Annabelle Speaks

I wrote this when I should have been eating lunch

Psychologists call it "free-floating" anxiety. What contradictory words. Anxiety doesn't free-float. It stalks. It attacks. It lands on you with a thud. - Martha Manning, in Undercurrents: A Life Beneath the Surface, an amazing book about her struggle through depression that I find myself in every time I re-read it.

 

One of the places my anxiety is constantly getting the best of me, much to my chagrin, is in food.  I am hardly the first woman to write on the Internet about her issues with food.  Food issues, disordered eating, and eating disorders are disturbingly common, particularly among women and girls (though men and boys are not at all exempt).  And while I certainly have all the "usual" issues around food and weight (I shouldn't eat X because I'll get heavier, I should exercise more to lose a pants size, if I lose more weight/keep this weight off X will love me more, etc), I've also got this whole generalized anxiety and panic disorder that latches onto the existing insecurities and supports them with fear and panic in highly disruptive ways.

 

Weekday lunches are my biggest problem.  I don't normally have trouble eating at home or when I go out with T or with people I know well (and it is usually easy enough to avoid eating out with T's friends/coworkers that I don't know well), but for some reason eating at work in the middle of the day horrifies me.  I frequently go from a banana for breakfast at 6:30am (eaten on the way to the train) until dinner at home at 7pm without consuming anything more than water.  The days I don't pack lunches are the worst; it is almost certain I won't eat anything for lunch.  I work in a large office building in the middle of downtown Chicago; I'm certainly not lacking in food options.  But I start to worry around ten or eleven about where I'm going to go to get food.  I worry about lines, and crowds, and having to be around noise and people.  I have mini panic attacks when I think about going to a new place because I don't know the menu, I don't know the flow of the line, I don't know exactly where to stand, and I have to decide what I want while people look at me and I just can't do that; it's too much.  No way.

 

Days I pack lunch or days I'm planning on eating from my always fully stocked food drawer aren't much better.  I probably eat lunch about 50% of the time I've packed food to bring with me.  If there is too much food then it is overwhelming.  An entire sandwich can seem like an impossible amount of food to eat.  Every bite is torture and takes me forever to get up the nerve to take another bite, chew, and swallow, and not throw up.  Last fall I bought a bento box type of lunch box so I could deal with one small portion of lunch at a time, hoping that would be less overwhelming.  It is, sometimes, but most often it takes just as long to eat that way as it does when I confront the whole of my lunch at once. 

 

The longer the panic and fear pushes back my lunch, the weaker I feel, the more I shake from lack of calories and energy, the more tired I feel, and the worse the panic gets.  It's a circle I don't know how to stop.  Coworkers tease me that it often takes me hours to finish my lunch.  They point out how healthy it is to eat small amounts all day instead of the "regular" three meals.  They compliment me on how I eat or my recent weight loss and I want to hide in a corner and cry.  "I'm not doing it on purpose!  I can't help it!  I don't know why I'm afraid of food!  I wish I could make it stop, but it just isn't that easy!"  It doesn't matter what food I pack, when I try to eat it, or if I'm alone or around people.  It's frustrating and no matter how often my therapist and I go over it, we haven't managed to change a damn thing.  It doesn't seem connected to my self-esteem or body image.  It's just there, and it won't go away.  I hate that I feel like I can't control this, stop it, make it better.  It seems so simple.  But it isn't, and I don't know why.

Home Sweet Home

I was part of a conversation the other day about what makes a place "home".  T is of the opinion that our apartment is "home" and anywhere else (our parents' houses, for example) is not home.  I on the other hand refer to both our apartment and my parents' house as "home", and I suspect I will continue to do so until my parents downsize houses and move into a house I haven't lived.

 

When I moved to Chicago I remember getting on the airplane and having exactly one key on my key chain.  I had turned in my old apartment keys, office keys, and had given my car keys to my parents (who were keeping the car for the first four months I was living in Chicago).  I hadn't yet gotten the keys to our new apartment, so for the few hours between when my parents and I tearfully parted at the airport in Minneapolis and when I met up with T just as tearfully in Chicago I had only one key with me, the key to my parents' house.  The one place that would always be home.

