We Shall Not Regret the Past...

nor wish to shut the door on it.

To any 12-step program member, this sentence is burned on our brains. My response to it is, "Oh, really???" Just as my response to the Promises of recovery is, when read aloud, "Do we think these are extravagant promises?" and everyone answers "We think not!" I either keep my mouth shut or say out loud, "Hell, yes!"

My past has caught up with me in recent months. It has been heartening to know that some bridges didn't burn down completely, that others were never erected but always had the potential to build, but they ALL send me whizzing through time to 1972 - 1984. I've been through one of the worst depressions I've had in a very long time.

I can tell how bad it was because it's slowly -- s-l-o-w-l-y -- lifting. I've actually told four people about it and three of them offered understanding &and faith. My mother, who last week was on my ass about insurance and retirement, said, "You're a strong person, Francie. You've weathered a lot when a lot of people would have given up." That felt validating. Admitting it is a first step. Realizing yesterday that Daisy is my anchor to having to get through it was a second step to crawling up. Having a fierce crying jag that has been building for weeks was good.

It's all been made worse, of course, by losing my abstinence & then getting off sugar again. Yesterday was Day Three & I was jittery and hyper-emotional.

Which was a good time to have something like a six-hour conversation with a friend I haven't spoken to in, um, like 20 years.

One afternoon when I was an undergraduate at the University of Montana, she stopped and asked if I was Francie Kuffel. I am sure I said coldly, "Yes." Undeterred, she introduced herself. I knew her brother from high school. That's all either of us can remember but it began a sporadic friendship for about ten years that was both acutely painful for what and who she was and what and who I wasn't.

One of the things she did that made me break down crying as we talked was fall in love with my hair. Age has done things to my hair. It's more red than black now. It's straight after being naturally curly. But I have glorious hair and she would sit me down in a chair in the back yard and trim it and brush it and gush over it.

It was the first time in my life I felt feminine. It would, in retrospect, be another 20 years, until I lost weight, that I felt feminine again.

All through the early chapters of PFT when I lament about the life obesity prohibited me from having is imbued with C. She was an adventuress. In fact, she googled me when she and her cousin got to reminiscing about showing up at my door at 5 a.m. to haul me off to Mount Lolo to watch an eclipse of the sun. I didn't go but I packed them off with chocolate cake for their adventure.

How fucking perfect. What a microcosmic look at my entire life. No I won't go but I'll send you off with cake. I'll provide but not participate.

I don't happen to remember this episode but it burns with all the toxin of my M.O. in life, all the things I didn't do.

It turned out, however, in the course of the conversation, that I said some perspicacious things about her that she found to be among the nicest things anyone has ever said about her. At that same time, I listened to her success and the aspects of her thick fruitcake of a life & felt I'd never lived or achieved anything at all.

There have been two other old friends who've touched my email lately. One I have yet to seriously deal with, the other I exchange witticisms with on Facebook, but by the skin of my teeth. She was brilliant in high school and is still an elfin character. I was thinking of her when I told my mom today that I'm SO tired of battling depression & food -- so, so, so, so weary of it. Had anyone noticed, which no one did in Missoula, Montana, in 1973, that this 14-year-old kid was drowning, I could have been so much more. Instead, the consensus, of course, was that I needed to lose weight.

I need fucking drugs, man, and the second I graduated from high school I asked for a shrink, which was pretty self-preserving as I entered my Suicide Years. But regrets have been flowing through me like another set of white cells. The men I couldn't have. The travel I didn't do. The sexiness I did not feel. Reed College, my dream school, far above my pathetic grades. C still visits her favorite teacher and asked if I was fond of her. I laughed. I had what I now know was a nervous breakdown my senior year and was out of school for three weeks. "It's just as well," said-teacher said when she asked if anyone knew what happened to me, "she doesn't belong in school."

She was an English teacher.

So, no, I'm not fond of that teacher.

Depression is like this, OK? I've been feeling on the verge of tears for weeks. It built. I self-medicated and was excessively tired. I played computer games and brooded and hated myself for not doing something constructive. The crisis, like scarlet fever, came yesterday: the fever broke enough for me to feel my feelings, to cry for not going to Reed College or playing the Poetry Game in graduate school, to look at Daisy and realize I was alive because I have to BE with this animal. To realize I had not been admitting for a while that I didn't want to be alive: the battles against myself are so so exhausting. To tell my first, beloved shrink that I'm in a Bad Place, and my friend D., and my friend J., who completely got it and didn't act as though I was insane when I asked in a small voice if she thinks Daisy loves me. To actually tell my mother what I've been going through and have her respond sympathetically.

