I'D FORGOTTEN......

....how shitty I feel when I overeat.

Thanksgiving Day, I remembered.

Oops. Well, oops and not-oops, both. I want to be a normal person. Normal people will occasionally overindulge. It would not be normal to eat only lettuce leaves and carrot sticks on a food-themed holiday. (Granted, there was probably a middle ground between that and what actually happened,but let's not quibble.)

The revelation, kids, was that I felt like crap. Tight clothes, bloaty, slow, headachey.

And then it hit me: I felt like this ALL THE TIME when I was chronically overeating. Only, see, i didn't realize it, because it really was all the time. My default was stuffed and over-sugared and just feeling lousy.

Great food, really, Just too much of it, and it was all carby and heavy, and there was quite a bit of wine, and later beer, and there was Bailey's and whiskey and some late night conversation over that beside the fireplace after the grandkids went to bed. Didn't exercise other than of course cooking a meal for twenty six, which actually should count, but definitely didn't stay hydrated well enough, or keep my stress level totally managed.

I'm not thrilled that I overate. But it didn't bleed into multiple days, and I am serious when I say I felt crappy, even the next morning, almost like a food hangover. I don't want to feel like that again, certainly not on a regular basis. I mean, no wonder I was miserable all the time.. And I won't lie, there's a little 'one more bite' voice that I've had to quell since Thursday evening. I can see how easy it would be to derail this train.

So, I look toward Christmas, when there will be multiple opportunities for bad choices. I hope I've learned something over the past few days. A little indulgence can be okay. Too much just isn't worth it. I didn't feel comforted by the extra bites anymore. I think I'm learning different ways to calm and care for myself.

MUSIC THERAPY

I mentioned a few posts ago that I'm starting a winter project, hoping to have a cup of coffee with 100 interesting people over the next few months........and real conversations.

I'm up to ten, and I have two things to pass along.

One, this is helping a lot with my holiday / early winter blues. I mean, A LOT. I'm still on high alert for a holiday meltdown. But I can see that the increased social time is helpful, and by social time I mean genuine connection, not just jostling along in a crowd at a mall.

Second, I've learned an interesting technique from the former student I met today. Halley is a music therapist, about two years into her professional career. We spoke of many things, and at one point I asked her what kind of therapy she devises for patients who are dealing with depression or anxiety. (Her facility does not deal specifically with addiction.)

Now, my stated goal in these conversations is to genuinely listen to the person to whom I am speaking but can we just be brutally honest her for a moment and I'll admit that deep down OBviously I just want to talk about ME, but in a carefully disguised way, as in: what is it, my friend, that you are doing in your professional or personal life that might help me solve my problems? (Only of course I'm much more discreet, and I'm only admitting this to you.)

Halley explained that when a new patient is admitted to the residential psych facility where she is employed, they first undergo a medical and psychiatric evaluation. She's able to study the notes from those evaluations, and then she'll have a conversation with the person along the lines of 'what brings you, here, how is it that you got to this point, and what is if that you need?" In other words, many of the same questions you and I are struggling with.

Part of her process is to use, obviously, music as a healing tool. I asked her what she does if a person is choosing music that is intrinsically working against their best interests, or might seem to be: if someone who's depressed or dealing with self esteem issues is listening to music with lyrics that reinforces their sense of hopelessness, what does she as a music therapist do?

And that launched a fascinating and helpful conversation. I'll share just a few points. She's not judging. There's no discussion of 'good' vs. 'bad' music. But at the same time, listening to only 'depressing' music is often not in a person's best interest. (And as a musician I'll note that defining 'depressing' can be a difficult thing in this context and highly personal, and she is of course aware of that.)

Essentially Halley's suggesting that her patients figure out a playlist for times when they need to climb out of their bad places - one that starts where they are and progresses to more positive or uplifting songs. (Again, highly personal; there is no right or wrong here.) I won't get into specific titles here, but she said that for a person in a crisis point, popping something upbeat into a CD player is not going to work; it's too far away from where they are at that moment and it will seem intrusive and foreign. But a person can sort of match music to the mood they're in, and gradually shift themselves to a different place.

It occurred to me that I've been doing that to an extent my whole life, but I've never really thought about it, and any sequence that led from point A to point B was purely accidental By not thinking about it specifically, I've probably missed the opportunity to refine it a bit and use it more effectively to help me with the various demons that drive my addiction. Now, i'm not going to (nor do I advocate that you do this) turn my passion for music into something clinical. (It interested me to hear that Halley holds her own 'personal songs' as a private thing and does not use them in a clinical setting, ever, for that very reason.)

But I do know what to pop into the CD player when I need a good swift kick in the ass, and I know what to listen to when my autoimmune issues and thus my own mortality weigh on me. I don't, i guess, have a specific thing to listen to when the Food Beast attacks. but perhaps I can think about this and come up with something. And the idea of a sequence, a playlist that goes from the identified unwanted mindset to the more desired one makes sense, and is a reasonable thing to actually do in terms of time and money needed to make it happen.

I'm going to mess around with this a little bit and see what I can come up with. And perhaps it's something that would be helpful for you, too.

A NEW SCRIPT

Normal human: I ate too much for dinner! Probably should have had a smaller piece of that pie. Damn, but that was good. Okay. I'll drink extra water tonight and try to do an extra 2,500 steps tomorrow, and I'll eat a little under my normal caloric consumption tomorrow.

Normal human shrugs and moves on.

Food addict: OMIGOD. I ate that huge piece of pie! I'm disgusting. I bet everyone else at the table is judging me. I'm so effing useless, I have no self control what the hell is wrong with me? I feel awful. I look awful, I am awful. No wonder no one loves me. I am hideous. There is no happiness in my life except for that feeling of sugar and fat melting onto my tongue.

