This isn’t a meandering, depressing essay about inadequacy, in case you were wondering. It’s more a surprised realization of how often I tend to sit idly by and wait for disaster to strike, and why.

My adopted brother David and I were at dinner discussing something about society, culture and politics—because that’s what we do— when we talked about the issue of mental disorders. I’m not sure what brought it up; anyway his comment was that children raised in an unpredictable environment were probably worse off than kids who just know everything’s for shit. Mind you, we’re not parents and were not child psychologists so this is all conjectural and based on our own experiences. For that reason I’m not prepared to rate one environment as categorically worse than the other but his comment clarified something for me so well that I demanded we change the topic completely. Because he loves me, he did.

What David’s idea did was put my own childhood under a different lens than I normally view it. Between my father’s alcoholism and my mother’s extreme case of bi-polar disorder, it’s safe to say that my childhood was unpredictable on a daily basis, something I had not given any thought to before. I had a roof over my head and two parents who loved me and never abused me, so I have a lot I’m grateful for. The effects of the problems that did exist, though, have a long reach.

My reaction to this life-long uncertainty has not been to buckle down and prepare for the worst, as a well-adjusted adult should. I think my ingrained expectation of “unpredictability” means that even when I know bad times are ahead, I also know that no matter what I do, I’ll never actually be prepared for them…and I’m just collateral damage anyway. This is really the key: what happens to me is not consequential to the matter of the boat hitting or not hitting an iceberg. I’m on that boat, one way or the other, and if it goes down I’m sinking with it.

This was how I handled my parents’ completely predictable, expected demises. They both suffered from fatal illnesses, and I was fully aware of that. Mother lived longer than expected and Poppa died sooner than expected but neither death was UNexpected. Yet, during that nearly four year period, I completely neglected the question of what I intended to do with my life after their deaths – professionally, academically, and financially. Because: their health was unpredictable (Mother could have died at any moment, Poppa could have kept going for another decade). I made weak overtures but nothing seriously concrete like building up a savings to live off of after the fact, or trying to set up a graduate school plan. Or even researching graduate schools. Or…you know, anything. My whole attitude was well summed up by the phrase, “why bother?” It’s not that I expected everything to work out somehow eventually (which it all did, mostly badly), but that I felt helpless to change anything, no matter what I did.

Yes, we can argue about “self fulfilling prophecies” and that applies, but isn’t the point; what I’m getting at here is the reason for my emotional feeling of helplessness and how that contributes to my (complete lack of) motivation.

It’s a current problem, not to mention a recurring one. What I do is sit around waiting for disaster to strike. I know I’m good in a crisis, but let’s face it, that’s the worst skill set to rely on in order to create a fulfilling, meaningful life. My tendency to avoid self-responsibility means I’m often sitting around not doing what I know I MUST DO simply because I don’t think it will make a difference (most noticeable when it comes to my finances; while I’m not completely irresponsible, I tend to make things worse through avoidance behaviors when times are tough). I sometimes find myself in a profound state of self-imposed ennui, semi-fugues of suspension, where I am waiting and not doing even though I know the latter would have a far more positive effect on everything in the long run. Might, even, help avert the disaster I’m so convinced is going to flatten me. (Okay, it’s hard to even type that and believe it. But I should try, right?)

So I’m trying to call myself out on this, acknowledge the behavior and accept it and do something else instead.

I’ll let you know if it works.

Two weeks ago on Tuesday, March 12, I consumed a lot of junk. It was yummy junk. I regret nothing!

But it was junk nonetheless and I realized, rolling around on the floor in pain that night, that it was doing more harm than good. I’ve gotten away with over a year of fairly lazy eating habits, filled with far too much grains and sugar — fueled, in part, by my terrible health/injury issues last year, so I’m not beating myself up about it. 2012 was what it was.

Time to move on.

