Losing a part of me

Category: Depression

  • Day 691

    My work schedule changed this week. Beginning yesterday I was teaching from 9am – 1:00pm, and then I had six hours off and taught from 7:00pm – 11:00pm. The change made me change my food schedule, so I had my breakfast as usual, and then after class I prepared my lunch. I was not hungry again before class, and I knew that I would not be able to eat again unless I ate a very late meal. I opted instead for a meal replacement shake, which I had not done in a couple of months. I was hungry again after class, so I had an apple. I was hopeful that I would not gain weight because of that late-night fruit. And then I saw the holiday basket that I received last week… and I started going nuts. I fell off the wagon last night and today.

    I am done. I am throwing the rest of it away and will try to be back on track tomorrow. I hate what I am doing to myself. I have to pull myself back onto the right path.

  • Day 685

    You would think that days when I teach until 11pm I would be getting to bed reasonably soon after that. The last few nights I have lay in bed tossing and turning with difficult and depressing thoughts keeping me awake, so last night I decided to shake things up a little. After class I had a cigar on the balcony as I watched TV. I fell asleep at around the same time (maybe 3am), but at least I did not spend three hours in depressive misery leading up to that.

    My weight stayed the same this morning. I’m okay with that. I do not want to gain any more, but my diet it still not the most pressing thing on my mind. I am still above 250, but if I can stay put for a few days I’ll be happy.

    I picked my car up from the mechanic this morning. I left it with him yesterday because my brakes needed to be replaced, so this morning I drove home feeling just a little bit safer. He and I were talking yesterday about how so many people wait until the last minute to put their winter tires on. I always make a point of doing that around the middle of November, so with winter wheels and new brakes I am as safe as I can be.

    See you tomorrow.

  • Day 684

    It’s another hard day after another long night. I fall asleep after tossing and turning for hours. It’s little wonder that I am groggy throughout the day.

  • Day 683

    I’m not doing well. I wish…

  • Day 671

    I do not know if I am having a harder time today than I have the last few; I do know that the emotional pain and anxiety are crippling today. I am not sure if part of that is because when I took Her Floofness for her walk we met up with her friend Angus… a corgi. The lot of us then met up with Molly. Their mommies are very nice ladies and chatty and sociable, and we did our full walk for about half an hour and all that time I pretended that everything was okay when everything really is not. Looking at Angus… it is just painful inside.

    While I was speaking with the doctor yesterday, I told her what was going on and she asked me a lot of questions trying to determine if I might be in a state of mind to do harm to myself or to others. I assured her that my religion precluded me from self-harm; my religion and my desire to be a good person preclude me from harming others. I have no interest in hurting anyone. I do not want to hurt myself either. The fact that I do not know how I can carry on does not change the fact that I do not plan to end it all. No, that is not how I am going to go. As bad as things are, I am hoping that I will come out of this into something better. That might take a long time, but it will get better.

    I had mentioned that my weight was up significantly yesterday from the previous day. Fortunately, that righted itself this morning; according to the bathroom scale I weigh the same today as I did Monday. I hope to do better today so that tomorrow morning that number goes down again. I know, hope is not a strategy. I will work to make sure that is the case.

    It has been five months since my housecleaner has been here, and she is coming over this afternoon. While the apartment is not a complete pigsty, I am looking forward to having her mop the floors and do a bunch of other things that I normally forget to do. I did not book her in anticipation of my buddy coming into town next week, it only worked out as a happy coincidence. There is so little happy in my life these days so I will take what I can get.

    I’ll see you all tomorrow.

  • Day 668

    I fell off badly yesterday. I went grocery shopping (I had no food in the house) and thought ‘what’s the harm in buying a box of breakfast cereal? Oh, I also bought a bag of mini crisps. Here’s the harm: I ate all of the crisps and most of the breakfast cereal last night and finished it off this morning. The result (nothing to do with the bowl of cereal that polished off the box this morning) was a two-pound jump in my weight. I deserve it. Today I will do better. I will also remember that when I am no accountable to anyone but myself it is best to not buy large portions of cheat foods… coupled with my current emotional state I will just not have the willpower to make the right decisions. This means that I have to make those right decisions when I am in the store. If I do not have the temptations in the house, then I will not succumb to them.

