Once Again Down the Rabbit Hole. And Once Again Back Out

It is the last day of 2017 (Thank God. Thank God?). My morning meditation led me to something Neil Gaiman wrote in his blog several years ago—a New Year’s wish. Beautifully written, I defied my own rules of the last few days and posted it. On Facebook.  My motivation: it really was beautiful, and profound in the way only fabulous writing can be. It was a great reminder that an authentic life requires love, learning, creating, and making mistakes. If it struck a cord with me, perhaps it would strike a cord with others. And how lovely would it be if, in 2018, we all walked around a little more inspired, a little kinder and full of love, and a little less careful in the ways that mattered. My plan: post it, credit it, and get off. What happened: as soon as I posted it, a friend almost simultaneously “loved” it. And commented. A question. It didn’t need to be answered. But. But. What if I didn’t? What if I did? What would it hurt? So I typed a quick response back. And then vowed to get off. But as I was already here, maybe I should just look at the top couple of posts on my homepage. And as I browsed, feeling that all too familiar voyeuristic rush, my reply to my friend niggled. Too braggy? Possibly self-pitying? How did it make me look to the two hundred and something people who had access to my information? So I edited it. Added one sentence for context. A sentence right on point for the persona I had been publically creating this year. And then I vowed to get off. But then another friend replied, my best friend I had known since third grade, and I certainly couldn’t not acknowledge her reply when I had already acknowledged the previous one. So I did. Short and sweet. And then off. But then just a few more glances at my homepage because I really had been wondering how that one friend was doing. And if that other friend’s boyfriend had made it back into town. And as more friends “liked” and “loved” my post, and commented, the desire to leave, the firm, soul-deep knowledge of why I had been off Facebook in the first place, left me. Eventually, I hopped to Twitter to catch up on politics, and before I knew it, it was 7:30, my legs were sore from sitting, and the chickens were late being let out. My beautiful morning routine of yoga, journaling, and organizing my day had been hijacked.

I joked with my husband yesterday when he threatened to buy popcorn at the movies that if he could not control himself and had to buy it, he could at least help control me and slap my hand away if I reached for the bucket. When he bought the popcorn, after we had already been seated, because, of course he did, I told him I wouldn’t help him eat it. “There is no way I’m going down that rabbit hole with you,” I said, my resolve firm. But, of course, I did reach my hand into that bucket, and, because he’s a kind man, he refused to slap it away (wise also because I would have been irrationally angry at that point if he had followed through), and, while I did not eat as much popcorn as I normally do, really trying to savor it before going back for more, I still ate it even though my resolve was that I wouldn’t. Snack foods are my rabbit hole in the food world. Quick, easy grab foods keep me eating at times when I am not hungry, when I would prefer to be doing something else or even when I would prefer to be eating something else. But once I enter that space, I am helpless to help myself out.

I got off social media because it is my rabbit hole of time. When I did a careful and honest examination of the quality of the life I was leading, the reasons why it fell short, social media was at the top of the list of ills. In spite of all of the research that I had read about why it is destructive to mental health, I rationalized why I stayed on it. I loved seeing pictures of my friends, their adventures, their kids. My former students were on it (even if the weren’t ON it) and it was a way to keep up with them. I often find great articles on it, either through friends reposting them, or because I have “liked” and “followed” so many publications whose writing and content I find worth reading. But really, we can rationalize anything we do that has become a bad habit. There are good reasons behind most things we do out of habit, or we wouldn’t have started doing them in the first place. What makes these reasons lose their positive power is when they comprise such a small amount of our time spent while doing it.