 

We didn't move into that house until I was nine, but there are so many memories wrapped up in that house, in that neighborhood, that I'm pretty sure it will always be home, even after my parents move away.  There isn't another neighborhood where I would go on long nighttime walks with my parents in the cool spring air, or middle of the night walks by myself in the heat of summer.  There is only one apple tree I leaned against with my friend Dana, talking about school and boys and parents as we ate popcorn out of greasy brown paper lunch bags.  I watched the street grow up around me as new houses were built.  I knew the layout of every house before the new neighbors ever moved in by exploring the construction sites.  We had neighborhood bonfires in the empty lots until the last house filled up our street.  I remember how neighbors would gather on lawn chairs to watch my Dad and a couple of the older neighbor boys set off fireworks on the fourth of July.  Many summer afternoons were spent on my knees with sidewalk chalk, drawing elaborate roads and houses in the cul-de-sac - creating a "Heather Town" for the neighbor kids to play in (named after the neighbor girl for whom I made the first Heather Town).  Two of those neighbor kids were in my wedding last fall; they are as much my family as my parents are.  Three sets of neighbors traveled to Chicago for the wedding, one family I hadn't seen in a good eight years (they had moved out of the neighborhood a while back).  But they came, and it meant the world to me.

 

Certainly not every moment of my childhood was quite so shiny and clean, and we all had our share of darkness hidden beneath the colorized-fifties sitcom version of my neighborhood that I'm remembering today.  Everyone has those types of stories, I think.  But not everyone had Heather Towns, and cul-de-sac fireworks, and apple trees, and popcorn, and bonfires, and neighborhood parties, and hide-and-seek in half built houses.  I think everyone would be a bit happier if they could find their own Heather Town to visit from time to time, if only in their memories.  Anyone would be lucky to call such a place "home".

ALERT! ALERT! iPhone Down! iPhone Down!

Friday I had one of the most harrowing experiences of my life.  Mind you this is coming from someone who: was hit by a car while walking to school, had a building held hostage by students with guns while I was in class in college, had a murder happen in my dorm when I was a Resident Assistant, had to call 911 and be interviewed by police when a friend was beaten badly outside the mall I worked in, had to call police again from same mall when a man posing as a new employee tried to gain entrance to our store (I was working alone, and other stores in the city had been targeted in the same manner over the preceding weeks), and, AND, I once killed a millipede the size of a dollar bill in my parents' downstairs bathroom.  But this?  Was much scarier than any of that.  On Friday, April 24, 2009, at approximately 10:23am...my iPhone stopped working.

 

iPhone down!

 

My thoughts when it suddenly turned off in my hand for no apparent reason and would not respond to my repeated attempts to turn it back on went something like this (paraphrasing)  "OMFGWHATDOIDOICAN'TLIVEWITHOUTMYPHONEICAN'TCALLICAN'TTEXTICAN'TTWITTERORPLAYSUDOKUWHATIFSOMEONECALLSHOWDOIREMEMBERWHATIHAVETODOTODAYOMGOMGOMG."

I then quickly exited all programs I was in at work and immediately left for the nearest Apple Store.  It was a long and grueling walk (half a mile in 70 degree weather), but I made it there, only to find out that they were full and I needed to make an APPOINTMENT and I had to WAIT and the next appointment was available in SIX HOURS and no amount of my flailing about and stuttering while gesturing at my iPhone was going to change their mind.  I bought a spare wall charger for work while I was there and then quietly left the store, cradling my poor, silent, dark iPhone.

 

I spent the rest of the afternoon back at work pretending to do Important Things between futile attempts at turning the iPhone on and/or plugging it in for the 800th time.  "Maybe it has rested enough and it will turn on now?  No? ... How about now? No? ... How about now?" etc.  It was shaping up to be a long afternoon.

