How to climb out of hell
So, two fatty posts from throwingstardna in one week has spurred me to finally getting around to posting this. I suppose its about due.
Last year was a train wreck for me. The people closest to me, in my day to day life can attest to this, as they probably saw me a total of 5 times from January to August. I didn't leave the house for months. I had quit my high paying, higher stress networking job after the last countless massive nervous breakdown. I stopped therapy, and quit zoloft cold turkey, in a dangerous and poorly thought out move that led to a couple of psychotic breaks and more tears than you can imagine. When I quit, I was topping out at 280 lbs.
Nothing in my life was working. I mean, absolutely nothing. I had about $4K in savings, $6k in my 401K, and about $6K of free space on my credit cards. So I quit my job and lived on that for almost 8 months. I quit going out, quit spending money, (except I kept the digital cable and high speed internet, two moves that I think have contributed quite largely to sending me to the poor house these days, but I digress..) and decided to just stop everything until I could figure out what was wrong, and what I could do to make it ok again.
I couldn't leave the house without having a massive panic attack, being out in public with my friends was physically painful. I was afraid of everything, and had no idea where the nameless fear had come from, or why it was there. Life became about getting through the next 5 minutes. There were days when "one day at a time" seemed like far to large a chunk of time to deal with, and it became, "how do I sit here for five minutes without OD-ing on Ambien, or some drug cocktail?" I wasn't sleeping, and the insomnia was getting Fight Club bad. I still have the Ditech, Sleep Foam, and Girls Gone Wild Commercials memorized, as that's about the only thing they show on late night 4AM, the sleeplessness is physically painful, television.
I had more problems than I knew how to deal with. I wanted to run, just get in my car and keep driving, leave all my stuff, all my problems, all of everything behind me and just disappear. Problem is, I had tried that a few years earlier, and ended up coming back to Denver anyway, broke, and still broken. So much of that type of action involved running away from problems that just get carried with me anyway, so I guess I was forcing myself to sit and stare into that darkness, confront that fear, and either be done with it, or have it done with me. I stopped answering the phone and the door, and I sat. And thought. And did some writing. Some drawing. Thought about everything I had covered in therapy about abusive homes, and the kinds of decisions coming from that place leads you to make. Thought about the differences between reacting and choosing. Tried really hard to relax. Come to terms with myself, all the things I love and hate about myself, and waited to see which one would win.
I can't delineate the process at all. It was like a never ending mental film strip of trauma. But as long as I didn't have to leave the house at all, I could deal with it. Then it got worse, and I felt myself drowning in the house. Started leaving anyway. Started summoning the courage to face the world as it is now, rather than living in the past, retraumatizing myself for no good reason, and trying to get out of my own head enough to see the outside world again.
It was a weird kind of patience with myself, with these random markers lining the path, little mental post-its saying, "Don't go there," or "Been there, done that, don't need to do it again." No one gets a map to living their own life, but I started seeing a map behind me of all the choices I had made, and the reasons for making them. Slowly I started making progress. Started breathing again. Started bathing again. Started eating regularly again. I would go for days without eating much, if anything, subsisting mainly on Diet Coke, Coffee, and cigarrettes. Smoked a WHOLE lot of weed. Tried to figure out where the zoloft ended and I began. Started losing weight. Kept on healing.
Mostly I think, it was the mental processes. I carry most of my weight in front of me, a nice shield to prevent people from getting too close, masked by a jolly exterior, typical cheerful fat girl, no problems here, no, I am totally comfortable with who I am, and if you ask me any different I'll lie so smoothly no lie detector in the world would tell you differently. You just aren't getting in there. Relaxing that was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. But I had lived the first 29 years of my life like that, thank you dysfunctional, Machievellian, childhood, and it wasn't working for me anymore, and I knew it.
The hardest thing you can ever do in this world is go out of the house vulnerable, hurting, and HONEST about it. Probably the number one lie ever told is the answer to the question, "how are you?". Most people will say "Fine" without batting an eye, regardless of whether or not they are fine. I was not fine, but I was getting more comfortable with being where I was rather than always staring at where I wanted to be, then beating myself up for not being there. THAT was a massive struggle. I have an overachievement syndrome of some kind, I guess, where I am never doing as well as I could be, not living up to that potential. It's hard to actively stop lying to yourself. Especially when the "lie" is, "I'll be a whole person someday."
