Transcription - Health

Hey, hey! It’s transcription time! Yes, that time of the whenever when I write from my brain as directly as I can without filters with the exception of this paragraph because it’s always awkward to start these things! Yay!

Today I want to try to write a bit about a habitual behavior/thought cycle I’ve been caught in probably since my teens. And that is “my eating disorder”. I’ll flesh it out some more and see if we still want to call it a disorder. But I’m guessing its more like “Marie’s magical unconscious coping skills for an unintegrated Self and a disintegrated sense of reality due to the evolution of humanity into hyperstimulation, puritanical ethics, and ethnic supremacy”. But sure, let’s call it an eating disorder. That way, it feels like a problem and it feels like I’m to blame. See, that’s so much easier.

I don’t know where to start because I see dozens of doors in my head begging me to start this way or that way. But as soon as I entertain the idea of proceeding with one door, another door whispers to me that it is the better way to start and that you will think I’m a better writer and self-reflector if I go through that door. Rinse & repeat. So I’ll just start like this.

Yesterday I went into the clinic to get some labs done. Some of the tests had to do with making sure that that nasty virus I had was out of my body. I’m still not sure if it is based on the tests, but I sure do feel better if not a bit lethargic but of the organic kind of lethargy. One test said I had mono, but I also had it in 6th grade so maybe it’s detecting the antigens. Regardless, the other tests I had were just run-of-the-mill health indicators. I hadn’t thought too much of what the read-out on them would be but once I got the results I was pretty shocked. Everything was outside of the healthy lines.

Usually, I squeak by with generally okay numbers. But these numbers are significantly deviant. And I am having really complicated feelings about that. And that’s what I want to try to talk out here. I have had health anxiety and an eating disorder for as long as I can remember. And I’ve admitted it often and I have sought help for it. But it has never really gotten markedly better because my routes to “success” are just usually cyclically based in built up shame and fear and a desire for control. Plus, I’ve been in an unconscious dissociative haze for most of my life and have begun to realize that only in the very recent past. So there is a LOT of backup in my head and heart that I’m trying to process now that I am a bit more aware of my unconscious workings. This is all to say that while I feel this familiar viscous black heaviness over my internal sense of safety and self-worth, a wiser part of me knows that these numbers aren’t an indication of a new level of failure on my part and a promise to die early from “too much candy”, but a sign that I’m finally cornering some things in my head/heart and I think this eating behavior is probably one of the biggest coping mechanisms that has yet to be addressed directly. So here we go, right? This is the beginning, not the end.

First of all, I guess I should note the numbers don’t lie. They make sense given my lifestyle. I’m trying to think what exactly has been going on and what has been the latest stress that has gotten me into this loop. If I had to reason it out, I would guess that it started around April 2022. It was April 2022 that Adam got sick with COVID and so Keith stayed with his girlfriend for the week which afterward led to the realization he liked doing day-to-day life with her. And so our situation of being platonically married and living together shifted into a discussion of selling the house and moving forward with our lives. So beginning in May and through August there was this tornado inside of me to get the house ready to sell, purge items, find a new apartment, and move. It hurts that that was so simple to say in a sentence because it didn’t feel simple at all. It was really stressful. Yes, I made $83K from the sale, but I’ve learned more than once that money won’t solve your problems, especially the kinds of problems that I have that are mostly cognitive.

Living Situation: Even after Adam and I moved in July and the house was fully sold by early August, the changes and adjustments kept coming at me. There was the divorce, which was easy as fuck, but part of me feels like I haven’t really grieved the unraveling of romantic connection with Keith and the loss of experiencing my day-to-day life with him. There’s also the loneliness of living in this apartment. My boyfriend works out of the home but also has another girlfriend he spends time with. So I spend a lot of time in this apartment alone. And I don’t even know if I like this apartment. I’ve felt ill at ease in here since the beginning. I always am afraid that it’s going to crumble to the ground or start on fire and that I’ll have to run the 5 minutes down 27 flights of stairs to get out. I also feel unsafe, like all my belongings are hanging in the tops of a tree. It doesn’t really feel like home. Plus, getting anywhere is a pain. It’s walking down a hall, waiting for an elevator, standing in that elevator for 30 seconds, wandering out, having to greet lots of strangers, remembering where the hell I parked my car, driving in a circle to get out of the ramp, pausing to scan my pass to escape, and then being forced to only take a right turn and figure it out from there. I feel like I live in a tower and I kind of hate it. And I’ve been spending all the time since I moved in here ruminating on whether I’m willing to renew the lease with Adam or not, because he really likes it here and he couldn’t afford to live here alone. So if I decide that I hate it that much, it would force him to get uprooted yet again. But that’s where I feel torn. How essentially do I feel I need to escape this apartment versus could I work through some of my issues and spare my burned out partner more transition stress? So that’s been weighing heavy on my mind basically since August 2022.

