Snow Day

Well this really sucks -- or maybe it doesn't.

I tripped in the Grand Canyon this October & smashed the lens coverings of my camera. If I was careful, I could still use it but last week it died a true death. I find I'm lonely without my camera. It's been a good friend. I'll replace it in lower-priced everything in Arizona but in the meantime I can't show you what my street looks like under whipped cream.

On the other hand, it's one more reason I don't have to put on 8 million items of clothing & go outside.

I was due to leave The Bat Cave for La Guardia at 6.30 a.m. for my 8.30 flight to Phoenix. When I called American Airlines last night about the weather conditions, the Human said the flight was on but to call as soon as I woke up. At 4.45 this morning I called & found out my flight was canceled & please hold for the next available agent. I knew, after something like 24 hours of cancellations, I had to stay on the line if I was going to get a flight in time for Christmas. At 7.15 a Human voice interrupted the music & woke me up.

"M'mpg m'mph, yabba, bwaf," I said.

"I can't understand you," the Human Agent replied.

I shook myself awake and told her my flight had been canceled and what should we do about this. She reticketed me for Monday afternoon & I found myself truly alone for the first time in years. There was white snow-light pooling into the Cave, I was exhausted from therapy, errands, packing & laundry the day before, Daisy is staying with her auntie & uncle for the duration of my trip & went off to the Fields of Snow in New Jersey yesterday. I keep thinking she's sleeping at the end of the bed & will start whining any minute for a walk. It's very quiet. I slept till 11, called various car services to cancel & re-book, read, called my father, read, napped, considered a spot of interpersonal turmoil I've hit but had had explained to me by New Therapist & now it's 8.30 & I've taken two Klonopin & thought I'd write a spot of blog before it hits.

I love Daisy. You know that. But I'm oddly enjoying this strange solitude that comes from everyone thinking I've left & no dogs to be wrenched around by & resting after an incredibly busy week. I've boarded with dogs for something like two weeks, had a promotional video & podcast to do at Berkley, a day of tradition with my friend Meem (Union Square Xmas Fair, Qi Dong massage in Chinatown), a marathon present-wrapping day & another of delivering, then a Saturday of errands & appointments & chores. Had I made that flight this morning, chances are I'd be a zombie tomorrow. Maybe I'll be a little fresher & rested for today's enforced downtime.

I'm missing a radio interview in Phoenix, however. Never a good feeling but, well, not my fault.

I'm actually looking forward to this two weeks in Arizona, although I know it will have some heart string tugging without Mom. Does Dad really want a tree? Does he really want cookies? Will I be forced to make mincemeat pie with my mother's alliance? Despite the questions of who my father and I really are when it comes to Christmas, I know my presence there will do more good than not. It's a good feeling, to be needed.

One of the gifts of this year's general yuckiness has been a growing correspondence with one of my cousins. She gifted me her kids who have adopted me. I'm like a pig in shit with all these younger first-cousins-once-removed who are snarky, smart, articulate, educated & share some common ancestors we can laugh at. One lives in Arizona & another is coming to stay with Dad and me (I should tell him this, yes?) for a few days.

I'm looking forward to 2010. Angry Fat Girls may have been turned down for some of the media coverage that Passing for Thin got (20/20 wants all five women in the book & I've been creative in protecting their anonymity), but I think AFG is a much more important book. PFT is a sort of fairy tale come true; AFG is the truth waiting at the close of every fairy tale. I want very much to make the point that weight gain is not merely statistically inevitable but biologically and emotionally normal. If we can't live with our selves we won't sustain weight loss and will make being overweight a form of 24/7 punishment. I want to salve some of our collected woundedness.

I want my relationship with my family to mend. New Therapist asked how I expect this to happen & I said, "Organically." I'm not sorry for this hissy fit(s) I threw over not being at Mother's memorial service but I am working through the anger & not mattering to my family. The lump in my throat right now is MUCH smaller.

I'm done with writing about fat & thin. I'm moving on to the kookie side of my life, of being a peasant in Brownstone Brooklyn. Today is the only day I've not had some light bulb flash of something I need to add to one or another planned essay.