Maybe there are parts of me that will always be broken. That's ok. I have learned to be patient with myself, my thoughts, and my moods. The no money thing was kind of nice. It kept me on a schedule of sorts, as in, "You don't have the money or the inclination to do this forever, so do please get something out of it, then move on. Don't drown in this."
Finally got up, got out of the house for job hunting. Finally got a job, and released a lot of stress when money started coming in again. Within a month I had moved out of the house, releasing the stress of renting from my overscrupulous parents while going through something so intimately haunting and devastating that I couldn't be around them without screaming. Somehow managed to prevent a complete estrangement there...while they have their faults, they are my parents, and cutting ties is too extreme for me.
I went from laying on the couch, prone, and crying for 20 hours a day, to up, going to work everyday, packing and moving. I had slowly been going out more and more, and since I've been in Boulder I've been going out, mostly comfortable in public, with strangers, and being open enough to start letting people in, and letting them get close again.
Throughout this whole year, I've been steadily losing weight. I now only have 2 pairs of pants I can wear without a belt, the rest just slide right off. Now I'm down to 216 lbs. (That's 64 lbs for those of you doing the math. Want to be really impressed? Grab 6 10lb bags of flour and haul them around for the full effect. It's massive.) Didn't really do much for diet/exercise per se, except I stopped eating out, finding the energy to stand up and cook something for myself gave me activity and a way to care for myself that was solid and concrete. It was more to battle the depression than the weight. I still don't have much of an appetite, so making really good, culinary temptations gave me something to do, and made it easier to eat, even if it was only a few bites, by making something better than I could get anywhere else. Started moving more when I increased the level of responsibility I could handle. Standing for long periods of time is no problem anymore. I take walks now. I do little tiny things to increase my movement. I've regained huge levels of strength and flexibility. Mostly just by listening to my body while my mind was making no sense.
So much of depression revolves around building up new neural processes in the brain so that when pleasurable things happen, you can feel that pleasure, and feel that it feels good, and even enjoy it. It's not a scary thing, and the rug isn't going to get pulled out from under me whenever I am happy. I stopped looking at how things could potentially get ruined, and when they were good, I stopped and enjoyed the goodness of it. Even when the only thing I could do was give it acknowledgement, and couldn't really feel good or happy about anything, the acknowledgement of it led to being able to genuinely feel it.
As the levels of acceptance on that point increased, the panic attacks, nightmares, mood swings and the rest of it started decreasing. Slowly I started to feel human again, felt like I could be present and in my own body without freaking out about judgement or rejection. Slowly started learning that the world is an ok place to be. By and large, people are nice on an individual level. They are pretty accepting too. We walk around afraid of each other because the TV tells us that we aren't pretty enough and we don't have enough stuff. No one will like us unless we look a certain way, talk a certain way, have certain opinions about things. I think on an intellectual level, most of us know that we can reject that, but looking at the political climate in this country, it seems to me that many many many people have internalized this message. Now we scream at each other. We don't have discourse on our airwaves. This is the next level of programming we are getting. If you aren't for us, you are against us, and we can't civilly disagree about anything, if you don't fall in lock step with my way of thinking, we'll go Springer on your ass and create needless drama, chock full of personal attack, while completely ignoring the real problems we may be facing.
Which leads me full circle to the fatty articles. We can go round after round discussing how the Diet Industry is set up to bilk money out of people, not lead them to weight loss (Carnation Instant Breakfast has both more nutrients and fewer calories than Slim Fast), or how our food supply is being poisoned with High-Fructose Corn Syrup, Nutrisweet, preservatives, hormones and anti-biotics. Consider the article throwingstardna posted:
As goes the national agenda, so goes the populace. As goes the deterioration of meaning, so goes our need to bulk up, thicken our skins, add layers of blubbery armor to help add a tiny shred of comfort to protect against the slings and arrows of a maniac world we seem to understand less and less, all while maintaining our God-given sense of denial that we are, in fact, the ones in control of our lives.
...
It's true. We want nothing more than to give it up, to hand over control of our lives and our thinking and our deepest beliefs to the government, to drug companies, to priests and corporations and TV shows and a disappointed and distraught Jesus who, we hope, will tell us what the hell to think, how to behave, what the hell to put in our mouths, our bodies, our minds, our hearts and souls and pants. We gleefully shut down our intuition, or deeper knowing, because such intense cognition takes, you know, work. On the self. And man, do we ever hate that.
