Frustration

At this precise moment, I long to smash my shiny glass scale with a hammer.

I'm eating well. I make myself go out and walk regularly. My weight? It stays the same--or goes up a couple of pounds.

The curve on which I grade my own obsessive tendencies is definitely skewed, as I spent a sizable chunk of my life with an eating disorder. The number on the scale is annoying me, but not consuming me. Today, however, it's annoying me a lot more than usual.

That's probably because I'm annoyed about other things, like that my job is being eliminated. I know for a fact that my work is not only important, but an asset to their business. The people behind the elimination of this job ultimately have little to no idea what I do or what the impact of laying me off will be. (That's usually the way it works, isn't it?) I've always worked really hard for this agency; in 2008, I left a full-time job there after two years because I had so many stress-related medical problems (stomach issues, migraines, panic attacks). It had to almost kill me for me to quit, and even then, I quit reluctantly.

I came back part-time last summer because they would work around my schedule and because I really needed the money--I had one job as a blogger that only lasted a couple of months, so I went about ten months without any income. There was just nothing out there--I sent out hundreds of resumes and had a bunch of interviews. One of the reasons I actually went forward with weight-loss surgery was because of these circumstances--because I had time to fight the insurance company. Even though I went without working or drawing unemployment all that time, it was really like earning $25K because the weight-loss surgery was covered and only cost us about $5K out of pocket.

There doesn't seem to be much out there now in the way of jobs. At ALL. I don't know if I can get unemployment this time--I really hope I can, assume I can because my job is being eliminated, despite veiled hints that they "might" want me to come in and do a little work for them here and there as they figure out their whole restructuring scenario over the next few months. This is the ultimate frustration: this is all I'm worth?

I'm trying to figure out what to do next--what's actually feasible for me to do next. If I had my druthers, I would pursue a technical writing certificate/degree, and I'm looking into that--but funding is an obstacle.

I also wonder if I'm more likely to get hired now because I weigh less. It's a shallow world.

Frustrated. It started because of a book...

I've had a nice quiet long weekend with Mr. Salted; we went to see "Star Trek" and I didn't fall asleep, yesterday he grilled steaks, etc. etc. My ankle is hurting all the time now, and I'm not doing anything beyond the ordinary. I just take ibuprofen for it and listen to it pop when I walk. My last support group meeting is tomorrow night, and in a couple of weeks I'll have the six-month appointments with the nutritionist and exercise physiologist so we can resubmit to insurance for approval for surgery. I also found another dentist to go to; a friend of a friend is the hygienist. They won me over in part because they don't charge for nitrous. Sure, I have to drive an hour and a half, but if I like the dentist, I don't care! I'm going to try and stop the exercise physiologist visits for a while, at least until after I've had ankle surgery and am coming back from that; the last few months, it feels like I'm just setting fire to the copay money.

So, I read this book in a day and it frustrated me. The book is "Tweak" by Nic Sheff; the subtitle is "Growing Up On Methamphetamines". (His father, David Sheff, wrote a book about his son's addiction and their relationship, called "Beautiful Boy". I haven't read that one yet.)

Let me just say, I applaud anyone who has the courage and takes the time to write the truth about their life. I think the more books are out there that show what the world is really like from different points of view, the better. I wasn't as mad as everyone else seemed to be at James Frey, but I took creative nonfiction classes at university. As a writer, I err more on the side of writing your memoir as you remember and experience than what everyone else tells you happened, but that's neither here or there with this particular book.

The writing isn't bad at all--not terrible, but nothing particularly special, either. However, the attention to detail is fabulous, and it's a quick read. I read another review of "Tweak" on Visual Bookshelf or Goodreads that said every addict's story is the same. There is some truth in that statement, though I find it to be a gross overgeneralization.

I was frustrated by this book because its author had not only every opportunity in the world and two loving parents, but a seemingly endless supply of family friends and people that just fall out of the sky to help and care about him--and he's too deep into his disease to be cultivating those relationships, they are just there for him whenever he decides to need them. He says at various points in the book that he knows what he's thrown away and who he's hurt and how alone he feels, but then his parents are still there to pay for treatment and therapy and rehab and sometimes college and he still has their connections so that he can go on book tours with his father and have this fabulous career at the end. I felt manipulated when I finished the book--yes, addiction is harrowing, and the drug life is full of unsavory people and needless suffering and death--but how "on the edge" could this person really have been when he had not only a lot of advantages, but his youth as well? It was all just there waiting for him, whenever he decided to start appreciating it--it wasn't like he was just born into a mess he didn't ask for. Coming up from that, if you can, takes decades--and it ain't glamorous. I can attest that there's usually no book tour, with your father or anyone else, at the end.

I think this book frustrated me on a number of levels that have very little to do with Nic Sheff at all. Whether or not every addict's story is the same, every person's story has value. I don't care how rich or famous you are--I don't think anyone is born automatically more worthy or interesting than anyone else. There are a great many of people who could have been contributing more positively to society in any number of ways--if there had been someone there to pay for their rehab, their therapy, or help them to go back to school--or just love them unconditionally and try to keep them safe as they grew up. There are a lot of people who don't even get to breathe anymore because they happened to not be lucky or have the inner strength to keep plodding along through life and trying. The people who get to write these bestselling memoirs are, nine times out of ten, people who had some semblance of a safety net, whether it was parents, husband, Great-Aunt Matilda, or all of the above. I'm not just frustrated because of my own life and its path to date, though that certainly contributes to this rant...I'm thinking of a thousand tragic stories I've heard--and a million more none of us will ever get to hear. It doesn't seem fair that this is true when there is so much to learn from every person's life experience--including that of Nic Sheff.