I've eked out enough savings to plan another trip abroad, either to Budapest/Krakow or Brussels/Amsterdam. I'm planning to go to Seattle & Portland to promote AFG & will see many friends & extended family there, as well as snoop around Seattle as my potential next home.

Right now my attention is on those things. It's also on the intangibles of what I want from therapy -- setting boundaries, making myself heard, not reacting to stubbing my toe by automatically saying, "I hate myself." It's high time I hie myself off to the Rooms to get those boundaries & automatic reactions applied to food as well. But for now, it's a small miracle that this Panic-Disordered Lady can run a half dozen errands & get herself into a shrink's office.

These are the ruminations of a snow day. I'm grateful this difficult year has less than two weeks to wreck its grief, worry, stress, loneliness & rejection on me. I want, for the first time, to be the driver of the new year, rather than a nervous cringing passenger.

So. Happy new year to all of us. May the snow melt quickly.

Junkie

A close friend called last night and took me to task -- gently, a little bit -- for leaving my blog readers dangling for a month. I'm sorry. I've been on a bender of pain and finding ways to dodge the pain.

I start my days wondering whether it's a Klonopin day (if my heart is beating fast and my stomach is fluttering at the thought of leaving the house, leaving bed), or a codeine day (if my heart is in my throat and I've got to try to show up. Some days I use those drugs, other days I get back in bed as soon as possible, or I zone out on computer games or, of course, at night, sugar.

The other day I realized I was really and truly poisoning myself with sugar. I was dashing to the toilet a half dozen times a day, shaking like a leaf and so, so tired. I have a very fragile few days' reprieve and my energy is a bit better as are my visits to the bathroom.

But each of the last three mornings would have been a codeine morning had I chosen to swig some back. Let me explain that my reaction to codeine is a muffling of bad feelings and a slight heightening of good ones. It's also dangerous if not taken with a lot of water, on a full stomach. And one of the reasons I'm making an effort to reign in my food is that my new shrink commented on Saturday that it's no wonder I'm so tired: I'm hanging onto the cliff above all the grief, fear, anger and love that I need to go through that it's exhausting. He's right. So I'm trying to get rid of the sugar/flour & let myself fall off the cliff, as frightening as that is.

My poor friend who prodded this entry: she got to hear a shard of the abandonment by my family and my fright over Christmas alone with my father. There are other things gnawing my insides as well. I don't have a good feeling about the fate of this book. I know of an adoption going on and my birthday is soon -- I want to write a letter to that baby to tell it how special it is. I've started work on a new book proposal and, wouldn't you know, despite it not being particularly about me, I hit a spot where I'd have to talk about how apart I've always been from my family: dead halt. Nor am I sure I want to write that book. There is a boy on the far, far periphery of my life that I try hard to keep behind my dinky fake Christmas tree on a high shelf who has fallen off the shelf a few times. My favorite aunt died a month after my mother did.

I don't even know where to start letting myself feel this stuff although I'm weepy as I write this.

There have been wondrous things as well, of course. I've discovered a branch of my family who care unjudgmentally about me, who are hilarious, literate, interesting. I spoke with the cousin my age about my aunt's brief illness and that little contact with a cousin I've always looked up to was marvelous. Hero's dad took Daisy and me pheasant hunting. Daisy put up a flight of crows, found a dead pheasant and played nicely with a pheasant from the freezer, her repugnance to feathers a one-off before she caught on. I watched how much fun she had following Hero's lead into the brush, how well she took my commands to go with Uncle S., and her concern when I lagged too far behind. I saw about 95% of what a Lab is all about that day.

I've spent masses of money creating a wardrobe for my hoped-for publicity, mostly in browns (a bright color will really add pounds; black is what is expected of authors, fat women and New Yorkers) & I've assembled a couple of calendars for gifts and a raffle item that were absorbing, amusing projects. I want to start my last calendar, for the Labs, today.

And, after two months of being unable to concentrate on much, I'm sick of chick lit and can, with certainty, say that the only writers in the genre truly worth reading are Helen Fielding and Marian Keyes.

