Spring, cruel, butterflies hurting, yadda yadda

Ugh, I feel so sad today. All I feel is the limits on everything - time, energy, relationships. Looking back feels framed in loss and regret and looking forward is framed in fear and hesitation. I still don't know that I'm making the right choice by going to Florida to get my MFA next year - all I know is that it felt like the only way out of my life right now. Or, not the only way, but the way that the universe was giving me. Or something.

But now I have to leave my best friend, and before I can leave her, she and I have to spend a few months separating ourselves from each other emotionally so that we're a little more prepared to separate physically. So we still live together and we still love each other but we're starting to make a thousand little rips in the fabric of our life that we've built and loved for the past two years. I still feel like I betrayed both of us by deciding to leave, even though we both wanted me to do what was best for me as an individual and not necessarily what was best for us as a pair - because us as a pair is going to survive no matter what. But there has always been a tacit acknowledgement with us that we prioritize our friendship higher than most other things in life, and it may look co-dependent from the outside, but we don't really care because it makes us happy and to hell with how it looks. Then I went and made a decision that looks right from the outside but that hurts both of us and puts something else ahead of being together. It feels like tearing down the best thing in my life, the thing that gives me the most joy and makes me feel the least alone, and the loss of it just feels so senseless and irrevocable.

Another one of my closest friends moved to Boston a couple of years ago, and it was like a gift from the universe just for me - for the first time in years, the people that I loved the most were almost all together in one place. I literally couldn't get over how lucky I was. I have dinner once a week with those two friends. We talk about everything and they help me sort out my views on literally everything - from the experience of surviving in the world to what makes The Office so awesome. The weekly dinners have been an emotional lifeline for each of us at different times over the past couple of years. That's going to go away (for me, at least - presumably they'll keep meeting) because of a decision that I made, and now there's a piece of my mind that's counting down how many dinners I have left.

And my sister is going to be away for the summer, which I didn't think about much until this week. That means that she and my mom and I won't get to go strawberry picking together, or to the beach, or shopping at Costco. I love shopping at Costco with my mother and my sister. They're really funny, and they think I'm really funny, and we just laugh at each other and make the rounds of all the free samples. That's another one of the biggest joys of my life - doing something or nothing as a member of a three person family whose dynamic has been worked out over years to make us all feel more or less comfortable and welcome together - that I'm losing and I won't have back for a while.

That also means that when I go to my mom's house this summer it will be just the two of us for the first time since high school. It means that I won't have a family dynamic to hide in. If I'm depressed or sad, my mom will see it, and we'll talk about it, and I'll have to deal with it instead of just ducking and covering and hoping someone else will come along and deal with it for me. And my mom will be worried about me and will question whether I made the right decision if it's making me unhappy, and she'll be right to question it - and I don't know how to deal with that because if I did, I wouldn't still be questioning it myself.

For a few minutes yesterday, I was excited about Florida - just excited, with no emotional baggage. About getting a new apartment, a new job, a new life. For a short time I was thinking about what I'm going to gain instead of what I'm in the middle of losing. Then at dinner with a group of co-workers, someone said something about having moved to Worcester ("Worcester: because dirty is the new clean") for his wife, and how if you make decisions based on being with the people you love, everything else just falls into place. And my stomach dropped and the world went gray and my eyes filled with tears and I didn't know what I was doing again.

I'm so tired of being here, in this sad, scared place. I tried to make an appointment with a therapist who had been recommended to me but she isn't taking on new patients, and I still haven't called anyone else on the list. Because evidently I just don't care that much about my own happiness. Awesome, me. Way to go.

One bright spot is that this morning my mom offered to fly down with me to Florida to look for apartments late in the summer. A few years ago I might have resented the implication that I couldn't do it myself, or felt like I wouldn't be able to follow my own instincts and make my own decision around my mom's instincts and opinions. Now, it just makes me feel so much less alone and so much more taken care of, and I'm so grateful that my mom is going to help me with something that I'm finding really, really hard.

