The Spirit of Christmas

I have a lot of Grinch themed Christmas stuff that I have received over the last ten years or so.  It isn't that a bunch of other people were implying I am a Grinch.  It was a self-assumed role.  The year 2007 was the nail in the coffin of my taking on the role of the Grinch, but it was only the final nail.

At the time, I blamed it on Nana's death.  It was easy for other people to understand that I was grieving not only her death, but also the death of what the Joyce side of my family structure looked like at the time.  It is not a big family.  My grandparents had two children, my dad and his brother, Mark.  When I was in college, Mark was killed in a trucking accident.  He never had any children.  Nana's death meant that our little family was literally just my dad, step-mom, their two kids, and me.

But, my lack of spirit didn't start then, it had slowly happened over the four years or so before that.  In 2003, Nana made a pretty big request of me.  She wanted me to buy a property outside of Memphis for her and her boyfriend to rent.  She had always wanted to "move to the country".  I have no idea why.  She grew up on a farm (very poor) and always spoke of it as something she did not enjoy.  Maybe she was trying to re-write memories of what being in the country meant.  A couple of years after they moved into the house I bought in Covington, she later said she regretted being so far away from everybody because it meant less visiting with us.  I digress.

I found her a house, and they moved in July of 2003.  They both signed a lease.  The house was in my name.  She told me at the time that she was afraid Buddy would try to claim they were common law married and take the house after she died.  I told her she was being ridiculous.  He took care of her.  He took her to all of her dialysis treatments.  He even helped her with her catheter when she needed it.  As time passed, and the dialysis would make her weak, she even signed a medical power of attorney for Buddy to be able to take her blood draws to the doctor for her.  In hindsight, she should not have done that.  In hindsight, she should not have trusted him.  In hindsight, she was right.

After Nana moved to Covington, things changed.  Since she was an hour away, I didn't get to take her to her doctor appointments anymore.  She still came to the same doctors in Memphis, but Buddy brought her.  I should have insisted on going too, in retrospect.  She didn't want him to go back to talk with the doctor with her, which meant that she was the only one in the room and I don't think we (as a family) ever really knew the state of her health after that point.  I don't think she was trying to deceive us, but she would always forget to ask her questions or forget what they told her.

We all, as a family, didn't see her as much as before, and Buddy took on a much bigger role in her life as the person responsible for her care while on dialysis.  When her numbers with the treatment were weird, we were being informed second or third hand information about it and what was going on with her kidneys.  And, in general, she just seemed more removed from all of us.  When she asked if I thought it was ok to sign the medical power of attorney for Buddy to be able to drop off her blood because she was so tired after treatment she didn't have the energy to walk in the clinic, how do you say no to that?  What I didn't realize, what none of us realized, was that meant that when she got sick and was dying in the hospital, Buddy was the only one with the authority to make medical decisions for her (and he stopped answering the phone).

But I am getting ahead of myself.  Buying the house in Covington came with a house note.  Nana hadn't had a house note since the 90s.  I don't think she really realized how much even paying half of the note (she and Buddy split it) would make a difference since she was on a fixed income with her social security check.  In addition, I don't think she realized how expensive all of the drugs she would need to be on would end up being.  Moving to Covington meant that she didn't have the expendable piece of income she had before.  Which put a lot of financial stress on me, particularly at Christmas.

Nana had always loved all of us with food and gifts.  We never required that of her, and it certainly wouldn't have changed how we felt about her, but it was just something she did.  I remember when I was a kid, she would just hand me the Sears catalog and tell me to circle whatever I wanted Santa Claus to bring.  And I shit you not, if I circled every damn toy on every damn page, that was what was under the tree on Christmas.  I guess it was a good thing I was picky about my toys or I would have had way more than the play room could have held.

But that's just how she was.  She spoiled all of us.  Not being able to spoil us on Christmas was something she couldn't handle.  And she made another really big request of me.  Buy all the Christmas for everybody.  Still make it magical for the family and particularly my siblings.  But with me footing the bill.  And, since she was not well, she was not up to cooking like she used to either.  So, buy all the Christmas, and cook the food.  She didn't want the spirit of Christmas to end just because she couldn't afford it, or because she didn't have the energy to make it happen.  She wanted me to do this for her.  And I couldn't say no.

For me, Christmas changed into this really stressful time.  I was 27 in 2003.  It isn't like I was a child anymore.  But it also wasn't like I was a grandmother who had been cooking for 50 years, or like I had some really well-paying job.  I had student loans, and a car note, and all of the other bills that go along with be a single 27-year-old woman living on her own and trying to make ends meet.  It ultimately ended with bankruptcy.  The financial part you can recover from.  It was a long time ago.  But I was also emotionally bankrupt.  Whatever Christmas had once meant to me, slowly started leaving in 2003, and got progressively worse because of what happened in 2005.

Christmas of 2005 should probably be a fond memory for me as it was one of the last Christmas holidays I spent with Nana.  I have vague, cloudy memories of us all being at her house in Covington, eating dinner, opening presents.  I remember her Christmas village was in the living room.  They are all wispy little flashes of visual memories, not anything specific of her or anybody or anything else.  Because of what happened when I was leaving.

My car was loaded with everything I needed to take home with me, and I had hugged everyone and walked outside.  Buddy had followed me out there which was weird, but whatever.  This part of Christmas 2005, I remember vividly.  I gave him a hug and when I pulled away, that man tried to stick his tongue in my mouth.  I was shocked.  I remember driving down the road leaving her house and calling Stephen because I was so upset.  Stephen thought it was hilarious which was not helpful.  What was I supposed to do?  Why did he think I wanted him to do that?  What had I done to give him that kind of message?  I mean, I fully realize now that he was a pervert who took advantage of a weird situation and it had nothing to do with anything I did.  But at the time, I didn't even know what to think about it.

I never told Nana.  I knew she would murder him.  Poison probably.  But she would absolutely murder him.  Not only because he was supposed to be WITH HER, but also because she loved me and would murder anybody who tried to force themselves on me.  And it changed things even more.  Because it meant that I really didn't want to go to Covington and possibly be left in a room by myself with him.  I ended up taking a job that required weekly travel in March of 2006, so it was more like a built in excuse because I was barely home anyhow.

