How we got here, pt 1

Okay, now the first thing to understand was where I started from in all this. It was an intensely bad period in my life. I was as heavy as I’d ever been, feeling uncomfortable and ungainly in my body. I was intensely hating my condo and wishing I’d never gone there. Part of that was economic, part of it was dissatisfaction with the actual physical space. But a lot of it was also feeling so alienated from my home and my life that it felt like I had nothing to hold on to. The dog was in her final days, marking the end of six months of brutal decisions, painfully watching her suffer, and, not incidentally, living an almost itinerant lifestyle. I was spending three or four days a week in Milwaukee, living on the couch in my dad’s cramped living room, across the room from my sweet girl while she cried and whimpered all night. When I was at home, I was furiously catching up on a massive workload, covering for the fact that I wasn’t getting much done on my WFH in Milwaukee days, and just cripplingly exhausted both physically and emotionally. I couldn’t get comfortable – with the dog gone, I had basically no attachment to my home or my neighborhood. It was like Sam and Dean in their hotel rooms – living on junk food and takeout, never feeling like I actually had a home. And meanwhile the economic situation got worse and worse. Not mine personally, I was okay, but becoming more and more convinced I’d make a huge mistake in buying and was never going to dig myself out of this hole of depression.

Oh, and did I mention I’d gone off my meds? Well, I had, after some disturbing side effects and some lengthy delays in refilling prescriptions.

So.

It was bad. I was nearly drowning under the weight of three major things – my body, my home and my dog. The dog I couldn’t do anything about. Or rather, I was doing everything that could humanly be done.

But I had reached a breaking point, and I knew I had to do two things – I had to do something to get to where I didn’t actively hate my body. And I had to reclaim my home, make it mine again.

I started to tackle the first by joining weight watchers on line. I knew I didn’t have the time or energy to do actual meetings, but I’d found the tracking useful in the past, and it was a system I understood and could internalize pretty easily. And for the second, I decided to start cooking again. Reclaim the kitchen, so to speak.

It was the confluence of these two things that led me down the path I went. I’d done WW before, and with some success, but I was relying a lot on frozen meals, diet products, granola bars etc – not a ton of real food. And it was okay, and it was kind of fun sometimes, but mostly I remember it being a constant struggle. I didn’t want to go there again. So, cooking.