But then to narrow it down, how is this all related to health stress? Well, like I said, I find it a hassle just to leave the apartment. It feels like climbing down the stairs of a pyramid. You really have to think whether you’re ready to do that or not or would it be easier to just stay up here and eat whatever trash you can find in your house? But I find all of this to be a barrier to getting groceries. In Brooklyn Park, when I lived there, I experienced a similar problem. We were tucked away in a suburban cul-de-sac and the nearest grocery store involved lots of turns and annoying road with stoplights and traffic. I didn’t really get groceries that often when I lived there. However, when we moved to Columbia Heights, suddenly getting groceries was a lot easier. First of all, we had a larger kitchen and so there was more space to store things and more space to cook. But also, the grocery store was about a mile away but it was through quiet neighborhoods, passing a few stop signs on some quiet roads, driving past a lake, and then entering the parking lot through the back so I never had to deal with the chaos of the entrance. I knew exactly where I’d park every time. I knew the grocery store layout. It was a lot easier. Living downtown, though, I have a few convenience stores available on weekdays from 7am to 4pm but the variety is profoundly slim. Closest grocery store is the expensive Byerlys. And I could walk the 10-15 minutes to get there, some of the walk is outdoors which is really unpleasant in the winter, or I could drive there which involves all the of process of exiting the building, getting in the car, and driving 6 blocks which makes my brain mad. So much mental effort for such little distance. Byerlys has a limited selection of products, makes me feel uncomfortable due to the class of it all, and I don’t know where things are still. Now, Cub is my steady friend. I like Cub. Not because Cub is good but because it’s good enough. There aren’t any Cub Foods nearby home. I have to drive 12 minutes in some direction to find one. In the past, I designated a day as grocery day and I would buy the staple foods that I eat. But I am finding it so hard to get the motivation to do the whole apartment exiting process, driving more than 10 minutes away from a bustling downtown area (shouldn’t downtown have more conveniences!?!), to get my groceries. And I still am not sure which Cub I prefer. There are several to pick from. Midway stresses me the fuck out. So then there’s a Cub near Phalen or the one near 3M. Both are annoying to get to. Neither I’m familiar with nor like nor feel safe in. And so I’m not really able to access the skills I’d been developing at the old place of planning more meals, cooking, keeping healthier snacks on hand. And I don’t think I’d really spelt out why this was happening because I feel shame about all the text above… that it’s this difficult for me. So it seems I rather just keep it quiet and to myself and blame myself and shovel candy in my mouth to cope with the stress of feeling like my health is out of my own control and I’m just a frightened, compulsive, broken animal sucking their thumb in the corner. And maybe I am.

I feel stagnant.

But I’d be wrong to blame it all on the apartment. That’s what I’ve been doing sometimes. Just ruminating all day about how this isn’t working and I need to get out of here. I realize now, for me, that rumination isn’t something in your head being broken. It’s something in your head being very very very right. Rumination means that something in my brain thinks something is very very important and is going to keep talking about it until I talk about it. And I haven’t really been talking about it due to shame. I have a lot of shame about how difficult it is for me to participate in the whole eating process. And I have so much shame with how I cope with that and other stresses, which is through eating junky food. And I have infinite shame and fear about what that coping is doing to my health and my appearance. I feel shame that I have shame about my appearance,… that I even care. And I feel inside of me the gravitational toilet-bowl flush of my life and vitality down the toilet as I approach 40 years of age and nearly 27 years of this kind of uncontrollable behavior that I knew from the beginning would compromise my health but I haven’t been able to stop. I mean, honestly, probably a lot of my baseline stress has to do with this issue constantly being front and center of my mind but me doing nothing to talk about it… like, really. Yes, I’ve been in eating disorder clinics and have had therapists. But like I said, I’ve been living mostly unconsciously all of my life and oblivious to what was actually happening in my mind. And no one could show that to me except me. Those damn shrooms in 2020 began that journey of seeing those mechanisms, so I guess you could say that I’m probably on a really good path upwards towards health, but it really doesn’t feel like it after getting these numbers back from the doctor.

Let’s talk more about the stress I’m presently dealing with. I already mentioned everything involved in selling the house, moving, and the stress of my new living situation and food repercussions. But wait, there’s more! I also lost my job at the end of October 2022. I have never been laid off before. It was pretty jarring. And I’ve never been on unemployment. And I’ve never had NOTHING to do. Basically November, December, and January, I have been home most days all day alone. With no job. No excuses. No significant distractions. Just Marie TV all the time. By that I mean, the combination of now being aware of my thoughts and impulses PLUS having time off from capitalism created a 3 month hellscape of wading through my inner shit. I didn’t even know what I was doing at the time, to be honest. I was just trying to survive the day and the noise of my mind. I felt like I was going crazy. I still do to an extent. But I’ve seen enough progress that I at least have a bit of hope and faith in the process of awakening to your subconscious. But I didn’t have the language for that for most of this time. So I’ve been meeting a lot of my demons without even knowing it the last few months. And this is where the food thing really applies, because I decided I was going to let myself use food to cope. I could tell I was going through something really dark and intimate with my Self and I guess it just seemed like a bad idea to also try to control my impulse to comfort and distract myself the major way that I know how. So that my numbers came back so shitty,… well, I’m not surprised. I let myself do that.

But now that I see the numbers, I feel less clarity. I feel that “falling” feeling like I need to reach out and grasp something,… get control,… before I can't catch myself and I am lost. More literally, get a healthier control over the feeding of this animal body before this animal body suffers real consequences and I lose life opportunity due to my own choices (or were they really choices and just a survival mechanism that I decided I don’t like because of how obsessed with being alive I am?). What if I reconciled with all of my demons in the next year and THEN had a heart attack and was in a wheelchair or something? Would I be regretting things at that point, even still? Hating myself for all that candy? Or was the outcome I really wanted all this while to just reconcile with myself (my demons) and be at peace? Would a day of peace be worth prioritizing reconciliation with the self over the longest possible life span?

I don’t know.

I just know that there’s a lot going on in my subconscious around food that I have never put into words and that keeps me in this cycle. I’ve typed some of them out here today but I can sense there is still so much more to say. Another day.