Addict eats another piece of pie.

And another one later, and downs a bag of cookies in the pantry, in the dark, after the rest of the family has gone to bed, and the next three weeks become a massive blowout binge.

Folks, it's the holidays. We're gonna screw up. And actually, having an occasional overindulgence isn't even considered a screwup by normal humans; it's considered........and occasional overindulgence.

And what do they do, these mysterious mentally healthy people (at least in regard to food, who knows how screwed up they are otherwise, after all)? They shrug and move on. They acknowledge that it was good, they take responsibility, they quickly calculate the appropriate penance, and they're done.

Let's change our script this holiday season.

(Long stretch without posting - there is an eight week old puppy in the house. I'll catch up in a day or so.....)

DEPRESSION WEARS MANY CLOAKS

So here's some stuff going on in my world lately. I don't usually post this kind of thing but it's relevant to the point I want to make today. I will wander a bit before I get there, as one does, because there's a few asides that have caught my interest as well that sort of fit into this.

I just wrapped up a week of rehearsals and performances for the Nutcracker, which is a truly lovely thing for an orchestral musician to play, unless you play horn as i do and you're doing the reduced orchestration, in which case it's a bit of a ballbreaker, but still gorgeous music. Depressed Russians apparently write the best melodies. I mean, seriously the man was a wreck. but what a legacy.

It was a wonderful week - some good old friends with me in the pit, met some lovely young people, the professional dancers who were brought in from Puerto Rico were just outstanding, the conductor was a true pro himself and very easy to work with. And the local dancers were very well prepared. I can't help but remember the scale in the women's room, though, and some overheard conversations about perceived weight issues among the dancers. And I can't help but think how perfect and graceful and happy they looked on stage.

Plus, a nice paycheck at the end of it, and this was a gig I hadn't expected this year, so it's a nice number in the plus column, to balance out the dead dishwasher and broken underground water line to one of the greenhouses.

Anyway, here's where I'm heading: things are good in my world. The RA is pretty well controlled right now, and that's actually a huge thing, it's the best I can ask for. The new puppy is freaking adorable, and the older dog, while clearly disappointed in my judgment in re this decision, is slowly coming around. One sheep died, but he was something of an asshole really; there's just no other way to describe him, and while I'm of course saddened by the loss, I'm .......not that sad. I'll find another one who will hopefully not be a woolly psychopath bent on taking out kneecaps. The ancient van just passed inspection. Nutcracker was great and I'm at the top of my game as far as playing after taking a bit of a risk and making a change recently, too long and too horn-centric to explain here, but the gamble paid off. The husband and I are at a good place. My kids and grandlovies are thriving. I'm losing weight slowly.

So my point?

My point is that I've realized that I'm climbing out of a depression that I didn't know I was in.

If you glanced at my life quickly, you'd see a lot of shiny things. My FB page has performance pics and cuddly grandlovey pics and photos of the most darling puppy ever, and shots of the farm that make it look charming and quaint. Up close, of course, is always grittier, what with dead sheep and broken water lines and so on, but my life is a good one.

And yet.

And yet, i'm realizing that I've been moving underwater a lot. I'm realizing that I have been sleeping too much, and I've had episodes of lethargy that may be related to the rheumatoid arthritis, sure, but which seem an awful lot like I-just-don't-give-a-shit.

I'll come home from errands and sit in my car in the parking lot and just not seem to have the energy to come in the house and start in on the necessary things. I'll go to bed early with a huge workload undone because it just seems like too much to face. I'll make a list of things to do and then sit down and read for an hour or two. I let the dishes pile up, I don't make phone calls I need to make. Some of that last part is my aversion to adulting, but in hindsight (I hope; I hope this is now past tense) I can see that I've just kind of been shrugging and not caring about a lot of things that were once important to me.

Now, my diagnosis of depression here is a self-diagnosis and thus of course suspect; but after all, I know myself better than anyone else. There is some weird shit afoot, something that sees to have shifted to a better position, because now i can look back and say whoa, what the hell was going on in my head for the last couple months?

And there have been some life changes, some of the paradigm shifts that move us from one phase of life to another - there are some other explanations for me feeling that my footing has not been secure for a bit. So let's not get too hung up on the word 'depression' itself here; maybe let's stick to 'weird shit afoot'.

And finally, my point: depression, or weird shit, doesn't always LOOK like you think it will. I smile. I laugh. My warped sense of humor is intact. I have an illness but overall I'm healthy. I haven't much money but we aren't in crisis. I have a good, good family. While I am careful to balance my Facebook page with some moments of honesty that are not always flattering to myself, overall I think someone who didn't know me would look at what I have chosen to share there and they'd say oh, that's a happy person.

Chosen to share. That's a key phrase here. When the curtain came up for Nutcracker, the audience saw perfect bodies, stunning costumes,beautiful faces, and smiles. Backstage, I saw the callouses and bleeding blisters on bare feet, and a frantic wardrobe mistress using a stapler to quickly mend a torn skirt. I walked into a restroom when one of the ballerinas was vomiting, I imagine deliberately, in one of the stalls, and I saw a teenage dance with terrible acne just plastering pancake makeup on her face. But what they choose to share on the stage, of course, is something beautiful and perfect-looking.

You are a good person, and thus you already know that the perfect-looking person you meet in your life may in fact hide a terrible secret or carry a heavy burden. You already know that, and you already extend compassion to others and withhold judgment because you know that you don't know the whole story.