 

Then, somewhere around the 6,734th time I tried to get the phone to reboot, I got distracted by something shiny in the middle of holding down the two buttons at the same time.  I held them down for probably two minutes straight with no response, and then! Magical silver apple in the middle of the previously-dead screen!  IT WAS ALIIIIIIIVE!!!

 

It seems my iPhone just needs longer to wake up than most phones.  Clearly it takes after my wife's side of the family.  Figures.

Mirror, mirror on the wall...who is the dimmest of them all?

I am the first to admit that none of our cats are very bright.  They are often referred to as tweedle-dumb, tweedle-dumber, and tweedle-dumbest; we just have trouble deciding which title applies to which cat.  This week was a pretty good week in the idiotic cat behavior competition in our apartment.

 

Second runner up this week is Ricky.  He didn't do anything particularly noteworthy in the idiot department this week.  He most often works his way into the running for dumbest cat ever by being afraid of *everything*.  He has been afraid to the point of fluffing up/hissing/fleeing/panicking/hiding from the following objects, in no particular order: garbage bags, my messenger bag, sunglasses, an orange traffic cone, and a loaf of bread.

 

First runner up this week is Maddy, who stayed with her "normal" level of idiocy.  She routinely (several times a day) tries to climb the wall in our bedroom or whatever door jam is nearby, forgetting that she doesn't have front claws and this has never once worked.  She walks along the top of the TV or the back of the couch and missteps and falls off.  And, my personal favorite, she'll try to jump onto the arm of the couch or onto a windowsill and not quite make it, cling to the couch/windowsill with her front paws and chin for a while, and then slowly slide to the floor.  It's like living with all three stooges smashed into a grey and white fuzzball.

 

But the winner this week by a long shot is Piper.  Normally she comes in at the bottom of/in the middle of the list, mostly because she has the memory of a gnat.  But this week she really outdid herself, and the other cats.

 

To understand this particular story you need a bit of background.  Piper is not a fan of the other cats.  Generally she tolerates them fine, but we go in phases where she hates them so much, or they decide to poke her too many times, that she will go into hissing and screaming fits, generally requiring T or I to intervene to save our eardrums.  A few nights ago she had such a screaming fit that both T and I were propelled from bed in the middle of the night to figure out what the hell was going on in the living room.  It turns out Ricky was LOOKING AT HER OMG.  Growing up an only child I didn't have experience with this, but I imagine what we have going on in our apartment is the kitty-equivalent of MOM RICKY IS LOOKING AT ME, MAKE HIM STOP and Ricky answering with I'M NOT TOUCHING YOU, NOT TOUCHING YOU! with one paw raised near Piper's face.

 

Anyway, yesterday morning I was in the bathroom getting ready to go into the hospital.  T had already left for work, and I was home alone with the cats.  Maddy and Ricky were in the bathroom with me, and all was calm.  Then from the bedroom behind me I hear Piper making the most awful racket, screaming and hissing like she does when Ricky and Maddy are both too close to her and she wants us to save her.  I looked at Ricky and Maddy, who both looked back at me and shrugged their little kitty shoulders, all "Man, I stopped trying to understand her YEARS ago."

 

Going into the bedroom I found Piper, fluffed up to her fullest, one paw in the air ready to strike at her adversary, hissing and screaming in full battle mode.  It was an impressive site and would have likely scared any other cat away, had the cat she was battling not been her own reflection in our mirrored closet door.

 

Oh, Piper.

The worst part is the tumble-weeds of cat fur all over the apartment

I don’t really have much to write about today, so I thought I would show off my cats.  We are a blended family, T having come with the older two cats, Piper (who is now 8) and Maddy (who is now 5).  Ricky is my baby, the only boy in our apartment, and he is almost five, being a month younger than Maddy.  They are all little-shits in their own ways, but we love them.

