THE BEST CONFERENCE I NEVER ATTENDED

Two years ago, before I started posting here, I was to attend a farming conference about two hours away from home. It's an annual event that I anticipate every year, a great chance to learn and to recharge my batteries. I've met wonderful people there. I've gone from being a complete neophyte to being a presenter over the ten or so years I've attended.

I can't afford to stay at the conference hotel site, so I usually book a room a few miles away, at a very cheap hotel, on one of those strips of endless malls and gas stations and chain stores that look exactly alike, no matter where you live. I could cut expenses by sharing a room, but this is my one chance a year for complete solitude, those evenings after the conference ends for the day, and I love it.

So, two years ago, I'm chugging up the highway in the little car, with my conference booklet by my side, thinking about the exciting options ahead: at ten am, for instance, would I go to the session about grafting greenhouse tomatoes, or the one about integrated pest management, or perhaps listen to the expert on growing mushrooms at home? Nirvana, I tell you - nirvana.

But then something funny happened.

I started thinking about everything else I had to sort out - my ever-increasing weight, my disinterest in exercise, my cluttered house, my cluttered brain, my missed deadlines, the increasingly boring marriage, my growing feeling of being overwhelmed, my growing lack of self-esteem. I recognized the downward spiral, and as I drove, I begin thinking about what I was going to do about it.

And suddenly, learning how to grow mushrooms didn't seem quite as important somehow.

I hadn't registered for the conference yet. I had planned to get in line and hand over my credit card and pay about $350 for the three day event.

I drove a few more miles. I thought a little bit more.

I got to the exit for the conference hotel.

And then....then I just kept driving. I went to a fancy grocery store and bought some fresh fruit, and a baguette, and some chicken salad and cheese, and a few other things. I bought a bottle of seltzer and some regular water. I knew the hotel would have a coffeemaker in my room, so I bought some filters and some good coffee.

I went to an office supply store and bought a gorgeous notebook and a package of my favorite kind of pens. I bought some highlighters in different colors.

I checked into my cheap hotel (and may I add that it was relatively clean, but as basic as you could get, and had a two inch gap at the bottom of my door.) and put the "DO NOT DISTURB" sign on the door. I unplugged the television. I put my cell phone in a drawer. I unplugged the provided electric alarm clock.

I called the desk and scheduled a wakeup call for two hours before I'd need to check out. I told them I knew that was two days away but I wanted to make sure I didn't forget.

I unpacked all my stuff and organized it. I don't usually do that, I usually just live out of the suitcase. But it felt important to do it this way. I had bypassed the turn for the conference hotel on instinct, and I kept trusting that feeling.

I sat down at the little hotel desk and started writing. I titled the page "every damn thing that is wrong with me" and I just started SPEWING. I wrote down big things. Little things. icky things. Silly things. Embarrassing things. All the things. I cried while I wrote. I swore. At one point I threw a few things around the room. I pounded the bed pillows. I would have screamed, but I'm the sort of person who doesn't want to disturb the people in the next room.

I wrote "my ass is fat". I wrote "I never return phone calls". I wrote "my car is always full of trash". I wrote "I'm judgmental". "I lose receipts". "I eat too much shitty food." "I don't always floss." "My sister is becoming a stranger to me." "My hip flexors are way too tight." "I never remember my inlaws' birthdays." And on, and on. All of my failures. All of them.

It was an awful experience.

When I was finally done - this took hours - when I had nothing more terrible to say about myself, and no more tears to shed, I went into the bathroom and used all the little soap and shampoo samples and stood under a hot shower for a very, very long time. You know what I mean. The kind of shower that you can't have at home because the dog needs to go out, or the phone rings, or someone else needs the bathroom. I took that shower, and then I stayed under that blessed hot water even longer, for twenty more minutes.

I dressed in clean clothes. I made a pot of coffee. I made myself a nice lunch with my stash of groceries. Or maybe it was dinner. I didn't actually know what time it was.

And then I started writing again. But not a list, this time. Not yet.

First, I took my highlighters, and marked each item on my list by category: health, farm, financial, family, etc. Some of them had two colors, since there was of course crossover.

I realized that 'health' had a physical and a mental component, so I used another color and made a subcategory.

I realized that there was a lot of crosspollinating going on here. My failure to organize receipts was surely a factor in my inability to get my taxes done in a timely manner. So I drew some arrows on my list. (It's not that I miss the deadline, it's that I don't get my half, the farm and music stuff, done in time for my husband to get everything else out the door as early as we could otherwise.)

Once the categories were established, I recopied the lists to separate them. I told someone about this later who suggested that I could have done this on a spreadsheet instantaneously. All I can say is that for me, the writing was crucial. Even though I was still working on instinct, I understood that i needed to do it this way.

I stopped and ate again, and I might have napped; I don't really remember.

I started writing again. This time, I took every single line item, no matter how small, and I wrote out an action plan for it. I did not try to make my action plan actually feasible during this step - this was brainstorming, and a major rule of brainstorming is that you don't put parameters around your ideas. So, I didn't stop and say wait, wait, i can't afford a private trainer. If that was relevant to an issue, if it could potentially be part of the answer, I wrote it down.

Most of my problems, therefore, had multiple entries. I plowed through the whole list. I wrote and wrote. My hands cramped. I started taking breaks and stretching and doing calisthenics. I considered a walk, but it was about ten degrees and windy and there was a lot of ice on the ground from previous snows, and the hotel was not in a good location. And again, instinct told me to stay where I was.

I realized that there were a few things on the list that were truly, genuinely, not fixable. There weren't that many, really - even things like my complicated relationship with my parents could be fixed, despite the fact that they were both dead - and I mean that seriously. Healing was still possible. But yes, there were a few things that were truly never, ever going to be different. I could not make a diagnosis of a chronic disease actually go away. I could not change my chronological age. Things like that.

I took a few moments to release those things, to sort of grieve and let them each go. Had I planned this, I might have set things up so that I could burn a slip of paper with each thing written on it......but I couldn't do that in my hotel room. So I wrote them out on small slips of paper, and methodically tore them up into tiny, tiny pieces, like confetti. I considered tossing them in the air as a symbolic gesture of release, but I couldn't do that to the maintenance staff, so I just put them in the trash.

I started to take breaks to sleep, too. Since I'd closed the blinds I really wasn't sure if it was day or night. I didn't know how long I slept because I'd unplugged everything. I was deliberate about drinking a lot of water, but didn't really eat unless I felt hungry, which at the time was a new experience for me. So was sleeping until I wasn't tired, as opposed to sleeping until an alarm clock went off.

I went back to my action plan. I was out of different highlighter colors, so I used a black pen and devised different shapes - you know, like an asterisk, or a small star, or a circle - for the things I needed to indicate on the next round. If one of my ideas was going to cost money, I'd put a dollar sign in front of it. As I worked through the list, I refined that further - if it was going to cost just a small amount, one dollar sign, if it was more, two or three. If it was going to take time to put into effect, I'd draw one or two small clocks. I used different symbols for things that would involve other people in some way, or things that for one reason or another could not be done immediately.

I rewrote the whole list so that it was now separated in this way, as well as into the original categories.

I figured out how much money I could actually contribute to this project. It wasn't much. And decisions had to be made. This is of course the second stage of brainstorming, when reality steps in. The three week spa wasn't going to happen, you know? Easy. Cross that one out. But there were real decisions: if I started going to the chiropractor twice a month again, I'd need $50 a month. But, the healthier groceries I wanted to start buying would also cost more. Could I barter with my farmer friends for things I don't grow here, like stone fruits or grass-fed meats? Then I have to shift dollar signs and clocks around on my page, because it will take more time to provide the item with which I'd barter, but potentially save me some money.

I'll add here - I didn't realize it would work at the time - that some of my 'impractical' brainstorm ideas actually came to fruition. I was able to barter a share in my CSA for the services of a personal trainer. Had I not written it down in the brainstorming phase, I'm not sure I would have even tried to make that happen.