But do you extend this same compassion to yourself?

I did not see my own depression-like situation because despite being nearly obsessively self-aware, I chose not to see behind my own facade in this instance. How could the person who tells the jokes at rehearsal be depressed? (Pause while I admit that yes, I do realize I knew better, one some level.) But really, I'm genuinely a fairly content person, I'm not moping or whining or dismal.

But it was still there. And we both know that it factors into our addiction. I'd go out on a pretty strong limb and say that all addictions have some depression / discontent / aching-loss-yearning at their core.

As we look in the mirror, let's make sure we're aware that it doesn't always fit a certain look. Let's make sure we're watching out for it, even if it's hard to see.

I wanted to wrap this up by saying I can suddenly breathe more deeply, but I just took a deep breath as I started to type that thought, and realized that the puppy has obviously pooped somewhere downstairs. So please excuse me while I go search for an errant turd.

MORE UNFLATTERING SELF-KNOWLEDGE

Goodness, I keep discovering more and more unpleasant truths about myself. What an ugly process this intense self-discovery has been at times.

Here's the latest.

I am having one of those days where I really, really NEED to cross shit off my to-do list, and of course the best way to make that happen is to write up a thoroughly detailed list that leaves nothing uncelebrated. For instance, in the last six minutes, i've crossed off "get coffee". "walk upstairs", "wake up computer" and "open dailystrength tab'. I am on a roll, I tell you.

Now, we've already established that addictive personalities manifest their crazy in multiple ways, yes? I certainly do. I get addicted to computer games. Not the interactive kinds that kids play, just word games or logic puzzles, or Tetris, or things like that. Currently, it's a beat-the-clock version of mahjongg.

I can waste a lot of time on it. I tell myself that it's unlocking my brain, and I truly do have great ideas while playing it, so i believe that's true. I mean, would I have thought of buying superheroes Underoos for my 38 year old son for Christmas otherwise? Perhaps not. And yes, we're talking serious geek kid here, so it should be a big hit.

But I can't stop once I start. I keep saying "one more game", much in the way one might say "one more peanut butter cup".

So today, back to this to-do list, which literally took as long to type as it will to enact, I gave myself scheduled breaks, and wrote them down, with time limits. And one, because I knew i'd really need to rest a bit, what with this freaking autoimmune thing screwing up my own superpowers, was "mahjongg 15 min."

An actual 15 minute sanctioned time to play. Pretty exciting. Normally it's a stolen few minutes; it's the minutes that make me late for a meeting, or that I take away from exercising, or sleep.

Fifteen minutes to play with no guilt? Hoo boy. Bliss, right?

Nope.

It took all the fun out of it for me. Apparently, the 'wrongness' of playing computer games when I should be doing something else is what makes them enjoyable. When I've given myself permission to do so, it's all of a sudden whoa, i'm supposed to spend fifteen minutes clicking on some silly tiles? Nah.

So I started thinking about this.

Is my repressed Catholic upbringing at fault here? Because there's sure a pattern. As a child I stole orange baby aspirin from the medicine cabinet but resisted it if my mother told me to take some when I was sick. As a teen I sampled my parents' liquor when they weren't home, but passed on offered wine at holiday dinners because I didn't really enjoy it at that time. Married sex has never quite had the zing of illicit premarital fumbling. As a grownup, I'm not much of a drinker, unless it's a beer out of the cold room when I really need to get some farm chores done but I'm hiding out in the cool storage room.

It might also be tied to the thing I do, where I let the gas tank get too low.........I know I shouldn't, but there is definitely a sense of having gotten away with something when I coast into the gas station on fumes. And that's of course ridiculous.

I wonder if this is connected to my food issues. Well, of course it is. I'm willing to bet that if I took a two pound bag of peanut M&M's and put it in a bowl and told myself I had to eat it, I'd be grossed out, or unable to actually do so. And yet if that bag's in the pantry, I can get a handful every few minutes and pretty much wipe it out in a few hours. I can eat a whole pizza if I quickly slide 'just one more slice' out of the box at a time. But to sit down with that whole pizza in front of me on a platter, and tell myself it's okay to eat it? I don't think I'd want to, or be able to.

Can you see how important this is? It's embarrassing, but let's get beyond that as quickly as possible and find the truth in this. What if i took the shame and guilt and excitement, the forbidden-ness, out of the food that I eat?

Cripes, I was smart enough to tell my kids that if they wanted to experiment with alcohol they could do so - at the kitchen table when I was home. "Well, that takes all the rebellion out of it," my younger son said. But they stuck to the agreement, and did in fact each decide to have their first taste of hard liquor right here (in their late teens; we're not talking toddlers here). And now they're responsible drinkers.

I don't mean to suggest that every addict is acting out some once-forbidden fantasy and the forbiddenness of the substance is the allure.

But I think that's a good part of my motivation.

Ugh. How shallow and selfish and spineless that seems. How..........ugly, really.

but knowing is always better than now knowing. Now I can work on this and figure out how to get past it.

(The underoos are awesome and have capes on the t-shirts. I got some WonderWoman ones for myself.)

Twenty four hours after realizing that I am extremely motivated by 'getting away with something' and that this informs my food choices...........I am still reeling from the significance of that discovery. I think if I can figure out WHY it's so motivating - if I can figure out what hole it fills - I might have the last piece of the puzzle.

I know your determination will lead to success. You’ve been too focused for too long to give up without the answer!

