Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: creative writing, fiction, flash fiction, short story, story, writing
Achem, humble and hardworking son to the clay pot maker Ono, was at work repairing roof of his father’s hut in the hot noonday son when he first realized that there might be an easier way to make his living than learning the craft of his father. This inspiration came in the form of Toro, a local rice merchant, who found him at his work.
“Ho, Achem!” called the fat and wealthy merchant.
“My father is at the market, sir.” the boy called back.
“Oh, never mind that my lad, come down and have a talk with me.” replied the merchant Toro, much to the puzzlement of young Achem who had never in the past been spoken to by such a prominent figure.
Down from the roof came Achem and Toro proceeded to offer the boy a drink of wine from his wineskin and generally treat him as though he was an equal. Strange behavior indeed for a merchant, who had a reputation of not offering anything without expecting something as payment.
“Achem, I was thinking this morning of how important it is that the growers of rice recieve a bountiful crop this season. The farmers need to trade the rice for pots and linen and wine and salt for their families and the city folk need rice to last them through until next harvest season. Yet the crop of rice depends on the rain and the sun and the outcome rests in the hands of God, not in the work of the farmers. It occurred to me that a clever lad who had helped so much in ending the practice of eating rocks might find himself again in conversation with God, and if so you might like to bring up the harvest and suggest to God how important it is that everything goes well.
Oh, and as to the earlier time you spoke with God, I’ve been so pleased that one the Twelveday all we now have to do is go without salt and seasonings. I’ve taken to saving the salt I would have used on the Twelveday in this little urn and I thought you might like to have it as my way of saying thank you.”
With that the merchant presented Achem with a small vessel of with a cork stopper. Achem’s mind had been working quickly, and he felt it best to accept the salt and make no promises as to his abilities to intervene with God in the matter of the harvest.
“If I ever have the opportunity to speak to God again I’ll definitely mention it.” said Achem.
Filed under: anorexia, bulimia, eating disorder recovery, eating disorders | Tags: anorexia, bulimia, eating disorder recovery, eating disorder treatment, eating disorders, pro-ana, proana
Well, today is the third day of my having become newly focused on reducing my weight with no sign yet that I’m going to come to my senses. It actually made therapy and my nutritionist visit a bit easier because I mostly let everything take place on a fake level and didn’t have to actually think about things, until the last 15 minutes of therapy when I broke down crying over how different I am today as opposed to how I was back when I was working just after college.
My weight is down, although I’m not all that encouraged yet. Basically, I have about 5-7 pounds to lose before I even start considering myself human, so despite a bit of good news on the scale today the number is still so depressingly high it barely registers.
Yesterday I was still very much on the fence about all this, still thinking maybe I’d spend a couple days off the rails and then return to the meal plan routine. Today that feels less likely. Ive noticed in the past that my point of no return is often way way earlier than I realize with these things. Obviously I haven’t passed that point yet, but I’ve noticed in the past thinking I had a couple months to fool around with before I had to start worrying where this all was headed and by the time that couple months was up I was so stuck in my new pattern the thought of change seemed impossible.
Even so, I deserve a couple weeks of a break, don’t I? A couple weeks of feeling better, a few pounds down so when I get back on track I have some breathing room? I’ve been so unhappy lately, and now I just want to feel ok for a little while. Worry about the consequences later, kind of thing.
In other news- I’ve got to start writing fiction on the blog again. I was keeping up with writing “instructions” every day and sometimes writing for the blog for a bit, and then somehow I started skipping days, and this is not a good thing. So later today I’ll post something new for “instructions” or I’ll think of a new story, and from now on I need to make sure I post something every day and if I can do more than that so much the better. I don’t like the prospect of going months before I wake up and say “hey, what ever happened to that writing thing” so let’s just nip this bad trend in the bud, shall we?
Filed under: anorexia, bulimia, eating disorder recovery, eating disorders | Tags: anorexia, bulimia, eating disorder recovery, eating disorder treatment, eating disorders, pro-ana, proana
Still leaning towards the “dark side” with today having been so far the first day of being wildly off my meal plan. I’ve found so much pleasure in feeling hungry and anticipating a very good feeling tonight as I go to bed knowing I didn’t binge, purge, and that I ate less than I had been.
Things aren’t going so well lately, my fiction writing has tapered off and I’ve been binging and purging at least once every day for a couple weeks now. I’ve been feeling down, my energy has been low, I’ve caught myself in old thought patterns, hating myself and my life and thinking nothing will ever get better.
