Then And Now

This isn’t from my yearbook, but it’s from the year I would have graduated, had I not taken my GED and gotten out of Dodge a year early because I hated high school.  (If the curiosity about whose yearbook it is is too much to bear, feel free to email me at the address on my Passwords page and I’ll tell you.)

But this post isn’t just about high school.  It covers a span from somewhere around 3rd or 4th grade onward, until high school, and with some residual effects even now, although I hadn’t realized how far-reaching it was until fairly recently.

It’s about bullying.

There were several girls who enjoyed humiliating me in different ways.  I had a good friend named Tammy as a kid, and she used to say that the “popular” girls who look down on or humiliate others usually grow up to be fat and ugly.  I always had to laugh when she would say that, and I must admit a very small part of me that never grew up finds great pleasure in imagining these girls looking exactly the way they criticized others for looking.

Fast forward to recent months, when I have been writing on the effects of bullying that still fuel my inner critic to this day, albeit not with as much power as in the not-too-distant past.  I began to wonder whatever happened to those girls.  I joined classmates.com and looked a few of them up, but only found one.  Two others, who were particularly big on the humiliation thing, weren’t there.  The other day, however, I received an email from classmates, asking if I remembered Michelle (I’m leaving last names out).  The next day, I think it was, I got one asking if I remembered Anne.  I had to laugh.  Then I got curious and looked them up on facebook, and found both.  I saw their pictures.  Neither of them is fat, but they both look . . . tired . . . unhealthy . . . and kind of unhappy.  I felt bad for them.

An ex of mine used to say that happiness is the best revenge.  I’ve been experiencing a deeper level of happiness in my life, lately, than I had in a long time, possibly ever, but I no longer feel any need for revenge.  In fact, I wish them happiness, too.

*   *   *

This is a rerun of an old entry that I wrote for my old online diary back in April of 2008.  I had run into another girl who sometimes picked on me, but didn’t leave the same lasting negative effects as some of the things Michelle or Anne or some of the other kids did.  This girl was fun to be around, and she and I were sort of part-time friends, in between our bouts of her turning on me and my disliking her for it.  I see that when I wrote the entry, I was pretty dismissive of my whole bullying experience.  That was before I was able to see so clearly the impact it had on my life all these years, and the role it played in my inner critic gaining the kind of momentum it has had all this time.  I guess I finally had to see it for what it really was before I could start to work on defusing the power of that inner critic.

I also noticed that I told a story that involved Anne and (I believe) Michelle, in that entry.  It’s the pencil-dropping incident.

Here is that entry:

34 years later
Wednesday, Apr. 16, 2008

A couple months ago, I ran into Peggy, a girl I went to school with from about the third grade or so. I think we went to junior high and high school together, too, but I’m actually not sure. I mostly remember her in fourth grade. That was when she made the biggest impact on my life. During that year, we were on-again-off-again “friends”, but she was also friends with some girls who were part of a group that didn’t like me, so I guess it’s safest to say that she was my friend occasionally, until she wasn’t again.

These other girls were catty and bitchy – you know the type. I didn’t have good skills for dealing with kids who picked on me. Mom said “Ignore them and they’ll stop because it won’t be any fun anymore.” I thought “ignore” meant “pretend you don’t hear/see/feel them doing whatever they’re doing.”  Boy, was THAT a misunderstanding of advice, and it didn’t work.

When you’re 43, looking back, it’s eye-rolling childish crap that doesn’t warrant much thought anymore, but when you’re 9, it sucks big time. They did the typical stuff (although it’s really tame compared to things I’ve read about what kids do to each other now) – whisper and laugh while looking at me, pull my hair, call me names (usually having something to do with my wiry hair, my glasses, or my weight), stuff like that. One time, I had a pair of shorts on, and I don’t remember anymore if they were more see-through than I’d realized or if they were too short or if they had a hole in them or just what the problem was, but evidently my underwear showed if I bent over.  So, one of these girls, while accompanied by a few others (I don’t remember if Peggy was one of them or not) dropped a pencil and asked me to pick it up for her. Sure, no problem. It rolled right over here by me. But when I bent over, I guess my underwear showed and they laughed and laughed. Again, when you’re 9 . . . Oh, and that was in the 1970’s, way before thong underwear, back when having your underwear show wasn’t a fashion statement.

