Post Secret Strikes Again

Another quick-media-link-weekend-type post.  I don't know if y'all keep up with Post Secret, but one of the ones today sort of hit home for me. I honestly have never really wanted kids.  Any relictual maternal instinct in my brain is totally satisfied by feeding G. twice a day, and the lifestyle of my chosen profession is not at all conducive to raising offspring.  But there is a part in the back of my mind that won't even let me consider changing my opinion, because of this:

Not just genetically, but I'm so scared that I'll never have the behaviors enough under control to not trigger whatever hereditary misfortune I did happen to pass on.  I know it's complicated, and I do NOT JUDGE anyone with an ED that does choose to have a child, again there is no disapproval here of that at all (don't be mad at me, I'm too much a people-pleaser to handle that!). No two cases are the same and I know people with EDs that are fantabulous mothers with amazing, healthy kids. Any statements made on this blog reflect upon my personal neuroses alone, I assure you.  My mom had never been on a diet in her life when I developed anorexia, but I have a strong family history of that and other depressive/obsessive/addictive disorders.  Some people with no family history will develop it.  Some people with actively disordered parents turn out just fine, others don't.  There is no rule.  Just sharing my personal gut fear about the issue. Slight tie in to my last post about P!nk's new single: I think I heard she's pregnant, I got the feeling the song was conceived with a message to her child in mind, as we see at the end of the video.

And another one in today's hit parade was this:

.

Not because I was abused (my biological dad was an abusive alcoholic, but my mom took the brunt and got us out of there before my third birthday, for which I owe her a lifetime of gratitude), but because I am pretty much 100% sure that my best friend in the 4th grade was being sexually abused by her father, but my realization was completely after-the-fact.  We are friends in Facebook, and I often want to tell her how much I hate what she went through and how much better she deserved.

F**ckin Tears

So, I'm weird about crying.  I have a really hard time creating ocular precipitation when I'm sad, almost never do it when I'm hurt, and usually only spill tears when I'm frustrated or mad at myself.  But for some reason, songs in particular and music videos in extraparticular really tend to break through and bring on the Sad Waterworks. Maybe that's why I am mostly likely to cry in my car, when I have on a song that really hits home.  Major eye leakage over P!nk's new video, F**kin Perfect (no I'm not a prude about language usually, but that's how it's spelled for marketing if you try to search for it).





This is one of those that--after I composed myself from watching it--I went immediately to iTunes to buy for my Recovery Soundtrack that I started for H. waaaay back when.  I first mentioned it very early in this blog's history, but need to put an updated list up soon. It's interesting to me to see how the tone/theme of the songs changes depending on when in my recovery I added them. Probably worth a post of its own, I suppose.

(And I guess I should put a disclaimer, if you're squeamish about seeing a man's upper back while he's in coitus, skip the first nine seconds of the video).

More Thoughts on Yesterday

 An hour later I came back to look at my last post, about the stupid comment from the doctor, and now I REALLY hope people don't see it as hypochondriacal at all. Now I feel the need to explicate on it a little bit.

 Despite my best efforts (except for depending on the BC pill to cycle and this damn recurring infection) my body is running very well these days, relative to what I've experienced in the past.  Keep it up, indeed, I don't want to let myself deteriorate again.   I'm not trying to be sick, or convince anyone that I'm sick, or idealize sickness. I felt like my last post could have been misconstrued as me not wanting to admit that I'm healthy, as clinging to my pathology because it's all I know.  I often tend to second-guess what I've written or the way I worded it, and this was a good example.

This was the first time I had seen this physician, and he knows none of my history besides the "anorexia, diagnosed February 2000" that I dutifully recorded on my paperwork.  He doesn't know how far I sunk at my worst, or how many dozen pounds ago that was. Or what my current habits and lifestyle are like, or the fact that I've lost a significant amount of weight in the past 7 months.  Two different sides of a very complex coin, if I can butcher the metaphor thusly.

