As you can see, I changed the name of my fearless little blog to Renee Writes Here. With the change to the New Year, I decided it was time to start over again. It seems that my whole life is a work in progress, and I continue to struggle with the good and bad of it. I look at the last five years of my life and wonder how the hell I got here.
I’m almost 50. I had a boyfriend for about five minutes till he became a disaster and tried to take me down with him. I bought a house with my daughter and live with her and my toddler grandson. I’m morbidly obese and feel like shit most of the time. I went to rehab for alcohol addiction, relapsed and then went back into recovery, all in the span of 16 months. I shut out the world, only to become so lonely I had to let it back in again. I watched a total fucking moronic asshole become president of my precious country. I gave up social media so that I could curtail the depression that seeped into my soul every time I glimpsed my timeline and saw the shininess of everyone else’s perfect life. Good God, I could go on and on!
A week ago, I decided I was done with the self-loathing and went back to the Medical Weight Loss Clinic that helped me lose 150 lbs more than five years ago. I’m on the second day of the Three Day Cleanse Diet and I feel like absolute hell. Have you ever gone on one of those low carbohydrate diets and you feel yourself crashing because of the lack of sugar? Well, that’s how I feel, but my stomach is also in turmoil, because all I’ve eaten for two days is two eggs, and two oranges a day, and all the red meat and raw green veggies I can stomach. The first day was great because dammit, I love beef. But now I’m tired as fuck and I’m cranky as hell, and I swear to GOD that my skin smells like meat.
I told Sheri in a text this morning that I think I need to journal how I’m feeling on the second, 25th, 100th, hell, even 300th day of this diet to remind myself why I don’t ever want to feel this way I again. I’m sure I’ll write about other things while trying to deal with this process yet again, but I can’t give up. I’m tired of being tired, and I’m tired of feeling like crap.
A colleague of mine that is not a food addict said she dieted one time back when she was in college. She said she hated that food was always on her mind, and that she was constantly hungry. She vowed that she would never feel that way again, and has made very conscious decisions about food and dieting all of her adult life. I wanted to call her a bitch, and tell her to fuck off, but I didn’t. I meditated on what she told me and really digested it. I realized, she’s right! You can’t make a decision to change and not be mindful of it for the rest of your life. It’s like any other addiction, you have to keep working at fighting the demon that’s chasing you.
And so it begins… Again. In 2018, less than three months until I turn 50, I’ll begin this process of change again. I’ll write my words here. I’ll write about my anger here. I’ll write about my sadness here. And I’ll write about my triumphs here too.
I hope you’ll come back and read my words, even if the Sparkly Girl you knew is gone…