If I walked regularly every morning, I needed to take time away from something else. What was expendable? I wasn't cleaning the house sufficiently, but of course I could actually do it more efficiently, and I could get Himself to help more. I'm barely practicing enough as it is, actually, I'd written down that I wanted to practice more, I wanted to up my game, get some better (and better paying) gigs. So, what gives, where do I shift? And did I need to purchase some better shoes first, or some bitter-weather clothing? Add a few dollar signs.......but that means I've got to take them away from something else. Do I postpone the repair of the greenhouse roof? If I do, am I cutting into potential income in the upcoming spring months because I won't have the desired temperature in there? If I hire help to do some grunt work that's eating a lot of my time, can I make the farm pay enough to justify that expense? Time is finite, but if you have money, you can hire some time-eating things out. What was possible for me to do?

There were a lot of decisions to be made, and of course, the realization that many things were not in my control, As it turned out (remember, this was two years ago) that particular spring was fairly warm, and the need for the greenhouse repair was not as pressing as I'd expected. But I slammed something in my lower back that spring and ended up going to the chiropractor much more than I'd planned. You can't be too rigid when you do this.

Several hours and several showers later, my groceries were starting to look a little meager, but I had a few more steps to take.

I needed priorities. And I needed values on which to choose them. I opted for 'will anything die?" as #1, which is perfectly legit for a farmer; the needed muckout of the sheep pen wasn't purely cosmetic, but had to be done before the lambs were born for their own safety. The hours-long adjustment of the grow lights in the cellar seed-starting room were critical for the seeds I'd start as soon as I got home.

I needed to focus on things that would provide an income, but I also needed a balance. I needed to focus on my own health, because without having my body in better shape, I couldn't do the things that would earn money anyway.

So, I made some notations about priorities. And then I started the final steps.

I wrote down what I thought was reasonable to accomplish in one month. There were some flowcharts involved in this, a few 'if-then' moments here, where I'd do A if the weather was bad in the next four weeks, or B if it were warmer and I could work outdoors. So it wasn't ironclad. Because it can't be, not really.

Once that was done, I wrote out what was reasonable to accomplish in just the first week. I also listed the things I'd need to procure to make that list happen, so that on the way home I could stop at a hardware store (or wherever) and pick up the odds and ends that I'd need.

I made another list for the first 24 hours after I returned home, using the week's goals as a starting point. And I made sure it was balanced, that there was time for sleep, and exercise, and reading.

And I wrote one last list, and that was for the immediate moments, the time - however long it was - until I actually got home. I'd shower again, I'd sleep, I'd finish up my grapes and bread and cheese. I'd drink more water. I'd tidy up the room a bit. I'd brush out my hair. I'd stretch and exercise a bit, and then I'd sleep until the front desk phoned, and I'd shower one last time. (The showers were sort of a ritual by this point.) I'd stop for some supplies on the way home, but I'd also stop and walk at a park I knew I'd be passing on the way. If I was too bitterly cold to do so, I'd walk at a mall, but I really felt that i needed to be outdoors.

Friends, I think often of my first post here as the starting point for what's happened in my life over the last two years, but I think my unplanned retreat weekend, which preceded my first entry on this forum by about seven months, was really truly the kickoff moment for me.

Everything did not magically change afterward. I didn't, at the time, really even understand my food addiction, for instance - I may have not even known the term. But the experience of locking myself into a hotel room for 48 hours was the turning point. And everything DID change.......just not 'magically'. Oh my God, it was, and is, such hard work.

I offer this not as a suggestion, but simply a story. It may be a springboard for someone here. Obviously it can be tweaked to fit your own circumstances. All things considered, taking 48 hours out of your life and paying for lodging elsewhere is not available to everyone. For me, doing it incrementally would be much harder, but honestly, since that weekend I've gone back to this idea in smaller chunks of time, to sort of fine tune it, to bring it up to date - and it works that way too.

If I had money and more flexibility, I'd do this every year, and I'd probably expand it a bit to include time for walking outdoors, and maybe - again, i'm dreaming - it would include a deep tissue massage, or a good haircut, or something else.....i don't know,. I guess that's what fancy spas do. But look, friends, I spend $48 a night for a basic hotel room, and probably another $48 on the groceries and office supplies (and i could have cut that cost if I'd actually planned ahead for this.) I had to rely on the husband to feed the animals while I was gone. But if I'd gone to the conference I'd planned to attend, I'd have spent more, and would have had to make those arrangements anyway.

And if I'd cracked up from the stress I was under, or if i'd had a physical crisis because of how badly I'd been taking care of my body at that point, the repercussions would have been tenfold.

By the way, when I got home, my husband asked how the conference was, and i said "fine." This isn't a reflection on him - it just took awhile for me to even want to share the experience with anyone. I was very protective of it for a long time, before I could share it at all.

And then I came home and mucked out the sheep pen.

A few months ago, I posted that I'd received a copy of the routine bloodwork I have done every three months, to make sure my rheumatoid arthritis meds aren't destroying my liver. Because it's a complete panel of tests, there's a lot of info on the results, a copy of which is mailed to me. I noticed that my blood sugar was a little bit over the accepted level.

The nurse had not asked if I'd eaten that morning before the blood was drawn, so the results were marked "non-fasting", which meant that the out-of-range number wasn't flagged by anyone.

Except me, since I knew that I hadn't eaten that morning. I'm not medically trained, of course. But my husband is a Type II diabetic who tests every morning, so it's been on my radar. And the results themselves were clearly marked as too high.

I knew my number was out of the normal range, but I also knew it was not horrendous; my husband has literally had readings nearly twice as high. So I knew that my situation wasn't one that put me or others at risk. I wasn't going to go into a coma and crash a car, or pass out at the grocery store or anything.

I figured I had a couple months, before my next bloodwork, to get my shit together and tweak my diet and basically try to follow the diet my husband does, which keeps him from needing insulin. I figured I could work on my diet, and my next tests would be fine, and I'd never have to 'fess up. (Among other things, I don't want any additional pre-existing conditions in my records; we'll need to buy our own insurance next year when my husband retires. If you're not in the US, that might not seem like should matter to you, and you can be grateful that it makes no sense. Here, it's a worry.)

So I tried, but it hasn't worked. My most recent bloodwork shows an even higher number for blood sugar (135) and my GP, who also received a copy, called and told me to come in. In the interim, using that same sample, they did a three-month average (I've forgotten the name of the test but it's a routine one for diabetics). This test gives a better sense of what's really going on. I'll see those results at the appointment.

My appointment is in an hour. I'm reflecting on possibilities right now, and trying to put my thoughts in order.

The first point for me is always to shift from "Why is this happening to meeeeee?" to "What does this have to teach me?" There are clearly many lessons here, both in how I may have mishandled this, and for going forward. I'm working through that.

Here's what I want to talk about today, though: the double standard and the guilt.

If YOU were diagnosed as a type II diabetic (which is a reasonable expectation for me to hear at my appointment this morning). what would I say to you? I'd say okay, hey, shit happens. Genetics, environment, and meds can play a role in this. It's not your fault. Who knows, you may have actually held it off for a decade longer than it could have shown up, because you really were doing a lot of good things. And no matter what, the key thing now is simply to go forward; this is a Thing, and it is a Real Thing, and looking back and blaming yourself; that won't make the Thing go away, and you really do need to marshall your energy now into dealing with the Thing. take a moment to be pissed, and another to grieve, and then let's have a coffee and talk about the changes you can make now. You can do this.

Yes, i would say all of those things to you. I said them to my husband when he was diagnosed years ago. I've said them to many friends.

You know what I said to myself, though? (I know I don't actually have that diagnosis yet, but whatever the logistics are, the number IS high, so it's fair to start thinking this way).

