I had this up before, then screwed things up and now it’s back: if you’d like to register for a community blog, this link ought to set you up:
Update: Community page on this site has been removed. If you’re looking for your own blog, you’ll have to head over to community.edrecoveryblog.com to sign up. For those who answered the survey, thanks very much for your input (and support). Hope to see you over there.
There are a few things that I know with absolute certainty:
- Distraction isn’t good for me
- Not only was I feeling really off the other day but I keep finding my partner asking what’s up (and tending to ask what I had for lunch)
- My sleep habits are askew and I need to reign them in
- I’m excited about the idea of building community here with the blog - and that’s starting to take up my time (rather than my time going to things like the work that I get paid for)
- Every time I get really distracted I start to think that I should go to the gym - even when I’m so tired I can barely keep my eyes open
- I’ve made a lot of decisions that I’m just not even a little bit happy with - both over the long term and more recently
I made a comment on my Twitter account earlier that went something along the lines of “I’m starting to think that I need to take out space on the back of a milk carton in hopes of finding my missing attention span.” It’s true - I’m pretty sure that I’ve been swimming in my thoughts lately and that the undertow is stronger than I am really able to deal with.
I just feel set off at the littlest things lately. I’m tired of seeing a ton of diet ads but, tis the season I guess. After all, it’s all about making sure that everyone’s top new year priority is losing weight (though it’s really more about the fact that the businesses spending so damned much on the ads are just looking to make money). I see them and I think about an idea for a post or for something else completely unrelated. I’ve been feeling just insanely wrong since last week when I saw a high school friend and a number of acquaintances - and I know the reason too: I started to understand the fact that for every choice that I’ve made, for every time that I chose to skip a meal or to doubt myself, I got so much in my own way that I feel like I’ve fucked up in ways that I’ll never recover from I’m just not sure that I’m ready to confront it.
Tags: distraction, frustrations
I’ve had a lot of feedback about the idea of creating a blogging community here on the site and it looks like it’s going to be a go - which is exciting and terrifying all at the same time, but something that I think will be a really good thing overall.
As of now, there are two blogs up other than mine and they’re getting started, very new, but getting started:
- Gabi’s blog is the first other than mine on the site and has been getting a great reception.
- Mari Schofield’s blog was set up yesterday and will be bringing a very different perspective to things.
I’ve been fighting a little bit with Wordpress MU - the multi-user version - and have started to think that I’m going to launch the official community site using Nucleus which is pretty easy to use (though a little less familiar, even to me, than Wordpress) and easy to manage. As soon as I get the plugins and additional theme skins uploaded, there will be a formal announcement that you can sign up for your own blog in the community, and the details will all be provided. I’m optimistic about the project (and, given my own stresses lately, I haven’t been particularly optimistic about much, so I think that this is a really, really good thing and I suspect that I will be something that does a lot of good.
To make it a lot easier to keep track of everything that’s going on - both here on the blog with my own posts and with the development of the community, I’ve decided that the time is right to really put the Twitter account that I set up for this blog to work. Over in the sidebar there’s also a link to the Twitter profile, but here it is again: Twitter.com/edrecovery Following will also ensure that you’re aware of new posts as they happen, or new surveys here on the site or just random thoughts that I’m working out or looking for feedback on. I think that Twitter is a fantastic tool for letting others know about what’s going on and for further building community.
That’s about it for that; I’ll be working on the community today and keeping everyone posted and might even get around to putting in a post of what’s going beyond that since, well, I’ve been struggling a bit.
Tags: building a community, ED recovery blog, ED recovery blog community
The end of a year sometimes creeps up all of a sudden and the impulse is to look around and wonder where the hell it came from. This isn’t really all that different than the fact that on the first of the month when I head down to the office, it always surprises me that another month has gone by. More often than not, this has been a good year - stressful, yes, and often frustrating, but good.
I think that’s why yesterday caught me so off guard. The random dizziness, the sense of being overtired and the strange panic when I headed out to buy groceries: all of these things connected together brought a long ago time right into the moment and I seemed to lose track of where I was and even of how far I’d come.
Have you ever had that experience? Have you ever been so drawn into a web of physical memories that all of a sudden you are no longer sure of whether you’re coming or going or even of the time frame in which you are living?