On one level, I agree. Much of it comes down to personal responsibility, and doing the hard, difficult work behind the "why?" But the reason so many people DON'T do it, is because it is extremely difficult, and there are no pre-defined answers. You have to find your own answer, and in our constant need for instant gratification, if the answer isn't sitting there with fireworks on top, we get lazy or discouraged or traumatized into stopping the search and giving in to defeat. So many people complain about how their lives are wasting away, all they do is watch tv. They have every opportunity to go out and do something about it, to do something real with their lives, but that's hard work. Nothing wrong with not wanting to bite off more than you can chew, I certainly learned more than I ever wanted to about the human psyche, but to say, "Just take some personal responsibility about it and things will be fine," is just as simplistic as drinking a shake twice a day. Personal responsibility is hard. And the reward for honestly trying to look at that is great, but its also immensely personal, and 9 times out of 10 won't result in external validation. I think that's hard for a lot of people. They want a cheerleading squad in their corner, who doesn't? But maybe if they'd had that cheerleading squad to begin with, they wouldn't have the problems they are now cornered by. A good support system is worth its weight in gold. But it's not something everyone has, and from my own experience, there were some cold, lonely, bitter moments in there in spite of the fact that my own cheerleading squad rules.
Take some personal responsibility. I want to slap people who say that. Go look into the void, and try to make sure it doesn't look back. Then after that, be completely ok with yourself. Yeah. I'll get right on that. I still have a lot of anger. And so much of it is tangled between the personal (crying in the closet at 10 on a pre-pubescent diet of judgement from my parents) and the societal (fuck an acting career, you just aren't hot enough, fuck getting a man, you aren't hot enough, forget about a family, see point #2). Oh, and by the way, as a fat girl, you are representative of all fat girls, and together we will remove the stigma, and the shame, and one day everyone will love us, because this is just a fad, and in the Renaissance, we were the ideal. Yeah. Ok. Fuck that. You know what that includes? "I'm Fine. I may be invisible, but I'm fine."
What if you aren't fine? What if things aren't ok? No one wants to hear that message, but that's where I was, and what I was doing was trying to find a way for things to be ok. Because really, no matter what is happening, as long as you are alive, you are ok. You are ok until you die, and then you're dead.
All we are is time. So do you want to spend your time looking for formulaic answers that don't work, or can you be brave enough to go to the place where there are no answers, sit, and see what comes to find you. I certainly didn't do this to lose weight. I did it to find my mind again. I did it to be able to live. The first 28 years of my life were geared towards surviving. Then at 29 I decided I wanted more. I wanted to actually live. I'm in the process of discovering what that means to me. It's not easy, but it's where I am, and I can only move forward from where I actually am, not where I want to be.
The weight loss, believe it or not, was incidental. But it taught me a lot about how we carry around our drama, our issues, our defenses. I learned where the tender, sore, defenseless spots were, and how to care and nurture them instead of rubbing them with sandpaper to make them more raw. I have been overwhelmingly blessed with meeting great people who are accepting and laughing and sweet. I am learning more and more everyday that the world is an ok place to be, in spite of what we are fed day after day about fear.
And just to illustrate my point, from the National Institute of Mental Health
A brain chemical recently found to boost trust appears to work by reducing activity and weakening connections in fear-processing circuitry, a brain imaging study at the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has discovered. Scans of the hormone oxytocin's effect on human brain function reveal that it quells the brain's fear hub, the amygdala, and its brainstem relay stations in response to fearful stimuli. The work at NIMH and a collaborating site in Germany suggests new approaches to treating diseases thought to involve amygdala dysfunction and social fear, such as social phobia, autism, and possibly schizophrenia, report Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, M.D., Ph.D., NIMH Genes Cognition and Psychosis Program, and colleagues, in the December 7, 2005 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.
Huh. More trust = less fear. Who knew. All things being equal, I suppose my experiences from this year sort of illustrate the point, at least to me. I just know I am happier now that I don't spend every day drowning in fear. No antidepressants. No therapy. Just me, being who I am, and being ok with that. I feel superficial and shallow for letting my own appearance fuck with me so much, but I feel ok knowing that its a process, and I don't have to be completely fine with myself today. I work on accepting what I can, changing what I can, and letting go of what is outside of my control. Outside of that, I move from day to day with ease and relaxation, knowing that I am truly taking care of myself, and that I am truly worth it.
Because hey, I'm pretty enough, and I have more than enough stuff. Beyond that, I know and love great people, and I am rich in the things that are truly important.