You know what I said?

Let's see, it's something like this:

"You friggin' fat cow, what the fuck did you think would happen, stuffing your fat face all these years, sitting on your ass at the computer, taking all the shortcuts you could find, eating everything in sight, you have no self control, you are pathetic, you are a terrible role model for your kids" (see. that one's my fatal arrow, that one ALWAYS get me) "...and this is your own stupid fault."

This is quite the speech isn't it, considering that it comes after the seventeen months of intense personal work to get over this kind of thinking and heal?

At first glance you'd think I'd made no progress in the past year and a half, because that sounds remarkably like the same unhealthy way I talked to myself before. It reeks of the same self-loathing that I firmly believe anchored me to my addiction, which then, of course, fed into it and perpetuated it.

BUT, there's some good news. True, I did give myself that horrible speech. It was classic, actually, I'd poured myself a whiskey and stood in front of the bathroom, mirror, the husband was out but the two dogs were in attendance waiting expectantly because the dog treats are kept in the bathroom under the sink, so that say at attention by my feet, hopefully. I yelled into the mirror and tossed back the whiskey with, if I say so myself, a certain panache.

But THEN.........I laughed and gave the dogs a treat and scratched their ears, rinsed out my shotglass, apologized to myself (yes, it's weird, but I deserved it) and got on with things. Since that moment, I've been using the first script, the healthier one. The seventeen months of intense navel gazing (well, I would be gazing at it if my neck wasn't always stiff) have actually paid off. I am not beating myself up over this, other than that initial fury.

So there's that.

Maybe this is how it works. We know we have 'bad voices', in whatever form they take for us, undermining our confidence. We know that our depression / self-hatred feeds our addiction, and we know that we have to stop the downward spiral.

Maybe the voice doesn't actually ever go away. Maybe the good voices, maybe the good messages, just override it. Maybe it will pops up sometimes, but we've developed the strength to not listen, to not be contaminated by its message. Maybe it's like misogyny and racism and other systematic evils on the large scale: we're naive if we think they actually ever go away, but we can create a healthier environment in which they do not flourish, and we can be vigilant for the little hissing sound they make when they reappear, and we can vanquish them..............over and over as need be.

Is this overly dramatic? Is this overly wordy? Sure. But it's my post. And this is how I think, and this is how I process things, and this is how I heal. You can do you. :)

Because here's what I know: two years ago, this would have sent me into a real bingeing nightmare. that screaming in the mirror moment would have lasted for weeks, albeit internally, and it would have left terrible scars. THIS was like a fly landing on your shoulder, and you brush it off. Before this, it would have been a plague-carrying swarm of mosquitoes. It would have been awful.

Encouraging the good voice, practicing it, feeding it the way we fed the bad messages before.........this is what will save us.

So that's where I am. Things still kind of suck, I guess, but they suck LESS. i'm gonna call that progress, and go shower and get dressed for my appointment. Carry on, warriors.

FOLLOWUP

So no surprises. I'm officially a type II diabetic. It looks like my blood sugar has been creeping up slowly for years; sort of wish someone would have pointed that out to me earlier, you know? But no point whining or trying to shift blame or anything here at this point. It is what it is. It might not need to remain that way if I really truly can lose the remaining extra weight - perhaps this can be revisited if I lose weight - but for the moment, this is where I am.

I also have high 'bad' cholesterol after a lifetime of stellar numbers on bloodwork. So I've got to add two meds to my routine.

There is a tiny part of me saying "but........but.........this could explain everything! This could be why you've been feeling lethargic, achy, unmotivated!"

(I had, in fact, made today's appointment before I even got the bad bloodwork - I was going to ask about an antidepressant, for the first time in my life.)

My GP said yes, this may explain the other things, the brain fog, the occasional lightheadedness, the lack of focus.

Since there is no way to genuinely determine that my blood sugar level has been contributory to my sluggishness and brain fog, I now can choose to believe or disbelieve that it is (or, of course, to suspect judgment).

I think that suspending judgment is probably the most intellectually legitimate choice. But, let's look at the other two options.

If I believe that it is NOT relevant, I can start taking the meds and test my blood sugar twice a day as directed and whatever happens will happen.

If I believe that is IS relevant, I can push through my tiredness and go take those walks, and tell myself that this will pass, that this is a temporary feeling of achy tiredness, that this isn't who I really am, that the meds WILL kick in and get me back to my normal.

It's a "Schrodinger moment", I guess. But I do believe that when you have the option of choosing a positive or a negative outlook, and you truly can't quantify it scientifically, choosing the positive one is in your best interest. I'll be able to quantify things soon enough, once I start testing daily and taking the meds. It won't hurt to go into it with a positive attitude.

Dang, i wish i could edit what I write after I post something. There is nothing that improves my proofreading like hitting a send button. I wrote "suspect" instead of 'suspend' above, and I wrote 'that say" for "they sit" when referencing the dogs. This kind of thing makes me nuts, and I wish I could fix it. I don't care about the frequent lowercase i or lowercase first letter in a sentence, that's just my aching old hands and I give myself a pass on it. The other stuff bugs me.

NEW NORMALS, and a CHOICE

Getting up and testing my blood sugar is now part of the daily routine.

I am surprised by how matter-of-fast I am about this whole thing. Not just the testing, which involves needles - honestly, that's no big deal. If that must ever become part of your life, please don't freak out.

No, I mean the whole diagnosis, the axis tilt that comes from this particular disease. I think there's two relevant parts: first, there's absolutely a tendency culturally to blame the person who develops type II diabetes. You know what I mean. Heck, some people reading my posts about this are probably thinking well, for crying out loud girl, you're fat, what did you expect? So, there's that. For many diagnoses, unthinking people's automatic response is "you should........." followed by some self-help trope they read on the internet. I don't mean to sound snotty. I know the intentions are often actually good ones. But the implied or blatant blame and the suggestions that if I just drank my coffee black (I already do, actually) it would magically disappear.......yeah, I could do without that.

That's the annoying bit. The axis tilt, of course, is the necessary lifestyle changes. yes, i can take one pill a day and it (seems so far at least) is capable of changing the morning numbers. So, better living through chemistry, great, hooray, that will slow down the potential for damaging my body further.

But of course the ideal scenario is one in which I really do make even bigger changes. It's taken me nearly eighteen months to get a good grip on the addiction. I have lost a bit of weight and I've become a bit more active, but honestly I haven't worked as hard as I could have; it's taken all my mental energy to deal with the addiction, and my other medical issues have contributed to serious physical fatigue. Now, in order to get the type II truly under control, I really do need to make changes.

At a restaurant last night - no alcohol, just water, ordered fish tacos with grilled fish instead of deep fried, did not upgrade to french fries - these are all positive steps and not one damn one of them is what used to be my 'norm'. In fact each of these decisions caused me genuine pain in the moment. It is worth noting that this 'terrible deprivation' did not result in loss of life. I did not wither up and die of starvation overnight. In fact, I slept very well.

None of this surprises me. I know people mean well but often come across as judgmental, because it's our human way of telling ourselves that the Bad Thing won't happen to us, right? that's why we collectively do those shitty things like saying he deserved it, she asked for it, if he'd only done this differently, etc, etc. We're trying to protect ourselves subliminally, and so outwardly, we act this. I know this. I accept this about people.

I'm not surprised that I have to make changes. Even with all the changes I've made in the last year and a half, there were still obviously many, many more to make. I already knew that.

No, what's surprising me is this: I'm not pissed off. I'm not in despair. (Nor am I in denial - I know myself pretty darn well, and I know when i'm doing that, even though that sounds contradictory.)

Nope, I'm just moving on. Dealing with it. It's weird, because as people find out, I'm getting overloaded with responses like oh you poor thing this is just terrible aren't you upset what an awful thing........yada yada.

