Halt! ... Or I'll Say "Halt" Again

Yesterday was stunning, a welcome surprise at this time of year. Muzzy and I walked for miles, and rounded up my mother for a nice stroll at the dog park. Muzzy has lots of friends there, including this honking big harlequin Great Dane and a sweetly disposed lady Pit Bull.

In my last post, I wrote that I thought I was coming to the end of a depressed period... I was wrong. To paraphrase my late great-uncle, Fred, the weather was just drawin' back its fist. A fairly intense cloud of existential angst settled on me for a visit Friday and Saturday, an unwelcome visitor in a time when I'm trying to accomplish some difficult things. Really, it was all I could do just to get up and go to work.

I'll refer again to my 12-step recovery work, because principles that I learn there are useful in application to my eating problem... during this latest blue period I thought often of HALT. HALT reminds us that it is dangerous to become too Hungry, Angry, Lonely or Tired. Well, folks, as of late I have been three out of four of those things most of the time. I haven't been angry much at all, but the other three lurk around sullenly pretty much always... waiting to pounce. The thing is, I really don't know how to avoid any of that. Work makes me very very tired. I just had two lovely days off, and I'm tired (almost exhausted) just thinking about working in a couple of hours. I fear that's just the deal, though. That's what working people feel, and I'm fortunate to have a job that pays me as well as mine does, and even the measure of flexibility that I'm granted. Also I get to take a week off this summer to spend with my family, and I get paid for it. So Tired is just going to have to stay. Hungry... well, golly. If I ate every time I felt hungry, I would never lose weight. The big one is Lonely. That's just something that I feel, regardless of the wonderful, supportive people in my life. I know you love me, I know you're there... but I can't escape the lifelong feeling that I'm all alone on an empty sandbar, watching the world flow by. I think I've been trying to fill that emptiness since I was a wee lad... and it may well be a big part of my former alcohol and drug abuse, as well as my eating issue.

Now, I don't feel that way all the time. Like I wrote before, it lurks. It gives me enough down-time so that, if I work on myself, I don't have to eat, drink or drug it away. Also, I'm reminded of a novel by John D. MacDonald, in which Travis McGee tries to explain to his friend Meyer a sentiment similar to mine. As I remember, Meyer looks bemusedly at Travis and says something like, "Why, Travis... that's the way it is. For everyone in the world."

So I suspect that this unique suffering of mine, this special and private sadness, is maybe something that I share with everyone I know. Maybe it's just part of being a human being on the planet, this feeling. In any case, I tried to eat it into submission a couple of times over the past week.

But it's not all bad, friends. I had a really great couple of days filled with walking and sunshine and my dog and healthy food. And I made an interesting discovery. My father, as usual, was completely right about my scale worries. I weighed myself at the hospital, then walked straight home and tried out both scales. The digital was right on the money, the analog was way heavy. I tricked myself. So, by way of "shooting" the offending scale, I'm going to neatly package it up and ship it back... get my sixty bucks back, I tell you. It was nice to be wrong, and a little humility provided by gentle correction is always good for me.

I'm not entirely sure that I'm through with this particular bout of depression. I feel like I am, but I'm wary. We'll see how the work-week treats me. I am cautiously optimistic today; that's the best I can do. If I write, I'm doing OK... I find that I'm completely unable to write about a bad time while I'm in it. So hopefully you'll be seeing regular posts again.

From my sandbar to yours,

Steve "Big Daddy" Hodgson

March the second, 2010

286.2 pounds