Awkwardly Social

We’re a few hours away from dinner at my mother-in-law’s house.  She told me not to make anything, because I’ve been working too hard.  All we’re bringing is champagne.  I feel anxious and worried wishing I could use my hands to do something other than fret about work.

Two years ago we toasted her.  The toast given by my father-in-law, on her incredible survival instinct, had us all in tears.  She, always stoic, tried to brush it aside.  She spent two weeks in the hospital, one of those weeks completely non-responsive.  Now, two years later, we’re hours away from a dinner where we’ll toast my father-in-law, gone after four months of an unwinnable battle. “Here’s to you, Marsh,” we’ll say.

I’m avoiding the living room, in the meantime.  I can’t face the task at hand.  My job stress has reached an all time high, and yet, we’re setting up the Christmas tree today.  “I should be working!” I keep thinking.   I won’t see my house for the next 2 weeks except to shower and sleep.  All I can manage is to eat forbidden rye bread with forbidden butter and take a magic calming tincture to keep the worst of it at bay. Lula is responding the only way she knows how by peeing on the dining room rug.  I’m obsessively grabbing my boobs looking for signs of PMS that seem suspiciously missing, hoping unrealistically that my overly confident yet terminally serious acupuncturist was right, that I will be pregnant by Christmas.

I’m sick to my stomach, is it because of stress, grief, hormones, or a combination of everything.

Here’s to all of you.  Thanks for giving me a place to let it all spill out.

On a show I was on (what seems like) ages ago, there were story questions about mental health and addiction.  Two things I’m really super familiar with.  Painfully familiar with.  So familiar with that when I gave really specific answers to really specific questions without consulting dr. google, people started to get uncomfortable and ask painfully obvious questions about why I knew so much about certain things.   The answers to those questions are pretty personal, but if you ask them correctly, sometimes I’ll spill.  But most of the time I’ll just know you’re straight, clean, mentally healthy and really fucking lucky.

Then there were the “other people” in the room.  The other people are people I consider “my people.” We are the people who’ve dealt with suicidal thoughts (real ones, and not necessarily our own).  We are the people who have dealt with addiction (and I’m not talking about nicotine - although, cigarettes are the hardest thing I’ve ever quit, and I’ve quit a couple of hard things…).  We are the people who love people who have problems.  We are the people who know that there are no perfect people.  We are the people who don’t ask questions about why you know so much about crystal meth, pain pills, depression, bi-polar disorder.

I am drawn to people like me.  I like people who have dark secrets that come spilling out.  I like people who talk about their past not to make you think they were cool or lived hard or have a more interesting past, but because they can see my dark parts and how much I’m dying to just spill so everyone can move on and live their lives and not worry that someone is going to have concerns about something as obvious and tired as relapse.  Relapse and my people are familiar with each other.  Phone messages returned with text messages are ok with my people.  They know sometimes it’s too hard to hear someone’s voice being so nice on the other end of the line.

My people know that when you say you’ve dealt with commitment they know you don’t mean in a relationship.

My people know that my crazy obsession with food and jokes about anorexia aren’t just that.

My people know when to push and when to just let their hands lay by their sides.

My people aren’t straight, they’re crooked and half-healed, chipped edges and false fronts, open wounds and bandaged sprains.

I sometimes don’t realize someone is one of my people until I accidentally bubble over like a secrets fountain and spill my guts and hear the almost imperceptible acknowledgment of what they know too.

This is the last weekend I have free until mid-December, and it coincides nicely with my sister coming into town with my youngest niece and my dad.  It coincides not so nicely with Seth having a huge work weekend that might prevent him from seeing the light of day, much less me and my family.

I cried this morning when Seth told me he would meet me for dinner on Saturday.  A whole weekend.  ALONE WITH MY FAMILY.  Without Seth.

I love my family, but if Seth isn’t there, there’s a huge piece of my family missing.

