Chaos and my refrigerator

I have been kind of ok the past two days. Not great, not horrible. Really, it could be a lot worse.

One of the things I have been thinking about is the link between how I feel about myself, and my surroundings; and what I put into my mouth.

We moved up to the mountains at the end of November - I have a hard time remembering that because it seems so long ago. Then I had surgery. Then came the holidays. Then the Road Trip across America. So it's really been only about a month since I've been home from that, and have been able to nest properly and get into a pseudo-routine.

I really like routine. As much as I love travel and new adventures, I'm a Taurus, and I'm happiest when I can count on stability. For a long time my stability was travel - that was the constant in my life. It's basic 17th century physics - the whole Newtonian "body in motion stays in motion, a body at rest stays at rest, unless acted on by some outside force" law. For a long time I was a body in motion. Then an outside force came about (age, marriage, a job I like, who knows) and I became this body at rest.

So the point is, I am trying to get into a routine, and I really should be gentle with myself because it really hasn't been that long. But it's still hard when parts of the house are still in chaos, and we don't have a bathtub, and stuff is just not right yet.

So it stresses me out, and I eat. I don't plan what I eat because everything is in chaos. I just stuff things into my mouth without thinking about it because nothing else seems to make sense, so neither will the food.

The way I need to look at it, though, that would be more empowering, is that everywhere around me is in constant chaos; the least I could do is keep a routine with my food. And maybe that would start to create the "energy" of routine in my life, and then other things would follow. So that's what I'm going to start thinking about.

I say all this because yesterday I wasn't in my normal routine at home and so I ate a fast food fish sandwich. Ok, it wasn't mcdonalds, but still, it was breaded and not good. At least one good thing is that I didn't eat all the fries. Go me. I'll take the small victories whenever I can.

What do I get from food?

It has occurred to me several times that so many of my happiest and most visceral memories involve food in some way. I suspect that's the reason that I don't want to forego food at all - it brings back all these happy memories for me. I wonder how it's related to the fact that I'm a hoarder - I hang on to lotions and pens that have "special" meaning to me, and then they go to waste. Whenever I go back to London I have to stop at muji and paperchase to stock up on pens, even though I have about 3000 pens with ink evaporating as we speak. In the same way, I need to go to Boots and stock up on lotion that brings back a "London smell" to me, even though I currently have 6 tubs of untouched Boots body butter. It's the same with food. I need to go to sainsbury's and get muller rice and trifles and volvic fruity and sugar-laden water, and all these tastes that I associate with London - it's like a trip isn't complete without at least five cadbury bars.

But then I make the same excuses to eat all the time. It's always a "special occasion" that justifies my excess. It's either a holiday, or getting ready for a holiday, or voting day, or arbor day, or Obama winning a primary, etc etc etc. Why do I need to have food to have a happy celebration? Where does that come from?

Sometimes I think about when I was little. It's no secret to most people who know me that I had a kind of crappy childhood - oh, I was always loved (that's the line my mom uses on me to assuage her guilt - "but you were always loved!" and I was - perhaps too much). There was a lot of fighting, and screaming, and mental health issues that went untreated for years. I remember fighting with my mom when I was very small - only about three. It's my contention that three year olds don't know how to fight and need to be taught it by, oh...an adult, perhaps?

Anyway, that aside, one of my happiest memories is eating tastykakes with my mom. Sometimes it would be after we'd fight. I remember one time when I was about 4, and she said that she wanted to stop fighting with me, and then we had a snickers bar. How could you not associate chocolate with goodness then?

The thing is, I'm not around fighting or screaming or violence any longer, and there's no reason why I have to keep eating food to remind me of happy times. I can have the London memories in my head - I don't need the fat on my waistline to remind me of Soho Square. I can celebrate Obama winning another primary without it involving brownies and ice cream. Besides which, all of that is just a distraction from the Happy Memories anyway.

Yes, food can be a big part of celebrations, but it shouldn't be the thing that happiness revolves around.

staying in the game

So it's february and I haven't lost more than 2 lbs. Ok. So it's the time when I would normally give up and start earnestly digging into the peanut butter swirl ice cream in the freezer. But I'm not going to do that. I'm going to blog more, and I'm going to keep showing up.

I do these personal development seminars - have done 'em since I was a teenager - and the one thing they always say is that the breakthrough lies in showing up. Because if you don't do your homework, and you're confronted by the stuff you're thinking about, the easy thing to do is to quit going. But even if you don't do your homework, even if you sit like a zombie during the whole session, if you keep showing up, there will be a breakthrough (even if it's just that you came to each session despite the fact that you hated it).

So I'm going to show up. I'm going to blog. It's not going to be out of site, out of mind. I'm going to get back on track.