I am not at all sure about this creative writing class I’ve gotten myself into. I’m trying to tell myself it can’t hurt and it might help with the winter blahs and writers’ block… but I dunno.
Problem #1 is that it’s very focused on “literary” fiction. I always knew this would be a problem with any class, because most of them are total snobs about the type of writing I find most interesting, which is science fiction. Badly written sci-fi is everywhere, and I won’t defend it. But a story that has science fiction or fantasy elements that is well written is sublime. I would take Kurt Vonnegut over Hemmingway or whatever other literary writer you care to name any day.
So, the class involves a lot of reading of these “literary” types of short story. ICK! UGH! GAG! What could be worse than being forced to read emotionally manipulative claptrap about white people from a bygone era.
Which brings us to problem #2 which is that our Mary Poppins of a professor doesn’t like negativity and tearing things down. We are supposed to be learning from masters, here, not criticising them. So not only do I have to read and comment on and write essays about a bunch of lame bullshit, I don’t even get the release of finding things to put down and demean in any of it. KILL ME!
And of course problem #3 is that when it comes time for me to actually write fictional stuff myself I have to either work twice as hard to make sure my sci-fi is literary enough or else I’m stuck writing lame crap which meets with teachers approval.
This is exactly why I always resisted just signing up for some random class without making sure it matched my needs. But I wasn’t doing anything productive so I talked myself into doing this on the theory that it couldn’t hurt, could it? Well, lovely. Now I’m stuck with this lame ass bullshit.
Should I drop out? I probably can pull out now and save my parents a few hundred dollars. I better decide quick though because that window won’t stay open long, a week or two at most and week one is almost over already, I’m guessing.
dude! i tried doing the first assignment for my class today. there were 3 parts, the third of which was to write for 20 minutes about a smell and the memories connected with it. i didn’t quite do the assignment, but i’m pretty pleased with the result, seeing as how blocked and unable to write anything i’ve been feeling. it might just be that this course was a good idea after all!
I don’t remember any smells of childhood. I was born without a nose, in 2003, before modern medicine gained the ability to recreate noses for little deformed children in my pitiable position. Science had progressed enough to allow me reconstructive surgery which gave me the appearance of a nose, but the ability to smell things with it was withheld for many years from me.
In my late teens, however, I did gain a sort of sense of smell when I volunteered in some of the early experiments to augment ordinary human senses. Rather than growing the ordinary apparatus with which the human animal smells things, however, the researchers wired my visual function in to the unused olfactory apparatus in my brain. The upshot, as you’ll no doubt have guessed, was that I gained the ability to see what others smell.
Human beings are far more oriented towards vision than they are to smell, so my abilities allow me to detect scents with a much higher resolution than an ordinary person. Ever since the operation I’ve been able to find work with law enforcement operations, since the sparkly green of tiny cocaine particles or the dull brown and orange of explosives are as clear as day for my new senses.
One thing that suffered for a while after I gained this ability, however, was my social life. Imagine if you always knew for certain that your date had failed to wash his hands when he returned from a trip to the men’s room! Even after I learned to ignore such minor concerns (most people are simply dirtier than we admit to one another) I still had trouble. It’s a fine party trick to tell somebody how many dogs they have at home, or whether they took their own car or a bus or the subway to get there, but it ends up making people uncomfortable. Most guys don’t want to take you home once you’ve alerted them subconsciously to the idea that you’ll be able to say exactly how many weeks it was since they last vacuumed.
Eventually I learned that it was best not to draw people’s attention to the fact that in my eyes they sit or stand inside a cloud of multicolored stink. It’s the type of information I’m well served by saving for the second date.
Filed under: anorexia, bulimia, eating disorder recovery, eating disorders | Tags: anorexia, bulimia, eating disorder recovery, eating disorders
yesterday was the official start for my online writing course. i’m feeling intimidated and fearful, even though the work is slight and the stakes are non-existant.
i’ve been very down and very low energy for the past week or so. my eating disorder has been the most active thing in my life, everything else has been like a blur. this is exactly the reason for the course- because winters can be so brutal and i hoped something to do might help a little.
for now though i’m just terrified even looking at the syllabus and assignments. i’m afraid i won’t be able to write the single 8-18 page story required and wondering if i should use my already begun stowaway story, for safety. and there are also 4 five-paragraph essays on short stories we have to read and write critical essays on.
i’m scared i won’t be able to do the work, scared of being parlyzed and not able to do anything at all. and i feel embarassed and ashamed at even thinking that. this isn’t hard stuff. it is extremely unlikely that i will actually have any trouble with it. i’m only scared because i’m depressed and my self confidence is basically zero.
the only thing i have to fear is… fear itself! snap out of it, dummy. no one wants to read your self pity.
