I missed daily Mass yesterday, thus violating (yet another) of my Lenten precepts. In my defense, it's because food was taunting me all flipping day long and I was virtually exploding out of my skin with concupiscence, so I wound up napping all afternoon in a last-ditch (and, for what it's worth, successful) attempt to stave off purging, and thus didn't make it to 5:15 p.m. Mass at the Shrine. That said, to atone for this execrable failure to get my holy on yesterday, I hit 8 a.m. Mass this morning in the most drastic exercise in piaculative self-flagellation of which I could conceive. (I have long thought there is a special circle in hell reserved for people who wake me up before eleven o'clock on weekend mornings. I can't remember the last time this decade that I was up at seven on a friggity-fricking Saturday.)
So there I was, nodding off in the pew, bloodshot and bleary-eyed, jostled from the arms of Morpheus at the butt-crack of dawn after a sleepless night of starting awake every hour on the hour drenched in a cold sweat because I've taken to having obsessive hallucinatory dream sequences about food (I'm an addict in detox. It's not as weird as it sounds, I swear.) Had I, like Matthew in the Gospel this morning, been called upon to drop everything, pick up my cross, and follow Christ, I can totally envision myself balking, buying time in a desperate attempt to negotiate for my Disney princess comforter. Funny -- but at the same time, not. (The rich man walked away sad for much the same reasons. And he probably wasn't as sleep-deprived as me.)
My eyes began to wander around the church, which is historically not without precedent -- I have the attention span of an ADHD gnat, the spiritual depth of a Slip 'n' Slide, and a sense of the sacred that outs me as Howard Stern and Ozzy Osbourne's lovechild -- and I noticed, to my horror, the presence of a boy at Mass with whom I am supremely pissed.
I am Jack's raging bile duct. Seriously? Seriously? Of all the parishes in all the towns in all the world, he walks into mine. As Calvin (as in "& Hobbes", not John) would say, of course I believe in God -- SOMEBODY'S out to get me!
So while I carried on an interior dialogue with aforementioned deity consisting largely of permutations of friggity-frickin-frick-frick-friggity-FRICKING-I-HATE-THAT-BACKSTABBING-FORMER-FRIEND(!!!) and other sentiments equally unsuitable in church, I realized the whole thing was quite simple, really, at least in principle: I had to forgive him. That 'Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us' bit? The God of the universe nudged me; I scowled. I meant it, kid.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that I have a massive effing abandonment complex. (Just ask my ex-boyfriends.) I don't just have issues on that front -- I have a whole damn subscription. This trait, immediately and acutely perceptible to anyone who has known me longer than about three minutes, sticks out like a proverbial sore thumb and causes me a hell of a lot of angst and interior tumult. As a consequence, the qualities I admire most in others are consistency, fidelity, patience, loyalty, and stick-to-it-ive-ness in interpersonal relationships -- and conversely, I will forgive anyone anything -- except leaving me. I hate Tolkien with a burning passion, but a brief passage in The Fellowship of the Ring:
"Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens," said Gimli.
"Maybe," said Elrond, "but let him not vow to walk in the dark, who has not seen the nightfall."
serves as my life's mantra. Or as Walker Percy puts it, "We love those who know the worst of us, and do not turn their faces away." And this particular friend had violated my trust in cataclysmic fashion, reneged on a timeworn friendship, and abandoned me when I needed him most. And I was supposed to forgive him! It was absurd. Unthinkable.
I did it anyway. Okay, tried hard. Working on it, at least.
I had an epiphany of sorts last night (somewhere in the midst of all those subconscious erotic fantasies about kung pao chicken and rocky road ice cream that rivaled the tunnel scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory for sheer phantasmagoric trippiness) that if we would just get our heads and hearts out of the past, quit bracketing, categorizing, prejudging, and resenting others for what they've done or haven't done for us, and just freaking love them, no strings attached, we'd spare ourselves a lot of sorrow and stupidity in this protean tragicomedy we call life.