Here's to the path:
Last year was a train wreck for me. The people closest to me, in my day to day life can attest to this, as they probably saw me a total of 5 times from January to August. I didn't leave the house for months. I had quit my high paying, higher stress networking job after the last countless massive nervous breakdown. I stopped therapy, and quit zoloft cold turkey, in a dangerous and poorly thought out move that led to a couple of psychotic breaks and more tears than you can imagine. When I quit, I was topping out at 280 lbs.
Nothing in my life was working. I mean, absolutely nothing. I had about $4K in savings, $6k in my 401K, and about $6K of free space on my credit cards. So I quit my job and lived on that for almost 8 months. I quit going out, quit spending money, (except I kept the digital cable and high speed internet, two moves that I think have contributed quite largely to sending me to the poor house these days, but I digress..) and decided to just stop everything until I could figure out what was wrong, and what I could do to make it ok again.
I couldn't leave the house without having a massive panic attack, being out in public with my friends was physically painful. I was afraid of everything, and had no idea where the nameless fear had come from, or why it was there. Life became about getting through the next 5 minutes. There were days when "one day at a time" seemed like far to large a chunk of time to deal with, and it became, "how do I sit here for five minutes without OD-ing on Ambien, or some drug cocktail?" I wasn't sleeping, and the insomnia was getting Fight Club bad. I still have the Ditech, Sleep Foam, and Girls Gone Wild Commercials memorized, as that's about the only thing they show on late night 4AM, the sleeplessness is physically painful, television.
I had more problems than I knew how to deal with. I wanted to run, just get in my car and keep driving, leave all my stuff, all my problems, all of everything behind me and just disappear. Problem is, I had tried that a few years earlier, and ended up coming back to Denver anyway, broke, and still broken. So much of that type of action involved running away from problems that just get carried with me anyway, so I guess I was forcing myself to sit and stare into that darkness, confront that fear, and either be done with it, or have it done with me. I stopped answering the phone and the door, and I sat. And thought. And did some writing. Some drawing. Thought about everything I had covered in therapy about abusive homes, and the kinds of decisions coming from that place leads you to make. Thought about the differences between reacting and choosing. Tried really hard to relax. Come to terms with myself, all the things I love and hate about myself, and waited to see which one would win.
I can't delineate the process at all. It was like a never ending mental film strip of trauma. But as long as I didn't have to leave the house at all, I could deal with it. Then it got worse, and I felt myself drowning in the house. Started leaving anyway. Started summoning the courage to face the world as it is now, rather than living in the past, retraumatizing myself for no good reason, and trying to get out of my own head enough to see the outside world again.
It was a weird kind of patience with myself, with these random markers lining the path, little mental post-its saying, "Don't go there," or "Been there, done that, don't need to do it again." No one gets a map to living their own life, but I started seeing a map behind me of all the choices I had made, and the reasons for making them. Slowly I started making progress. Started breathing again. Started bathing again. Started eating regularly again. I would go for days without eating much, if anything, subsisting mainly on Diet Coke, Coffee, and cigarrettes. Smoked a WHOLE lot of weed. Tried to figure out where the zoloft ended and I began. Started losing weight. Kept on healing.
Mostly I think, it was the mental processes. I carry most of my weight in front of me, a nice shield to prevent people from getting too close, masked by a jolly exterior, typical cheerful fat girl, no problems here, no, I am totally comfortable with who I am, and if you ask me any different I'll lie so smoothly no lie detector in the world would tell you differently. You just aren't getting in there. Relaxing that was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. But I had lived the first 29 years of my life like that, thank you dysfunctional, Machievellian, childhood, and it wasn't working for me anymore, and I knew it.
The hardest thing you can ever do in this world is go out of the house vulnerable, hurting, and HONEST about it. Probably the number one lie ever told is the answer to the question, "how are you?". Most people will say "Fine" without batting an eye, regardless of whether or not they are fine. I was not fine, but I was getting more comfortable with being where I was rather than always staring at where I wanted to be, then beating myself up for not being there. THAT was a massive struggle. I have an overachievement syndrome of some kind, I guess, where I am never doing as well as I could be, not living up to that potential. It's hard to actively stop lying to yourself. Especially when the "lie" is, "I'll be a whole person someday."
