THE LOST DOGS OF LANGSTON.

Entry 31.

Okay here it is. The BIG METAPHOR THAT YOU'VE BEEN WAITING FOR.

I know I have.

Here's why I'm hanging on the cross for five dogs and five cats, two dogs with heartworms and another two dogs that are strays that won't come close to me but yet I still feed and water them every day.

Do you know how tired I am of this "retirement project"? Well tired enough to start saying, out loud, "I don't WANT to feed the garage cats. I don't WANT to go see Annie Belle. I don't WANT to play with Patterson/Brownie. I want to sit here and play my video game and pretend to be an actual RETIRED PERSON. I want someone to bring me a drink."

I want the PANDEMIC TO END AND I WANT LIFE TO GET BACK TO WHAT IT WAS BEFORE THE PANDEMIC WHICH WAS GLORIOUS AND NONE OF US KNEW WHAT WE HAD, DID WE.

Yeah I do a lot of shouting around here. I have to make these big old honking dogs know who's boss sometimes because yes that's part of the hanging on the cross bit and when you hang on the cross too much you get a little irritable with things in general especially if you're not sleeping at night due to pandemic fears or fears of the future or whatever else you are anxiety-drivenly hard-wired for.

So I had to stop shouting because it was hurting and I had to stop dieting because it was hurting and I had to stop doing a lot of things I was doing and I'm having to just stop sometimes because being 56 and now I'm taking a course with Isabel Foxen Duke and that's my self-care thing because after playing with and feeding and loving on and taking care of all these animals all day, there's not a lot of time for self-care and I think I already mentioned that I only get time (or TAKE time, let me say it that way) to take a bath every three days or so.

But the hanging on the cross bit. The thing about some anorexics is, they love to get everyone else fed but themselves, and then they get whatever's left over. It really is a little bit like a Jesus complex. So I guess that's what I'm kinda doing is seeing about everybody else here and now it's time to see about me because it's been TWO WEEKS since I saw the doc and he said go get your hurt wrist x-rayed at such and such location and I haven't even TAKEN THE TIME to go get my hurt WRIST x-rayed yet

my WRIST, that I use to haul dog food bags and water pans and such

because of taking care of dogs and cats!!!!!!!!!!!

Well now I have to figure out how to do that and how to go to the dentist and how to get the car serviced and all the things I was waiting to do until I got the vaccine. Trouble is, I am so entrenched in my daily routine which involves switching dogs out to their yards because they fight with each other and I don't want them hurting each other that it's sometimes hard to schedule any time for ME.

And I need to work on this. Because the grumpier you get when you're trying to "help," that means you're just being a martyr and it's not fun anymore. And so you start complaining on your blog to whomever will listen, even if it's just a blank screen.

As I think I said before, these writings here are something like Julia Cameron's morning pages and they might just be helping me figure things out. So they're necessary for me to do and it's probably part of my self-care so just bear with me, if you will.

So for my class with Isabel Foxen Duke. We have these coaching calls and I got to speak to her directly on the first one and I was SO EXCITED because I've been following her work for about three or so years now and I'm a huge fan. Huuuuuuge. Takin' it back. Well I got organized with my questions for her on the coaching call in about the five minutes before the actual call. It went well but I want to prepare a little bit more this time and not feel so pushed and rushed. So I'm thinking of what to ask and I've developed a theory that might just be put forward that might help somebody who hasn't woken up to what THEY'RE doing yet.

If you want to help things, you have to have the energy to help inside you and enough energy to give out to whatever individual or cause it is you want to help, and you don't just exhaust yourself because you WILL have a nervous breakdown. I've seen it happen to other people, they just literally burn OUT when they drive themselves too hard at work or taking care of other people or whatever it is they're doing. Burnout HAPPENS.

Why is this?

Maybe because I thought, I'm young, I can take care of all these creatures and as I'm doing it I'm just going to get skinnier and skinnier because I'm literally giving myself away to them but underneath it all I'm hoping that with all that activity I'm finally gonna get my ideal super-thin body that I've been told all my life I'm supposed to want to have! It's just another form of anorexia, in action!!!!

