Struggle

I seriously hate that I keep writing about food issues.

Filling in the empty spaces

“And I still haven’t found what I’m looking for...”

I try to find it everywhere, every time I’m alone.  I just don’t know what it is....

  Lately I’ve turned to food, with late-at-night eating, stress eating, boredom eating being my problem currently in the forefront.  I’ve had a hard time diagnosing my natural sweet tooth as truly being a case of stress eating, until this weekend when I and my other half were stressfully searching a succession of city stores in search of ridiculous, un-find-able things like punch bowls and gingerbread men and guava juice concentrate, and I found my gaze focusing in on the Sour Patch Kids and felt strongly compelled to buy & eat these in a way that I knew would directly fix my comfort with the situation. (Thankfully, in realizing this, I didn’t buy them.)

  It used to be alcohol, but now somehow that doesn’t pleasure me the way it once did - a bit unhealthily.  I used to be able to forget my desires for desserts with the promise of alcohol that night.. of practically any kind... Ah, to be underage and have this off-limits substance be one of the more exciting things I could get my hands on.... My mom easily turns down prospects of dessert for her nightly glass(es) of chardonnay instead.. but wine just doesn’t turn me on that way. (If anything, it gives me reflux.)  My parents say if my brother has inherited my grandfather’s temper, then I have inherited my grandmother’s endless sweet tooth (oh joy).

  Even my writing is my (more productive) way of trying to.... fill in the gaps in between life.. to combat the boredom of daily working.. or perhaps to fill in for the lack of the other incredibly comforting human body that’s sorrowfully missing from my bed during the weeknights.. hard to say.  

When I first fell in love as hard as I did more than two years ago, it was so hard that I couldn’t focus on anything, and I couldn’t stand to ever be without her.. it was to the point where I actually couldn’t bear to be alone.  I thought, though, that since then I’ve really overcome that. Faced all the issues that were underlying my perhaps over-dependency... Is it really the case that I can’t be alone now, again?  I don’t really think so..... But “something’s missing, and I don’t know how to fix it,” I guess you could say, (if you were John Mayer).. and I really don’t know what I’m looking for right now... Maybe I will stop comfort eating whenever the heck I figure it out.

The Urge to Write, Coming Out, Food Obsession... What's On My Mind Right Now

I have been itching to blog lately. as weird as that is....  I used to really dislike the idea of blogging.  I think it was the days of angsty Xanga entries that threw me off.. I never liked the idea of airing one’s dirty laundry for all the public to read.  A friend of mine in high school used to rant about all her relationship drama and everyone would talk about it the next day - that’s a little too attention-seeking, even for my taste.  And I once tried to jump on the bandwagon and start a Xanga the summer after I graduated high school - it only lasted about a month, mind you - that had unfortunately happy-go-lucky entries along the lines of “Today we went to the movies. The movie was so cool. Then we went to the diner. It was so much fun.” -- not sure whether to yawn or barf.

But I’ve kept a private journal for quite some time now - sometimes it’s been my savior - and I think part of what’s begun to hook me into blogging is, funny enough, Twitter.  I’ve enjoyed sharing little statements of how I feel about life at various points throughout my week.  And lately I’ve felt this strange urge originating in the bottoms of my fingers and pushing to get its way out through my fingertips - to WRITE.  It’s a strong urge I get fairly often, at which point I’d usually turn to my highly password-protected journal, but sometimes my busy daily life makes me ignore it -- and now suddenly I no longer can.  And for some reason I’m not seeking the same protection I normally do.  

---

Hm.  It only just now occurs to me as I’m writing this, but I wonder if this sudden relinquishing of my protective tendencies is due in part to my recent if not long-overdue coming out to my extended family and my parents’ friends.  I no longer need to hide who I am or who I’m in a relationship with from my family, church friends, country club people, mutual friends of my cousins... and I’ve got to say, it really is liberating after two years of walking on eggshells around people who aren’t from Villanova (who’d have thought that would be my gay haven, of all places!)  

Tonight at my film acting class, I shared (we have to share something at the beginning of each class) the fact that I am now about to introduce my girlfriend to my extended family, that I just finally told them about her after more than two years.. and in doing so I came out to my class as well.  Well, it’s a funny phenomenon: as soon as I uttered the words “my girlfriend,” all attention in the room was on me in a way it hadn’t been the moment before, and suddenly I was much more interesting to everyone than I had been.  It’s sometimes as if everyone was seeing me as this generic girl and all of a sudden I became multidimensional to them.  One of my best friends used to (somewhat jokingly) tell me that I would be a boring fruity-drink-loving college girl if it weren’t for the fact that I was into girls.  And you wonder why I revel in this identity.  I certainly don’t think I’m boring without my bisexuality, but it does feel like something special - like I’ve discovered this incredible secret in the world that most people aren’t in on.

---

So after being on a diet for the past four or so months (trying to become an actress = trying to lose the college weight) and being on Weight Watchers for the past two or three, lately I’ve been having a rough time with it.  I guess I’ve become aware of the consequences of the extreme attention to calories and points all the time: an unhealthy obsession with every bite of food you’re putting into your mouth.  As the Weight Watchers leaders say, “If you bite it, write it.”  That puts a whole lot of calculating into everything you eat all day, every day.  After a while of this, I think it’s finally been getting to me.  Tonight I caved and bought a pint of Ben & Jerry’s.  I worked it into my extra points for the week (there are 35 extra every week - not bad - though I usually spend them all on weekend alcohol, sigh), and I thankfully didn’t eat the whole pint though I did end up having more than I’d like to have.... but I think I needed this so I could stop feeling deprived.  And I think it might have done the trick.  It was “bad” enough, delicious & decadent enough, that I don’t feel the need to keep cheating on my diet the rest of the week. 

I will go back to my personal battle tomorrow, though: Working at a bakery shoots three or four bullets right into my diet-shield every single day I’m there.. I try to combat it with ammunition of celery with peanut butter and 100 calorie packs of goodies, but it’s a skirmish where I can never be sure which side will come out on top... I really should leave for that reason alone.  I struggle back and forth with whether this is actually enough reason to find a new job or if I should stick it out longer.  So I stick it out, for now.

---

All my postings probably won’t be quite this long, I promise... but, like I said, I was having the urge to get my thoughts out through my fingertips.

How sweet it is to have a kitty curled on the bottom of my bed right now.  I highly recommend it.