But we talked on the phone a lot.  And he managed to make that awkward and weird for both of us too.  She would call me and say hello and then I would hear him yell in the background, "Tell her to get her legs out of the air and talk to you for a minute!"  Nana would just sort of laugh that awkward "I'm-not-sure-what-else-to-do" laugh.  I would say something to her about how that was not appropriate and not cool that he obviously thought I was a slut or something.  AND, I had literally just had sex for the first time *in my life* at the age of 29, so he could think a lot of shit, but at the time I was absolutely not a slut (no comments from the peanut gallery, I said *at the time*).

So it made for a very odd situation whenever I did go visit.  We all (as a family) would sometimes meet them for dinner somewhere, and we all went out there as a family to celebrate birthdays, mother's day, father's day, and things like that.  I tried to make sure that it wasn't just me going to the house, which I am sure confused Nana.  I remember in the summer of 2006, she wanted me to come out there to visit, just me and her.  Buddy had planted a strawberry patch, a bunch of fruit trees, a blackberry vine, and a vegetable garden.  She wanted me to see it all and take some things to the family.  So I agreed.

While I was there, she suggested I go out and see everything growing.  So I helped her walk out there with me to look at everything.  When we got back inside, she mentioned that we had forgotten to look at the blackberry vine which was behind the garage.  I tried to get her to walk back out there with me, but she was too tired.  "Just go with Buddy.  He will show you."  I tried to say no.  It wasn't a big deal.  Some other time.  But, of course, he insisted.  And proceeded to chase me around the blackberry vine trying to touch me again.  I went back inside.

So my very last Christmas with Nana in 2006, I don't really remember.  I remember buying and wrapping all the gifts for everybody else.  Cooking food to take.  But I don't remember anything else.  That may have been the year I had to drive from Covington to Hernando from the Joyce celebration to my mom's house.  I did have to do that one year and it was like a road trip, but I don't know if it was that year or not.  I should ask my step-mom for some photos from Christmas of 2006.  Maybe I will remember something.

And then she died.  Christmas of 2007 was more of a relief than anything else.  Just call me a Grinch.  I didn't care.  I didn't have to stress out about spoiling everyone with money I didn't really have.  I didn't have to worry about seeing Buddy.  He did the thing that Nana thought he would do.  He called an attorney after she died and found out that common law marriage isn't legal in Tennessee.  And then he spouted off a bunch of lies at my dad about how I had stolen her house because it was suddenly and mysteriously in my name, *and* her money, because she didn't have any.  "She did it at the bank where she works!"

Yet, at the time, I was working for a software company and travelling every week, and none of the accounts he was referencing (the mortgage and her checking account) were even at the bank where I had worked until 2006, nor had they ever been.  He seemed baffled by the lease he had himself signed with Nana when they moved in.  He sent me nasty letters about how he wasn't going to pay the rent because I could just pay it with all of the money I stole.  He was exactly who she thought he was.  He didn't even go to her funeral.

I spent a lot of years being a Grinch.  I tried to get both sides of my family to exchange names instead of everybody buying for everybody else.  We still do that with the Joyce family.  But it was mostly because we decided in 2010 or so that we would rather spend the money on a family trip than Christmas.  Mom's side name exchange went awry too many times.  There is always someone on her side that just didn't put forth the effort and someone got screwed.  I still do a lot of cooking, but it isn't like it was when Christmas was in Covington.

There have been different points in time where I have been in the spirit of giving and did the Angel Tree gifts for underprivileged children, or the Silver Bells for needy seniors.  I've even put up a tree a couple of times.  I've baked pumpkin bread for my coworkers.  I've tried to get it back, whatever that magic is.  But in December of 2016, I tried to die of sepsis, and literally had a bowel perforation during Christmas.  In December of 2017, I was recovering from the shit bag take down surgery after spending a year in that shitstorm (literally).  In December of 2018, Dave had a pulmonary embolism and tried to die on me.  And now, here we are in December of 2020, global pandemic and I'm doing chemo.  Merry Christmas, pass the bourbon.

I don't want to put so much burden on my niece to bring back this magic for me.  But she is right at that age where Christmas starts to be really exciting.  Next year, Santa probably won't be so terrifying, and her little eyes will light up with all of the lights and cookies and presents and love and joy.  And maybe...

“Maybe Christmas (he thought) doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas perhaps means a little bit more.” — The Grinch

Unremarkable And 100% Normal

I went to see my endocrinologist about a month ago.  It was my routine appointment (that is usually every 6 months or so), but it was a new doctor (the other one retired early).  I had been anticipating going to see her because I was anxious to have her run extra blood work and give me an overall checkup because I have been exhausted since July.

I mean, at the time, I had mono and it was completely expected that I would be exhausted for a while.  I spent two weeks pretty much in the bed.  I spent two more weeks only working part time hours and sleeping the rest of the day.  My regular doctor told me if I took it easy and got some rest that I should recover.  But if I didn't seriously get some rest, it would linger.

I took her for her word.  I did rest.  I didn't overdo anything.  I underachieved.  I know it's hard to believe because I am usually stoking 85 coals in the fire, but I really didn't do anything.  My husband took care of the house.  The projects (kitchen and bathrooms) that we had been so diligently working on just went into a state of limbo.  When my husband started walking 2 miles a day to get back into shape, I went a few times but ultimately decided it was too much.  If I wasn't at work or asleep, I have pretty much been sitting in my recliner.

So here we are 6 months later and I feel like whatever lingering fatigue leftover from mono should be gone.  I had decided in my mind that something must be off in my vitamin levels.  Since my husband and I had gastric sleeve surgery nearly six years ago, it's really easy for some vitamin or mineral level to get out of whack.  We take a lot of supplements, but over the years have had to change up the mix several times to get everything to stay around normal.

So I asked her to run several extra things on my blood work, and she wanted me to have an MRI to check in on my pituitary tumor.  It was not visible on my last MRI, but that was over 10 years ago.  Since I have some unexplained symptoms, it had been so long, and she was new to my case, she wanted a look.  I went and had the MRI on Friday.

Today, the radiology report was available online and the blood work came back weeks ago.  All of my vitamin levels are in range.  Nothing is out of whack with that.  The radiology report noted that my pituitary is still misshapen (as it was in the last MRI I had), but the tumor is not visible and overall my brain scan was unremarkable.  They didn't only look at my pituitary, he noted that everything in my brain was normal.

So here we are.  "Nothing" is wrong.  But I am tired all the time and have the motivation of a rock.  Not just regarding the unfinished projects on the house, but for pretty much anything.  I do what I absolutely have to do, and the rest is falling by the wayside.  I feel like I am disappointing people, but I am sure that is only in my mind.

