Tag Archives: binge eating disorder

29 April 2017

Cows & cars OR: guardian angels are completely fucking arbitrary.

By andpantomime

My mom called last weekend. We talked about my suicide attempt.

When I was 19, I was a little over a year removed from staying @ either of my parents’ homes. It wasn’t a pleasant move. There was no big send-off, no “Congrats you’re 18! You’re free to go!” complete w/ the efforts of a loving family loading your belongings onto a truck so they can finally turn your bedroom into a home-office, home-gym, or in my mother’s case, home-pet-shelter. It was just that around the age of 17-&-a-half I started getting kicked out a lot (Mom would say, “You should go live w/ your dad!” & Dad would tolerate it for a little while before saying, “Go live w/ your mom!”) & I was only a week into my 18th year whenever I moved into a dorm room mere blocks from Dad’s apartment & started going to college. That was freshman year, & sophomore year I upped the ante by moving 2 hrs away to Denton, to study Film @ the University of North Texas.

I transferred partly because I’d decided I didn’t want to be a stage actress (& had been on a theater-degree path @ the college local to my family’s hometown), partly because my best friend M was already @ UNT, & partly because my boyfriend C wanted to go to UNT for Film as well. My real dream was (& still is) to write television sitcoms, but there were no affordable in-state programs for it, so I figured I would just enjoy my college degree, no matter what it came out in name to be. So long as I graduated w/ @ least 1 scriptwriting class under my belt, I’d be a happy bird.

C broke up w/ me pretty immediately after we arrived @ UNT. This was perfectly reasonable, as I’d been a traumatizing, inconsiderate wreck the entirety of our relationship. I was convinced I was undeserving of love, had my parents’ & sisters’ opinions to show for it, & was generally always on the verge of breaking down & trying to convince him to break up w/ me. So as soon as we landed on campus, out of town, amidst @ least 18,000 other pretty girls, he did. & I broke down.

@ 1 point, I told C to take back everything he’d ever given me. Pajama shorts, a bound book of 1 of my favorite webcomics, these neat green shoes I’m wearing.

17717

Green tennies as featured in the shadowy bits of my frontage.

Later, probably w/in the same week, I asked for it all back. I’m goddamned sentimental & I wasn’t ready to let him go.

Since I’d lost my virginity to this person, we started sleeping together again really soon after the break-up. We were still apart, & I distinctly remember encouraging him to go after every girl he had a crush on, but lonely + hormones is the perfect cocktail for having a friend-w/-benefits that you are not developmentally equipped to handle. It took me a long time to come to terms w/ the idea that we would just keep having sex but not get back together, despite my enthusiastic cheerleading of his every amorous attempt.

For Christmas that year, the dorm where M – my aforementioned best friend – & I were roommates closed up & all the tenants had to go home. I wound up back @ my Dad’s place, & then my Mom’s, but not before crashing & totaling my purple Chrysler Concorde, Daria.

1993-Chrysler-Concorde-Sedan-Image-01

This is what Daria looked like but w/ rims less cool & flat-ass Texas behind her.

This is where things get blurry.

On my way home for Christmas, or maybe Thanksgiving, I had crashed Daria, & my parents met me somewhere in Dallas to help me get my belongings outta the totaled vehicle & help me purchase a replacement car. As soon as the local gov’t offices were open & I was in town after New Year’s, I would need to go get the title officially signed into my name.

On New Year’s Eve, I was @ a house party @ my friend S’s place, where I had stayed much of the previous summer between Local College & UNT, in order to avoid living w/ my parents. Bonus, C was allowed to stay there as much as he liked, too, that past summer.

M & C were both @ S’s place. M told me she’d slept w/ C. In our dorm room. I forgave her, I walked out of the room where we were discussing it, & I sucker-punched C in the face. He didn’t see it coming, & neither did our group of a dozen friends who leapt up & demanded to know what made me so suddenly & heartily violent. S kicked me out of her home & has never spoken to me since.

I don’t know where I went that night, but I went to my Mom’s the next day or day after. My mom says when I arrived, I somehow got myself locked in the garage, & wailed on the door to the house hard enough to put several dents in the sheet metal comprising that door. I think I was just trying to make my little sister, who was often in her own world, hear me & let me in. I was a bottle rocket. I was devastated by what M & C had done, even though he & I were no longer together, because it just felt more like infidelity when your best friend & ex have sex in your room. I’ve changed my mind about this point, since, because relationships ought to be defined by what you have the courage to name them, but still. Then, I felt betrayed.

