Hey, Man! (A Memory)

Yikes! Sorry for my absence!  It's been a long time since I've gone more than a week without posting (unless I'm out of town.)  Just had lots of stuff to do and honestly didn't really feel like posting.  This has been a really difficult season for me.  Spring is always hard, I always hate it, but this particular spring has been worse than usual.

Today I was driving home from meeting my mom at the old condo and there was nothing good on the radio and my iPod was dead.  So I fished out my huge CD case from the depths of the backseat, grabbed a random one and popped it in.  The orchestral swell of the beginning of "Hey, Man!" by Nelly Furtado reverberated around in my car.

(Click HERE to hear Hey, Man! and read the lyrics.)

As I listened, a slew of memories washed over me.  Stopped at a red light, I remembered the series of events that lead me to listen to this song, grabbing out a few particular parts.  I'm not always a huge Nelly Furtado fan; I think her voice is a little too whiny and nasal at times.  But the chorus of that song got my attention:  

There's a shadow in the sky
and it looks like rain.
And shit is gonna fly
once again.

In late 2008, after the majority of the Kartini-induced weight had been lost, my parents and doctors finally figured out that, hey, I actually wasn't cured by Kartini (imagine that!) and I was actually still pretty sick.  I just wanted to be left alone, but my doctor was all, "I refuse to see you anymore unless you go to treatment again of some kind......" but, bless her soul, even SHE knew better than to mention the words "meal plan" to me.  I wasn't underweight, but I was headed that way.

So my parents, who still had medical guardianship of me at the time, decided I needed to go to this other place called Portland DBT.  (Click HERE to read about Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, or DBT.)  To be honest with you all, I don't remember a whole lot about how that happened or how I actually ended up there.  

But here is what I do remember. My therapist was a guy in his mid-40s, we'll just call him Bob.  He wore green and brown every single day, and he was kind of short and had short legs, and I remember he would sit with his legs crossed and his pant legs were short and I could see his green or brown socks all the time.  I can't remember what we talked about much, but I remember I didn't really like him.  Toward the end of my time there, he admitted to me that he had struggled with an eating disorder when he was younger, and I remember thinking that it would have been nice if he'd told me that sooner.

The program I was part of in Portland DBT had 2 parts - individual therapy and group therapy.  The group therapy I was in involved eating a meal together.  The group was like 2 hours long or something, and we ate right in the middle.  We didn't have meal plans provided by a dietitian, but we had to have a  "proper meal."  Whatever the hell that meant!! I remember eating a PB&J, baby carrots and drinking skim milk out of a container like they give you in elementary school.

The group therapy was, in a word, disastrous.  But that's a story for another time.  The main memory that washed over me as I listened to Nelly Furtado this morning was actually about the idea of immersion therapy.  Every time I went to individual therapy with Bob, he weighed me.  I hated it.  I refused to look at the scale, even though he told me I could.  That, in fact, I should.  I was having none of it.

One day, Bob and I got into an argument about that.  He was trying to convince me that I should know my weight, that it would help ease my fears if I just knew, that I probably wasn't as heavy as I feared I was.  I called Bullshit.  It wouldn't help me at all!  Why would I need to know that?  Don't most ED places want you to not know?  Because it shouldn't be about the number, right?  Apparently Bob didn't think so.

I remember sitting in his office, across from him and his damn green and brown socks, and I just KNEW that he was about to tell me my weight.  Despite my best efforts to make him understand that I did not, under any circumstances at all, want to know, I knew he was going to blurt it out.  That realization came to me in a fraction of a second, and it was like slow motion.  Before I could say, "No" or "Stop," he said the number.

True to form, I freaked out.  I was yelling at him.  "Do you have any idea what you've just done?? Do you know how TRIGGERING that is for me?  Are you STUPID???  What part of 'I don't want to know' is hard for you to get your empty skull around?"  I slammed out of his office and made it to my car, barely, before I started bawling.  Of course that number was way higher than I hoped to hear!  (It's actually still just ever so slightly higher than I weigh right now, at 3 and a half months pregnant!)

As I drove home after that, barely able to see through my tears, I found myself singing "Hey, Man!"  Mostly the chorus.  ".... and shit is gonna fly... once again..."  I think I must have known that Bob was going to tell me my weight that day, because I was listening to that song on the way over.  

And, as Nelly Furtado said, it was cloudy and it sure did look like rain.