Meh. Yes, this kind of sucks, but.............I'm going to be sixty soon. I have great kids and grandkids. I like my life. This isn't going to kill me. If anything, it's sort of like a little warning flag telling me that I was going in the wrong direction, and I need to correct my course. When my Dad's type II diabetes was discovered, he was hospitalized for three weeks with a terrible infection in his foot and blood sugar numbers over 300. We thought he'd lose his foot (and he already had post-polio issues and other problems, so this was truly catastrophic). When mine was discovered, the number was 135, and it came up on routine bloodwork.

In a weird way, I feel very lucky. Five years ago I noticed a small lump on my finger. I would have ignored it for awhile at least, because I was busy, but the same day I noticed it, I cut my leg on barbed wire and realized my tetanus shot was out of date. I went to my GP for the shot that afternoon and mentioned the nodule on my finger, and he said whoa, wait, we're doing bloodwork. Did that, and found the rheumatoid arthritis (eventually, after a few more tests.) Although it was classified as moderate-to-severe, I was actually asymptomatic at that time other than some fatigue, which I incorrectly attributed to hormonal changes due to menopause.

Because the RA meds can be toxic, you get bloodwork done every three months to make sure your liver etc are coping. It was that bloodwork that found the diabetes. I was, again, asymptomatic except for feeling tired and a little 'off', which I'd attributed to the RA.

Now, I realize that I've made a conscious choice here to interpret things this way, but I do truly feel fortunate. I live in a part of the world where good health care is available, and we have insurance. Right there, that's more fortunate than a considerable part of the world's population. I could whine about the scar the barbed wire gash left on my leg, or I could look at it and say damn, this thing probably saved my life. (People with RA who are asymptomatic and do not get treatment are at the highest risk for organ damage / failure due to the disease; it's not just an achy-hand kind of thing.). Yes, the RA meds may be contributory to the diabetes in some way, but there's no way to prove that, and my choice to believe that the RA bloodwork is the reason the diabetes was caught so early is an equally valid interpretation.

I can choose bitterness or I can choose gratitude. I know which choice will be better for my mind, and my body, and for my relationships, so I'm going with the gratitude.

But, I'm still surprised that I'm apparently now mature enough to make that choice this gracefully. And I think I owe that to the intense work I've done getting my shit together this last year and a half.

We can make changes. We do not need to be controlled by the disease of addiction. It's an enormous amount of work, but it is possible to get out from under this thing. And once you do......it looks like it helps you with other Bad Things that come your way. Life is good, friends.

WELL, THANKS FOR NOTHING, DAD

In what would be a weird coincidence if I didn't genuinely believe the universe is somehow conspiring to get me to be healthy - and yes, I know that's egocentric - I found my Dad's medical records today when I tripped and spilled a box of what I thought were some old school theses. I'd seen these papers before, about thirty years ago when he died. I was in grad school then and I guess they just got stuck in the same box and put into storage in the basement.

Dad was diagnosed with type II diabetes when he was 59. My age exactly.

I was also surprised to read, in the list of his pre-existing conditions, that he had severe rheumatoid arthritis. That's just an aside, since I have it too - not really relevant to this site. I knew the damage he had to his body didn't quite fit the polio profile - he'd had that as a child. This explains a lot.

Now, here comes the part that I just can't shake: the subsequent paperwork indicates that my father, perhaps typically, did not follow instructions, did not adhere to a reasonable diet, did not stop any of his other high-risk behaviors. He kept eating whatever he wanted, and he stayed at too high a weight. The three packs a day didn't necessarily impact his diabetes, but they sure as hell didn't make his emphysema any better. He would pour salt on his food. He never tested his blood sugar. Real men, apparently, didn't do that. Or something.

This was in the days when general practitioners typed up reports for every patient they saw, long before the standardized forms the insurance companies require today. There were details, lots of details. My dad's doctor was a family friend, and you can just sense his frustration when he notes, over and over again, that this man would have improved significantly, and quickly, and reduced his chance of an early death if he'd just change some behaviors. Sometimes those lines were underlined. If you ever used an actual typewriter, you know that took a little effort, to backspace and add the underlining.

I inherited my addictive personality from my father. My father's addictive personality manifested itself in some intense ways: morphine addiction in his early teens after botched surgery to 'repair' the damage the polio did. Alcoholism after that - he was, literally, the town drunk in his twenties. Prescription pills at several points, and a relapse the alcohol at some point.

I know he spent six months in some kind of residential treatment, when I was two, because after he died I found his discharge papers. But I don't know what that was for. By the time I discovered it, there was literally no one left alive who could answer questions. My mom was still alive, sort of; her strokes had taken the person I knew away and left someone else entirely, who did not remember us well, and could not communicate with us.

But let's go back to the salient point:

My kids never got to know him. He died when I was in my late twenties, and my boys were still very young. They would have loved him, and vice versa. But they never had that chance, and I had to bury my father when I was still very young because he couldn't, or wouldn't, get a grip on his addictions.

I used to be angry about this, because I felt that he just didn't try. Now, I wish I could apologize to him for thinking that (although I never said it to him). I understand so much better, now. I have nowhere near the physical pain he endured, but I have enough to understand what an asshole I was to assume he was self-absorbed and complained a lot. My addictions have never been as gripping, but they're bad enough that I understand now that yes, he probably did try, and at the very least, he never intended to leave us all when he did. i am much more compassionate now.

But here's the thing: I have kids. I have grandkids. How will they remember me? I'll be damned if they look back and remember a blob of an old lady who was always eating, you know? I will keep working on this, I will keep getting better, and I will deal with this new challenge of diabetes. I will not follow the path my Dad did.

I loved him, and I couldn't stand him, and he was wonderful, and awful. All at once. But right now, what matters is that half of that gloriously fucked up DNA is in my body, and I can do the right thing here, or I can, at any point, give in to the addiction again.

But I don't want my kids to be angry, the way I was after he died. I don't want my grandlovies to not know who I was, or to only have a vague memory of someone ill and in pain. I may still not have the healthy self esteem needed to do it for me, but I'll do it for them.

Someone loves you, too. Or maybe there's someone you haven't met yet, who will. Please don't let them down. Do what you need to do to get a handle on this thing. You matter.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

If there were a movie about someone dealing with a food addiction, it would go like this:

Teaser: The camera pans around a cluttered kitchen, We hear crunching noises. We see our heroine, or at least, we see her from the neck down, as her face is entirely buried in a bag of Doritos. The camera closes in on the bag. Suddenly we realize that we hear sobbing noises in addition to the crunching, and a muffled voice saying "I can't take this anymore."

Exposition: we not see a series of unfortunate events, as it were, from our heroine's childhood. Mom handing out candy as a reward. Mom lamenting that one daughter is heavy (but the other is perfect,) School classmates ignoring the child, who comforts herself with her TastyCakes in her lunchbag. Watching the 'popular' girls at high school, and saving up to buy Seventeen magazine because surely the answers were in there.

I think the scenes of our heroine as an adult would have a Bridget Jones like quality. We'd see her bringing the groceries in from a shopping trip and hiding several things out of the sight of the rest of the family - and oh, that's after sweeping out the potato chip crumbs in the car, from the bag she ate on the way home. Let's not forget stopping at multiple fast food places within the same hour. We might, for emotional balance, insert a scene or two highlighting the inability to communicate with the husband, and show our heroine comforting herself with chocolate after a failed attempt to break through. But we'd keep it kind of light. We'd show her leaving a salad lunch with a female friend and promptly driving through McDonald's for fries.

Maybe a scene at a therapist's where she asks "what's wrong with me?" and gets some silly, dismissive answer. Maybe the voice of the helpful best friend telling her "oh, just eat a few carrots, you'll stop craving bad food in two days" or "it's all in your head, there's no such thing as a food addiction."