My time on social media these days is 10% looking at photos of friends, their adventures, and their kids and 5% finding good things to read (my students are all on Instagram or Snapchat, and, lord knows I do not need a different rabbit hole). The other 85% of it is hours of compulsive looking at mostly crap even after I have grown bored with it. And I like to say that, as an English teacher, it feeds my love for a good story when someone overshares, or leaves something (or someone) conspicuously out of a post or picture, but I have begun to suspect that my glee has less to do with the good story and more to do with a destructive need to bottom feed off the misery of others. Today, I didn’t wonder how that friend was doing. I was hoping to see a crack in her insufferably cheery demeanor. And I didn’t look to see if the boyfriend had arrived in town. I was hoping to confirm my prediction that there was something off about them as a couple. And, as long as I’m being 100% honest here, I posted the Neil Gaiman post because, yes, it was beautiful and poignant, but it also made me look literary and positive, something I haven’t been able to claim a ton of this past year. I stayed on Facebook long after I felt the need to chew off my own arm to escape because I worried about what I would miss if I left. I rationalized that I would miss the births, the engagements, the weddings, and even the lovely photos of sunsets off back porches and all of those sleeping dogs. But the reality is that the time lost down the rabbit hole of Facebook made me miss out on my life. Since deleting my account from my phone, I people watch when out in public. I work on sitting quietly and am learning once again how to be bored. It’s bliss. At home, I journal. I read again (!) and occasionally sit down to play the piano. I’ve started to work out daily and my laundry is all sorted and put away.

I’ll end the way this started, with Neil Gaiman’s words. To follow his advice, my life needs a bit more space than a rabbit hole will allow. So once again, I’m logging off and seeing where this undocumented road takes me.

“May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

...I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you'll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you'll make something that didn't exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind.

...I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.
Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're Doing Something.

-Neil Gaiman

On Food, Exercise, and Eating

-->

Food is ridiculous. Or at least America’s preoccupation with it is. At 45, I have read more about food than I have read about any other subject. I know more about it than our nation’s history, how our government works, child rearing, teaching methodology, the environment, relationships, and any other subject about which having a working knowledge would have helped improve the quality of my life and my effectiveness as a human being. But I grew up in a family of naturally skinny people. My sister and brother were rail thin, and my father was a military fitness nut. There were only two people in my family who didn’t fit this: my mother and myself. My mother is legitimately big-boned. Growing up in the 50s, her 5’7” frame must’ve seemed huge compared to everyone around her. Dating my father, who was two inches shorter than she was, did not help, especially since he and his college friend found entertainment in teasing her. She played the bass drum in the marching band (really, you had to admire how secure she was), and one day when they were picking her up from a game, my dad’s friend exclaimed, upon seeing her approaching them with her instrument, “Lord, she’s going to tip over the car”, a story my father delighted in telling over and over again.
 
I did not inherit my mother’s large bones, although I would grow to be at least full inch taller than she, but I also was not one of those children who naturally burned off everything I ate. I had a belly. And thighs. Baby fat certainly applied. Left alone, I may have grown out of it, many kids do, but two issues cemented a lifetime of being aware of size: my family’s cruel sense of humor and my mother’s insistence my sister and I dance ballet.
 
My father continued to tease my mother about her size after the bass drum incident. Her nickname around the house was Her Eliphancy. I don’t know how it made her feel; I can’t imagine very good. I know I laughed along with everyone else. I had my own nickname, although only my sister used it: Blubber. It was the 70s, and Judy Blume’s book had just hit the stands. My sister, who sometimes liked me, but mostly tolerated me (I stole her stuff on a regular basis; she had grounds for discontent), latched onto the cruelty demonstrated by the girls in the book, and started picking at a wound that was just beginning to form. By 8, I was painfully aware of my size. And that mostly had to do with ballet.
 