COCOONING

It's the hokiest metaphor in the world, isn't it, to think of ourselves as caterpillars waiting to turn into butterflies? I remember putting up a poster of an emerging butterfly in my room when I was twelve, and convincing myself that when i woke up on my thirteenth birthday, i would have transformed from ugly duckling into swan, from caterpillar to butterfly. I wouldn't be awkward, I'd have clear skin, significant boobs (that was important to us in the early 70's), bouncy hair, shapely legs, etc. I did not put any effort into achieving any of those goals or anything, I just assumed it would happen, like magic.

I also remember waking up on my thirteenth birthday and looking in the mirror and thinking "fuck."

So it's a little deja vu to approach the next two months with that kind of mindset, but.......I'm cocooning in Jan and Feb.

I think I've gathered all the supplies I need, physically and emotionally. It's time to focus inward and do some hard physical work. It's time to forego distractions and devote my energy to making the next set of changes.

Now, I don't intend to wake up on my birthday and look in the mirror and say "fuck". What's different? This time I don't have unrealistic expectations. This time I know that I need to do a lot of work. This time I know it's an ongoing process. the goals I'd set for my 60th birthday were no more finite than my own improvement will be; until the day I die, I hope I'm getting better, smarter, kinder, everything-good-er.

It's not like I'm locking myself in the house or saying no to invitations anything. But I'm going to try hard not to spend much money, and I'm going to keep a cleaner house, and I'm going to work on establishing some good routines. I've got a puppy to train (it's going well, she's a love, but the older dog is depressed now) and a farm to re-invent. I need to practice my horn and I need to exercise. I need to do all the health things - eye doctor, dentist, mammogram, etc. I need to sort through some stuff and downsize a couple of things.

It's a good time for this, int he dark of the year, but with the light starting to return.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Hey all........let's make this the year that we surprise ourselves.

It's great, isn't it, that no matter how much we fuck up, the sun comes up the next morning. As long as we're breathing, there's the possibility of change.

NEXT STEP

When I was younger and more foolish - like, you know, yesterday - I thought it was key to be able to visualize the intended outcome of any goal. I thought that if you didn't have a clearly defined outcome in mind, it was pointless to even start the journey.

What a load of horseshit THAT was.

I never applied this concept to anything other than fixing my food addiction / dealing with my excess weight. That, right there, should have been a clue that this was simply a stall tactic.

I didn't embark on motherhood with a clear sense of who my adult children would be. Who could? I did my best. I learned from older mothers, I read valid books, I was self-aware in re my parenting skills, and kept trying to be better at it.........but mostly I just loved the kids, and I let that guide the decision making; a choice that contradicted love was never a good one, even if at times it wasn't clear cut.

I didn't embark on my years of teaching with an absolute end goal. Only silly politicians who are on committees to make standardized goals, without any actual sense of what comes into or goes on in a classroom, would ever do that. I studied, I improved my own skills, I'd frequently assess my work, i'd ask peers for advice. but, mostly, I loved those kids and I let that inform my decision making. (Again, not in a carte-blanche kind of way - that's not real love.)

I don't approach performance with a rigid image of the final product. Sure, you need to get the right notes and all technical stuff. But the exact emotion in the moment, no, you don't create the box ahead of time and simply fill it to the edges. It doesn't work like that. You pour your heart and soul into it (having already done the woodshedding, i.e. the hours and hours of practice and analysis of your efforts and work).

I'm restructuring my farm right now, for maybe the fourth time since we bought it, and here's what I can tell you about that: it's easy to sit inside the house on a cold winter day with a cup of coffee and spread out a schematic of the farm on the table and start penciling in 'orchard' and 'chicken pasture' and 'cut flower garden' and so on. But once you actually get outside, and start doing the work, well, you inevitably find a massive boulder where the post for the pasture fence was going to go, or you realize that the subsoil in your intended cut flower bed is pretty bad but there's a better spot a few yards over, or the local market dried up for cut flowers and you can't sell any, and so on. If you want things to go well, you put your rigid plan back in your pocket and you start listening to your land, you start thinking about what's best for it, about what it's best suited for, and you just.....start. And maybe you shift your goalpost along the way.

I was wrong when I thought that dealing with an addiction and the accompanying life-restructuring had to begin with a goal in mind.

I get the idea, the begin-with-the-end-in-mind concept. I can see instances where it's valid. But those instances tend to have one thing in common - total rigidity - that I don't see all the often in real life.

If your goal is to clean your kitchen counter, then, sure, begin with the end in mind, because after all, it's just you and a counter full of old junk mail and cereal boxes and coffee cups and perhaps a gin bottle, right?

But if you share your home with someone who will without fail leave his car keys and wallet on that kitchen counter, then there's at least one element out of your control, right?

We just aren't walking linear paths here, my friends. We read sometimes of the successful adult who 'decided' as a child that they'd become a successful artist, ballerina, entrepreneur, whatever. Sure. I suppose it can happen. But what if that child's parents had died early, or the family had suffered unexpected financial catastrophe? What if that person had an accident and was disabled? What if they fell in love with someone who lived across the world? What if their singlemindedness meant that some other, better dream was unrealized?

I don't shop for clothes really or dress up often other than performance blacks, so this is a weird analogy to come from me, but it would be like having a special event to go to, and deciding you wanted to buy a blue dress with a certain cut to it, and going to the store and realizing that there were so, so many other options, colors and designs of which you could not even dream.....wouldn't it make more sense to start with some basic concepts like "something dressy enough for the occasion that I can wear again that's in this price range', and then see what your options are?

Maybe that's the way to approach these big life goals. Maybe it's not the best thing to start out saying I know exactly what I want. Maybe it's better to start out saying I want something that's compatible with my principles, so let's work in that direction, and take things as they come.