So on March 13th, I turned back the clock and cut out all grains and sugars. Those who follow me on Facebook know I suffered from a long bought of paleo-flu; only now has it finally started to clear up. I know it’s clearing up because I wake up refreshed after 7 1/2 hours of sleep, and during the day I’m completely awake and buzzing with thoughts, ideas, and energy. My appetite has fallen off, in that I don’t have wild cravings for things like potato chips or ice cream (my two major weaknesses). I don’t think I’ve lost any weight but I’m feeling and looking less bloated, and that’s something, but it’s not as important as feeling re-energized, sleeping better, and not suffering endless rounds of IBS.

I think I’m still including too much dairy, i.e. CHEESE NOM NOM NOM! But eh, one step at a time. I don’t use artificial sweeteners in anything, I’ve cut all grains out, I’ve cut all sugar out that isn’t in a piece of fruit, and have also limited the empty calories of things like potatoes. Some people think that is an extreme diet but honestly, all it really means is cutting out FAKE FOOD and JUNK.

I think Kendall at primalbalance summed it up: It’s Just Not That Hard. When you are committed to feeling better, to living a full life, you will make the changes you need to make. I’m still recovering from 2012 in some ways; I feel like I was on a great path and but was totally derailed by factors far outside of my control, and my frustrations and anger about that swamp me sometimes. But getting my health back is a critical step towards forging ahead, for me.

Two weeks in, the rest of my life to go!

I try not to be too evangelical about going paleo, because diet really is a very personal choice and what works beautifully for me doesn’t work for everyone. But I feel I need to write about this book, which is not a book about paleo or is even a “diet” book of any kind, because I was really moved by it.

Yes, moved — as in emotionally gut punched.

The book is Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes. The author is someone you will hear talk about if you do any reading in the paleo blogosphere, but while I had heard of him I had not done much to find out why he is considered important. Well, now I know.

The heart of this book is not instructions on how to eat right, for both weight loss and health, although those instructions are included in an appendix. No. Taubes, who is a respected science journalist with a degree in physics from Harvard, instead looks critically at the state of modern nutrition science and the prevailing theories of why we get fat and how we are supposed to lose fat.

Basically, he spends most of the book calling out bad (by which I mean, terrible) science studies and research of the last century. In the end, he blows apart the myth of “calories in/calories out” theories (aka “eat less, exercise more”) and explains WHY it is all so much nonsense. He explains why the First Law of Thermodynamics does apply to fat gain/loss, but not in the way you have been taught that it does.

The reason this was such a gut punch to me is that not only have I spent my entire adult life losing and regaining weight, but I have seen around me people who have amazing willpower and persistence in every other aspect of their lives fail when it comes to “eat less, exercise more.” And according to the popular paradigm, that just shouldn’t happen.

Taubes shows the science of how and why exercise is great for your overall health, but kind of pointless for losing fat, and why cutting calories seems to make so much common sense but is actually profoundly stupid in practice.

He ALSO provides the science, however grudgingly shared by scientists (and they are definitely full of grudges about it) which proves that low carbohydrate diets are not only better for fat loss, but better for overall health.

Nothing he presents here is, actually, controversial. Over and over again he presents known facts about nutrition, and then shows how those facts have been covered up, twisted, or dismissed by the mainstream nutrition industry.

For instance, we all know that a good way to work up an appetite is to work out — play a round of soccer, go for a run, etc. Science has proven this over and over. Yet, the advice to dieters is that when they get hungry, to go for a walk to curb their appetite. WTF? If you’re hungry, eat less? Who in their right mind thinks these admonitions make any sense?

In the end, Taubes recommends a low-carb approach, not necessarily a paleo approach. I think the real message here, though, is QUESTION AUTHORITY. All our lives we’ve been preached the “eat less, exercise more” solution (and I use that term loosely) for fat loss, but seriously ask yourself: how many overweight people do you know whom that has worked for, long term? Who have lost 30+ pounds and kept it off? Do you really believe that everyone you know is slothful and gluttonous and lacks self control? Does that even make sense?

