of Simone Rights that a subconscious part of me thinks is deserving and my conscious mind thinks are absurd. I deserve to eat whatever I want, whenever I want. I deserve to live in a house that is magically cleaned by house-elves. I deserve to be slim and pretty regardless of what I eat and how much I move. I deserve to go on holidays and buy nice things even when we have no money. I deserve to be treated like a princess at all times. I deserve miraculous healing of my broken leg, regardless of how I treat it.
All of these things make me feel awful. When the house-elves (aka my husband and/or children) clean the house, I feel guilt. When I buy nice things or go on a holiday, I feel guilt. When people treat me with kindness, I feel guilt. When I eat, I feel guilt.
I am deserving of guilt. Bowls of cereal and guilt.
I spend my whole life working. Working, working, working. I don’t earn any money – which is a bit unfortunate for a whole pile of reasons – but I spend 15 hours a day typing away on my computer working on one project or another. It keeps me busy. Busy is important because it distracts from the guilt. Busy is important because it is my excuse for not doing all the other things I should be doing.
I spent the past two days working on my memoir. It is so close to being finished – so close to sending off to a publisher to lay bare my very essence for the entire world to see and judge. My memoir is in five parts – I completely completed 3.5 parts in the past two days before deciding I deserved a five-minute break. Four hours later I finished watching all the Michael McIntyre clips on YouTube and had a refresher dose of Tim Urban’s TED talk on procrastination – just in case seventh time around gleaned new insights into how to avoid procrastinating.
There’s something about nearing the end of a project that brings about procrastination, avoidance, perfectionism and a fear of finishing. The same can be said of recovery. I start eating well, thinking well, behaving well and then just as I glimpse the magical land of recovered, I relapse. It’s kinda tiring. I’d like to be deserving of escaping the hamster wheel.
This is a photo of my dark brown cat, sitting on dark brown carpet in the middle of the night, expecting me not to trip over him.
This is the same logic I am applying to finishing and publishing my book – just plonk it down and people will either see it or they won’t. I just hope nobody trips over and breaks their neck.
During my extensive fall from grace I lost sight of who I am, why I’m here and what I need to do. The little voice of reason that chips quietly away at the obnoxious voice of insanity knows my book is an important part of my story. And my story is an important part of my book.
Unlike my cat, I feel genuinely deserving of very little. But I do deserve to finish my book. I have one more day dedicated solely to writing for me. Watch this space.
