July 7th - blog 1 - many, many insights into my own approaches

I spent a long time writing to Mum yesterday evening, and think that some snippets of information would be relevant here. Although it’s tempting to just copy and past I don’t think that would feel a relevant way to approach detailing this morning’s take on what I was writing last night.

So much of my blogging so far has revolved around food. For this I usually would feel it necessary to make an apology however felt last night the realisation dawn that this is entirely a positive reflection of where my physical, mental and emotional focus has been for the last few months. How to start eating, how to keep eating and how to eat enough. There is so much about the constant evaluation by others in here which entirely demands that the nutritional intake is where everyone’s energy is flowing towards, including mine. And so preoccupation mentally may seem unnecessary but I identified last night has a very powerful implication that I am intellectually engaged in the identical process to that in which my body is embroiled and that feels really rather united and positive.

I also wrote in great detail about the pressure I have felt under. I don’t know that I could admit until last night that on Friday I was ecstatic at the weight gain, but a little confused. In my mind it has always been a potential fluke, just a happened-upon weight increase as opposed to a ‘goal’ I’d ‘achieved’. As such the ease of replication (where all the pressure felt heaped upon me) has escaped me. I could not identify what I’d done initially sufficiently enough to ensure it’s repeat…and became incredibly paranoid about every meal again: it’s content, quantity and type.

Such paranoia has been akin to every other foodie paranoia about my consumption. The approach to a meal when I’m petrified that it is going to come up to the measure feels bizarrely similar to the paranoia over a meal when I feel physically incapable of dealing with it. Though the latter is no longer a valid space to enter into, the first one has been so overwhelming: even more so since I gained weight and especially given that I did not think I was doing it in the first place so to be told I’d gained weight and not know what I had done made for such a disconcerted ‘fluked’ vibe around the success that all congratulations has not felt real. More overbearing has been the pressurised feeling of being observed in the progression and the utmost pressure to maintain what I have begun. It is the consistency of gain that will demonstrate the truth of the way I feel and approach food. If I don’t have similar success this time there are all sorts of implications: not least the potential interpretation that I panicked at last week’s weight gain and so ‘regressed’.

But the last paragraph that has detailed my paranoia to you all only comes out after witnessing the folly of that mindset and the behaviour it elicits. Operating under the illusion that I had not really done it and had just happened upon weight gain has made for an incredibly tense weekend anxious over the ‘watchers’ (not 24/7 but the assumptions garnered by those who investigate my weight every Tuesday and Friday about the intake and exertion of the few preceding days given the figure that they review). I can only see this because somewhere I have emerged out of it (and this is an important informative description of the way in which I work as a human being – witnessing the fallacy of a behaviour as I am emerging out of it, and then it instantly disappears).

So seeing the paranoia enabled it, over the next few hours, to dissipate. Not instantaneously, but as I grounded myself by writing down what I’d eaten for lunch, mid-afternoon and dinner I’d realised I’d been acing it on a day I’d felt I was “failing”. And because I’d had no concept of what I’d done for “success” it has been all too easy to feel I have not been replicating it. And yet last night I looked through my diary and witnessed what I’d done – stupidly it’s all written down and added up. Perhaps all the calories are complete guesses, but they’re consistently my guesses which will make them accurate/inaccurate to equal degrees. And so analysing the few days between weights when I gained 400 grams I recognised I am replicating if not exceeding those days with delight – and I saw for the first time that communal involvement I expressed in the beginning paragraph.
Though you all congratulated me on Friday I didn’t feel worthy of congratulations. I had been so anxious in the run-up to the weighing that I was not sure whether I had done anything near enough or not – and so to find out that I had did nothing but encourage and confuse me in equal measure. It must have been a ‘fluke’ because I didn’t relate to my own active involvement in the outcome. So replication of ‘flukes’ becomes impossible: this weekend has been anxiety filled at the replication required.