Mom got home from work to find the dents in the door & me in my bedroom, which had been almost completely dismantled in the year I hadn’t lived there, further dismantling it by viciously unpacking the suitcase I’d brought from UNT. I was probably looking for the papers I needed to go into the DMV & register Garth, my new green Chevrolet Beretta, but I was pissed, & I was tearful, & I was making a lot of angry racket. She burst into my room, screamed about the dents in the door & my clearly-loosed temper, & told me to get the hell out & go back to Dad’s.

Garth

This is not Garth, but is what Garth looked like, except this car has way more paint. Also, I hated this Beretta & berated it every single day.

 

Mind you, until that point, Mom had never more than suggested I get out of her house. She’d never spoken to me in the imperative. She’d been telling me since I was 14 that her home was my home, & she hoped I would always think of it as home, & she mostly had only pushed me out the years prior because I was staying up too late for my little sister to get a fair amount of sleep.

I think I might have intended to drive to my Dad’s place, @ 1st. But that 19-year-old-lonely-hormonal brain set in instead. I went to the supermarket & got a bottle of extra-strength Tylenol. Perhaps because I thought people could read suicide on my face, I had to be careful to buy it from 1 of the cashiers who didn’t know me & C’s relationship too well, because he’d worked @ that supermarket for years &, well, would someone really phone him & say “Dude I saw your ex-girl crying & buying painkillers?” I dunno. The desperation brain does not make itself accountable to reality.

I took the entire bottle & drove Garth really far out of town. I think I just got on a highway that I rarely used, so even I didn’t know where I was going, but I texted my mother what I’d done (because, of course, if you kill yourself you not-so-secretly want everyone who loves you to feel like shit), then I turned my phone off. I drove for over an hour, until I could feel myself getting very sleepy & sick. My liver was shutting down, for all I knew. I just realized that I couldn’t keep driving, because I didn’t want to die in a crash or, god forbid, kill anyone else by running my piece-of-shit Beretta off the road.

I pulled into a field that had a house on it, set way back from the road. I didn’t know where I was, what town, or on whose property, but I think the farmland reminded me just enough of my mom’s house to be a comfort. I turned Garth off & I went to sleep.

After who-knows-how-long I woke up, though.

My car was fucking surrounded by cows.

I always think about this part of the story as the guardian-angel portion. A lot of these details don’t add up exactly, but they are nonetheless what happened.

1st of all, I didn’t open anyone’s gates in order to get onto their land & park my car. I’ve lived around enough barn animals to know that wherever they are on your property, they should be on the other side of a damned gate. So these cows had clearly stepped over some collapsed barbed wire in order to greet the new, green member of their herd. That part makes sense though. Cows are mad friendly.

2ndly, these cows were excited about my car. They were mooing, & rubbing up against it, probably just trying to scratch their faces but thankfully also waking me up from the sleep that probably would have killed me. It was like I’d taken a reverse-cow-tipping trip, where their frenetic energy rocked my car back & forth quite noticeably.

3rdly, they were ear-tagged. W/ the name of the farmer. & his phone #. If you’ve ever lived in a rural area where people keep their animals between fences that they can barely maintain, you’d be dumbfounded to see that they’d sprung for the money to ear-tag their cattle w/ that much info. I guess it makes a little sense though. Cattle are capital, & if you’re not gonna maintain your barbed wire so they can get out & save a 19-year-old girl w/ liver damage, you probably don’t want to lose money on not being able to find a head in your herd when it goes to visit the neighbors.

So I woke up. I immediately opened the door & willed myself to vomit. Fun fact: this was when my bulimia officially started. I felt so nauseous & headachey, & the cows rocking my car were definitely exacerbating the former, so I opened the door & stuck my finger down my throat & a few weeks later, still depressed about the break up & the betrayal, I remembered having the power to not keep down food so that I could instead keep down my weight.

A feeling of being profoundly alone hit me after vomiting. The nearest cows were dismayed by this display, & they backed off, which really bummed me out because I kind of wanted to get out & pet them & hold them & cry. I was too weak, though, to stand. So I closed the door to my car & turned my phone on.

The missed calls & voicemails took a lot of time to sift through. My mother had called, screaming, angry, but also sad. Wanting to know where I was. My other best friend, Pierce, had called, & he was neither screaming nor angry but very sad, & very scared, & also wanted to know where I was. I called him. I told him everything I knew, which was that I had taken a bottle of extra-strength Tylenol & driven out of town & now there were cows who wouldn’t let me go back to sleep. I told Pierce I wanted to go back to sleep & I hung up on him. I’m sure I told him I love him, but I don’t remember anything he said. I’m sure I wasn’t too lucid either.

