Issue #50 Ultimate Beauty
Welcome to A Most Unreliable Narrator, the slice-of-life newsletter of GenXer around town, Lisa Rabey. I talk about anything and everything with a bit of swears. I’m glad you’re here.
I joined Overeaters Anonymous (OA) before Christmas. Only a few people know and I hesitate about talking about it, but just as being crazy is now becoming easier to talk about publicly, I thought going forward would be a good idea. Putting a face to the disease, if you will.
It's a disease that pictures 600lb people and keeping boxes of Snickers in the glove compartments in their car as well as exploitive TV shows on TLC. Going to multiple fast food places to binge at home. That wasn't me. I wasn't bulimic or anorexic. I didn't have an eating problem.
I have an eating problem.
It is my current therapist who encouraged me to join. Food/exercise/health has taken a side seat in my life since early last year and it has amplified since early fall. We've been talking about my obsessive calorie counting and my inability to lose weight. I have a recommendation to see a bariatric surgeon. I made deals with myself to give myself X time to lose Y weight or else I would go to the surgeon, but I never followed through. Surgery is a serious step and it's not one I'm ready for just yet. If, maybe, ever. One day my therapist said, I think you have an eating problem. Have you considered this? I shook my head no. I don't have an eating problem.
I have an eating problem.
This is not the first time I've been encouraged to join a 12 step program. Previous therapists have suggested Al-anon would be good seeing as I grew up in a household with alcoholics. It's pretty clear I don't work on my trauma. Sure, I talk about it, a lot, but my talking is superficial. I don't actually work through it. I don't want to seem like a victim and this ideology has spread back as far as my early 20s after I was date raped as well as physical abuse that stretches into my early teens. Self-blaming is the game and I am the winner.
I told my therapist I would look into it. I somehow found a virtual meeting by which I mean an email list. I lurk, for now, watching and I feel a bit like a spy. Some people post every day and you get to know their lives which I suppose is how people feel about reading me. You don't have to wade in, of course, but it may be helpful. We shall see.
I found that I related to a lot of these people. The use of food for comfort and as a supplicant to what was going on in my life at the time. Why deal with trauma when cake and Mexican food would suffice. I used food to celebrate the highs and the lows. Every time I had a crazy episode, food (and drugs and sleep) helped steady the course for my "recovery."
I hemmed and hawed about going to a face to face meeting. There is a twinge of religious overtones that make me nervous. I style myself as a spiritual person over a religious one and giving up my world to a singular god seems odd. My therapist told me to think of my higher power as a future self for support and not the omnipotent and omniscient man that keeps a book of your rights and wrongs. I told my therapist I would go to a meeting after my work contract ended because I didn't have the time nor could I find a meeting after work. She called me on my bullshit and I relented and went to my first meeting which happens at 10A on Tuesdays. I also bought the OA 12 Step and Traditions book and on my therapist's advice, I'm reading it slowly, not rushing as I usually do.
So, Tuesday I pack up my heavily highlighted book and my $5 (they ask, but it is not required, to donate to your local meeting to help offset expenses such as chips, pamphlets, and the like) and went to the meeting. The meeting was all women and they were super nice; welcoming me with open arms, literally. We spent 20 minutes going over the rules and updates of the group before the sharing began. When the group reading occurred, I read out loud my part which felt natural and organic. I didn't feel afraid. I also got my first chip simply for coming.
Just like AA, everyone is known by a first name only. As the sharing began, I nodded along in agreement with things that seemed applicable to me. Some of the women have been members for 20, 30 years. Some go to meetings every day. Others struggle while some maintain their abstinence. There were old women, young women, fat women, and normal sized women.
The meetings last an hour long and many of them stayed behind to speak to me. I was handed a packet with lots of information including the names and phone numbers of everyone in the group to call/text if I needed help. I, of course, have not called or texted. One woman, as we were leaving our coffee klatch, said that reaching out for the first call is going to be hard. I said nothing.
After the coffee klatch, I binged and I've been bingeing every day since that meeting. I'm stylizing that it's mainly my only meal for the day so it was and is okay. I'm hyper-conscious now I'm using food to reward and chastise myself. The first step is to admit that we're powerless about food and our lives are becoming unmanageable. Intellectually, I know that is me but emotionally, I am struggling so hard to accept it.
Kristin turned me to a podcast called The Calories. It's short, only three episodes, and the episodes average to about 30 minutes so it's totally palatable. The host, Max Lasser, lost 100 pounds in 2015 and began a quest to understand why "diet and exercise" didn't work for him and why it doesn't work for others. His guests are well-regarded doctors and neural behaviorists. Peer-reviewed papers are quoted and stats are trotted out. The basic premise is that to lose weight, it's simply about calories in and calories out (CICO). I mentioned all of this before in the last issue but it bears repeating again. I have finished listening to the podcast and I'll listen over and over again. There is a such a sense of relief, along with OA, that I'm not a horrible fucked up person when it comes to food and that yes, I can go into recovery and change, but I must accept I will stumble and fall and one day I will get it right.