No, it doesn’t, and Taubes explains why. I recommend this book highly, even for those who are not looking to lose weight.

In 2007 I saw the movie Hot Fuzz and proceeded to stumble, tumble, and otherwise crash into a slow-motion emotional breakdown that culminated in April of 2008 with a multi-day catastrophic withdrawal from life. Intensive therapy came later.

FTR, Hot Fuzz is a comedy about British policemen officers.*

It is, in and of itself, not much to start an emotional breakdown, I think you will agree. The thing is that it was not what the movie’s subject matter or who starred in it or anything that gut-punched me. It was the thought, insidious and cruel, that I kept on a loop in my head: “You should have made this movie.”

Now I’m not British nor am I Edgar Wright (the director), so even if I tried I would not have made that movie. But that’s not really the point I was making to myself with that refrain. What was plaguing me was the idea that I had not made anything. That after years and years of being an “adult” my life was pointless and completely lacking in accomplishments I valued for myself.

Once, a long time ago in a childhood far, far away, I decided to be film director. This was probably about 1980. Female film directors were thin on the ground, but I didn’t care, I had ideas and ambition. I was going to make movies.

By the time I went to college in 1988, that goal had become a day dream.

Many factors played into that; my mother’s discouragement of the idea, very significantly, but also my unwillingness to take a risk and my fear of rejection. I found out quickly that the movie industry is harsh and hard, and the idea of me — home-schooled, socially awkward, fat, female — trying to break into that was literally overwhelming.

In retrospect I can see it was a self-fulfilling prophecy: I suspected I would be broken by the industry, and I’m sure if I had gone ahead and tried anyway I would have definitely been broken by it. I was not strong enough as a young woman to take the kind of hits the ego has to take in a creative, competitive industry like movies and survive.

And yet.

Seeing the path Joss Whedon has taken brings up all these regrets for me. I’m only nominally a fan of his; I didn’t watch Buffy and the Dollhouse did nothing for me, but I am a huge fan of Firefly and (as you might have guessed *cough*cough*) the Avengers. I admire what he’s done and how he has done it. As I watched the trailer for his movie Much Ado About Nothing, I kept thinking, “You could have done something like that.”

Ego? Yes. Inflated sense of talent? Most likely. Completely unrealistic? Definitely.

And yet.

Sometimes I still revisit that dream. It was my first real “adult” goal, probably akin to most ten year old plans in being more of a fancy than an aspiration, but I really believed for a few years that I was going to be the next Spielberg, the next Lucas, the next Billy Wilder. Or something. That dream carved out a place in my heart and never died, just got boxed up and put away.

Sometimes I open that box and mourn over the loss.

It would not have happened the way I imagined it, then or now; I was not the person who could have pulled that off. But I wonder what my life would have been like if I had been that person, or if I had at least tried to be that person.

I have a lot of small regrets about life, but I think this failed dream is my greatest one. My goal now is to never have any more regrets that are as painful to me as this one still is.

#

*It stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, with Edgar Wright directing. It’s hysterically funny and if by chance you have not seen it, I suggest you do so immediately.

I wish this could be a humorous post about getting up in the morning on Monday and feeling grumpy and annoyed and brain dead, but no such luck for either of us.

No, this is going to be a post about my body.

I’ll start with the fact that there is a reason every mirror in my house is hung so as to show me from the shoulders up. Anyone who is shorter than I am is SOL for using my mirrors, because they are lucky to see themselves eye-to-eye in them.

But this morning I got a glance at my torso in the reflection of the window when I opened the blinds, and that was that — because I’m fat, and I loathe my body. There is no way to put it politely, or kindly: hate is nearly not strong enough a word.

Because I’m fat, I don’t deserve nice clothes. I don’t deserve nice people, either. I don’t deserve money or success. I certainly don’t deserve sympathy, kindness or love.