W/in seconds, my mother called, & I figured I would get no peace if I didn’t answer her. I genuinely did just want to go back to sleep, but I think I had decided not to die, which was why I didn’t turn my phone off as soon as I finished talking w/ Pierce.

In my memory, I told my mom exactly what I told Pierce. Yes, I did take a lot of painkillers. No, I don’t know where I am. But here is some information off a cow. & the license plate of a truck parked in this driveway. & I told her my phone only had 8% battery, & that I wanted to sleep, & then I hung up on her.

Last week, my mom told me what really happened.

As soon as I texted her, she scoffed because I must have been bluffing. & then she thought, “What if she’s not?”

She called & called Pierce, & C. She drove to S’s house. She found C. She asked him if there was anywhere I might try to go for solitude. He told her yes, that there was a back road in Oklahoma where I often drove to think. He took her there. I wasn’t there. Wherever I was, I hadn’t gone north to Oklahoma.

My mom & C sped back to Burkburnett, TX. During that drive, Pierce was in touch. He hadn’t gotten ahold of me. My mom called me over & over. Finally, she got more than 1 tone before voicemail, which meant my phone was back on. Must have been while I was talking to Pierce. She called again. I picked up. She arrived @ the police station & told someone what was happening, & they took the phone off her. They traced it for about 15 seconds. Then my phone died.

I fell back asleep in Garth that day. I woke up when an ambulance arrived. I went to the hospital, had my stomach pumped, & then was sent to a psychiatric ward for the weekend, where there were no doors & a young man walked in on me in the shower. I convinced the resident shrink that I didn’t really want to kill myself, & was just acting out for attention. He bought it. My parents bought it. Hell, I bought it.

But I came really fucking close to dying. I never really knew how close. I thought I’d saved myself, w/ my vomiting & my miracle cow phone #. My mom & I hadn’t really talked about it the past 6 years, &  I’m glad that now I know how hard she worked to find me. She & C, who were the people I was most angry @, that day.

Louis CK has a new bit about suicide. It is the answer to all of the world’s problems, for you. The people who are here right now are just people who have succeeded @ not killing themselves, again, today. If everyone who were afraid of, say, ISIS, just killed themselves, it would end the terror because it would suck all the fun out of it for them.

Maybe suicidal tendencies are a recessive gene. That wasn’t the 1st, or the last, time in my life that I considered killing myself. Sometimes this is all way too much.

But I’m sitting in my apartment in my green tennis shoes. My best friend & lover is behind me promoting the shows our band is going to play next month. I’ve had a houseguest in recent weeks who keeps secretly leaving original poems in different parts of the living room. & I am writing this stupid blog because I kind of needed to cry & laugh @ the fact that I’m still alive. Even if I DO beat the recessive gene, I will die someday. But, as my partner puts it, “If everything is dreadful, fun isn’t going to be handed to you. You have to make fun.” So I guess I’m trying to make fun of the fact that I, too, succeeded @ not killing myself again today.

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21 January 2017

The way my apprehension divides the miles on the car by the youth I can’t get back.

By andpantomime

Y’know how sometimes we say that such-&-such was a “helluva” thing when what we actually mean is, “Such & such was a thing that wowed me”? Like, “That was a helluva burrito” because, y’know, you sprung for guac & when doesn’t guac amaze?

Last year was a Hell of a year. & even though it’s inauguration day, 2017, last year still isn’t over.

I’m seated in my home office @ my makeshift desk(s), which I just discovered doesn’t qualify for a tax credit even though I typically work a few hours a day @ this spot, & listening to the most monumental man in my life play guitar into a microphone so we can record our 1st track as a duet entitled Conveniently Weird. I’m writing today because it’s been about 2 mos, I am going to jail in about 2 weeks, & I want to wholeheartedly thank all my readership because I dunno apparently I’m Sally Field @ the Oscars & you like me, right now, you like me.

Well, maybe not thank. But I do feel a deep need to address my readers.

I started this draft mid-January & just couldn’t get through it. Primarily because the life that I am trying to lead got in the way: band practice, tire center, PRiMO, Zachary, & sleep. Mostly the final line-item, though. I was switched by the tire center to opening shifts, which are @ 8 AM & require me to get up @ 6:30 for the 1st time in 4 years. While getting off @ 1 PM sounds rather glamorous & freeing, it is less so when you can’t train yourself & your partner to go to bed @ 10 PM, so instead of clocking out @ Costco & coming back to this desk to make sure Vic’s business is running smoothly, I carbo-load on the way home & then pass out on a full stomach because I’m not 19 anymore & I need more than 5 or 6 hrs of sleep & carbs are the quickest way to an energy crash.

