Managing The Basics

The Washington Post Magazine, which  comes out each week with the Sunday paper, did a great cover story this week. “The Heart of a Cop”  was a write up about DC’s new(ish) police chief. The chief’s story is amazing. Broken home, raised by a single mom who worked all the time but still had to rely on food stamps and welfare to make ends meet, dropped out of school at 15… but, who through a twist of fate, became a DC police officer. The police chief now has two master degrees (one from Hopkins), and since taking over as chief has been to every roll call (there are two each day), demands accountability on all levels of the chain of command, and is breathing new life into the police department and the city.

But did we really need to know how much the police chief weights???

I’d bet my house that if the chief was a man no one would have thought to ask his weight, let alone publish it. But since the DC police chief, Cathy Lanier, is not a man, I guess how much she weights is newsworthy.

(What makes this even more sad is that one of the two writers of the piece is a woman. Allison Klein, staff writer for the Metro Section, either sees nothing wrong with the double standard, or isn’t brave enough to stand up to it.)

Elise was mean to me yesterday. Like really really really nasty mean.

She asked me, “Anna, how long are you going to think of yourself as the victim? Being a victim must be doing something for you, because you’re playing the part very well. Is it the attention it gets you? Is that why you like to be seen as the victim?”

Ouch.

A slap only stings when it hits its mark.

I don’t know how I feel about basically being told that I’m resistant to recovery because I want the attention that being sick brings with it. What a twisted way to make people notice me. My knee jerk reactions was a thundering, “Of course I’m not doing this for attention!” I know enough about me, however, to recognize that the things I protest and deny the loudest and most strenuously are often true. Or at least close to true.

I feel like I need to tread carefully here and chose my words deliberately. I don’t want anyone to read this and say, “See! I told you so! Eating disorders are a bunch of bunk! People just do it for attention! It’s not really a disease.” That couldn’t be further from the truth. EATING DISORDERS ARE DISEASES. What I’m about to write in NO WAY challenges or denies the irrefutable reality that mental illnesses are physical illnesses just like any other disease.

Recovery from severe mental illness, and I’ll use depression and bulimia to illustrate my point here because that it what I know most intimately, requires more than medication and an effective treatment modality. It requires committment to recovery and belief in the possibility of recovery on the part of the patient. If I catch pneumonia, I don’t have to make a commitment to the penicillin or even believe that the penacille will cure me in order to get well. All I have to do it take the penicillin as prescribed. The medication will do everything for me.

Full recovery from mental illness requires commitment and belief in addition to therapy and medication**.  I’m doing a good job on the therapy and medication part, but I’m lacking in the commitment department. A lot of this, most of this, is due to the fact that I hate myself and don’t feel worthy or capable of being better. But if I really want to be honest, a part of my does also like the attention being sick brings me. It is nice to be noticed and a part of me does worry that if I get 100% well for good I won’t be “special” anymore.

That said, “attention” is no where near enough to explain why I’m still sick. I KNOW that if I went to live in a cave all by myself tomorrow, where there would never again be anyone around to pay any attention to me one way or the other, I would still be depressed and would still have bulimia. Attention seeking isn’t the issue. It is an  issue, but not the  issue.

So Elise was right. I do get something from the attention that comes with being sick. She knows, as well as I do, that what really keeps me stuck is my self hatred and the feeling of being unworthy. She is well aware of the fact that even if I suddenly was able to express my desire and need for attention in healthy ways tomorrow, my depression and bulimia would not be magically cured. But she has a point. An important, but uncomfortable, point.

I think her main objective in speaking harshly to me was that she wanted to get my  attention. And boy did it work. She has never been that blunt and that stern with me before. She wanted me to realize that as long as I see myself as the victim, for whatever reason, I will not recover. There is no questions that I’ve been victimized, abused, and mistreated by others in my past. But that isn’t an excuse for me to sabotage myself in the present.

** This does not mean that a person who is taking her medication and is active in therapy but is still sick is uncommitted to recovery. A patient can be 100% committed to recovery, believe that recovery is possible, participate in therapy, and take her prescriptions as directed and still be very very very very ill. That is one of the cruel realities of mental illness.**

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/26/AR2008082600863.html?nav=hcmoduletmv

Of course, this means NOTHING to the 45.7 million people in the US who still lack health insurance.

For some reason I just can’t celebrate the fact that there are still so many Americans without health care coverage. A dead fish still stinks, even if you wrap the bow of “one million more people are insured” around it.

I’m not concerned about how many people DO have health insurance. All I care about is how many who don’t.

So did I.

They didn’t print the piece I submitted to them about the religious beliefs of health care workers

Bastards.

(I still have to wait a few more days before I can post it here, but don’t worry, I will.)

“Anna, who are you?”

I cannot tell you how many times I have been asked that question in a therapeutic setting. I give all the answers I can think of: wife, sister, daughter, daughter-in-law, mommy (to our dog), auntie, god-mother, geologist, Christian, mentally ill chick, writer, student…… but apparently those aren’t the “right” answers. I need to WHO I am. Whatever the heck that means.

