Reality sucks. That I know, because I spent most of my life compartmentalizing real life from my over-idealized notion of what life should be like. The last couple of years have been about dealing with that, and as a corollary, reducing my compulsion to eat. It is really true for me that my compulsive eating didn’t have anything to do with food and did have everything to do with the fantasy life I was leading.
My mother spent the last 40 years of her life in the same way, and I never actually knew how to live “normally.” Even today, I am continually surprised with some new element of normal life that I don’t really get. Today, for example, I recognize that I’ve been unnecessarily worried about my work issues, as I described yesterday. Once I chose to stop worrying, and start taking action, I got reasonable results. Not perfect results, and I still stress myself out about them, but results nonetheless.
This morning I did my duck-lining-up in getting the managers aligned on the topic I want action on. I was so worried, but the results are almost all good. One colleague said his boss got a little upset that he didn’t know the guy was doing this project, but the boss calmed down when he found out that the guy hadn’t spent more than an hour a month on the project yet. My very real, but not earth-shaking, mistake was to not ask my colleague to inform his boss himself. Learn from it and move on. The colleague is not upset about it. It actually looks like I might get this project off the ground after all, so my worry is wasted. I’m a little tired from the worry.
The reality I have to face at the moment is that reality is a choice I make. If I choose fantasy, then I have the consequences of compartmentalization and the need to eat to stuff down/push away the moments when reality is unavoidable. God, I just don’t know how to think through this.
Fantasy requires that I keep reality out. That’s impossible.
Reality requires more, but I gotta go right now. As Scarlett would say, “To-mah-row is another day.”
