Admittedly, I haven't been writing much lately (or at all), mostly because what is consuming 99.9% of my thoughts is an intimate internal battle the topic of which I fear my readers will not enjoy as it possess little humor. I'm also uncertain that people will comprehend the pure torture of what I've been putting myself through, to varying degrees of bad, worse and horrible, for the better part of six years in an extreme and irrational attempt to maintain my weight. I'm not quite equal to describing what it is like to be a prisoner of the war being waged in my own head, one between my Mind and Body; fear triggered by one of the essentials for human life: Food.
I'll leave it at that for now, but today I realized another major deterrent to writing; the fact that I don't like to begin writing unless I can finish the work in its entirety, in whatever form it my present itself, in one comprehensive session. In college it appeared that I was procrastinating, refusing to begin an essay or lab report until I had just enough time to work on it straight-through. Essentially, I was afraid that if I started and stopped writing it would come out disjointed, unorganized and incomprehensible, and anything less than a perfect cohesive publication, in my extremist mind, was simply unacceptable. As a perfectionist it has always been all or nothing with me, usually to my detriment.
When analyzed in the golden light of pure unbiased logic, however, these two issues are the result of one underlying mental illness: Addiction.
Addiction is the hallmark of all my family members, though we each have our own unique and often odd set of obsessions. Ask my sister about her chickens, I dare you. Seemingly harmless, the first word leads to four or five hours of obsessive writing and editing the same way the first drink leads to a week-long bender, the first mile leads to over-exercising, the first bet leads to a mortgage foreclosure, and the first hit off the pipe leads to having no teeth and questionably contracted STDs. Finally, relating to my aforementioned prisoner, the first bite of food leads to falsely perceived notions of overconsumption and overwhelming food guilt, coupled with extreme counting, purging via excessive exercise and food restriction, as well as meticulous planning of caloric intake. True, not all addictions are tragic and harmful, but they all generate feelings of false comfort cloaked in the pain of enslavement; an otherwise rational mind rendered fallacious, freedom from the uncontrollable thoughts and behaviors nowhere in sight.
I can no longer tolerate being held captive by my fear of weight gain; I'm 30 years old dammit, both too young and too old to be unhappy. I've decided that I'd rather be free of this addiction with a few extra pounds than be the hungry irascible skinny wretch who refuses to allow herself to eat because of an arbitrary caloric calculation, whom I've become. As if my cell phone calculator is some magical object that dictates how much my Body burns and needs to take in to refuel; it cost $40 bucks at Walmart for shits' sake, I highly doubt it possesses such advanced knowledge. But even my Masters-level intelligence was rendered moot under my addiction. I hit rock bottom when I felt the true weight of the powerlessness the addiction has inflicted on me for so long, observed how my addiction caused me to shy away from the people I love and things I like to do, solely because I might be expected to eat something I hadn't planned for; that weight feels heavier than I ever was.
The good news is that addictions are nothing more than compulsive habits, and all habits can be broken albeit with copious amounts of will power; something I've already proven to myself that I possess in abundance. I must work diligently and teach myself moderation, constantly steering back towards the middle when I enviably start heading for the ditch, applying the same principles to my calorie-addicted Mind as my writings; I will not be afraid of loose ends and half-concieved plots, paragraphs in disarray; I will return to the story again and again until it is complete, whole.
I'll leave it at that for now, but today I realized another major deterrent to writing; the fact that I don't like to begin writing unless I can finish the work in its entirety, in whatever form it my present itself, in one comprehensive session. In college it appeared that I was procrastinating, refusing to begin an essay or lab report until I had just enough time to work on it straight-through. Essentially, I was afraid that if I started and stopped writing it would come out disjointed, unorganized and incomprehensible, and anything less than a perfect cohesive publication, in my extremist mind, was simply unacceptable. As a perfectionist it has always been all or nothing with me, usually to my detriment.
When analyzed in the golden light of pure unbiased logic, however, these two issues are the result of one underlying mental illness: Addiction.
Addiction is the hallmark of all my family members, though we each have our own unique and often odd set of obsessions. Ask my sister about her chickens, I dare you. Seemingly harmless, the first word leads to four or five hours of obsessive writing and editing the same way the first drink leads to a week-long bender, the first mile leads to over-exercising, the first bet leads to a mortgage foreclosure, and the first hit off the pipe leads to having no teeth and questionably contracted STDs. Finally, relating to my aforementioned prisoner, the first bite of food leads to falsely perceived notions of overconsumption and overwhelming food guilt, coupled with extreme counting, purging via excessive exercise and food restriction, as well as meticulous planning of caloric intake. True, not all addictions are tragic and harmful, but they all generate feelings of false comfort cloaked in the pain of enslavement; an otherwise rational mind rendered fallacious, freedom from the uncontrollable thoughts and behaviors nowhere in sight.
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| Addiction to anything is possible, and it's always ugly. |
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