We're forever being exhorted to think of others more, but I think, paradoxically, true charity is only attainable if we think about them less, at least in a qualified sense. We've got to dispense with the bullcrap of psychoanalyzing their actions, questioning their motivations, and judging them on the monstrously sophistical grounds of whether or not they've suffered as much as we have (maybe they haven't, but so what?) and simply give of ourselves -- no questions asked. One of the greatest tragedies of modern civilization is that we've outgrown forgiveness -- we're too damn Freudian and enlightened for it. There's no room in our smug cultural zeitgeist for what is is, in some sense, the province of the intellectually unencumbered. (Look at little unlettered Maria Goretti. She was good at it.) Dismas didn't volunteer his whole life story on the cross; more importantly, Christ didn't ask.
On a related note, the only purging I've done in the last 36 hours is finally purging myself of the ex-boyfriend box in which I've obsessively stockpiled photos of -- and love letters from -- every boy I've ever loved for the last decade, refusing to relax my grubby, tenacious little grip on the past and only paining myself for my own recalcitrance. So after Mass this morning, I settled into a mountainous, imposing heap of scrap paper and Polaroids (have there really been that many boys?), and slowly, methodically, painstakingly, went through each one last time, reread, retrod, relived, chuckled, wept, and then, without further ceremony, bagged up the whole lot of broken promises and shattered dreams and chucked them into the trashbin once and for all. The fact that it anguished me so much to do it convinced me all the more that it needed to be done. "What we call the beginning is often the end," writes T. S. Eliot in the Four Quartets, "and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from." Baggage, in life as in traveling, can be prohibitively heavy, and looking back is the surest way to miss where you are going.
When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us. (Helen Keller)
For a practical, pragmatic update, I'm doing passingly well. I've been pretty bad about weighing myself -- still doing it too often -- but haven't touched hooch, have been reasonably good so far about hitting daily Mass, and purged only the one time in three days (which, when contrasted with 10 times a day in the months preceding it, is some serious progress, and as they say in AA, progress, not perfection, is key!) I've been going through about 10 packs of gum a day in an effort to not binge on everything in sight, and have been chewing it till my jaws have about fallen off in exhaustion.
My next goal: figuring out what the hell I used to do with my time back before it was all eaten up (pun intended) with this bulimia crap. I'm thinking of taking up playing the piano again. It's good catharsis, and stuff.
I've already gone on too long, but I'll leave you with this parting thought:
"What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step." (C. S. Lewis)
Lest we forget.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Friday, February 27, 2009
Call Me Gizmo
I've forbidden myself circumlocution on this blog (consider yourselves the cognoscenti who are privileged enough to be made privy to the interior workings of my tortured little mind), so here it is:
I let myself get tired and vulnerable and purged last night.
I figured I wouldn't make it all the way through Lent (I deliberately set the bar unattainably high), but I figured I could at least make it more than two freaking days without a screw-up, so it was more than a little disheartening. I know F. Scott Fitzgerald's whole deal -- "never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat" -- intellectually and all, but let's be honest, it inevitably propels us into the slough of despond when we realize we are not the Champions of Virtue we think we are. Good for the old humility, I suppose, particularly as I had triumphed over several baser temptations more urgently calling my name throughout the course of the day, only to fail ingloriously in the eleventh hour because I let myself get tired, smug, and complacent.
Lesson learned. I am apparently a mogwoi. Do not feed me after midnight or I will turn into a gremlin. (I do not, however, so far as I know, die when exposed to broad sunlight or spontaneously reproduce when submerged underwater.)
Just call me Gizmo.
That said, the crucial thing -- indeed the only imperative thing -- is to keep on trucking and do the next right thing. Wallowing is for quitters, quitting is for losers -- and there's no crying in baseball!
Pray for me. This is unbelievably slow going, and hard as hell.
"Why do we fall, sir? So that we might learn to pick ourselves up." (Batman Begins)
I let myself get tired and vulnerable and purged last night.
