It’s hard to eat a salad with a plastic fork

I got back from lunch about an hour ago. I’m still giving the overhaul to my eating habits the old college try, but it’s not easy in any way, shape or form. It sucks. I can be good all day at work for the most part, but it’s at home, in the evening that I am totally, and completely out of control. I’ve been repeating this mantra in my head over the past few days “the only limits we have are those we place on ourselves”. If I am so good at placing limits on my success, my happiness, my sex life…whatever, why can’t I take some of that and make it constructive and limit my food intake, limit my tv time, limit my pot smoking, limit my laziness and napping… but instead I do what I just wrote…limit my ability for success. I get so damn frustrated with myself and just slap the old failure sticker on myself and go off the deep end. I KNOW what I NEED to do…why am I holding myself back? Why can’t I just push through this? Why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why…. I’m so sick of asking that of myself over and over and over again.

I set my mind on Monday to get our piles and piles and piles of laundry. What’s so different then about setting my mind to not smoke before dinner and dishes or to just quit all together. Why can’t I decide as soon as the alarm clock goes off in the morning that I am going to get up then and not hit the snooze button twice. It’s about getting tough with myself…no one else will do it for me. I’m really good at being tough on Rob to make sure he gets the things done he needs to do, but me…nope. In a kind of backwards way, I walk all over myself. I would never allow a friend or loved one to put off showering or cooking, or picking up the phone to call me because they are too tired…but I let myself do it all the time. If I knew a friend was putting off paying bills like I am, I’d shake them and set them straight. I’m 3 months behind in our bills, I’m not sure Rob really knows. I’ve been pissing our money away on clothes (size 24 no less) and other crap I don’t need (make-up, jewelry, food treats) to make myself feel better for all of these failures that I keep experiencing….keep LETTING happen.

My mom was visiting Wed to Tuesday just past. We had a good weekend. I know she’s been worried about me because of what happened when I called her at Desmond’s the week before. I was so inside my head about her not answering my calls, I thought she was dead, or mad at me… when I did get a hold over her I was hyperventilating and bawling my eyes out…just out of control. What scared her is that she has never heard me like that before…truth is, I’m like that every time I have “an episode” I just don’t usually pick up the phone then. So, I think she was really trying to keep our weekend about us, and not let recent events with my brother and his wife ruin our time like it has so many times before. There was one blip that happened Friday night she was here, after too much wine, and she started in on me with all these you shoulds:

–          “you should use the treadmill every day”

–          “you should follow weight watchers, LA weight loss, Jenny Craig as a kick start to loosing weight”

–          “you should do a load of laundry every night so that when the weekend comes or we’re out of clean undies it doesn’t seem so overwhelming to get it done”

–          “you should make a list of chores and divide them by night for each you & Rob so that when the weekend comes or when we have company coming it won’t take us hours to clean – we’d always be on top of it”

I know all of this stuff. Trust me, I should myself to death all the time. But what no one understands, and what I’ve been trying to say all along…I don’t have the energy for this. If I walk, do laundry, cook and clean up dishes Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, then Thursday & Friday roll around and I don’t have enough left in me to even make it through the day at work. I end up finding a dark little meeting room to nap in for 20 minutes in the afternoon. I’m too tired to cook, I make poor decisions for dinner, don’t clean up after, let things pile up and back where I god-damned started! I beat myself up, feel like a failure, wonder why I bother and decide not to even try….it’s such an ugly and disgusting circle. My mom just didn’t get it…until I was yelling at the top of my lungs that I’m tired, I’m always tired. What part of tired is so complicated for people to understand?! Or…is it me? Is being tired a normal thing and people just push through it? Am I over-exaggerating…I’ve can’t remember ever feeling differently than this, so I have no point of comparison. Just all the “shoulds” in my life

. I should have more energy after exercising. I should have more energy from eating all the right foods. I should have more energy after taking hundreds of dollars of supplements over the past 5 months. BUT I DON’T. Some days it gets to the point that if I could get my hands on meth, I might consider trying it. I’ve heard that there’s an epidemic of housewives who take it for the energy and weight loss. Some days I’m so tired that the promise of swiss cheese brains, meth marks and a life down the toilet, don’t seem all that bad in trade for energy and weight loss. Sad, but true. It’s desperate. Caffeine…laughable. Energy drinks don’t cut it. Can’t get ehpedra any more. What else can I do to give me that kick in the ass that I need…to hop on the treadmill and not feel dead, to have enough energy that the reaching for high sugar high carb foods for energy stop, to get on with my life and start fucking living!

Every “issue” I have is tied so closely, tangled in fact, with each and every other issue. My self esteem…well there’s really none to speak of. I can hardly look at myself in the mirror. I am disgusted when I catch my reflection in a window. I hate having sex with my husband…I repulse my own self that much. I’ve tried to love myself as I am, but it’s not working. It’s all tied to my weight, how it makes me look, and the one thing that can solve it, it all wrapped up in the above. It’s so confusing…and thinking about it all, worrying about it, planning to change it, not changing, beating myself up, over and over an over again…it’s vicious. I wouldn’t wish these thoughts and feeling on my worst enemy. It’s like carrying around a sack of rocks…it all weighs me down…

A manager at work is off today to be with her daughter. Her daughter’s best friend from Grade 6 (now 22) committed suicide Sunday night. I’ve been thinking a lot about this girl I’ve never met, wondering how bad her demons were to think that this was the only solution – to decide and carry through with this way out. In some ways I can see a bit of myself here….it’s scary. How long can you battle the same things without success. How long can a person hate themselves and/or their life situation, seeing it repeat and snowball over and over, before you say that’s it. I need out. How many times can you reach out for help only to find yourself in the same place days, weeks or months later. I’ve thought about it before. I’m grateful that it’s stopped at the thinking stage and has never gone any further. I’m scared that without making changes, permanent changes, that the thoughts might progress – even though I can see the pain it leaves behind for others. Somehow that doesn’t bother me given the pain that I’ve been carrying around for so long. My goal, of course, is to release this pain, find happiness, break the chains that hold me down and soar free. Free from the worry, the agony, the physical pain of hating every inch of my being – inside and out. I hate my weakness’, my broken plans and promises, my procrastination, my lack of energy, my worrying, caring what each and every other person thinks of me and being devastated when they don’t think much. I hate my expanding waist line, the closet full of clothes that don’t fit, the size 24 pants I now need to wear, the spots on my inner thighs from them rubbing together all the time, the thick strapped ugly gramma bras I have to wear because of my size, the unhealthy look of my skin and hair. I hate hating myself. I hate the prospect of feeling all of this for another second let alone minutes, hours, days and months it would take to fix it all. Right now I even hate the word hate.

This wasn’t really the entry I intended to write, but I guess I must have needed this since the words came so easy. At least something came easy….