Tonight I dissociated. After getting back from work @ 2 PM & over-eating again, & then passing out but this time self-administering diphenhydramine so that I could sleep hard in the paint, I woke up around 5 PM when Zachary came home & I didn’t roll out of bed until nearly 6. The plan had been to get out of bed @ 3 so that I could log some hrs for Vic @ PRiMO, but a week of sleep-deprivation had its own designs on my brain’s use of time. Understandably, for me @ least, I woke up frustrated. Why had I taken the sleep aid? It worked; I slept through my alarm, & then my only wake-up-call was a person who wanted to know what I wanted to do tonight. Which was far less important than what I had wanted to do this afternoon. Which was far less important than what I had wanted to do Thursday night (which was sleep a full 8). Which was far less important than what I had wanted to do yesterday afternoon (which was also work for PRiMO & not nap [which I did. The latter, not the former]). & so I got up, on a Friday @ 6 PM AKA the-close-of-business, realized that today was my 1 opportunity to be responsible to my 2nd employer, realized tomorrow is my 1 day-off before I travel to Florida for my best friend’s wedding, realized that a week from Monday I will be sitting in a cell @ Arapahoe County Jail, & realized – very violently – that none of this is okay & I have been but pretending everything is normal.

It isn’t.

Trump is president. I’m running low on vape oil. My steel-toe boots fell to pieces. I weigh almost 150 lbs.

My therapist made 2 observations yesterday that both surprised & validated me. 1, she told me that I was being a bit guarded; a bit matter-of-fact in my explanations of work, my partner, other work, my domestic violence classes, my urinalyses, my probation officer, my bankruptcy, my band, my best friend’s Florida wedding, my friends, my family, & my ex. This surprised me, because I have never thought of myself as guarded. I think of myself as an open-book. Why, I have this blog right here where I spill my guts in full SEO-exhibitionist-view. But, okay, I was open to it. Maybe she’s right. Maybe being so matter-of-fact is being guarded; I’m not emoting, I’m simply stating the cold hard truths. & 2: She told me that I probably wasn’t emoting because I honestly don’t have spare minutes to do anything except hold. it. together.

Tonight I stopped holding it together. Tonight I lashed out @ Zachary, because he simply wanted anything from me. & I can’t do any more giving anymore. I am out of time to give. I can no longer keep my cool. He wanted to know, would I like to go to the grocery w/ him? Was it okay if he did laundry while we were together? What would I like to do tonight? Anything fun? Why wouldn’t I talk to him? Why won’t I touch him? When will I talk to him? Is it okay to touch me now? & I snapped like a fucking locker-room-towel. Dirty, cold, & bracing. I was angry. I didn’t, & still don’t, want to do anything. Or talk to anyone. Especially not anyone who is going to pretend that my life isn’t about to come to a temporary-yet-screaming, confusing & harrowing halt.

Everybody seems to want some fucking thing, which I have spent my entire life normalizing for them. Sure, you want a thing? I’ll get you a thing. I’ll do a thing for you. I’m all about things for others! The band has a show tomorrow. Vic wants me to call him @ 10 AM. The jail wants me to have $200 in cash when I book in. My bankruptcy lawyer wants my 2016 tax return. Managers & supervisors want to know if I can stay late. Vic wants me to do research for PRiMO. The band wants to record a few videos before the show. Everyone wants to know how to interact w/ me while I am in jail. Everybody wants to know when they can see me or how they can write to me or when the motherfucking visitation hours are. Vic wants to know how many hrs a week I can devote to his business while in jail (news flash: I don’t have a fucking clue). Everybody wants to know if we can have dinner before I book in. Everybody wants to know how long I’ll be there (extra extra: I have no god-forsaken idea). I owe my sponsored child a letter. I owe the thrift store a few dozen articles of clothing. I always, always, always seem to need to do everybody’s goddamned dishes. & I am running out of clean pants. & when I book in, I will need several weeks’ worth of pants.