I wasn't sleeping very well, so I decided maybe it was because I was drinking an afternoon coffee at work.  It was mostly as a pick me up because I am so tired in the afternoons, but I sort of felt like if it was affecting my sleep, it was keeping me in a pretty vicious loop.  So I cut out the afternoon caffeine.  This usually means that by the time I go to bed (at least on work days), I am super exhausted.  But I am not having trouble going to sleep (or staying asleep).

I started questioning if I needed a new pillow, or maybe we needed a new mattress.  The thing is that I am not uncomfortable.  Before we bought this mattress, I woke up aching all the time.  Like I had to get out of the bed because continuing to lay there was painful to my hips, neck, and back.  I don't wake up like that now.  But I am still tired all the dame time.

I am supposed to go back to the endocrinologist on January 9th.  I anticipate she is going to pull out my blood work and my MRI results and see the same thing I do: nothing.  But where does that leave me?  Going back to my regular doctor to follow up on mono that should have been resolved months ago?

The only other thing I can think of that could be a problem is my blood sugar and insulin levels.  I have hyperinsulinemia, which means my body overproduces insulin when I eat sugar or carbs.  So, if I eat sugar/carbs, my blood sugar spikes, my body spikes insulin (more than I even need), so my blood sugar drops.  I will get the shakes and feel kind of faint which is easily resolved with eating some sugar, but that just starts the whole process over again.  I don't usually eat a lot of carbs without something else to balance out what my body is doing (protein, fat, etc), so these drops in my blood sugar don't happen daily.

But I would say they happen weekly either because I only eat something sweet, or I don't eat (too much time has passed).  I am starting to wonder if the highs and lows of my blood sugar roller coaster is causing the fatigue.  I was doing pretty well with staying with a relatively low carb diet until I got mono.  Carbs are my comfort food, so not feeling good usually leads to eating more of them.  That's really the only other thing that is different since July.

I have already decided to go back to low carb after the holidays.  I knew that it would be too difficult to do that at Christmas, so I just eliminated the battle and decided it would make more sense after all of the end of the year celebrations are over.  I am hopeful that maybe it's just my diet that is the problem.  Because at this point, it isn't looking like I have a whole lot of answers coming from anywhere else.

Nice To Meet You (?)

So, I don't post as much here as I once did.  I think part of it has to do with the fact that I am doing better... in a myriad of ways.  When I originally started writing this blog, I literally had a shit bag.  And although we are coming up on the two year anniversary of the shit bag take down, and the three year anniversary of that time I almost died (mostly of stubbornness), it sort of seems like a long time ago at this point.

Every now and then, I will bend or twist the wrong way and I get a shooting pain in the spot where the shit bag was.  There is a surgical hernia repair underneath my scar next to my belly button, and the twinge of pain reminds me of the hernia mesh just under my skin.  I remember everything quite intensely if I look at my scarred up tummy.  But I have kind of arrived at a place of it just being that crazy thing that happened that one time and it really doesn't define that much about me anymore.  My immune system isn't what it used to be, but I guess that is a small price to pay if the alternative is being dead at 40.

The progress I have made with my therapist regarding my eating disorder (along with all the other things we talk about) surprises me sometimes.  Particularly about changing behaviors that have been around for a really long time.  One of the hold-outs is hiding food that I eat.  I have been doing that since I was probably 3 or 4 years old.  There wasn't a trauma (that I am aware of) that caused this.  I don't remember there being a cause.  But I would steal my grandmother's maraschino cherries from the top shelf of the refrigerator door and hide while I ate the whole jar and drank all of the juice.  I was young enough that I had to drag a chair over to the fridge to get to them.  I still don't know what prompted me to do that.  But I am 43 years old and hiding food is still something that I have to make a conscious effort not to do anymore.  

Sometimes I don't win that battle, but most of the time I do.  A year ago, I couldn't make that statement if I was being honest with myself.  At the time, every time my husband left to go somewhere (he was going to a lot more music shows at the time) I would eat until he either came back or I went to bed.  It obviously wasn't bad enough that it caused me to regain weight, but it was something that I was constantly doing.  I tried to identify what emotions were triggering this behavior (at the recommendation of my therapist), but I don't really think it had to do with emotions.  It seemed more opportunistic.  Like, ok, I am alone, I am going to eat all this food I love with no one here to judge me.  At the time, I was also eating food in the car and hiding it.  I am aware that no one was judging me anyhow, but that was just how I thought about it in my mind.  

I sometimes still think about eating and hiding food.  Like, I will think about stopping for fast food and eating it in the car.  I go through this whole planning process of where I would stop, what I would get, how I would get rid of the food wrappers, if someone would notice (like are we supposed to eat dinner when I get home and I would be too full to eat or something), etc.  I spend the time ruminating on all of this long enough that there isn't time to stop for food anymore.  But there was a point in time where I was stopping for the food and hiding that I had eaten it.  So I guess thinking about it but not doing it is an improvement over actually doing it?

I bought a jar of cherries a couple of months ago at the grocery.  I have eaten maybe 10 of them but the jar is still in the fridge.  I don't think about them.  Correction, I don't obsess about them.  But if I feel shaky (which sometimes happens) and I think it may be that my blood sugar has dropped (because sometimes it's protein instead), a few cherries soaked in sugar juice perks me back up pretty quickly.  But I don't want to eat all of the cherries or hide that I ate them.  So, progress I guess?

I have also been feeling better about my body and accepting that where I am at is a good place to be.  Maybe accepting a little bit that I don't have to lose more weight to be considered a weight loss surgery success story.  Learning to live with the fact that I don't have to have the extra skin removed from my body to feel sexy (or even be sexy).  Accepting the idea that I can weigh 200 pounds and be ok with my weight and my appearance and still be a "success".  Because even if I still weigh 200 pounds, I don't weigh 300 pounds.  And even if I still think about food binges, I am not usually participating in them (most of the time anyways).

Well... this morning has been a challenge.  My endocrinologist (who manages my pituitary gland tumor in my brain) decided to retire early and a new doctor came in to take over her practice.  This morning was my first appointment with the new doctor.  I don't particularly enjoy appointments with new doctors because I have such a long and complex medical history at this point.  My brain tumor was diagnosed when I was 19, so we are talking about 24 years of treatment just for that.  Not to mention everything else that has happened in the last 10 years or so (I have been under anesthesia 7 times since 2010).