    The plan for today is to take Her Floofness to the spa. She will be there for a few hours, and so I will probably check to see if the cigar lounge near Chez PetSmart has a smoking area. If it does not, then I will probably just find a park bench and wait there with a cigar and my phone or a book. We’ll see. All I know is that I have to try to be good today. No excessive food. No cheating.

    I woke up this morning to find a message from a friend who reads my blog daily. She was worried that I had not published yesterday, and what’s worse, the last entry was from Day 666. Yes, even in my current emotional state I noticed the 666, and yes, I know that it is the number of the beast (although I swear I never understood what that was about), but no… there was no connection. As a fairly religious Jew I would never use a reference from the New Testament with regard to my dismay. In fact, I had written yesterday’s article, but I somehow got distracted and never published it. I fixed that this morning. With that said, I truly appreciate the love and support from my friends… many of whom I do not see or speak to nearly as often as I would like.

    Anyhow, it is time to get moving. Take care folks.

  • Day 667

    (Sorry, I wrote this on Saturday but forgot to press Send. –MDG)

    My weight finally dropped this morning… after five days of gains and over 5 lbs. in that time, it finally receded slightly. A 1.4 lb. drop from yesterday is a bit of a relief, if not a massive one. I could not have expected more though – not from the kind of week it has been.

    It is a mixed blessing to have the next ten days off now. I have a lot of preparation for an exam that I have to do, and there are a couple of errands I need to run. I would like to resume some sort of exercise regimen. Other than that, I just have more time to think about the mess. I will hopefully get more sleep, but I will also have less to distract me from what is going on.

    I was finally able to get some sleep last night. It took me a bit to fall off, and I woke up a couple of times, but I finally settled in and rested. According to my fitness watch my sleep score was higher last night than the last two weeks. I actually slept until 9:00am, which I have not done in a very long time. A couple of hours after waking up I had a very successful bowel movement – my first good one in several days – which would likely have made more of a dent on the bathroom scale this morning had it happened earlier. All in all, my body is slowly starting to recover… I hope. Now all I need to do is to get some exercise.

  • Day 661

    My life is no better today than it was yesterday. It is still a complete and total disaster from which I see no way out and no way forward. Still, I have to go forward. Aside from the fact that my religion forbids any form of self-harm, there are people who love me and care for me. I have to remember that. There are people who know that I would never hurt the people that I love, and that I would in fact go to the furthest extremes to protect them. So I move forward, and I try to continue to do my best to not give up the progress that I have made through nearly two years of hard work… even as I see that I am losing those which are most dear to me.

    One of the ways I encourage myself to keep going is with numbers. I have been trying to weight for six hundred and sixty-one days, and when I need the push, I look at the numbers. I am in the worst place I have been emotionally in many years, and so I decided to turn to my numbers for at least some encouragement.

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    This graph represents my weight every day since September 30 (excepting the 26-29 of October, and November 5). The yellow line represents my lowest weight ever – 238.6 lbs. on October 18. The red line is my highest weight in the forty-three-day period that I selected (249.4 lbs., this past Wednesday). The green line represents my weight today (243.4 lbs.). The vertical black line is the day my world fell apart. I had a bad slip for a few days… what with the pizza dinner splurge Friday night, my life crashing down on me destroying everything on Saturday, and then the travel day on Sunday. With all of that, knowing even that I had gained a full eleven pounds from my best weight by Wednesday, but have been able to reign that back in and get back on track. This morning my weight is less than half a pound up from that terrible day… even though every day since has been even worse. I am now less than 5 lbs. from getting back to my best weight ever.