I figured I wouldn't make it all the way through Lent (I deliberately set the bar unattainably high), but I figured I could at least make it more than two freaking days without a screw-up, so it was more than a little disheartening. I know F. Scott Fitzgerald's whole deal -- "never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat" -- intellectually and all, but let's be honest, it inevitably propels us into the slough of despond when we realize we are not the Champions of Virtue we think we are. Good for the old humility, I suppose, particularly as I had triumphed over several baser temptations more urgently calling my name throughout the course of the day, only to fail ingloriously in the eleventh hour because I let myself get tired, smug, and complacent.
Lesson learned. I am apparently a mogwoi. Do not feed me after midnight or I will turn into a gremlin. (I do not, however, so far as I know, die when exposed to broad sunlight or spontaneously reproduce when submerged underwater.)
Just call me Gizmo.
That said, the crucial thing -- indeed the only imperative thing -- is to keep on trucking and do the next right thing. Wallowing is for quitters, quitting is for losers -- and there's no crying in baseball!
Pray for me. This is unbelievably slow going, and hard as hell.
"Why do we fall, sir? So that we might learn to pick ourselves up." (Batman Begins)
Thursday, February 26, 2009
God is Not a Pharisee, or How I Ate Meat on Ash Wednesday
Father, forgive me, I have sinned.
I ate meat on Ash Wednesday.
I didn't mean to, mind you -- even one possessed with the most ironclad of homeschooled holy-roller rad-trad Christendomite upbringings can subdue or even obliterate one's knee-jerk primal-instinct inhibitions with enough practice in the art of disuse. Reverting to the faith of your childhood after four years spent as what may only be termed a secular-hedonist wannabe necessitates an arduous [and rather humiliating] process of remembering all the things you aren't supposed to be doing that you'd long ago forgotten you weren't supposed to be doing. In a sense, it's far easier to excise the more prominent mortal sins from your life [even your favorites] than to do battle with the more mundane and socially accepted vices of mistaking "damn" for God's last name and sleeping in on lazy Sunday mornings.
In any case, I was about four bites into the chicken before I stopped dead in my tracks and blanched to my roots in horror. Had I ever wondered if Catholic guilt was still strong within me, my fears were cessated. That scene in The Silver Chair when Jill and Eustace realize they've just eaten a talking Narnian stag and the little blue-blooded Brits go green to the gills? They got it from me and they toned it down a little.
I felt like I just ate baby. I couldn't have felt worse if I had just chopped up my mother with a meat cleaver. Some things never depart you, no matter how far you've fallen or how long you've strayed. "An Ulster Scot," as Lewis writes in Surprised by Joy, "may come to disbelieve in God, but not to wear his weekday clothes on the Sabbath." Perhaps Hallmark should sell fourteenth-birthday greeting cards: "Congratulations, Mary Elizabeth!" they'd crow. "Now your lunchmeat options can send you to hell!"
That being said, the reasonable part of me recognized that I obviously hadn't done it on purpose, that I put away the chicken as soon as I realized it was an abstinence day, that any priest worth his collar would probably absolve me of food-related penances along with the kiddies and pregnant ladies anyway [God knows it's more penitential for me to eat the chicken than to not eat it], and that, as we all learned in moral theology back in the day, there can be no sin if there is no intent. Yet I was astounded by how quickly the devil was at my elbow with a velvety whisper, crooning, Forget it. You're hopeless. What an inauspicious Lenten beginning. You're pretty much the worst Catholic ever. Give up your resolutions, throw in the towel, eat everything in the refrigerator, then purge till you puke blood. Oh, and hey, while you're at it, there's a bottle of Jack Daniels under the sink, and I'm sure you can find some new and creative way to compromise your chastity!
It was a herculean effort, but I told him to bugger off and went and got my ashes. I accidentally ate four bites of chicken; it is what it is. No need to turn an accidental lapse into a deliberate debacle, for-the-love-of-all-that's-holy. The Venus de Milo is missing some limbs, but that's no reason to burn down the Louvre.
