Failure to Launch

First, thanks to everyone who left kind comments on my catching-up post. I felt pretty vulnerable and anxious about putting the blog back online, but hearing from y'all was worth it.

One of my college friends is at a conference about 45 minutes from PhD Town (this is EXTREMELY far from where we went to college together, so it was an exciting coincidence), so I drove over to see her yesterday evening. We were never extremely extremely close during college, but mostly because I really wasn't extremely close to many people in college at all; I have a tendency to keep people at arms' length and was really sick for much of that time. Anyway, we were involved in a lot of things together over the years and have a lot in common, so it was really great to catch up with her. There is something so special about seeing old friends, you know?

Even though during high school and college I almost never talked to anyone in "real life" about my ED struggles as they were going on, in retrospect I'm sure that most people at least had some idea of what was going on, especially junior year when I came back to school after having a really severe relapse over the summer (2007). This friend in particular is one of the few that I told about my recovery tattoo when I got it right before Thanksgiving of our senior year (one of my close guy friends actually went with me to get the tattoo; he was great. Does anyone else have an easier time talking to guys about ED stuff than their female friends? Not counting online friends, at least? That's a topic for another post).

So when I do get the chance to catch up with college friends, I can often sense them tactfully trying to get a read on how I'm doing. The friend I saw last night was a competitive gymnast for 13 years, and while she never had any ED issues that I know of, I'm sure she saw a lot of it and is more in tune than most people. For example, when we were making plans she suggested doing dinner and was careful to also offer "Or we can just get a coffee, whatever works." In other words, "Don't be scared away from coming to see me because the food situation is intimidating."

We had a great conversation (over coffee, I swear I've gotten really good at eating out but I just wasn't feeling it this week), and as we were wrapping up she stopped to say "You know, you look really good, how do you feel?"

Which, when it comes to non-ED people trying to check in on you, was one of the best approaches I've heard. But. I always have major mixed feelings on being told that I look "good", of course: "OMG she doesn't think I look too skinny which means I'm FAT which means that there's no way I can change this lifestyle which it totally structured around workouts and food because I'm doing all of that and I'm not even skinny and if I gain an ounce I'll leave the "good" zone and be FAT and if she thinks I look "good" she probably assumes I AM good when really I feel like this disease is a huge vat of cement that I'll be buried in forever."

I know, intellectually, that she actually meant: "I'm relieved that you're not as emaciated as you were for a lot of the time I knew you in college, because that shit was scary."

And the last part of my gut-reaction was also automatically invalidated when she asked how I "feel", as in, "The surface looks improved but what's going on underneath?"

So, Cammy gets an insightful and compassionate inquiry. Following an extremely lonely and vulnerable and emotionally fraught month. And I had a complete failure to launch. This was me:

I'm so terrible about fielding inquiries about this stuff in real-time. The only person that can ask about it without me completely shutting down is Match, and I still stumble to explain myself to him on this topic a bit sometimes, even though I've gotten way better at it and I know that he displays more insight about this stuff than some therapists I've seen.

So I stuttered and babbled a bit about how yeah, everything is great, only rainbows and roses over here, and rambled some other stuff that I can't even remember now, and then we ended that awkward segment of the episode, said our goodbyes and parted ways. Brilliant, Cammy, brilliant. I can intellectualize my way through what her comment really meant, but I still fail at responding coherently.

In my last post I talked a lot about how my Nana's death has affected me. I think one interesting component is that the month since her death has been a novel time during which (some) people were interested in some aspect my mental well-being, and asked about it, when I didn't feel immediately emotionally and verbally clamped down (depending on the context of the asking, that is). I suppose part of how an ED works is by making it seem like it has some kind of wall built around us, so that even people who really want to help can't get in.

Preview of the next week: Finals week is almost done (I'm in that double-whammy period of life during which I still have to take exams AND write and grade my own students' exams), and I'll be back home for the holidays next week. I hope everyone else is weathering finals okay, and if you're past the stage during which you have to worry about finals, I'm extremely happy for you and jealous of you.  Love y'all.

Catching Up

*Tiptoes in* . . .

Hey y’all. It’s been a while. I don’t have high expectations for anyone even still reading this anymore, but I’m in a place where I really feel like writing about feelings and such would be a good idea.


In other words, this is what the Me vs World battle looks like right now:

When I decided to go on hiatus from this blog last year,  I was having a really tough semester, partly because DOING A PHD IS HARD and partly because while I was in the field earlier in the year I let my weight get low enough that it was affecting my emotional stability and ability to deal with both hard and not-so-hard things.

So now it’s over a year later. The past 15 months in a nutshell:

September - December 2013
Had to take a break from running last fall semester due to overuse injuries. This didn’t really result in me gaining weight but did make me feel like I was literally going CRAZY and going even more nuts about food/body stuff than usual.  The inside of my head felt like a full-on Jan moment:

Was able to start running again over Christmas break. Fa la la la. Between June and December regained some of the weight I’d lost earlier in the year.

January-June 2014
Left for in Tropical Research Country. Stayed for 5 months.
Changed my dissertation topic halfway through Year 2 of my PhD. I don’t recommend this, but it was the right decision.

Dealt with a good deal of emotional yo-yoing related to things beyond the scope of this post, but also loosened up enough with food stuff to actually gain weight while I was living in challenging conditions. It wasn’t a huge gain, but it did put me back at the highest weight I’d been at since around summer/fall 2012, although still not up to where I was when I started grad school in 2009. I was still exercising a LOT but have gotten better about shaking off food rules for special occasions and visits to places I know I may not ever go again. So the weight gain was the result of having a lot of fun, but still kinda freaked me out.