Depression is like this: I published a book that cracked open an experience many women share that led to a cyberspace community of sharing. Maybe I saved -- or salved -- some lives. Now I'm getting ready to edit a book about the shame of regaining weight in an effort to tell these woman it's OK. It's OK to gain weight, it's what we're unfortunately wired for. And whatever battle we chose with regards to our weight -- diets, exercise, acceptance, surgery, depression -- they're all OK to. Because it's a war between self and self, society and self, and we Americans haven't won any wars lately. It's OK to love our success and to deeply revere and respect our failure and to celebrate every day that we stick to whatever option we have decided to fight for and with in this battle. Hell, let's celebrate every hour.

And then depression is like this: telling myself all that doesn't make me believe it. I'm still the young fat woman standing at the front door with chocolate cake wrapped in tinfoil, sending my friends off to have fun, have an adventure, drive 9,000 feet up closer to the sun while I went back to bed.

I hope to God I said no because I was writing a paper on Troilus and Cressida that day or had an Italian test coming up. I hope I was reading Proust at 3 pages an hour. And I'm grateful C and I found each other and that maybe I can make up for lost time in some small way.

Say a prayer for me, friends. I'm working hard to climb back up to the daylight. One day I'd like to be close to a tricky sun.

MIA

But I am, in fact, in action.

First of all, thank you so much for the many compliments. I suppose I know I'm pretty but we all know what it's like when we're squirming in our own bodies, of which this week has been chockful of. This is the email I wrote my sponsor this morning in lieu of a formal inventory. It seems crafted enough to post here...

Monday: jury duty and my air conditioner died. Taking it out of the wall pulled out part of the wall.

Tuesday: Bought a new air conditioner for twice what I expected to spend. Called Craig's List guy to install. He did but my socket is so old it couldn't plug in. All stores closed for converter.

Wednesday: Found out there is no converter, the socket would have to be changed. Joe from CL brought an electrician friend over and changed socket. Plugged in air conditioner. It works for less than a minute before shutting down and flashing numbers at us. Called store -- they told us to return it. Joe went out to get tools to do so and saw his car being towed.

Luckily, the weather was cooling off. I went out and bought another fan because I don't have the time to go to store & be here for installation until Saturday if I'm fair to Joe & fair to myself.

So. I'm out approximately (and this is gonna hurt because I haven't added it up yet): 430 (air co.) + 120 (removal) + 25 (car service) + 140 (Joe, so far) + 40 (electrician) + 2 (subway): $757. And we still don't know if it's a matter of the wrong amp for air conditioner or the air conditioner itself.

AND the wall will have to be re-drywalled AND we need a sleeve for the air conditioner.

But I'm abstinent. My meals have been small and cold because I'm so fucking hot and so fucking anxious, but they have been self-contained and, if not weighed and measured, not excessive. Today is Day 14 and I've gone from 262 to 252, and yes, I've been drinking my water.

I woke up today and didn't pray. I thanked. Daisy and I stayed here last night rather than at Boomer's house; there were big thunder storms; it's cool but very rainy today. I'm thankful we could stay at Boomer's but we were both very happy to be home, even with the door on the chain, ajar, & fans.

I'm behind in meetings. Will do my best to catch up. One reason I nixed tomorrow night or Saturday morning for the air conditioner is that I want to go to live meetings. I need them.

I haven't done anything nice for anyone because I'm in a nasty, jealous mood -- they have air conditioning, let them put their OWN garbage bales back. I haven't felt in the least feminine -- hard to do when I sweat so much that my hair stand up in thoroughly wet spikes. The scale is part of my higher power right now because I know that every pound I lose will make the heat more tolerable and the walking less painful to my hips and back, and it will help me restore order to the Bat Cave, which is a wreck with a million sizes of clothes for all seasons that don't fit.

I've had to deal with workmen, sales people, hosts and sympathy calls from dog owners, as well as a distraught M, who is borderline suicidal over her eating and in desperate grief about a death in her family. I can only listen & pray and DEAL with what's on my plate and hope that she sees if I can do it, in the same relapse as she's been in, then, maybe, she can try too. She calls me because I'm probably the only person who understands the eating, the weight, the Rooms, the loss, the walking of dogs, and the jealousy of her clients who HAVE family. It's strange that the person who, in a sense, inspired my book (she broke off our friendship, which were the first strong Amazon posts I wrote), turns to me when she's grieving and hurting.

An odd thing about being so focused on one problem -- the restoration of physical comfort and a refuge from the outside world -- is that it takes me to the bones of my misspent life. All kinds of regrets, people, incidents come up as my sadness, physical duress and frustration bubble to near-tears. Things from 20 years ago are vividly in my mind. Other times that were painful replay themselves. I feel self-absorbed and guilty -- was it especially painful for M to walk Daisy (or try to: Daisy is extremely reluctant to walk with anyone but me)? How can I pay for Joe's towed car? Where are the words to address other people's problems -- R's stolen wallet, M's grief, Joe's car?