That's when it hit me for perhaps the first time in my life: God is not a Pharisee. He sees my pathetic little efforts at something great for what they are (inadequate but cute) and even if I botch the job a bit here and there, the God of the universe isn't about casting aspersions on all my perceived deficiencies and endlessly berating me for them. That isn't His schtick. The kerygmatic image of God as Father is not an arbitrary one. What father scoffs at his three-year-old proffering yoinked dandelions from the neighbor's yard in an act of love? What cold-hearted bastard would have the heart to say, "Honey, that's a weed -- now put those back and go pick me some real flowers?"
I'm reminded of a truly heinous clay creation of mine dating back to perhaps the first or second grade -- the artistic representation of a creature I had imagined with the head of a dog, the body of a brontosaurus, and the tail of a squirrel, an affront to aesthetes of every culture and clime, an enormous fat bulbous monstrosity of grotesque proportions, conceived in love and painted a bright bilious brownish-green. [Fortunately for posterity, my career as an artist was a short-lived one, and I soon thereafter shelved my Sculpey forever and took up the pen.] In any event, I gave it to my mother for a Mother's Day present, and hideous as this thing is, she still proudly displayed it in a place of honor in our home for years to come [to my eternal chagrin]. In similar manner, I think, God chuckles to Himself as He takes our humble lurid-green squirrel-dog-brontosauri offerings, and fashions them into something beautiful for the kingdom.
I am now propounding a spirituality that sounds suspiciously Little Way-like, and as St. Therese of Lisieux and I have been on the outs for years, I'd better stop now.
In a different vein, I've been in horrible, horrible physical pain for the past day and a half. Digesting food is a bitch when you haven't done it in eight years, and it hurts unimaginably badly. I find myself prostrate and crying on the floor more often than not. Prayers would be much appreciated. I also find that time crawls by painfully slowly when it is no longer filled by hours of epic bingeing, and reclaiming my life and remembering the other things I used to like to do instead of dying is slow going. I'm continuing to slog away at it, I guess. It'd be easier if I weren't in gastrointestinal distress, though.
On the resolutions front, I've already broken the weighing-myself-after-eating one and gotten supremely grrowked off as a result. But, for what it's worth, still didn't purge. But gaining weight - for the eating disordered - is a traumatic effing experience. It's like waking up in the morning and finding yourself without an identity. Rotten feeling. Just rotten. Hinc illae lacrimae.
Onward and upward, I suppose. Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself. (Francis de Sales)
I ate meat on Ash Wednesday.
I didn't mean to, mind you -- even one possessed with the most ironclad of homeschooled holy-roller rad-trad Christendomite upbringings can subdue or even obliterate one's knee-jerk primal-instinct inhibitions with enough practice in the art of disuse. Reverting to the faith of your childhood after four years spent as what may only be termed a secular-hedonist wannabe necessitates an arduous [and rather humiliating] process of remembering all the things you aren't supposed to be doing that you'd long ago forgotten you weren't supposed to be doing. In a sense, it's far easier to excise the more prominent mortal sins from your life [even your favorites] than to do battle with the more mundane and socially accepted vices of mistaking "damn" for God's last name and sleeping in on lazy Sunday mornings.
In any case, I was about four bites into the chicken before I stopped dead in my tracks and blanched to my roots in horror. Had I ever wondered if Catholic guilt was still strong within me, my fears were cessated. That scene in The Silver Chair when Jill and Eustace realize they've just eaten a talking Narnian stag and the little blue-blooded Brits go green to the gills? They got it from me and they toned it down a little.
I felt like I just ate baby. I couldn't have felt worse if I had just chopped up my mother with a meat cleaver. Some things never depart you, no matter how far you've fallen or how long you've strayed. "An Ulster Scot," as Lewis writes in Surprised by Joy, "may come to disbelieve in God, but not to wear his weekday clothes on the Sabbath." Perhaps Hallmark should sell fourteenth-birthday greeting cards: "Congratulations, Mary Elizabeth!" they'd crow. "Now your lunchmeat options can send you to hell!"
