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My meal plan

I had my first meeting with a nutritionist on Wednesday. She specializes in eating disorders and was recommended by the eating disorder treatment center that originally gave me my diagnosis. I had never been to a nutritionist before, although I’d worked with personal trainers and had done dieting apps. I wasn’t really sure what to expect, even though I’d done tons and tons of research into my eating disorder.

I basically gushed for the first 45 minutes to an hour, telling her everything about my history with food and how I had come to this diagnosis. It was just like going to a therapist, except we were talking about food. We discussed my history with antidepressants, my current medications, my eating habits, how food was offered in my childhood, and what I’d come to believe about food.

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I have an eating disorder

This past month, I was diagnosed with an eating disorder.

It’s probably not the one you think, and if you know me, you probably don’t think I “look” like someone with an eating disorder. You probably would also tell me it doesn’t sound like something clinical if you heard what it was.

It took me 37 years to figure out what my eating disorder was, and now that I have the diagnosis, I feel a great sense of relief. The only thing now is to get to work.

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A meditation on pain

I started a 10K training program a few weeks ago that included running, weight lifting, and strength training. I was excited to be devoted to a program with an end-date (10 weeks) and a goal (getting my mile time back down). I was hoping to tone up and lose a bit of weight before heading to the beach for a Memorial Day wedding in Mexico, although those weren’t my specific goals for the training.

Lo and behold, at the end of the first week I tweaked my back doing a core workout. My sacrum bone hurt a lot. It hurt to bend over or sit down. I figured it was muscle soreness and pushed through, taking my rest days as prescribed and stretching more.

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5 ways to reduce stress in wedding planning as a bad bride

I am currently in the midst of planning a wedding. This was not ever something I aspired to do with my life, and so I’m not necessarily taking it as seriously as many women in my situation would. I’m 36 (37 in a month!) and have a pretty good idea of who I am, as does the groom. Neither of us has any misgivings about what the wedding is going to be — a great party to celebrate our love for our friends and family. 

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Cherries

Growing Up

We had a sour pie cherry tree in the backyard. The cherries would ripen in the summer, alongside Frank’s, our neighbor on the back fence. His were bing cherries. He had to put nets up to keep the birds out. We didn’t really have to do that, although sometimes there were worms. They were too tart to eat right off the tree.

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Back on the med wagon

When I was 20 years old I was diagnosed with depression and given Zoloft. I was in college and it seemed like every woman I knew (and some of the men, too) were on various mind-altering medications to fix their moods. It was the year after 9/11, we were in DC, and I lived in a basement room that got little to no light, like a cave. Job prospects were bleak. Things were dark. There was no point to anything. I slept a lot and watched the Independent Film Channel between naps.

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Feeling unremarkable? Rewrite your resume

In the coming weeks, some of my largest long-term contracts will be wrapping up, and I’ve found myself wondering if I should try to put myself into the workforce as a full-time employee at a single company again, rather than as a freelancer on several different projects.

Of course, the main thing that keeps me from applying to the full-time grind is a reminder of the horrors of the application process: the rejections with no explanation, the clear lack of a recruiter or hiring manager even looking at your experience, the understanding that only people who knew people could get in to an interview, and even then, you may be disregarded as a piece of human resource rather than a person with feelings.

But another of the hardest aspects of diving back into the application process for me is having to rewrite my resume.

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Going full creative

Ever since I was 13, I wanted to have blue hair. I can’t remember what enticed me to want it exactly, except the wave of Manic Panic colors that tinged the heads of my favorite punky bands in middle school and high school with a bit of late-night anime cartoons for good measure. Changing my hair to an unexpected shape or color was always a thrill for me, from the first time I cut it all off in fourth grade on. Some people get tattoos; I just change my hair. I shaved my head several times in my teens and 20s, but never quite got around to bleaching my light brown hair the platinum required to do a real true blue. I had teal bangs for a day or two one summer, but it washed out pretty quickly, much to my mother’s relief.

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My tiger

In 2002, I was a junior in college, and I met Chris, a senior, with whom I would spend the next several years in love.

Within a few weeks of meeting, I decided to take the remainder of the fall semester off from school and go home to Albuquerque, due to my first serious bout of depression. Chris’s and my relationship moved from working together at a coffee shop and hanging out once in a while to writing emails to each other, and then handwritten letters to each other, and eventually calling each other.

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