That is all arguable, of course, and I argue it every day. It’s easier to argue it when I can’t actually see myself though, and when I do see myself, the argument falls apart completely.

Now, it’s de rigour to blame your mother for these types of things, I mean it’s really a trope of self-analysis. In this case, though, it’s also accurate. She had me on calorie-restricted diets starting when I was an adolescent. She only bought me nice clothes when I lost weight and would look “presentable” in them. She made it clear that no one respectable or worthy would date me if I was fat. Ironically, she also taught me by example that I should only exercise in public when I was thin enough not to be laughed at.

Essentially, I believe that my being fat means that I am less than human, unworthy and pathetic. It is an emotional box I cannot figure out how to get out of.

I’m not looking for pity or sympathy or even help on this. It is just the way it is…and it’s exhausting. I hate being fat, and I hate that I hate myself for something I have so little control over.* I don’t want to be scared of success or dating or clothes.

But I am, and on days like today, I push forward, wondering why I bother doing anything at all.

———

* Yes, “so little control over.” If you are so ignorant as to think that losing weight and keeping it off is easy, then please do us both a favor and fuck off.  Believe it or not, I’ve heard all the weight loss platitudes before. You have no idea what I eat, how I exercise, or the supplements I take, and in that void of ignorance, you should shut up. Instead, maybe you should ask yourself why it is so important to you to blame and shame overweight people by implying they are lazy, gluttonous, and mentally broken when the science behind obesity suggests something quite different.

I am, honestly, a pretty lousy friend. Not on purpose, I assure you; I’m just not good at it naturally. I didn’t get the socialization I needed when I was young, among other things, and so friendship is something I have to consciously think about doing right (vs. doing wrong).

I have made some pretty spectacular mistakes; but they were purely that, mistakes. I don’t use my shortcomings as excuses, just reasons, and I try to learn from the fuck ups I make. It is an effort that is sometimes successful.

One thing I’ve had to come to terms with, though, is that sometimes friendship isn’t about you. Sometimes people have their own issues they bring to the plate, and if you inadvertently trip one of those switches, then it doesn’t matter how long we’ve been friends or how hard I’ve tried to be a good friend, then they will write me off. It’s unfair. It’s also just human nature.

Recently, a friend I’ve known for a few years took something I wrote online, completely misread it, hurled accusations and hurt feelings at me, and then shut the door in my face rather than try to reconcile. To be clear: she destroyed our friendship based on something I DID NOT ACTUALLY DO. The end.

One friend was unable to deal with my periodic, depression-induced periods of social withdrawal and simply told me that I’m a horrible friend and she did not want anything to do with me. Which, to be fair, was not unreasonable of her. But her decision to write me off was more about her inability to handle being ignored, and less about the factors that put me into a deep, dark seclusion. In a better world, we would have met in the middle; but I wasn’t even given the chance to apologize or explain. The end.

Another friend, someone I’ve known since college and who was a stalwart support through my parents’ deaths, bizarrely and secretly decided that I was a double-agent, spying on her for her ex-husband and actively working against her. I made an expensive cross-country trip to visit her during her divorce, thinking she needed a friend nearby. She was distant with me, and I thought it was just due to stress, but no, turns out it was because she thought I was a traitor to her. Not long after that trip, she completely cut off all contact with me. The end. (Honestly I don’t really know why she came to believe this about me, as it was all completely untrue; I don’t want to think that she was mentally unstable, but I’m really left with no other explanations.)

True friends accept that people aren’t perfect, that they make mistakes and regret them and learn from them. I’m used to rocky waters and I do everything I can to try and fix what I did wrong, and my real friends understand that people can learn from mistakes.

False friends don’t care what you did, they decide your sin with or without your efforts (no lie, I don’t need the help! Jeeze). They don’t look at the whole weight of your friendship when they make their judgments, and they don’t stop to say, “Maybe I should ask if what I think is going on is true, or get the whole story.” They are comfortable writing off our friendship because, I suppose, their (mostly imagined) slights were more important.

