X-Amount of Time

I couldn’t follow the dharma teacher’s guided meditation this morning to save my life. My monkey mind swung from thought to thought, and my body busted loose from every position I put it in, even though I was in the comfiest place in the world: my bed.

I sat up and took out my iPod ear plugs and said, “What? What the hell do you want?”

The answer I got was, “Live now, not later.”

Don’t ask me where that came from because I don’t have a clue. I often wonder if it’s not my past lives coming through (all of whom had obvious issues with patience) saying, “Come on already! Figure it out and let’s move on! Chop chop!” But I guess that wouldn’t really be embracing patience now, would it?

Anyway, I sat with that question and answer for a moment. Then I reached in the nightstand for a pad of paper and wrote this: “When my knee is fixed, when I lose 10 pounds, when this depression leaves me, when I’m done with school…THEN life will be the way I want it.”

Ha! Like some magic fairy is going to come along and make my life great – without any  exertion on my part – once x-amount of time has passed?! Fat. Chance.

X-amount of time will pass: One. Second. At. A. Time. And in those seconds, I am.

I. Am.

So instead of a formal guided meditation this morning, which clearly wasn't happening, I broke it down into my own meditation. 

I am:

1. A person who needs a knee replacement.

Sooooo….What can I do in the x-amount of time between now and surgery? “Duh…” say my impatient past lives. “You can still have goals!”

I can’t ride my bike and I can’t work out on the elliptical – two things I love to do – but that boo-hooing has put at least two pounds on each of my thighs, I swear. I CAN walk, for cryin’ out loud. Pretty well most of the time, despite the limp. And I can lift weights. And I can strengthen my core. So I set goals: To walk the entire length of my beloved 20-mile bike path twice before replacement, a few miles at a time. And every other week, my BFF Shari will join me, like she did today. So will Al. 

Today, Shari, Al and I walked my favorite part of the bike path and I saw some old friends and their babies: 

I’ll also pick up the weights again at home, and I’ll hit the gym and talk to a personal trainer. I might even join a yoga class, like I’ve said I’d do for how long now?

2. A person who wants to lose 10 pounds.

Sooooo….What can I do in the x-amount of time between now and when my shorts feel a little loose? PAY ATTENTION to everything I put in my mouth. It worked before, it will work again.

3. A person who is clinically depressed.

Sooooo….What can I do in the x-amount of time between now and the time I’m feeling less depressed? I’ve already started doing something about that (pat on my back).

“I met her in a Kuhn’s grocery store parking lot…” Sounds like a great beginning to a cheesy romance novel, but that would be how I met my AIM blogging friend, Debby. Google maps sent her 20 miles away from where we were supposed to meet, and when she called and said she had no idea where she was (which is totally understandable since Debby lives in California and has never been to Pittsburgh, and Pittsburgh motto is, “If yinz don’t know where you are, go home.”), I went in search of her.

“Stay put, I’ll find you,” I said, and typed in her coordinates into my Garmin. (When I was a kid, I wanted to be Uhura).

We were supposed to meet – of course – at a groovy healthy breakfast place, but that was light years away from the grocery store, so we went to my favorite Mexican place, Mad Mex, where we ate pepita hummus, chips and salsa, and chopped salads. 

 

Often, the Internet feels ethereal, so meeting Debby grounded me. I needed to be reminded that real people read my blog, real people write blogs, and real people interact with real people, just not always in person. Having said that, the Internet has a silent surrealness about it, at least it does for me, and I’ve been needing some real-life connectedness.

Last week, I met another online friend, who works at Clarion University, just a few blocks from where I used to live, and yet, we never got our s*it together to meet when I lived there. Melissa has lost over 100 pounds and, like so many of us, struggles with the “Can I/How do I/Do I want to lose more?” question, along with “Who am I now?” 

We got along juuuuust fine *grin*

I also went to a Pirates game with my friend Rachelle.

The Bucs are doing great right now, but even when they’re bad, I can’t be sad at a Pirates game, thanks to Michael McHenry and Andrew McCutchen. …sigh… 

 

4. A person who is still in school. 

Sooooo….What can I do in the x-amount of time between now and certification?