But I've been in heroin zombie mode except for those times I had to get it together, and exhausted from the effort afterward. I keep thinking of first lines of this blog but fall into pointlessness almost as quickly as I think of them.

Fingers crossed that I stay clean. I've got Christmas to do, dogs coming out of my ears, and vegetables to chop.

Life Is a Buffet

Last night Daisy & I stood next to a young woman on a cell phone as we waited for the light to turn across from the Binge Store. Daisy gave her a happy look & she said, "Oh, what a cute puppy!" Unfortunately, Cute Puppy's look of interest swiveled immediately to the trash can on the corner which was filled to the brim with the tossed out eats wrappers of the intersection of Binge Street & Binge Boulevard. She jumped up & started pawing around before I pulled her out. I slid a look to the cell phone woman & said, "She's a buffet eater."

The light changed & I heard her telling her friend my remark. It made me think as I doled out ice cream to Daisy, freezer-burned enough that I think I may have lost my taste for the stuff for a minute. I've been low lately & using my blog as a way of talking. This strange zone of quasi-grief is not the only thing in my life. There is a buffet of moods, observations & tasks that I don't report here.

For one, after I posted yesterday, I took a galley & a gift over to Daisy's Uncle Gerry. We sat in his garden & I told him I'd ordered Eye Witness guides to Belgium, Amsterdam, Cracow & Budapest, but that I'd also been looking at a website called The Blue Army because I have an itch (mainly to buy up the girft shops) to go to Fatima & Lourdes. Fabulous tour but, we agreed, unbearable after a maximum of three hours because of one's fellow tourers. He gave me a handful of leaves to smell, lavender that kept breathing the scent of wellness every time I crushed them again. A small hour-long chat that did worlds to bring me out my morning funk.


I have decided that the only thing more wonderful than a slender woman wearing black balerina flats is a slender woman wearing red ballerina flats.


As Daisy & I were crossing yet another street (sans ice cream for once), we slowed our pace to match a whizzy-haired hippie mom with two kids who were ahead of us. She was loaded down with their backpacks & of course one had the name tag "Maya" hanging from it. I think even Daisy rolled her eyes.

It's odd that if I were to hop on a train & go ten minutes beyond New York City the leaves would either be in great yellow piles or blazing on the trees. Is it the ambient heat of the city that keeps the same trees that turn colors everywhere else from turning here. It's rare to see a tree in fall foliage. I didn't grow up with much of it in Montana so I miss it more keenly knowing it's out there, a ring of fire around the city.

Today I terminated & cut up two credit cards. One company tried to convince me the monthly fee & 23% interest was in my best interest. The other asked what they could do to keep me. I told them I wouldn't keep any credit card that was more than 14%. She very generously came back & offered me 14.99%. "That's 15%," I said. "Yes it is," she agreed. I terminated. Did Citizen's Bank think I would listen to the fourteen rather than the ninety-nine?

And finally, an overheard conversation between a yuppie mom & her eight or nine-year-old son.
Son: Mom, do you like nature?
Silence as both parties think about this question. Son realizes it's a sumb question.
Son: Like, you know, leaves?
Mom: Yes, I like nature. I like trees & flowers & animals...
At which, Daisy began barking her big scary bark for no discernable reason.

I wonder if there is a book in the Blue Army? I wonder what a year of Marion devotion would make me?

Now I have to deal with all the jewelry I brought back from Arizona & confirm the appointment with the possible new therapist. Noon on Halloween. Doesn't that sound...auspicious...?

Contrary to Evidence

This morning it occured to me that I need to go back into therapy. I wish I didn't. I have a pretty good idea of what's wrong with me -- low self-esteem, depression, addiction, social anxiety. I also have some ideas about what's right with me -- talent, intelligence, wit, generosity. But I don't know how to get the two categories to balance each other out.

I've been sitting at my computer most of the morning doing the usual things, taking pleasure in none of them and wondering why I'm doing them. I need to get into my files, three feet away from where I'm sitting, and find some stuff for my publicist and editor. I planned to put away all the clothes that happen to be out. None of this is difficult work but I can't do it.

