madermouse's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Steam Steam. I take an extra 5 minutes in the shower again, something I used to do, years ago. Tom yells at me when he hears I haven't turned on the fan in the bathroom. "Do you want us to get black mold behind the walls! Turn on the damn fan or crack the window honey!??" I crinkle my nose and crank up the hot water and just stand under the stream doing nothing. My hair is already washed and conditioned. My faced is already scrubbed. This artificial rain doesn't cleanse away guilt, but I stand there and wait for the steam to do it's job. I close my eyes and slip away, thinking about how old I'm getting. I'll be thirty two this August....hard to believe. Thirty-fucking-two. What have I accomplished this year? Let's see, well, I filed bankruptcy - that's something to be proud of. I moved to this mid-western hell-hole and lived with my parents for 4 months. (and they say you can never go back!!)I left a $17.00 an hour job in the city to see if I really could cook for a living. Turns out I can and I'm good at it, and now I just have to figure out how to pay rent and go to the doctor and buy food and clothes and drive a car on $8.00 an hour. The hot water runs out. I turn off the spigot, and pull back the curtain. The mirror is clouded enough that I can't fully see my naked body. Thank god for steam. Well, I mean, I can still see my outline - one that has those wide curves and rounded edges which have grown wider and rounder with the past two years. I towel off and put on dirty sweatpants and one of the 4X men's t-shirts I bought at Wal-Mart. I've grown out of the big-girl sizes there now. I'm back in the land of specialty catalogue shopping - only this time I don't have a credit card, and it's making the whole thing sting quite a bit. Or maybe it just stings more because I know who I've been. Before. I know who I was - this energetic, motivating empowered woman who had control. She had strength. She used her passion for cooking to create healthy food that tasted good. She was a woman who was approaching thirty and saw a whole life ahead of her, full of promise and opportunity. She never let the mirror steam over. I feel the pang of all the things that confine me again. The small chairs at the theatre, the tight booths at restaurants, the loud creak of my mother's couch as I sit down on it. I struggle with stairs and sweat on a cool afternoon and I'm about 35 pounds away from not being able to wipe my ass again. I feel the sting, no - the sharp knifing agony - of all these things again and yet I wait. I don't know what for. Like maybe I think something will snap and I'll wake up and be that person again -the one who lost 120 pounds, the one who was proud, the one who saw glimpses of beauty in herself. I joined Curves a couple of weeks ago, and I go three times a week. At the end of 30 minutes, I'm sweating and high as a kite. I'm so out of shape. But then I go home and eat Dairy Queen for lunch and a whole bag of Doritos and even as I sit in the drive-thru, deciding what to order, I know that I'm sabotaging even the smallest attempts at being healthy. Yet I keep driving thru. I started taking Idebenone, you can google and read about it if you like. And it helps with depression among other things. I can feel it working - in my head - feel it re-arranging things in there. I have no side-effects from it, other than some slight drowsiness. It helps me do things that I normally can't do when I'm depressed - like get out of bed, like get dressed, like clean the house and run errands and be social. And I'm thankful for this. If you've read my journal, you'd might remember that I've tried many SSRI's like prozac, paxil, etc... for depression and couldn't handle any of them. So I'm thankful to find something that works. Yet, in the midst of this normalcy, amidst the ability to function like a normal non-depressed human being...there is still the sadness. It never goes away, and I don't understand it. I don't know how to describe it, but it's like for every pound of fat I've gained, I carry around an equal pound of sadness. Sadness for the loss of the person I am not. Sadness for the loss of the person I was and sadness for the person I can't seem to become. And the weight of this sadness is so heavy, I am paralyzed by it. and the cycle continues. I am moving back to Portland in the next few months. My husband bought his plane ticket, and leaves in two weeks to find a job and find an apartment for us. I long for the city life, but I know that a change of environment isn't the cure-all. If I've learned anything by being here - it is simply this: No matter where you go, there you are. And so I struggle to find the power to change from the inside out. Because I know it's the only thing that makes sense. 3:34 p.m. - April 19, 2005 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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