State of the Me

So! OK. I have been somewhat depressed, off and on, since going off of Zoloft. It's been sort of sloggy, thick, blechy, tough going. Nothing has been too bad, but NOTHING has been too great either, which is sort of the problem. I'm really, really tired of trying SO HARD to do one or any of the following things on any given day:

1) Get out of bed, because I have a job, and I want to keep my life moving in a general forward direction, and also I want to keep my apartment and don't particularly want to have to move in with my mother (as much as I enjoy her company), so I really need to get to said job, which necessitates climbing into my car dressed and somewhat bathed, which is mutually exclusive with staying in bed, which is what I would really LIKE to do, because job = blech.

2) Go for a run, because I LIKE RUNNING, and because I'll feel better about myself and my life afterwards, and even if I don't, I really really don't want to gain anymore weight, which brings me to item #3. . .

3) Stop eating everything in THE WORLD in an attempt to make myself feel better, because it will not work, and I no longer fit into the majority of my clothes, and while Lane Bryant clothes are really, really cute, they are also somewhat expensive, and I can't afford to buy all of them ALL AT ONCE, so I should probably chill out on the weight gain by way of chilling out on the EATING ALL THE TIME.

4) Do anything productive at work. Anything at all. Just so that, when my lovely boss who wants me to go far in this company asks, "what have you been up to?" I can have an answer that WON'T break her heart by requiring her to FIRE MY ASS.

In order to get to a place where I'll be better at doing the items on the list above, I'm trying to accomplish the following:

1) Stop feeling so ashamed of being kind of messed up. A lot of people are kind of messed up. No one else seems to blame me or judge me for it, so I should probably join the club and get over it.

2) Stop feeling so ashamed about eating and gaining weight. I have had my reasons for eating more than my body wants to eat for my whole life - on some level, it worked to make me feel protected and safe and sane. So naturally, if I remove the limits I've imposed on myself in the past, about things like calories, and what kinds of foods are OK to eat for breakfast, I'm going to blow up at hyper-speed like a life raft.

But I removed those limits for a reason, because I can't stand the thought of being afraid of food for the rest of my life, so I'm just going to follow this path to the end and find out whether it leaves me fat or thin. Personally, I'm rooting for thin. But I'm travelling through the Town of Fat right now, and that's just where I am, and being ashamed of it is a burden that is too heavy to carry along with me.

3) Chill the frick out. I just got back from Peurto Rico and I'm going to Senegal for two weeks and after that I'm going to Mexico, and I don't want to look back on this time and remember being all angsty. There are a lot of things to enjoy as they come, even if I don't quite have it in me to get excited about them beforehand. And in between and after the trips there are dinners with friends and the fact that the days are getting longer and awesome mix CDs and running playlists to create. So I'm not going to force myself to be happy, but I'm going to try to stop second guessing myself and criticizing myself and, let's be honest, basically hating on myself EVERY SECOND OF EVERY DAY, and just let the seconds go by and bring with them whatever piece of my life they've got to offer.

Yeah. . . that might be a little ambitious. Which is what brings me to that stupid, annoying thing that I think I might have to do in order to get on accomplishing THAT list of things.

1) Go back to therapy. I think it's probably time. As much as I hate the thought of starting the whole stupid process and filling in a stranger on all of my issues and being all, "well, my parents got divorced when I was little, so. . . yawn. . . excuse me, but if you look up 'divorce' in your Intro to Counseling Psychology textbook it can fill you in, I'm just going to take a little nap, wake me up when you get to 'abandonment issues' and 'poor sense of self worth'. . ." I think I need someone else to kind of climb into my head, take a look, throw some shit around, bash down some walls, and just generally do some renovation and upkeep.

Sigh.