But that isn’t the point of this entry.  It’s just backstory, to set the stage.

So, Peggy was fun and cool, and kind of quirky. She was famous in our class for holding her breath until she would pass out. That was always cool. At recess every day, one of us would usually ask her to do it. She’d ask someone to stand behind her and catch her, and someone always did. I could turn my eyelids inside-out, which brought mixed reactions (the boys liked it much better than the girls did), but Peggy could pass out!  Wow.

I went to church once or twice with her and her family.  It was my first experience at a Catholic church, and I thought it was really interesting and different from what I was used to.  I had a dress I wore to church, and once in a while to school, that was grape-bubble-gum-purple with tiny lime green polka dots. It had a belt made of the same fabric as the dress, and the buckle was a huge lime green plastic apple. The fabric the dress was made of was thick and coarse and didn’t move or bend very much.  Peggy called that my “cardboard dress”, and we would laugh about that every time I wore it.

Those are my main memories of her – the passing out, going to her church, my cardboard dress, and her peripheral connection to the girls who picked on me.

And then there is the big memory I have of her.  The one that made such an impact.  She was the first person to ever call me a lesbian.

I still remember her sitting there at her desk, turned sideways so she could look at me, her braids hanging down in front of her shirt. She kept looking at me, and finally, when I asked her, “What?”, she said, “You’re a lesbian.”  I didn’t know what the word meant, but from her tone of voice, I knew it couldn’t be good, so of course I said, “I am not.”

Then I went home and asked Sister, who was 16 and an authority on everything, I believed, “What’s a lesbian?” She said a lesbian is a girl who loves other girls.  Well, that didn’t seem so bad to me.  Not bad at all.  So what was the big deal?

I don’t recall Peggy ever bringing it up again, but a few weeks later, when I was staying over at my friend Cindy’s house, I made the mistake of telling Cindy that when I grew up, I thought I’d be a lesbian.  Cindy told her sister, who told everybody, and I spent the next seven-or-so years learning all about homophobia.  I never experienced negativity from anyone as an adult, when I actually did have relationships with women.  But I experienced a whole lot when I was too young to really even know who I was.

So, I saw Peggy once, several years ago, in a craft supply store, but she was too far away from me to say hello, and I was too nervous anyway.  Then I saw her a couple months ago, and I didn’t even know it was her until she told someone her name (she was picking something up).  I turned to her and said, “Peggy (Last Name)?”  She didn’t recognize me.  I told her we’d gone to school together and then I told her my name.  Her face lit up and she hugged me.  It seemed genuine.  Sometimes adults do the hugging thing to be nice, but it meant a lot to me anyway, since it was something that “those girls” in school would have frowned upon her doing, back then.  It was acceptance.

She quickly blurted out a short bio of her life now – where she works, how many kids she has, etc. – but I didn’t catch most of it because I was lost in my own memories of my cardboard dress and her braids and her being the first to ever call me a lesbian.  I seriously doubt she remembers any of the same stuff I do.  It would be weird if she did.  That isn’t the way it’s supposed to work, anyway.

But she will probably never know what a huge impact she had on my early life.

*   *   *

And on an unrelated note, did you notice I finally succeeded at NaBloPoMo?  Yay!!  What a beautiful thing that is!

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I Love Fall!

I used to write “I Love Fall” entries in my old online diary every year.  I wait for the first cool day, every year, the same way some people wait for big holidays.  After the long, hot, humid summers here, Fall feels to me like coming out of a cocoon and waking up.