Today I’ve felt better about myself, felt like I was embarking on a new project by eating less, feeling less self hatred, feeling proud of myself for resisting temptation, all that stuff. Tomorrow I have appointments to see my therapist and nutritionist, and we’ll see what happens. I haven’t fully decided whether or not to be honest- I don’t believe in spending the time or money and then lying in these situations and never have done so, but I may choose to withold the truth this week and only tell the truth next week if I haven’t changed my mind by then. Mostly that’s because… well, because if I say what my true thoughts are right now and then I do change my mind I’ll feel ashamed, like a failure, and like I changed my mind because I wasn’t tough enough to restrict my calories. So I’ll feel an added pressure not to change my mind if I level with my therapist and nutritionist tomorrow- wheras if I tell them things haven’t changed (and really, one day isn’t much of a change) then if I do change my mind it won’t be as hard to face them a week from now.
I know it’s messed up to feel good about myself for eating less but it’s been long enough since I felt good about myself that I’m feeling like however dumb and fake it is I’m tempted to take it.
Filed under: anorexia, bulimia, eating disorder recovery, eating disorders, overeaters anonymous | Tags: anorexia, bulimia, eating disorder recovery, eating disorder treatment, eating disorders, overeaters anonymous, pro-ana, proana
ok, so winter is coming and winters are bad. and in the past i can think of three alternatives.
these are the three options:
1. depression and binges
2. numbness and starvation
3. milder depression and strict 12 step program adherence
So far, since at least my teenage years, one of those three options has described my life between late october/november and as a best case scenario, late march to mid-april at the earliest. That includes times when I’ve been on medication for depression (depression w/ binges and numbness w/ starvation have both coexisted with various anti-depressant type medications), times when I’ve been in school or working, times when I’ve seen a therapist throughout, and times when I’ve done nothing and isolated myself from everyone.
Option #3 has happened a grand total of once, and if I want to try that option again I have to say, I’m cutting it pretty close because I haven’t been going to meetings much less practicing the 12 step method in any serious way.
I have to admit, option #2 is looking to me like the best alternative. If I have a choice I’m thinking I might try and get something going in the starvation/numbness area. It’s not too late, I’ve done it before and always found it way more enjoyable than binging and depression. Sure, there are drawbacks. But, well, look at the options.
Filed under: politics | Tags: George Bush, Guantanamo bay, politics, torture, war on terror
I had a weird thought today. I started wondering if my American-ness would be a stain that made me unpleasant or unwholesome if I were to travel outside my country. Not in the traditional way of Americans seeming overly loud or rude as tourists, or dumb, or whatever other stereotypes may be held about Americans abroad, but a stain of something darker and more evil because of things that have happened in the name of my country since the start of what we call the war on terror.
I was thinking this because I recently read something about torture, and I started thinking as I have in the past about how I’m living through a time that seems to me to be like the time of the internment camps for Japanese Americans during WWII. A time when things were done by our government in the name of keeping us safe that will seem completely and utterly immoral and wrong when future generations look back on them, and I’m living through them and can’t do anything to stop them being done in the name of my country. In my name, people have been tortured and imprisoned and denied their civil rights for years. Some of these people have been innocent, like the Uighurs in Guantanamo, and there’s not been anything I could do about it.
What this connected to in my mind all of a sudden, was when I meet or see on television or hear on the radio a white person with a South African accent. I get a visceral sense of discomfort when I hear a white South African, and it doesn’t go away even if I learn that this person was an activist that fought apartheid alongside Nelson Mandela. I realize it’s wrong, but my discomfort doesn’t go away just because I find out that this particular individual wasn’t implicated in the crimes of their nation. I imagine that a generation ago a German accent on an ethnic German might have had the same effect- the effect of making you instantly and unconsciously associate the person speaking with the crimes of the Nazis.
It’s a very unpleasant thought that my accent might hold that same association for some people. Maybe in parts of the world where the reputation of the USA is pretty low it already has had that association for a long time. Or maybe the policies of the Bush administration will never rise to the same level in most people’s minds as apartheid did for me, that these things will not stain me the way I feel apartheid stained all white South Africans that lived under it. The idea that it might, though, is sobering. Either way I’m left wondering if we shouldn’t have done more to protest and fight the policies so many of us find morally reprehensible. In our name our government tortured and illegally imprisoned people for the purposes of keeping us safe. Even if I never agreed with that, I’m stained by it.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: atheism, philosophy, religion, spirituality, Uncategorized
Last weekend I saw the Bill Maher “Religulous” movie with my family, and I was relieved to find that we all pretty much hated it. Relieved because my family are atheists and I no longer consider myself one. No matter what your beliefs are I don’t recommend the movie, because any atheist who is even slightly self-reflective or intellectually honest will wind up feeling that Bill Maher doesn’t do either side of the debate justice.