I think this entry is a sort of thank you. Like, a “thanks but no thanks.” Like, “thanks for reading, but please for the love of all that is holy do not try to talk to me or spend time w/ me in the next 10 days before I book in, because it is extremely painful to go sit down & eat Cuban food w/ you & pretend that I’m fine & everything’s fine & I have all the answers to your burning questions. It is really painful to answer the Facebook messages which ask politely, ‘How are you doing?’ w/ anything other than, ‘I’m going to jail while you do whatever the hell is normal for you, how do you think I’m doing, asshole? What do you want me to say?'” It is painful to know that I won’t be coming home for a long time.

I know that all of the attention & questions are just misguided affection. But, I don’t appreciate it. I don’t like your curiosity, if anything because it mirrors my own. I simply don’t know anything about what’s going on, what’s going to happen, & what I am feeling or going to feel. On a scale of 1 to 10, I think I’ve been dissociated @ about a 3 ever since I got sentenced, which was November 4th of last year. But I couldn’t go all this time w/o telling people the cold-hard-truths, that I will be put away for all of February & some or all of March, so now I’ve got myself in this bind where so many people necessarily know about my situation, & they want to help, & they can’t, & I wish I were somehow able to have lied to you all for the past year. But I couldn’t. I don’t do that. I’m not guarded in that way. I may be callous, but I’ve never been armored to lie.

As I said: last year was a Hell of a year. & last year has stretched into this. What that means, though, I just do not know. I don’t want to feel so angry w/ others for just living their lives & being concerned w/ mine, but I also don’t want them to spend any of my time w/ their concerns.

bfphooey

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7 September 2016

Something isn’t clicking anymore & the silence in me is heavy.

By andpantomime

I

can’t

sleep.

Today, I reported for jury duty. Out of 40 people, there were 4 surveys the judge & attorneys found eyebrow-raising enough to interview the jurors who filled them out. I was the only woman singled out for questioning, & when asked if I think I am fit to serve on a jury, I said politely, “Truthfully, your honor, I am very skittish of the legal system right now.”

I went home. Went to work @ my desktop. I gradually binged on everything in the fridge, from tempura-frying tofu to polishing off a block of blueberry chevre. Then I looked over all my court paperwork & realized that, oh boy, I need to sign up for alcohol education classes. They will be 3 months of Saturdays @ 8 AM.

I’m getting sick & tired of not being alone. Which is disheartening, because this time last year I was so sick of being alone that I committed infidelity, joined a band, & wrote a Christian stage play (in reverse order).

The band might be what is keeping me alive in any sane capacity. Hell, I think I have been living off the energy of the band all these 12 months. The trouble is, I need to make things, & perform, & be seen – but court is trying to eat my bank account, succeeding, & work is eating my remaining time so that I can afford to eat Wheat Thins & cereal & Otter Pops & yogurt.

I sat down to work on a song of my own tonight – got not very far. I played my keyboard, & realized that all my melodies are single whole steps apart & not quite compelling. But hey it’s E minor & the violinist may be happy to play all those naturals.

Every day or night that I get to myself, though, is weeks apart from the next. What am I? Am I as extroverted as humanly possible but legitimately exhausted by my retail job? Am I an introvert who prefers to relate to large groups of voyeurs through a veil of symbolism in song before skittering into my car to pick my nose & wish it were winter?

My amazing, beautiful, soulful & dynamic roomie moves in this Saturday. I am honestly excited. I want to put her brain in my gut & process all her thoughts w/ my feelings.

I struggle to do that for myself. I’m a bibliography of lists & account passwords doubled over spitting haikus & vague couplets. I’m a flat character convinced she’s in a round body. I’m a headache & a neckache & always a chiropractic appointment away from release, relief, redemption, recompense.

No matter how little sleep I get, my circadian rhythm thinks there aren’t enough hours in the day. I got up @ 6 today, went to Brighton to have my time spent & my waist leered @, logged 2 hrs on the clock, 2 hrs @ Anchor Education & Counseling, then damned near 6 hrs trying to squeeze the music out of my soul & I’m stuck on an opening line I wrote a month ago about lipstick on pigs & cigarettes (can’t resist assonance).

I think in the end I am just too physically exhausted from always getting home after 10 PM. I no longer drink, so when band practice is over @ 7  & the boys want a brew, I lust to do my laundry before the laundromat closes. I covet the hours before the sun goes down, the magic minutes made for movie-making. I desire to sit on my porch twice a day when the Earth starts & ends its revolution around Apollo’s burning chariot but every single day it seems like Phaeton is @ the wheel & the sun goes crashing out of sight in a blur of heat & truant ambitions.