I want to make this frustration I'm feeling now motivate me to try and do something more with my own talents, much as I have transformed many negative emotions and experiences in my early life into motivation to achieve as an adult. That's what I'm going to try and take away from this today.

Weird week

It's been a weird week. I had one night where I actually slept enough, and I can't remember the last time that happened. I felt fantastic, and met up with two old friends; it was the first time in 22 years all three of us had been together. That was a lot of fun. I was glad the sleep coincided with that day so I could enjoy it. It's been beautiful outside.

I haven't been exercising, which isn't good. My stupid ankle still hurts, but I haven't even done strength training. I don't know what it is. If I know I have to do something and be somewhere, I manage my time a lot better and get up and do things. When I know I don't have to go anywhere, I tend to be a lot less productive. It seems like human nature to me, but who knows?

Today is Day 111 of the blankety-blank food diary. I wish insurance didn't require the stupid thing, but they do. 180 days will be six months, so I guess that's the second or third week of June.

I want to get a move on this surgery process already. I feel like I'm not doing enough, because I'm not working, but I feel like I could never be doing this if I were working, so I'm trying to see the whole situation as a blessing as friends are encouraging me to do. I'm trying not to beat myself up too much over it, but I've been working since I was about nine. (At that age, I remember picking blackberries in what we called "urban renewal", this area of town that wasn't developed yet, and selling them to my neighbors for $2 a gallon.) My logical mind knows what it should know, but it can be difficult to stifle the old tapes in your head. My family always accused me of being lazy growing up; much of the world assumes fat people are that way because they are "just lazy". Physically, I am not the most energetic or driven person, never have been, but mentally is a whole other story. Anyone who knows me at all that I am a worker bee, but I do work to live, not live to work. That can be misconstrued at times. I've probably followed an exercise program for about half my adult life--they just don't seem to "take"--which is a lot more than many thin people I've known.

The support group is great, but emotionally draining. I do get overwhelmed by it; I'm pretty much good for nothing the day after it meets. I can see why I put off dealing with food issues the longest of any others that I've worked on.

A guy I used to work with died this week, which was sad. He was 40, the same age as I, and had a wife and kids. Things like that always make you remember how lucky you are to wake up in the morning.

How I can end up spending the better part of a day on the phone with insurance and the doctor's office

The past week has been incredibly frustrating. I was turned down for three of the five jobs I'd applied for; I didn't hear anything on the other two. My sleep continues to be on and off, which can make a person a little crazy all by itself. I tried to force sleep a couple of nights by taking two Benadryl, which resulted in grogginess the entire day after and still waking up every couple of hours. I took a generic version of Unisom tonight and was (am) up after 2 hours.

My primary-care doctor is about three hours away and so I conduct a lot of business with her via e-mail. My husband's insurance has been hounding me to get all my medications via their mail-order program, so I have been trying to transition them all. There are seven or eight of them. The health insurance took so long to process the initial switch that I ran out of everything for several days, requiring several frantic phone calls back and forth with insurance and the doctor's office, paying almost $20 to have overnight delivery, etc., and after all that neither my antidepressant nor my sleep medication were included. I've emailed my doctor two or three times in the last couple of weeks to have those things transitioned as well. Of course, the emails were never answered and I found myself playing the call-everyone-involved-two-or-three-times game a couple of days ago to try to get those medications transferred to the mail order pharmacy program before I ran out of them, having to request expensive overnight delivery again. My doctor and I have had a long-standing relationship, and she has never had a problem changing a medication for me. Unfortunately, I think her staff is getting their signals crossed now; I haven't had any direct communication with her at all on this issue, and after thinking all was said and done and the medications were ordered, I get a call yesterday from her staff saying I had never gotten the new sleep medication from her previously and that they were just going to discard the request from insurance to fill it--because insurance had referred to it as "a refill". (I had made it clear to insurance that it was a new medication.) Of course, this was left on my voicemail at home while I was out; of course, I received it after their office had been closed on Friday afternoon; and of course, they acted annoyed, like I was trying to put something shady past them, sounding rather indignant with me on the message they left. And of COURSE, the sleep medication is the one being disputed.

Doubly frustrating is the fact that I tried repeatedly to get the fax number for the doctor to send a request for the new medication to insurance, but insurance would not give it to me, preferring instead to fax something to the doctor and have her fax it back to them. If they had simply given me their fax number in the first place, I seriously doubt this would have played out the way it did. I left a frustrated message on the doctor's office voicemail in which I doubtless sound like a total freaking loon, telling the entire story for what felt like the 500th time and trying desperately to say the right polite words at proper intervals.

"How do you not go mental?" a friend asked me not long ago. I chuckled somewhat ruefully; I think it's too late to refer to it as "going" mental at this point.