I heard a weather report earlier that we’re getting a cold front.  Today’s high is 88 or 89, but it’s supposed to go down into the 60’s overnight and in the morning.  Tomorrow’s high is something like 85, I heard, but it should be dryer, which feels so much better.  And this means that Fall is officially here again.

I’m looking forward to weather that is good for opening windows.  I especially like open windows while I am cleaning and/or organizing and/or decluttering.  While I am continuing my decluttering of the apartment, there will be a flow of fresh air moving through, blowing out negative energy and stale fears and difficult emotions that are no longer needed.

This is good.

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Throw It Away Already

A month (or two?  three?) ago, I was web-surfing and reading about compulsive hoarding.  Somewhere (I don’t remember where), I found a web page that had a long list of comments from compulsive hoarders, discussing their situations and challenges.  Someone had posted that they were afraid to be seen taking trash out of their house.  I don’t quite remember their reason for that, but it struck a chord with me.  Every time I start to work on decluttering my apartment, I pile bags and boxes of trash by the front door as I work.  And then they stay there.  For a long, long time.

This is so extremely hard to write about in such a public way.

I always tell myself I’ll take the trash down to the dumpster later, when it’s dark, and I’m less likely to be seen.  Somehow, as illogical as it is, I have this impression in my mind that if people see me carrying all that trash out, they’ll know I was living with that much trash in my apartment.  The thing is, it isn’t smelly trash or food trash or anything; I can take the kitchen trash out, and take out the trash from cleaning out Emily’s litter box.  That doesn’t bother me because that’s “normal” trash.  The stuff I keep getting stuck on is paper trash, old clothes that are too worn or torn to donate, junk that needs to be gotten rid of.

Logically, I don’t believe that my neighbors sit by their windows and count how many bags or boxes of trash the rest of us carry out to the dumpster.  And if any of them did, it would be an indication that they had problems, just as I do.  Different problems from mine, but problems, anyway.  I shouldn’t care whether anyone spends the time and energy to care how much trash or clutter I’ve been living with.  I should only care that I’m purging my living environment of it.  No longer having to step over it.  No longer risking tripping and breaking my neck.  No longer avoiding having friends and family come over.  No longer having situations like yesterday morning, when the cop rang my doorbell to ask if I’d heard anything when my neighbor’s car was stolen during the night, and I had to squeeze outside my door and shut it behind me to keep the cop and my neighbor from seeing inside while we talked.

It should be easy.  It’s easy enough to put the stuff into the boxes and bags and set them by the door.  But then, that block is there, from whatever illogical place or abnormal brain synapse it stems, and it isn’t easy.

Beyond Words

Cathy by Cathy Guisewite - July 18, 2009

Tonight I’m at that place that is beyond words.  Did some work toward de-cluttering today, took another look at myself and my life up to this point, and loosened the manhole cover that has been holding back some feelings I’d been ignoring.  And now I’m numb and have no words.  For now, anyway.

Rambling Thoughts About Climbing Back On The IF Wagon

I’m working back toward the anti-inflammation diet again.  I’d gotten away from it, after the two or three weeks or so in June and July that I did really well (I don’t actually remember when I let it go by the wayside; I just stopped writing about it at some point, just as I did in January when I was trying to lose weight).  Money was an issue the week I gave up, and I couldn’t afford the right foods to continue properly.  By that time, though, I’d already begun the process of letting go of it gradually, first eating some of the inflammatory foods I’d been craving, justifying it to myself by thinking the anti-inflammatory foods I was still eating would make up for it.  I knew about that tendency in myself, to justify, yet the Inner Enabler (I don’t know if that’s an actual psychological term or not, but it seems to fit) can effectively wipe that knowledge from accessible memory and make it seem like it makes sense in the moment.

“I’ll just have one.”

“I’ll just have a few.”

“Well, half the package is already gone.  I’ll just finish it so I won’t have any more left to tempt me and I’ll start again tomorrow.”

“It could be worse.  I could have eaten (fill in the blank with something worse).”