We are walking through an enchanted forest, not across an open plain. We can see a little bit ahead, usually, although not always. Sometimes there's tantalizing glimpses of the next stretch and sometimes we have to step on faith because it's totally dark.

We don't need a perfect understanding of the goal in order to move forward. We need principles, an idea of right vs wrong. We need to love.

And we need to apply this to ourselves. It's easier to do this with your kids, your new puppy, your farm. It's hard as hell to apply it to yourself.

I've been stuck on reaching a number on the scale, a blue-jean-size. I have been allowing a healthy self-love to guide my decisions. The concept of loving oneself is rife with landmines; it rankles our Puritan ancestors, it seems selfish. But it's not, and I can see that now.

Because here's the thing that really hit me today: I could achieve all the goals I was visualizing and still be a miserable shit of a human being.....because I was visualizing the wrong goals. Thinking that they'd be easier to reach if they were objective, I made very objective goals: this weight, this waist size. Well, I could achieve those things and have skyrocketing anxiety, high blood pressure, high sugar, frayed relationships, all manner of bad things, right?

I have lost weight. I suppose i could make some kind of heroic effort for the next six weeks and actually reach my original goal weight for my birthday in late Feb. But you know what? I'm realizing that isn't what's going to make me happy. It's the other stuff that's happened along the way over these last seventeen months. The changes in me that are genuinely remarkable are far deeper than forty pounds.

If I can move forward with the guiding principle that love is more important than rigidity, I think things are going to be good. Really good. Because that principle will nudge me towards the right decisions about food for the right reasons, not because I've decided that 1600 calories five days of the week and 1900 calories the other two is the key to success. What I've missed, with all my charts and spreadsheets, is that underneath all the theater they provided was a growing sense of my own self-worth, and with it, a growing sense of the need to lift others up as well. THAT is what has gotten me into those smaller jeans. Not the low-carb diet or the sugar free whatever or the exercise equipment. i didn't stop binging because of RULES. I stopped because I grew up, because I realized I had a purpose in being here.........

,..........look, I'm going off the deep end here as far as getting into weird quasi-spiritual stuff, and that wasn't the goal when I started writing today. This is a post that, when I sort all this out into a coherent manuscript, will be revised heavily, I can already tell that. What you've waded through here is pretty stream-of-consciousness. I know there's a valid point under all these words, and perhaps in a later iteration I'll be able to say it more clearly.

For now, this will have to do: You, and I, are worth saving. And we don't have to go about it in a flawless way. We don't have to all be one size, literally or figuratively. We don't have to see the north pole - we just have to have a good compass. And as the poet Rumi said - I'm paraphrasing because I don't have the exact quote as hand - you can't see the path until you step onto it.

Don't lock yourselves in, friends, Don't set goals that you can't reach and then feel like a failure when you can't reach them. Work by principle instead. Do the right things, the healthy things, the loving things. The rest is just details.

FAIR WEATHER FRIENDS

I'm doing some farm paperwork in January and one of the things that routinely happens is a lookback at weather int he past year so I can track things like which varieties performed well in an extra-rainy year, or what diseases cropped up (pun intended) in hot weather, and so on.

Since I had all the data in from of me, I checked it against journal entries that tracked how my battle against food addiction was going.

Now, this is really no surprise, but I've got to admit, I did not expect it to be such an intense relationship: on bright, sunny days, I handled the challenge of the addiction superbly. On grizzly drizzly days, I tended to stray, but not all that much. And the absolute worst days, the truly off-the-rails days, were nearly all on those days in which the weather was changing, intensifying: when there was a big snowstorm 18 hours, out, or the potential for high winds overnight, or a nasty storm threatening downpours.

All of those things can translate to financial catastrophe on a farm, but I honestly think there's something in my psyche that's tuned into barometric changes, or somehow linked to uncertain weather, or....something. I know i'm working with depression here, and I'd think that the gray rainy muddy days would be the worst, but it really seems like the transitional ones are the days where I struggled the most.

I had some bad days that didn't fit the pattern, but they could easily have been caused by non-water-related stresses; there's certainly plenty of those.

For me, these days are characterized by intense restlessness, an inability to focus, a sense of hopelessness, a feeling of failure, a feeling of being overwhelmed, of not know where to start. I feel like I'm drowning in obligations and I'm not doing a good job meeting them, and so I eat. I pace around the house or the property, I start things and don't finish them, I make lists of jobs and get so overwhelmed by them that I want to crawl under the covers and sleep. I get short tempered, and I'm distracted and irritated by everything.

On those days, it's a terrible struggle not to give into comforting myself with food.

now, I have more information. I knew the bad days were linked to stress, but I hadn't really factored in the weather, I don't know how relevant this might be to anyone else, really. I mean, if you have an office job, maybe you're unaware of barometric shifting that precedes weather changes. If your paycheck comes regardless or the rain or snow or wind, maybe it doesn't stress you. Maybe it's not the weather exactly, maybe it's the 80 year old barn that's leaning precariously and leaking and dear God when will that contractor ever get his sorry ass here to jack the thing up and stabilize it so I can get the roof re-shingled and start getting the thing back to a safe and stable condition before it blows over? See, that's more of a financial thing than the actual weather, specifically. So, i don't know if I'm on to something that's relevant for you too, or just for me.

But, either way - pay attention. pay attention to the environmental factors around you that might contribute to your stress level and in turn, your addiction manifestations.

Oh......okay, here I go on another tangent, sorry.......I wrote a paper in grad school about environmental noises and stress. Not like loud hammering noises, this was after all a degree in music education - it was about pitch, specifically. If you're not a musician, I can't bring you up to speed on the background info totally, but movement creates vibrations, and vibrations are pitched based on their frequency, and some pitches sort of clash and irritate us more than others; much, in music, is based on the dance between that tension and the release that comes when more congruent pitches are reached.

