Good Days

I feel like a lot of my winter posts have been miserable, and I deal with so much just by writing it out that this blog bears the brunt of my struggles with any and all things, so it is important to take inventory and to remark upon the good days.


Or even the days that just don't really suck.


In typical eff you New England weather style, March came in like a lion and is leaving like a swamp rat. It's cold, damp, frequently rainy, muddy and kind of gross. No flowers are poking out of the muck, and there are those delicious wads of dying snowbanks that are ninety percent sand and chemical salt limning driveways and brown, crushed lawns.
This means that I am still trapped inside with the boo boo more often than not.

The war, however, is finally beginning to turn in our favor.

I've begun having post-dinner dance parties with my fifteen month old.
After our super early five o clock dinner, we have about two and a half hours before bed time.

My Beard typically doesn't get home until about six thirty or seven, so there's an hour of "what the hell do we do now?" time between the last supper and the moment I get to throw my kid at my man and hide in the bathroom for twenty minutes pretending I'm peeing, when in fact I am just shakily breathing and looking at my reflection, taking an extra long time to brush my teeth, or plucking my eyebrows-and-hey fuck you random chin hair!

For that hour, I am just about all out of creative ideas of what to do with the bairn.
I am also, looooooaaaaaathe to give in and watch television, because guess what? I've probably already watched an hour or so with the kid after lunch or even let him watch sesame street while I took my shower, and I don't want to depend too heavily on the screen.

So I turn on a playlist of my most random, get up and shake it music, and we dance.
We dance like crazy people.
I pick him up and I swing him around as he giggles hysterically.
I hold his hands and we bop around the carpet.
I chase him across the room and then let him run between my legs, and we generally freak out and scare the cat for a while.
It's really becoming a lovely little thing we do together.

In all honesty, I began doing it in the hopes that it would tire him out and get him ready for bed, but it shows no signs of affecting his energy levels. Instead, it has made me fall head over heels for this ridiculous activity.

I love seeing him shake his butt and run around and giggle madly.
It reminds me how good movement is supposed to feel, that exercise isn't about trying to look a certain way or beating your own PR, it's about joyful physical expression. It's about having a wonderful time letting adrenalin move you and endorphins psyche you up. It's about playing at a time and in a world that really discourages letting go and being uninhibited.

It's also about having a good time.
Just a good old time.

Pep Talk.

Dear Dad,

I forgive you for not understanding how damaging your remarks  would be to my self esteem when I was still a child.

I forgive you because you were damaged in your own way, because you ultimately loved me, because you did the best you could.

I forgive you because staying angry at you only makes me hate myself, and I don't deserve that.

I never did.

You wonder at my low self esteem, but you built it. You didn't know it, and I forgive you, but I do not forget. It is not my fault that I struggle to see worth any time I look in a mirror. It is not my fault that I catch myself treating my husband the same way I had to treat you; as though his needs matter more than my own, as though his struggle is always harder than mine, as though his mistakes must be forgiven while mine can linger and radiate shame.

Dear Mum,

I forgive you for never taking a compliment seriously.
I forgive you for chattering on about how much you hated your body in front of me, how sad you were that pregnancy had changed its shape, and that you were disappointed in it.
I forgive you for the control top panty hose you started giving me every Christmas starting when I was twelve, because I had a tummy.
I forgive you for making me and my sister silent in the face of my father's tantrums, for never making him apologize for his unkind remarks. I forgive you for holding us hostage to his needs because you made them matter more than yours...or ours.

Dear Me,

I forgive you for eating that chocolate earlier.
You did nothing wrong.

I allow you to process your stress, your emotions, your anxiety however you need to. If that means eating chocolate, that is healthier than many other ways you could stifle your feelings. Just let yourself feel the feelings as well as eat the chocolate.

Know that your worth is not eclipsed by anyone else's. Your needs are just as important as your partner's, your mother's, your father's, your son's.
Know that it is okay that you felt bad about your body. You learned to be. Know that it is okay for the process of unlearning to take a while.

Forgive yourself for holding on to those insults, those examples. You were a child, and these were the adults you loved and trusted more than anything else in the world. It is not your fault that you accepted what they told you without even realizing it.

Take back your worth, your value, your space.
You are allowed to push back when pushed.
You are not a doormat.
You are someone worth fighting for.