That being said, the reasonable part of me recognized that I obviously hadn't done it on purpose, that I put away the chicken as soon as I realized it was an abstinence day, that any priest worth his collar would probably absolve me of food-related penances along with the kiddies and pregnant ladies anyway [God knows it's more penitential for me to eat the chicken than to not eat it], and that, as we all learned in moral theology back in the day, there can be no sin if there is no intent. Yet I was astounded by how quickly the devil was at my elbow with a velvety whisper, crooning, Forget it. You're hopeless. What an inauspicious Lenten beginning. You're pretty much the worst Catholic ever. Give up your resolutions, throw in the towel, eat everything in the refrigerator, then purge till you puke blood. Oh, and hey, while you're at it, there's a bottle of Jack Daniels under the sink, and I'm sure you can find some new and creative way to compromise your chastity!
It was a herculean effort, but I told him to bugger off and went and got my ashes. I accidentally ate four bites of chicken; it is what it is. No need to turn an accidental lapse into a deliberate debacle, for-the-love-of-all-that's-holy. The Venus de Milo is missing some limbs, but that's no reason to burn down the Louvre.
That's when it hit me for perhaps the first time in my life: God is not a Pharisee. He sees my pathetic little efforts at something great for what they are (inadequate but cute) and even if I botch the job a bit here and there, the God of the universe isn't about casting aspersions on all my perceived deficiencies and endlessly berating me for them. That isn't His schtick. The kerygmatic image of God as Father is not an arbitrary one. What father scoffs at his three-year-old proffering yoinked dandelions from the neighbor's yard in an act of love? What cold-hearted bastard would have the heart to say, "Honey, that's a weed -- now put those back and go pick me some real flowers?"
I'm reminded of a truly heinous clay creation of mine dating back to perhaps the first or second grade -- the artistic representation of a creature I had imagined with the head of a dog, the body of a brontosaurus, and the tail of a squirrel, an affront to aesthetes of every culture and clime, an enormous fat bulbous monstrosity of grotesque proportions, conceived in love and painted a bright bilious brownish-green. [Fortunately for posterity, my career as an artist was a short-lived one, and I soon thereafter shelved my Sculpey forever and took up the pen.] In any event, I gave it to my mother for a Mother's Day present, and hideous as this thing is, she still proudly displayed it in a place of honor in our home for years to come [to my eternal chagrin]. In similar manner, I think, God chuckles to Himself as He takes our humble lurid-green squirrel-dog-brontosauri offerings, and fashions them into something beautiful for the kingdom.
I am now propounding a spirituality that sounds suspiciously Little Way-like, and as St. Therese of Lisieux and I have been on the outs for years, I'd better stop now.
In a different vein, I've been in horrible, horrible physical pain for the past day and a half. Digesting food is a bitch when you haven't done it in eight years, and it hurts unimaginably badly. I find myself prostrate and crying on the floor more often than not. Prayers would be much appreciated. I also find that time crawls by painfully slowly when it is no longer filled by hours of epic bingeing, and reclaiming my life and remembering the other things I used to like to do instead of dying is slow going. I'm continuing to slog away at it, I guess. It'd be easier if I weren't in gastrointestinal distress, though.
On the resolutions front, I've already broken the weighing-myself-after-eating one and gotten supremely grrowked off as a result. But, for what it's worth, still didn't purge. But gaining weight - for the eating disordered - is a traumatic effing experience. It's like waking up in the morning and finding yourself without an identity. Rotten feeling. Just rotten. Hinc illae lacrimae.
Onward and upward, I suppose. Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself. (Francis de Sales)
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
An Inveterate Sinner in Christ the King's Court
With all due deference to Mark Twain and his [really appallingly bad] novel, it seemed an appropriate title for the forthcoming pensees.
In a half-hearted attempt to eschew the more flagrant forms of emotional exhibitionism to which I am so prone, I thought I'd relegate my thoughts this Lenten season to blog form rather than than voicing them in that [slightly] more shamelessly self-promoting and self-aggrandizing format of the Facebook note. In sum, I plan to render a thorough and honest reckoning of myself for the next 40 days and make privy to said reflections only those whose input I value and whose judgment I do not fear.