My mother, along with being larger than average, seemed to be less coordinated than most, but maybe that was just my father’s perception, and not the reality of anything. He teased her about that as well, so that anytime she fell, it became an anecdote at a party. If you ask her, she will tell you that it was because of this that she enrolled both my sister and me into ballet. We started it on our military base in Spain. I was 6; my sister was 8. It was held in the basement of the base’s church, which also served as the movie theater. I don’t even remember if we had a dress code. In truth, I don’t remember much about it except that it was mixed with tap, and it led to my mother enrolling us in an actual ballet company when we moved back to the States. The teachers at the new company were former New York City professional dancers. Jeff and Joy were husband and wife, Jeff, a tall man with warts on his fingers, Joy, the epitome of ballet charm, all clavicle and visible ribs. It was in Jeff and Joy’s studio where my mother would eventually work as a pianist, and where my size became painful awareness to me. Dress code for all dancers was a black leotard, pink tights, pink shoes, and a bun. We were to look uniform, and most did. Most of the girls were built like my sister: tall, and stick thin. We were all in elementary, so it’s not like they were doing the dangerous dancer diets I would later read about. They were young girls who hadn’t hit puberty; that was just their natural form. In contrast, I was lumpy. I had rolls and bulges where others had straight lines. I may have been teased. Someone may have said something, or I just may have reached a point in my growth where comparing myself to others naturally happened. I began to dread ballet class and often begged my mom in tears to let me skip lessons. I think she offered to let me stop dancing, only forcing the classes once the tuition had been paid, but there was pressure to do what my older sister was doing, so I waged tearful battle after tearful battle. The climax of my ballet story came in 4th grade when the annual Nutcracker performance came around. We danced at the mall (some elite ballet studio, huh?), and all 3rd graders were tin soldiers. By 4th grade, though, we were Chinese dancers. The costumes for the toy soldiers were ridiculous, the makeup silly, but the Chinese dancers wore silky, colorful pajamas, their makeup sophisticated in contrast to the huge, red cheek circles of the soldiers. Jeff and Joy approached my mother sometime in September and said that I was too chubby to be a Chinese dancer. Maybe they told her I wouldn’t fit into the costume. Maybe they told her I would dance better with a few pounds less. I wanted to be a Chinese dancer. So at 9, I went on my first diet. I don’t remember much about it except that I gave up Yorkshire pudding on my mother’s suggestion, the best part about pot-roast night (she knew how much fat she put into making that delicious, magically rising bread), and I gave up my Halloween candy. All of it. I don’t know if I gave it to my brother and sister or threw it out, but that year, I skipped it entirely. I guess I lost weight, but not enough for Joy and Jeff because in November, when we threw all of our ballet effort into learning our Nutcracker parts, I was the only 4th grader who danced the soldier’s dance with all of the 3rd graders. I believe we are not to hold grudges, and that we forgive others as a way to make peace with our past, but if I ran into Jeff and Joy today, even in their frail, aging state, I would be hard pressed not to want to physically slap them, or at least verbally berate them for doing that to a 9 year old girl.
 
The climax of my family issues happened on a hike sometime in my junior high years. As stated, my father was a fitness buff. He ran daily and ate salads long before they became chic. My sister remained a dancer long after I quit. One day, they and my mother and I went hiking together. I still remember the trail, one that I would return to on a regular basis in the years that followed. The first couple of miles are incredibly steep and rocky until it smooths out into a mellow, meandering path through grassy meadows, ending at a popular fishing reservoir. It was on the first part of the trail, though, that I felt my father’s disapproval for the first time. My sister and my dad scaled the trail at what seemed like an effortless pace. My mother and I, on the other hand, snailed our way up, stopping often to catch our breath. I believe my father was frustrated at having to wait for us. I absolutely get his frustration, but at one point, I glanced up to see him turn back, gauging how long he would have to wait again before we caught up, and his face was unmasked disgust, aimed at not just my mother, but me. I was not measuring up in his eyes. I was a disappointment because rather than being lithe, sprightly, and powerful like my sister, I was slow, lumpy, and cumbersome like my mother.
 
There were other moments that I remember from childhood, like finding my mother’s hidden stash of M&Ms in the bathroom hamper, comments my dad would make about a shirt being too tight, efforts my mom would make for the whole family to eat differently, when only she and I seemed unable to control ourselves around the junk food she bought at the commissary. Before I knew it, I had my own food issues. And exercise issues, although those would come later. I became a binger and hoarder. I ate in secret. I remember once eating an entire box of Ding Dongs within two days and hiding the evidence. My mother questioned where they went, and I played mute. I’d hoped she’d think she incorrectly imagined buying them. I suspect she knew they were eaten by me. Maybe she thought my sister had helped.
 
