I decided that I need to get my spending habits and my eating habits under control.
So here's my first thought:
"I shall go to Starbucks with my trusty notebook and get a strawberry blended lemonade with whipped cream, and sit outside and go over my budget and grocery list and see where I can cut costs and calories..."
Can you see the discrepancy? I shall SPEND MORE MONEY (buying a strawberry lemonade) while considering dieting ( DRINKING PURE SUGAR AND FAT...)
So in my attempts to save money and lose weight, I am actually spending money to gain weight.
EGADS!!!
All irony aside, the underlying desire is, I want to be in a different environment than my home to chill out with my notebook. I can't think at home due to too many distractions. (...I should write Shelby and email...I should call PW Stain...What's in the fridge?)
I want to focus on my goals, saving money and creating a new diet plan. (I gained 20 lbs in the last 8 months) This requires plotting out whole new recipes and grocery lists.
Besides, I think I have a coupon somewhere for a free beverage from Starbucks. That takes care of the money aspect. I'm not giving up the whipped cream though.
Regrets
No one likes regrets.
I thought of mine, today, passing a tattoo parlor, full sleeves tatted guy with peircings arms crossed standing in the doorway watching me walk by...
I thought, "I wish I had pierced my nipples years ago."
Because I always loved the look of nipples with delicate nipple rings. (not the big thick rings with balls, mind you, but a feminine, delicate, thin ring...)
But I didn't do it because I didn't want scar tissue messing with my milk ducts in case I had a child.
And now, I know I will not birth children, so it would theoretically be a perfect time to get my nipples peirced, my dream of 21 years finally come true...
But my boobs.
Alas, my boobs.
They no longer look like they did 21 years ago.
Not to mention I lost 50+ lbs.
It just seems so sad to decorate my little deflated balloons.
I love this poster. It made me feel good. I'd googled "demotivational posters" looking for that one with the guy who had his girlfriend tatted on his arm (couldn't find it, if you have it, please send it to me).
But this one made so much sense to me.
I remember incidents of depression prior to first grade, but my chronic depression began on my first day of first grade: I was confused, unsure of where my class was, in a totally foreign environment. By lunch, I was starving. They served me an enchilada in a thin aluminum tray. I had never tasted Mexican food before, and it was too rough for my palate. I'd been brought up on delicate flavors like fluffy white rice, tofu, miso soup. The grittiness of the corn tortilla and acrid earthiness of enchilada sauce were such a shocking affront to my tastebuds. I pushed it away, starving, but unable to eat it. I was so forlornly depressed. That depression stayed with me for the next 35 years.
At that moment, the essence of my soul turned into "this fucking sucks."
The enchilada? My inner self saying, "this fucking sucks."
My home life? My dad had just left my mom, and she was miserable, no goodness left for her children.
"this fucking sucks."
the fact that I was six, seven, eight, nine and beyond,---and had NO control over anything.
"this fucking sucks."
The fact that my mom was/is a control freak and controlled everything, including what I ate, what I wore, how I looked and used her control to make sure I looked like a freak...
"this fucking sucks."
(it sounds pretty harsh, but everyone was wearing saddleback ditto's or jordache jeans, and she's buying me wool kilts because she thinks it looks like a "schoolgirl." WTF?
I wasn't living in whatever Japanese version of England she was fantasizing about. Wake up and smell the 70's. Then beating the shit out of me for borrowing her much more up to date fashionable clothes so I wouldn't be ostracized for looking like such a dork freak...)
Add to "this fucking sucks" -- "and there's nothing I can do about it."
Until I got into my teens, and it became, "this fucking sucks," but let me try to make some decisions within the boundaries of all that sucks.
Some of those decisions included dating a rapist, because home fucking sucked, and dating a rapist fucking sucked, but at least it got me out of a home that sucked for a few hours, even if I had to pay for a few brief moments away from hell fighting for and losing my virginity.
Hi, John! Thanks for the half-assed apology while driving me home. "Sometimes I get a little assertive." YA THINK?!????
The problem is, that when you make all your decisions from "this fucking sucks," you tend to (I haven't figured this out quite completely yet) make decisions towards eradicating the pain, but you can't see beyond the immediate pain. This affects your choices.
So its like someone is twisting your arm behind your back, and it hurts, so you desperately reach for a Tylenol.
Or a bottle of booze.
Or a new outfit.
Or a new relationship.
Not that those options are not valid choices, and valid solutions.
But are they the right solution to that particular pain? Or will they create a whole new set of things that suck, esp if you go back to them time after time? (like the drinking, or compulsive shopping, or whatever...)
I wrote this in an email to Shelby:
When I was a little girl, I didn't dream of becoming a fat, drunk, uneducated meat-eating smoker with no money in the bank living in a one room dump serving cokes in a nudie bar.
And yet, there I was. And in my late thirties, too, not at 19!
(dont' be totally offended, I'm actually cracking myself up)
But truth be told, I'd come from a lifetime of trauma, and that one little room to myself was the safest place I ever had, no parent or tweeker boyfriend beating me up, the job was really fun, and I had a lifetime of pain to numb with the alchohol--including a dead boyfriend.
In one of my college art classes, we each did a performance expressing our lives up til now.
For my life, I instructed everyone to dance in a circle. I watched people dance, and I'd go up to someone, and i'd replicate their movements. I'd go to another person, and replicate their movements. The end of my performance was me, going into the center of the circle, dancing my own dance.
When the TA asked me what that was about, how that was about my life, I said, "I'm just checking out everyone else's groove, looking for my own."
(its getting late! I need to finish up this post to get on with my day!!!)
So what happened is I began taking care of me, to the best of my extent.
I got a degree. I quit eating meat. (the thing about eating meat for me, is that I have suffered so much, I have gotten beaten up so often, starting with my mom, to lovers, that I do not want to inflict physical suffering on any creature if I can help it. And that includes cows and chickens and fish and pigs and pigeons.) I quit smoking. I quit drinking (as an anesthetic. I will have a sip or two of wine with a meal, but very rarely, and I havent' finished a glass in years). I dropped a few pounds.
This was all fine and good, but I never dealt with the emotional stuff. So about 2 years ago, all the shit from past, now that it had an opening because I wasn't drunk-numb, came out in the form of anxiety. Out of the blue, I couldn't do things, like go a mile from my apartment without extreme terror. I was upset, too, because I just lost all this weight and I was like, "I look great!" but I couldn't go to a mall to buy clothes, or even out to a restaurant to be seen. I was like, "what did i lose all that weight for..."
but anyhoo, I started dealing with the emotional shit.
And dealing, and dealing.
I found some stuff called releasing, which did wonders. (google Larry Crane or Hale Dwoskin) That saved my life, and I can now go beyond a mile from my apartment.
I found NVC, which is so line with my values. Non violent communication, a.k.a. compassionate communication. Google Marshall Rosenberg.
It is truly about ending suffering on the planet. All suffering.
Right now, I can still see where I'm still running from the shit inflicted on me as a kid. I can also see where I'm reacting to the shit inflicted on me as a kid. (my interest in NVC is a direct response to that)
I'm in the healing stages, with some growth. After this, I expect to be in a more expansive emotional growth stage. I functioned from "this fucking sucks, and I'm powerless to do anything about it," during my childhood. Then young adulthood, which was "I'm doing what they all told me I should do, and this still fucking sucks." To now, which is a slight inkling of, "when I do what's best for me, because my soul is screaming for it, not because my parents/society/our culture told me I should do it, it doesn't always suck..." and lets see where we go from there...
That's my plan for today. I gotta go. It's after 1 pm and I'm still in my pajamas...