Anyways, we are talking through my history with the tumor and everything it affects and I mentioned that I would like to have some blood work done on my vitamin levels because I have been really worn down since I had mono over the summer.  I haven't been participating in my usual level of activities to give my body a chance to recover fully, but at the same time it has been over three months and I still feel tired all the time.  I thought maybe it could be my B vitamins or iron levels or something so I mentioned that I had weight loss surgery in 2014 (which could be a reason why my levels are off).

Her response: "You know, you have to participate in your diet and exercise program for the rest of your life after weight loss surgery.  You should still be eating low carb.  Have you regained a lot of weight?"  Followed by the elevator look.  You know the one.  The one where they lose eye contact to slowly go down your body and back up again.

In the moment, I explained to her that I had lost 100 pounds and was maintaining that with the exception of about 10 pounds of water weight I gained in the last three weeks or so thanks to lots of bags of fluids while dealing with the kidney stone (while simultaneously not being on the "water pill" I take).  But I am stable around 200 pounds and have been for a couple of years.  She ordered an MRI (because I haven't had one in 10 years or so and my tumor has been more symptomatic in the past year) and blood work and I am supposed to follow up with her in January (though I will be able to see the lab results online in a few days to see where I am at on my vitamin levels).

But after I left her office, her words started cycling over and over in my mind.  All of these doubts crept in about not losing enough weight, not being "normal" what the fuck ever that means, still being overweight, and overall not being the success story that I had kind of decided in my mind I was.  I mean I think I handled it in the moment with her in the best way I could have because I didn't take what she said as a criticism and just made clear what tests I definitely wanted added to my usual blood draw.  

But the weight of her words and what she was implying became more and more clear to me after I had left her office.  I spent the better part of the rest of the morning battling with my eating disorder about behaviors that have the potential to derail me in some major ways.  It is kind of disappointing that an interaction with a new doctor can still send me into the same mental spiral, but I guess it is encouraging that it didn't result in a binge on cupcakes.

I am just left with this overall level of self doubt.  Maybe I am not doing enough.  Maybe I should try harder to lose more weight.  I mean, my husband and I still eat small portions and I cook something for us most nights of the week.  But in the past few months or so, my lack of energy has led to more take out than I would prefer.  And I have definitely let sweet treats and crunchy snacks back into my house like an old lover I just can't quit... the comfort foods providing that hit of endorphins that I am not getting from exercise because I just don't have the energy to do it.

I had planned to go back to keto temporarily after the holidays as sort of a brain reset.  I didn't want to set myself up for failure by trying to do keto during Thanksgiving and Christmas because that is a mental load I just don't want to take on at the moment and I truly feel like it would be self-sabotaging to even try.  But I am just sitting here thinking to myself that I am not doing enough.  I am not enough.

I took a photo in the hotel room when I was in Wisconsin.  I was feeling pretty good about the image in the mirror.  I don't often look at myself and feel like a success, but I did that day.  This morning I am just trying to get back to that mental place.  Thanks, doc.

You Ask A LOT From Your Body

I am admittedly a crazy person.  So it probably shouldn't surprise anyone when I tell them about some Cuckoo Larue craziness that I do on a regular basis.

That said, I have a spreadsheet where I have been tracking my weight weekly since the beginning of 2016.  There.  I said it.  I recall that we were doing a weight loss challenge at work around then, and I just kept recording it afterwards.  I have a fancy scale that measures your body fat percentage, percentage water, bones, and muscle, along with your weight.  Every Thursday, I weigh myself and record all of these numbers.  With the exception of the entirety of 2017 when I was working from home, there are weekly weights recorded in this Excel file.  Just to paint a picture of the level of nuts I am, I have been wearing the same dress every Thursday for quite a while to make sure I get a good measure.

Well... this picture popped up in my Facebook memories a few weeks ago from 10 years ago in 2009...

When I saw it that morning, I thought to myself, "What happened to *that* girl?"  I feel like that girl was more confident, sure of herself and where she was going, proud of herself, strong, independent... not, well, so broken.  Was it just denial?  

Thinking back on who I really was in 2009... I was in therapy for the grief that nearly crushed me after Nana died (which was more about healing a lot of other things besides the grief).  I was taking Lexapro to help with depression (which pretty much just turned off my feelings so they weren't overwhelming... good and bad).  My relationship with my idiot ex-boyfriend at this point was resolved as being over and something I didn't want anymore, though he was still around (he was my roommate at the time - separate room, separate lives).  I was in this place of being single and working on myself and being completely comfortable with that.  I was working out pretty much 6 days a week and felt stronger (physically) than I probably had ever felt.

Life was pretty complicated.  I had just moved out of the first house I had ever bought.  A series of consistent gunshots (too close to our house for comfort) left me watching the coroner removing a body one bright Saturday morning and suddenly I didn't feel very safe.  The housing market promptly crashed and I was left with an adjustable mortgage that was underwater in value to the house.  It ended up working out for me financially, but at the time it was pretty stressful.  The move to the rental was the worst moving day I have ever experienced.  My brother dropped the piano on his toe, so most of it was spent at the ER while my friends and family (who I was and am still thankful for) unloaded our truck.  When we got home, all of the furniture was in the wrong bedrooms, and everything was a wreck, but it was unloaded and my brother's toe was still attached, so... perspective.  Life wasn't easy, but I was ok and I felt like life was looking up (although uncertain).

I wonder now if being sure that life would work itself out was some sort of false sense of confidence.  Or maybe it was just the Lexapro.  Maybe it was youth.  But I felt happy.  I felt good.  I remember one of the first dates my (now) husband and I went on was on Halloween of that year.  We had both gone to separate parties and met up afterwards at Perkins.  All of the women at the party were in sexy costumes, and I was in my bee girl costume...

But this was 100% something I would do... and feel totally comfortable doing.  I wasn't the girl that would necessarily always wear a sexy costume.  I was the girl that made her own costumes and made them as elaborate or simple and cute as I wanted... and felt good wearing them.  My after party date at Perkins turned into a lot more than that.  And my choice of costume was one reason he was interested.  I was intriguing.  Where did that girl go?

