Welcome to life on the Thin Planet: Every time you turn around there's another challenge. This was the life I signed up for when I decided to move here and if I'm going to stay here, I have to figure out how to cope with it, otherwise I'll be going back...home?
I have to say that Planet Fat (tiring of this metaphor yet?) still feels like home. I still feel the pull of my native Bingetopia. I think I'll always feel like an immigrant to the planet of those people who seem so effortlessly thin, but you know, it isn't effortless. I've been told (even if I don't really believe it) that even thin people have struggles. Amazing! And in one part of my brain I do know that, that would be the logical brain which is supposedly the most recent part of the human brain to evolve, but my stronger, more primitive brain, the part that is obsessed with my next bite, doesn't believe it for a second. So it's going to take some more work for that idea to really sink in.
Bingetopia seemed straightforward for me: Have a problem? Eat over it. Problem didn't get solved, but I got to eat! Thin people have these strategies that enable them to cope, more or less, with life, and they don't eat a whole box of chocolates on a semi-daily basis. Part of the coping is not feeling like every problem has to or can be solved and wrapped up neatly. Many times you just have to live and wade through the crap of everyday life.
I'm learning that lesson in my dealings with the board of a choir I sing with. There are over a hundred people in the organization, seven other people on the board with me, and an artistic director who is very talented and has an .... artistic temperament. (Note to self: how do I get one of those temperaments? Reply from self: Congratulations, you have one, just ask your husband! Oh rats...) Since I joined the board, we've done a lot of housekeeping stuff, but there are always interpersonal issues, within the board, in the choir, between the board and some choir members, between the AD and choir members, between the board and the AD, normal stuff, right?
That's the thing, it IS normal stuff! And after being on the board for two whole months, it comes and goes, and what seems maddening one week recedes after a couple more weeks, and then something else comes up... And I looked back and thought, wow, what was really bugging me in September just faded away when I was distracted. I didn't have to do anything about it, it was like water over the bridge. Then something else happens. It's like Gilda Radner said: it's always something. I don't have to fix it all. The compulsion to fix it is from my scared little primal brain, screaming "Eek eek, it's going to eat me, it's going to eat me!" Yeah, well, some day it might. But it usually doesn't. The bigger threat to me is actually what I do in the privacy of my own kitchen.
What feels like comfort food is actually a comfort weapon in the long run, a Weapon of Mass Addition! So, I have to cultivate those Thinnite coping strategies, and the helpful ones, not the self-sabotaging ones, because there are plenty of the latter out there, I just couldn't see them through my veil of fat: a myriad world of addictions or compulsive behaviours, controlling behaviour, rage...
The positive coping strategies are subtle and not sexy at all: I'm using one now as I write this. Prayer and talking it over with my OA sponsor and therapist and friends (including my best friend, my husband) are other ways, but boy, they are tough ones for me to learn. It has been my pattern to first isolate and then eat. But you know what they say, repeated practice is the only form of permanence nature knows.
So I have to repeat these new dance steps over and over, and occasionally step on a land mine. But I doubt it will be any worse than the old booby traps I laid for myself.
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