121.8

That's the lowest I've been in a while :) I'm feeling more positive than I was when I last wrote, and I relish the chance to write something more upbeat.

The weekend has been close to perfect.

I've not eaten much, and what I have had has been pretty healthy.

A and I went to play squash and I feel like I played my best game yet. Ok, I still lost, but not as badly as previously! I've only been playing for a few weeks so I'm still very much a beginner, and it's something that takes me totally out of my comfort zone. I've never been one for organised sports; I like to go running, and I like to dance, but I've never felt the urge or had the ability to hit, kick, catch, run after or throw a ball! Doing so just reminds me of sports classes in school, when I was this geeky, uncoordinated little girl, always afraid of the ball hitting her glasses and always feeling ashamed of her lack of grace and sporting ability. So the first couple times we played squash I didn't enjoy it, and was pretty frustrated with myself because I sucked. But I feel proud of myself for persevering with it and for getting a little bit better :)

We also spent a bit of time just hanging out. We sat in Starbucks for an hour or so; I brought a book and he brought his laptop, and it was just wonderful to sit in companiable silence with him, relaxing together in our separate ways. We did some errands - bought groceries, did some cleaning, did some more house-hunting online - and those mundane tasks became more fun for doing them together.

A is American so we'll be celebrating Thanksgiving even though we live in the UK. His family are all abroad, in various places, so we'll celebrate with a few friends. I'll be making a pecan pie, rather than a pumpkin one, as that's A's favourite, and am determined not to stress out about the calorie content of that or any or the other traditional Thanksgiving fare. (However I will be making sure there's lots of steamed vegetables and fresh salad for those of us who are a little frightened by all the more indulgent foods!) Mostly I'm really looking forward to it :)

It's just over 3 weeks until A's office holds their Christmas party, and I'm hoping to be 115-117 by then. I'm conscious that I've not made most of my targets this year, but this one feels really attainable. It would give me a 19.3 BMI. I'm in two minds about trying to get below 18.5 - part of me wants to prove to myself that I can do it, but part of me knows it's not healthy and doesn't want to start down that road again. 

All of that weekend news aside, I've saved the most exciting thing for last... my sister (the one who lives in the States) is having her second baby today! She's due in about a week or so, but was induced a couple hours ago as the baby hadn't been growing the last couple weeks (though it was otherwise healthy), and they decided it's better off outside of the womb where they can monitor it. So the rest of us are waiting with bated breath to meet the new addition!

"The taste of dried up hopes in my mouth"

I guess I was pre-emptive in celebrating the brevity of my usual October/November slump, as it's back with a vengeance. Maybe I'd over-analysed it and it's just the changing seasons getting me down, though this year I feel unusually eager for winter to come. 

I sleep fitfully at night, and wake feeling tired and heavy. In my office I sit at my computer with the curtains drawn and the lights off and tears streaming down my face, frightened and confused by this inexplicable, all-consuming sadness. I sit alone until 5.30, not eating, not seeing nor talking to anyone. I drive home in the dark. Often the thing I want most is to take some sleeping pills and fall into the warm, dark winds of sleep and dream that I'm not lost. I imagine sleeping for days and days - days and days worth of cell turnover and renewal until I finally wake up and I've become someone else. Instead I make dinner, make conversation with A and our friend who's staying with us for a while.  A drifts between being bewildered by this thing and exasperated by it; between dismissing it as an affectation and trying to fix it. Sometimes there are moments of buoyancy; bright little glimmers of laughter and light that pierce the fog with a straight, narrow beam. 

122.2

My weigh-in on Friday went better than I expected and put me at a 20.3 bmi, which clearly isn't my ultimate goal but it's definitely better than I'd expected. I had been scared to death that I was going to be over 130 and have a big meltdown about it, but forunately that disaster was averted.

So obviously I spent the weekend ingesting roughly my own body weight in chocolates and alcohol.

Way to go, Sophie.

Euurgh...

I'm pretty sure I'm enormous right now. I haven't felt this huge for a long time, and I'm not sure why, because I've been restricting relatively well. I did kind of slip up and snack a lot yesterday - on some healthy things and some unhealthy things - but I didn't have any real meals, and as far as I can calculate my total should still have been significantly below 1,000.

I guess not having a scale is just getting to me. My new battery should come tomorrow (bloody Weight Watchers scales that use batteries you have to buy online!) so I should get a verdict on Friday morning.

That's about all I have to say today, actually. I'm struggling to think about anything at the moment other than the fact that I'm huge, but I'm hoping that getting that out of my head and down on "paper", as it were, will free up some space in my mind to tackle my giant to-do list at work today.

I just want to be tiny, and to stop feeling disgusting, as soon as possible. I'm too impatient for this; why does it take such an interminably long time?! I've been finding some pretty thinspo the last couple days and am in the process of putting together a nice little collection for you, so watch this space!