Filed under: anorexia, bulimia, eating disorder recovery, eating disorders | Tags: anorexia, bulimia, depression, eating disorder recovery, eating disorders
Usually I tell my parents I’m okay, whether or not I’m ok. Okay can mean anything from fabulously happy to desperately depressed. I don’t want to worry them.
Today somehow my mom asked in just the right way to get a real answer. I began to cry and tell her everything. How disappointed I’ve been in the failure of my attempts at getting help for my eating disorder. How I’ve temporarily suspended therapy. How hopeless I’ve been feeling.
It felt so good just to say it. To feel it and admit it instead of saying I was fine. And just talking to her was enough to help me remind myself that I don’t always feel this way. Winters are hard. But even so things aren’t just black and terrible- less than a week ago I was actually feeling more hopeful and doing a lot better.
It feels like forever right now, like things have never been ok and never will again. When the depression is worst it’s really hard for me to think that those times of feeling less depressed are worth anything since even in my better times I’m isolated and eating disordered and not doing anything constructive.
I’ve had a long streak of bad in my life. Maybe things will never get better. Maybe one day I’ll look back on this whole time as a bad dream. I can’t know which it is or do anything right now but slog my way through it. It felt good to get it out and tell my mom how bad things felt though. I probably should consider re-starting therapy, if only because it helps a little just to have someone know how things really are, even if there isn’t much they can do to help with them.
hey guys, I’ll be MIA for a little while. I spilled a big glass of diet coke on my keyboard, see, which has resulted in my not having an “e” or an “s” key.
you may ask, then how am I posting even this short message? Well I am resourceful, and am copying and pasting in “e”s and “s”s one by one from a random word document from before I lost those letters. Needless to say this is a very painstaking and annoying process- so this is it for now until I find a way to solve the problem.
Think quick. If someone uses the phrase ‘the American People’ or the word ‘Americans’ whats your fallback mental image?
I don’t know about you, but I know my images range from a generic looking white man to a crowd of white faces to a husband and wife from the heartland (white, obviously). I don’t instantly picture a woman or an immigrant or a generic looking black businessman. I might react negatively to the word ‘American’ and connote a sort of tackiness that I associate with our culture, film, celebrity and consumerism. I might react negatively to the idea that when the person speaking says ‘American’ I assume they’re talking about white people. I might feel alienated and not included, especially if Sarah Palin or someone from Fox News is the ones using the word or phrase. Or I might feel uplifted if someone explicitly tells me they’re including a wider group within the word or along with the phrase.
My challenge to myself from today on is to do the work myself to picture someone I wouldn’t usually, and to strive to do that in a positive way that doesn’t judge the speaker or pat myself on the back for doing it. When I hear a commentator say ‘the American people’ I’m just going to take a second and put it on myself to picture a people who aren’t a sea of white faces.
I hope more people than just me are taking on the challenge of including new types of people into the American people they unconsciously picture. But it isn’t on me to make anyone but me include a wider vision of an American- so from now on when I hear the word or phrase I’m just going to take a second to picture a poor black woman. And to challenge myself to start doing that in a way that doesn’t carry a pat on the back to myself for being such a wonderful liberal, or anger at anyone for anything, but just to start to think of the American people as a group that includes everyone living in this country by picturing a group of black and latino and asian and arab Americans, with maybe a white guy or gal stuck in there too, or to picture a black grandmother or a striving black buisnessman- or maybe a black politician with a white mom and an immigrant for a father.
Filed under: anorexia, bulimia, eating disorder recovery, eating disorders | Tags: anorexia, bulimia, eating disorder recovery, eating disorder treatment, eating disorders
My considered opinion, as as expert in this area, is that my very worst times are when my bulimia becomes a foregone conclusion. The black hole looms large and my fears of passing the event horizon start to seem either realized or, at best, inevitable. I’m a bulimic and I always will be, and nothing and no one can help things.
These periods have days where I don’t fight- where I wake up planning when and how and on what I’ll binge and purge. Those are the worst days, except that the days where I do fight and give it my all only to surrender at 4pm or 6pm or 9pm or midnight might be ever harder. There’s no reasoning with me if I give in after having promised myself I wouldn’t- I simply can’t believe I’ll ever have another day in my life when I can get through all the way to bedtime without puking junk food into my toilet.
To me that idea, the thought that I can’t escape this no matter how hard I try, is poison. Although I know there’s more I could have done when I came back from treatment last summer- and I never expected treatment to be a cure, just a starting place- the thought that I could have put so much effort into trying to escape this disorder only to end up right back where I started feels like a life sentence, no parole possible.
I wish there was a way for me to believe, in the midst of a time like that, that at some point there will be a break and a few rays of sun will begin to get through again. I don’t know at all what makes the difference between the times I try my hardest and fail and the times when I start having some power over myself, but I do know that so far the times when fighting is impossible have always passed, eventually. It doesn’t make it less real when I’m in it- but sooner or later a day comes when I try and actually succeed.