The director might include a few references to failed attempts to solve the problem. Maybe she'd be checking a few diet books out of the library and then the camera would immediately cut to a scene in which she's returning them, obviously unopened. Or, let's see, a closeup of a package of low calorie something......being devoured it in its entirety. She burns the healthy fiberfest she's cooking for dinner and eats a cake instead. No, no, wait, she calls for pizza delivery, then tells the delivery guy she has six other people in the house waiting to eat it, really, it's not just her.

It has to be dramatic, so the potential boyfriend would leave after catching her eating six muffins the morning after. Friends would mock her - let's see, she'd accidentally overhear them mocking her, that's better cinematically. She'd be bypassed for a promotion at work, and again, she'd overhear a boss saying she was qualified, but image is important, and she's clearly not what the company wants to project. I suppose a scene or two where she's the wingman for her BFF, but getting passed over herself. maybe she'd visit her Mom and get an earful of guilt from her.

Then there's the climactic moment. We'd return to the opening scene, where she's sobbing as she snarfs the Doritos. She'd pull her head out of the bag, say something like "Tomorrow is a new day!" a la Scarlet O"Hara.....oh yeah, let's add "And as God it mah witness, ah'll never binge again!"

Next, a superfast tranformation: in scenes lasting less than five seconds each, a sort of montage, we see her purging the pantry, driving past McDonald's and giving the golden arches the finger, throwing out her fat clothes, pushing the menu aside and telling a waiter to bring her ice chips with lemon. We'd see the snarky BFF giving her envious glances, and men falling over themselves to attract her attention. We'd see her take a delicate bite of a chocolate cake and refuse the rest. Scenes of jogging along a waterfront. Scenes of crossing the finish line at a marathon. She'd get a man, a new job, a new wardrobe, and bam, the movie ends, happily ever after.

It isn't like that in real life.

See, this is a central problem: we think, subliminally at least, that things go the way they do in movies. Problem, declaration of new intent, and - miracle! Cue the swelling music and the credits.

I'm here to tell you, your transformation will not be like that. Overcoming your addiction will not happen in a three minute montage of five second clips.

The movie I'd direct on food addiction might start the same way, I suppose. But the second half would be far more honest.

I'd show a scene of the heroine jogging exactly twelve steps and stopping with a leg cramp. I'd show a montage, all right, but it would be of her saying 'never again' and within ten minutes making a bad decision. i'd show her late at night with a legal pad and pen, writing and writing and writing, trying to organize the thoughts, find the patterns. I'd show her at the grocery store buying healthy food, then coming home and rummaging through the cupboard for four-year-old Halloween candy for a sugar fix. I'd show her jogging twenty four steps and stopping because the damn shoes are so uncomfortable.

The 'moment' where you decide that by God THIS IS IT!!! will happen many, many times - it's worse than the Groundhog Day movie, and even though it seems like you keep going back to square one, the reality is that each of these heartfelt dramatic declarations is somehow inching you to the moment where it really does begin to turn around.....which, in itself, may not be dramatic at all.

You will, most likely, not stop self-destructive behavior all at once. But if you keep working hard at it, you will one day realize whoa, I have not binged for five days! but.....it starts with staring at the clock because you're going to try to go for an hour without mindless eating. Or maybe only six minutes.

Those 12 jogging steps will turn into more, but it won't be like the movie where it happens within a few days. You'll get blisters, and chafing in terrible places, and you'll have humbling moments where passersby roll down their car windows and ask if they should call 911.

You'll find answers and inspiration in the craziest places, but they will be cumulative, not immediately miraculous, and it will be your job to sort them out and extract their message for you.

You will vacillate among emotions like grief and anger and resentment and hopelessness. You will wallow in self-pity and self-loathing. You will begin, slowly, to recognize the unhealthiness of those things, but that will take awhile, and the figuring out how to deal with them will take a little longer. Some things will actually get worse before they get better; you will learn things about yourself that you'll wish you didn't know, and you will be horrified or ashamed of them. But of course you can't fix them until you can see them. So you'll get through that, one issue at a time.

Our addiction is unlikely to ever be made into a movie, because it's not a sexy addiction like drugs or alcohol or gambling. But if it were, and it were honest, it would be a long hard slog............with many, many good things happening along the way. I want to be honest about the amount of hard work involved. I have haunted this board now for seventeen months and two weeks. I have two weeks to go, and I'm thinking about loose ends. And this is one of the biggest: I have seen, over this time, literally hundreds of people come here, post a heartfelt declaration of turning their lives around immediately and forever because they've just had it, and they're going to do whatever it takes, and they're going to stay here and work it out, and then they're never heard from again. I'm not able to prove this, but I suspect many of them give up because they're so overwhelmed, and they feel that this only cements their suspicion that they're weak and worthless and a failure.

news flash, friends: you feel overwhelmed because THIS IS OVERWHELMING. Period, full stop. You fail because this is FUCKING HARD WORK and there are going to be many, many, many mistakes and relapses and failures.

The flashy movie with the easy ending is ALL WRONG.

Groundhog Day is a much better movie to watch, because as I remember it, things keep repeating until he gets it right; it seems like it's repeating exactly, but isn't he learning something each time? And wasn't there another movie involving amnesia and a relationship, where they had multiple 'first dates' because one of them kept forgetting what had already happened, but the other one was learning more each time until it worked? Or maybe I just dreamt that.

THAT'S the movie I'd make about food addiction.

If you're frantic and despairing and thinking you'll never get this right, you may be watching the wrong movie. Seriously.

STRESS (mis)MANAGEMENT

I think that I've been working on reducing stress, or perhaps more accurately, managing it better - for who can ever expect to have no stress in their lives, after all? But I just tried a little experiment which showed me that I still have a lot of work to do.

I set up my phone to buzz every 12 minutes for the last three days. Yes, i know that sounds pretty hideous, and certainly not stress relieving, but bear with me here. It wasn't audible, it was a vibration that I felt from my back pocket - okay, okay, it buzzed my butt, let's call it what it is.

At the buzz, no matter what I was doing, I would simply relax my shoulders. Pull my shoulder blades away from my ears. That's all.

With the exception of showering, I'm pretty sure I hit every twelve minutes for three full days. It was not at all intrusive. I did it while driving, during conversations, while cooking, while giving a sheep an injection, and in the middle of rehearsing a gorgeous Brahms piece with a timpanist so close to me that the movement of his mallets made my hair fly. And, of course, times when I thought I was relaxed and resting. It did not disrupt anything.

With only a few exceptions, I discovered physical tension in my shoulders nearly every time. Like, enough that my shoulders lowered significantly, and I genuinely felt the release.

Now, that tension is not doing me any good. Sure, we need a bit of adrenaline, and a bit of fight-or-flight from time to time. But that consistent tension in my body is not in my best interest. It is not helping my blood sugar, it is not helping my blood pressure, it is not helping my general feeling of achiness, or my back pain, or anything else. I understand that the correlation between tight shoulder muscles and stress and inflammation is not necessarily an absolute, but let's be clear here, it isn't a GOOD thing. And inflammation of any kind, ironically, is going to cause more stress in the body.

And what does that do to our addiction?

Well, I'm thinking we'd be hard put to find an expert who would say it's good for us.

the science of the human body is a complex one. Muscles are part of an amazing living system, not just bits of machinery. Metabolic by-products like lactic acid have to be regulated by the other systems in our bodies, it's all related, right? So, doesn't it make sense that additional stress and additional inflammation could be contributory to our addiction in some way?

At my worst, I ate when I felt stress - but here's the thing, I felt stress a LOT. I actually interpreted boredom as stress (am I wasting an opportunity? Is there something I should be doing? Have I forgotten something important that's supposed to be happening today?)

Yes, it's a rare gift to be able to do that, I'm very blessed. And all the usual things cause stress, things like social anxiety and financial anxiety and is that damn sheep going to recover and will I splat the high entrance in the Brahms at the concert this weekend? And, at one point in my life, all of those things would drive me to fast food and empty calories for solace. Seriously, that high note in the Brahms alone would be the catalyst for three or four binges.