My brother called to tell me that my last and favorite aunt is in the hospital being treated for lymphoma. I spoke to the cousin I'm closest to in that family and it was good in the moment -- we cried about our parents and laughed about our parents, recounted the many ways her father (my father's youngest brother) and my father were tied together. But when I hung up I was empty. Empty or full. Full of a feeling of what's-the-point. I walked Daisy, then walked myself to the ice cream and cookies at Gristides, took two klonopin and we shared a bingelet.

Today I'm on the verge of tears.

The deal with me is that whatever happens, I accuse myself. Objectively, of course, I didn't kill my mother but it's easier to mutter "I hate myself" than be sad. That has to be fixed. So far, I haven't been able to.

When I realized I should get a shrink, I wondered what sort. I trotted my fingers over to the Psychology Today website to look for therapists in my neighborhood. Much as I love Dr. Miller, it was a three-hour commitment to get to the Upper East Side and back again. It's time to shop local. The website has a nifty diagnostic test and this is what it told me:

• You appear to have experienced at least one major depressive episode.
• You show signs of Generalized Anxiety Disorder.
• You appear to suffer from panic disorder with agoraphobia.
• Your responses strongly indicate that you suffer from Body Dysmorphic Disorder.

I also came up as having lesser symptoms, kind of like having a minor subject area in college, linked to "Social Phobia," post-traumatic stress disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder.

Who, I wonder, decides which of all these states gets capitalized??

My body dysmorphic would have been off the scale if it asked questions besides those concerning anorectia/bulimia.

I found a therapist a few blocks away and emailed him. I think it's time to try a male shrink again. Now I'll have a cigarette, brush my teeth and get ready to call my father about my conversation with my cousin. That may call for a nap.

A Month of Two Full Moons

Goodbye, June. We went through some heavy rains together, roses & lilies, the Rose Moon & now a Blue Moon.

I cancelled therapy today. I woke up at 10.20 with the start of a cold, too limp to lift a finger beyond the weekend dog obligations -- it became apparent that I had no energy for either the subway/self-revelation or the dinner party I was invited to this evening. I'm running that small fever that's under the skin: I feel normal to the touch but can feel the burn on my cheeks & forehead & the tops of my thighs.

I feel beaten up, as well I might be, as though this moon-heavy month has pulled me this way & that. Part of how I'm feeling comes from getting off sugar yet fucking again. Part is crashing after the plane ride from hell on Wednesday. "You're due, honey," I tell myself. "This is inevitable." But I miss my old energy.

It was a gorgeous day, even for someone with fever under her skin if she stayed in the shade. We walked Mellie & ran into lots of people we know, some of them by their dog's name: Izzy, Roger, Stanley. Tom rushed out of the store to play with Daisy's mind & to tell me about the spate of complaints he's gotten lately, providing a good deep laugh I sorely needed. I managed to vacuum a very little, write one email, clean my desk up sort of. It's 7.30 & I bet I'm in bed by 9.

So what's a crazed girl to do when she's got a fever & sore throat & the woozies of getting sick? Order smacking-firey chicken vindaloo (use only under adult supervision) & two pairs of jammies.

Time to wash the dish, stash the left-overs & clean some Italian grayhound crates. If we're lucky, Daisy & I will make the turn onto the Promenade in time to fall in love with the fireflies...

Throwuppy

Every other Saturday I figure out what trains are running & I toddle off to the Upper East Side to see my therapist. I call these 45-minute sessions "throwuppy" because that is so often what I feel like doing before, during & after.

I like to talk about my feelings when they're well in the past tense & don't threaten to blow up on me in their freshness.

No, let's take a few steps back in light of today's discussion of Frances's anger about men & their Cheshire Cat behavior.

It takes me a couple of days of something balling up inside of me before I recognize I'm having an emotional reaction. It may then take more days to put a name on it. When it's anger, I'm so freaked out by it -- this volatile, counter-anger-inducing can of kerosine -- that I turn it back on myself.