Maybe there are parts of me that will always be broken. That's ok. I have learned to be patient with myself, my thoughts, and my moods. The no money thing was kind of nice. It kept me on a schedule of sorts, as in, "You don't have the money or the inclination to do this forever, so do please get something out of it, then move on. Don't drown in this."
Finally got up, got out of the house for job hunting. Finally got a job, and released a lot of stress when money started coming in again. Within a month I had moved out of the house, releasing the stress of renting from my overscrupulous parents while going through something so intimately haunting and devastating that I couldn't be around them without screaming. Somehow managed to prevent a complete estrangement there...while they have their faults, they are my parents, and cutting ties is too extreme for me.
I went from laying on the couch, prone, and crying for 20 hours a day, to up, going to work everyday, packing and moving. I had slowly been going out more and more, and since I've been in Boulder I've been going out, mostly comfortable in public, with strangers, and being open enough to start letting people in, and letting them get close again.
Throughout this whole year, I've been steadily losing weight. I now only have 2 pairs of pants I can wear without a belt, the rest just slide right off. Now I'm down to 216 lbs. (That's 64 lbs for those of you doing the math. Want to be really impressed? Grab 6 10lb bags of flour and haul them around for the full effect. It's massive.) Didn't really do much for diet/exercise per se, except I stopped eating out, finding the energy to stand up and cook something for myself gave me activity and a way to care for myself that was solid and concrete. It was more to battle the depression than the weight. I still don't have much of an appetite, so making really good, culinary temptations gave me something to do, and made it easier to eat, even if it was only a few bites, by making something better than I could get anywhere else. Started moving more when I increased the level of responsibility I could handle. Standing for long periods of time is no problem anymore. I take walks now. I do little tiny things to increase my movement. I've regained huge levels of strength and flexibility. Mostly just by listening to my body while my mind was making no sense.
So much of depression revolves around building up new neural processes in the brain so that when pleasurable things happen, you can feel that pleasure, and feel that it feels good, and even enjoy it. It's not a scary thing, and the rug isn't going to get pulled out from under me whenever I am happy. I stopped looking at how things could potentially get ruined, and when they were good, I stopped and enjoyed the goodness of it. Even when the only thing I could do was give it acknowledgement, and couldn't really feel good or happy about anything, the acknowledgement of it led to being able to genuinely feel it.
As the levels of acceptance on that point increased, the panic attacks, nightmares, mood swings and the rest of it started decreasing. Slowly I started to feel human again, felt like I could be present and in my own body without freaking out about judgement or rejection. Slowly started learning that the world is an ok place to be. By and large, people are nice on an individual level. They are pretty accepting too. We walk around afraid of each other because the TV tells us that we aren't pretty enough and we don't have enough stuff. No one will like us unless we look a certain way, talk a certain way, have certain opinions about things. I think on an intellectual level, most of us know that we can reject that, but looking at the political climate in this country, it seems to me that many many many people have internalized this message. Now we scream at each other. We don't have discourse on our airwaves. This is the next level of programming we are getting. If you aren't for us, you are against us, and we can't civilly disagree about anything, if you don't fall in lock step with my way of thinking, we'll go Springer on your ass and create needless drama, chock full of personal attack, while completely ignoring the real problems we may be facing.
Which leads me full circle to the fatty articles. We can go round after round discussing how the Diet Industry is set up to bilk money out of people, not lead them to weight loss (Carnation Instant Breakfast has both more nutrients and fewer calories than Slim Fast), or how our food supply is being poisoned with High-Fructose Corn Syrup, Nutrisweet, preservatives, hormones and anti-biotics. Consider the article throwingstardna posted:
As goes the national agenda, so goes the populace. As goes the deterioration of meaning, so goes our need to bulk up, thicken our skins, add layers of blubbery armor to help add a tiny shred of comfort to protect against the slings and arrows of a maniac world we seem to understand less and less, all while maintaining our God-given sense of denial that we are, in fact, the ones in control of our lives.
...
It's true. We want nothing more than to give it up, to hand over control of our lives and our thinking and our deepest beliefs to the government, to drug companies, to priests and corporations and TV shows and a disappointed and distraught Jesus who, we hope, will tell us what the hell to think, how to behave, what the hell to put in our mouths, our bodies, our minds, our hearts and souls and pants. We gleefully shut down our intuition, or deeper knowing, because such intense cognition takes, you know, work. On the self. And man, do we ever hate that.