Dark Days

The reason I haven't been writing much is because I am experiencing a bout of depression.
You can call it postpartum.
You can call it anxiety induced.
You can call it Seasonal Affect Disorder.
It doesn't really matter what the source is.
What matters is that right now, I am having trouble sleeping.
I can be exhausted beyond belief, but the moment the baby falls asleep and I'm alone in the dark with my thoughts, my brain begins obsessing about death, suffering, the meaninglessness of my life, the pointlessness of having brought a child into this cruel and horrible world.

I lie there for hours with my brain running this indoor track marathon.
When I do fall asleep finally, it's often into nightmares. Sometimes it's into anxiety riddled dreams that I technically wouldn't call nightmares but certainly aren't restful.
For the last month, I wake up just as tired as I was when I went to bed, and it has nothing to do with the baby.

During the day I feel my brain scrounging through itself for creativity like  a spoon scraping the concave, glass sides of a peanut butter jar. Is there anything left? I ask myself. Scrape scrape scrape...
A tiny rind of an idea comes up, and I attempt to execute it. Often, it is thwarted by the baby's schedule, or the cold weather, or transportation, or money, or simply as soon as I get started I decide I don't know what I was thinking trying to do anything to begin with.

A lot of times this is even when I try to play with Baz.

I want to dance with him, so sing songs, set up fun imaginative activities, but he is still so little everything gets jammed in his mouth and he either fights me to smash things, rips apart whatever I was trying to build, or stuffs things in his mouth and I either have to shove my fingers between his teeth and get bitten several times to save him from poisoning himself or choking, or I have to accept that whatever he just swallowed is either going to be okay or warrant a trip to the hospital.

Lately it's a cycle of horror.

I can't help but feel like with the current political climate we are all going to die.

Climate change, missile launches, terrorist attacks, nuclear arms races, oil conglomerate battles, pollution, all of it.
Everything I read basically leads me to the conclusion that at any moment we could go up in a ball of fire and if we're lucky, we'll get maybe twenty more years before we wish we had.
It all leads me back to the same questions over and over.

What am I doing?

How do I help?

How do I protect my kid?

What if it's already too late?

This is where I am right now.

I don't have the answers.

How is anyone getting any sleep right now?

I feel like no matter what I do, I'm doing it wrong, and yet if we're all about to die, shouldn't I be living life to the fullest? Shouldn't I be taking Bastian on all the adventures there are to have? Eating ice cream for breakfast lunch and dinner? Dancing and screaming and playing until we fall down?
And yet I can't.

It hurts too much.

It hurts too much to think of how beautiful this world was at one time, and how he's never going to see it like that.

And right when I've stopped crying long enough to actually engage with my child, he starts trying to electrocute himself on the computer printer, or pull the shelves out of the bureau down onto his head, or goddammit what did he just put in his mouth?!

I keep fighting to keep my kid from killing himself, but then I just don't have the will to do anything else because I don't know why I'm doing it.

People tell me its' always been this scary.
People tell me there's no getting over it, we just have to.

Well you let me know how that's going, will you? Because I'm still over here, not sleeping.

The Thing About Intuitive Eating

...is that it sometimes is the most liberating wonderful thing I have ever done, and I am so amazed at the relief I feel when I approach food and hunger and fullness now in comparison to how I approached them for about twelve years before.

The other thing is that sometimes it gets all twisted up and it's really difficult.

Why, you ask?
Well, apart from the obvious disassociation from body cues that comes with disordered eating, our culture is designed to revolve around the idea of excess.
It's nothing new. We're constantly bombarded with the idea of keep progressing, keep going after things, keep progressing, excelling, fighting our way to be the "best version of ourselves" but that's just the newest sheep's cloak the wolf has donned. It's a new package for the same old adage that "You aren't happy unless you have what we're selling" (we can thank those dickheads on Madison avenue in the '60's for this).

How does that apply to intuitive eating?

How could it not?!

When it's so insidious that our society is saturated with the idea of "higher performance" and "living our best life" that just listening to our bodies and shutting out all the nonsense is not only going against the grain, it's bloody revolutionary.

Diet culture, the idea of self denial, the concept of cheat days and cheat meals, all of it is a way of ignoring what our body is telling us and making the very act of giving our flesh machines the nutrition and movement best for their survival into a fucking game.

