The problem with being an emotional eater is that I may head for that bag of chocolates, or down that half gallon of ice cream and it will make me feel temporarily better with the sugar rush and the endorphins that make my blood go whee! But in the end, I know it will make everything worse. I will end up on a sugar high, an artificial mood, for a little while, and then I will crash worse than I started. I will look at the empty container and the guilt will creep in. I will think "Oh! I was so awful! Look what I did.. I am never going to get thin." This will, of course, build on the cycle of emotional eating. I will get even more depressed at the thought of gaining back all the weight that I just lost, at my deteriorating health. Everything I do or think will have a black cloud of doubt and gloom cast over it and I will get even more negative than I already am.
The other part of depression is the lethargy. I do not want to move. I do not want to think. This slothlike feeling goes hand in hand with the depression and all I want to do is sit on the couch and watch sappy romantic movies and cry my eyes out. (The Notebook being the movie I cannot watch during these downswings as it will leave me a pile of sobbing goo on my couch.)
In my head, I know I just have to wait for it to pass. I know that my mind is just playing tricks on my body and I have to wait it out, don't do anything drastic, and try to surround myself with positive thoughts and influences. I need to accomplish something that will make me feel better about myself.
Writing is out of the question. There is nothing more depressing than sitting down to write when I'm in one of my "moods" and finding all the poetry coming out of me, or even writing, being about heartbreak, sadness, and death. As a former recovering Goth kid, this was the tenure of much of my teen angst writing. I could work on my novel, but my mood will inevitably shift to that of my characters and they may do something drastic. I'm all for editing, but really often, the characters run the story and I just write down what they tell me to do. Right now, they're telling me to go eat all the ice cream in the fridge and write them into torrid love affairs that will all end badly. Not an option.
Instead, I think I will go clean something. Empty the dishwasher, clean up around my desk (which has the detritus of probably 3 weeks of lack of cleaning surrounding it), maybe even get up the nerve to finally sort out and clean off my dinner table... but I wouldn't hold my breath about that.
Altogether, writing this made me smile a little bit, which is good and I can feel my spirits picking up. I had better go clean something while I still have the energy.
Thanks for reading! (and to my followers! I have three now! How awesome is that!) I hope you have a lovely everything.
-ToryLynn
Instead of sitting still depressed, maybe sitting still or moving slowly with yoga?
ReplyDeleteJust thinking out loud from my own experience.
-ls/cm
Oooh! I might try that, Crap! Thank you for the advice... Maybe once I get my desk area clean, I'll look up some yoga videos.
ReplyDeleteWhat you say sounds so much like how I feel about cigarettes. Also, why not let your characters have torrid love affairs that end badly? You can market them as (holy crap I am a genius) as side stories named after each lover. If they're short stories, you can make a whole book of short stories about torrid love affairs that end badly. I know women would love to read a book full of torrid affairs that end badly. Aaaaah! Write it already so I can give it to my friend who just had a breakup! No pressure or anything.
ReplyDelete