So when he said "keep it up", I'm sure he thought he was being encouraging at the fact that, with shoes, a belt, jeans, two sweaters, and breakfast plus a venti Americano in my stomach, I am almost in the healthy weight range. (NOT intentionally weight-loading, btw.  I stopped that around the time I became apathetic about pleasing my treatment providers. i.e. very early).

But my mind always twists comments like that, even though I know that they wouldn't carry the same meaning if he had all the information.  To me, it says "There's nothing to be concerned about unless you're a bundle of sticks being pushed into my office in a wheelchair. Organs all seem to be working? Bravo, all cured.  You can be underweight and mired in behaviors, prone to anxiety attacks, and highly dissatisfied with your lifestyle, as long as you don't look like a skeleton to me."  And I'm aware it's my brain playing games.  I try to turn it off.  But, as this word vomit illustrates, that doesn't always work.

I just get so disheartened when the "book is judged by its cover" and it makes me feel like my day to day struggles and anxieties aren't all that valid. Yes, my pulse and blood pressure are great compared to the average for our population, and I'm wearing adult clothes sizes again, so I should just shut up and quit acting like there's something wrong with me. Right? :(

Ok, sorry for the venting, I think I just need to let out more of my thoughts about that brief comment I mentioned yesterday, I felt like I had left a good deal of ambiguity as far as my thought processes on it.

Keep it up!

Doctor: "Wow, what great vitals!  Whatever you're doing, keep it up! Hahaha."

Yep, I'm going to write a book soon on the life enhancing properties of compulsive overexercise, poorly spaced/unbalanced meals, and periodic anxiety attacks.  Hahaha. Sigh.

Kitten Voyeurism and Some Bad Luck

So, notes on the past few days:

• The kitten loves to sit next to the sink and watch me put my contact lenses in every morning, I would be fascinated to know what he's thinking about this crazy primate putting her fingers in her eyes all the time.

• Remember that staph infection I had back in November?  Well, it definitely flared up again over the weekend, in precisely the same spot as before.  Seeing doctor tomorrow.  I am *so* incredibly frustrated.  And a little angry with myself for not really treating my body in a manner conducive to good immune function recently. Seems like there should be a lesson in here somewhere.

• One of my favorite TAs from undergrad died in a car wreck over the weekend, I found out via Facebook.  Really, really sad to see such a promising life end so early. Three other people died in the accident as well, really tragic.

• I took a trip down to my university on Friday and had a chance to meet with my professor and do some reconnecting with my lab mates.  All went REALLY well and I'm way less stressed about that whole situation now.

• Can I whine for a minute about what babies men are when they don't feel good?  M. had the sniffles over the weekend, and you would have thought the boy was dying. I'm good at giving sympathy and being supportive, he definitely does enough of that for me, but still, damn. There must be a reason women are the ones that have to do the whole menstruation thing, I really, really think men are too wimpy for anything like that.

• I did yoga yesterday, for the first time since before the holidays.  I really need to get back on a regular schedule with that, I miss the way it makes me feel.

Ok, I guess that brings this edition of miscellany to a close.  I hope everyone's week is off to a great start, love y'all.

Endorphins and Exercise Addiction

Slate has an article this weekend (Gym Rats and Dope Fiends) that discusses recent findings of a study that show exercise seems to decrease rats' susceptibility to abuse drugs in a lab setting.  This leads into discussion of whether the endorphins generated by working out are addictive or habit-forming in themselves, and studies have suggested that they are.   The "endorphin addiction" model of anorexia is the one that I've always felt most applied to my case (see Endorphins, Eating Disorders, and Other Addictive Behaviors by Hans Huebner, a bit dated by this point but still outlines the theory well).

In the early 1960s, there were 100,000 self-identified runners in the nation. By the late 1970s, there were 30 million.  It wasn't long before the ranks of psychologists and packs of joggers ran headlong into one another. More and more people were working out, and clinicians noticed that some of them were hurting themselves. What's more, their devotion to marathon training or aerobics was taking on some of the qualities of an addiction: Runners claimed to experience a "natural high," and some were steadily increasing their distances to achieve the same level of satisfaction. Scientists wondered if this had something to do with one of the body's naturally occurring pleasure peptides, the beta-endorphin, which gets released during exercise. (Endorphin is a shortened version of the "endogenous morphine.") Were runners getting "addicted" to endorphins? Sometimes they showed signs of withdrawal—increased anxiety and depressive tendencies—when they missed a visit to the track.