Pottery and House-hunting!

After my spate of rather negative posts lately, I'm really pleased to be able to write a much happier one.

I'm in an unusually positive state of mind at the moment. It's unusual because I always get depressed and agitated around the end of October and beginning of November. Every year. I don't think it's related to SAD or anything like that, though the weather does affect my mood a little. I think it's more related to the fact that mid-October would have been the birthday of a very good friend of mine, who died of a brain tumour when we were 16. She was my first friend when we came to the UK from Nepal  - I walked into school on my first day, halfway through the term, full of nerves, not knowing a soul, and as soon as this little girl clocked me she detached herself from the huddle of other little girls, came over and took my hand and announced "I'm Lizzie, and I'm going to be your friend!" And she was, for the next 9 years, until she died. Every October it comes around to her birthday and I think of all the things I've done and learned and experienced during that year and am saddened that she missed out on so much. The end of October is also the time that the baby would have been born. I'd never connected that to this annual low period until I read somewhere that, even if a post-abortive woman isn't consciously thinking about the abortion, sometimes her body still "grieves", kind of. It seems it's not uncommon for a woman's mood to change around the anniversary either of the abortion or the due date. I don't know what the science is behind that, but it's certainly borne out anecdotally in my own experience. Even before I'd read anything on the subject I was conscious that I always felt on edge around the end of October, and other people even commented that I was worst around that time of year.

Anyway, this year it seems to have passed much more quickly than usual, and I'm extremely grateful for that.

I have a couple of things to be excited about at the moment, too :)

Tonight I start my pottery class, which I'll be doing for the next five weeks. I'm looking forward to having something creative to work at, to producing something tangible, and to have an evening out of the house meeting new people.

A and I have started house-hunting in earnest, in preparation for our move to London. My boss has confirmed that they'll be able to keep me on until next May, possibly until next September (I'm employed on a rolling contract), and has agreed that I can work from home two days a week once we're living in London, to cut the cost of commuting. A is looking at a couple properties this week and we're both going to look at few on Saturday. I'm really excited about having a place of "our own" (even though we'll be renting, at least it'll be a neutral place without any previous memories or associations for either of us; at the moment we live at his parents' place), and about living in London again.

The job extension is good news in itself, actually. I had been expecting to finish at the end of December and was a little nervous about trying to find a new job in the current economic climate, so this is really something to be thankful for. And... I'm *hoping* this extension means I'll get sent to our annual conference in Dallas next year, after which I could hop over to Tulsa to visit my sister and her family. She will have had her second baby by then, and being able to visit her would just be the icing on the cake :)

I hope things are going equally well for all of you, and that you're blessed with the things that make you happy, weight-related and otherwise. I'm getting my scales "fixed" (that is, I'm buying a new battery, haha) on Friday... wish me luck for my first weigh-in since about August...! *nervous face*

Lots of love, Sophie

Dear Jesus,

If you're there, please make me invisible. Make me disappear.

Remind me always that I'm worthless, so that I can be docile and obedient and not speak out of turn. So that I don't protest when I'm hurt or offended. Make me believe my thoughts are nothing, too wretched to use in combat or conversation.

Make me empty instead of overflowing, impassive instead of animated. Take away the fire in my soul and dull my spirit. Make my eyes flat, my tongue quiet and my hands still.

If you answer one prayer of mine, let it be this one. Take my intensity and give me indifference. 

Amen.

On the nature of rules

Over the last few weeks I've become increasingly aware of an uneasiness within myself with regard to the lack of structure in my diet. I've felt gradually more drawn to very structured ways of eating, such as the raw food diet, and I find myself wanting to make up little challenges and rules dictating how and when to eat. "If all you've consumed by 10:30 is water, you can have some honey on your rice cake." "You should see if you can make this apple last all day."  This is the first time in years that this has happened with no conscious effort on my part and I'm kind of bemused - though not troubled - by it.

Rules are good things. Structure prevents the world from falling into chaos. Suddenly I see with great clarity how absurd it is to allow one's eating to be dictated by whims and hunger and sporadic cravings. Imagine if everyone just did exactly as they felt all the time - the world would go to mayhem! Much better to be disciplined about these things, and have a plan. It makes everything more stable, and I feel calmer.

It's not so much a lucid thought process (unless I deliberately try to articulate it, as I have in this post) as an ill-defined assurance that this is the right way to do things. More and more, unstructured eating feels like writing a sentence that you know is ungrammatical but you can't figure out why; it just doesn't sit quite right with you. Eating within rules feels like the "aha!" moment when you look in the dictionary and realize that all this time you've been using that transitive verb without an object.

(Ok, you can insert your own analogy there if you're not a linguistics nerd... I know you all know the feeling I mean.)