The movie did get me thinking about atheism though, and for what it’s worth I figured I’d share with you all my thoughts on one of the major things that most atheists miss when they get down on religion. That missing thing, the ingredient they don’t even concieve of, is gratitude. One of my beliefs is that god is necessary in order to have somewhere to say thank you.
In the traditional atheist view early humans didn’t understand stuff like science so they needed an explanation for things like natural disasters, lightning, earthquakes, floods, that stuff. Basically, when things went wrong people needed someone to blame and they made up big people in the sky who were punishing them. If you see life as basically unpleasant and the world as a bad place I guess you don’t see anything missing from this picture.
Personally, I see a huge missing element and that is gratitude. If things go well, if the world is beautiful, if you’ve just had your first child, if you’ve got a huge crop surplus and know you’ll be able to make it through the winter, I think there’s something deep within us that wants to say “thank you” to something or someone when that sort of good stuff happens. It’s one of the things I like about humanity that when good things happen we don’t assume that it’s something we deserve or that we’re better than the farmer whose crops didn’t come in as well or the neighbor who lost their job. We want to thank someone, because when things are good we understand that it didn’t have to be that way.
The fact that good things happen isn’t proof that god exists, obviously. I consider the ability to see beauty and feel gratitude one of the elements that argues in favor of there being more than just mechanical or scientific explanations for everything, but that’s not proof either. I do think, though, that humanity may have needed religion more as a place to direct their thank yous than as an explanation for why everything sucks so much. One of my criticisms of atheists is that they don’t seem to realize that.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: creative writing, fiction, flash fiction, religion, short story, story, writing
As a young man I had a passion for two areas of study, and these were history and theology. For much of my youth I imagined I might become a monk and spend the rest of my days in study while living in my romantic conception of a monastary (which most resembled the library of a wealthy English nobleman 100 years ago). These plans may well have come to nothing as age slowly stole the romance out of me, but what actually did occur was far more abrupt and traumatic than that process might have been. Rather than a gradual accumulation of fairly useless knowledge my studies led me to what seems to me a fairly obvious conclusion. This is, in fact, that the end of the world happened sometime in the middle of the fourteenth century.
The clarity of the evidence on this point confused me. Was it possible that we were currently inhabiting the kingdom of heaven and no one noticed? For a time this idea appealed to me, for if you consider the sort of life led by a peasant in medieval times our modern world could certainly be said to have some heavenly aspects. After a short time, however, I discarded this idea as reality confronted me with too much evidence of suffering and sin and human misery to support the notion.
My next explanation has proven more durable, but much less satisfying. If we are living in neither heaven nor hell then it seems to me that the end times may have been protracted. Neither God nor Satan has prevailed and the two great forces have entered into a state not unlike our recent cold war which has gone on ever since the 1340s when the black death signalled the end of days to everyone in the period who was paying any attention. This cold war between the forces of good and evil has allowed civilization, composed of those that were not saved and their descendants, to continue without the knowledge of the world’s having ended.
This understanding is what made it impossible for me to pursue a vocation within the church and led quite naturally to my choosing a career in business. I have been quite sucessful and it is only lately, as the end of my life looms larger, that I felt a need to share my reasons for having abandoned my religion early in my life and to warn anyone that dreams of a better future that there isn’t one. The best that can be hoped is that the state of cold war between the great forces will continue for as long as possible. I recommend you make your family and your own self comfortable and pray God only that the status quo remain unchanging for your lifetime.
Filed under: anorexia, bulimia, eating disorder recovery, eating disorders | Tags: anorexia, bulimia, depression, eating disorder recovery, eating disorder treatment, eating disorders, mental illness, psychology, therapy
Well, maybe that title is a little unfair. I could just as easily say that all methods of therapy are equally good. It depends on your point of view, and whether you want to be nice about things. Still, if the method of therapy- the theory and techniques practiced by a therapist- makes no difference then I think my title stands.
In preparation for this post, which I decided to write yesterday after reading some of the comments on my last post, I did a little googling to find the evidence to backup what I’d learned in both my undergrad psych days and when I was in social work school. Both places told me in textbooks that studies have shown that therapy is a very effective way of treating mental illness (more effective than placebo), that therapy combined with medication is more effective than medication alone, and that the actual type of talk therapy, the school from which a therapist comes, has no effect whatever on the outcomes. This article, while not exactly what I’d been looking for, discusses the issue and points anyone who’s interested towards a researcher who has been looking at it.
Anyway, just so we are clear. Take a bunch of therapists. One is doing CBT therapy, one learned something freud-inspired, one is doing straight behavioral intervention, another is trying gestalt therapy, a younger one is probably using strength-based methods, whatever. If you never got a degree in psychology and never went to social work school take my word for it that there are a bunch of different ideas about how best to do talk therapy. Then if you do a study comparing which method gets the best results they all come up equal. All of them work, mind you, but none works better than any other.
