Slamming it into Fifth or I Love Ben and Jerry's for the First Hour

Sometimes when I talk to a person and I can see their beauty and magic but they can’t, when they tell me all the reasons they need to stay the way they currently feel: unseen, misunderstood, powerless, or having less power than they feel is fitting their true nature, I get upset and it manifests in various ways.

Today I woke up with a migraine.

I think a lifetime of wishing my mom would think she was as beautiful as I thought she was has made me a crazy person.

I just ate a pint of Ben and Jerry’s The Tonight Dough after bragging to my friend Pam the other day that I almost never turn to ice cream any more for solace. After decades of using food as a reward or as medicine or as a therapist, I felt good about me and food. We were okay.

And then today came along and I was a fucking beast. For dinner I cooked rice and beans because there was nothing else around to eat. Before that I had eaten the rest of the sourdough bread and the goat cheese and the avocado and the last tamale and the apple and the orange and the Bulletproof Collagen bar. And the espresso. This is not a confessional. It’s a rant. Because the rice and beans didn’t do it, and so I got in my car and got the thing I was bragging I didn’t need to eat anymore: ice cream.

You may be fine eating sugar, but I’m not. It’s like I’m a boat and the sugar is a dinosaur that tries to get into the boat. Sugar sinks me. But the first hour after eating it is great. I get full, quiet, high.

Feeling empty, emptier than empty: desperate, is so distracting. I got shit done today. I had one wonderful coaching call with a person I loved the first time I saw her over a year ago, and the rest was me wondering what I could eat to get my brain to stop making me feel bad.

I did yoga.

I listened to music and danced.

I jumped into the freezing cold pool, naked.

I choked down two chewed aspirin (yuck!!) because my biological father had told me that he also gets migraines, and he quiets down the light show in his eyes by chewing on two Bayer aspiring and, dear reader, this works!

I wrote a stupid meme in reaction to the feral (like me) adoptees who hate me and posted it and didn’t take it down before they got a screen shot of it and shared it.

I tried to remember what my purpose in life was. I hate that feeling: drifty, useless, vision-less.

And then I realized I had become the very person who drives me crazy: someone who doesn’t see her own light or potential. Then I remembered it’s not as easy as just deciding to see the wonder of yourself.

Sometimes not giving up on yourself is a fucking battle.

As I was writing this, my friend Lori was texting me, checking in. She’s one of those people who keeps a finger on my pulse always, even though we live thousands of miles away and have been together only a handful of times. Again and again and again when I get tough on myself, Lori reaches out a hand because she can feel I need it. It’s amazing.

Tomorrow I’m guessing I’ll be back to normal. I have a call early in the morning with a client who quickly became a friend, and I want to be on the top of my game because I want to help inspire her to write the amazing book I can see inside of her.

I hate leaving places. Tomorrow is the day before I leave Sebastopol and head for Santa Cruz, a place I love, but leaving does a number on my brain and nervous system. It’s like someone I can’t even hear is screaming down my neck that everything is wrong. I don’t hear it, but some part of my brain does, and I stumble around, disoriented, off track, no idea why I’m not happy when everything around me seems fine.

That’s one of those adoptee things that’s like…fuck. Still???

Transitions still have to be an issue for this 55-year-old person? Come on! Seriously?

But even more than that, I hate to see people not going for all they could be. I hate living it. Why? Because it’s boring. It’s like we all have these cars that we are driving around in third gear and if we just went Whitman on our lives and Barbaric Yawped our way to fifth, we could fucking tear down the roads and feel like we were flying.

And what’s so great about that?

Everything.