And then when I think about those Amish women who go anorexic because they just don't want to have any more children. And I just want to either throw up or cry or go to bed under a huge weighted blanket in a dark room and sleep for forty-seven hours and not wake up until I've forgotten all about that because it really and truly disturbs me that they would be such martyrs on acount of their religion.

But why would I be disturbed about that? UNLESS I WAS DOING THE SAME SORT OF THING. And that's Jungian, but there you go. That's the kind of thing you find when you think something is wrong with you and you're looking everywhere outside yourself for the solution. You find Jung, and the Urantia Book, and Diet Center, and Jenny Craig, and yoga and EFT and Marisa Peer and Pema Chodron and Adyashanti and the list just goes on and on.

You find a lot of fascinating stuff, when you're on your own handcrafted idiosyncratic spiritual journey. Which you probably ARE on, whether you realize it or not. And I'm not talking about that with any regard towards religion, I'm talking about YOUR INDIVIDUAL JOURNEY.

And mine.

So when I gather my thoughts towards talking to Isabel Foxen Duke on the coaching call, I wonder where to start. She and the younger generation are talking about all the things I actually started wtih in the early eighties. I went to college in 1982 and couldn't have gotten through without my therapist there. There were two therapists for 30,000 students (luckily not many of those students were going, percentage-wise, or I would never have gotten in to see her) (and it was funny too, new moons and full moons we were all there in the office, the usual group of suspects, I know because I'd see familiar faces sitting quietly in the waiting rooms waiting for hypnosis which is what my therapist used at the time) and my therapist was very ahead of her time. She was just about, with maybe a few tiny exceptions, right on the money. She was talking about helping people with eating disorders jsut about the time Karen Carpenter had died of anorexia which was just about the time I started getting sick from it. And yes it will make you sick, mostly sick in your mind and I think I mentioned before that it's kind of a slow form of suicide if you don't get better from it, because there are a lot of people who actually die from it and I think it's documented that it's the mental illness that causes the most death.

THE MOST DEATH.

Okay so there I was talking to my eating disorders therapist who was doing hypnosis on me each week (and there's a fascinating story about something that happened with that once but I won't digress or put it here) (merci, Jacques le Fataliste) and she was talking about the Ellyn Satter Eating Competence Model and Geneen Roth Breaking Free from Compulsive Eating which I slept with under my pillow for years and the setpoint weight theory and ALL this stuff...and telling me at thirty pounds "overweight" that I was NOT obese, and at the same time my family hated me for being "big" and wanted me to go on a diet yes you did you hated me don't deny it or at least my weight upset you because I wasn't "normal" for our super-white-super-high-achieving family

but come to find out I might actually avoid some kinds of cancer by putting on that weight at the time that I did and I sure did figure some shit out about how this weirdass sickass society and culture are run, so don't bother to try and push off your stuff on me because there just ain't room, I got ALL my stuff and I don't have room for YOURS, you can keep it, thanks

And yadda yadda yadda. Well point being here that I had all this stuff YEARS AGO.

WHY did it take so long to SINK IN? I noticed it was only about ten years or so ago when I was having food and body anxiety that I suddenly stopped myself once and had a sort of epiphany...that I was just going to be okay no matter what my food or my eating was actually about, that my body was just gonna kinda "take CARE of it" which is what my therapist on THE campus of THE University of AlaBAMA was saying over and over thirty-something years ago.

But you can see why it took SO LONG to "take," all her advice and wisdom did, because of ALL THOSE OTHER MESSAGES ABOUT HOW YOU'LL NEVER SUCCEED OR MAKE IT BIG IN LIFE UNLESS YOU'RE THIN LIKE THEY WANT YOU TO BE.

And now all these women in bigger bodies are making it in the music biz and I have been left far, far behind.