Soon these obsessive joggers were being described as victims of an exercise addiction, though in deference to diagnostic conservatives their affliction was also termed obligatory exercise, overtraining syndrome, or exercise dependence (the "other" ED). Some researchers felt the condition was merely an outgrowth or subset of anorexia nervosa and declared the combination of undereating and overtraining responsible for the Female Athlete Triad, or FAT. (Its three components are disordered nutrition, amenorrhea, and osteoporosis.) And since men were diagnosed as anorexics less often than women, it was further proposed that overtraining might be the masculine version of an eating disorder.

The rest of the article is well-worth reading, (although I don't totally agree with the concept of a "masculine version" of an eating disorder or with their tossing around of terms like "exorexic").  These findings and the idea of exercise addiction in general (not just with runners) are probably notably unsurprising to anyone who has ever dealt with compulsive exercise issues.  It honestly can feel like physical withdrawal when you try to slash time or even just change the routine of your workout.  Anxiety? Through the roof.  After a while on the new routine, you get "weaned" and the symptoms abate (even if you still want to work out, the anxiety symptoms aren't as intense), but at the start it's just so tempting to give in, hit the workout, get your endorphins and get along with your day feeling calmer and saner (I am NOT implying people with EDs are insane, just describing a subjective feeling about oneself from my experience), even though you've just engaged in the behaviors that are supposedly harming you.  Which reinforces the feeling that you "need" them, of course.

I've always accepted that eating disorders involve hereditary factors, and would even if it weren't for the convenient anecdote that my family tree's branches almost touch the ground because they're so heavy with alcoholics, EDers, and anxiety disorders.  They don't go into this much in the article, but an endorphin addiction model also lends support to the theory that some people have more inborn genetic susceptibility, due to different neurochemical wiring, relative receptor densities and types, etc.

Obviously, I'm speaking largely from my own experiences here. Please chime in with comments if you've dealt with this also, though, always interested to hear how overexercise has developed and (hopefully) been overcome by different people.

Slate has a couple of other fitness-related articles of interest:
-Profile of a "fitness model" that does ads for sporting goods, etc.  I liked this because they mentioned that they have to have separate fitness models because the "regular" models are too thin and don't look healthy and fit (or even "recognizably human", according to the author) enough to sell sportswear.  I also like that they don't mention her weight, her diet, etc.

-Article of how people in countries outside of the U.S. tend to get their exercise, is interesting to see how it's approached in different cultures and societies.

Tied Together with a Smile

So, January, we meet again.  Damn.  This time of year has historically been really tough for me.  My poor tired neurotransmitters need more sunlight, there is the post-holiday letdown, there's something in the water, I don't know, but the first two or three months of the year usually herald a period of alternating mainly between anxiety, depression, and just plan frustration and hopelessness.  Nice, huh?  Every time I've bottomed out with the ED, it's happened around February (not to imply that I bottom out *every* February, though).

Anyway, I've felt that creeping in on me over the past 4 days or so.  I will get in the car to drive somewhere and find myself crying for no identifiable reason.  Waking up in the morning feels like a big weight on my chest, and it's hard to get up even after I've been lying awake since the earliest hours of the morning.  I slip into a state of definite detachment when I amp up my already overdone workouts, completely dissociated from pain and/or logic about what I'm probably doing to my joints, heart, etc.  I do friendly banter with my family like the golden daughter I'm supposed to be.  I do my work and fire back responses, drafts, and documents to my adviser as fast as possible, to be the assiduous and stable worker that I'm supposed to be.  I tap out witty, cheerful text messages to my M. to be the entertaining, confident, no worries girlfriend that I want to be . . . when I actually feel like my head is about to explode from loneliness because I can't tell him what's wrong.  Because I don't know what's wrong.  I want desperately to talk to someone, to tell them that *something is not right*, just to get it off my chest....but I can't figure it out myself, much less articulate it, which makes for very ineffective reaching out habits, as you might imagine.  But every time I paint on a big fake smile, it feels like it comes closer and closer to choking me.