I wonder if, for them, I was actually a person, or just a convenience or some kind of caricature. It hurts, but then I get back to the spiritual idea that everything happens for a reason. As a skeptic and atheist, I interpret this as “I chose…unwisely.”

A couple of days ago I got myself into a pointless kerfluffle by trying to point out a popular writer’s hypocrisy, and how she was constantly espousing rules and ideals that she would then turn around and claim exception to.

A whole rash of people decided to twist my words into some nonsense about how I was “mandating her behavior” but the funny thing is, they were both right and wrong.

I was not mandating that she follow my own choices or ideas on the subject. I would not do that about something people take personally, and for their own reasons. In this arena, there is no “one right way.”

However, I was mandating was that she be honest about her intentions and stop making excuses for why she can’t bother to live up to her own rules. This, I thought, was a reasonable demand.

You cannot imagine the shock I received when someone whom I thought was reasonably smart and enlightened sent me an angry email that included the phrase (among so much else) that said: “you do not have the right to demand honesty from anyone.”

Well excuse the fuck out of me, but I most certainly DO have that right.

If the idea of “respecting an individual’s choices” has morphed into “you may not criticize anyone, ever, for any reason, not even for LYING” then sign me out of this experiment called humanity. And personally I lump hypocrisy under that umbrella; it is a form of lying about who you are and what you value. It is, at best, a “do as I say, not as I do” mentality which actually encourages falsehood and deception.

Recently my friend and fellow New College alum Ray D. posted a link to a thoughtful article about secular ethics that is very timely to this discussion. You can read it for yourself, and I encourage you to since I’m not recapping it here. What I want to say about that article is that it brings up the ideas of “character” and virtue, two vital aspects of being human that I think secular circles tend to hand wave over.

And this idea, this utter nonsense that “you do not have the right to demand honesty from anyone” is partially a result.

Right vs. wrong is a tricky, tricky thing, and smarter people than I have been hashing it out for, oh, centuries now. But if, as Sam Harris suggests, we use the measure of well-being to judge right vs. wrong, I think we can all agree that lying falls on the side of WRONG. Hypocrisy falls on the side of WRONG. And I’ll be damned if I sit dumbly while someone tries to tell me otherwise.

This here is a post about health issues. Read at your own risk.

I have had insomnia for two nights in a row. For the last two years, outside of illnesses, this has been unusual for me. I evened out my sleep patterns when I went paleo, which solved the issue of waking up several times a night and having trouble falling back asleep.

But even after that, I would often stay up wayyy past any reasonable hour. Of course, that time was spent on the computer. For the most part, it had to be: I was doing classwork for grad school, trying to write my own work, and managing blogs. At some point in the night I’d reach a burnout point and just start surfing, though, and while I knew that going to bed was what I needed to do, my brain was too wired to do it.

My body was exhausted but my mind would not give up.

Then I installed f.lux on my system, mostly as a lark, as I had read somewhere that it helps fix disrupted sleep cycles by making the color of your computer’s display adapt to the time of day (warm at night and like sunlight during the day). I figured that was far too simple a solution to be a solution, and…I was totally wrong. I saw the difference within the first few days: by bed time, I was completely ready for sleep, mentally and physically. Getting up and going to bed was not a chore but a necessary thing. I’ve been a f.lux evangelist since.

But sometimes you forget the obvious things. For the last two nights I’ve had trouble going to bed, because I was just too wired. It’s a problem — in fact it made me late for work because I overslept through my alarms.

I realized this morning that it’s not a big mystery, though: both nights, I disabled f.lux for a couple of hours in order to get some work done. I did this about 8pm from 10pm both nights, and since my bed-time is 10pm, it’s pretty obvious where this went. I was in no way ready for sleep by 10pm, and ended up staying awake past midnight until I basically collapsed.