Study. Finish my final projects. Pass my exam. There’s no room for wishy-washy, feel-good sentiment here. I need to kick myself in the ass and do it.

I. Am.

You. Are.

We all have x-amount of time between now and….when? I will do my best to fill that space with compassion. Fill that space with love. Fill that space with curiosity and questions. I just know I can’t fill that space with the future. It doesn’t exist.

“Live now, not later.” Life is the way I make it. Now.

A Little Story About Mental Illness

It was 3 a.m. and my sister, mother and I were watching cartoons in a hospital waiting room, anxious for news about Dad, who’d had a heart attack. What began in my stomach as a churning crept upward to my heart, which began beating wildly. The feeling crept to my lungs, which couldn’t complete a full breath. It then crept into my mind, which began thinking, I’m dying, too. Within a few minutes I was on my own gurney and a doctor was handing me a pill.

“You had a panic attack,” he said. “Here, put this under your tongue.”

It was Halcion. Valium with a kick. Within seconds, I was calm. So calm I forgot why I was at the hospital. My sister reminded me and I remember saying, ‘Oh, that’s right,’ and I drifted off to sleep as my sister poured me into the front seat of my car and took me home.

I slept the rest of the morning. When I woke up, I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. I was groggy and deeply frightened. Did my heart just skip? What did that sigh mean? That I can’t breathe? But no fortress could stop it. Panic returned and my only defense was to slip a Halcion under my tongue. It came back the next day and the next. By the end of the week my defenses were spent and the pill bottle was empty.

For two weeks, panic poured over me like tsunami. I went to every emergency room in the Minneapolis area begging for Halcion, usually in the middle of the night, waking my then-husband, Jason, and dragging the kids out from their beds because I couldn’t drive myself. The last ER physician I saw said I needed to see a psychiatrist and refused to write a script. He sent me home shaking and throwing up.

So I called a psychiatrist. He wanted to explore my past. I just wanted drugs. He assured me I could control my panic through deep breathing. I told him I hadn’t caught my breath in weeks. We were in a shoot-off and I was running out of bullets. 

Then came the day at work when my Selectric II typewriter ribbon broke and I began to cry. I cried while I changed it, cried as I typed a memo, and cried when my boss sent me home because I couldn’t stop crying. I cried driving home, cried while eating a grilled cheese and Old Dutch potato chips dipped in cottage cheese (best comfort food ever). I cried when I dialed the phone to tell my psychiatrist I was crying, and cried even harder when he told me he was checking me in to the hospital. A special hospital.

A few hours later, Jason dropped me off at Golden Valley Health Center and I checked in to the psychiatric ward. I’d stopped crying, but I was exhausted. My head felt like a bowling ball and I answered questions with monosyllabic words.

After filling out insurance forms, a nurse led me to a scale in the hallway across from the nurses’ station. I was wearing knee-length knit shorts and a size XXL t-shirt stained at the hem. Tears had washed away my makeup, and my hair was matted to my head. I took off my slip-on canvas shoes with the hole in the toe and laid them beside the scale, like their half-pound weight would make a difference.

The nurse optimistically started the large metal weight at the 150-pound position and nudged the smaller weight higher and higher. The balance arrow didn’t budge. She moved the large weight to 200 and again moved the small weight higher. The arrow bounced a little around 240. For accuracy, she should have moved the large weight to 250, but she said cheerfully, “We’ll call you 249.”

The next day, I spent two hours in group therapy drawing pictures and writing in a journal and feeling completely out of place and ridiculously selfish among people facing electric shock therapy. One woman was the only survivor of a car crash that killed her niece and sister. She’d been the driver. A chain-smoking young man had locked himself in a closed garage and started his car’s engine a few weeks before. He’d been repeatedly molested as a child.

Could I be a bigger baby? I thought as I wrote my name with a blue crayon on a piece of yellow construction paper. We were to draw a “family tree of feelings.” The only thing I felt was guilty for taking up space in a facility meant for people with real problems, and stupid for having called my doctor in the first place. So I’d cried for a few hours? Big deal. People cry.

I took a two-hour, fill-in-the-hole-with-a-#2-pencil psychological test that asked me to answer yes or no to statements such as, “I would like to do the work of a choir director” and “If I could sneak into the county fair or an amusement park without paying, I would.” Were they kidding me?

