One week in April.

Update on the vegan thing and the money thing:

The vegan thing seems much easier this time.  Hope it sticks.

I've saved about $35.00 so far, money I would have thrown away on senseless stupid stuff.  $5.00 of that money would have been spent on a loaf of bread I was eyeing, thinking about taking it home to c/s.  Didn't do it.  Felt good about that.

I keep trying to work myself into some level of enthusiasm.  I have so much to be grateful for, so much.  And yet it's so difficult right now to think of anything other than crawling under the covers.  I think it's this season.  I wish I could sleep until spring.

It takes so much energy, sometimes, to interact with people, to appear normal, engaged, something other than completely gray and flat inside and uninterested in saying one word to anyone about anything.  My job requires a lot of interaction with people sometimes, and January and February are the busiest months of the year.  I have to be "on" all day and that's hard in the best of circumstances, but when I am feeling like this, what I appear to others, what others see, clashes violently with the real me.  It's so incredibly difficult and so jarring.  Even my husband doesn't know the real me.  Sometimes he catches a glimpse, and to be honest, I think it scares him.  I know it does.

It's taking insane amounts of energy to appear normal right now.  People leave the room and I shut down immediately, drained beyond measure with the charade of normality, of enthusiasm, of the polite necessities of custom.  Small talk.  So, so, so difficult.   When I am finally alone I deflate like a balloon.  I could sit and stare at the wall for hours, I think.

I am not losing but my normal sense of urgency appears to be a casualty of this thickening of my heart, this clouding of my brain.  I don't feel the urge to binge but I can't seem to buckle down and do the hard work that needs to be done, either.

Every year in April, my husband and I visit a city I love.  I love everything about this city:  its shops, its food, its flowers, its trees, its architecture, its history.  I am always happy there, always.  I have imbued the city with qualities it does not possess, I see it as a magical elixir for everything wrong.  When I am there everything is perfect and beautiful and I am happy.  If I could live there I would be perfect and beautiful and happy.

I cling to the promise of April in this city I love so.  It's all that's keeping me going right now.

Two Things for Two Months

January and February are not good months for me.  It's cold, and bleak, and it rains a lot.  The gray in the sky matches the smudged shadows in my head.

I want to focus on two things for the next two months:

1.  Going vegan (again) -- I've been vegetarian forever, and it's very easy for me, but for some reason it's very, very difficult to go vegan. When I try to go vegan, I never last for more than a few weeks.  I think it's the cheese.  Yes, there is vegan cheese, but I'd rather eat greasy cardboard.  In fact, I think that some of the vegan cheese I've eaten actually was greasy cardboard. I miss cheese, and bread, and cheese, and milk chocolate, and cheese.  Did I mention I miss cheese?  And eating in restaurants is a freaking logistical nightmare -- trying to communicate with the kitchen through the waitstaff proves exhausting, embarrassing, anxiety-provoking, and irritating all at the same time.  This segues nicely into goal number two, which is:

2.  Spend no money for two months on anything except groceries, gas, and household necessities.  That's it.  No new clothes, no thrifted clothes, no new books, no used books, no eating in restaurants, no movies, no cute vintage aprons, no candles, nothing.  I am far from wealthy but I have an abundance of stuff and I really don't need anything more.  I may want more, but there is literally nothing at all that I need.  My little house contains everything I need, and then some.  So I want to note where I would have spent money and didn't, I want to start a list and every time I don't buy something I would have ordinarily bought, I am going to write it down.   At the end of two months, I will donate the savings to a worthy cause.  I already have the perfect idea for where this money can go.

So combining the two quite nicely, my little plan means I won't be tempted by restaurant food, as it's strictly verboten until March 1.  And I can stop (at least temporarily) accumulating stuff. And simplify.  Simplify my diet, simplify my home, simplify my life. I want to put less in my stomach, less in my car, less in my house. And at the end of two months, I will (hopefully) have something to show for it in more ways than one.

"It is the great curse of Gluttony that it ends by destroying all sense of the precious, the unique, the irreplaceable."  


-- Dorothy Sayers

One's Real Life

I'm trying to enjoy these last few days off before I return to work in the new year, but I am one of those people who feel guilty about every second of pleasure I experience.  I'm spending time with my cats, drinking lots of tea, reading books and blogs, and it has been glorious and magnificent (although marred by intervals of meals with friends.  The friends part--- good; the meals part -- not so much.)

I could easily stay like this forever...waking at 10:00 every morning (instead of 6:00 a.m.), my only focus and responsibility of the day being the number on the scale, the number of calories I take in, and the number of calories I burn off.

I wish I could take a year off and go live in a very small room by the sea, a room the size of a walk-in closet with nothing but hardwood floors and a high ceiling and a comfy chair and a wall of windows.  I'd take my cats and a trunk of books and tins of tea and read read read read and gaze at my cats luxuriating in the patches of sun on the floor and I would walk on the shore in the mornings and listen to music and I would write and I'd be happy, perfectly, magnificently happy, and it wouldn't matter -- actually, it would be infinitely preferable -- if I didn't have one word spoken to me over the course of that year and if I didn't have to speak to anyone.

