Changes I'm Making

If it's seemed a little quiet around here lately--quieter than usual, anyway--there's a good reason for that.

As much as I write about my life and bitch about work, about LJ, about my mother, and all the rest, there are certain things I just haven't talked about too much. Mostly those are the things that haunt me--things I know I CAN change, but just HAVEN'T changed. Those are the things I'm ashamed of, I guess. No one can fault me for bitching about things I can't change--the assholes at work, for example, will always be assholes (as they proved most admirably yesterday--but that's another story and unrelated to this Very Special Episode of "The Story of Why") but the things I have just so far CHOSEN not to change....well, to admit to those is a little harder. They don't exactly portray me in a flattering light, you know? And for a woman who's splayed out every little detail of my various traumas and addictions, that's saying something. I guess I'm not so much worried about looking favorable in the eyes of OTHER people, but when it comes to maybe not seeing the things I want to see in myself---well, that's been the Unbloggable. It's a little hard to explain.

For the past couple of weeks, though, I've thought that maybe it might be worth a try--the changing, not the explaining.

One of the hardest things for me to do, in the past year, has been to look in the mirror. I know some of the things I'm seeing--the circles under the eyes, the little lines, the stray gray hairs--are just the consequence of time; I'm not really okay with that, but the reasons for that are far, far deeper than vanity. Every day that passes, every day that I get older, distances me just a little more from the time that I remember being really, truly happy. I've come to understand that I will probably not ever experience happiness like that again, which is hard to accept.

This, though, is different.

I was never skinny. Well, when I was on heroin, but that doesn't count, exactly. My "normal" size is about a 14, which looks pretty good on me. But at the moment, I'm a 23 (22's are tight, 24's are big). Which does not look good on me, at all, and which has played seventy-five thousand kinds of hell with my self-esteem. I take all sorts of abuse from people when I don't deserve it, and let things go that I shouldn't let go. Not because of my looks, exactly, but because I honestly just haven't liked myself very much in a while. My weight is a big part of that.

This came about post-heroin; one of the legendary truisms about junkies and ex-junkies is that most of us have ravenous sweet-tooths. (Sweet-teeth? Whatever. You get the idea.) I was absolutely the prime example of this rule. When Tim and I were sharing the studio, I had a big container of Froot Loops right next to my bed. I would wake up and eat Froot Loops. (I think I'm gonna turn the comments off on this post, since that was just the WEIRDEST damn thing I've ever admitted to.) Along with that, I have an absolutely amazing affinity for Pepsi. Not Coke, not RC, not DIET Pepsi--just plain old all-American Pepsi, in vast quantities. We were going through a case every three days or so, and LJ was absolutely NOT drinking half! I might as well just eat sugar straight out of the box. (Okay, I've done that too. Brown sugar only, though--not the regular kind.) Also, I am a fairly-sedentary animal. I will walk from point A to point B, even if they are a mile or two apart, but only if I was going from A to B in the first place and it was my only way to get there. Exercise, as a concept, is not something I generally consider as part of my life.

Well, I'm tired of looking the way I look. I'm tired of not being able to buy clothes; I'm tired of not getting any interested looks when I walk down the street. (So yeah, I'm a little vain.) And so I've started trying to do something about it. I've been eating better, trying to exercise more--stuff like that. I've even cut down massively on the Pepsi--I'm allowing myself one per day. I know it's going to take a while, but I've promised myself some faaaaabulous gifts at various milestones. (First up: an iPod when I lose 20 pounds. If, in fact, iPods still exist that far in the future. I think if I lose the full 100 pounds I'm going to buy myself a new, kickass Mac--the big, powerful, expensive kind.) I've been doing this for about two weeks, and I can't really say I feel any different, except that a)I'm ravenously hungry most of the time, and b)my kidneys have gone into total overdrive now that I'm trying to drink the recommended 64 ounces of water per day. No wonder people who drink lots of water are skinny--they burn it off running to the bathroom every 15 minutes.