And your world is jammed with pitch producing things, even if they're so soft you're not consciously aware of them. Fluorescent lights (in the US) are usually 'humming' a Bb. My refrigerator hums a slightly sharp A. These are nearly indiscernible as far as volume goes (although when the power goes off, don't you always notice how weirdly quiet things seem?) but those two pitches really, really clash; if they were louder, musician or not, you'd find them terribly irritating.

I'm simplifying and condensing the results of my paper horribly here, but the point is that there are subtle things in your environment that can put you on edge without your even being aware of it. And while I suppose there are addicts who actually do better when they're feeling edgy, I'm guessing that most of us do not do our best under those conditions. imagine if the room in which you sleep has a subliminal clashing thing going on. Or if your kitchen is sending you a stress-producing message. (Seriously: I got rid of the fluorescents.) Right now, I'm 'listening' to my computer, which is a noisy beast; there is also a clock on my husband's desk here in the home office that's humming, and I can hear the air purifier (helps with the wet-dog smell) that's downstairs. This stuff can irritate the heck out of you if it's producing clashing pitches. Stress rarely helps us unless it's some kind of adrenaline response to a true emergency.

Anyway, I'll stop before I go so far down the rabbit hole here that I can't find my way back. Today is gorgeous, sunny, shiny, calm, and I feel completely in control of my addiction. I'm going to figure out some tricks to get through the next changing-weather day before it gets here.

ALL OF THE ABOVE

I'm wrapping up an intense eighteen month quest for answers about this addiction, and I've decided this: all the answers are right.

Seriously. I decided to search and study every possible reason for my food addiction. I've looked at physical things like metabolism and how we process different nutrients. I've looked at how we deal with physical or emotional pain. I've done my best to learn about how our brains are wired, and how trauma might inform that. I've looked at childhood events, and the messages we get from our parents, and peer pressure, and relationship issues. I've looked at media influence, and peer pressure, and how our spiritual beliefs might factor into our addiction issues. I've wondered if we're just weak, if there's a self-discipline issue that can be fixed. I've researched how addictions are diagnosed and treated. And I've spent a lot of time looking at people who have succeeded in overcoming addictions, and learning about what worked for them.

And it's all important.

The word that keeps coming up, the word that will tie this whole search together for me, is 'balance'.

We are addicts because something is not in balance, after all. Food isn't a bad thing. But in our lives, food's importance is out of balance.

And any 'answer' that is not, in itself, a balanced one is probably going to fail.

Yes, our metabolisms are weird, they're probably not like non-addicts. Yes, something is wired funkily in our brains, we're somehow pre-disposed to have the Howling Food Beast emerge when we eat / see / think about our trigger foods. Yes, whatever normal people have that tells them they're sated just doesn't work for us.

These are all true in general for food addicts, and for any one of us individually, very probably true to some degree.

But if we focus only on the physical things, we aren't going to heal completely. Because those emotional traumas - the times when you were told in some way that you were 'less-than', and you learned to turn to food for comfort - those things are factors too. And yes, there is definitely a self-discipline issue here, because yes, we DO have agency, we DO have the ability to control our actions - but I'd argue in favor of kindness here, that the food addict has so many other messes cluttering their emotional landscape at this point tat simply saying "just do it" isn't usually going to be the answer. (Plus, trying that approach and failing will only lead to another layer of shame and self-loathing.)

And if we focus only on the emotional issues and don't look at the plain, boring gritty bits, the behavioral changes that have to accompany any real change, well, we will just be sitting around blaming our mamas forever, with one hand in the cookie jar.

But if we think it's as simple as just making a list of desired behaviors and then by God just doing it, well, we're doomed, because that high blood sugar or that underlying food allergy might be wreaking so much havoc that your best intentions cannot possibly overcome it.

You see, we need to balance all the pieces.

Many years ago when I was in Toronto I came across a promotional pamphlet or poster or something - these details are foggy, but i do remember the rest - describing Toronto as a 'mosaic'; the concept was that its beauty and strength came from its diversity, and the idea that each contributing ethnicity was allowed to retain its own color and vibrancy. I loved that idea. The 'melting pot' concept so touted in the US would, after all, lead to a sort of colorless sludge, wouldn't it? As opposed to a culture in which different foods, music, art, etc could be celebrated.

Of course this is simplistic, I get that. But what I want you to think about if the idea of the mosaic itself, and how that applies to your healing. I believe that your healing, and mine, comes in the form of little colorful pieces of glass, small shiny moments that offer you some insight. I've acquired so many of them over the last year and a half. I've often written for thirty minutes after hearing one half-sentence on NPR while I'm driving, or had one small thought that unlocked another tiny part of me that was stuck.

Maybe there's a better analogy, maybe it's more like a whole lot - a LOT - of tiny keys, and each one opens another part of what's locked up and preventing you from being the person you are meant to be.

Let's never mind the search for the exact analogy right now, though, and focus on the underlying thought here: the answer to this problem is complex, and individual, and I doubt that is ever simplistic. Be open. Look for clues, they're all over the place, and grab each one and study it. Hold on to the ones that work for you. Put the others aside in a basket, and examine them occasionally, because who knows? One might fit later. You really can do this, you know.

MESSY BUSINESS

If you based your ideas about what it's like to make serious life changes on internet articles - I know, you're too smart for that, but someone else might not be - you'd think that the steps we need to take to derail our addiction are as easy as snapping your fingers. (An ironic choice of words, actually. With rheumatoid arthritis, that's something I can't do anymore.)