    I am still not sleeping well. Admittedly, I did do a little better last night than any of the previous seven, but that is probably owing to the sheer physical and emotional exhaustion finally catching up to me. According to my fitness watch, my sleep score was only a 49/100. My body battery was an abysmal 31/100 when I woke up, and at 11:15am it is down to a 26. There were a number of times that Leslie offered to give me a few of the pills she has to help her sleep, but I refused. I know I was right to, but I am still kicking myself that I do not have anything in the house (aside from copious amounts of scotch) that would help me to rest.

    It was good to see my friends yesterday. They are the first to know what is going on and how I feel. I do not know if or when I am going to start talking about it… but it is not today. Today will be spent trying to help a friend with his computer that seems to have died so I will go over and try to salvage everything he has lost. In the evening I am tutoring one of my students who needs extra help, and who seems to have started my class behind the eight ball because her instructor for the previous class (which is a pre-requisite for this class) seems to have taught way too fast and using way too much jargon for anyone, but especially for a non-native English speaker to understand. I promised I would help, and I will help. Hopefully in doing so I will be able to keep my mind off the fact that I really have no interest in living anymore.

    One day at a time.

  • Day 660

    My weight is slowly dropping back to where it was before I flew to Texas (nearly a three weeks ago). It is astounding to me that in the last week since my world imploded I have not gone completely to pot. It would not have surprised me had my weight jumped fifteen pounds this past week after what happened last Saturday. While the bathroom scale still has me up 2.2 lbs. since then (my last pre-collapse weigh-in, also my last weigh-in before a completely depressed travel day), it could have been much worse. From that weigh-in I would gain 6.4 lbs. over a four-day period, but have been able to drop 4.2 lbs. these last three days.

    I am slowly coming to terms with the reality of my world which has been completely destroyed. I do not know how things are going to play out, but I do not expect that I will be able to go back to the way things were. It is strange… a week ago I woke up happy and optimistic. I have not gone to bed nor woken up like that since. I have not had a good night sleep in that time. I do not expect I will have one for quite some time.

    When I finish writing this entry I will leave the house for social reasons for the first time since I set foot inside late last Sunday night. I have gone shopping, I have walked my dog. Today I am going to see friends who might, I hope, be able to offer me some sort of comfort. Nobody knows what is going on with me yet. I suspect that had I told any of my friends, they would have been banging on my door immediately and all week. With my ridiculous work schedule this past week (and the next one as well) that just would not do, as I need to maintain both my work schedule and my composure during the day. I cannot let my students know that I do not care about living, let alone computers. I have put on a very brave face and I know that they are learning and enjoying the classes – the results of the mid-course exams yesterday bear that out. The fact that I am dead inside is masked from the world.

    I got the most touching communication yesterday. I truly have no idea who reads this blog; in truth, there are times when I think that nobody reads it. When a reader reached out and told me that she reads my blog every day and that she hopes I am okay, it was more than heartwarming. It is entirely possible she is the reason I did not dive into a bottle of scotch last night… and chase it down with a large platter of deep-fried chicken wings with extra sauce. I am not sure that I would have physically harmed myself, although that thought has certainly crossed my mind. Diving off the addiction wagon would not have killed me, but it would certainly have started a long and slow road back to where I was two years ago.

    Maybe Paul Simon was right. A rock feels no pain, and an island never cries. Maybe the best course of action to never feel this again would be to completely cut myself off from the world. Friends and lovers have hurt me more than any enemy combattant ever could. Maybe that is the answer.

    For most of the last 660 days I have ended my journal entry with a positive wish to my readers to have a great day. I am sorry that right now I do not have it in me to feel anything positive.

  • Day 659

    My weight dropped another few ounces this morning. I can assure you that it is not because I did much different yesterday. It is certainly not because I am feeling any better about myself, and I know that I did not get any significant exercise in yesterday. I am as emotionally down as I could be, and I have not fallen off the wagon, I have not crawled into a bottle, and I have not harmed myself. I have not only taken care of my responsibilities, and my students seem to be happy and do not notice anything wrong. It is emotionally exhausting to put on the happy face, but I am getting through the day. What will happen tomorrow when I am not working? I don’t know.