Here's something you might not know,
when I was the skinniest, and the most unhealthy in my anorectic days, my mantra was not
LOSE WEIGHT. I knew I was thin. I even had the notion that perhaps I was a little too thin. I wasn't concerned with losing more weight.
The thing that kept me scribbling down every crumb I put in my mouth in a food diary and then tallying up the calories so I would make it under my goal; the drive that had me cradling my screaming, roiling, empty stomach at four in the morning when I was so hungry I couldn't sleep was that I didn't want to GAIN THE WEIGHT BACK.

So many of us who fall into truly disordered eating do so because we are only taught how to lose weight. Once we achieve our supposed goal, we may have the notion that it's okay to stop losing weight, that we might have gotten where we wanted to be and can stop now,
BUT THERE IS NO PROTOCOL FOR JUST MAINTAINING.
They call that shit "plateauing" and warn you against it.
They call it, "a crucial time for backsliding" and warn you against it.

You know why?
You know why society and diet industries won't celebrate or congratulate you for reaching some weight loss goal without encouraging you to KEEP FUCKING GOING?
Because then you stop funneling your money into their garbage products and terrible self care mindset.
You stop buying into their industry built on an elusive, impossible ideal of perfection.

I didn't know how to just eat anymore, so I just kept losing instead because I figured that was better than gaining. You know, because in our fucked up culture ANYTHING IS BETTER THAN GAINING WEIGHT EVEN IF YOU NEED TO.

GAHAHAHAHAHA.

This is the stuff that makes intuitive eating really good on most days.
It feels revolutionary to shut out all those voices.
I know you're a stay at home mom whose contributing to your income by peddling the wraps or the teas or the shakes or whatever, but your instagram pics and faux motivational posts are incredibly damaging.
I know your fitspo, or supposed body positive hashtags are getting you more likes as you whip yourself into shape for your wedding and encouraging you on your way to whatever dress size society told you it was acceptable to be on your big day (let's not even go down this rabbit hole), but it's also psychotically cruel to troll women with disordered eating histories who click #bopo hashtags looking for encouragement and bodies we can identify with, and instead are bombarded with pictures of how many calories you burned on the elliptical this afternoon.
This is the kind of stuff that people tell each other is supportive, but the only thing it supports is the "not good enough" mindset that keeps you trapped in the current of disordered eating, ignoring your body's cues, and drags you back out to sea if you don't seek actual support to deal with it.

Right now I find the best thing I can do to support myself is give voice to my cues.
Because so much of my disorder was built on secrecy and silence, saying the words, "I'm hungry," or "I need to eat now," are both terrifying and liberating for me.
I never got to say them before because hunger was a prized sensation that I clung to for validation that I was doing the work.

Now I say shit like,
"Hey, will there be food there, or should I pack a snack?"
And my bag overflows with snacks! It's not just awesome as a mother to have an unending supply of biscuits, apples, single serve peanut butters, and trail mix in my bag, but it's awesome for me too! It's there. The food is there for me if I want it! I don't have to get into the mindset of starvation and freak out later (or all day in fact) because food is not a scarcity anymore.
I have it in abundance.

Sometimes it's still difficult.
Recovery is never linear.
I have days where I just can't bring myself to eat breakfast.
I try. I make something and then I just can't put a bite in my mouth.

There are other days where I eat and eat and eat. I stand in my kitchen with the cupboards and the fridge open and I turn into a food wrecking ball.

But afterward I look at the situation with "curiosity over judgement" which is something I learned from Kylie over on Imma Eat That, which is her incredible blog.
(Maybe sometime soon I'll do a round up of the body positive blogs and babes who have really helped me? Is that something y'all would like to see?)

Anyway:
Curiosity over Judgement was a huge step forward for me.

Now, I check in myself.
Am I hungry?
Do I want to eat?
If the answer is yes, then I think, what sounds most satisfying and delicious right now? Toast and eggs? A smoothie with nine hundred vegetables? A cookie? An apple with peanut butter?
And I keep suggesting things until I get to something that I get excited about.
Then I make that, and I eat it, and I enjoy it. I force myself to taste it and to slow down. The easiest way to do this, is to share it with the baby. I find if I'm telling my bairn how delicious something is, I stop and taste it more. Then we enjoy it together. It's wonderful. It's teaching me so much more about unabashedly enjoying food because he doesn't give a fuck.
If he likes something, he eats all of it.
If he gets full, he stops.
Another incredibly magical thing that he has taught me is that shame is not a natural behavior around satisfying hunger. I love seeing how much he delights in his food. I seek to be as happy as that in my eating.