I'm also--as I HAVE mentioned--trying to get out of this job. I had two interviews this week--one yesterday, one today. The one today was the one I really wanted, but I think I totally whiffed the interview. I'm out of the habit of spouting little interview-y platitudes, and so I think I was a little more candid than I should have been. Fuck it, you know? They'd have to work with me anyway; best they find out now. The one yesterday went much better, I thought, and plus they're desperate to fill the spot; my only concern is that I think this one might pay less than I'm making now. However, it's downtown--a big advantage! Even if I don't get either one of them, I'm not staying where I am much longer.

It's got a lot to do with my image of myself, I guess. I've told myself for four years that I can't do any better, that I need this job, that I'm only using it as a means to an end, as if somehow that made it okay for them to treat me the way they do. Well, I CAN do better, and even though I need A job, I don't necessarily need THIS job. In fact, I'm thinking this job needs me more than I need it. As for the "means to an end" excuse--well, the "end" was supposed to be the house. I've GOT the house. What I don't have is the time or energy to enjoy it, and that's largely the fault of the job. I work eight-and-a-half hours, but my day is over twelve hours long if you count the commute. I leave at 6:40, and on a good day I get home at 7:00. And that would be fine, if I liked where I was working and the people for whom I was working--but I don't. I'm tired of being disrespected and underestimated and scapegoated. That was fine when I was just a couple of months off heroin, when I REALLY needed this job in more ways than one--or when I didn't like myself very much, like when I was with CR--but it's not fine anymore.

Since I went public with this blog, various and sundry commentors have mentioned that they think I should write a book. I haven't, mainly because I'm consumed with the fear of having no story to tell, nothing relevant to say. (Though I jabber irrelevantly all the time in this blog, so why I should be afraid to write a book is beyond me. So wags the human psyche, or something.) Anyway, I got to thinking about that fear, and how I've been letting it run me for just a little too long now. It's been at least seven years since I've written anything substantial, and that's not something I'm proud of.

Tomorrow would have been JP's 36th birthday. In October, it will be ten years since he died, and all this summer will be the tenth anniversaries of all our many little adventures together. I have tried to block out those memories as much as I can, since they render me bitter and nonfunctional for days at a time, and even when I've blogged about that part of my life, I've only let myself skate along the surfaces of what I remember. It's hard to let it out, but it's hard to keep it in too. I can already see the cracks in the facade, and it worries me.

Those things together--the memories, the stress of keeping it together, and the beginnings of the knowledge that yeah, maybe I -could- write it (and it helps to have an actual published-every-day type of writer voice agreement to that--you know who you are!)--anyway, all those factors have finally combined to convince me; I've started writing down some of the things I remember about those 18 months that JP and I were together. I'd like to have it finished by the end of October, and I think I can do it if I try. I know it will be hard, and I know it will hurt, and I know I will cry. But it's something I need to do. It's kinda like losing weight, I guess--getting rid of something that's holding me back.

I'll post some of it from time to time, maybe, but then again if I do that I'll lose fully half of its eventual market share, since you will all have read it already and won't need to buy it. So then again, maybe not. We'll see.

Any one of these things is scary to me. All of them at once is just completely unsettling. But each one of them distracts me from the terror of the others, so maybe it's a good thing.

Back in the summer of 1994, when JP and I first got together, we talked about the two years that had passed since our last, vicious argument. We'd talked briefly in that span of time, occasionally, disclosing nothing real; he didn't know how bad it was for me where I was, and I didn't know how bad it was for him where he was. We had kept these things and many more from each other because we had each been told by a mutual "friend" that the other person was still angry and had no interest in communicating. But when that wall had been breached, we talked about our impressions in the two years since our friendship had ended. And both of us remembered having the same thought in the early days of 1994: It's going to be a very interesting summer.

I haven't really had that feeling since then, but I do now.