Scared

I don't watch the amazing Miz Oprah much as I've realized that turning on daytime tv is just too convenient a drug for me, but I still like how she says the word "scared" --- it comes out like "Don't be scurred" or is it "skurrd"? More like the latter I think. And I just realized the similarity of "skurrd" and "scarred". And I wonder, perhaps I get skurrd because I'm scarred. I look around the rooms and consider the good friends I have made there, and the people I really can't stand, brave warriors of the food wars, all of them, and how we are battling ghosts that feel really, really, concretely threatening.

When I got home from the studio yesterday I was not in the greatest mood anyway. I'm quite sick of the painting I'm working on, I fear it isn't improving much after many many hours of work, and I have an illustration project that's worrying me a bit (will it be a lot of effort that comes to nothing?) although I haven't even started it. I've got to get some practice in before choir on Wednesday night, and I don't know when I can do that.

Then I got a message from a friend who is a teacher of 10-12 year olds and wants me to do a portraiture lesson with her class, and it just filled me with dread. Scary, heart grabbing, stomach-dropping-in-air-turbulence dread. It's not even logical, because, you see, I used to be a teacher. I have wrangled entire classes of kids. And I wasn't bad at it even when I was wrestling with this awful self image and at least a hundred extra pounds. And portraiture is my bag. I've got an MFA majoring in that type of painting. So why am I so scared? I can't explain it, I don't think it has anything to do with logic, I think it has more to do with some scar that is acting up. Kind of like Harry Potter's, except this must be some scar on my soul. Something that flares up when accidentally touched. Maybe it's in the shape of an...ice cream sundae?

I think there is a lot of fear here, and my therapist might tell me as she has many times in the past that it is a fear of my own power. I wasn't able to access my own power when I was a kid growing up in my crazy household. In fact, I was systematically undermined, made to feel like it was hopeless. I know this was likely unintentional, I may have just breathed in the fumes from two people who were locked in their own feelings of hopelessness.

And that hopelessness feels so powerful right now: I can physically feel this dark ache in the center of my torso, with its grey tentacles reaching out to my limbs to drain them of their movement. Wow. I am really feeling pretty awful here. I can't deny how bad this feels. And yet I know that if I can get into these projects, this horrible feeling will likely dissipate like a bad odour.

I've been struggling with this stuff my entire life, but it wasn't until I really threw myself into the twelve step stuff about five years ago that I really started rebuilding my life. It feels like forever but it has only been a few years.

Last night I was tempted to spend the evening on the couch or in bed to hide myself from my
skurridness, but an hour after dinner was finished I gathered the courage/momentum/resolve/whatever to get myself to the Y for 20 minutes on the elliptical and my weight training. It took me a half hour to get out the door, and I was back in an hour and a half. This is the second time I've done an evening workout in four days and I kind of like it. If I hadn't gone to the gym I probably would have watched tv or just read the paper and craved food. Housework? I don't think so! Doing it in the evening means not only means I get to go to bed earlier feeling more tired with a happy virtuousness (ok ok, you can call it smugness), I have more time during the day to do other things, which I need because I'm in the studio most afternoons now. And I've discovered that I have to do this writing for my sobriety's sake.

We don't talk about "sobriety" much in OA, but I need to do things to keep my thinking from going squirrelly, because it almost always precedes a slip in food abstinence (ie bingeing behaviour). So I need to develop those habits which keep my thinking from slipping into insane territory, in other words, cultivate sober thinking. The terms insanity and sobriety probably shock those who think it's "just a weight problem", but oh honey, if you get something here, please believe that for me it is so much more.