I have stopped abusing food in that way. But, I know that the underlying stresses are still there, and the next challenge for me is to address those.

My goal is not to be a stoned, mellow zombie. (Nothing against my friends who are.) But that's not me. No, I just want this stress to no longer control me. The 12-minute-alarm experiment showed me that it very much does. And I recognize that this physical manifestation of stress indicates psychological stresses, and that the mental stress is contributory to my addiction.

Admit it........you just checked your shoulders, didn't you? You might carry your stress elsewhere; a friend with whom I had this discussion yesterday told me she's going to try the timer approach to see how frequently she's clenching her jaw, because her dentist is concerned about some grinding damage to her teeth, which continues even though she's now wearing an appliance at night. So she's pretty clearly doing it during the day too, but she's unaware of it.

My daughter in law manifests stress in her belly. I imagine there's few body parts that can't house stress.

The lovely woman who massages my aching self when I have a little spare money for that luxury tells me that people can learn to de-stress their problem area, but they must be careful not to transfer that stress elsewhere in their body.

You're here on this site because you're trying to get out from the grip of an addiction. Look for your stress, learn your own body,listen to what it's telling you.

YOUR ANSWERS ARE IN AISLE SEVEN

Are you just getting started on this journey, just starting to get your shit together? You're wondering where the key to the door is hidden, you're wondering where to look for advice, wondering who and what to trust, am I right?

The answer to the first part is 'everywhere' and the answer to the second is 'in your own heart.'

Native Americans believed that the remedy for a problem often lay close to the problem itself: an example which is relevant to me is that jewelweed, an antidote for poison ivy, grows in the same conditions and is often found growing near the more noxious plant.

The problem is not that the answers aren't there - the problem is that you need to open your eyes and ears. When you do, you will find them.

A program on NPR about drug addiction gave me a tremendous insight into my own unhealthy relationship with food. They did not mention food addiction at all, and actually weren't even talking about treating the addiction itself; it was a show dedicated to strategies to keep people from backsliding after they'd become clean, and it made me understand how I needed to change things in my home environment so that I could succeed.

A six year old issue of National Geographic magazine in the dentist's office had an article about brain development that left me open-mouthed, amazed at the insight it provided into why I was resisting making the changes I knew I needed to make.

An overheard conversation in a long grocery line provided several hints about how I could increase my chances of following through with some new resolutions.

A line in a poem was like a beacon of light in the darkness for me, illuminating the need for self-awareness and self-care, and it allowed me to forgive myself for not having done so before.

Watching my compassionate son talk his own toddler through a tantrum made something click in my brain about how I personally handles stress.

A book fell on my head when I was reaching for a different one in a crowded bookstore. The one that fell on me was like an instruction manual that was written just for me.

An interview with an athlete about her training program made me look differently at the role I was allowing food to play in my life.

I hung up the phone after a conversation with a distraught alcoholic friend and realized that it had just given me something serious to think about in regard to my own situation.

There are countless other examples. What ties them together is NOT their subject matter - very, very few were literally about food addiction, and very few were even about addiction itself.

These things had always been out there, but until the point that I became receptive to them, I was totally oblivious to their existence. And THAT's a point I recognized when I was plowing a field to prepare it for the seeds I was about to sow: as anxious as I was to do so, if I hadn't waited for the right time, the seeds would never have sprouted the thrived.

Until you are ready, you won't see any answers anywhere.

Once you allow yourself to become receptive, you're going to be amazed at how many messages there are to help you on your way.

Too many, actually, which leads to the second part of the day's post: how to sort them out. To do so, you must begin trusting your heart. Which sounds peachy until you stop and say well yes, but how, actually?

And the answer to that......wait, hold on one second here.

Lemme point something out. I've been posting for almost a year and a half; my goal was to do so from the moment I started until I reached my 60th birthday, by which point my hope was to enter the last third of my life as a not-fucked-up, badass power for good in this world. During this time, I have rarely, RARELY, said "here is the answer." I have ALWAYS wiggled around that my saying "this may not work for you, but it has for me." In today's post, I'm doing so. This idea, that the answers are there, and you can find them and apply them - this is a TRUE THING, and thus, I am breaking my own rule of not being adamant about something, and also about minimizing annoying caps. If you've actually read this entire line of posts, please take note of that. This one really matters.

Now, back to the that answer:

You can't really listen to your heart unless you've looked in the mirror, figuratively, and you know yourself, honestly, and you accept yourself as you are. That emphatically does not mean that you wish to remain the same forever, or even that you condone everything you see. But it is a non-negotiable starting point.

What it meant for me was being able, eighteen months ago, to say this: I"m a hot mess. I'm fat, I'm undisciplined, I lie about food, I give in to every whim regarding food, I'm lazy about exercise, I'm totally disorganized, there is far too much stress in my life, I am harboring anger and grudges that I no longer need, I am holding onto ridiculous resentments from the past, I am incredibly insecure, I don't feel that I really am worth the effort to save, I can't seem to control this overeating thing at all.

There were a few more bits too, I'm just summarizing here.

I had to do that. I had to be able to look at all those things squarely. Once I did that I had to accept that yes, this is who I am right now, and you know there's actually some good things about me too, so that's not a complete picture, and what I have here is one giant ball of yarn that has been attacked by cats and toddlers, and I must now unravel and untangle it by gently tugging at the exposed loose bits, and following them back where they lead, and sometimes tying a few together, and sometimes backing up and trying a different lead instead. I cannot get to the core of this tangle, I cannot reconstruct it, unless I work at these bits that are exposed on the outside, and gently find my way to the interior.

And you see, right, there, it is possible to find a part of your answer in the form of a tangled up ball of yarn. You won't solve it all at once. There may be a lot of loose ends to follow, it may no longer be 'whole'. Some knots may be really, really hard to undo.

But once you know who you are, both the bad and the good, then you can sort out the answers the universe is putting in your path, and see what works for you.

My control-freak friend's rigid spreadsheets for diet and exercise work for him. They would actually cause a setback for me. I do like my spreadsheets and I do like planning, but any whiff of rigidity and I rebel instantly. So, I looked at that about myself: was that necessarily good? Could I find some compromise there, some area in which I might grow? Could I take his approach and fine tune it in some way to work for me, or was that one to just put aside?

Once you've got that frame work of who you are, it honestly becomes easier every time. The marketing scheme a friend does for the miracle drink powder? Not for me, but I'm happy that it's worked for her. Another friend has prepared meals delivered to his door, and has found that he has overcome a lot of his food addiction issues by simply abdicating the responsibility for making decisions. That works for him and he's doing well. I've got enough oppositional disorder in my personality that my gut instinct is always to undercut the authority; I'd be eating the prepared meals and chasing them with two Snickers bars just to 'show them' that 'they don't control me', which, I realize, is immature and perhaps not even entirely sane. That's a whole other set of problems to solve someday - the point is that I know myself well enough to know that my answers are not in a subscription service for meals.

My answers aren't on daytime talk shows or in women's magazines, but they seem to show up on Facebook sometimes. That, again, is about me, and my snotty elitist sense that daytime TV is silly, and women's magazines are part of the oppression of women - see, I told you there was some silly stuff going on here. Facebook, which I recognize is widely despised for legitimate reasons, is for ME a tribe of phenomenal and supportive and brilliant thinkers; my friends post things that really make me think. I seem to have avoided the weirdos, and yes, that's judgmental. The point, again, is figuring out what works for ME, and I did. If, in the process of finding what works for you, you discover something unsavory about yourself, something kind of judgmental, well, you can always bookmark that and get back to it later.

If you are starting out, or perhaps starting over, as we all do from time to time, please hear my words, because they are the words of an old woman, now, who has screwed this whole process up so, so, so many times, and has finally managed to claw her way out of the abyss; I am Sisyphus triumphant. (Look it up if you need to.....there's answers there, too.)

Open your eyes. Open your ears. Open your heart. Things will start to happen. I promise you that.

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY, FRIENDS

It sounds ridiculously corny to tell you that I love the people on this board. Corny, sappy, possibly egocentric, and to a certain degree even delusional. I mean, nobody but me really posts here anyway; whenever I sign in I see that there's maybe one other person even signed on to the site, if even that. The people with whom I have actually engaged though comments on this post have been lovely, but few. My posts have always been horribly katie-centric, and without apology, because that's all I was capable of when I started; I had no answers, only questions. I will leave here so much stronger than when I started, and I will be able, now, to reach out to help others. But here, well, here I've mostly just been sorting my own messy self out.

So why do I feel that I know you - let alone want to send you a Valentine?

Because, my friend, we are in the fucking trenches together. There is a camaraderie born of shared experience, and it is a particularly strong bond when the circumstances of that experience are intense.

Yow know from your own life that if you've gone through something wrenching, whether it's a divorce or family death or a miscarriage - or even a particularly grueling class at your school - that you have a sort of respect or affection for those who have also gone through it, or are in its midst right now. Of course you might also have a connection to these same people without that bond, but......the bond makes it stronger. It needn't be a huge thing. Sometimes it's the the shared glance between two exhausted mamas pushing carts through the grocery store, with cranky infants in the seat and whiny toddlers velcroed to their legs. That glance that says "I know you. I know your struggle."

To my untrained eye, it seems that a common element in our particular addiction - perhaps in all addictions but I don't know that - is a feeling of unworthiness and isolation. I doubt there's anyone who struggles with food addiction who genuinely does not know, intellectually, what should happen, in regard to food; I mean, it's only a google click or two to find recommendations for a healthy adult diet. But, we don't actually DO those things, because......reasons. Complicated reasons. And since we don't do the right things, we feel shame and guilt. Shame and guilt are not feelings that tend to drive people toward building strong community relationships; quite the opposite, they instead encourage us to draw the blinds and lock the door and comfort ourselves with food. And every time we self-medicate with food, we feel worse about ourselves. And the worse we feel, the less worthy we feel - we start thinking there's no point in even trying, we're so far down this terrible rabbit hole. Well, hey, you know the script, it's running in your head too sometimes. I know that.

And that's what I feel connected to when I think of everyone else here. You KNOW what a mess is inside my head. You get it. And I get what's going on with you, even if I haven't heard your story. You aren't alone. You're part of an enormous community, one that goes well beyond this very small and un-trafficked site. Our addiction has no visible outward sign, we haven't got the needle tracks, we can function at normal jobs and often even fool our families and loved ones. And what that means is that, as far as you know, two out of the next ten people you see may also be dealing with food addiction.

Now, here's the tricky part. When you are faced with a situation in which you cannot prove either or your options, a Schrodinger sort of situation as it were, you have the ability to choose which interpretation you want. Bear with me for a second if this idea seems weird. it's based on the work of a woman named Byron Katie, who writes self help books. Oversimplifying horribly, I'll sum up the premise of the one I read: when you are faced with a destructive thought, you ask these questions: Is it true? Can I be sure it's true? Is there any other interpretation? Who would I be if I believed that instead?

When I read that for the first time, I applied it to the idea i had in my head that my mother didn't particularly actually like me.

Was that true? I thought it was.

Could I prove it was true? Oh....actually, no, I couldn't. Not really. I had anecdotal evidence, and feelings, and so on. But real proof? I guess not. She had never said those words. I had no written evidence. I just felt that way.

Was there any other interpretation? (this part took me weeks) Um, yes. She could have struggled with depression. Her own parents had certainly not been warm. I was her first child, perhaps she simply wasn't sure how to express genuine warmth to me. I was, after all, certainly well cared for, and as a teacher, she was incomparable. Perhaps I was not an affectionate child myself.

And finally, who would I be if I didn't believe, anymore, that she hadn't loved me. Well, whoa Nelly, as a neighbor used to say. This changed everything, can you see that? Everything. I would have grown up, I believe, with self-confidence. With self-confidence, I would not have made several mistakes that stuck with me a long time. I would have made some different decisions that would have had lifelong impacts. I would, actually, be a totally different person.

And it all went back, really, to something I could not truly prove. And, given, that, it meant that I could now choose otherwise. Which, from that point, i did. My mother was dead by then, but I actually managed to repair our relationship post mortem, seriously; I was able to forgive her, I was able to forgive myself. She could have loved me. I can choose yes or no here. Why not choose yes?

Now, let's tie that to those board, and more importantly, to YOU. This board has no traffic that I can see, based on the number of new posts and the number of users online at any given time. But I can't prove that there isn't traffic at other times; I tend to check in here at a specific time each day, and maybe that's not the typical pattern. Because I cannot prove otherwise, I have chosen to believe that there is a silent community of people sharing this process / journey with me, a huge wall of support that's been holding me up as I have dismantled all of the protective layers around myself and put myself back together. Is that egocentric? Sure. Can I prove that it's not true? Nope. So.........I'm going to choose to believe it, because that makes me a stronger person. I cannot tell you how many times in the last eighteen months I have made the right decision because I thought of all of you, because I thought that I didn't want to let you down. Is that ridiculous? Maybe. But who cares? It WORKED.

Now, let's apply this to YOU. If you are one of the people who feel that you're all alone, and no one understands, I'd ask you to consider using Byron Katie's metric (I'd encourage you, also, to actually read her stuff, as I've hardly done justice to it with such a brief summary.) Is that true? Can you prove it's true? Is there any other explanation? Who would you be, or what would your life be like, if you believed an alternative?

You will find, if you go through that process, that you are in fact emphatically NOT alone in this. If nothing else, you've got me in your corner cheering you on. You've got all of the (possibly imaginary, but we can't prove that) people on this board behind you. This addiction is widespread. The person ahead of you in the post office line yesterday might be struggling with it too. We are community, and we have compassion for each other because we understand each other's struggle. You simply cannot prove otherwise, so why not do yourself a huge favor and choose the interpretation that will help you heal?

And so,with that logic, I believe that you are on my side, as I am on yours. And thus, I wish you a happy Valentine's Day, because your love and support has helped me heal, and I hope mine helps you.

HOW A NORMAL PERSON BINGES

At rehearsal yesterday - a small ensemble, people who have been working together for years and are all good friends - somehow the conversation in a break turned to Three Mile Island, which is near us, and what we were all doing when it had the accident. This happened forty years ago; at the time I was just twenty. My friends in this ensemble are all a few years older than I am.

The initial news reports were terribly confusing, and there was no consensus about the amount of danger we were in.

So we all shared some memories; Jim had three toddlers and left for another state immediately; Don was a pastor at a church that was designated as an emergency shelter so he couldn't leave, etc.

And my friend Dave starts talking about how he and his young wife went to his parents' house and watched the news on a small tv in the kitchen and debated whether or not to bug out for somewhere safer.

In Dave's words, "and I'll always remember this, my father in law had picked up two boxes of cream filled doughnuts that morning that he was going to take to a church meeting that night, and they were on the kitchen table, and while we were talking I was absentmindedly eating a doughnut, and then another one, and do you know I ate SIX of them! I'll never forget that! I was so sick the next day. And I couldn't eat a cream filled doughnut for years."

I did not comment on that, not from a food-addict's perspective, but here's what I thought.

1. Dude, you're an amateur.
2. Okay, what's it like to have literally one episode like that, and still remember it so clearly forty years later?
3. There's so definitely a link between stress and abusing food.
4. I carry a lot of stress; I don't seem to process it the way a healthier person might. My recent experiment with a timer and just checking my shoulder blades showed me that.
5. Dealing with the stress in my life - the real stress, the perceived stress, and how I hold onto it vs letting it go is absolutely a critical step to staying healthy and not sliding back into addictive behavior.