My throat hurts. My heart hurts. I need a vacation. Not for a wedding this time, Texas travel & fried food – I need a week in a hotel in Manitou Springs, w/ a laptop I don’t yet own & a decent pair of walking shoes. I need to bring every scrap of fabric I can make into a quilt & every instrument I own & a pile of notebooks as tall as my stash of pens end-to-end.

I’m gonna break. Gimme a break.

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18 July 2016

This is the 5th time in a year I’ve ended up in here eating PB&Js & watching the church channel nightly.

By andpantomime

All I want is to eat a jar of Nutella, buy a printer, & a mini keyboard piano.

I am so productive today, which is something I really needed. I worked almost 3 hours from home & that’s $40 in my pocket eventually. I went to court on Thursday, & my hearing was reset for September, but I was a wreck every day up until then. It was all money-worry headaching me left & right.

The other day I did the math on my total bills (not including anything which changes month to month: therapy, primary care, groceries, eating out, electricity, gasoline, the leasing of my ignition interlock device, oil changes, & student loans which are currently deferred) per month, & the total came to $1,387.78.

I already know that I make between $1,350 & $1,400/mo @ Costco, so that’s right square in the realm of “not de(bt)ath”, & between $250 & $500/mo @ PRiMO, so that’s roundabout “maybe I can eat samples @ Costco & PB&Js @ home.” Part of me is so, so certain that if I would just spend less money on food, I would lose the 5 to 10 extra lbs I’m sick of carrying & also save an extra 50 to hundred bucks a month. Ah well. The binge-eating half of bulimia is my primary nemesis, & I’m proud to say even though it stares me in the face every hour of every day, I haven’t purged in 6 weeks.

Navy Federal is having a sweepstakes this month: if I use my debit card for specific transactions each week, I might win $25K. So I’m manically doing that. Because the totals on the credit cards (which I used to pay the court & the lawyer, then shredded them so that I don’t touch them for anything else) + the loans is up to $24K.

Most days, despite crippling debt, I remember that other people took out $40-$100K in student loans that they cannot be rid of, even in the event of a bankruptcy, & I feel better. Sometimes I don’t feel better, because my interest rates are all between 10 & 15%, & my weight is always between 140 & 144 lbs, & on those days I lean heavily on the voice of my partner. I’m so lucky to play music in a band w/ the obvious love of my life, because whenever I need cheering-up I have a Dropbox account littered w/ his guitar riffs & breathy singing.

I didn’t really believe, before this person, that I deserved to be in – & would benefit from – a relationship w/ someone who truly inspires me to do the things I love. & it doesn’t matter what they are – I can write a song & sure, he’ll play guitar under it, but I can compose these ramshackle musings on this silly site, dress myself in something I made or modified, simply tell a joke, or interact animatedly w/ other people, & he appreciates how I’m a sloppy pile of disparate talents & trenchant social compulsions. He’s going to read this, so I have to say it: I’m in love w/ you & thank you.

Last week & this, in therapy, I am working on boundaries. Working on saying, “No, I need to take my break alone,” or “My room is my home office, you cannot intrude,” or, “I appreciate the offer of your leftover food, I just don’t need it right now.” I’m still the person who jumps up & says “YES I WILL CATSIT FOR YOU” or “DO YOU NEED ME TO PICK OUT A LIPSTICK SHADE YOU’LL LIKE”, or “HOW ABOUT IF I BRING YOU SOME SHOES WE ARE THE SAME SIZE”, but doing for others brings me insane pleasure & always will. I don’t intend to change Column B except where it interferes w/ Column A, & I intend to outline the boundaries of Column A in a thick dark margin. Finally, “I think I’m growing into someone you can trust” to define herself before she defines her relationship w/ everyone else.

I’m yellow & blue & brown today, beeteedubz. This shirt was originally an X-large. Also I always color-coordinate my shoelaces.

2016-07-18 14.43.04

“I know I deserve every elegant word that you’re hurling @ me.”

I love everybody. I like me, too.

Also, it’s #haikumonday. If you’re reading this & haven’t read my Facebook update immediately prior, what’s wrong w/ you?

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1 May 2016

Hack into dietary sustenance.

By andpantomime

This 1 is particularly hard to begin, so to prepare my heart I’m bingeing on un-sauced noodles, & granola bars, Wheat Thins, Diet Dr. Pepper, an over-(maybe under-)abundance of PBR, & nicotine oil. As I sit down to tell myself & the internet some bullshit about me, the alarm – which I have set to banish my presently-absent but constantly-loving roommate from my private space & time – goes off.