It's beyond the what-did-I-say syndrome I wrote about yesterday, more along the lines of I'm so fucking mad at myself for caring/getting sucked in/not getting over it.

So now I'm mad at any number of people, always doubled because I'm angery at myself for being angry at X, Y &/or Z.

& that's where I get stuck. I don't, the Good Doctor Miller informed me, let go of my anger, which more & more turns against myself. "You're adopted. You weren't allowed to feel anger because these people took you in."

Yeah -- partly. I began to think about anger in my childhood & saw a very scared little girl whenever there was fighting going on. My parents would argue occasionally & it terrified me -- so much so that my family has a saying I started when I was very young & the discourse around me was displeasing (scolding, arguing, fighting) -- "Don't talk". My father still says it, with his brows all rumpled & each word kind of canon balled in its wholeness of intent, when my mother nags about scrubbing a pan or disagrees with a charity donation he's making or discovers he's appropriated a set of towels for cleaning the garage. It doesn't have an exclamation point. It's not sullen or pouty or pleading. It's a command, but understated, & scrunchy things must occur with the eyes.

If my father was angry all of us kids quaked in fear. As the oldest of three brothers, growing up in the Depression, he was raised by parents with third & fifth-grade educations, still speaking with Polish accents. When my grandfather got work on the railroad out-of-town, he took Grandma with him, leaving my father in charge of his brothers for weeks at a time. Part of being the oldest was that he would get the beating & then was expected to dole it out to the boys -- who could run squealing to Grandma who might then beat Dad for abusing them. Very complicated Old World stuff that came down to the fact that my father could dish out some brutal punishments. These were rare. They were never repeated because they didn't have to be. We were always given fair warning that a piece of behavior had to stop before he raised a hand. But when he did --

Another famous family story. My brother Jim got in trouble for something. Dad took Jim aside a belted him once across his bare butt with his tennis shoe. Jim went snivelling to Dick about how much it hurt only to be met by Dick's laughter. The snivelling now included being laughed at -- until Dick turned around, dropped his pants & showed off the treads of his Converse on his ass.

Or a scene no one else remembers & I will never bring it up because it was so savage, of my father beating Jim up with his American history book. I don't know why. I was seven & scared witless.

Jim once complained to Dad that because Dick was bigger & heavier, he always won when they fought. Dad's answer was to get an equalizer. A two-day car trip back from seeing cousins (the last car trip the five of us ever made). I had the chicken pox & was placed in between my brothers who were bickering and badgering each other mercilessly for two days. By the time we pulled into the driveway, Dick's taunts had turned so pointed that they jumped out of the car & Jim began chasing Dick, picking up an equalizer -- the garage broom -- on their way into the house. Dick laughed all the way, his laughter another part of how he taunted us, all the way through the den, the hall, the kitchen, the dinette, two halls & into the bathroom where he slammed & locked the door.

Only to have the broom stick come slamming through the door right up to the broom.

That's what anger was like in our house. Either painful & terrifying (we all worshipped our father), or sadistic (Jim & I tried not to piss Dick off). I became so sensitive to anger, in fact, that in first grade Sister M. Marcillia would send me to the bathroom whenever there was a punishment coming. I'd go & sit on the pot. Nothing. I'd go back to class, the scolding would be going on & I'd pee all over the floor.

The last time Dick hit me, I was, I think, in high school or college. We were arguing over something as we set the table together. He got mad & slammed a dinner plate down on my head. For once, with great coolness, I picked up a fork & stabbed him in the arm so hard it stood up.

So yeah, I have a problem with anger: I have a problem feeling it, admitting it, expressing it, letting it go. "When do you let go?" I asked the GDM. "When it starts to hurt you," she said.

I guess part of that means before I get angry at myself for being angry.

She did not, however, tell me how to let it go.

I've only ever discovered one option & it doesn't work for more than a few hours. No, that's not true. Sleep, drinking, drugs & reading can also push anger aside. For a while.

I think I will make an Anger Box. I'm not sure how I'll work it, but I think I have an Art Project in my future.