My sister and I once developed an entire diet plan called the It Could Be Worse Diet.  It works like this: Whatever you want to eat, just think of something worse that you could be eating but aren’t.  (“I want a big bowl of ice cream, but I won’t eat the whole container!”, “I want a second donut, but it could be worse; I could eat the whole dozen.”  ”This burger and fries has to be better than eating an entire pizza.”)  Bingo.  Your Inner Enabler is happy, you get your comfort food, and all feels right with the world.  Granted, you won’t lose much weight,  but it kept us amused for a while.

My food addiction is making it so difficult to eat the way I know I need to.  The other day, while walking through the grocery store and picking out healthy items, I fought tears, facing that I would be giving up my comfort foods again.  It felt something like walking a tight rope without a net, a comparison I have made to the fighting of fears in a few areas of my life.

In the last month or two, I’ve been feeling the effects of the inflammation growing steadily worse again.  The knees, the hip, the back pain (especially after sleeping for any length of time over about five hours).  Then, last week, my left shoulder started to hurt again and got worse every day, and finally my jaw started hurting again by about Thursday.  I was afraid the stabbing headache pains would be next, so that was why I went to the store and bought a supply of some of the easier anti-inflammatory foods to incorporate back into my diet: tuna, sardines, sweet potatoes, cantaloupe, salad greens, avocado, V-8 juice, baby carrots.  I still had frozen strawberries, which, along with cantaloupe, I hadn’t actually stopped eating regularly since doing this in June and July.  I still have some frozen Brussels sprouts and some frozen spinach.  I’ll pick up almonds the next time I go to the store, and olive oil for cooking.  Maybe a jar of olives.  According to the book I have, one jumbo green olive is worth 8 IF (Inflammation Factor) points.  Two tablespoons of chopped raw onion is worth 52.  A quarter cup chopped red bell pepper is 45.  So, adding those things (and counting out maybe five jumbo olives) to a salad would add 137 points to a salad eaten with dinner, and will add a whole lot of flavor, as well.  If I include raw kale in the salad, that can really boost the IF ratings even more.  (A quarter cup is worth 128 points, according to nutritiondata.com [the book doesn't list raw kale, only cooked].)

I’ve been in the habit of looking up foods either on the Nutrition Data web site or in the book when certain ones are listed in one place but not the other.  Sometimes I look things up in both places, and sometimes I can’t find specific listings anywhere.  There are a few things I am finding extremely difficult and frustrating.  One is when the web site and the book contradict one another.  Another is when I can’t find something anywhere.  And yet another is not knowing how to figure out packaged foods or gluten-free foods that aren’t on either list or show the IF Rating as N/A on the web site.  So I do the best I can and hope I’m right, and that if I’m wrong, I’ve done well enough with the rest of my day to make up for it.  I’ll just continue to hope that the concept of IF Ratings catches on and becomes something that more people will want to pay attention to, and that that may mean more access to information about more foods in the future.

I think the most astounding thing I noticed last time I did this was that I was suddenly able to sleep through an entire night without waking up with back pain.  For years, I felt I had a choice: either get enough sleep to function on all cylinders or be able to stand upright and walk in the morning.  I’d had no idea that it was any longer an option, at my weight and age and without buying a new bed, to have both.  But eating anti-inflammatorily (I still like that phrase, even if I did make it up) made it possible.  And, of course, it went back to the way it was before, when I stopped.  Because a decent night’s sleep is imperative for so many things, including ADD, fibromyalgia, and depression, and because allowing those things to be any more out of control than they already are (especially the ADD) could very well cost me my job, I’ve come to the conclusion that avoiding inflammatory foods is something I’m going to have to do.  (I’ve decided to talk with my GP about trying ADD medication when I see him in October, but even if I  find a medication I like and it helps a lot, proper sleep is still vital.)

I read an article yesterday that said:

The fatty tissues of the body secrete hormones that regulate the immune system and inflammation, but in the case of an overweight individual this can become out of control. Three of the hormones that play a role in metabolism are leptin, resistin and adiponectin.