In those situations where I check in with myself and the answers are not simple, the curiosity over judgement credo is even more important.

Am I hungry?
No.
Am I really hungry, but I don't feel like eating?
Yes.
Why is that?
And then I think about what else could be going on to interfere with my desire to eat. Am I nauseated? Sick? Sad? Too anxious to eat? Each of these has a remedy, and sometimes the easiest one is just time.
Okay, I say. It's okay that you're hungry but you don't want to eat.
Let's wait half an hour and check in again.
And then I do.
Often, the feeling of not wanting to eat has changed, and I am ready to eat and I do.

Sometimes the conversation gets muddy and more complicated.
Am I hungry?
No.
Do I want to eat?
Yes.
And then I do.
And maybe I just eat one chocolate and it satisfies me and that's okay.
Or maybe I eat a whole chocolate bar and follow it with a packet of biscuits and an entire quart container of yoghurt.

The Curiosity over Judgement conversation is never more important than it is at this moment, because my disorder used to immediately berate and shame me and it would start a starving cycle to "make up for" the transgression.

After a binge, I'll ask myself,
How do you feel?
Overfull. Uncomfortable. Out of control. Ashamed.
That's okay.
It is?
Yeah. Truly. It's okay. Nobody's going to judge you here.
But didn't I fuck up? Aren't I a failure?
Failing at what? Fucking up what? Who is there to impress. It's just us, and I already told you, it's okay. You did nothing wrong.

Then I breathe.
And maybe the conversation progresses.
Maybe I have to reassure myself that I don't have to make up for the binge.
Or maybe I just keep asking myself questions until I figure out why the binge happened.
Because I don't know about you, but I binge when I'm lonely. I binge the hardest when I feel like I don't matter, like nobody cares about me, and that nothing matters.
I seek comfort in food because I am not finding it in any other person or outlet of my life.

Once I identified those triggers, it got easier to forgive myself for bingeing.
I have even managed to stop a binge halfway through, which I used to think was impossible.

The superpower of intuitive eating is being gentle with yourself and treating your "food brain" like a tender little hurt animal part of you because that's what it is.
It's a beaten down, broken little creature that society has all but destroyed, and this is you being bigger and kinder than diet culture and rescuing it.
It is worth saving, just as much as your life is worth saving.

Especially in these times where we are being told to manage our bodies more because if we aren't tying up all our time with exercising and counting calories then we aren't calling our senators or signing petitions or protesting (think about that for a second: What has your ED kept you from doing that might be really important? What's the first thing you would do if you didn't have to worry about it anymore?).

Anyway, I just wanted to share with you my own experience with intuitive eating because too many times I think people make it seem easy and straight forward and I always felt like it was something I could never do. I could never actually trust my body because society told me my body was a liar.

And then I started to stop listening to that shit and start caring for the little creature in my brain that wanted me to love myself, and as it heals and gets stronger, so do I, and that is more motivation than any stupid hashtag.

If you do nothing else,
Be kind to yourself today.

Having a Bad Day

Sometimes I have a bad day.

It's hard to explain because nothing actually goes wrong.
In fact, often times, the bad day is completely innocuous to anybody from the outside looking in.
Like my Beard for example.
I'll say,

"I don't know why, but I feel angry. I feel like crying. There's no reason for it, but I just want to hide."

And he says something like,

"Well just remember, everything's fine. Nothing's really wrong."

Which doesn't help at all.

In fact it then piles a nice big helping of really damaging self critical head noise like
-WTF is wrong with you for feeling like human garbage when there's no logical reason for it you stupid, worthless pig person?!-
Which is just sooooo helpful. Right?

It is days like these, which used to put me in a deep hole.
Before I had a kid, I could collapse under this kind of depression. Sometimes it lasted for weeks, or even months, but it all started with a day, a day I felt terrible for no good reason and I didn't allow myself to just be okay with it.

Since having a kid, actually since getting pregnant, I've been much more aware of how hormones control our general moods and responses so much more than we give them credit for. It's funny, when a woman is pregnant, she's given carte blanche to cry at puppy food commercials and wail hysterically in the eyeliner section of Sephora. She's largely forgiven for things like forgetting her keys or accidentally scheduling a dentist appointment for the same time as her eye appointment.
We forgive pregnant women myriad transgressions because "their hormones are just crazy right now!" but the truth is, there isn't an animal on the planet whose hormones aren't largely controlling everything they do from sun up to sun down.