I think part of what has me so stressed is thinking about moving back to my university town in a few months.  Now I'm *not* worried about the moving back out on my own part.  That part I can't wait for.  The past 6 months have been really challenging because, after 5 years of living solo, I was really set in my ways and used to having my own space. The all of the sudden I'm sharing a kitchen with 4 other people and a bathroom with my two teenage brothers. Culture shock...

The issue is more of one to getting onto a schedule that includes and hinges on other people.  Over the past few months, I've been working entirely from home in between trips to my field site.  Which means I've totally dictated my own schedule and routines.  Which would be nice, if it weren't a perfect opportunity to structure my day around exercise and food rituals.  So the thought of going back to active engagement at my university, where there are places I'm expected to be at times I may not be able to choose, is pretty stressful.  I've handled it before and I'll handle it again, but the anticipation of that loss of freedom is always a big downer.  I can feel the dread building in my chest whenever I think about it, even though  in reality I'm not free now.  So many nights I go to bed wishing I had spent my day differently, but feeling completely powerless to change anything.

Also, my adviser has been a bit distant any way less friendly than usual this week.  He's under an enormous amount of stress due to some important professional milestones coming up, but I am rarely able to view it that objectively.  I just assume that any email with a tone that is less than overtly positive means he's unhappy with me.  And one of the things MOST likely to cause me an anxiety attack is thinking that someone is mad at me or unhappy with me for something, so it has bee a really rough week in that regard.

It occurred to me today that this is the first winter in 5 years that I have not been in therapy, which could explain my bout of "I need someone to talk to but don't know how to ask for it."  Before, there was someone that was paid to sit their ass in a chair and listen to my braindump every week.  Now I don't have that, and it's useless to try to find a new therapist right now when I'm planning to move in about 4 months.

It's not like I have no one to talk to.  I do, indeed, have friends.  Good ones.  They don't live nearby, but that doesn't matter as much in the era of the reign of Facebook.  I have an amazingly insightful and caring boyfriend that really wants to be there for me.  I have a solid family that loves me no matter what. I have the coolest dog EVER, and he happens to be both an excellent listener and a hopeless clown that can always get me to laugh.  But I'm still so heart-numbingly lonely right now, and I don't know why.

I'm really starting to drag, past my bedtime, please excuse any incoherence in this post.

Not really sure of the graceful, natural way to wrap this up.  I know that this is a seasonal pattern for me and a lot of it will be solved just with time, but damn if it's not rough while it lasts.

I know posting song lyrics is kind of cliche, but the refrain from Taylor Swift's song "Tied Together with a Smile" sort of hits home for me right now:
Hold on baby you're losing it
The water's high, and you're jumping in to it 
And letting go, and no one knows
That you cry, but you don't tell anyone
That you might not be the golden one
And you're tied together with a smile, but you're coming undone . . .

Froglets, etc . . .

I'm still a little bit in "I don't wanna talk about it" mode for the stuff that's been bothering me, partly because I don't really know how to pin some of it down, but I think I need to work on writing it out soon.  Anyway, in the meantime, I'm doing the 7 Random Facts meme that's been circulating recently.  Everyone that I've seen that's done it recently hasn't tagged specific people (something I never like doing either) and has just given an open invite to readers to participate, so I figured I'd jump in and do it.

1.  I played softball for many years, and was one rockin' firstbasewoman.

2. When I was a kid, I used to smuggle tadpoles in from a pond near our house and raise them into froglets.  My mom didn't mind the critters as much as the fact that I quickly algae-fied all of her best Tupperware.

3.  I often stream The Daily Show, The View, Modern Family, or reruns of The Simpsons (not all at the same time!) on one half of my computer screen while I enter data on the other half.

