…when, if you don’t stop, your body will stop for you.

I can’t believe I let it happen to me again, but I did – and yesterday I suffered the consequences.

With the hormones, the demands from work (and a lot of demanding people), suddenly having to figure out how to do Australian income taxes, a stack of Christmas cards yet to finish and send out, financial woes, and just wanting nothing more than to sit down and write… Well, all that stress bubbled up and came out yesterday.

After walking out of the tax office (an appointment we had to put on our credit card), I sat down on the steps and just cried. Poor Bloke was great and helped me to calm down, but I was in full on panic attack mode just trying to breath and not think about anything other than being in that exact moment. Every time I started thinking about something else we had to do, I couldn’t breathe again. So I had to sit and not think about any of it.

Not exactly an easy task for a woman who runs her to-do list through her head almost constantly.

I managed to calm down and make it through the day, but getting the rest of my work done involved frequent breaks because I couldn’t sit for long doing it before I’d start to tear up and have trouble breathing again.

Today is a bit better, but I still have to layer my work with task, non-work something, task, non-work something… (This is one of my non-work somethings.)

I was in denial. I was in denial about being exhausted, about being strapped for cash, about having to declare a no-presents Christmas because we just can’t afford it, about the fact that not having a ‘proper’ Christmas broke my heart because it’s ‘my’ holiday, that I was freaking out over having to learn taxes because we can’t afford an accountant, about… a million and one different things.

I’m so tired of feeling like I have to justify my stress because someone might scorn me for having it better than they do.

So no more justifications, no more denying that I want to give my husband a gift on Christmas even if I have to put it on a credit card and no more feeling like I have to keep my mouth shut when they treat me like crap.

I’m done with all of it.

At the heart of it, my change of direction is not only for my immediate health but to answer the big question in my life:

Why don’t I want to lose weight?

This may seem like an odd question coming from someone who has been trying (and losing, and gaining back) weight for so long, but it’s the question that has been bothering me for a long time now. I can lose weight. I know how to and I know what to do. But what keeps me from doing it?

Why do I, instead of ‘falling off the wagon’ and getting back on, fall off the wagon and roll around into the mud while trying to dig myself such a deep hole that it’ll suck the entire wagon inside, never to be ‘gotten back on’ again?

As much as I try and succeed, there is a part of me that wants to pad itself with weight and never see the light of day again.

I have gotten past all the anger and shame to do with the question, leaving it more of a matter of curiosity than anything.

I’m sure it has to do with control; I don’t want anything being taken away from me. I am also on a journey to learning to self-soothe without food, which is a biggie because food was the only thing I could depend on for most of my early life.

With those kind of things standing in my psychology, I’m attempting to be patient with myself.

Did I mention patience isn’t my virtue?