Tuesday, May 9, 2017

How it took being happy to realize how miserable I was

There is no perfect metaphor for how I feel on the days when anxiety has a vicious hold on me. I've searched for it. I've used all manner of natural disaster metaphors, none of which truly fit for me. Last night I tried to explain how it felt by writing how my body felt like it was being stretched out and folded over again and again. In my mind, I wanted to express how it felt like I was being packed tightly into some confined space. That isn't exactly correct either. To be fair to my metaphor creating abilities, anxiety is kind of new for me. Okay, that's a straight up lie. Allowing myself to express feelings of anxiety is new to me. I have always dealt with anxiety by drizzling it in chocolate sauce and shoving it down my throat. I tried to suffocate my anxiety with food. Hello, obesity.

For most of my life, I have ignored anything that I felt would make it difficult to, you know, survive emotionally. I am much more likely to let myself cry at a Cheerios commercial than I am because I am having an emotional breakdown. Crying is not a problem. Feeling is the problem. There was a point in my life where I decided every bad thing I experienced was due to my obesity. Because I alone caused my obesity, I decided I could not express feelings of depression, anxiety, sadness, frustration, anger because it was my obesity that caused it, therefore, I had no reason to express those feelings. Instead, I could just shut up and lose the weight.

Until the last few years, I had never felt comfortable as a human being. I've written in the past about my desire to take up as least amount of space as possible, as if somehow, I could make up for my obesity by not ruffling feathers, by sitting quietly passive. Maybe no one would pay attention to all of my body if I could sit still. I took up so much physical space and hated it that I wanted to take up the least amount of emotional space as possible. Now, the first sentence of this paragraph makes it seem like I'm not that way anymore. Man, I am lying all over the place, here. I still prefer to not take up space. I am way more likely to sit quietly in my emotions than I am to express them out of fear of taking up too much space in someone else's existence. Some of this has to do with feeling worthy of taking up that space, some of it is fear that I will take up too much of that space, and eventually my obese body will break that space. As any fat person can tell you, putting too much weight on something will break it. I have broken more chairs than any other person I know.

In November of 2016 I saw a doctor who didn't automatically assume everything wrong with me was due to my obesity. At least, he didn't express that as the immediate thing. He ordered every possible test. He wanted to cover anything that could be playing into my constant exhaustion, my constant hunger, the nagging pain in my shoulder, all of it. I also decided, after years of avoiding such things to go talk to a therapist. After talking to this woman for a while, she stopped me and asked how often I let myself feeling and express any of the things I was telling her. I said, "Never. I never slow down. I never let myself take a day to feel things. There's too much to do." She asked if there were ever days where getting out of bed felt impossible, and I said yes, but I got out of bed any way. I have 130 teenagers depending on me. I don't get to be selfish.

The word selfish caught her attention. I imagine it was more the way the word sounded coming out of my mouth, like such a dirty word. What transpired was a pretty lengthy discussion about what the differences were between self-care and selfishness, and how all relaxation felt selfish to me because there was always more I could be doing to help my students, help my wife, my friends, my family, homeless people, etc. I'll relax when I'm dead. I am not sure those exact words slipped through my lips, but I have thought them many times.

So what does this all amount to? Well, in some ways I am doing better than ever before. There are nights where I sleep more than four hours. My shoulder pain is gone. Weight is slowly, but surely, coming off. I have awesome people around me, many of whom wish I would take up more space. Then, in some ways, I am way worse than ever before, because allowing myself to be anxious, to live with feelings instead of smothering them in delicious, deadly chocolate sauce is hard. Admitting that I am struggling emotionally is hard. It is weird that it took getting to the happiest, most comfortable place I have ever been to admit how fucking miserable I can be.

This whole realization started when I was re-watching my all-time favorite television show: Sports Night. In the second season of the show, one of the main characters, Dan Rydell (Josh Charles) slowly crumbles to the point where he sees a therapist. One night after the show, he tells his co-anchor, Casey McCall (Peter Krause), that there may be long stretches of time when he doesn't say anything funny, or anything at all. He isn't exactly sure what is happening, but he knows he needs to turn it all off. I have watched both seasons of this show no less than 75 times. For some reason, this time it hit me in a different way, in a knowing way. It was exactly the kind of thing I have wanted to say many times in my life, but instead of trusting the people around me to be okay with it, I would just stay home, away from the people who might expect things of how I behave. I'm slowly learning to trust the people. It is not easy. I fail more often than I succeed, but I have some pretty understanding people in my life, and I am getting better at not caring so much about those who are not so understanding.

I don't have any grand point here. I have not reached any life-altering conclusion. This is just a thing that has been inside me for a while and needed out. So now it is out. Maybe you can relate, or maybe you can't, but maybe it helps you understand something in a new way, the way reading blogs helps me understand things. Or maybe,  you are just curious which Cheerios commercial I cry at (hint: All of them).