I’ve had another 2 days straight without purging, and at last I’m starting to feel ready to think what I want to do to build on this. Probably getting back in touch with my nutritionist and therapist would be a good place to start things. I’m still not sure I believe recovery for me is possible, but I do, at least, believe again that there’s some chance of my escaping. That event horizon might be real, or it might just a monster I’ve dreamed up to torment myself with. But real or not, I don’t think I’ve passed over it.
Filed under: anorexia, bulimia, eating disorder recovery, eating disorders | Tags: anorexia, bulimia, eating disorder recovery, eating disorders
another day without binging, purging, or restricting yesterday. i can’t express how impossible doing this felt as of a week ago or so. i felt completely trapped and utterly convinced that nothing i did could stop me from eventually giving in and going out to buy binge food at least once every single day.
what i eventually decided to try was just to give myself a break and see if it was even possible to stop myself. extreme measures, i would call it. i’d love to say i was eating in a rational way, with meals and nutritional balance and all that, but that’s not where i am now. basically, i have most of my calories during the day from really safe things like soups and yogurt, and then my last meal of the day is basically a huge binge on vegetables to the point of being uncomfortably full.
the thing is, i just couldn’t get myself to stop after a reasonable amount of food. it was sooo frusterating. so i decided to keep the binge, but on stuff that was low cal enough for me to resist the urge to throw up afterwards. it’s not a perfect solution, but as a temporary one i’m really happy with the results. when i’m stuffed full of broccoli i still want to puke, but i can talk myself down from it.
i skipped writing another bit of the story i’ve been working on yesterday. it was for a kinda silly reason- i realised i’d avoided dealing with the gravity/acceleration/weightlessness question. i know where the story is headed, but i was annoyed at myself for not saying whether there was normal gravity on board the spaceship my heroine had stowed away on, and if so why or if not how she was dealing with it.
anyway, i’m just going to ignore it and finish the story without answering, and if i go back and edit/expand the story i can easily put something in about that. but i was just so embarassed that i’d forgotten about gravity not being the same as usual if you leave the surface of a planet i avoided writing more.
silly, huh?
Filed under: anorexia, bulimia, eating disorder recovery, eating disorders | Tags: anorexia, bulimia, eating disorder recovery, eating disorders
first, let me just tell you that any weight loss i may have experienced is now in the past. i’m not wanting to make a big deal about it, but eating more and purging less tends to do that, especially if the weight loss in question was a product of a whole bunch of eating less and purging more.
the good news is, though, that yesterday i ate a sane amount (calories wise) and didn’t deposit any of what i ate into the toilet after having consumed it. that’s the third day i’ve done so out of the past four days, which is a big improvement on my previous situation which was no days without purging in god knows how long.
i’m extra happy with myself for getting back on the positive track after slipping off it the day before yesterday. the easier thing for me would have been to see the 2 days before when i’d come up with a new plan of action and followed it as an irrelevant and unimportant blip. the easier thing would be to tell myself that my failure on the 3rd day was proof that the whole thing had been pointless and hopeless and now i was back to “normal” having once again proven to myself how impossible and hopeless my situation is.
instead, i decided to just skip the whole self pity thing and try again yesterday. and i promised myself not to write anything approaching an update, since i think writing something positive spooked me in a weird way on wednesday.
today is another day and i feel encouraged. i don’t know if i’m giving myself a break from the worst of my ed or gearing up to get back into full out recovery mode, but either way i’m encouraged just to know things are a little less hopeless than i’d been feeling them to be.
Filed under: anorexia, bulimia, eating disorder recovery, eating disorders | Tags: anorexia, bulimia, eating disorder recovery, eating disorders
I seem to have found a new approach that I’m hoping might lead to my getting back on track with recovery. If today finishes the way yesterday did I won’t have binged or purged, and my eating while weird and disordered has been according to plan and not restricted.
Not exactly normal and with a lot of compromises made with my disorder, but a huge improvement and enough to give me some hope again. Especially the not purging for maybe hopefully fingers crossed a third day in a row.
If tonight goes okay I’ll give some more details tomorrow. I’m so unconfident I didn’t even want to post about what I was trying because I was so sure I’d just end up failing and fucking up as usual…
edit: THIS JUST IN! I am a total idiot. I know better than to write something like “so long as this evening goes well, which I know it should because it’s 1159pm which means all I have to do is last one minute without doing X, Y, or Z. Of course whenever I do something like that I always end up doing X, Y, and Z as quickly as possible because I freaked myself out by admitting I’d been doing well!
Argh. I am writing this edit not soley to beat myself up for writing this positive post and then going out of my way to binge and purge despite it being much later in the evening than I’d ever usually go out and buy binge food- but because I want to promise myself that even though I feel like an idiot and a fuck up, I’m still not going to scrap everything and pretend I never even started trying to do better. Instead I think I’ll start tomorrow with the hope and expectation that I can have another good day regardless of what happened at the very very end of this one.