It's a delicate balance of diet, exercise, sleep, and general well being mixed with personal chemistry and the level of your own fertility that dictates pretty much every motivating factor outside of "don't die".

Hormones tell my Beard he wants to go pick up and put down heavy things at the gym.
They tell him he's hungry or grumpy or stressed out.
They help him play with the baby after a long day at work, and they are responsible for his softening around his spiky edges when I give him an extra long hug (ten second hugs are scientifically proven to release serotonin, a hormone that combats stress and calms us down).

You'd think after thousands of years of evolution, we'd be better at forgiving ourselves for hormonally ruled outbursts and compulsions, but as a society, I'd say we're probably the worst at listening to our biological imperatives we've ever been as a species.
We don't spend enough time outside so we're not aware how much the weather, seasons, moon cycle, and even barometric pressure are effecting our bodies.
We eat overly processed food from all over the damn place, so we're being manipulated by chemical preservatives, along with super high levels of salt and sugar to experience irregular energy rushes and crashes which put our bodies into high stress modes (altering the release of our natural hormonally induced fight, fuck, eat, sleep, or fly responses).
We over medicate rather than try getting two or three decent night's sleep and limiting our exposure to other people, because introvert or not, we all need solitude to recharge sometimes. It's how we check in with ourselves, regulate our behavior and examine our activities. This isn't easy. In fact, I spent a lot of time making sure I was so socially engaged I couldn't check in with myself because I didn't want to know what was going on underneath. I'm getting better about that now.

Long story short, pregnant women are not the only beings who should be forgiven their sometimes erratic or inexplicable behavior.
We're all erratic.
We're all inexplicable.
We're all a seriously complicated mixture of chemistry, biology, and magic, and more than anything else, we are actually capable of controlling our hormonal effects if we concentrate.
But we can't concentrate, if we're too busy judging and criticizing, feeling guilty, and generally bludgeoning ourselves with horrible self talk.

"Just remember, everything's find. Nothing's really wrong." Beard says on his way out the door to meet a friend at the gym.
He's combatting his blues by some social engagement and the release of endorphins.

I am stuck at home with the baby squealing until I nurse him down for a nap, and then not letting me put him down while he sleeps.

So yeah. Nothing's wrong. But I feel shitty.
I feel like crying.
I feel lonely because I have no friend to meet.
I feel crappy because I don't get to go to the gym, or go for a walk, or do yoga, or any of the things that make me release endorphins and feel better.
I feel sad because my Beard just sashayed out the door as though telling me to feel better was the easy fix and now he doesn't have to deal with me anymore.

As though I am something not worth dealing with.

Hormones are making my feelings of powerlessness feel bigger than I can deal with.
Maybe I'm extra tired after two weeks of sleep regression.
Maybe I haven't eaten enough protein today.
Maybe I'm super concerned with the upcoming weeks of somewhat stressful life stuff we have going on, and I don't know what to do, if anything to make things go more smoothly for us, and that has me pumping my system with cortisol, which we all know is the nasty stress hormone that brings on things like anxiety attacks, physical pain, and actual health problems.

But it doesn't mean I'm unreasonable or unworthy.

All it means is that I need to speak up.
I need to say, "I feel bad. I'm having a hard time. It isn't for any specific reason, just a whole lot of life stuff is really weighing on me, and I need something to balance it out."
I need to then take a moment and ask myself what would do that.

What will help me to feel better?
A walk?
A spoonful of peanut butter?
A phone call to my best friend?
Writing a blog post?
A glass of wine and an hour without the baby?

You know what?
Today I think it's the last one.

I think I need to remind myself that I'm allowed a friendly little glass of vino.
I'm allowed to take it into the bedroom with my new book and read for an hour.

A little solitude, a little indulgence; these things can go a long way when you're out of whack.
And the really important part isn't that the wine is a ten dolla holla from the corner store. It isn't that the book is a library book so dog-eared its verging on origami. It's that I took the time to check in with myself and allow myself to feel shitty without excuse.

I am allowed to feel shitty "for no good reason".
Because technically, as a human, there is ALWAYS A GOOD REASON for whatever you're feeling. And even if you never figure out what it is, that doesn't invalidate the feeling!

I hope you're being kind to yourselves, friends.

I'mma go buy that wine.