Here’s what I do know - here’s what went on in the past week that left me feeling inside out and developing a sense that somehow I’d started living in the past all over again:
- Three days of spending time with my family. My parents have remarkably unhealthy relationships with food. So does my maternal grandmother. For that matter, even my paternal grandmother pays close attention to what she eats, but that’s more because of managing diabetes.Not only did my mother talk a lot about the fact that she’d gained weight and was going to have to work extra hard to take it back off, but I watched as my dad drank a pot of coffee as breakfast rather than eating anything and listened as my grandmother talked about all of the diets that she’d tried and why she couldn’t stick to them - and the fact that the family physician has told her that because of all of her dieting throughout the years, her metabolism died years ago (and, truth be told, my biggest fear in the world is that this is what is going to happen to me).
- I started to recognize my depression as being as out of control as it has been and started to get a sense that all of the drinking that I’ve been doing is far, far from a good thing.
- I went out for the first time ever with an old friend from high school - someone who I always respected who I’ve been talking with on Facebook. It was the first time that I bluntly came out in a long time - “before we fully add this to the schedule, you’re okay that I’m gay, right?” - and, as I explained to him while we were out, it was because I felt like I was just done with going out and feeling judged and since it had been a mighty long time since high school and I was far from out then I just needed to be clear. What I realized, however, is just how much the choices that I’ve made (and the extent to which I became ill) shifted me off of the path that I had thought that I would go down.
All of these things caught me off guard - though some more than others. I know that I’m in a spot where I can make changes and I know that if I don’t act on that opportunity there’s a good chance that I’m going to take a few giant steps backward, and I’m really not sure that I could survive that. So the plan, I guess, is to jam out some work, go to the bank and the post office and maybe try to hit the gym to get back into the habit (and, yes, I do realize that that could sound a bit contradictory but somewhere along the line I also told my godfather’s wife that I’d join her and a number of her friends on a 300+ mile bike ride for charity and I’m going to need the time for training). Then I’m going to start focusing a lot more on everything else that I know I need to be doing to bring myself back to a place where, well, where I’ll be working toward my goals rather than standing in the way of them.
Tags: family, potential relapse, recovery, slipping
It doesn’t happen quite as often as it used to for me, but there are definitely those times that leave me thinking that there is something that is desperately askew and about as far from right as humanly possible. Today I had one of those days and it’s left me pretty shaken up.
It all started with waking up later than my partner and hearing the clanging of dishes coming out of the dishwasher that was run before we headed out of town. It was a far, far less than subtle statement of “wake up, I’m hungry.” And that meant that I needed to be ready to have breakfast without my usual time to wake up and start feeling the hunger (I’ve always hated eating when I first get up - I need about an hour to adjust to being awake).
From there, it was all about finishing up with adjusting to being home, and then it was a matter of needing to run some errands and then to head to the grocery store. I used to hate grocery stores. A lot. It hadn’t really been an issue for a while - years really. But it roared up today.
It was the roughest damned day that I’ve had in a long, long time and I don’t know whether it was about the time that I spent at home with my family or the general stress that I’ve been under lately. But given that moment of chaos and the stomach ache I have now, I’m really, really, really concerned.
(or, why it’ll be a little bit quiet for a couple of days)
The holidays are stressful and angst-ridden for more or less everyone to begin with - and it’s just a few more days until the onslaught of New Years weight loss commercials take over the airways. Add in the fact that everyone’s fear of weight gain starts coming at us from every direction and those who are thinking about recovery and it’s little wonder that there’s an increase in the struggles.
Calm and peace at the holidays is supposed to be there - it’s something we deserve to let ourselves experience. And as I’m about to hit the road and travel, my holiday wish for myself and everyone else is merely this. Let yourself feel the calm. Let yourself have fun and don’t let yourself get bogged down in the emotional chaos. Let yourself experience some of the joy of the season.
I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time now. One of my initial intentions when I bought this domain was to create a pro-recovery blogging community. Now I’ve got to ask: would you want to be involved?
If you could please take a minute to fill in the survey below and include your email address at the end - I assure you, I don’t have the time to spam anyone and I wouldn’t even know where to try to sell addresses - if you’d like me to drop you a note about the possibility of setting up a blog here.
Thanks!
Alternately, if you KNOW that you would like to have a blog in the community, you can click here or on the “Community” page from the links at the top of the page.