I don’t hate my father for his contribution to my issues, and there are times when I have peaceful, forgiving feelings toward Jeff and Joy. The reality is they were products of their own issues. I just became a great source of sticky glue for them. And I didn’t stay fat. Maybe it was my natural leaning out after childhood, but I suspect it had more to do with discovering exercise. I did my mother’s aerobic Beta video tapes, aimed at middle-aged women. To this day, I can sing all of the words to “If You Like Pina Coladas”. And I discovered running. I ran laps in our basement originally, feeling too awkward to go out into the world with it, but eventually I took to the streets, in Ked sneakers, feeling like my feet were already too large, and actual running shoes would make them look even larger (I lost countless toenails until I got over that insecurity). I didn’t learn to eat better, but the punishing exercise and intermittent fasting (not a term I knew back then), made me thin, although I never felt it, choosing one summer to wear long-sleeved shirts every day because I felt my arms were too fat (if you saw me today, you’d laugh at this because even with extra weight, my arms are stupidly small). By high school, I would skip breakfast and lunch, come home to collapse in front of the tv and binge eat Rice Crispies, milk, bananas, and artificial sweetener until my stomach hurt, go to my room and sleep for two to three hours, and awake in time to skip dinner with my family and run the four flights of stairs from our basement to our second floor, over and over again until I felt like I had worked off my earlier eating. I don’t know how my frenetic THUMP, THUMP, THUMP didn’t drive my family crazy, but my sister was struggling with drug abuse, my dad with his sexuality, and my mother with her own food and loss issues (my brother passed away at 16 from Duchene Muscular Dystrophy).
 
By college, the binging was worse. Having gained the freshman 15 (exactly), I spent my sophomore and junior year trying to get my high school body back. I had a boyfriend who said he thought I was overweight, but that he still loved me anyway (swell, Dude!), and I vividly remember a night with too many cookies, chips, and whatever else I could put my hands on ending with a large dose of Epicac. I never could make myself throw up. To this day, if I get the stomach flu, it’s probably coming out the other end, as I can count on two hands how many times in my life I have thrown up. In between binges, I experimented with food. There was the lowest amount of money spent diet, where my roommate and I ate tuna fish, baked potatoes, and canned peas for a week, trying to save money on groceries to the other extreme where I shopped at our natural foods store for the highest quality of food, thinking that if it was healthy, it wouldn’t matter how much of it I ate.
 
My weight has yo yoed through the years, although not as drastically or noticeably as some. I am tall, so I can carry extra pounds without it being incredibly obvious (although I think I can fool myself about others not noticing, too), but I have been as thin as 118 pounds and as large as 201--I was pregnant, yes, but it was only one child, and she only comprised 8.3 pounds of that weight. The first time I went shopping for jeans following my pregnancy, I went home and cried on my bed for at least a half of an hour. The happiest I was with my weight was in my mid 30s, when I was running on a regular basis, and drinking only Slimfast shakes during my workweek working hours, and in my early 40s, when I broke my jaw and had to liquid diet for six weeks. I had two reactions to learning that I had broken my jaw in eight places: 1) Can I still run while I am healing?, and 2) I am going to lose soooo much weight.
 
At 45, heavier than I have been in a long time and struggling to find motivation to muster up any change, I am tired of food. If I could stop eating it forever and still manage to live, I would because I don’t want to think about it anymore. I don’t want to use up the energy ingesting the energy I need to live (the reason the Slimfast and wired jaw diets made me so happy). Which is why most days, I grab crap as I move about my day. I like to eat healthy, but it takes time, and energy, and commitment, and by 3:00 in the afternoon, my weak time, all of those things seem to be used up. So I still eat myself into a food coma, but as a 40something year old wife and mother, dinner still needs to happen, and we don’t have four flights of stairs (nor would I make my family endure that level of madness), so I often sit down to eat with my family when I am already uncomfortably full.
 
What I know from reading exhaustively about food is that my food issues are common. Way too common. And it’s not weight issues; it’s food issues. So many of us are afraid to eat. Or afraid of our bodies if we eat. We compare ourselves to each other and society’s ideals. Our heads buzz with everything we’ve read, often contradictory in nature, about healthy eating and exercise. There is no natural to our eating and moving patterns. Life becomes a crazy maze of shoulds and should nots, and how successful we are on a day to day basis comes down to how much and what we ate and how much we exercised. We ignore our value as parents and partners and family members. We negate our badassery in mediating issues among friends and coworkers. We downplay the fact that every morning we wake up, take care of business with minimal complaint, and show up the next day to do the very same thing. Our prisons we build are entirely of our own construction. And many of us feel as if we are drowning in them (forgive the mixing of metaphors).

At 45, I'm tired. And I don't want to do it anymore. I'm tired of holding out for some ideal version of me. I'm tired of my enjoyment of events being dictated by how close to that version I am or by how many steps I took toward making that version a reality. There has to be more to life than this. I've seen glimpses. This year, whatever that freedom looks like, I'm chasing it.