My sister is awesome

For many reasons, but the subject of awesomeness today is that she inspired me to be OK about taking fat-girl sizes in clothes. A year ago, I didn't fit into fat girl sizes (I was a size 10, so, no Lane Bryant for me) and I was all smug whenever we went into the fat girl stores and I would see a nice shirt or dress - "gee, I WISH I could have this shirt! But I CAN'T! It won't fit me! They don't carry my size here I'M TOO THIN HA HA HA HA HA!" (Well, not in so many words -what I actually said tended to be a little more condescending and a little less. . . loud) Even the jewelry was too big (which really did sting - Lane Bryant has some sweet jewelry).
That was about 20 pounds ago, and now even my fat jeans are a bit binding. My usual tendency when I get this fat (actually, I've never been THIS fat before) is to continue wearing the clothes that are too tight for me until I shrink back into them again - because buying new clothes to fit my bigger body would be giving in, right?
Yeah. That theory doesn't really fit in with my new self-acceptance project. The only way I know for sure to shrink back into my "thin" clothes is to count calories. The very thought of counting calories makes me want to puke, then eat a chocolate cake. I swore off counting calories knowing that I would probably gain weight, and I decided that being fat and happy was better than being thin(ner) and fearful and controlling. So. . . now I'm fat(ter). I knew this would happen. Time to suck it up (. . . but not in) and deal with the consequences.
So my sister is better at this than I am because a) she's fatter than me and always has been and b) she swore off counting calories before I did, so she's had longer to sort of get over it. When she first started shopping at fat girl stores, I told her that it was like giving in, that she wasn't THAT fat, and that she should just take the largest size at the regular store.
Then, seriously, I saw how awesome she looked in her new clothes that fit her body. And she knew she looked awesome, and as a result would just sort of glow while she was wearing them, and that made her look even awesomer.
So then I started to think, hey, maybe I should try finding clothes that fit my body. Up until now I was using the excuse that I don't have money for a new wardrobe, since my body's changing, and in theory after I get over the binging stage of my after-diet-body-image-rehab I'll lose this weight again anyway, so what's the point of investing in new clothes?
But that? Is bullshit. The truth is that I was so afraid to settle into this body for long enough to clothe it, like to do so would be to doom myself to stay at this weight. No, I don't have a ton of money, but that's what after-Christmas sales are for. No, I don't know how long my body will be at this weight, and I hope that I won't be eating like this - frantically - forever. But squinting my eyes, refusing to look at it, and hoping that it will go away soon is no less destructive, no less hurtful towards my body and myself, than dieting was.
So I'm going shopping, and I'm going to look as awesome as my sister. It's a role reversal for us. For our whole lives, there was a tacit understanding that, well, of course she would rather look like me (at least in terms of our bodies) - I was thinner. This is the first time that I'll be emulating her, and I just want to say, she makes a kick-ass role model.

Get out your tickets and get ready to board the roller coaster of crazy, because I'm officially phasing out the zoloft, starting yesterday!

A few months ago, my company announced that they're changing their health plan to a high deductible plan with an HSA (which basically means that if you're healthy, you save money, and if you're not healthy, you get screwed. But physical illness is just moral weakness, right? Right! Buck up, sick people!) and I was thinking about how much my zoloft would cost over the course of the year. I've gone generic, so the cost wouldn't be nearly as bad as it would have been a year ago, and it wasn't really about the money, anyway. If I had to pay every red cent of a brand-name zoloft prescription out of my own pocket, I would, if that were the only way to ward off the depression. If someone told me that, in order to avoid falling into a depressive pit, I had to behead a live chicken and bathe in the blood every morning, I'd do that too. Anything, anything, to build a big, strong wall between me and the depression.

I'd thought before about going off of the zoloft, and each time, the thought caused a panic reaction - my body got tense, my stomach flip flopped, and I could feel myself getting angry at the world - as though someone were actually standing there, trying to take my zoloft away from me. "Go ahead," I would think. "Just try to pry it out of my cold, dead hands."

This time, it was different. I didn't feel angry or defensive. Instead, I felt curious. I wanted to see what I'm like without zoloft - what my life as a grown-up would be like without zoloft. For me, going on anti-depressants was a stage of maturing - I did it as one aspect of the process of learning to take care of myself. Taking anti-depressants is, to me, part of being an adult.

Now, I want to find out what it means to be an adult without them - whether I have the ability to manage my depression by managing my life, without the medication. I want to try to be sane by cultivating habits of sanity - good nutrition, good exercise, good choices like time for meditation and plenty of sleep.