And so I have to ask myself, Well am I really talented enough to "make it" in the music biz anyway? And do I really WANT all that "success" and fame and fortune and all that wild activity and people criticizing and haters and all that stuff?

I mean when you actually think of things like this from an eating-disordered standpoint, or even with regard to my migraines and fibromyalgia and whatall else I have, it comes down to asking yourself some pretty hard questions. DO YOU ACTUALLY WANT SUCCESS.

I don't like the idea of haters. I try really hard to feel joy and happiness for all the success of other women because I don't want to be a little scratchy cat like the Madmen era wants us to be, all fighting over the men to make the men look superior. That's just not who I am. It won't work for me. I didn't even watch Madmen because I knew it would be super duper depressing to me. Like just LOOK at this huge BULLSHIT we all have to drag ourselves OUT OF now, it's MONUMENTAL.

And with all that, sometimes I think it's kind of a miracle that I'm even still here at all, considering all the times I've tried to starve myself to death.

And one thing that's kind of ironic (and Fellini made a whole career on irony, so ya gotta give it some respect) is that when I was about four or five, my Halloween costume was a princess costume and I went to a kids' Halloween party and a little boy in a skeleton suit jumped out at me at the front door and I was very afraid of skeletons then and I cried and kicked up a fuss and Mama had to take me home

and then later I was trying to BECOME a skeleton

well there's a lot of irony there but I don't know if I can make a career on it.

Or maybe I can, ironically enough. Or maybe not enough but you know, whatevs.

So. All that to say, still trying to weed out what to ask Isabel on the next coaching call. Maybe I'll ask her why I'm so paranoid. I've read that dieters are more paranoid than regular/normal eaters. Why would this be? Well if you thought you were starving to death, wouldn't your peepers bug out just a little more because you'd actually be on the lookout for when the next meal was coming? Kind of? I mean it sorta makes sense that if you're starving yourself to death it's gonna be real easy to project all your meanness and fear onto the rest of the world. It's gonna be real super-irrational the way you think about people after starving yourself for six months and losing your period for about that amount of time and then trying to regroup and figure out how to eat again over several YEARS' time because you just don't know when you're hungry and when you're full and when you're "emotionally eating" (which is kind of bullshit, all eating is emotional eating in one aspect or another so just get over it right now, COMPULSIVE eating is what you really wanna call it and yes you're afraid of it so go ahead and admit it right now) (See? Just plain PARANOID) and then going through exercise bulimia and being super-driven because you're the white girl form the high-pressure family that you are, after all, you're driven with a VENGEANCE to be thin and look super-successful and slim and elegant and fantastic and with-it and all the things They've told you you're going to be when you FINALLY ACHIEVE THAT GOAL WEIGHT AND KEEP THE WEIGHT OFF FOR ABSOLUTE EVER

which is what They've also told you half your life or more is supposed to be about

and you can kinda see why somebody would be an absolute MESS after they have been bombarded with all that any number of times, for years and years, which they have been

And then here comes Jamie Kern Lima with all her motivational speakers and THEY say, "Let your MESS be your MESSAGE."

Very clever.

Very clever indeed.

And you notice I am capitalizing "They" there. So big so scary so right so very very hard to live up to soooooooo all that.

So when you go from 100 pounds to 158 pounds in a year because you are busy trying to make up for your "starvation points" and your body and brain are going crazy trying to keep from starving and you're building up your reserves

And then everybody hates you when you weigh 158 pounds because they all hate fat people and don't want to be one

Well it actually makes me kinda proud that I was a fat person at one time, or kind of a fat person even though my eating disorders expert and hypnosis therapist told me I wasn't ever obese, on the charts

because LIZZO. I mean look at Lizzo. Success success success is all I see when I see her. I don't see fat; I see SUCCESS. Glittering, rich, fortunate, famous, millionaire-wonderful high-up-there-on-the-top-of-the-charts SUCCESS.

Lizzo. Sing it, girl. You know you want to.

