Feeding salt (and ice cream) into the open wounds.

This past week was the epitome of emotional awfulness. I hit rock-bottom, slammed upward from the momentum, only to come crashing back down onto the jagged rocks time and time again.

I had intended to sift through the muckity-muck, to clear out the skeletons in my closet, so that I could better understand the whys and hows of my life as it currently exists. I wanted to dive a bit deeper into issues that were arising as I wrote out my variety of emotions and questions, particularly those expressed here; I thought the experience would be, at most, a cathartic, soulful cleansing of sorts.

Instead of the joyful release that I expected to feel upon unleashing a decades worth of demons, I felt every heartbreak, every gut-stabbing moment of pain, every ounce of regret and guilt. Every moment of wrong was relived as I navigated myself through the maze of all the unhealthy relationships that I have witnessed and all the unhealthy relationships I've been a part of in my life.

One moment I'd be fine, the next I was sitting on the shower floor, water pouring down me, as I was choking out sobs and trying to wrap my mind around something I've been avoiding for so long. I'd be fine again, thinking I'm getting it all under control, then I'm in my car headed back to my apartment and a super-personal song comes on the radio that has me bawling and trying to wipe tears off my face as quickly as possible so I can see the road...

I was absolutely desperate to talk to someone about all the guilt, shame, bitterness, confusion, disgust, and just get RID of all the stuff that was being held like a fist full of bile in the back of my throat. I needed to get it out, to clean out my system, but there was no one. The things I needed to let out were so personal that I'd already reduced my potential "supporters" to people I really felt I could trust with such information. The person I most adamantly wanted to talk with was no where around and I don't have his phone number so I had no way of getting in contact with him... His sister was my next effort and she didn't respond to my text message.

My last potential vein of support was to talk with my best friend who I've not been able to talk with about anything personal in quite sometime because she's been so seemingly uninvolved and uninterested in anything that's not her husband or her child. It seemed kismet when she ended up calling me before I could call her, but then all she could talk about was how Steven Tyler was "such a sell-out" because he made a pop album and how he was her "idol" and now she has "no respect" for him because he's "not a 'rocker'" anymore and that a "part of [her] died" because of his being a sellout. She talked for 20 minutes about how this was such a huge disappointment, such a sad day, blah blah blah. Toward the end she picked up on my total lack of interest in the whole (completely stupid) conversation and mistook it for me being "tired."

Lost and alone, I thought I could get myself out of the demon-plagued mind-trap by writing it out here and, hopefully, get some sort of support that I'd been denied for too long last week. Well, wouldn't you know it, when I got online Blogger was down for maintenance and was in read-only mode or some such thing.

I had exhausted every possibility and had been left, as usually, entirely empty-handed. That's why I've always chosen food. That's why I "chose" food again. In the 48 hours my mom was back home in NW Ohio, I ate 6 "party pizzas," 5 large cinnamon rolls, two containers of Edy's ice cream (not the "double-churned" supposedly-healthier variety, either), finished off a container of Nutella, and ate a bunch of almonds for good measure.  I drowned myself in food and soda; in both the sweet and sugary and the salty and savory calories. I kept eating because at least when I was eating I could trick myself into thinking about the food and not the loneliness and the emptiness and the shame of it all. I had no one when I needed someone the most, NO ONE, but I had food.

Now, a few days later, the demons are lingering in a big way, the already stretchy-as-stretchy-can-be clothing are getting tighter, and I still haven't been able to talk to anyone so I just... keep eating. It doesn't seem like it should be this hard; I don't WANT it to be like this, but I'm so tired of facing nothing beyond loneliness and emptiness. Where do I turn when the only thing that's ever constant is food? I'm so mind-numbingly scared of what the future holds if this is the "prime of my life" and I'm this miserable and perpetually locked down by food because there's nobody around to throw me a helping hand to help me help myself pull away from it all.

What do I do? WHAT? I need help, I admit it, I'm ready for the next step, but I need help because I don't know what the next step is and I don't know how to face it alone -- I'm not even sure I can. I just need help.

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"One of these days I'm going to love me and feel the joy of sweet release; one of these days I'll rise above me and at last I'll find some peace. Then I'm going to smile a little, and maybe even laugh a little, but one of these days I'm going to love me."

[Tim McGraw; "One of These Days"]

When it's time to find something that fits, somedays are better than others.

A few weeks ago I was sitting by myself in the one bedroom apartment I share with my mother and I mentally cataloged all the foodstuffs I had ingested in my time alone. My roommate (re: mother) was in NW Ohio for the better part of the week and it occurred to me that my eating habits had spiral-rocketed out of control.

As I thought back on all that I had eaten, I became more and more upset--not only about what I was eating, but also because I began thinking of the reasons I had eaten in the first place. This is one of my primary problems: I don't just eat when I'm hungry, I eat to fill voids, ease frustrations, and soothe hurts. When I sit down and think about all the food I've stuffed into myself, I can't avoid the reasons I found to do said "stuffing," and of course that leads me down that same path again--only now with the added angst of realizing that I'm shoving calories down my throat faster than a hurricane uproots a palm tree.

The night I hit my breaking point was my last night "alone" for that week. I'd went to the store with ten dollars (ten dollars that I very much did not have to spare) and I bought all the high-calorie goodness I could manage. I left the store with two Totino's Party Pizzas, one (40-count) bag of generic pizza rolls, and a quart of Homemade Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream. I'd purchased all these items and returned home by 9:30 P.M. and I ate the two party pizzas and half the ice cream that night, by 2:30 in the morning. The next day I woke up, ate the pizza rolls, and finished off the ice cream. In less than 24 hours I'd eaten that much food and I wasn't so much "ashamed" as I was conscious of the fact that I should have felt ashamed.

Actually, I did feel a bit of shame when I ate the second pizza when I was already full from the first and then went on to eat the half quart of ice cream. What really set me off in the "shame" department is the fact that the pizza rolls were absolutely disgusting; they had a terrible flavor and the texture was mealy, and even though I had told myself at several points that they were the worst things I'd ever put in my mouth, I ate every. single. one.

Though that night was a low point (or a turning point?) it was not an isolated incident by any stretch of the imagination. In the past few months I've had so many moments of inhaling a high volume of food in a short amount of time. The bright side is that the "low point" prompted me to do a little search on disordered eating, and what I found seems to fit. According to the information provided by the Mayo Clinic, I've got a very clear-cut case of a Binge-Eating Disorder. I say "clear-cut" because it all fits. The depression, the anxiety, the eating alone, the secrecy of what/why/how I eat, and all the thoughts and worries I have "post-binge."

I'm here though, to sort through all that because it's not enough just to say "This is my problem." I still need to figure out the whys and hows of it so that I can fix the way I think about food; I want to understand this so that I can, someday in the future, be truly better. I just have to take it one step at a time and I'll get where I'm going, eventually.

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[Katy Perry: "Firework"]