So that’s why it doesn’t bother me that my therapist has what I consider to be really silly ideas about how the human mind works and how best to fix it when it goes awry. Since therapy itself does work I figure it makes no difference what she believes- what matters is that we have a good working relationship, I have someplace neutral to discuss what I’m going through, she posesses common sense enough to help me find practical solutions to things, stuff like that. Not her theoretical underpinnings, ludicrous though I may find them.
So all this being said, I’m now going to totally contradict myself and tell you a method of therapy I most prefer, and that is DBT or dialectical behavioral therapy. If I was a therapist I’d probably want to be doing DBT. The reason I like DBT has nothing to do with theory, though. It’s just that DBT has a sort of kitchen sink mentality in its application. There are reams of worksheets, dozens of excersizes, all sorts of different things to try and angles of attack for any problem. There are CBT influenced worksheets and 12-step influenced worksheets and buddhist philosophy influenced worksheets and just a whole lot of things to learn and then try to apply to whatever your problem is. I like the kitchen sink approach because I figure what works for one person may not work for another. If you throw everything you have at everyone, though, something is likely to work out, somehow.
Plus all the different worksheets really kept you busy.
Filed under: anorexia, bulimia, eating disorder recovery, eating disorders, overeaters anonymous | Tags: anorexia, bulimia, eating disorder recovery, eating disorder treatment, eating disorders, overeaters anonymous, pro-ana, proana, recovery
Yesterday was therapy, and I found that I have a basic disagreement with my therapist. She’s one of these cognitive-behavioral types. Since arguing about psychological theory is not a productive use of therapy time she quite rightly changed the subject once we’d established that I firmly disagree with her ideas. It did, however, get me thinking about the topic of feelings vs thoughts in human experience.
My therapist believes in the primacy of thought. She expressed her position (which I disagree with) very clearly. What she said was basically that she believes that the basic problem in therapy is bad patterns of thinking, and that if you intervene to change the thoughts then that will lead to changes in the feelings. She believes that feelings are caused by thoughts- first you think something, and then you know how you feel about it.
I think the opposite is true. I believe that thoughts are usually elaborate after-the-fact justifications for feelings. First you feel something, then your brain figures out a way of explaining it to yourself or other people. Depending on how important you think that thinking is, this may sound radical or it may seem very common sensical. To me the opposite idea, that thinking causes feelings, is totally ridiculous.
Look at it from an evolutionary perspective. Human beings with the ability to form complex thoughts are a relatively recent invention. I think most of us are comfortable with the idea that animals experience emotions, but they probably don’t do much thinking. Emotions are what drives the mother bear to protect her cubs, for instance. Without getting too far into all that, doesn’t it suggest that emotions pre-dated thinking? That thoughts were a newer add-on to the inner workings of our brains? If that’s true then I think it suggests that the very idea of thoughts causing feelings is on shaky ground to begin with.
Think about it another way. Imagine you’re walking down the street and carrying an expensive new laptop computer. All of a sudden someone- a man larger than yourself, let’s say- grabs the laptop from you and starts to run away. What happens immediately as this occurs? Do you feel something- maybe an initial feeling of shock or fear, and then very quickly anger? Or do you think to yourself “oh, that man just grabbed my laptop. How terrible.” and then realize that you should be feeling shock or fear or anger.
In everyday life I think that thoughts and feelings interact with one another. They can reinforce each other or a thought can be used to mitigate a feeling. For instance, if someone does something careless and you train yourself to think “they probably didn’t mean anything by it” you can dissipate some of the anger you might otherwise feel. On the other hand if you automatically think “they think I’m stupid” after every slight you may find your anger growing. In both of these cases, though, the feelings are there first and the thoughts act as an amplifier or reducer, not a cause.
For eating disorders I think this is a very important thing to understand- it’s why I may insist on discussing it further with my therapist. I think the most important part of helping people with eating disorders is to help them to first to tolerate anxiety and discomfort and then to help them tolerate other strong emotions without needing to use their eating disorder to make the discomfort go away. Challenging their thinking is sometimes necessary but definitely not enough to help on its own. That’s because the bad thinking came after the fact- once they learned that their eating disorder helped them feel less anxious and deal with life better they came up with all sorts of elaborate rationalizations for why their behavior was a good idea, why losing weight was important, etc. This is exactly like an alcoholic who comes up with reasons and justifications and excuses for their drinking- what the alcoholic wants is to keep drinking, because it makes them feel better. What the anorexic or bulimic or overeater wants is to keep doing what they’re doing, because it makes them feel better.
