Feisty Boots

Fair warning, if you are offended by cursing you oughtn’t read this frickin post.

Walking through the Mission District of San Francisco is never boring.  As I walked tonight, other people’s realities perforated my internal stirring.  I was just out of my dance therapy session.  And I was processing what had just happened. This is the first time that I stopped dancing and started feeling and it was hard.

I’ve had an interesting week and I updated her on my goings ons.  I am struggling with my weight and body image.  After so much weight loss the fact that I’ve put some back on is terrifying.  Some of my old binging behaviors are creeping back in.  And I fear I am looking over a cliff and about to plummet into a pit of uncontrollable gain.  She wants to know what it feels like before I eat, overeat or binge.  As I start to talk I disassociate.  She says, “Show me, can you dance it?”

“STAY WITH ME! THE LIGHT IS RED!!! The mom screams to the daughter who is more involved with her milkshake than the oncoming traffic.

I tell her I don’t know how to dance it.  She says that’s good.  I feel like an idiot.  I take a stab and start to move.  It’s not what I would call a dance.  It’s more of a pantomime of anxiety and secret behavior.  I feel all of a sudden angry and vulnerable.  I don’t know how to say what I had just moved.  “What was the big movement?”, she asks.  “My fuck-it moment.  I have a moment where I just don’t care and I am tired of resisting and I say ‘fuck it’ and eventually give up and do whatever.” 

“Dance ‘fuck it’ for me.” She says.

“This is hard.”

“Yeah”, she agrees.  My fuck it dance turns in to a fuck you dance and in the end I am sobbing.

“It’s ok man. It’s ok man. It’s ok man. It’s ok man. It’s ok man. It’s ok man.” He says to himself as he passes me in the intersection. I am startled.

“I feel like a child”, I say.  She says, “yeah.  What do you feel good about right now?  In the last six months you’ve quit drinking and smoking.  You are having problems with your food right now.  You have a big fuck you in you, and that’s good. When you were growing up fuck you saved you.  Fuck you got you out of the cult.  Fuck you still serves you in a lot of ways.  But it’s no longer serving you in your food.”

“Fuck you saved me…you’re right.”

“Hey girl, you probably married or something, ain’t you?”

“Or something” I reply, as I walk on by.

“How do you reward yourself?”

“I don’t know… through food, money”… I list more and I can’t think of one way that doesn’t involve consumption in one way or another.  “Praising myself was vanity. If I did something that was good it was because of god.  If I did something bad it was because of me.”  I can praise others all day long finding perfection in every bit of them.  But me?  That’s different.”

He does a move that is half waltz, and half balboa.  He staggers into the street and summons a juicy loogie from the depths of his soul.  “I’M A CYLON!!”, he screams toward me.  His glassy eyes don’t make any contact.  I keep walking.

She says she bets self-discipline is hard when discipline was so strict and externally imposed.  We were even coerced into confessing our thoughts.  Self-discipline is hard, acknowledging the progress I have made is unthinkable.  Every time I praise myself I rattle off business accomplishments and sound like some disassociated press release.  She had me dance my accomplishments cause I couldn’t make the words.  I tried.

The session ended with that last dance.

“24^th and Mission towards Pittsbugh/Bay Point”  I get on the train.

I wonder how other people reward themselves.  How do you celebrate you?

Tags: alcohol, anxiety, body, Compassion, cult, dance, fear, food, forgiveness, trauma, weight

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