I think in the last 10 years, life has worn me down... for a lot of reasons.  In that time I married the love of my life and that part of my life has been amazing (when it really was not in 2009).  But so many other things have changed in the last 10 years, things that come with maturity, self-realizations, ugly pieces of the world that creep in on you, the list is long and varied... that I shouldn't really be surprised that maybe my eyes aren't as bright and hopeful as they were in 2009.  My face is older yes, but most of the changes of time marching across my face have more to do with other pieces of life outside of whether I use sun screen or an eye cream.

Anyways... I got a little off track.  So the picture from 2009 showed up in my memories, and I have been ruminating about how different I am now vs. then, questioning myself and my confidence, and how I feel about my body, blah blah blah, and thinking about how I constantly feel like a failure about my weight and my body because I don't feel like I succeeded with the weight loss surgery (for a lot of reasons), and I weighed in (like I always do), and opened my spreadsheet to record my weight.  I decided right then and there to scroll all the way back up to the top of my spreadsheet to check out where I was in the beginning of 2016 and prove to myself what a failure I really am because the number from then was obviously going to be way better or different from where I am right now.

1 POUND. 

My recorded weight from the beginning of 2016 was ONE (1!) POUND off from my weight last Thursday.  Did I mention I am a crazy person?  I know a lot has happened since the beginning of 2016.  I nearly died of sepsis.  I had a shit bag for almost a year.  I lost 20+ pounds in a couple of weeks when I was so sick.  I gained 40+ pounds at home eating my feelings when I had the shit bag.  I did keto to take off the regain and get back to a comfortable spot.  I started doing yoga and have a really strong core and awesomely improved balance.  I can plank for over a minute after starting my plank challenge last month.  I have been maintaining my weight, and getting stronger, and building muscle...

and simultaneously constantly feeling like I am failing.

I mentioned all of this to my therapist... even the neurotic ass spreadsheet.  She said, "You ask *A LOT* from your body, and it constantly comes through for you.  When are you going to have an appreciation for that?"

Maybe this was like an A-HA moment?  I do ask a lot from my body.  I have asked it to re-do entire houses.  I have thought to myself, "You are not strong enough to do x-y-z," and then went directly and did x-y-z anyhow.  Literally every week in yoga, my beautiful sister-in-law instructs us to take our poses to the next level (if we feel like we want to or are strong enough to challenge ourselves), and I try to do the things with my body fully expecting it to respond something along the lines of "this bitch is crazy" and instead it gives me "we can do that" or at least "we can almost do that".  My body still manages to surprise me.

I think I got stuck in a pattern of feeling like I can't because for about 18 months after I nearly died I really couldn't.  It took a long time to recover (fully recover anyways).  I can still push myself and my body too far (and you know, end up with a recurrence of mono because I try to do all the things, as a completely arbitrary example).  But more often than not, my body just says, "Fine... I guess we are going to do all the things, you insane person."  And I clearly don't appreciate that enough, or show enough gratitude for it.

I feel like I could be on the verge of making peace with myself... and my body.  Forgiving myself for nearly dying (mostly due to being hardheaded).  And giving myself a little space of self-acceptance.  I don't hate my body.  I realized recently, that I never really hated it.  I didn't entirely dislike it either.  I just didn't really love it.  Maybe the feeling was indifference?  

I spent a lot of time thinking that it didn't matter if I didn't 100% love my body because I could always change it and love it more later.  I could sit comfortably at 300 pounds and say to myself that it was ok to not be in a body I loved because I needed to lose weight first, then love myself.  And after losing a lot of weight and realizing that my body still wasn't what I wanted, I said it was ok to not be in a body I loved because I needed to have some loose skin removed first, then love myself.  But I have come to realize, that my body is not ever going to be exactly what I want it to be.  The caveat is that I don't think anyone has a body that is exactly what they want.  You ask any person if there is something about their physical body they don't like, and most have at least one thing (if not a list of things).

I ask *A LOT* from my body, and my body is asking me for very little in return... just acceptance and love.  I give this so freely to so many people, it doesn't seem too far fetched to give this to myself, or at least start to do so.

GOOFY AND AWKWARD AND NOT SEXY AT ALL

Several weeks ago I went home on a Tuesday and went directly to bed.  Wednesday morning, I got up and tried to go to work, but by about 9 am I told my boss I was going home because I thought I had the flu.

"In July?" he asked.

I know, I know.  But it isn't like my body has a history of handling things normally.  So I went home and went back to bed and by the afternoon I had decided I should probably visit a clinic considering I had chills and felt like I had been hit by a truck.  The clinic confirmed I was ill, but it was not the flu.  

Apparently, I am one of the lucky few to get mono more than once in this lifetime.  Since it's a virus, it's always in your body after you have it (I was a senior in college on the first ride).  And if you really overdo it and wear your immune system down enough, the virus can reactivate and voila - you are sick again.

So, trying to redo an entire house - including a complete kitchen renovation and a partial bathroom do-over - in about a month can result in your immune system going on a quick vacay.  Particularly when your partner in crime broke himself physically on demo day and you are down one man.  I worked myself to the point of having mono again.  I was out of work the rest of that week as well as the following one.  The following two weeks I worked half days.  This past week was the first one where I put in close to 40 hours.

Of course, all of this happened about 10 days after we moved into the new house.  The kitchen isn't finished (no back splash, trim, filler panels, toe kicks, cabinet pulls - like hella not finished).  The wallpaper in the bathrooms isn't up.  The hallway needs to be painted.  The painted rooms need to be touched up.  My husband's music room is full of tools.  My sewing room is just boxes.  You get the picture.  So, my husband broke himself, and then I broke myself, and then we just had to sit there and look at everything that wasn't finished while we are both healing and can't do anything about it... and not go insane.  I may have failed on that last one.

In the middle of this, on top of breaking himself on demo day, my husband was diagnosed with a diseased gallbladder (full of stones) and needed surgery to remove it.  I mean, gallbladder surgery isn't a major thing anymore if you can have a laparoscopic surgery, but since he nearly died of pulmonary embolisms (yes plural) when he had surgery 8 months ago, the prospect of this was wrecking both of our nerves.

So, he was prepping for surgery and we were both broken.  I couldn't kiss him and risk making him sick with mono on top of everything else.  I mean, you would think that not kissing him wouldn't be a huge deal, but we kiss a lot.  And (more so than I even realized prior to this point) it is a really big part of the intimacy between us.  There is all this stress, and the house is chaos, and we're both broken, and he needs to have another surgery, and I can't even kiss him.