I have borderline personality disorder. Or, emotional dysregulation disorder, if you prefer. But more on that momentarily.

Here’s a haiku I wrote today:

I’m a psychotic,
Nightmarish, episodic,
Aphrodisiac.

Followed by a definition:

According to the DSM, Fourth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR), to be diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, a person must show an enduring pattern of behavior that includes at least five of the following symptoms:
Extreme reactions—including panic, depression, rage, or frantic actions—to abandonment, whether real or perceived
A pattern of intense and stormy relationships with family, friends, and loved ones, often veering from extreme closeness and love (idealization) to extreme dislike or anger (devaluation)
Distorted and unstable self-image or sense of self, which can result in sudden changes in feelings, opinions, values, or plans and goals for the future (such as school or career choices)
Impulsive and often dangerous behaviors, such as spending sprees, unsafe sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, and binge eating
Recurring suicidal behaviors or threats or self-harming behavior, such as cutting
Intense and highly changeable moods, with each episode lasting from a few hours to a few days
Chronic feelings of emptiness and/or boredom
Inappropriate, intense anger or problems controlling anger
Having stress-related paranoid thoughts or severe dissociative symptoms, such as feeling cut off from oneself, observing oneself from outside the body, or losing touch with reality.

I got diagnosed a little over 6 weeks ago. It was thrilling – it was like being told, “We have a name for your crises, & we will slowly but surely talk you out of having them all the time.” I immediately read the Wikipedia on BPD, & learned that most therapists give the diagnosis after a series of escalating questions. Questions like, “This is a symptom, & then these are 5 other symptoms that go w/ it, does that sound right?” & then patients typically accept the diagnosis willingly, which is also symptomatic of having BPD, like, “Oh totally, that makes sense, we can ascribe that initialism to this series of manias I have. Now what?”

I have been describing it to people in my own terms ever since. Yes, I fit the criteria according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders: I panic or get depressed if I think I am being abandoned; I have stormy relationships w/ my family & no long-term friends; I am impulsive, I spend too much, I abuse too many substances, I drive recklessly, & I binge; I have manic episodes of joy & of misery; I have outrageous anger; & sometimes I have out-of-body experiences. But, when I am trying to tell someone about my BPD for the 1st time, face-to-face, I tell them the gentler truth:

I have no idea how to feel my own senses. & I sense everyone else’s feelings w/ far too much ease. & that makes me flip out a lot.

Imagine, for a minute, that you never know if you are hungry until you are way, way too hungry. That happened to me today. I got close to passing out @ work, while driving the forklift because – whups – all I ate were samples & a pile of veggies while voraciously drinking coffee.

Now, extrapolate further. Imagine not knowing if something smells good, or if sex feels good, or if you like a band the 1st 10 times you hear them. On the other hand, imagine there being no food you don’t like, because the act of eating is 1 of the only things that will give you instant pleasure, so, sure, give me cold beets & dried snap peas & a pound of Jarlsberg, if you will.

Oftentimes, I can’t pin down what I want. Do I need to watch Who’s on 1st? Do I need to tell my calorie counter what I just did? Do I need to give up & go to sleep? Do I just need to drink more water? I’m angry @ being on the planet today. @ the fact that I can’t play an instrument but I think all my thoughts are better in song. Today I tucked in my shirt & sucked in my stomach & I hated myself. I was around WAY too many people, then after that I went to go be around people.

I’m angry that I’m not easy, & even that makes me uneasy.

The other half of my explanation has to do w/ my extreme, sometimes-crippling empathy. Even though I can never seem to figure out how I feel, it is usually alarmingly easy for me to read strangers’ emotions, or to mimic them, to “make friends”, to know & understand how they feel. I know what to say, to whom, & when to say it, & usually why they need it said. If we get along relatively well after a few meetings, I know when to hug you, & when not to. I know when to smile & flirt & make lingering eye contact. I know when to build you up, put you down, pick up your pieces, but usually not when to let them fall to the floor because I am afraid if I drop you, you’ll leave me forever. & sometimes I get into those situations so many times in the span of a week, that I myself completely collapse under the perceived-pressure of other people just being themselves around me. After I have known you long enough, I go screaming in another direction – I run as far away as I can – because, if you’re yourself, then who the fuck am I?

I’m a flickering fluorescent or a burnt-out incandescent; I can’t shine all the time.