• Leptin is involved in appetite control.
• Resistin is a hormone that increases insulin resistance.
• Adiponectin lowers the blood sugar by making your body more insulin sensitive.

The fact that it is the fatty tissue that produces these hormones makes the fat self regulating, as the hormones should act to bring the increased fat under control. Bodies with more fat will produce more leptin bringing the appetite under control. However in cases where the body is inflamed there is often a problem with leptin resistance, and the self regulation of fat does not occur. Leptin resistance is where to body stops responding to the appetite controlling effects of the hormone.

In addition to these metabolism regulating hormones your fatty tissue also produces chemicals that cause inflammation and this can make the problem of leptin resistance worse. This is why obesity can cause an increase of these inflammatory chemicals which in turn inhibit the correct balancing function of the weight controlling hormones. This results in a vicious circle of weight gain causing inflammation which inhibits hormone function thereby causing further weight gain.

And this drives home the point that I not only need to avoid inflammatory foods; I need to lose weight as well.  I suppose that saying “I’m not doing this to lose weight, but to feel better, and the fact that I’ll end up losing weight anyway is just a bonus” is becoming less effective at distracting my fears.  Fooling myself into thinking I can skirt around the Inner Enabler unnoticed isn’t going to work anymore, either.

I suppose it’s wake-up time.

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A Therapy Related lolcat Pic

The UPS Guy and Dick Clark

There are a few different regular UPS drivers who deliver to the office where I work.  One of them is a guy who used to be the regular UPS guy for the place I worked back in the mid-to-late-80’s.  I don’t think he remembers me from back then because I’m quite a bit older now, but I remember him because he hasn’t changed a bit.  Seriously.  Like the way Dick Clark didn’t change for so many years.  It’s almost creepy.

When he delivered a package yesterday, I got to thinking about just how many years ago it was that he used to deliver to the other office, and how much has changed.  Twenty years ago, in 1989, I was 25.

In 1989:

• My hair was still dark even without my dying it.
• I weighed (muffled, unintelligible word) pounds less than I do now.  I wasn’t “thin”, but I weighed a whole lot less.
• I had no arthritis and no symptoms of fibromyalgia (other than depression, which is related, but then again, is related to everything I deal with).
• I was able to sit with my foot under me in my chair at work.
• I still smoked.
• My migraines hadn’t started yet.
• I had a lot of sinus trouble.
• I wore aqua-colored contact lenses, which prompted a lot of compliments, but I always felt I was cheating, since the compliments weren’t for my real eye color, and I went back to clear lenses.
• I used to occasionally wear heels to work, but I never got the hang of walking in them, so I eventually blamed my height (I was about 5′11″ at the time) and quit trying to wear them.
• I wore makeup at least a few times a week then.
• I smoked pot.  A lot.
• I had been in love with my best friend for five years and finally admitted it.
• I came out.
• I still had my small, old, black and white TV from when I was a teenager, but it never bothered me that I couldn’t watch TV in color.  Even though it seemed to bother my friends.
• I was still years away from knowing what gluten was, let alone that I shouldn’t eat it.
• I ate a lot of Whoppers back then.
• Burger King Whoppers, not the malted milk balls, although those are also a no-no on a gluten free diet.
• I’d felt the loss of a pet, a year or so before that, when I had to have my beloved cat, Indigo, put to sleep.
• I didn’t know, yet, what it felt like to have a relationship, or a breakup.
• My parents were still young and the looming reality that I will have to say goodbye to them one day was not part of my daily ruminations yet.
• I had no idea that within a year, I would begin a relationship that would change the lives of everyone in my immediate family, in ways I would not have believed, had I been given a glimpse into the future.
• I’d been in counseling before (may have even been in counseling that year) but I’d never stuck around long enough to call it therapy, or to make the kind of progress I’ve made this last year.
• I did not know that I had Adult ADD.
• I thought I knew what fatigue was then.  I had no idea it could get so much worse.
• I thought I had a clutter problem then.  See second sentence of the point above.
• I’d heard of Microsoft Windows but had never seen a computer with it installed.
• My niece and nephews were all under seven.  They’re all grown up now, and have spouses or fiances; the boys both have either children or a child on the way.
• I didn’t know any of my three closest local friends yet.  I have been getting back in touch with some of my older friends on facebook lately, though, which is nice, but I’m not in touch with the two friends I was the closest with, back then.
• I thought I would never lose touch with many of the people who were in my life at the time.
• I had no idea that SS existed, or that my life wouldn’t begin to be lived with the depth of feeling that I’m seeing is possible until my hair turned silver.

