Scared Out of My Mind

“The most important things are the hardest to say.  They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless.”  ~Stephen King

This week I had written a different post that detailed the beginnings of my addiction.  I thought starting at the beginning and working up to the present would be a beneficial story, but today I just wasn't feeling it.  For me, my food addiction has represented a large wall, a buffer between how you feel and what you feel.  When your senses are dulled it's easy to overcome a sad feeling (for me at least) because you don’t have to deal with it in the same way as a healthy person.  Once that buffer comes down, those emotions, those things you thought you had fixed come rushing back like a dam bursting open.  Perhaps this is why I've been so emotional in the past few weeks.  It’s a new feeling for me and I really don’t like it.  I’m scared out of my mind.  

As the Stephen King quote reminds us, some things are diminished when they are said aloud or written on paper.  The emotional state that represents shock, for instance, must be felt to be understood and when describing that feeling all words pale in comparison to how you felt.  The same can be said for how I feel today.  The common colloquial “scared out of my mind,” is used in many ways today that don’t represent what it actually means.  So I can only ask you to trust me and believe me when I say that I am truly scared out of my mind.  This is by far the scariest thing I have ever done.  

Today my trainer told me half the things I’ve been eating are going away and that she wants to know via text/call how I feel and what I’m eating.  She’s a great trainer, but right now I’m super pissed off.  However, I’ve known myself long enough to acknowledge that if I’m pissed it usually means I’m just terrified and I’m masking it with anger.  There’s a reason why these two specific things are so terrifying and I will attempt to describe them to you.  Some of my thoughts may sound confusing, but that’s just because you will read them using logic.  You can’t use logic when you’re an addict.  

Step One:  We admitted we were powerless over compulsive eating — that our lives had become unmanageable.

Step Two:  Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

Step Three:  Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.  

No matter what other people will say, for me, the hardest part of OA/AA/NA are the first three steps.  For starters, I am as far from religious without being atheist that a person can be, therefore how can I give my life over to something I don’t even believe in?  (In a later post I will talk about how I’m overcoming the whole “God” part of this, which ironically, in finding a substitute, I accidentally found faith).  Secondly, words like “powerless” and “sanity” and “turn our will and our lives over” are absolutely terrifying.  How in the world can I fix my disease by admitting defeat?  

I won’t ever fix my disease.  Accepting and fighting an addiction is like trying to get over losing a loved one; the pain will get better but it will never actually go away.  For every minute of every day for the rest of my life I will be an addict.  I can only hope that by working my program and staying true to my new self that every minute will be as a recovering addict.  That predicament alone is scary.  To think that as an addict the only true cure to my disease is death.  Really scary stuff.    

Logically I can sit alone in a room and know that I am strong enough to overcome sugar.  Hell, it’s just sugar.  It’s not like I’m fighting some rogue nation with a pair of pliers and a stick of juicy fruit.  However, the same logic that tells me I am strong enough to overcome this illness was also the same logic that I used when I ate entire pizzas and had no idea I had even ordered them.  It was the same logic that said if I eat eight Krispy Kremes tonight and save the other four until tomorrow it’s actually healthy.  And then the same logic that when I ate ten said it seems wasteful to just leave the last two all alone.  I need to recycle the box.  

My trainer wants me to cut out half the food I’m eating and text/call her about everything I’m eating.

 Here is what my logical brain hears:  This is too much and I can’t do this.  You’re telling me that I’ve already cut out everything I love eating, now I can’t even eat what I like.  I’m a failure and I can’t do this.  It’s like I’m a runner and you’re cutting off my legs and then telling me to run.  Fuck, now I have to call her about my food.  This sounds like a sponsor.  It’s getting all too real.  There’s no way I can fix my life in six months.  Now I can’t get my PhD.  I’m stuck in Iowa, I miss my friends, and my job, and my life.  I now have to fix every facet of my life…this very minute.  My future is knocking at the door telling me it’s over.  Why do I keep going?

That’s how I feel.  It’s how I have felt for the past two weeks (I’m two weeks clean today).  Some of you would read this and say he’s spiraling (true) and he’s not thinking logically, but the problem is that I am thinking logically.  I am thinking the way my brain has always worked.  For me, this is logic.  I build one conclusion on top of another conclusion.  My brain is diseased and is far from being sexy.  

This is the true nature of what I’m dealing with.  It’s not that I have to overcome an addiction to sugar or to certain foods or to food in general.  That is only one small facet of what I’m going through.  I have to change the way I eat, sleep, drink, read, go about doing work, go about teaching.  I have to change my entire thought process and my entire world that I’ve lived in for twenty-seven years.  If I am successful, the next time many of you see me, I won’t have just lost weight, but I will be a completely new person.  It is such an immense task and I am scared out of my mind.  

There is hope and I will end on this.  Since starting back up in recovery, I have been diligently doing my program but as they say in OA, I haven’t been working it.  One of the mottos of OA/AA/NA is “one day at a time.”  So I will try that.  I will work my steps, my program, and continue one step and one day at a time.  The future holds much to be scared of, but I don’t live in the future.  I live today.  Today, I am abstinent.  Breathe.