So tonight, I’m going to try to get work done early and let f.lux run its course. I need the sleep.

I had high hopes at the start of 2013, most of which consisted of “this is not going to be a replay of 2012 or someone who is not me is going to get hurt.”

So far, so good!

To be more serious, it is true that 2013 has not been all manna from heaven. My January rent is in arrears and being paid in installments; my electricity got turned off early last month; my bank account balances are wayyy low (mint.com keeps pinging me with “low account balance” notices, as if I just somehow forgot to deposit all that money I have sitting around).

But February rent was paid on time, I finished a freelance job that will help with the bills, the electricity was turned back on that same night, someone may be interested in buying my broken car, and my new business the Task Mistress (Personal Project Management for Success) is in successful beta-launch.

AND I WON SOME MONEY!

This is not something that happens to me often. But here you go, I wrote a site review for the blog Dukeo, which is a very helpful resource for bloggers trying to make money from their blog. It was part of a contest that Ste, the person behind Dukeo, was running in order to get feedback about the site. I figured, what the hell, and entered. I figured I had as much of a chance at winning as anyone, for not too much effort.

SCORE!

The Dukeo post announcing the winners is interesting reading in any case, to see how others review a site, what they see or did not see that escaped me. Interesting stuff! I admit to being somewhere between an amateur and professional webmaster/blogger, so it’s always good to read analyses like the ones Dukeo got.

Thanks, Dukeo, for the money! I’m sitting on it for now, and going to use it for business expenses for my blogs. I really appreciate the help!

So yeah: 2013, doing it RIGHT.

Starting in December, I started a morning routine that I forced myself to stick to no matter when I got up, or how little time I could devote to it. Once I crawled out of bed (me=/=morning person) I did the following:

1. mix and drink a high-protein, low-carb shake
2. meditate for at least 10 minutes
3. work out for at least 10 minutes

Seven days a week I did this, and I feel have successfully made this all a habit now. If I skip any one element in the morning, weekdays or weekends, I miss it and feel off kilter all day. My meditation and workout times have increased, and I feel great. The shake first thing takes the edge off my hunger and I’ve noticed a marked improvement in satiety levels for the rest of the day.

Towards the end of December I also started cleaning up my diet. Over the course of my illnesses and stress in 2012 my eating habits had tanked, and while I wasn’t eating pizza every night I was eating wayyyyy too much other junk like ice cream, potato chips, and egg rolls. I gained weight, and started having gastric problems again. Predictable, if not less frustrating for it.

So what’s the point of this post? It’s to talk about change, and frustration. If there is one thing I wish I could change about myself it would be my fat deposits. I really can’t express adequately the level of hate I have for my body, how uncomfortable I am just sitting down or getting dressed. I read all the body-image positive blogs and articles and agree with them: beauty isn’t a size or a number.

Unless you’re me. Then it totally is.

The very wrong-headed diet advice of recent history — eat less! exercise more! — had me convinced that if I was not actively hungry, then I’m being unhealthy. If I’m wearing size 18 pants then that number haunts me ALL DAY. If my shirt is tight around my midriff, I obsess over it. If I eat more than 500 calories for lunch, I wallow in guilt all day. The only mirrors I own are placed so that they show me from my upper chest on up. Anything below my arm pits is literally so vile to me that it makes me upset to even see it.

“It” being my body.

But the stupid advice I always got about “dieting” actually made the problem worse. How cruel is that, to be given a rigged game and then told that it’s your own fault when you lose? It’s crazy-making, is what it is.

It’s hard for me to even write about any of this, because of shame. Shame for being fat, shame for trying not to be fat, shame for failing at diets that were never going to work, shame for trying to think it doesn’t matter.

The sad part is I want to be healthy, no matter what. That may mean being stuck at a size 18 for the rest of my life. I’ll be healthy, and that’s important. But I will always, always hate myself for it.