On one level, I agree. Much of it comes down to personal responsibility, and doing the hard, difficult work behind the "why?" But the reason so many people DON'T do it, is because it is extremely difficult, and there are no pre-defined answers. You have to find your own answer, and in our constant need for instant gratification, if the answer isn't sitting there with fireworks on top, we get lazy or discouraged or traumatized into stopping the search and giving in to defeat. So many people complain about how their lives are wasting away, all they do is watch tv. They have every opportunity to go out and do something about it, to do something real with their lives, but that's hard work. Nothing wrong with not wanting to bite off more than you can chew, I certainly learned more than I ever wanted to about the human psyche, but to say, "Just take some personal responsibility about it and things will be fine," is just as simplistic as drinking a shake twice a day. Personal responsibility is hard. And the reward for honestly trying to look at that is great, but its also immensely personal, and 9 times out of 10 won't result in external validation. I think that's hard for a lot of people. They want a cheerleading squad in their corner, who doesn't? But maybe if they'd had that cheerleading squad to begin with, they wouldn't have the problems they are now cornered by. A good support system is worth its weight in gold. But it's not something everyone has, and from my own experience, there were some cold, lonely, bitter moments in there in spite of the fact that my own cheerleading squad rules.
Take some personal responsibility. I want to slap people who say that. Go look into the void, and try to make sure it doesn't look back. Then after that, be completely ok with yourself. Yeah. I'll get right on that. I still have a lot of anger. And so much of it is tangled between the personal (crying in the closet at 10 on a pre-pubescent diet of judgement from my parents) and the societal (fuck an acting career, you just aren't hot enough, fuck getting a man, you aren't hot enough, forget about a family, see point #2). Oh, and by the way, as a fat girl, you are representative of all fat girls, and together we will remove the stigma, and the shame, and one day everyone will love us, because this is just a fad, and in the Renaissance, we were the ideal. Yeah. Ok. Fuck that. You know what that includes? "I'm Fine. I may be invisible, but I'm fine."
What if you aren't fine? What if things aren't ok? No one wants to hear that message, but that's where I was, and what I was doing was trying to find a way for things to be ok. Because really, no matter what is happening, as long as you are alive, you are ok. You are ok until you die, and then you're dead.
All we are is time. So do you want to spend your time looking for formulaic answers that don't work, or can you be brave enough to go to the place where there are no answers, sit, and see what comes to find you. I certainly didn't do this to lose weight. I did it to find my mind again. I did it to be able to live. The first 28 years of my life were geared towards surviving. Then at 29 I decided I wanted more. I wanted to actually live. I'm in the process of discovering what that means to me. It's not easy, but it's where I am, and I can only move forward from where I actually am, not where I want to be.
The weight loss, believe it or not, was incidental. But it taught me a lot about how we carry around our drama, our issues, our defenses. I learned where the tender, sore, defenseless spots were, and how to care and nurture them instead of rubbing them with sandpaper to make them more raw. I have been overwhelmingly blessed with meeting great people who are accepting and laughing and sweet. I am learning more and more everyday that the world is an ok place to be, in spite of what we are fed day after day about fear.
And just to illustrate my point, from the National Institute of Mental Health
A brain chemical recently found to boost trust appears to work by reducing activity and weakening connections in fear-processing circuitry, a brain imaging study at the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has discovered. Scans of the hormone oxytocin's effect on human brain function reveal that it quells the brain's fear hub, the amygdala, and its brainstem relay stations in response to fearful stimuli. The work at NIMH and a collaborating site in Germany suggests new approaches to treating diseases thought to involve amygdala dysfunction and social fear, such as social phobia, autism, and possibly schizophrenia, report Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, M.D., Ph.D., NIMH Genes Cognition and Psychosis Program, and colleagues, in the December 7, 2005 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.
Huh. More trust = less fear. Who knew. All things being equal, I suppose my experiences from this year sort of illustrate the point, at least to me. I just know I am happier now that I don't spend every day drowning in fear. No antidepressants. No therapy. Just me, being who I am, and being ok with that. I feel superficial and shallow for letting my own appearance fuck with me so much, but I feel ok knowing that its a process, and I don't have to be completely fine with myself today. I work on accepting what I can, changing what I can, and letting go of what is outside of my control. Outside of that, I move from day to day with ease and relaxation, knowing that I am truly taking care of myself, and that I am truly worth it.
Because hey, I'm pretty enough, and I have more than enough stuff. Beyond that, I know and love great people, and I am rich in the things that are truly important.
Here's to the path: