Day 197 - Treating myself like a precious object will make me strong.

Day 197

Anyway - I had a really weird day today - I feel hideously overwhelmed but I've had a couple of quiet victories to do with comfort eating - I had a slight panic attack at work the first thing I could think of to calm me was hot sugary tea - then on the way home I thought about pizza - neither of those thoughts were actually attached to the food - I was distant from the thought of the food - I just saw the thoughts and felt no sense of need or longing whatsoever - which is such a new thing for me - I think I have broken the cycle of addiction. I feel no emotion over food any more. I am now attached to moisturiser and exotic tea!

And then there was the lightbulb - the one I have been waiting for - the one I needed to hear (okay - and see!) before I knew I was ready for management. It ran along these lines:


'Food will not change any situation. It delays you from facing the present.  Now you know this, you are free from it.

You will never need or want to turn to food for comfort again. You don't have to be wary of it any more, you have let it go. You have won.'

It felt like the bit at the end of Labyrinth where Sarah says to Jared with the brand new thought shining brightly in her eys for the first time - 'You have no power over me!'

On a horrible day like today where I felt choked up by everything else in my life - seriously I am so overwhelmed by the number of things that are coming to me and presenting themselves as opportunities. I feel attacked by the sheer volume of thoughts and activities and things and stuff I have to do at work and at home and in my leisure time that I'm dizzy with it - you wouldn't believe this but it was - in part - triggered by the news that I may just walk into a new opportunity at work - the one I set for myself to achieve at the beginning of the year and the exact method by which I thought I'd lost the opportunity back in March has actually become the means by which I may get it (complicated, I know) but I'm kind of frightened at the way things I want just seem to be happening that I am terrified that if I asked for something I truly desired I might just get it.

It comes from the strangest places, you know - this sense of panic - You wouldn't believe it if i told you how overwhelming I found the management book when I received it!

I immediately thought I had to know about all of the exercises and activities RIGHT NOW until I took a deep breath and told myself to quit planning ahead so much, and put it down and leave reading it any more closely until Day 1 of management - I'll have more than enough time to obsess about it whilst I'm in the process - I keep on needing to be so ahead of the game all the time that I rarely enjoy the game (LIGHTBULB! - I rarely enjoy anything I plan because whilst it's happening I'm already on to the next thing!)

I tell myself I'm lazy and I get nothing done - the problem is that once I start doing, I binge on activity. (Ha - what was that about cracking addictions, again?!) If I sit down to read a book, I have to FINISH reading the book immediately so that I can pick up a piece of embroidery and learn how to play canasta and organise a trip to the Tate Modern. I exxagerate, but no wonder I get tired before I even do anything!

And I cycled and cycled through all the things I'm not doing, all the things I need to do and want to do and everything I get wrong - I came home to find a batch of junk mail dumped on my doorstep from my old address - with a note telling me to get it sorted! How can I stop junkmail going to an old address?! And I got quite upset about it - ridiculously so.

Stupid inconsequential things and some of the more important things - well - it just made me realise, if I move into management with a suspicious skittish eye ready to get easily upset - well - food and I are never going to have a normal relationship and that was always the problem - we've been enemies as well as bosom buddies for years and it should be neither. It's just food. I have choice from now on. I am abstinent and I'm okay with that - even on a horrible day. (I found myself reflecting, today - Tuesday - that I am not hungry. I really am not hungry for food any more.)

And so with all this dizzying tizziness, I realise that I had the same sort of meltdown this time last year - when I had to run away from the city and spend a few days in a fisherman's cottage that overlooked where I grew up and then walk across to Worm's Head and stare back at the hazy shore and watch the sea grass ripple and the gulls wheel by on their fish missions. And I realised that in the last year I have only had two holidays - one for 7 days last August that was half a festival in Holland where I caught a dreadful cold and then followed that up with a personal development course where I was working on myself from 10 in the morning to 10 at night for three days (with said stinking cold). And then the last vacation was Crete which was an obligation rather than a break and it was only actually 4 working days off. And it's just not enough. I need more time off. But I don't want to travel just yet...and I don;t want to spend any money - and I don't want to do something cheap like backpacking, camping or hostelling because that's just exhausting. Anyway - so I need a break.

Perfectionism - striving to avoid actually getting on with it
Heres the thing (this is a lesson I read from The Artist's Way on Sunday and did I take a blind bit of notice of it? No - it sent me into avoidance behaviour - so it must be an important lesson - so lets think it through...

Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right. It has nothing to do with fixing things. It has nothing to do with standards. Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead.

So - knowing that, and knowing that I am not ruled by food any more. I am ready for management - but as the wisdom teeth come out next Thurs there's no point in starting today as I would prefer to stick to the LL liquid diet for the first week after the op as a matter of convenience and lack of effort - if I'm in pain I'm not going to want to be bothered about preparing meals and thinking about it and the like - and I didn't lose an ounce this week so this is a great opportunity to definitely lose the last half stone to get me into the 9s - the magic number I thought I would never see again. Once I see that, then I can have my first piece of John Dory.

Do not fear mistakes. There are none.
Miles Davis.