I just wanted to set a clear stage for everything before I proceed with how I went nuts.

Switching gears (it will come full circle momentarily)... in general, I do not think of myself as being sexy... or really even as being a sexual being most of the time.  I know that when I was in high school and college it was totally a defense mechanism because I was one of the few obese chicks around at the time (it was the late 90s and Kate Moss and her waif body were the "norm").  I just automatically put every person in the friend zone because I assumed that was where they were putting me.  I did not want to express an interest in someone and be cruelly rejected in the ways I expected that I would be.

Fast forward twenty years and I never really acquired any capacity for flirting or really expressing myself as being sexy.  I am usually completely unaware when someone else is flirting with me.  My husband just sort of embraced this as some (additional) odd part of my personality and it was never really an issue.  Although sexually our relationship has never been lacking, when I specifically try to be sexy, it's mostly just awkward.  Sometimes I think I am accidentally sexy, but it became sort of a running joke between us that we could both laugh about.

Well... we could both laugh about it until all of a sudden stress overload showed up coinciding with illness and a lack of intimacy because I couldn't kiss him and I was feeling really insecure.  I decided I was going to be super sexy and I put on an outfit for him the night before his surgery.  I'm not going to lie, the trauma of what happened last time he went in for surgery left the possibility that he may die lurking in the back of my mind, and I wanted to make sure he didn't go out of this life sexually frustrated because his dumb ass wife worked herself into a second round of mono (at the worst possible time).

Well, it went as poorly as you can imagine it would.  Not overly sexy woman puts on sexy outfit in the middle of a period of super low confidence and insecurity and lack of intimacy with her husband.  Yeah, great idea.  My husband handled it as well as he could, but there was a lot of laughing.  I mean, I was laughing too, but my laughter was coming from this other "OH MY GOD WHY CAN'T I DO ANYTHING RIGHT" nervousness of like if I don't laugh right now I am going to cry instead sort of place.  His laughter was coming from the same place it always had, and where mine used to reside.  (If any of my close friends want details and particulars of how exactly horribly wrong this went so we can laugh about it - as I can laugh about it now - feel free to message me.)

The following morning, a plus sized model that I follow on Facebook (who he also follows) posted this photo of herself mostly naked and styled as a pinup.  She works on the campaign for Dita Von Teese's lingerie line, so it isn't like this is the first photo styled in this way that she has posted.  It isn't like this is the first photo of her that my husband and I have discussed.  None of this is new.  He showed me the photo and smiled and casually said something like, "She knows how to be sexy."

I snapped back something to the effect of, "I would know how to be sexy if I looked like her."  His response included commentary that the sexiness conveyed in the picture more so comes from her confidence, not necessarily her body.  But my reply was, "And I would feel confident too if I was walking around in her body!"  And I went to the bathroom.  To cry.

I knew he didn't know how much he upset me.  And I didn't want him to know because we were literally getting ready to go to the hospital for his surgery... where I was petrified something was going to happen to him.  I didn't want my last interaction with him to be an argument about me feeling insecure about my body.  No thanks.  So I cried in the bathroom, regained my composure, and wiped my face.

Well.  I let it build up in my mind for over a week.  I didn't know how to talk about it or how to even bring it up.  I just knew that it was turning into this whole other thing.  By the time I did tell him how I felt, I had decided that he didn't find me sexy at all, and that he thinks I'm goofy and awkward, and that he laughed at me when I tried to be sexy for him, and not only am I not sexy, but I also have a body that is damaged and broken from nearly dying that will never be attractive again, and I don't even know why he is with me.

If you are a woman reading this, you are probably thinking... well I could see how all of that would kind of lead you down this path to feeling really insecure, even if it wasn't true.  And if you are a man, you are probably thinking... how the hell did she decide that the man who *married her* didn't think she was sexy?

When all of this came flying out of my mouth, with tears streaming and snot everywhere... to be honest he looked blindsided.  Because he kind of was.  This thing that was sort of this joke between us, was beaten and broken down into wreckage by a battle that was only happening in my mind and with myself.  To him, I was still the same quirky weirdo that he calls his cute bean.  Our interactions about me being awkward were the same lighthearted silliness that they always were.  The lack of intimacy because we couldn't kiss each other on the lips was being propped up by all of the other ways we show that we totally dig being married... specifically to each other.

In retrospect, I don't think that my internal battle really had anything to do with something he did.  I recently came to the realization that I am probably not going to have surgery to fix my body from the damage from nearly dying.  When I look in the mirror, I see someone who looks like they were broken and glued back together.  I don't like the way my body looks.  The thing is, I never have.  The only difference is that now, there isn't some future date when I think I will like my body.

When I weighed nearly 300 pounds, I decided it wasn't important for me to love my body because I would love it when I lost weight.  When I had the gastric sleeve surgery to lose weight and all I saw was loose skin, I decided it wasn't important for me to love my body because I would love it when I didn't have loose skin anymore.  When I nearly died and had multiple surgeries that left scars scattered among the loose skin, I decided it wasn't important for me to love my body because I could love it when I had a tummy tuck to fix everything.  And here I am, in the same body that my mind sees as broken and ugly, trying to accept that it will more than likely never be "fixed".  There isn't a future end date for when I can just love my body.  I have to accept it as it is.  Which is what I should have been doing all along, but that is a story for another day.

And that, I believe, was the bigger source of my insecurity.  If I don't love this body, why in the world would my husband?  If I stand in front of a mirror naked and I hate what I see, why wouldn't he see me the same way?

The thing is, he has loved me and my body all along.  When I was morbidly obese, he loved me and my body.  When I lost weight, he loved me and my body (even the loose skin bits).  When I nearly died and ended up scarred for life (in more ways than just on my skin), he loved my body even more for being *alive* and scarred.  And when I went nuts and accused him of not thinking I am sexy at all, he still loved my insane ass.  Sometimes, I am not sure why.  

My therapist, when I unloaded all of this on her, asked me to name one thing I like about my body specifically.  I responded that I think I have pretty eyes.  So she said, "That is a place to start."  It is the tiniest thing, but I guess it is a place to start...

Crossover Episode

You know how TV shows on the same network will do weird-ass crossover shows sometimes with characters from two different popular series?  That's this blog today.  Today we talk about the house blog *AND* emotions in the same place.