Our new gym is six blocks from our house and they have day classes for yoga so I've been a few times. If I can't do a pose, like stay in downward dog for an extended length of time, my core trembles. My legs tremble. I work hard to not stumble and fall. An entire wall is a mirror and I watch myself through the moves and I work hard on not judging myself as I'm surrounded by normal people. I told this all to Kristin and she pointed out these same people were more than likely not giving a shit about me but about their own selves. I am starting to see a trainer this week. When you're fat AND tall, you're constantly feeling like you're being judged on everything you do and you are cognizant that spaces are not meant for you. I can't change my height but I can make my body smaller. This I can do.
OA does not shame you for losing weight nor if you attend a pay and weigh (Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, a zillion other diets). OA is not about chiding you for being healthy but for powerless over the food as a crutch and a support system just as AA teaches you to bear witness to how alcohol ruins your life. I searched Twitter to see if OA has an account and I found zillions of people fat shaming and using OA as joke. It's not a joke. It's an addiction. Fuck you, assholes.
For many, if you overeat, it is one and done. This is not how compulsive eaters and eating disordered people function. It's like the difference between sadness and depression, having a manic moment and being bipolar. I am not shaming you for your ills but one does not mean it is the other. I wish people would recognize that for many, simply existing is a struggle, a life of struggle. Please grant me this respect.
I feel good about this now. I vomited my life in the coffee klatch and that felt normal and organic. I also heard their stories as well and bonding occurred. I do not feel alone after being alone for a very long time.
I need to put together an abstinence plan and a plan of action. An abstinence plan can be whatever I want to be to help manage my foods. For some, it means getting rid of trigger foods. Some people, my therapist says, will plan out their foods for the day and if they eat green beans instead of broccoli consider themselves to have broken their abstinence and the clock begins another day. I do not see the point in that extreme. I am an old and I know to keep my body strong and healthy, I must move. I will go to yoga and see my trainer. I can do those things. Food will be a challenge to find something to plan for healthy eating but I know it must eventually be done.
My name is Lisa and I am a compulsive overeater. ---------- In the last issue, I mentioned the status of my job hunt. The one interview I thought was a very much a no turned out not. I followed up with the recruiter a few weeks back and she finally got back to me after the holidays to ask what my schedule was for the following week. Wide open, I said, now that my contract at Humana has ended as you know. She called me on the following Monday and set up an interview with the hiring manager for that Wednesday. The recruiter sent me a list of possible questions and told me to wear a suit. One of the points of pride in my life is I've never owned a suit but needs must. After the OA coffee klatch on Tuesday, I hustled myself to Torrid to buy a suit which I wanted to be in grey. They carried the coats but they are 3/4 sleeves. Why in the fuck 3/4 sleeves? All of them, black or grey. I planned it with a long sleeve shirt and looked for bottoms. I'm all over the place in Torrid sizes and I didn't want to feel fat shamed trying on clothes at Torrid. It struck me that I had a skirt that was near the exact color of the grey suit coat so I skipped the bottoms and bought tights instead. I took out the nose ring and presented myself as a passable adult.
The interview went shockingly well. It was like catching up with a girlfriend you haven't seen in a while. When it came time to actually answer the questions, she murmured "well, you've answered this one, and this one, and this one already." I was able to talk elegantly about my experiences at Humana, and my previous lives, and how they related to the position. She wanted to interview me not only because of my experience at Humana but that I've been writing documentation for the majority of my professional career. The interview lasted 1.5 hours and I was so ecstatic on how well it went, I was shaking in my car. Naturally, I binged after the interview but one meal a day as you do.
She gave me her email address and said if I had even more questions to let her know and we could set up a phone meeting. When you are working with a recruiter and you're interviewed by someone within the company, that someone always refers you back to the recruiter for questions so having her give me her email address was telling. I emailed her later in the afternoon and thanked her for the opportunity and stressed how much I enjoyed working with her. I got a response back that she also enjoyed it and an exclamation mark was included. I am trying to not read too much into it but if I don't get this job, I am cutting a bitch.
The job is near exact what I was doing at Humana but for nearly twice the money. The culture seems to be close to the chill of Humana, work from home options are available, and my potential manager seems to be very relaxed. It's a direct hire and not through a hiring agency. As I said, if I don't get this job, I am cutting a bitch. ---------- Some housecleaning: I recently joined a writer's group and I'm taking their advice to heart on drumming up work via social media. To make myself marketable, I created a brand new twitter account: writergeekgirl. I opted to not change my name instead because I wanted a fresh start. Having nearly 3K followers for being me looks pretty impressive but my feed on who I followed and who followed me was a hot dumpster mess that I couldn't shake ergo the new account was created. I culled the very favorite accounts from heroineinabook and added them. I'm not deleting heroineinabook's twitter I'm simply not going to post there. No other social media account names have been changed. Fun fact: writergeekgirl was the name of my LiveJournal account as well as the name of my very first twitter account before I changed it to pnkrcklibrarian (again, marketing).
Lisa x
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