And why am I alone at 51, dealing with this shit by myself? My alone-ness is very evident.

OK. Enough. Breakfast: 1 c. rice, 1/2 c. cottage cheese, 1 nectarine; lunch: steamed kale & a tomato, 4 oz. chicken; dinner w/ friends, which will be abstinent.

Love to you --

Frances

Mirror, mirror

A friend of mine has entered into a romance that her circle of pals has fair cause to distrust. The man has a history of taking direct aim at women and hurting them badly. This isn't one of those "It's just not working out" break-up mo's. He's always been on the look-out for other women, sleeping around, lying blatantly.

I am alarmed -- for her but more for me.

Maybe we need friends, I was thinking as I walked Zeke on this sunny warmish blowy Friday afternoon, to hold up a mirror to us. If you'd said this to me a week ago, I would have assumed you meant that friends tell us when our labels are sticking out or someone has been putting it out that we put out, but today I can see other ways this truism works.

My first reaction to her news was exasperation. Then I began to brood about it. Why should I get my knickers in a twist about her decision? I don't have to see the guy and wonder if he's telling the truth about why he canceled coming over last night. She has offered to keep quiet about it, knowing that her friends are so opposed to the romance: I don't even have to hear about it unless I ask for details.

Further, she's obsessed about this man for so long that this is the opportunity for her to find out if he's really all that and a bag of chips. I'll go so far as to say that she has a double-load to carry in beginning this relationship. She's got to evaluate him in his own right AND police his person for that doesn't match either of their heads. It's gotta to be tense over there in Loveland these days.

My official reaction was to wish her luck and warn her to protect herself. That's the kind of reaction that's guaranteed to have her prodding for what's underneath such a staid line. What was underneath, I began to realize, isn't pretty and I warned her that my curled lip at the thought of what she's doing has more to do with me than with her, and that it's a good object lesson for us both to see how much any reaction we meet with in life is not about what she (or I or you) have said or done.

I could also say that the name of some of what I feel is wrong. I envy her, but I don't envy her getting together with this guy or for having a relationship. I envy the balls she's shown in taking on such a Lothario. I envy her ability to forgive him, or try to.

The night she told me what she'd done, I had a vivid dream of being committed to an insane asylum where I and the other inmates were hearing voices and living in alternate universes. In the audience was the man I once loved. Sitting very close to him was his current lover. Audience? I don't remember why there was an audience. It wasn't Bedlam but for some reason they were there and he was terribly eager to ask me, apparently normal among the mad people, questions. When I saw him I morphed like Bertha Mason, lunging and spitting to get at him and claw his eyes out. The next day I received an email asking me if I wanted to be someone's "friend" on a website I know he lurks on. It was a bogus invitation but of course I had to go look. He looks very happy with his new love. I thought about how I was that pretty when I was thin. I thought about what he said about why "we" didn't work out. I thought about how he wanted to be friends with me as this new relationship blossomed and how I finally said I couldn't do it. I thought about how I dropped the last opportunity to be in touch with him like a hot coal. I thought about how thinking about him still tears my throat out.

I envy my friend's opportunity at a chance with someone she knows, warts and all. I won't have that opportunity.

Distraction! I thought. Other men! But there really aren't any. And so I had to acknowledge that one man I had an ongoing email/phone relationship with point-blank refused to meet me and how I terminated it because of that, how I pushed at someone else when I felt used and he'd dropped me. I thought about all the men kindasortalmosthovering on the periphery of my life and I envied her gumption to open herself up to that world of hurt and the stores of energy it takes even to get to the part that hurts.

"I can't date until the book is done," I said to myself. Well, that's not all that distant now. "I can't date until I've lost weight," I tried not to say. But isn't that a crock of shit? I mean, I'm fat. I'll always be fat. If I'm very lucky, I might get to hide how fat I am in a thin body, but I have a fat head and fat blood and a fat history. Maybe the point is to date someone now so he'll know...the worst of it. I didn't want to write that phrase. The truth of it? The Fat Girl I also love, or who should be lovable as well as the thin one?

Something.

And that, folks, is the first layer of my reaction to my friend's news. It leaves me sad for myself and ashamed of that sadness. Look, the grown-up Frances wants to say to that snarking Francie, YOU dropped two men for being too roughshod on your heart. YOU stated in one sentence how hurt you were and that man disappeared. You've done some good housekeeping in the last year so you don't get to be all regretful about the past you tossed out for very good reasons.

But her chance has reminded me of my lost chances and informed me of how reluctant I am -- and how undeserving I feel -- to court new ones.

It's not about her. It's not even about me wishing I were in her shoes.

It's about me and the mirror she's held up for me to see the state of my heart in.