So I went to see my therapist last Saturday and basically balled my eyes out for an hour.  I am pretty sure I have posted about my inability to express and define emotions before.  Nana and her "never let them see you cry" advice carries over in the long term in my life.  So even when I am sitting in my therapist's office, it is not super common for tears to show up.  I am still the logical vulcan you all know just sitting with her and rationalizing emotions that I am refusing to actually feel.

Welp, not this week.  Apparently, this week was vent-fest.  Tear-fest.  Ugly cry-fest.  Snot-fest.  I guess I have been retaining a lot of emotions throughout the house project that exploded out of my tear ducts in that hour.  I kept starting sentences with, "I am sure I am just overwhelmed, but..." as if I had to give a reason for being emotional to my therapist.  I'm nuts, I know.

I am usually pretty good at keeping my shit together to a ridiculous, anal-retentive degree.  But I have noticed in the past week or so that things like "it is what it is" or "I don't really know what to do next" are coming out of my mouth in an alarming frequency.  I am kind of used to Plan A not working out in my life.  I mean, Plan A rarely works for me.  I guess I am just not used to being on like Plan M because honestly, that just feels a whole lot like no plan at all and I am just winging it.

I am a person of extremes: truly anal-retentive, obsessive-compulsive plans OR flying by the seat of my pants.  Is there a form of bi-polar planning?  That's what this feels like.

Backstory: my husband and I closed on our new house on 05-23.  We ripped out the kitchen two days later.  Like, we removed the kitchen cabinets and the furdown above them and you could see into the attic level of ripped out the kitchen.  It was necessary because we needed electrical work done in those walls prior to installing a new kitchen, and we wanted that to happen before we moved in.  So mission accomplished.

I went back to work for the week and we returned the following weekend.  The plan was to replace the tile floor in the main bathroom over a few days (I had Friday and Monday off).  But what should have been a simple remove the tile, put down self-leveler, lay the tile, and grout the tile, turned into something else entirely.  The subfloor was rotted.  So we had to rip out everything down to the floor joists, resupport the tub under the house, and replace the rotted wood.  So instead of having a new tile floor at the end of that weekend, we had a new subfloor.

yeah that's me sitting under our tub

It was at this point that my husband started talking about his abdomen hurting.  To make a long story short, he needs to have his gallbladder out and we think he has a hernia.  So he has excruciating pain, alternating between his right side (gallbladder) and left side (hernia).  Our little house project that we were so excited about doing together just kind of got trampled on by 43-year-old bodies.  It wouldn't have been a big deal if there was an unlimited timeline on this whole thing, but we were supposed to move in at the end of June.

Fast forward through a lot of days of sanding, priming, painting, tiling, grouting, tile and grout repair on the existing bits, waiting on work to be completed by other people (electrician and plumber) and the end of June move-in did not happen.  So we asked for an extension on our current lease for an extra couple of weeks and we move on July 12th instead.

In the middle of all of this, the main sewer line to the project house I did in 2016/2017 (where my sister currently resides) caved in and required replacing.  Like dig up the yard and replace the whole cast iron drain pipe level of replacing.  This was on top of us renovating our new house and paying rent and a house note simultaneously.  I started describing our reality as a state of hemorrhaging money because we were free-bleeding at that point.

And this is how I arrived at my current state of overwhelmed and the ugly-cry fest with my therapist.  I guess the good news is that I did feel better when I left her office (and drove to the house to work on it).  I think I was trying to be super strong for my husband who is pretty much devastated that his body failed him and we aren't doing this together like we intended.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel.  The house is pretty much in a state of readiness for us to move in at this point with the exception of a few things.  We still need to organize and remove all of the tools and construction supplies from my husband's music space.  The privacy film I bought for the front windows needs to be put up in the living room.  And everything needs to be cleaned up from construction dust as well as the previous owners.  

They were nasty, y'all.  And I am not fucking Martha Stewart or anything, or typically judgey about a mess.  I would say I usually live in a state of organized chaos.  It looks messy, but I know where everything is.  But they were just gross.  Like I thought the tile was ruined in the shower but it was just dirty gross.  Like they must have some really strong immune systems gross.  Like I thought it was weird they left their brooms and other cleaning supplies but I have realized it is because they never actually used them anyhow gross.

I digress.  I am still overwhelmed.  Mostly because we aren't really packed yet.  There is still a lot to do before the projects are complete.  I have been saying this sentence a lot: "I can do that after we move in."  So I will be a busy little bee for quite a while.

But one super positive note (and sort of the point of this post) is that I haven't been binging on food every day as a coping mechanism.  Pizza day at work was still a challenge I failed.  My boss buys pizza for the office on the first of every month.  And it sits there smelling up the office all day and I have this 7 hour battle with myself about eating more pizza all afternoon.  I ate 4 pieces of pizza that day.  I realize that is not a lot of pizza for a person with a normal sized tummy.  In fact, that is probably the number of slices that everyone in my office ate that day.  But it was way too much for me and I felt ill and regretted it.  So, I'm putting that day in the L column.

But there have been plenty of other opportunities for me to just EAT.  And I haven't.  So I guess I have worked myself into a place of being able to be overwhelmed and not always binge.  And I have progressed into having some emotions leak out.

Conclusion: replacing your rotted psyche is a lot harder than a rotted bathroom floor.

Success Story?

So, March of 2019 marked five (5!) years since I had gastric sleeve surgery.  I can't believe that my husband and I have been going through this process of change together for that long.  It sometimes seems like it was forever ago that we looked like this:

It probably seems this way mostly because I don't feel like my weight loss journey was a success or that it is even over.  I lost the most weight in the first seven months post-op.  I remember specifically that when my brother got married in October of that year, I weighed 193 pounds.  It was the first time in my adult life that my weight had started with a 1.  I was just a matron of honor in a wedding, not the fat matron of honor in a wedding.  It was definitely my lowest adult weight and I hadn't been at that weight since probably the age of 16.  

During that first two and half years after surgery, my weight settled in around 205 pounds.  At the time, I was working on the project house and super strong.  I felt like I wasn't doing everything I could possibly do to continue losing weight, but I was also pretty satisfied with my progress so far.  I definitely did not feel like a success story because I still fell into the "obese" category on the BMI chart.  I realize that is a really arbitrary unit of measure, however it was the one my weight loss surgeon drilled into my head.  I would have to weigh 150 pounds to be "normal".  After having surgery, losing 100 pounds, gaining a lot of strength and muscle, getting off of most medications, and being able to physically do most anything I wanted... I was still not "normal".

