The view from above

I want it.

And today, I got myself a guru who will help me get it: a dietitian.

I'd been mulling over the idea for a little while -- a year of unexplained creeping weight gain will do that to you, particularly if you have a complicated relationship with food. There is, of course, much more to that story, but suffice it to say that after these last two weeks of eating a traveler's diet and seeing the results on the scale, despite my best efforts to manage the damage while I was away, I decided I'd had enough of going it alone. I have too much on my metaphorical plate to worry about -- thesis, marriage, family -- to make room for food anxiety.

Not that food anxiety is totally separate from all of those things; I dare say it's a common element among all three, even if it's not at the surface of each. In the here and now, though, I need a guru who will take on the day-to-day questions and concerns about food with me so I can focus on the less straightforward business of sorting out my life as a whole.

For just shy of a year, I've been talking to a different counselor about the things that have gotten me down. And despite multiple attempts to ask him to show me the bigger picture, the map -- hell, even the path -- he's managed to get around my question: what are the problems and what do I do with them?


I didn't see the pattern for several months, which baffles me. But it's been a confusing year, one in which I second-guessed my instincts many times over. In recent weeks, I started bringing up the food anxiety in our sessions, outlined its severity, its years of entrenchment. "I know it's easy to focus on that since it has a handle that's easy to grasp," the counselor said. But nothing more.

So on Monday, I told him I was going to find a dietitian.

I met with her today, and from my first impression, I think she's going to be great. I felt better after talking to her, felt like we could tackle the anxiety, felt like she had a plan for me even if we didn't get into the nitty-gritty details all at once. I know she can't be the person to answer the larger questions on life for me, but she'll help me clear away some of the debris on the path. Which is what I've wanted all along from the other guy.

Maybe it's time to clear him away too, in favor of someone else -- a search process I'm hugely reluctant to begin, especially since it's taken so long to determine how dissatisfied I am with my current counselor. How can I prevent this from happening again? What if the next person -- and the next one, and the next -- are worse? Am I really willing to throw away a year's working relationship? I don't know.

But that view.


I want it.

Photos taken at the High Line, New York.

Ahem

You know when you get a backlog of stuff you want to blog about but life gets in the way? And then you try to pick up from where you left off and your brain laughs at you?

Hi.

I'm just going to start with where I am now -- home, for one. After D.C. Part the First, the Toronto Interlude, D.C. Part the Second, and a wedding in New York tacked on at the very end, I'm back in my own time zone. I am cried out, danced out, and slept (on other people's couches) out, and I do not want to see another plane unless it comes with a one-way ticket to a state of bliss.

D and I wandered part of Riverside Park on Monday (we had several hours to kill before our early evening flight). It was the first piece of alone-time we had since I'd left, and it felt like I'd been away from him for months. Before my trip, we'd been having ups and downs with each other because of all the May-hem (and, in general, most of 2010), so it was a strange feeling to walk hand-in-hand, connected but also not.

I found a curlicue in one of the monuments just before we left in search of lunch. I can't remember if I pointed it out to D or if I just snapped the picture in silence.

The week's been okay, though. We finally pinned the hems on the remaining two curtains, which I'm hoping to work on tomorrow while D finishes putting up the brackets for the garage shelves, and we picked some new recipes to try this weekend. Last night, we watched a light movie together, the first romantic comedy in months. And tonight -- well, tonight we have no plans. Maybe that's a good thing; it gives us flexibility, the chance to be spontaneous. But the possibility of silence scares me more than a little.

Landing

I've done a lot of that in the last week. First in D.C., where Marketing Sis lives -- several months ago, I'd planned a visit, hoping, among other things, to catch a performance of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring at the Kennedy Center with her. (We have a more than slightly irreverent appreciation for this piece, but that's a story for another post.) Arrived last Tuesday. Took off again Friday for Canada. Came back for the remainder of my visit Sunday.

My grandmother passed away just before I was supposed to come to D.C. I'd meant to write something to honor her nearer to the date of her death, but I knew the stress of travel prep would keep me from doing that properly. So here I am, trying to find words, but none are coming. There are images, snatches of beautiful things other people said at her funeral last weekend. Still, this isn't the right moment for me to think of her in the way I'd like. Perhaps in a few days. I'm leaving again on Friday to go to a wedding in New York. Once that's over, once I've landed for good in Seattle, I can do this. It seemed important, though, to mark her departure sooner in this space; hence these sentences.

Landing here twice in one week has let me remember my first trip alone to this city too. I was moving here for the summer to intern at a magazine, with only the address of a university dorm anchoring me to the world beyond the airport. The rice cooker my mother insisted on letting me borrow -- there was no stove, just a microwave and fridge in the efficiency I'd found -- didn't fit in my luggage, to her dismay. But it wasn't until my plane was gliding in over the Potomac, giving me a clear view of the Capitol dome, that I started to feel panic. "What have I gotten myself into," I whispered as we touched down, suddenly doubting my credibility, eligibility, whatever had supposedly earned me the right to be there. I'd never held a paid writing job before.

Returning so many years later, following the same trajectory past the Capitol, remembering my fear on the plane's final approach -- it was an odd feeling. I still write, in a slightly different form. And there's fear that goes with it, not so much about the prospect of doing it but whether I can sustain it, given its emotional demands. What have I gotten myself into? I'm still not sure. But I have to believe in it, or try my best to, even when words refuse to stick to the page.

So today, even without a clear sense of what I'm trying to say, I attempt.

So, about May

That was kind of a wash, wasn't it?

That's sort of how I feel, looking at it from June. Not that I want to negate the good things that happened (irises, foster placements, and that random rainbow), but seriously, May, you threw some rather unwieldy wrenches into the mix, and I'm beginning to wonder what I have to do to make it stop. I don't think I can deal with another month like that, nor can my family or my marriage. Or, for that matter, my thesis, but that at least can be put on hold -- which is essentially what's happened for the last week, given the new chaos that erupted during that time. The situation's not bloggable yet, but suffice it to say that it's not pretty and will require some time to resolve.

So shape up, okay, 2010? These last few weeks haven't been representing you very well at all.

I've never been a willing roll-with-the-punches kind of girl, but I've done it out of necessity. That strategy is all that seems to be working in the short term these days. It's not sustainable, though. So I'm asking myself, what is?

I've asked that question for a while now, deciding to focus on small efforts, trying to push back without shoving -- because that doesn't work either, not with people, not with life. And I know I'm making mistakes, ones that make me want to give up trying because they cause frustration not only to me but to the people in my life. My husband, my sisters, my parents; the people who know me but don't know what to think of me or do with me in this state of flux as they too struggle with things like May. I'm tired; they're tired. And when I sense they're about to tire out, I back away, afraid they'll say, "Enough! Too much!" -- and leave. Which doesn't exactly help me with the learning process.

Give me the quotidian. Let me work with these challenges first, not the big ones that were May. I know; I don't really get to call these shots and May already happened. But I'm asking -- hell, begging -- whoever is in charge of the universe to cease and desist, or at the very least, dial down the intensity. Because no number of rainbows is going to help me make up the balance if it continues like this.