Here’s the thing about bipolar disorder. It’s like the wife who tells you everything’s fine as she rolls away from you in the darkness, she’s just tired and the kids have to get up early in the morning. You can lie there, content enough that though you’re not getting blown that night, your life is fine.
Then the next day, as you’re driving past the Starbucks on your way to grab some lunch, you see that wife in the parking lot. She’s frantically making out with your brother, and they’re pawing at each other like teenagers in a darkened theatre while they both hold grande non-fat caramel macchiattos in their free hands.
Yup. Everything’s fine. Until it isn’t.
The same can be said for depression as a whole, eating disorders, the gamut that I’ve ran in the past two decades (at least) of my life.
One night, I’ve gone to bed, not getting blown, but still content enough, and the next day, I see something that makes the fallacy seem so transparent.
Nothing was fine. I was just fooling myself.
In the past few months, I’ve quit drinking coffee. I’ve quit dairy and wheat – really anything with a trace amount of whey, casein, or gluten in it. I started running and doing multiple circuits of ab and thigh work. I’m becoming a better version of me, you see.
It wasn’t until about a month ago that I realized that my usual manic switch had never occurred in February. Curious. My moods have been leveling off, there isn’t such a violent dichotomy between the crescendos of anger, the paralytics of sadness and the ebb of contentedness. There’s been a relative smooth sail in the past three months.
Even though there was the build up of energy for the manic phase, it never happened.
I suspected, but hadn’t given the thought much weight, that diet had something to do with it. I mean, I was only sleeping more via the virtue of ana-mania (the lack of mania, that is {I just made that up. I think. Doesn’t it sound kind of delightful and like it has a theme song attached? Oh wait, that’s Anamaniacs. Anyway.}).
I wasn’t experiencing the highs and lows that most people complain about caffeine for (which I still have rarely ever experienced. I could go to bed 10 minutes after finishing a cup of coffee, anytime.) since I quit drinking it.
I wasn’t smoking less (or more).
I wasn’t on medication or engaging in therapy or meditation.
My blog sure as hell didn’t cure me, as can be evidenced from a piece I wrote in the past few months that I hope some of you get to read sometime soon. Regardless of how it might work for some people to get out their feelings and magically, they find self-acceptance, it’s safer to say I’m working in the opposite direction.
That left diet.
A day or two ago, I commented on some one’s blog that since I’d quit gluten/dairy, I felt much better. Healthier. It was as I was writing that sentence, I realized that it was true.
I might be over-analytical, but sometimes, things just don’t occur to me.
But the main tip off that this diet – flax meal, multiple protein servings, soy milk, naturally decaffeinated rooibos chai tea, fruit, vegetables, brown rice, quinoa, and freshly baked banana breads containing a wealth of buckwheat, seeds, chick pea and potato flour, nuts and purees – had anything to do with my moods came when I started cheating on it.
I wasn’t paying attention.
I felt like I was cheating on Isobel, honestly. Because she still couldn’t, wasn’t allowed, to have foods on the no-no list and here I was ingesting an entire cheesecake. Sometimes she’d be with her dad and I’d go out for lunch with a friend, and I’d have a sandwich, with real whole wheat bread, mayo and cheese on it. I’d sneak some chocolate that had milk in it, or have lunch with her and her dad and order her something safe while I inhaled a quesadilla with sour cream.
I was cheating on her, and every time, I felt terrible afterwards.
Because of the morals, that we were in this diet together and I was stepping out on her? A bit, but not really.
Because I was eating so much, so feverishly, during these cheating moments, that I was left with a lead ball of food in my stomach and feeling full to my ears? I thought so.
Until today, when a metaphorical light bulb went off.
Today, I wasn’t hungry all day, but I ate all day. You know those days. Every time there’s food around, it happens to meet your stomach. That was me today. I started off in a great mood. I’d gotten enough work done last night to cover for stepping away from it this morning – and I went to the gym while Isobel hung out at playgroup. I got to run my best so far since starting almost three weeks ago, did the most ab curls and leg raises I had yet and plié squatted my way into a stream of sweat running down my spine.
That never happens, because quite simply, I never have the drive, or stamina. I walked out of the change room feeling euphoric (how cliché. Thank you endorphins.), but neither tired nor sore. Maybe something was clicking, I thought.
Snacks dispatched, I was back to work on the laptop while she had some quiet time with Dora. Invigorating shower, check. Her in the bath and a tear-free session of combing her hair, double-check. I had this adventurous idea to take HCM and her little one with my little one to The Na’am, a consistently trendy 24-hour vegetarian/macrobiotic/vegan/health-food restaurant.
Even though we’d have two kids who sometimes do not get along and they’d be in the downslope of the day, what I call the witching hour (though it lasts more than just one); even though there could be a line-up up the block and there might be almost nothing for Isobel to eat there, excepting a gluten/dairy free dessert; even though we might ride two buses there and back to find out it wasn’t a very good idea. Even though. That’s how euphoric I was, okay?
We decided against it, but went for dinner, anyway, where Isobel didn’t eat much of her specially ordered clean food and I ate all of my not-verified-as-clean entree. Then, I ordered cheesecake, which is definitely not acceptable – especially given that 95% of it is made of dairy and it was surrounded by heaven-sent clouds of whipped cream. I ate two thirds of it within three minutes.
I was so full, I felt nine months pregnant; so full, my uterus was verging on bursting.
Within an hour, I dropped into a malaise.
I wasn’t full anymore. But for no fucking reason, I was depressed. All I wanted to do was sit in a chair in silence while Isobel slept. I grabbed a book and started reading. Then I started to nod off and considered just going to bed.
It was 8:30.
By 10, I was wondering what was going on. By 10:10, the pieces were coming together because I’d rehashed all of my lower-energy points over the past few weeks, all of the times when I’ve wanted to just crawl into bed for a day and pretend the world, work and even my kid didn’t exist. However short-lived these moments were, however much I didn’t act upon them by in fact sleeping all day and pretending that the crazed toddler jumping around our small space wasn’t real, these moments all followed me cheating.
Once I’d connected those dots, I went back a few months, then half a year, then to this time last year. A staggering amount of crazed mood swings have been shortly after going fucking mental on the dairy and wheat. I’m talking whole boxes of crackers after two helpings of pasta and four white mochas crazy. I’m talking entire cheesecakes loopy. I’m talking, and I might never admit to this again, an entire box of cereal in a 30 minute span.
Holy clarity. (besides the fact that my eating patterns are somewhat extreme.)
Moral of this story? Cheaters totally never fucking win. They do get to eat cheesecake; but they pay for it in feelings of worthlessness.
As of tomorrow, I’m not going to be cheating again. It’s not worth it, man.