The next day, a psychiatrist went over my results. She showed me a line chart indicating how I “scored” in regard to various emotions and behaviors. The line was flowing along nicely, indicating I was “normal” here and “normal” there, just as I expected. Then a steep, jagged line rose across the paper like a fjord on the Norwegian coastline. It went all the way to the top of the chart before plummeting back to the middle.

“That’s your anger line,” the doctor said. 

“What?” I laughed. “Just because I don’t want to be a choir director, I’m angry? I have nothing to be angry about!”  

I explained that my psychiatrist said I had a panic disorder and that a few days ago I couldn’t stop crying and that was why I was there. I just need to calm down, maybe lose some weight, and I’d be fine.

She nodded, wrote a few notes, and gave me Xanax. I promised to visit my psychiatrist weekly for a month and was released from the facility at the end of the week.

The Xanax worked almost instantly and it kept the physical symptoms of anxiety at bay. But the relentless weeks-long waves of panic prior to the Xanax made me afraid of fear and I was scared I’d have another attack at any moment. I needed something to change, something to help me feel normal again. God knows my psychiatrist was no help. He read the hospital psychiatrist’s report and ran with her whole “anger” diagnosis. He wanted me to journal about my anger, even though I insisted I wasn’t angry. But in order to get the Xanax, I wrote in the journal.

He also brought up Bruce’s death and asked me about Jason (domestic violence issues….another blog for another day), but I wouldn’t go there with him. I said there was nothing I could do to change the past, so why dwell on it? He said something about unresolved grief and lack of self-esteem and blah blah blah. Buddy, I thought, all I want is some control of my life.

I discovered the golden loophole a few weeks later when I went to my gynecologist for a routine exam. I told her how anxious I’d been feeling, leaving out the part about the hospital and the psychiatrist, and she diagnosed me with severe PMS. She wrote me a script for Xanax and that was the end of journaling about non-existent anger. I focused my energy on the one thing I knew I could control: my weight.

I joined Weight Watchers, but not before saying goodbye to a few of my “friends” – the ones I knew I wouldn’t be able to “contact” once I was on a diet.

The week before the first meeting, I made Kraft macaroni and cheese with real butter, and I grilled a T-bone steak. I ate garlic mashed potatoes and cheesy hash browns, baked a chocolate cake, and went twice to Dairy Queen for a Hot Fudge Brownie Delight. I poured 2-percent milk over Captain Crunch for breakfast, and made a parade of pasta dishes for dinner. Then on Saturday morning, after throwing out the leftover brie and French baguette, deviled eggs and Hershey Kisses, I walked into a Weight Watchers facility, paid the $8 fee, weighed in and left without attending the meeting. After four weeks, I’d acquired all the basic program materials and stopped going.

“You’ll leave me once you’ve lost weight,” Jason said.

“No, I won’t!” I insisted.

I subsisted on raw and boiled vegetables, fruit, skim milk and plain baked white fish. In my food journal, I checked off every allotted carb, protein and dairy allowed. I ate nothing more. I quit drinking and started riding a stationary bike I bought at a garage sale for $10. In return, I averaged a 3.5-pound loss every week.

I wasn’t angry. Heck no. Just highly motivated.

------------------------------------------------------

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. NAMI is my go-to place for info and support. Mental illness is often a family thing and should not be an embarrassment. Ask for help, whether it’s for you or someone you love.

AIM: Through Thick and Thin

Writer Rex Harris describes yin-yang as “…a synthesis of mutually dependent polar forces. Each force exists only in relationship to its opposite, each is ‘completed’ by its opposite...”

Take, for instance, a monarch caterpillar. It weighs 8 grams by the time it spins its cocoon. When it emerges as a butterfly, it weighs a mere half-gram. The caterpillar and the butterfly are opposite in composition and yet the same being, existing only because of its opposite.

Caterpillars and butterflies have no understanding of their changing

body structure. They just do what nature intends. We, on the other hand, consciously witness our changing bodies, and not without a great deal of angst and critique. It’s not easy seeing the butterfly for the caterpillar.

I struggle these days with my thick and thin, my yin and yang, my body as one being, yet of differing compositions. There was a point, however, at which I felt balance.