I miss the basement in the home of the man I meant to marry. It wasn’t much – unfinished floors, walls, & ceiling – a mattress on the concrete (not that I’ve ever been inclined to have a bedframe), & three desks hooked into a U-shape, in case I thought I needed to write a song while I wrote an email & finished the 2nd season of Fargo (still haven’t). But it was somewhere I could reliably go to be alone. To untangle the beaded necklaces that are my beat-up senses. Because if I don’t – if I’m not alone enough, if I am chasing away that feeling of boredom & emptiness by being extremely busy & literally filling up every single second on my calendar – I will eventually blow a fuse. I’ll go off on someone I DO care about. I’ll eat the fridge & all its contents. I’ll drink & drink & drink & smoke & drink & drink water & sleep & drink again. Or, I’ll start to dissociate. Sure, I’m here, you see me, w/ my convincing words & hugs & smiles, but the eye contact will diminish deeply because I’m not really there. I am actually so far away from being inside myself, that I can see the girl in the chair w/ her stomach sucked in & the beer in her hand. & I can ask, “Is the girl who is skinny having fun?”

It’s half-past midnight. I don’t know what I need. But I am gonna watch an animated conversation w/ Noam Chomsky. “Is the man who is tall happy?”

& I’m gonna drink a lot of water. & try not to weigh myself. & I’m gonna post this to the Facebook where I collect snippets of my personality, & hope for some empathy.

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25 January 2013

I am not a great person.

By andpantomime

I am never going to change.

My vices include: chocolate ice cream, being single, not exercising, and impulse spending.

I can attach a few stories to each, with varying degrees of intensity, but I think the reason I feel compelled to write right now is mostly based on the fact that I know I should not allow anyone to get attached to me, for the simple fact that I will abandon them.

It was a curious conversation I had with Ben Noe a few months ago. It must have been just after Mallory and Chris got married, before I left the band, and whenever Ben still had us all over to his house on occasion for movies. One night, I think after a party whereafter everyone had gone to sleep but the two of us, I am certain that I explained why I don’t date, don’t get into relationships, don’t get attached, and don’t expect to keep friends. I think we had this conversation on a roof and I was trying to help Ben sober up and stay awake by making his brain work harder. I know that I said, word for word, “I’m not going to get hurt, and I’m not going to miss anyone. I am going to disappear.” He took slight offense, and countered, “You feel as though you’ve been abandoned by everyone and so now you abandon them first? Well, you won’t leave us.”

I talked about my parents – how they forced me out of their houses in high school on the command of my sisters, who were unequivocally displeased with my 16-year-old presence. I talked about the boyfriends I’d had and how each of them had a reason for leaving me what-felt-like prematurely. Such bullshit evidences as “I have shared too much of myself and become too close to you,” and “I feel like all I can do from here is marry you,”  were all the lines I heard as reasons why we SHOULD end it. So, by 19, I was pretty jaded and pretty pissed. I explained to Ben that I’d moved away from all my friends growing up, because of the military, and how some of them that I followed or kept up with ended up forcing me out the door. All these people, Mom & Dad, Caitlin & Shannon, Aaron & Clinton, and then finally Meli & Cain kind of left me bruised.

I don’t mean to complain, just to explain. I have great relationships with all of these people now, just two years later. But the annoyance at always having to start over has not ebbed. So now, men must accommodate my “expiration date”. It goes like this, “I love you, but I’ll only be with you for so long.” And the “so long” might not be very long at all if I don’t get enough return out of the relationship in the first place.

The biggest negative – and why I’m not a great person – is that I don’t know what kind of “return” I want anyway. It’s a shame. I can recognize a lack, but try as I might to recognize an abundance it is never compelling enough to keep me interested.

Caitlin says that when you find the right person, you stop looking at others. Does that mean that the right person does all the right things? Probably not. But, I feel like I am due a few courtesies and fundamental commonalities in order to sustain a monogamy. I’m Megan Phelan – I’m happy and ambitious; therefore, I would like him to be happy and ambitious. I’m also a helluva talker. It doesn’t mean you have to compete with me for air time, but you damn sure better be able to respond frequently so I know you’re comprehending. And I’m expressive. I have a shit-ton of feelings. I want a guy who doesn’t hide his, whatever they are. I’m not a woman of few words.

I have to stop dating. I have to stop taking time out of men’s lives just so they can watch me spoil in the door of the fridge. It’s a poor analogy but I’m frustrated, and sad, and I feel I’ve made a mistake. Not because I left the last guy, but because I had no idea how to leave him and prevent him from detesting me. Is that an art? Can that be taught, let alone learned? I don’t wanna hurt people anymore.

I just wanna be left alone.

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