This is Piper, a.k.a. the cat with a constant state of bed-head.  Or bed-fur.  She always looks a bit ruffled up.  Piper is super friendly to any person who comes into our home, provided they do not bring any four-legged creatures with them.  Piper is very much of the Animal Farm philosophy “Four legs good, two legs better!”  She is not particularly a fan of either of our other cats, having only grown to tolerate Ricky after nearly two years of living with him.  Actually, the anti-anxiety meds we have her on probably help with that, too.  She constantly looks surprised by her surroundings, all “Mom!  Did you know there was a BED in here?  With PILLOWS?  This is AMAZING!”  She delights in sleeping on T’s desk chair, looking out the windows, and walking around in a very prissy way, complaining loudly about anything and everything.  Despite the complaining, she is a very sweet cat, and once you get her on your lap her purring can be heard three rooms away.

 

This is Maddy, our middle child.  And oh, what a middle child she is.  She is constantly vying for our attention.  She will knock things off tables and shelves one at a time, watching for our reaction in between crashes.  She will purr and stand on our laps, then suddenly flee if someone so much as coughs.  She hates being picked up, though that doesn’t stop us.  She is the fattest of our cats, weighing in at 14.6 pounds as of last November, but she is also the most active, hardly ever sleeping.  Her favorite places in the house are the bathroom (it is impossible to use the bathroom without having her “help”), lying on her back against the wall by the door of our bedroom, and crawling under the covers between T and me at night to wiggle around and generally make it hard to get to sleep.  But she is too cute to kick out of bed.

And this is the baby, Ricky.  Sometimes he gets a little confused as to whether I am the mom or he is, and he frequently grabs a hold of me to frantically bathe my hand.  But that could be his OCD coming out, I suppose.  He bathes himself more than any cat I’ve ever known, and he is always posed very perfectly, whether standing, sitting, or sleeping.  Once, when we were visiting my parents’ house, he was hanging out on their screen porch and instead of watching all the birds and bugs and activity outside the screens, he decided to spend his time pawing all the dust and dirt on the table out there into a neat pile in the middle.  He loves pens, and drinking from/bathing in the sink in the spare bathroom.  From the day I brought him home from the Humane Society he has followed me around relentlessly and slept on my head at night.  He walks up behind me on the couch and stands on my shoulders, perching himself as high up on my chest/neck as he can before he plops down on my face.  He gets quickly jealous when he sees me petting the other cats, and needs reassurance (in the form of neck scratches while holding him like a baby) that he is still my favorite.  T teases me that when I’m holding him I unconsciously rock like I’m holding an actual baby.  But how could anyone resist this cuteness?

 

 

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is NOT try and help

It’s pretty common in my field to feel a strange combination of elation and depression after the end of the busy season.  There is elation at the idea of free time, sunshine, a return to family and friends, and a sense of balance.  Yet there is still some depression over the end of a race; a race run as hard as you could possibly run it with coworkers who are your friends.  It isn’t so much that I want to jump back into busy season – far from it.  It is just hard to find a direction when I’m no longer running from one fire-drill to the next; hard to adjust physically and emotionally to a different pace of life.

The first few days after the end of busy season are something like a sugar crash or a hangover on steroids.  It feels like every cell in my body has been storing up the pain and injury I’ve caused it over the last three months, and they are only now bringing these ills to my attention.  After months of poor diet, little exercise, and even less sleep, I am now reminded that a diet of orange juice and swiss cake rolls is maybe not the best idea.  Every year I get sick right after busy season, and every year it surprises me.

First I have to work through the physical effects of the crash.  I need to catch up on sleep, and vegetables, and quiet time.  Next I’ll have to deal with the emotional crash and depression that tend to follow.  Right now I’m somewhere in the middle of those two phases.  I’m still catching up on sleep and rest and quiet time, but I’m also starting to notice the emotional fallout, and I don’t know quite what to do with it.

It is 12:36am, and I don’t know who to call.  I have wonderful, supportive people in my life who would absolutely wake up to talk me through this, but I don’t really want them to.  This morning at the hospital I told one of the staff that I was still not okay, and she offered suggestions of work I could do to help myself fix this.  She laid out the foundations of a plan – a checklist of things to do, but I don’t feel ready for that quite yet.  I approached her not knowing what I needed, but felt myself shutting down and withdrawing when she went down the path of trying to fix things.  I can’t go there yet.