I’m not the only one who doesn’t know who I am. Aubree has taken to calling me, “Uncle Anna.” As in, “Uncle Anna! Read it to me!” Or, “Uncle Anna! I pooped!” Or, “Uncle Anna! I want tea!”

If anyone happens to find an identity just laying around somewhere, let me know. I need one. Then, perhaps if I know who I am, it will rub off an Aubree and she’ll figure it out, too.

I love you.

Gabe loves you.

Casa Loves you.

Call or write when you can. My email is anna.keiter@gmail.com

Our property is surrounded on three sides by a sheep farm. The fourth side backs up to the side of the mountain is pretty densely forested. Deer come through the woods every day and graze in our yard and hang out with the sheep. The same heard of deer come each evening, and Gabe and I have nicknamed most of them.

We see black bears a couple times a year. Two of our friends have actually hit bears while driving, and I almost hit one myself a couple of months ago.

There are at least two pairs of bald eagles that live around the river where it makes the sharp bend at Eddie Site’s farm. They will occasionally follow the river toward our house while they’re fishing for trout, so we see them occasionally.

There are three great blue herons that live between our property and Gabe’s parent’s farm. I know exactly where to look for them along the river and I am rarely disappointed when I watch for them as we make the drive to Mozer.

Squirrels, opossums, raccoons, rattlesnakes, frogs, toads, copper heads, bats, rabbits, turtles, groundhogs, humming birds, foxes, and yes, skunks, are so common around here that I take them for granted and don’t even notice them anymore.

We have flocks of wild turkeys that roost in our woods in the fall and spring.

But I have never see a bobcat. Until today.

I’ve seen pictures of bobcats that people have trapped, and we even have a picture of Pap (Gabe’s maternal grandfather) holding two bobcats that he caught in one day as a young teenager on the farm (the same farm that Bev and Barry now own). Pap looked so much like Clay in that picture that if the worn condition of the picture itself didn’t show it’s age, you wouldn’t know which one it was.

I was driving to my gym orientation on 220, and I saw a bobcat run out of the woods and down into the hollow. It was lightening fast, graceful, powerful, wild, and seemed to move without effort.

I feel so blessed to have seen it.

If I was in the hospital, or if I was no longer living, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to see such a wonder of God’s creation. Maybe, by letting me see a bobcat, God is tempting me to keep going. If I can see a bobcat with no effort on my part, other than using my eyes and being at the right place at the right time, I wonder what I will see in the rest of my life if I commit to living with all my energy and determination?

I went to my orientation session at the gym this morning. I can’t say enough good things about it – the facility is brand new and gorgeous, the resistance and cardio equipment is state of the art but also user friendly and non-intimidating. Misty has done an amazing job with the place. Plus she is the most knowledgeable, kind, approachable personal trainer I have ever met. She made me feel at home and not at all like the embarrassingly out of shape eating disordered chick that I feel I am.

Really, the only thing I don’t like about the fitness center is that it has a tanning bed. Hello, world! Fitness center = a place to work on being healthy. Tanning bed = NOT healthy. I’ll save you my rant against “cancer coffins” this time, but just because you’re lucky.

The hours it’s open aren’t that great, either. Some of the gyms in Chicago are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I understand that hours like that just aren’t feasible in Monterey, Virginia (population 250), but the center never opens earlier than 10am and two days a week it is closed by 6pm.  

Scheduling is further complicated by the fact that this week is Highland County Fair Week, so the gym is running in reduced hours. Given what a big deal the Fair is, I should probably be grateful that it’s open at all. I just looked at my day planner and realized that, because of Fair and my work schedule, I’ll only be able to work out on Monday and Saturday next week. Not cool.

I hope the gym does well. I think Misty is incredibly brave to have done what she has. Her parents own the building, but I’m sure she has at least $2000,000 invested in the machines. There is such a need for a local fitness center, but need is different than demand. I’d wager a bet that the people that most need the services of the gym are the people that are least likely to use them, which is unfortunate, both for them and for Misty.

Ever since I submitted my opinion piece to the Post, I have been obsessively checking my email, hoping that there will be a message in my in-box from Katharine Grahm herself saying, “We’re going to publish your article on the front page of Sunday’s Outlook section and send you a check for $10,000!”

This is very unlikely however, for many reasons:

1. I have no writing experience

2. A million other people, who are real health care policy analysts, have also submitted peices

3. The topic isn’t sexy enough for the front page of the section

4. Katharine Grahm is dead

Realistically, there is probably more chance of Mrs. Grahm being raised from the grave than my being published.

I. HATE. THE. TERM. “PREGOREXIA.”

I love Brie’s blog. (http://notaletellsall.blogspot.com/)

But I still hate the term “pregorexia.”

Perhaps, rather than doing a show about an eating disorder survivor who got pregnant accidentally, television should consider doing a show about how freaking hard it is for eating disorder patients to get pregnant, even when they have met their goal weight.

That I could relate to. Very very very well. Pregorexia? Not so much.