Yes.  A lot has changed.

I should ask the UPS Guy how many things have changed in his life.

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“I Want” Wednesday . . . I Want To Know

Today’s question for “I Want” Wednesday is “What Do You Want To Know?”

Oh boy.  I want to know so many things.  There are so many things I wonder about on a regular basis, but I’m not sure whether they fit into the “want to know” category or if they are more of the “sure would like to know” variety, such as why cats purr and dogs don’t, or why some people don’t wonder about things the way I do, or what is going through my cat’s mind when she bites me (only occasionally, thank goodness).  But there are also those burning questions or problems, things I really, really, want to know, among them:

I want to know . . .

1 . . . a foolproof way to pick winning lotto numbers.  Even if it only worked once.  Yeah, I know; lots of people want to know that.

2 . . . how to build a database driven web site.  I’ve bought so many books over the years, and tried online courses, trying to learn PHP and MySQL and various other languages, tried database software, tried building a FrontPage (I know; I’m still in the dark ages) web site with an Access database, and I keep running into brick walls and caving under the massive overwhelm that falls over me.  I have never been so intimidated by a learning project before in my life.

3 . . . just how many hours of sleep I require.  No matter how long I sleep, it never seems like enough.  I’m just saying.

4 . . . quantum physics type stuff.  I wish I knew somebody who could explain those concepts and theories to me in language I could really wrap my head around.

5 . . . what kind of shoes my therapist wears.  She only wears socks in her office.  I have asked her if I can see her shoes at my last session, whenever that will be.  She didn’t really answer.  She said, “Shoes?  What are shoes?”

6 . . . where all those rolls of electrical tape are that I remember buying over the last few years.

I also have several religious questions and questions about societal issues and such, but I don’t want to make this entry a very deep and heavy one.  I’m in a “keep it light” frame of mind right now, but that might be a great topic for a future post.

So that, I s’pose, is it, for now.

Anyone else want to know anything?

Maybe I’ll add more items in the comments if I think of them.

Ten on Tuesday – Favorite TV Characters

I’m participating in “Ten on Tuesday” today.  Since the most recent entry is Ten Things You Think Are Cool, and I recently started a Bliss List that I would just end up repeating if I did that one, I decided to look for a topic that would be different.  I found the August 4th entry, 10 Favorite Characters From Television.  I started the list a little slowly, until it dawned on me that the characters probably don’t have to be from current shows that are still running.

So, here is my list (not in order of preference):

1.  Bianca Montgomery, All My Children

2.  Tad Martin, All My Children

3.  Melinda Gordon, Ghost Whisperer

4.  Sheldon Cooper, The Big Bang Theory

5.  Allison Dubois, Medium

7.  Audrey Penney, Ellen

8.  Regina Newly, Samantha Who?

9.  Samantha Stephens, Bewitched

10. Dharma Finklestein Montgomery, Dharma & Greg

Worried

Mom called earlier to say that Dad had chest pain and they went to the Emergency Room.  The pain disappeared once they got there, and the tests have been showing nothing wrong, but they admitted him and are keeping him overnight due to his age.  He’s 79.

Of course, I know that if the tests are coming back good and the pain is gone, things are really likely to turn out fine, but of course, I still worry.

I’ll be going to see him after work and I’ll drive Mom home.  Then I imagine I’ll take her back in the morning before I come back to work.  We should know more by then.