Yesterday at the hospital several of the nurses noticed I was not doing well, and one in particular approached me to ask if I was okay, if there was anything I needed.  The concern and worry were clear on her face, and I very nearly hugged her.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but that is what I needed; probably what I still need.  Support and care without a list of things to do and solutions attached.  Just a listening ear, a held hand, and time.  But I’m so good at standing on my own two feet and pushing through things that I don’t have such supports readily available around me.  I’m not good at accepting that kind of support until I no longer really need it much, and as a result I don’t know where to find it when I do need it.  When I’m strong enough to be pushed a little, when I’m ready for ideas and solutions, I’ll have plenty of people to call on.  But right now?  I’m noticing something I’m missing in my world.

For now, I think I’ll just go to sleep and see if tomorrow brings a better day.  One step at a time, I’ll get through this.  I always do.

New Beginning

Happy New Year, everyone!

 

Okay, that might seem like an odd thing to greet you with on the 17th of April.  But for me, this *is* a new year.  The 15th of April was my New Years Eve; yesterday was my New Year's Day.  I work in accounting, specifically in tax, and I do little from January through April 15th outside of work. Everyone else marks the New Year when the calendar flips from December to January and the calendar year changes by a digit.  They make resolutions in the middle of winter (in the northern hemisphere, anyway), and proceed to break them one by one as they fall victim to the cozy hide-away instincts triggered by long, dark days and snowy, cold nights.  I, however, mark my New Year at April 16th – the day I get my life back after a long, long tax season.  For the first time in months I am arriving to work after the sun rises and leaving before it sets. 

 

Two nights ago was the end of one year, and the start of my New Year.  We had our annual end-of-busy season party, which is always fun.  Last year, I two-fisted a martini and a vodka-cranberry, sang back-up karaoke with my coworkers, ended up at an after-party at a gay bar with one of my bosses, and lost my wallet.  This year I stuck to Captain-diets, danced mildly inappropriately with coworkers for many hours, made it all the way to the after-after party at a pretty awesome jazz club I don't know the name of, and did *not* lose my wallet.  Us accountant types really know how to pary, believe it or not.

 

Today, I discover that days have somehow magically gotten much longer than I remember them being back in early January when I last left work at five.  I remember hobbies and projects and books that have been sitting untouched for months.  I discover a hunger for fruits and vegetables and other real food not eaten at my desk while staring at Forms 1040, 1120S, 8825, 1116, 1065, K-1, etc.

This time of year part of me also wants to make resolutions.  I never really keep them for long, but it is nice to think of this new beginning as the start of a solid year of personal growth and change for the better.  This year I hope to, in no particular order:

01.  Floss.  Like, every day, not once a month.

02.  Go to the dentist for the first time since…2003?

03.  Get on the elliptical at least three times a week.

04.  Read some every day.

05.  Write some every day (here or in my paper journals).

06.  Eat fresh fruits and vegetables every day.

07.  Finally transfer all the old files from two computers ago to my new computer and get things organized electronically and backed up on the external hard drive I bought last year.  I sort of fail at computer organization, it seems.

08.  Figure out how to hook up a VCR in the living room so I can watch my favorite cheesy horrible movie of all time, Rockula.

09.  Replace work pants with some that are not three sizes to large, because no matter how much I hate shopping for myself, this is just ridiculous.

10.  Be less picky about lists ending in nice, even numbers so that maybe next year I can only have NINE resolutions, or at least I wouldn’t have had to go back and put zeros in front of the first nine resolutions so the numbers still lined up when I moved into the double-digits.

 

And with that, I am off on the journey of my new year.  So far I have managed to make it to all appointments (despite the lack of sleep caused by the above mentioned after-after party), have had ice cream for breakfast, popcorn for dinner, and taken three awesome naps.  Happy New Year!