Those of you who think being in the business is awesome and glamorous, I’d like you to know it is.  But it also is 14 hour days, and weekends away from your family, anxious nights thinking about how you’re going to fix something that seems unfixable and that something is “just a movie” or “just a tv show.” It’s days spent alone with just a computer and lifetimes of footage to mine.  It’s calling your husband at 10 o’clock at night telling him you’re still there, still in a meeting, still working.  It’s never being able to schedule a vacation more than a few days in advance. It’s explaining to your family that your husband can’t make your father’s 70th birthday celebration because he has a first cut due.  It’s really fucking hard and lonely and those are the good parts.

I’m excited to see my sister, niece and my dad.  I just wish I wasn’t spending the weekend alone.

If you read my twitter page, you already know that I am on a ‘cleanse.’  Long time readers also know that I am an obsessive personality and that I have (boring!) body image issues.  I’ve been trying to be easier on myself recently and I managed to be so forgiving that I gained 10 (cough15cough) pounds back that I had lost through extreme diet and exercise around this time last year.  The way I lost that weight was pretty unhealthy and (clearly!) impossible to maintain on a daily basis. Add to that, I was probably too thin for my body type but of course I loved it.  My body likes to be curvier, I know because when I don’t obsessively monitor what I eat and intensively exercise 6 days a week, I gain weight slowly but surely right back where my body likes it - my butt, my boobs, my thighs.  (Look for my rap album to drop under the same title next fall!) My body was complaining when I was too thin, I couldn’t sleep, I was anxious all the time, xanax wasn’t working, it was - except for my fucked up love of seeing all my bones - not good.  So, I relaxed, gained some weight, then I REALLY relaxed and gained some more.  Ah, happiness, why do you have to be so plump?

All of this is made worse by living in the capital of self-absorbed women who like to talk about what they are doing to make themselves less.  Less is more in the city of angels.  And I’m trying to get to a place where what I eat, and what I weigh isn’t the thing that I think about obsessively all day long.  Because really?  It’s boring.  No one really cares to hear about why you can’t eat the damned cupcake.  Just politely decline and move on.  Or eat it.  Whatever.  Just stop talking about the cupcake and how you wish you could eat it.

Anyway, I heard from a  friend about this cleanse and I told her I wasn’t interested.  I do not juice.  I do not drink maple syrup and lemon juice.  I do not fast.  But she convinced me that I should check it out, because Gwyneth Paltrow recommended it.  So I did a little research and was like, weight loss?  Sign me up!  (I am a work in progress.)

I am on day 4 of a 21 day cleanse.  Plus I did a pre-cleanse for 4 days.  I’ve lost 3-5 pounds, depending on which pre-cleanse weight you want to say was THE pre-cleanse weight.  But it’s not just the weight, reading the book has made me kind of a cult member.  I totally am buying into the idea that if I do this cleanse, I’ll be healthier.  The new me will be less anxious, less focused on what I “should” and “shouldn’t” eat.  The end of the cleanse will make me into a non-anorexic, non-overeating, non-obsessive thinking human.  Which is what I want to be.  Life List #22!

So far, I find the diet restrictions difficult but not undoable.  I’ve basically cut out all chemicals, caffeine, processed food, sugar, wheat, dairy and other foods that many people are allergic to, added a shit-ton of fiber to my diet (pun intended), and for 21 days will be drinking two of my meals (and not in the good way where I used to drink my dinner of 2 vodka martinis and a couple of olives). I’m trying a new meditation technique, and I’m drastically reducing my television watching (thank god the baseball season is over).  The only side effect is I feel a little tired, and I’m not sure how to get through 2 days at Disneyland with all of those Mickey pretzels and Main Street ice cream calling to me.  Other than that, I feel good.

The biggest problem with getting brainwashed by one of these “programs” is now I find myself wanting to convert everyone.  I want everyone to get off their prescribed meds!  I want everyone to poop 3 times a day!  I want everyone to eat Clean.  If nothing else, check out the book.  It was a best seller, maybe you already own it.