At 300 pounds, I was a size 32 and never dreamed, as I watched my 17-year-old daughter graduate from Army basic training in 2002, that I would fit into her size 7 class As. At 138, I did. 

At 300, I refused to get in an aluminum boat and join my husband fishing. At 135, he took me canoeing for the first time.

At 300, a man leered at me and said he “…liked my women big” like me. At 130, Today’s Natalie Morales told me, “Your legs are like toothpicks!”

At 300, I began my journey and read Bob Greene’s book Get With The Program. At 132, I met him in person.

Then, during my first year of maintenance, my body morphed to 125 pounds, a weight at which I was cold all the time and my joints ached. I won’t deny that I liked the litheness of 125 pounds, feeling like a feather and knowing there was nothing to “suck in” in my middle. But I shivered when it was 80 degrees, and reaching for a bowl in a cupboard high up was painful. I also missed my B cups.

When we were discussing our next topic, Lori asked if we had a “settling weight,” a weight at which we are not striving so desperately to maintain. A weight at which our minds were more at ease. I’ve thought a lot about that, and have wondered if I’m at my settling weight – 155 pounds and filling a C cup – or if I’m merely settling for this weight. The truth is that right now, I feel thick, not thin. I was physically more comfortable in the 130s.

So does that mean that the space within 5 pounds of 135 is my yin weight? Is that the weight at which I exist in relation to my opposite and am completed by my 300-pound yang weight? And if that is true, what do I do with these 15-20 extra pounds? How do I think about them?

While I believe I have the power to find and stay at any weight, despite the physical forces of menopause and arthritis, I’m not sure how badly I want to use that power. I feel thick, yes, but I also feel free from uber preoccupation with my weight for the first time in more than seven years. Maybe there is balance within the thickness, just as there is in the thinness of 130-140.

Maybe. But I know me, and I know I need to be mindful of what constitutes balance and what are outright excuses because I’m the queen of excuses. And excuses won’t help me find what is real and true; where I am complete and the butterfly emerges.

Do you have a settling weight or are you just settling? Where do you find balance?

Read what the other AIM members are writing about this topic through the links below.

----------------------------------

AIM: Adventures in Maintenance is Lynn, Lori, Debby, Shelley, and Cammy, former weight-loss bloggers who now write about life in maintenance. We formed AIM to work together to turn up the volume on the issues facing people in weight maintenance. We publish a post on the same topic on the first Monday of each month. Let us know if there is a topic you'd like us to address!

Lori @ Finding Radiance

Debbie @ debby weighs in

Shelley @ My Journey to Fit

Cammy @ The Tippy Toe Diet

A 5-Year-Old’s Marathon…In Pictures

I was one proud Grammy this morning as I watched my granddaughter, Claire, complete the Pittsburgh Marathon’s Kids Of Steel program, in which she not only ran 26.2 miles over the course of the last two months, but she raised $2,505 for the Animal Rescue League of Pittsburgh.

Claire ran 1 mile on 25 days and ran the final 1.2 miles with her dad, the day before the Pittsburgh Marathon, in which he and my daughter are going to run the half. (Daughter as in the one who had her fourth baby just two months ago. She rocks really hard!)

Here’s what the morning looked like:

We arrived downtown and put Luca and Mae in one stroller, while baby Audrey slept in another stroller (they're saying, "Cheese!"):

The finish line:

The medals:

The bananas:

Auntie Carly and Papa Larry making signs:

Audrey with her sign:

Luca on Uncle Ben’s shoulders with his sign:

Mae on my shoulders with her sign:

Claire running for the finish line. She ran in the tutu my awesome running Diva friend, Sondra, made for her. Claire’s all about the high fives:

Claire with her medal:

More of the tutu:

Claire with her mom:

Claire with her certificate and her dad:

It was so encouraging to see so many kids and their parents participating in the Kids of Steel program. Kids of all sizes and economic backgrounds ran their hearts out today, and the crowd didn’t let them down. They were cheered on by thousands of people, and the looks on the kids’ faces as they crossed the finish line was of pure joy. I have no doubt this experience will encourage them to continue running, or at the very least, stay active. They may not understand the physical benefits of exercise, but they certainly got a huge dose of the emotional aspect.