That being said, here we are at Ash Wednesday [I am, incidentally and apropos of nothing, reading Eliot's poem of the same name as we speak, his first piece written after his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism -- good stuff.]. These past few Lents I have been so enmeshed in a lifestyle diametrically opposed to Catholic spirituality that I've scarcely noticed its arrival, and certainly done nothing to herald it.
This time, I'm determined to make some real and lasting life revisions and excisions. This time, I'm determined to trade my sorrows for joy and fumigate once and for all the sordid shithole of sin and addiction I've inhabited for far too long. This time, I'm determined to choose life, that I and my descendants might live. For this, as Sandra Bullock's counselor observes in one of the more heartrending moments of the film 28 Days, "is not a way to live. This is a way to die."
I'm disheartened, discouraged, and a little dyspeptic, to be sure. I've failed, time and time again. I'm reminded of Marya Hornbacher's words on leaving a long stint in treatment: I was patently aware that I didn't think I could do it.
The thing is, I can't. I am utterly impotent in the face of leftover Chinese food. And after effectively obviating my one and only route to sanity for the the past four years, I've had the effrontery to wonder why I am still so freaking insane.
Enter grace, stage right.
I've accompanied enough recovering alcoholics to AA meetings and hit enough Eating Disorders Anonymous meetings on my own initiative to know that the first and seminal step in any 12-step program is admitting we were powerless . . . that our lives had become unmanageable; the second, distinct but intimately related -- we came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
And it can. He can. He, the only one who can restore the years the locusts have eaten, strip me of my scales [those of both the Voyage of the Dawn Treader dragon variety and the more prosaic but equally pernicious bathroom variety], and remove at long last the monkey on my back and the thorn in my flesh.
Behold, I make all things new. (Revelation 21:5)
In sum, for those of you who are wondering if my bloviating knows no bounds, this Lent, I am:
1) Not purging. Seriously. I have to cut this bullshit before I drop dead of hypokalemia and heart failure over a ceramic god, and I really, at the end of the day, have better things to do. Please - text me, call me, ask me point-blank if I have been. It's as awkward and uncomfortable for me as it is for you, but I desperately, desperately need to be kept accountable.
2) Not losing any weight. Urgh. I'm at my minimum healthy weight now, and I'm not going to allow myself to go below it, much as it drives me batshit to think of maintaining or gaining weight.
3) Weighing myself once a day, in the morning, instead of doing my obsessive little dance on and off the scale all day long every day. Observing weight fluctuations at too close range inevitably leads to #1, purging.
4) Going to Eating Disorders Anonymous in Falls Church on Sunday nights. If anyone wants to come with me, I'd be eternally grateful.
5) Not drinking. Addiction recovery tends to be a wild little game of Chuck E. Cheese Whack-a-Mole in which another arises as swiftly and surely as the first is temporarily tamed. I know I in particular have a tendency to juggle a whole host of subordinate dependencies concomitant to the major one; booze is my major backup escape mechanism, so I'm preemptively nixing it for the next 40 days.
5) Going to regular Confession and daily Mass insofar as it is in my power to do so. [Given that for quite some period of time, I wasn't going to Mass at all, or at best in hit-or-miss capacity, it's going to be an... interesting... transition.]
I am, for what it's worth, publicly promulgating these because I deserve a good ass-kicking if I start violating these precepts willy-nilly as is my wont.
I need plenty of prayer, and plenty of hugs. I'm teary, angsty, and repeatedly questioning, like J. Alfred Prufrock, "Do I dare / Disturb the universe?"
But unlike Prufrock, I'm going to actually freaking do it this time.
Life awaits. Or so I'm told, anyway. I've never actually lived it myself, but I figure it might be worth a go.