Of course, in December of 2016, all of that changed.  When I got really sick and almost died, I lost a lot of weight pretty much over the course of 6 days (26 pounds).  When I left the hospital, I looked ill (because I was).  During the first visit with my home health nurse at my mom's house she took my weight.  It was 179 pounds.  I remember walking back to my mom's scale after the nurse left because I assumed something must have been wrong with hers.  It was accurate and I was shocked.  The first time I got to take a shower, I remember it took every ounce of energy I had at the time just to make it through.  My mom (thankfully) had a seat I could use so I didn't have to stand up the whole time or I wouldn't have been able to do it.  

It is a crazy place to be when you are 40 and at the healthiest and strongest you have ever been in your life, to then be instantly so sick you can't stand up for a few minutes.  I caught a glimpse of my naked body in her very large bathroom mirror.  I looked like I was 80 years old, just skin hanging on bones.  I had never thought that I looked too thin in my life until that moment.

For the first time ever, I had a doctor asking if I was eating enough.  I realize in hindsight that he and his team needed to make sure that I was getting enough nutrition to help my very sick body heal from all of that trauma.  He had removed part of my intestines, my abdomen was full of abscesses, I was fighting off system-wide infection, I had a huge incision, and a brand new shit bag.  There was a lot that needed to heal, and I had a tiny tummy.  Him asking to make sure I was eating enough was just an inquiry into nutrition, but I took it as a green light to eat whatever I wanted for the first time in a long time.

2017 was a really hard year for me.  Of course, for the first two months, I was staying at my mom's house to recover (particularly because I was on IV antibiotics).  When I returned home and started back to work, I was working from home.  I was very thankful that my bosses allowed me to do that because having a shit bag was not super conducive to being out in public, not less in an office environment.  I realize that there are plenty of people who have a colostomy bag for the rest of their lives, I am just really glad I am not one of them.  It makes fart noises whenever it likes (you have no control over that).  I could smell poop pretty much all the time (although everyone else around me claimed they couldn't).  The clothes you wear are completely dependent on whether the bag is accommodated or not.  And if you got any of the chemicals from the bag on your clothes they were ruined (it acted like bleach).  

But working from home when I was incredibly depressed and suffering from PTSD was not the best situation for my eating.  I pretty much binged on food for the entire 325 days I had the shit bag.  I would skip out on drinking water and keeping hydrated just so I could eat more food (I mean, there's only so much room in a tiny tummy, and I was reserving that room for chips and ice cream).  I sought out a therapist in the late summer of 2017 because my husband was worried about my behaviors.  I had started to try to drink more water just so I would be ready for the colostomy bag reversal surgery, but 11 months of eating this way resulted in me gaining 40 pounds (back up to 225).

I knew I needed to make a drastic change to get me back on track, so when I returned to working in the office in January of 2018, I did strict keto for 10 weeks to detox from sugar and carbs and lose the weight I had gained.  I ended up around 200 pounds when I was finished with the keto.  Since then, I have been doing low (ish) carb to maintain that.  I have continued my treatment for binge eating disorder and although the progress on that front is slow, I do see differences in how I think about the food I eat and the choices I make.  It is a lot of work to unravel a lifetime of using food for more than just nutrition.

But small victories add up over time.  A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I went to the zoo.  It rained a little in the afternoon so most everybody left.  We were in the petting zoo area and there is this statue of a cow in there for kids to climb on for photos.  Since there wasn't really anybody there, I wanted to get on the cow and take a picture.  My eating disorder was loudly shouting that I couldn't get on the cow because I am a cow... that I am fat and would look ridiculous.  I quieted those thoughts long enough to fucking climb up on that cow and take a fucking picture.  When I told my husband what I was thinking after the fact, he noted that he thought I looked cute with my flower tucked behind my ear, and that I appeared really happy when I was up there.  I was happy... more so because I won that internal battle and got on the cow.  As a bonus, I can look at that photo and see that I *am* happy, and I am not judging whether or not I look fat.

But am I a success story?  I am a member of a few Facebook groups for people who are post bariatric surgery.  Overall, there is the full gamut of people within them.  People who have had the sleeve like me, bypass, lap-band, and a couple of other less common procedures.  People who have reached goal (BMI chart goal) and had the full range of plastic surgery to "fix" everything (arms, thighs, stomach, boobs, neck, face, you name it - one even had a calf lift).  People who never lost the weight they were expected to lose.  People who lost a lot of weight and regained a lot of weight.  People who lost, regained, and lost again.  People who count macros, calories, carbs, fat grams... and people who don't track anything.

A lot of people would call me a success story because I am 5 years out from surgery and still maintaining a 100 pound loss.  A lot of people would say that I am not a success story because I never made it to my surgeon's goal of 150 pounds.  Some people would say I am a success story because I am in treatment for binge eating disorder and am starting to win that battle more days than not.  Some would say I am not a success story because I still have days where I binge on food.

But what do I say?  Every day is different.  Am I a success story because I haven't gone off the rails binging on food in several days (and for the most part just one incident in the past few weeks)?  Am I a success story because of what the scale said this morning?  Am I a success story because I am none of the places I have been before?  

There is a part of me that still feels like I haven't done enough.  There is a voice in my head that says I am never going to be good enough because I am never going to weigh 150 pounds like a "normal" person.  The ironic part is that at this point, I have seen what my body looked like at 179 pounds and I hated it.  So 150 pounds isn't even a goal that I logically want for myself anymore.  But there is still this voice that says 202 is too much, and that I have failed on the weight loss surgery journey because I never made it to goal.

I don't see myself as I was before my husband and I started this process.  In my mind, the photo below is not the image I picture in my mind of either of us, and of course it isn't the image I see in the mirror anymore.

But whatever ideas I have about my self-worth or self-identification are 100% attached to the image above, even if the image below is the reality I am living in.  If I refer to myself as the fat girl, or my eating disorder is yelling about me being a cow, or any number of behaviors I identify as being a part of "fat girl syndrome" come out (from being a people pleaser, to being the comedian, to not being able to say no, take your pick, etc, etc, etc)... it derives from living in the body in the image above for the majority of my life.  Being in the body in the image below does not make me a success story.  Taking care of myself because I feel like I am worth it and deserve to feel positive about my body (no matter what it weighs) is 100% the criteria for identifying myself as a success.  I don't think I am at that place, but every day I feel like I might be a little bit closer.