The Downfall

When people think of eating disorders they assume right away someone has anorexia or bulimia but the battle for those who are overweight is equally as dangerous and disruptive emotionally.  It is the exact same battle in reverse. 

Although at one point I was 100 pounds lighter than I was at my largest weight and maybe 20 pounds away from my ideal weight, every day has been a struggle for me to lose more weight and at the least to not backslide. 

Sadly, I have allowed 2 major life events to spiral me out of control again with my inability to control my food intake and now I have gained back 20 of those hard lost pounds putting me even further from my goal.  

First, there was the loss of my father.  After his death, I put on what I called my “dead dad weight” which was a good 10 pounds.  Over the course of the years that followed I would ebb and flow.  I would lose a few. Then gain a few. But those 10 pounds were there again.  Every time I would get close to being back where I started it would trigger some panic in my soul as if letting go of that weight meant letting go of my dad somehow. 

I hoped I would find a way to let go, to mourn my father properly or enough or whatever that was supposed to look like. Then if I was able to shed that mental weight, the physical would follow.  But it never happened. Instead, the pandemic happened.

I never imagined living through a pandemic.  In fact, it was pretty low on the list of global catastrophes I contemplated experiencing in my lifetime. I am more of a supervolcano eruption or asteroid impact kind of worrier. Hell, I am pretty sure alien invasion was higher on the list than a virus.  And any thought I had to a virus was more like what you see in the movies where a bunch of people die fast and the scientists swoop in and solve it all in 2 hours. I never in my worst dreams thought it would look in any way like covid has. 

But here we are.  

I think in the beginning I was very focused on just being kind and all of us getting through this together, so I was also very kind to my own body.  But under the surface, it was all boiling.  

Only 2 weeks prior to the pandemic, I found out that I was losing my job of 21 years but we were not given an end date initially. I was still working and I guess in the back of my head I thought maybe they would realize my value and keep me on in some capacity.  I was deluding myself but that false hope kept me even keel in those early days. 

The week the pandemic blew up into a full-blown crisis, my husband lost his job of 23 years. He was entertainment at Disney doing the Nemo musical. He and the crew left that day thinking they would all return in 2 weeks.  That never happened. 

Getting through the first part of the pandemic was easier because it seemed temporary.  It had to be temporary right? I kept telling myself that my husband would go back to his job soon.  It was like we were always holding our breath. 

Early on I would say that we were not going to come out of this pandemic worse than when we went in. I would repeat it to myself and my husband out loud every day. Initially, we both worked to make that a reality. I was determined to not allow all of this to take us down and destroy the life we had built.  

We masked and stayed home.  We did what was asked of us.  I put signs of gratitude on the lawn thanking the first responders, the medical doctors, my garbage man.  At Easter, I put tiny plastic eggs on the lawn of every neighbor in my entire subdivision with messages of hope tucked inside.  I tried to stay positive and upbeat. 

My husband went back to college during his furlough. I took an online class on happiness and one for writing while learning how to do my job in a work-from-home environment. I started intermittent fasting taking advantage of my new “at home” status and was able to control my food intake more than I ever could at work. I was working to stay healthy in every way I knew how. I prepared pitches to my company in the hopes to continue my job as work from home as they collapsed our facility and moved the work to another state.  I was convinced that it was all going to work out. 

But I was foolish. Maybe believing in a reality that didn't exist gave me comfort. But little by little things fell apart more and more.  It was like trying to plug a hole in the dike and more water kept coming in.  I couldn’t stop what was happening or control it.  And come January of 2021 there was no more comfort in my pretend world when I was officially severed from my company and the endless march of days found me officially unemployed as well.  

It was my worst nightmare. Everything we had worked for and built up was crumbling and there was no way to stop it. In addition to the absolute collapse of our careers and financial stability came the loss of friends and family.  And not to the virus.  That might have been easier frankly.  People had not, as I had hoped, been kind at all to each other in these times of trial.  It was, in fact, quite the opposite.  Where I attempted to extend grace none was offered in return.  

Soon over a year had passed since the start of the pandemic and my husband was not back to work despite his seniority, leaving both of us unemployed at the same time. 

Entertainment took a huge hit as an industry and although Disney had reopened it had not brought back so many of its iconic experiences.  There were no parades or fireworks.  No shows or spas or even basic transportation like monorails and trams.  We would go occasionally just to seek some normalcy and although I was grateful to have an outlet, a tiny glimmer of light and hope, I was reminded of everything that was still missing.  

I remember one day in the sunshine staring up at the EPCOT ball and seeing the empty monorail track.  For so many those parks are an escape, but for us, it was our livelihood.  I never imagined seeing Disney in such a state. The sense of loss was indescribable. How could any of this be happening? 

And as the pieces of my life slowly eroded, I sequestered myself in my house.  Once my job was gone, I was relegated almost entirely to my home.  Even though I desired to see friends I either found them too busy or unwilling to meet up due to the virus.  

I think my only contact with friends at one point was a brief meeting in a parking lot, socially distanced with masks on.  I was feeling the burden of the lack of human connection.  I attempted to reach out on zoom calls or via email even with cards and handwritten letters but nothing filled the gap and worse still was the lack of response from the other end of those efforts.  The more alone I felt, the more food, once again, took center stage.  It was the only joy I had. It was my friend. It was all that was there when I reached out in the emptiness. 

My husband eventually did get recalled to his job after 14 months of furlough but being in limbo for well over a year takes its toll and he did not go back to the job he had previously so his schedule was upended and he started to work overnights.  In all of that juggling I became the thing I vowed to never be.  A housewife.  Not that there is anything wrong with people who chose that path.  My mother was a housewife for most of my childhood.  But I am not someone who ever wanted that.  I wanted to have a career from as early as I can remember.  I worked my whole life toward that end. But now in an instant, it was all dissolved and what was left was only to be described as being a housewife.  

Don’t get me wrong.  I was doing all of that cooking and cleaning before, but I had a career too.  Now I had no purpose except to cook and clean which was not my area of expertise.  I was fine with the cleaning actually and took it to an obsessive level.  My husband had to actually ask me to stop cleaning things. The pandemic worsened that OCD behavior for me as my germaphobia kicked in. I was definitely scrubbing things like it was a career.  

But the cooking.  Oh the cooking.  I just couldn’t keep up with his schedule and cooking and eating at weird times.  My own eating suffered as a result.  I was making quick things and easy things and basic things.  All of which are not healthy things.  I fell back into a pattern of eating a lot of what I had left behind on my weight loss journey – pasta, white bread, flour, pizza, desserts. Name something unhealthy and I was finding a way to eat it. In bulk.

In addition to losing my identity with my career, I also had the added burden of my lost income as the breadwinner of the family. So daily it weighed on me not providing in the way I always had.  Knowing I was depleting our savings just to stay afloat ate at me. And in turn, I ate to quiet the voices.  It was an ironic salve of failure to counteract my failure. But one I saw as comfort. A balm to cool the burn.  

I made excuses.  I acted like I was just under stress and was trying to keep my head above water.  But all along I was making my situation much worse.  To console myself with food, and let's be very clear that is exactly what I was doing whether I wanted to admit it or not, was only adding to the tragedy unfolding.  Now I was gaining weight on top of everything else going wrong in my life.