4.  There are four different maps of the world in my bedroom.

5. I'm a huge fan of slipper socks.

6.  My picture has been in Reader's Digest.

7.  I once rode a mechanical bull in a bar in Mexico . . . even though I was the only sober one in the whole building. LOL...I was wearing a skirt, and made a friend go into the bathroom to trade me for her shorts so I wouldn't get the clap from that overworked machine. And yes, those pictures buried somewhere on Facebook...that's what privacy settings are for. ;)

Okay....that's some obscure trivia about Cammy . . . anyone else feel like sharing?

I hope everyone is having a great week. <3

Meltdown is Over

So I've calmed down somewhat after my anxiety-ridden meltdown yesterday.  Just letting y'all know I'm okay and still seem to possess whatever thread of sanity typically holds me together, however tenuously.  There should be some way to prevent people from blogging in the middle of an anxiety attack, is there an app for that?

This is a crappy time of year for me in general, always is and always passes eventually.  Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled programming soon.

Bad Weekend

Some stuff has come up that have made this weekend an anxiety-ridden nightmare, definitely down from my high of satisfaction with my accomplishments last week. I am just so frustrated and unhappy with so many things right now, and I know my ED issues are probably at the root cause of all of them. The past few days have put me in that place where the only feeling I can even articulate is just that I wish that I still prayed so that I could beg for something terrible to happen to me to just make everything stop.

Productive Week

So, not one but TWO publications submitted this week, everything for both papers was in by Wednesday.  Holy carpal tunnel it has been a little intense getting all that finished up and sent in, but it's such a relief now!  Just have to cross my fingers that reviewers will be kind.

My mood, self-esteem, and general satisfaction with life go up exponentially when I have a job to do and feel like I've actually accomplished something.  Trouble starts (and ED is more likely to encroach) when I have too much free time and feel like a waste of oxygen. So I've had a lot of work recently, but it made me totally happy, has been a good week.

Speaking of writing, I don't think I've really mentioned before that I used to write fiction quite a bit.  I've had to put that aside (for the most part) in recent years, although there is about 1/3 of a novel that has been gathering digital dust on my hard drive ever since the summer after my sophomore year of undergrad.  Anyway, I'm not in classes this year, have wrapped up the side papers I intended to write, and am waiting for all of my field data to be collected before I can really dive into writing that up, so I have a bit of time to play around with just writing for fun again.  I've had a new idea for a stab at a novel and have had a lot of fun developing that over the past few days.  There probably isn't a point in sharing this, and sometimes I feel silly for spending time on other writing when I know that the most likely scenario is that it is no good and will never be seen by anyone...oh well.  (note that is NOT a criticism of fiction writers, it is a criticism of my prospects of being a legit fiction writer).

Because this is my research semester and I'm living at home between field sessions to save on rent, I haven't been on a college campus since sometime in early November.  Yesterday I was on campus at a nearby university (for reasons to be explained in the next post), and within the first 5 minutes of being there I came across a girl making herself vomit in the bathroom.  Totally sad and very awkward.  She came out of the stall with her knuckles bleeding and everything.  What do you say?  Besides that I wish with everything that EDs would just go the fuck away and let us lead happy and healthy lives.

As for me, trucking along with food, exercise still kicking my ass. An update I could basically cut and paste from all entries over the past 6 months or so.  Decided against the new therapist, for (honestly!) mostly logistical reasons, but may look into seeing someone when I return to school in the fall.  Even if I started seeing someone now, it would be infrequent and erratic due to my travel schedule.

In other news: BRRRR.  This is the farthest north I've been for a winter in over a decade...and some people would claim I'm not actually that far north.  Go away, winter!

Hope everyone has a fantabulous weekend, take care.

Miscellaneous Endorsements

I feel like lately my postings have been one litany of self-pity and muddlement after another.  So, in a break from our regularly scheduled programming, just some random notes to remind everyone (and myself) that I'm a real person outside of the ED quagmire.