Six doughnuts.

IT'S OKAY TO SHIFT YOUR COMFORT LEVEL

One huge challenge for me in conquering the addiction demon is that I literally would panic if I felt a little bit hungry. As with any other quirk, understanding the genesis of this helped me move past it: it started in my first pregnancy and was cemented during the second, which followed fairly quickly. I was a serial barfer during pregnancy, I had problems from practically the moment of conception until delivery, all day, all night, and the only thing that seemed to work was maintaining a level of something in my stomach. Whatever is was that was going on in my system - maybe extra stomach acid? - was soothed by Triscuits. So I started nibbling on them, and I learned very quickly that if I didn't let my stomach get too empty, if I kept that carb base in there, the constant nausea would be at least manageable.

Understandably, that led to associating an empty stomach with impending peril, and I believe that this is when I started really having problems with food. There were things in my childhood, yes, but this was the point at which I subconsciously associated a not-full stomach with "something bad". From there is was an easy step to grab food whenever I felt stressed. I wish, now, that I'd taken the time to figure this out all those years ago. Those of you who are younger, good for you for working your way through all this crap now before it affects your health - and for those of you who are my age, well, we've got a lot of miles to go yet, and good for us for wanting to do so in a functional vehicle.

Anyway, I've realized how many area of my life are NOT dictated by comfort, largely because I understand that discomfort can be temporary and it can be for a greater good. I can work in my greenhouse with freezing wet hands (hard to manage tiny seeds gloved, and you're always watering things) and it doesn't faze me at all. I do not think 'omigod I'm going to die'. I can wait in a long grocery line, which is a particular hell for an ADD person, without becoming homicidal. I can be hot and sweaty when I'm playing an outdoor concert, and I can put aside the awfulness of that and pour myself into playing as well as I possibly can. I can hold the youngest grandbaby, who weighs a ton, when he's sleepy and 'nesting' and needs some Nanno-loving, and not mind that it makes my back and shoulders ache.

We all do these things, it's just the specific acts that may differ. No matter how terrible your food addiction, there are areas in your life in which you put aside your creature comfort because for whatever reason it's the right thing to do at that time. Make a list of a few of those things in your life, will you? Because you're doing it. You're standing outside in the polar vortex so the dog can pee, you're staying up late at night to take care of paperwork when you really want to sleep, you're sitting on a horrible hard and cold bench at the skating rink during the kid's hockey practice. You're uncomfortable, and you look forward to soothing whatever the discomfort it, but....it can wait. You know you won't die.

So, all of us can do that, except when it comes to pizza, or whatever our food trigger is. Most of us seem to feel that our 'want' in those cases is a DIRE NEED and without the substance we crave WE WILL DIE IMMEDIATELY. I mean, truly, I don't think i speak just for myself here.

In my case, I'm now able to take a few deep breaths and remind myself that my perception of hunger got skewed during my pregnancies; that plenty of other people right this minute are feeling a bit peckish too but you don't notice THEM hiding in a closet eating cheese puffs, and that this, too, shall pass in good time. I don't even need to pull out the liberal guilt about how most of the people in this world can't even dream of food security, although I've deployed that occasionally. No, mostly, this is about re-programming ME, to accept that a certain level of hunger is not only a survivable thing, but a desirable one.

Not everyone who abuses food is overweight, as I am, so this is not necessarily applicable to everyone. But I do think that if you take a good look at what need the food fills for you, you may realize that it's not a legitimate need in the first place, does that make sense? And while we can't do without food altogether, and shouldn't even want to, we can, if we are abusing food by overeating, learn to reset our perception of what it means to be hungry.

I'm well aware that for anyone leaning towards anorexia, everything I've just said is poison. Please remember, if you're reading this, that all I can bring to the table is my own experience. We all need to find that healthy balance, and your path may not be the same as mine.

AND...........THAT's A WRAP!

Today, I am sixty. I'm embarking on a great adventure, the last third of my life. I'm excited about that, and even more so because of the work I've done in the last 18 months, learning to understand and be less controlled by my food addiction. There are a lot of unknowns ahead, but having the albatross of the addiction taken from my neck is an almost overwhelming relief. My addiction will always live with me, but it no longer suffocates me.

I need to stay vigilant, but it no longer consumes or defines me.

If you wonder if it's possible to heal.....the answer is yes.

I'm honoring my initial statement, that I'd hang out here and sort out my messy head until my 60th, and then I'd start the next great adventure. I guess i'm not totally ruling out checking in here once every year or so, but my time here is finished. It is time for someone else to get a conversation going here - I was never very good at that. This board could be a lifeline for someone, and you could be the person they need to reach out a hand. Consider that. I hope that if I do stop back in, I won't even be able to FIND my post, because it will be long buried by active, supportive posts. But that means you need to start writing, my friend.

May your path be lined with beauty, even while you struggle. May you be enveloped in support. May your eyes be open to see the signs that will point the way. May the number of the pizza delivery place fade from your memory, may your car no longer automatically turn into the fast-food place, may bags of Doritos no longer mysteriously appear in your shopping cart. May you never again look down with horror at an empty box of donuts and wonder how the hell you ate them without noticing. May you always remember that you are beautiful and worthy no matter where you are on this journey. May you remember that you will be defined not by your falls, but by how you rise. Do not give up. Love to all!

Sad that it is my addiction is literally tearing me apart. If I eat any form of grain foods my intestines get torn and blood pours out! Problem is I miss buttered toast so much. It's not the food that's the problem, it's arguing with myself.
When you "HAVE TO" go to the supermarket it's in your face. So, how does one not purchase what one sees as life!

Four months have passed, almost, since my last post. Things are going very well overall. It turns out that there was a fairly interesting, likable, and well-adjusted person underneath all the food-crazy that had smothered me for all those years, and it's been a joy to uncover her and get to know her.

You are wondering if it's possible to overcome a food addiction. That's the question we all start with, when we have our personal version of the come-to-Jesus moment that is our unique wake-up call. It's why you're here. It's what you wonder after every slip-up.

Here's what I think, based on an eighteen month, intense, exhausting, and scrupulously recorded battle, plus four months now of a sort of maintenance; plus a diagnosis of type II diabetes (and a loss of 20 pounds so far, so I'm off the meds already); plus a complete dietary and lifestyle overhaul - after all that, I think I can answer the question with a firm 'yes and no'.

I don't think the tendency ever goes away entirely. I have not binged or even overeaten in months. It doesn't mean that I'm am not sometimes tempted to do so (although i'm amazed at how less frequently, and less intensely, than in the past). I can't say with certainty that I will never screw up again. I do know that if I do so, I'll have the tools, now, to fix things quickly before it gets out of hand.

But having issued that caveat, I can also say that yes, you can get better, you can live a normal life, a life that is not obsessed with food, not covered in crumbs and grease stains. And it's actually a pretty amazing way to live. I plumbed the pits of hell to figure out the reasons why my brain was so messed up, and there were ugly, ugly moments as I confronted my demons. But holy shit, friends, it's worth it, it truly is. I used to get into bed at night and just lie there and think thank God I got through another day and I can escape into sleep for a few hours. Now I wake up in the morning and think thank God, I get to see what today's going to be like. I know I sound corny. But that's the way it is right now.

I made mistakes and took some wrong turns in my process. That's okay. I still got to a safe place. Don't be afraid of failure. it's almost a given - until you figure out your own personal recipe, you're going to make mistakes too.

Anyway, friends, I think of you often, and hope you are all doing well. I only had a few actual message exchanges with you all but I still felt like I had a tribe supporting me in the hard times, and I'm grateful for that. I'll check back in towards the end of the year. Hang in there, beautiful people.