In a half-hearted attempt to eschew the more flagrant forms of emotional exhibitionism to which I am so prone, I thought I'd relegate my thoughts this Lenten season to blog form rather than than voicing them in that [slightly] more shamelessly self-promoting and self-aggrandizing format of the Facebook note. In sum, I plan to render a thorough and honest reckoning of myself for the next 40 days and make privy to said reflections only those whose input I value and whose judgment I do not fear.
That being said, here we are at Ash Wednesday [I am, incidentally and apropos of nothing, reading Eliot's poem of the same name as we speak, his first piece written after his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism -- good stuff.]. These past few Lents I have been so enmeshed in a lifestyle diametrically opposed to Catholic spirituality that I've scarcely noticed its arrival, and certainly done nothing to herald it.
This time, I'm determined to make some real and lasting life revisions and excisions. This time, I'm determined to trade my sorrows for joy and fumigate once and for all the sordid shithole of sin and addiction I've inhabited for far too long. This time, I'm determined to choose life, that I and my descendants might live. For this, as Sandra Bullock's counselor observes in one of the more heartrending moments of the film 28 Days, "is not a way to live. This is a way to die."
I'm disheartened, discouraged, and a little dyspeptic, to be sure. I've failed, time and time again. I'm reminded of Marya Hornbacher's words on leaving a long stint in treatment: I was patently aware that I didn't think I could do it.
The thing is, I can't. I am utterly impotent in the face of leftover Chinese food. And after effectively obviating my one and only route to sanity for the the past four years, I've had the effrontery to wonder why I am still so freaking insane.
Enter grace, stage right.
I've accompanied enough recovering alcoholics to AA meetings and hit enough Eating Disorders Anonymous meetings on my own initiative to know that the first and seminal step in any 12-step program is admitting we were powerless . . . that our lives had become unmanageable; the second, distinct but intimately related -- we came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
And it can. He can. He, the only one who can restore the years the locusts have eaten, strip me of my scales [those of both the Voyage of the Dawn Treader dragon variety and the more prosaic but equally pernicious bathroom variety], and remove at long last the monkey on my back and the thorn in my flesh.
Behold, I make all things new. (Revelation 21:5)
In sum, for those of you who are wondering if my bloviating knows no bounds, this Lent, I am:
1) Not purging. Seriously. I have to cut this bullshit before I drop dead of hypokalemia and heart failure over a ceramic god, and I really, at the end of the day, have better things to do. Please - text me, call me, ask me point-blank if I have been. It's as awkward and uncomfortable for me as it is for you, but I desperately, desperately need to be kept accountable.
2) Not losing any weight. Urgh. I'm at my minimum healthy weight now, and I'm not going to allow myself to go below it, much as it drives me batshit to think of maintaining or gaining weight.
3) Weighing myself once a day, in the morning, instead of doing my obsessive little dance on and off the scale all day long every day. Observing weight fluctuations at too close range inevitably leads to #1, purging.
4) Going to Eating Disorders Anonymous in Falls Church on Sunday nights. If anyone wants to come with me, I'd be eternally grateful.
5) Not drinking. Addiction recovery tends to be a wild little game of Chuck E. Cheese Whack-a-Mole in which another arises as swiftly and surely as the first is temporarily tamed. I know I in particular have a tendency to juggle a whole host of subordinate dependencies concomitant to the major one; booze is my major backup escape mechanism, so I'm preemptively nixing it for the next 40 days.
5) Going to regular Confession and daily Mass insofar as it is in my power to do so. [Given that for quite some period of time, I wasn't going to Mass at all, or at best in hit-or-miss capacity, it's going to be an... interesting... transition.]
I am, for what it's worth, publicly promulgating these because I deserve a good ass-kicking if I start violating these precepts willy-nilly as is my wont.
I need plenty of prayer, and plenty of hugs. I'm teary, angsty, and repeatedly questioning, like J. Alfred Prufrock, "Do I dare / Disturb the universe?"
But unlike Prufrock, I'm going to actually freaking do it this time.
Life awaits. Or so I'm told, anyway. I've never actually lived it myself, but I figure it might be worth a go.
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