-My major professor and I are in the last stages of preparing a manuscript to submit, and today we were both supposed to be working on the *final* set of revisions our respective sections, to be finished TODAY.  I didn't leave my chair for an entire 4 hour stretch because I was so engrossed in it, and, as you might imagine, it is REALLY hard to get my exercise-addicted ass glued in one place that long. I happen to think that my work is pretty damn awesome, though, and it sucks me in. When I finally took a break and checked into Facebook to see if I'd gotten any feedback on a posting, I saw that my adviser had been playing Farmville all morning while I was writing feverishly to, I thought, keep up with the work he was doing.  Really???  *insert whip cracking noise here*

-I started the series 'Mad Men' this weekend and am TOTALLY hooked. I picked it up just on a whim when the seasons were on sale for $10 each after Thanksgiving. To be quite honest, I have little patience for the domesticity and materialism that seem to be so important to the characters, but it's written in a way that acknowledges and validates that aversion in a subtle and pleasingly cynical way, if that makes sense at all.  The characters are extremely well done, and the stories are told very well.  So, it wins my endorsement!

-I keep a space heater in my room to create a more Cammy-friendly climate envelope during the winter, and the new kitten has decided that makes me the most awesome person in the house. He pretty much stays in my room all the time now.  I'm definitely a dog person, but this specific cat is sooo sweet. He also wins my endorsement.

-Other things that I endorse: fuzzy socks, white fudge Oreos, Holst's orchestral suite 'The Planets,' the smell of old books, the Victoria's Secret after-Christmas sale that seems to go on for weeks, and the pleasure of blasting the heat in a car in the winter to create a moving sauna while passing through a snowy landscape.

I hope everyone's week is off to a good start, love y'all.

Picture Perception Puzzlement

Pictures puzzle me.  Throughout the course of my ED, I've had a range of experiences/reactions to pictures of myself as vehicles for reality checks.  I can look at photos of myself during some bad times, and be appalled at how terribly sick I looked. This has served as a major reality check for me at times.  On the other hand, I can look at some photos of myself when I was healthier and think how hideously huge I look, even though intellectually I *know* I was still underweight by the charts when it was taken.

I've been going through photos from this holiday season, during which I was significantly lighter than last year.  And honestly,  I can't tell at all that I've lost weight, from the photos.  I guess bulky winter clothes hide a lot. I actually had a doctor say to me, at one point when I was very dangerously underweight, that "You know, you look pretty normal with your clothes on."  It makes me wonder how seriously my family/friends actually take the ED sometimes, since it's so easy to fall into the trap of assuming everything is okay if someone's weight is up and/or stable.  But seeing little or no difference makes it so easy for me to minimize the issue.  I know that I've felt like absolute crap, and that my clothes fit differently, etc etc, but looking "normal" in photos makes it seem like maybe everything is in my head and really I'm fine.

And I hate the idea that I even care if people can tell.  I really don't want attention for losing weight, I want everyone to leave me the hell alone about it.  The main focus of most of my slips is not even a desire to lose weight.  I don't *want* to be superskinny, but I really can't stand the idea of gaining weight, and certain overcompensatory behaviors are just so ingrained I can't give them up.

I think I just get curious about what other people perceive, since I've learned I can't trust my own interpretation of what I see in the mirror or in photos.  Imagine you're wearing colored glasses that change how you see the world, but you're not quite sure what color they are on a given day, so you're not sure what's distorted or what's not.  Okay, how's that for a shoddy metaphor???

Then again, six months from now I could look at those photos and definitely see the difference.  That happens sometimes.  Sometimes it doesn't.  I don't mean this post to imply that I'm image obsessed.  I look in the mirror very little on any given day.  I don't really think I'm fat, I just have a hard time seeing being thinner as a problem I should take steps to reverse.  Even though I know I'd definitely think someone else in my position would be better off proactively working on the issue, objectivity is a slippery thing sometimes.

  I think at times like this, when I know I've slipped and need to turn things around, I vacillate between trying to admit there's a valid problem and trying to minimize the issue to myself, and so I go searching for evidence to whatever end of that spectrum my mind happens to be at any given moment.