Because hey, it's always easy in the media, right? Just write that resolution down and bam, you're there. Just toss that knickknack that no longer sparks joy, and your house will be clutter free. Just put some tulips on the kitchen counter, and your house will be cozy. Grip a pottery mug in your hands - making sure that your cableknit sweater cuffs are visible - and look! Instant hygge. Stack clear containers of fresh fruits and veggies in your fridge, and oh, be sure to laugh uproariously at your salad. (Side note: google 'women laughing at salads" if you didn't catch the reference, it's hysterical.)

Just get up twenty minutes earlier and exercise! just roll out that yoga mat and...........okay, look, I'm stopping right here. Because we need a little dose of reality before this pretty little fantasy goes too far.

Let's just talk about rolling out that yoga mat. Because see that's what I did this morning. A dear friend is doing a weekly yoga class for beat up old bodies, and I signed up, and I thought well let's review that sun salutation thingie before we go on Friday for the first session, sort of see if things still work.

They don't.

The yoga mat has been unused for so long that it crackled and pieces flaked off. I thought I had been doing yoga on the front porch every morning, with my pottery cup full of herbal tea on the railing, and a cat curled up on the porch swing. I mean, didn't I make a resolution to do so? Apparently that was only a fantasy.

Before I could roll the thing out, I had to pick up nine dog toys on the carpet, and the canine crew immediately assumed this meant it was play time. They obligingly plopped their hairy butts on the crumbling yoga mat, and the puppy took an experimental nibble off of the corner.

Never mind what happened when I tried a Downward Dog, only to have two actual dogs insert themselves between my belly and the floor. I gave up, rolled up the mat, and put it out for the trash, feeling terrible about it going to landfill. And I'll probably buy a new one from Amazon and feel terrible about not supporting local businesses, even though the nearest place I could actually buy one is a big box store twenty miles from here.

I thought maybe if I just started the day with herbal tea I could cut back slightly on the coffee, There's a drawer in the kitchen where herbal teabags go to die, and it is jammed with half-crushed boxes of teabags. Some of the boxes are apparently even empty. Some of the bags, without labels of any kind, are loose in the drawer. I saw some Lemon Lift tea that's in there, and I remember which aunt brought it at Christmas, only she's been dead for nine years. Yeah. I don't really want any tea anyway. I closed the drawer.

I tried the clear containers of fresh things in the fridge, too. I know you've seen the pictures, the shining white clean fridge magically backlit, the perfect containers of jewel-colored fruits and veg. Let me tell you about that shit. First, my fridge is disgusting. Something that might have been a cucumber at one time has turned to slime in one veg drawer. The track that hold the veg and meat drawers broke off, so the drawers just sort of get shoved in crooked, and they're hard to pull out. There are five half-filled jars of green olives on the door, and more salad dressing containers than i can count, and many of them are nearly empty. but, not empty enough that I can throw them away without the special kind of guilt that comes when you're the child of a Depression-era mother who grew up in Appalachia, and you, yourself, are a green crunchy liberal treehugger save the planet type who's wondering if those plastic salad dressing bottles could be re-purposed. The combination makes throwing away a bottle with a half inch of solidified Caesar dressing nearly impossible. I guarantee that there is no picture on Pinterest that looks remotely like the inside of my fridge.

I did, actually, achieve the goal, sort of - it's not nearly as picturesque when you have duct tape covering the cracked plastic ends of the shelves in your fridge. But it looked great, it really did. And then I realized that i'd just spent a hundred dollars and many many hours prepping the cubed cantaloupe and the cooked quinoa and the sliced carrots (and can I just point out that when you do this, you inevitably create far more product than the container will hold, and the leftovers have to go somewhere, and that spoils the pretty picture) but when I looked at the calendar I realized that in the new few days, between meetings and rehearsals and a business trip, hardly anyone would be eating meals here anyway, and there was no way this food was going to get used up before it all spoiled. So now I don't have a decomposing cucumber in the veg drawer anymore, but I do have a ton of slightly-off sliced red peppers and squishy plums in the fridge instead. in clear containers, though, so there's that.

I decided to walk the local trail at the wildlife sanctuary a few times a week. Getting right out of bed and just going there made sense - just go, just get it done, don't even think about it. Except of course the dogs need to be fed first and they have to pee and poop before I go, and when the sheep hear me they start fussing so I might as well feed them too. And if I'm going to drive ten miles to the sanctuary I really ought to combine the trip with an errand or two. Maybe go buy that new yoga mat at the chain store. Except now I have to make some effort so I don't look completely like a bag lady. The dogs need to pee one more time before I go. Suddenly half the morning's shot.

My point here, my friends, is that it ALL look like this. The decision to stay away from your trigger foods becomes complicated when the best friend, with whom you have routinely shared a large pizza while bitching about your husbands, shows up with a bottle of shiraz and a pepperoni pizza, because you forgot to mention this new conversion to her, and it would be rude not to eat some. Decluttering your house inevitably leads to those special moments when your husband realizes there was a fifty dollar bill in the pocket of the coat he just sent to Goodwill. Deciding to walk every day means some figuring out whether you should take the older dog, who will slow you down, or the puppy, who will just be hysterical the entire time, or no dogs at all, in which case you'll have to walk them again later anyway.

Changing ANY habit is hard, and it dominoes into other things. Not getting junk food after rehearsals wasn't the hard part - it was telling my crew that I wouldn't be joining them, or sitting at a bar drinking club soda while they had beer and wings - I mean, this isn't a life-ending kind of problem, I get that, but my point is that my bad post-rehearsal wings-and-beer habit didn't just involve ME, and changing it wasn't a purely personal, private thing.