It's been about five years since zoloft marked a new chapter in my life - a chapter where I'm capable of getting up in the morning and looking forward to simple things like a cup of coffee. A chapter where I can look back and see how overwhelmingly unhappy I was. A chapter where I don't have to struggle up a mountain of effort just to make a convincing appearance of being like everyone else.

I love zoloft - that sounds silly, but it's true. It's representative of so much in my life - freedom, independence, hope, strength. The ability to help myself. Now I want to see if I can take those things in, from all of the tools that I've learned to use in my daily life, without taking the pill anymore.

In a way, phasing out the zoloft is a technique for forcing myself to be more disciplined about creating my life. If I have a reason for eating, sleeping, working, and living well - avoiding depression - I'll be better about sticking to the habits that reflect what I want out of life. I'll have to be. There won't be as much room for error.

I came to terms a long time ago with the fact that my depression isn't like a disease that can be cured. It's more like cancer - you go into remission, prepared to deal with it if and when it presents itself in a familiar or new form. It's a part of me, and not always a completely negative part - but that's a whole other post in itself. So I'm not looking to eradicate depression, and I don't expect that I've been cured. That's not why I'm going off. Actually, I'm not sure why I am going off, except that a little voice inside me said that it's time to try.

So here goes - Day One of spring cleaning my life, aligning my habits with my desires, and making a conscious effort to buffer my head, heart and soul against The Crazy. Brought to you in part by my new, shiny, lower zoloft dose.

Wish me luck!

Kittens and Zoloft

If it were up to me, every depressed person would be given a kitten during the course of their treatment. Maybe not at the beginning, when they still don’t know that there is a way to live other than struggling from breath to breath. But later – when the medication or the meditation or the therapy has begun to take take hold, the pain begins to empty from the corners of the mind, and there is space where there was never space before, time that is not devoted to suffering or being numb – I believe that a kitten can be a very good thing indeed.

Note that I suggest a kitten and not a puppy. I don't think that a depressed person should ever commit themselves to something that will interrupt their sleep or destroy a physical space that they consider sacred and safe, and a puppy will, without malice or intention, do both.

But a kitten requires very little and gives very much. A kitten needs only to be fed, occasionally taken to the vet. A kitten – miracle of all miracles – will begin to use a litter box almost as soon as you show it how. A kitten respects your space. Its demands are quiet and unobtrusive, and can be easily fit into the cracks of your own raging, hungry needs – for sleep, for peace, for sanity.

Depressed people stand on the edge of a horrible blackness, and their fears and needs crowd behind them, whispering and nudging. Kittens teach balance. They nap, and then they wake up. They eat, and then they stop. They fight, and then they cuddle. They play, and then they nap again. For a kitten, a nap is not a battle lost, not a withdrawal from sensation, not a symptom or a trigger or a weakness. A nap is what you do when you’re tired. A nap is what you do until you feel like getting up again.

I would have written this column earlier today, but I had a kitten in my lap who was asleep and happy to be so. Kittens teach you patience. Kittens teach you how to fit your needs in with someone else’s.

When I knew I would begin to lose the words I wanted if I didn’t start typing, I finally moved her. She looked at me and blinked, and then lay back down on the chair. Kittens teach you that sometimes it’s OK to push someone away.

After I’d been sitting at my computer for a few minutes, she came over and climbed up in my lap. Kittens teach you that when you push someone away, usually they will come back.

They lick each other’s backs and heads, and snuggle together to go to sleep. When I am holding one of them, sometimes they reach out a lazy paw and rest in on my cheek. They always remember and remind of the pleasure of being touched.

People say that the problem with kittens is that they grow up to be cats. This is ridiculous. Cats have even more to offer than kittens. Cats are like all of the beautiful, graceful middle aged ladies that I know who make it look so good to grow older. They know how to love and give without sacrificing themselves, how to be affectionate without being desperate, how to be self-deprecating without being self-debasing.

On weekdays, my kittens wake me up before my alarm so that I will get up and feed them. Even if I go back to bed right afterwards, I look out the window and see the sun. Kittens teach that, even when you sleep through them, there are mornings.