Isolating and calmly assessing my behaviours last night I suddenly – not through belief/trust/faith/spiritualised feeling but through cold-hearted, hard-headed, equation filled counting and adding up I practically assessed and evaluated my two periods of behaviour: pre-Friday and post-Friday.

And I’m bloody intensively and actively ‘doing it’. It doesn’t feel like ‘effort’ as such but simply an engagement in working towards a goal that I am actually achieving. In not feeling like ‘work’ much it can seem that I’m not trying. I’m so used to struggling and meeting no success that to find it easy and succeed seems not only alien but difficult to isolate and identify. Yet in calculation last night I ‘proved’ to myself that I’m actually putting ‘effort’ in from somewhere beneath my conscious mind. My body is trying and making effort-filled moves to obtain its calories. Hungry in all the right places, for the right things at the right times my life is demonstrating the intake I have always needed. Far from needing to be paranoid each time I sit down to a meal in the anxiety of the potential that I will not achieve anything with it, I could actually sit down relaxed and appreciate that I am responding from deep within to consuming somehow near enough every day to gain weight and succeed in my current ambitions – of both becoming healthier and leaving hospital.

Yet I know I won’t ever truly relax around food until what I eat doesn’t have to meet a calorie count – which won’t be for months and months yet. The relaxation I perceive possible around dietary intake (and have always criticised myself for not being here now) I can see will not emerge until the time is such that it doesn’t have to perform a function but can simply be for survival. That is not the case now, nor will it be for some time to come and as such there is a pressure on what and how much I eat to perform the role of weight gain in my life. Therefore it would be naïve to hope or imagine that I would ever truly chill out and enjoy without additional factors being present in the background (and intensely present currently). The fallacy of my adamant insistence on constantly striving for this neutrality of enjoyment has only just become apparent. I accept, for the first time in my life, that there will always be a frisson of something hovering around food for the duration it is required to assist me get to a healthy weight which can then pursue the rest of its life. There is no 'nothing there' possible until I am sufficiently well enough for there to be no need to use food to get me somewhere.

And yet paranoia over intake is completely uncalled for. A constancy of clarity that I am consuming enough, a constant self-monitoring to guarantee the continued consumption until enough has been eaten is required and desired. But paranoia and stress that it might not be enough is not necessary.

And this brings me to another observation of last night where I saw the benefits of what I could potentially be criticised for in here. My perpetual ‘on-ness’ and inability to chill/switch off/relax actually just demonstrates the constancy of my involvement and intent towards my goals and aspirations physically. The continual half-ear/eye open displays the total approach I have to life at the moment: there is a wariness around letting go completely by my mind. It still feels a need to keep checking up on my body and assess whether its doing enough – hence the diaries, the calorie counts, the equating etc. My mind is so used to not meeting the marks that it still desires the checking of the process and the examination of whether it is or not. Last night I really got that I was…what that changes in terms of behaviour and/or mental involvement I know not as yet. But it can only be good to see these things for what they are within my life – and in so doing evaluate them and identify when there they are necessary to retain and/or not. Paranoia – not necessary. Monitoring – perhaps temporarily necessary just so my mind feels a little safer and allows my body to feel a little more comfortable.

Beyond that – I’ll stop the waffle. There is so much involved in this journey that I cannot begin to explain and perhaps would not want to. There are so many odd pains and dilemmas which I do not describe and so much of this whole life is about the way people perceive me – because it has the power to change my trajectory and my life through the decisions they make based on the opinions they form from their perceptions. In honesty I cannot weight to feel inconspicuous. And that was a Freudian slip, obviously I meant ‘wait’ to feel inconspicuous. I almost pray for the time when people no longer ‘care’ enough to want to monitor me and no longer have the power to rule my placement with their judgement of what they see. And this informs, once again, what is important to me and what I perceive as important in life: not the events that occur but the way they are received and perceived by individuals concerned. Then, more fascinating, is how the way one event is experienced filters into behaviour and informs the way they conduct themselves in the next events. And all of this I’m learning will emerge somewhere down the line…notelets from a pavement café.