But so when the pandemic came and I was taking care of all these dogs and cats, well, I was saying to myself, I'm a good person, I'm helping all these other creatures and I DESERVE to be thin, I DESERVE to have my high school weight of 118 glorious tiny pounds back and to stay, the weight I was before I ever got anorexic and fucked it all up (same weight that I actually "achieved," in 2019, and I thought that was my chance to start over because I thought I was "healed")

only to find out that I've "put on" about twelve pounds OVER that since pandemic started because I wasn't moving as much furniture or just wasn't moving around as much as I was back when I was manically and maniacally moving house in 2019, or maybe BECAUSE I JUST "PUT ON" (like I have any goddam control over it!) TWELVE GODDAM POUNDS, IS ALL, and nobody knows WHY exactly because they weren't here with the measuring sticks going into the lab with my vital fluids to test hormone levels and calorie intake versus calories burned off and all those things every single goddam minute that I was DOING that

which is kind of what you'd have to do, I suppose, and I'll include there on the list of things being measured my actual stress/cortisol levels from all the fear that ensued when we found out there was this deadly virus sweeping the planet, and we had to learn to deal with it, well I bet you a LOT of people's cortisol levels went up and I bet YOU'VE gained some weight too...come on...spit it out...tell it out, you know you have...

...or at least you've been changed IN SOME WAY by this pandemic...it's probably made you look older...it sure has made that happen to me.

But does that mean that I'm too old or too fat or too whatever else to deserve love and success and happiness and joy and whatever good might be able to be got out of this life? Am I a total wash-up now? Am I a has-been that never was? Is my whole life from here on out going to be one catapulting big failure after another and just a total disaster, so much so that I might just as well GIVE UP RIGHT NOW?

Well that sounds a little irrational, doesn't it? Kind of like one of those really super fast downward spirals when you're on too much meth and alcohol, right? Something like that?

Well THAT, my friends, is what DIETING does to your MIND. It warps it and makes you not trust people and makes you look at every other female body to pick it apart critically because you're doing the compare-and-despair thing and it makes you driven to try to keep up with every little bitty body in the universe because your ENTIRE SELF-ESTEEM is threatened at every turn, even if you gain just one or two pounds over your "ideal" weight...whatever that arbitrary number happens to be...

...but now Angelo is whining because it's 26 minutes or so past his usual eating time and I have to get up and get back on my animal rescue cross now.

END OF THIS CHAPTER. More to come, "God willing".

(!!!!!!!)

Oh. I did forget something. About the has-been that never was. Yeah every songwriter dreams of "making it" or "going big." (Funny that I would want to be so thin all my life and then also at the same time want to "go big;" you'd think I'd be terrified of "going big" and I guess that's what I am on at least one level because I've never "gone big" because of whatever, maybe I'm just fact-of-the-matter NOT TALENTED ENOUGH, or NOT CAPABLE OF HANDLING THE MUSIC INDUSTRY enough or whatever it is you have to be to be Billie Eilish or Madonna or Lizzo

or that my stuff is all so niche and there's not really a market for it anyway so I might as well just enjoy my obscurity and go on with life and just play my music for my own enjoyment or whatever and not be so SERIOUS about everything all the time for chrissakes

and then when you throw in all the years I thought I wasn't THIN ENOUGH or not PRETTY ENOUGH to actually "make it," well that's got to have some kind of residue in my aura, right? Such that no one's gonna buy "me" or "Aunt Sofonda" anyway because she's too worn out from all that negative thinking or whatever it is

But then if I was too tired or worn-out or scared or untalented or unbeautiful or whatever it was that was missing in me to really ever bother to "put myself OUT THERE" to get on track with fame and fortune and everything that goes with it, I thank you all...

Oh well. Jesus only knows. Or maybe He's decided on purpose NOT to know, because He's so damn freaking TIRED of it all, and He's packed up and gone on a LOOOOOOOOONG BEACH VACATION, far, far away from here.