My need for solitude is so strong, and so unrealistic, given my life.

Oscar Wilde:  "One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead."

Why

Because I need to know in times of uncertainty and despair that no matter what else is happening in my life, there is at least this one thing.

I have this.  At least there is this.  When everything else is going all to hell all around me, crashing down top of me, crumbling, shattering at my feet, at least there is this.  At least I have a closet full of cute thrifted size zero jeans, and they all fit.  Everything else may be fucked up, but at least there is a thigh gap, and I cling to that knowledge like it's a buoy keeping me afloat in a violent tempest.  I may have money problems, family problems, friend problems, problems in my fucked up head that make me want to escape into books for every second I can spare in the day, but at least there is this, I can wear a little miniskirt and tights in the winter, bundling up in a big warm coat and a scarf and mittens and feeling small under it all and knowing that no matter what, I have this.  I have this.  I have this.

When I am stressed, I run my fingers over my hipbones in the way that some people touch worry stones or rosaries.  My bones become a totem of what is possible with discipline, simplicity, and control.

It can center me, calm me, stop -- for just the briefest of moments -- the voices in my head telling me that I am an imposter, a fraud, a failure at life.  And sometimes it's just enough to see me through.

My Idiocy Knows No Bounds

So today was a gastronomic nightmare of the highest proportions.  Christmasy family angst = emo eating of ridiculous food, the kind of food that is normally an anathema to me, the kind of food that any other day of the year would cause me to recoil in horror and leap up from my chair and flail my arms and run screaming from the room and into a second room, say, a bathroom, behind the closed door of which I would exercise silently and with great fervor until the food in the first room was no more. But:  put me at a table with an assortment of relatives who all secretly harbor fantasies of stabbing their forks into the jugular vein of the person sitting to their immediate left, and suddenly I become the human equivalent of an industrial vacuum cleaner, quickly and efficiently ridding the table of all its contents.  If there'd been cookies and milk left out for Santa, well, screw that, it would have gone down my yawning chasm of a gullet along with the other forty-seven pounds of greasy detrius I inhaled.  It's still sort of hazy at this point, reports are still coming in, but I think I went into some sort of sugar-induced psychotic fugue there for a short period of time and consumed several elves (along with their little felt hats) and the tenderloin portion of a red-nosed reindeer.

Suffice it to say:  fuck.  fuck fuck fuck.

And tomorrow?  That's when the real fun begins.  Having bitched today up beyond all salvaging, I will fast tomorrow.  I must fast tomorrow.  But I'm spending tomorrow with the in-laws.  I can't simply not eat the food they prepare -- that would be rude.  So I'm actually going to bring my own vegetarian food so I can be slightly less rude by not eating my own food instead of not eating someone else's.

Nothing like the holidays to remind me of how completely, irredeemably fucked up I am.  Joy.

Getting Through

I'm sad that the holidays are something to be gotten through, but for me, they are and they always have been.  I am a hermit and the holidays involve waaaaay too much interaction for me.  There's serious infringement on my hermiting and I find myself resentful of the intrusion but unable to do anything about it.  Yes, I am an adult, but certain expectations of others cannot be avoided.

It takes me most of January to get myself back on track.  I'm not a religious person by any means, but I take a few days at the end of the year to visit a monastery (I stay at a retreat house there) and re-center after the stress of the holidays.  It takes everything I have to appear normal on an every day basis, and the holidays just pack a lot of activities and interaction into a period of time that doesn't allow me to breathe in between, and I'm so exhausted from by two weeks of all this trying to be normal and interact with people without frightening or offending them.  The best part of the monastery retreat is the fact that it is totally silent -- the only time anyone speaks is during prayer.  I can't explain the solace that comes from this place of quiet and peace, taking these simple meals in a small dining room with a group of people I don't have to talk to, at all.  I meditate and reflect on my past year and plan for the year to come, and when I leave, I've built some of my reserves back.  I don't know if I could make it through the holidays without knowing this awaited me at the end of the year.

Self-Discipline

"'Discipline' is a difficult word for most of us.  It conjures up images of somebody standing over you with a stick, telling you that you're wrong.  But self-discipline is different.  It's the skill of seeing through the hollow shouting of your own impulses and piercing their secret.  They have no power over you.  It's all a show, a deception.  Your urges scream and bluster at you; they cajole; they coax; they threaten; but they really carry no stick at all.  You give in out of habit.  You give in because you never really bother to look beyond the threat.  It is all empty back there.  There is only one way to learn this lesson, though.  The words on this page won't do it.  But look within and watch the stuff coming up -- restlessness, anxiety, impatience, pain -- just watch it come up and don't get involved.  Much to your surprise, it will simply go away.  It rises, it passes away.  As simple as that.  There is another word for self-discipline.  It is patience."

--Henepola Gunaratna, Mindfulness in Plain English