June-August 2014
Came back to the US. Spent the summer with my family and with Match (we celebrated our 5 year anniversary in late August. Time flies!). Felt amazing physically at the higher weight but the body anxiety/weirdness was all-consuming, and I was down to my pre-trip weight by the end of August.
Surprise surprise, dieting and running are a dangerous mix, and I managed to aggravate some old stress fractures and had to go on another fall running hiatus this year. Still easing back into it gradually; it feels like one step forward and two steps back with that.

Apparently the answer to this question is "the hospital."

August - Now 2014
This semester was a lot less stressful than Fall 2013 in some ways (I started off this year healthier, had a lighter class load, finally felt like I had a solid research project that I was making real progress with, and got the chance to teach, which I LOVE).

But this fall has been devastating in other ways. My grandmother died one month ago today. She was my mom’s mother. I still forget to use "was" when referring to her about half the time. We lived with those grandparents after my mom and I basically ran away from my biological dad, and they have been more influential in shaping my life than I can even articulate. Nana had been sick for a while and I knew the end would be soon. But I still wasn’t as prepared as I thought I would be. The last month feels like it has lasted a decade. I’m still pretty angry and bitter. Even though everyday life, on the surface, is basically back to normal routine, I feel like I’m just holding my breath every day waiting for . . . I’m not sure what.

I also feel like I learned more about people in the aftermath of losing Nana than I could even process at once. Humans are just so awkward about talking about death. We’re also uncomfortable around bereaved people. My support structure (outside of my family and Match, who are unfailing anchors for me) ended up being a lot different than I would have predicted. In one case, I feel like I just plain lost someone whom I thought was a very close friend because he couldn’t deal with talking to me when I was very low, and then wanted to take things up again like nothing and happened. Maybe I’m still too bitter and will get over it eventually. My mom says that people in my generation often don't know their grandparents well, and may not have realized what a significant loss it was. Maybe that's true. I know that the one friend that completely checked out definitely knew how close I was to Nana and how hard her illness had been for us.

Other people were disappointing in the same way to a lesser degree. Some people that I hadn’t really been in close touch with recently stepped up and have been amazing. So I guess, as Nana would say,  “you never can tell about people, and never assume that you can.”

Weirdly, losing Nana temporarily seemed to magically cure my anxiety issues (temporarily). I basically quit giving a shit about anything. Who the fuck cares about the weather, or the election results, or this paper I’m supposed to read, or my research funding? Every conversation I overheard for a couple of weeks just made me angry, because it seemed so insignificant. That was me wallowing in bitterness, of course.

It’s like as soon as you bury someone, things are supposed to go back to “normal,” as if they’re “out of sight and out of mind,” rather than the loss feeling more acute and bleak than ever. My world will never be “normal” again. People ask how you are when they don't actually want to stand there in the hallway or stop on the way into departmental seminar and hear about how one of the people that was a critical block in your foundation is gone. You will never talk to her again. You will never see her smile, or hold her hand, or hear her crack a senility-induced dirty joke that has the whole room rolling in laughter.

People don't stop in the hallway and ask "how are you" so that you can tell them all of this. They don't actually want to know how you're doing, they want you to say "I'm okay" so they can check of their "showed compassion" box for the day and move along. I felt this most acutely the two weeks or so after the funeral. I'm also probably being grossly unfair, because some people actually do care and were/are extremely supportive and did very helpful things, and other people are definitely not malicious when they don't know how to do that; it just is what it is.

I think a lot of my bitterness has been partly due to the fact that  none of the people physically here where I live, that I have to surround myself with day-to-day, were those supportive people, so I felt like just going to work in the morning involved a lot of facade. I don't know what I would have done if I hadn't had teaching as a distraction to take me out of my thoughts a few times a week.

 But back to anxiety: when things that typically would have stressed me out just rolled off my back, I actually stopped to wonder if this is how “normal” people feel most of the time. Not the apathetically angry “why the fuck would anyone care about the departmental Christmas party” feeling but the “oh well, in the end this will get worked out and not matter” feeling.

I’m moving past much of the anger I think. Some people disappointed me, but I’m not their job, and I’m glad I know where we stand now. I think “growing up” is a euphemism for just progressively lowering expectations about everything.

And the anxiety is moving back in, which means I must be going back towards my baseline mood state, even though I still feel different. I have stopped weeping every day and have times when I feel like I’m having fun in the moment. I went to that departmental Christmas party, wore a costume for it with my labbies, and even got drunk and ate so many Christmas cookies that I felt guilty and got drunker. Life moves along I guess.

So that’s that. I am returning to Tropical Research Country in January, but pushed my departure back a few weeks to spend extra time with my family before I leave. It feels terrible to admit this, but I’m starting to regret that decision; I think I’m still in a relatively dark place and want to just withdraw and run as far away as I can. I probably feel like this because living in PhD Town I’m on my own and the only people I interact with are ones that I don’t really confide in. I’m hoping that I will feel differently when I’m back with my family and Match soon.

Things are just hard at my parents’ house and I’m so emotionally sapped already — my grandfather’s health isn’t great either, my parents seem to be avoiding a divorce that they really need (they are emotionally done and barely tolerate each other), I get stressed about balancing family vs Match time over the holidays, and then there’s also the food stuff involved in being home and then traveling. I dropped some weight really quickly without trying after Nana died, but think I made up for at least some of it over Thanksgiving. Gaining weight in the field last year made me anxious about making sure I don’t “lose control” on this trip even though I know that is the ED talking.

So I disappeared for over a year and then wrote a novel-length return post, which probably guarantees zero readers, but if you made it this far, thank you. Love y'all.