Cleaning out a pantry full of crappy addiction-supporting food wasn't hard in theory, but it led to some secondary things. A previously undetected spill on the floor meant refinishing the wood floor, there was clearly a need for better mousetraps, and of course there was the guilt of throwing things out, even though a lot of the stuff in the pantry went to the chickens.)

Better eating habits, the kind that don't trigger the binge eating, costs more. Let's be honest here: poor people are obese because shitty food is cheap, because shitty food is subsidized - I won't even get started on that topic. Shitty food is what's available at the corner bodega when you don't have a car. Shitty food is what you can nuke between your first job and your second job every day. When you change your life and start eating healthier foods, you need more time and more money, and you need to do a lot of planning, or you end up with well-meant containers of cubed cantaloupe rotting in your fridge.

These aren't reasons to not make changes. These aren't reasons to complain. It's just that I think a little realism is important here, for a truly serious reason: our addiction is fed by our low self esteem. Our low self esteem is fed by our perception that we are failures. Our perception of failure is fed by unrealistic expectations.

So break that cycle from the top. Every single day you have left on this earth is a day in which you can nudge towards being less controlled by your addiction. We get a do-over every single day. It only happens 'all at once' in Hallmark movies. The reality is grittier, messier, and involves decaying cucumbers and crumbling yoga mats and all manner of messes and detours.

it is possible to break out of a food addiction. But it is a hard and messy process. Embrace that difficulty, acknowledge it, and promise to pick yourself up off the disintegrating yoga mat, brush off the crumbs, and try again. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT define success as one hundred percent perfection. Success is getting through today a little better than yesterday. Period, full stop.

IF YOU MEASURE IT -

- you can manage it. That was on the chalkboard at a farming conference I attended recently. Farms, even small ones like mine, are made up of so many subsystems, and have so many inputs. It's a complex thing, and learning to measure, learning to see patterns, is key.

But I think it applies to our addiction too, in a slightly different way. I suppose you could interpret it to mean things like tracking calories or steps walked, or flights of stairs climbed, or how many fast food trips you make in a month. I've done all those things. It can help or it can make you crazy; you have to know yourself, and know what will work for you.

The real kernel of truth in the saying has to do with denial. If you DON'T know where you are, you can't get where you want to go. Yes, you could make some changes, and sort of plod toward a healthier lifestyle, but how will you know if you've achieved it? Let's face it, we're always measuring in some way even if we pretend we aren't. Even if you don't get on the scale, you're still going to know based on, say, the fit of your favorite pair of blue jeans, or how you slide into your small car. You might as well face up to your reality, and admit how much you drink, or how many pizzas you eat, or what your waist measurement is, or how many pills you take, or whatever. Admit it, and start moving forward.

But here's where I've taken that saying, personally. i'm thinking in terms of percentages, not in absolute numbers. Our addiction, as we've discussed, is unique in that we cannot avoid our addictive substance entirely; we must eat. Perhaps it's less unique to a food addiction - we can certainly see the good in some medications, for instance, while they can obviously still be abused - but our substance of choice is not, in itself, inherently bad. It's our misuse of it that's problematic. We apply pizza to our heartache like it's a bandaid. We assuage our fragile egos with peanut M&M's like they were aspirin.

I'm tweaking another line I read recently, something along the lines of 'eat half as much, move twice as much, love three times as much." Now, you can't apply a line like that without knowing where you're starting, see, that was my point above, we've got to measure first, we've got to know our coordinates on the map, our cosmic GPS only works if it can find us in the first place, right?

In my case, I almost literally could eat half as much - certainly, half as much as I want to eat, maybe not half as much as I actually do. Thanks to the last eighteen months, I'm not eating anywhere near as much as I want to anymore. I definitely could move twice as much, I'm still fairly sedentary; the RA sometimes puts up roadblocks to that, but I can definitely do better. And I haven't begun to reach my potential, as far as giving love.

I'd add things like 'drink twice as much water, drink half as much coffee, judge one third as much' and so on. Then, a bunch of practical things: floss twice as often. Wipe the kitchen counter four times as much. Is that relevant to addiction? Yes. Self-care, honoring my own physical body and caring for it, is key to my mindset. Not living in a pigsty is, too.

But what really truly matters here is that it's a percentage, it's a process. I'm not striving for perfect. I tried that shit, and it blew up in my face. I mean that. I look at past New Year's Resolutions and I want to reach through time and whap myself upside the head. "No more sugar!' I'd write. And then, six days later, Sad Katie would write a terrible entry teeming with self-loathing and despair: it's hopeless, i'm worthless, etc. Well, of course, you dipshit (my 2019 enlightened self says). The goal was impossible.

If only, in 1989, and 1990, and so on, I had written a resolution to reduce my sugar intake by 25%. If only, instead of resolving to run a marathon, I'd have resolved to walk three times a week. (In fairness I should admit that I actually DID do a marathon, I walked one, but I ended up with some injuries as a result of training too fast - yet another reason to try an incremental approach.)

I'm old, and some of you are much younger, and you have the time to make these incremental changes now. You can make those ten percent changes and see a huge difference in how you manage your addiction. Because it doesn't go away, it just gets managed. And you can do that. And even at my greatly advanced age (that's sarcasm, actually, because I'm happy being where I am) I can and will continue to do the same.

Ten percent better. Or twenty five, or whatever you need to do. Two. Three. Just go in the right direction, just for today. And then maybe tomorrow.