I hope none of this was triggering to anyone, just kind of streamed my thoughts onto keyboard.  As a major disclaimer, it's not that I think being too thin is acceptable or desirable or something that should be treated ambivalently.  If I believed that, I wouldn't be in such turmoil trying to figure out where the hell I am and where I'm going right now.

Finally Home from Holidays

Soo...anyone out there? I've really been neglecting this blog lately, but I've been traveling a ton and honestly sometimes feel like all I have to say is the same ol' same ol' anyway....

Had Christmas, then took a road trip to another state to show Match off to the family for New Year's.  My parents and brother drove there also, but Match and I went separately so we could peel off afterwards.  He met a  ton of extended family and everyone loved him (of course!).  And my crazy relatives managed to not scare him off.  Whew.

After doing the family thing for a couple of days, my nuclear family went back home and Match and I did some sight-seeing in the nearby cities, was the longest continuous visit we've had (an entire week, Thursday-Thursday).

I had a fantastic time with my family and Match and was, as usual, spoiled rotten.

Eating was not so great, though.  We had a few active days, but the cold weather limited our time outside, and there were some days where we seemed to do little more than sit in the car, theater, someone's house, etc.  I always tend to restrict on trips like that, with the honest goal of just *not gaining* weight, and am always surprised to come home and find out that I actually *lost* pounds.  I suppose that should send me a message about how laying off the exercise really wouldn't make me gain weight as much as I fear, but I somehow manage to block out lessons like that.  Something to work on.

There was one highly distressing day: I managed to scratch the hell out of my eye with a contact lens.  It kept getting more and more runny, light sensitive, and painful throughout the day, and I didn't know why.  At first I thought it might be allergies.  We were driving to a new city that day, and by the time we got to the hotel I was starting to verge on freak-out mode.  We looked for walk-in clinics with my GPS, but had to try 3 times before we found one that was open.  The doctor there stained my eye and shone a black light on it to look for scratches, and as soon as she switched it on both she and M's jaws dropped, apparently I had seriously scratched the eye.  Still no idea how, I've been wearing contacts for 12 years and it has never happened before, and it was a fairly new set of contacts.

So that was the bad part, the baddest part was that she PATCHED my eye.  Some date, huh?  I have never aspired to be a pirate.  I got the patch about 8 pm and had to come back at lunchtime the next day to get it off.  Fortunately, the eye is incredible and heals very fast, so the scratches were gone.  I was in glasses for the remaining 2 days of the trip, which I normally despise, but I was so glad to get the patch off that at that point I didn't care.

So, for someone with great anxiety/doubt about their appearance in the first place, that was a bit of a nightmare, but M was really sweet about it.  He went into the store to get food for me to have in hotel because I didn't want to be seen, and kept complimenting me and telling me even the patch couldn't unprettify me even though I know he was full of BS, albeit sweet BS.  Was really stressful, but sometimes experiences like that can really make you closer.  I literally couldn't keep my eyes open on the way to doctor, so he was in hero mode, taking his poor blind girlfriend to get fixed up.

Coming back home, I've tried to get back on the wagon with eating, doing pretty well so far.  My stomach protested a bit, but not terribly.  The trap I always fall into is rushing back into full exercise when I haven't really replenished myself from a week of poor eating.  I've done well on every meal for the past 24 hours, only skimping was some on lunch yesterday, but feel really weak and light-headed.

Final issue of the day: I am scheduled to have my first appointment with a new ED therapist on Monday, and I think I'm going to cancel. Haven't 100% decided, but def leaning that way.  Part of it is financial: the walk-in clinic wouldn't take my student insurance plan, so that whole ordeal cost me $300 I couldn't really spare.  Part of it is a mixture of cold feet, ambivalence, and fear.  I'm only going to be living here for about 6 more months, and I'll be away on trips periodically during that time, so I am afraid setting up a new therapeutic relationship is kind of futile right now.  At the same time, I know I need someone keeping me on track, for every one step forward I've taken over the past few months I feel like I've slid two steps back.

Anyway, belated happy new year to everyone, I hope you all have had a fantastic start to 2011!