Old and New

I feel rusty. I haven’t written here for so long, it’s like I’ve forgotten my voice. Though my voice was so broken for so long, maybe I don’t need to recapture it.

I think I started this blog during the M and R era. It saw me through the death of T. Through the renewal of my trauma and my PTSD. Then four years of Trump, which I don’t think I even had the capacity to recognize how deeply traumatic that was until it ended only a few weeks ago. It’s been a long string of really brutal life events. Maybe being able to write out all of my pain here was a good thing. Maybe it served some purpose.

But it is hard to read now. I feel self-conscious of all my navel-gazing.

Hey, maybe my meds are working! I don’t feel quite as much like navel-gazing. Which means, of course, that I haven’t written. What’s new?

The pandemic has sucked. Is this news to anyone?

The disruption of my routines caused my mental health to take a loop and I had to go on a heavy psych med for a few months last spring. It was one of those fun ones that makes you gain 50 pounds in three months. No really. None of my clothes fit. Online jeans shopping is shit.

This triggered my barely-but-not-really-but-pretending-really-hard-it-was-dormant eating disorder.

I never fully admitted to myself I had an eating disorder. Unless there is a “You clearly eat too much because look at your body” disorder. Turns out cortisol and thyroid disease can do loads to disguise atypical anorexia.

I didn’t even know that was a thing, really.

If anything I would have once said I MAYBE had bulimia (when I would binge then throw up… YEARS ago), but that I had since gotten it under control (no longer throw up, just starve to compensate for binge calories). I didn’t know THAT was a disorder. Probably not a healthy way to live, but not actually an eating disorder…

So…

I’m in ED treatment (eating disorder, not erectile dysfunction, thank you).

I’m teaching online.

I see therapists or attend groups 4-5 times a week (depending on whether I see my psych on a given week).

And that feels like my life right now.

I’ve been flirting with the idea of coming back to this blog but it felt so heavy and so agonizing and so effortful that I have been avoiding it in favor of Candy Crush and Schitt’s Creek.

But then something happened last night. A good something, and it made me actually want to consider writing again. I’ll do it in another post.