This move is a big change for me. It is part wish fulfilment, part impulse decision, part desperation, and part of the plan all along. It feels like it was the right thing to do. I'll know soon enough if it was a mistake, once the bills start rolling in every month.
So why talk about a home in a blog about my health/ weight loss transformation?
Every now and then I will see an article about how having a lot of clutter or disorganisation in your life can really impede weight loss. It is a bit chicken and egg; does the clutter come first or the weight gain/ plateau? Does this mean all messy people are fat and all tidy people are not? Does it need to mean anything? Obviously its a self-limiting area of study because there are always exceptions to every rule, people are complex! But for me, at least, clutter and disorganisation are a part of my pathology.
I like things tidy. I am not overly OCD about it, and I don't like clinically zen environments, but it is definitely an issue for me. When things are not organised at home, my mind seems to fly into the mess and hide out there. My mother, bless her, was (still is really) a monumentally disinterested housekeeper. Part rebellion against her disapproving mother, part reaction to the things facing almost every woman who found herself in a suburban house in the mid 1960s, part a symptom of her long term depression. Instead of turning inwards and becoming the sort of fussy uber-mum some of my friends had (can you say temazepam?), or the disturbingly calm and relaxed perfect housewives other friends had (can you say valium?), she instead turned out. Literally, she would stand by the window in the kitchen gazing at the sky and sipping sherry for hours, while the house sort of piled up behind her. Hers was not the prescription drug route, she used alcohol. I was a kid with pretty severe allergies, so home was a struggle. Everywhere I went I sneezed and snuffled and wheezed my way though the stuff. There was no medication for these issues in the 70s, you just limited what you did. So for me, a messy house equals illness and my reaction to it is the same as it was then, to retreat into a cocoon somewhere and just read and daydream my way out of it.
In a nutshell the past three years have been a bit tough for me. Don't mistake me; there is a lot of really good stuff going on in my life and I am grateful for it. But being a single parent is hard work, being the parent of a kid with learning difficulties is hard work, jobs here are demanding and with the many benefits comes long hours and an encouragement of workaholism. Without even realising it, I had dropped into a pretty deep pit. In fact, sitting here in my new place I am a little overwhelmed at how deep and how all encompassing that pit had become. I had somehow gone from a busy but manageable life, where I was at a reasonably healthy weight, got a reasonable amount of exercise and was coping reasonably well with the demands of my son and my job; to one in which I pretty much lived on a spot on my sofa and tried to ignore the trainwreck going on in slow motion around me. If I did move, it was off and out of the house and into a shop or a movie or anywhere that just kept me spinning along doing nothing in particular. It had happened without me even noticing, and how had 3 years gone by?
My life, while becoming bigger and more complicated in some ways, had effectively shrunk to one square metre of cushioning and a TV screen.
Was it depression? Honestly, I don't know for sure. I have been depressed before and this was nothing like that. I got stuff done full speed ahead at work. I had had a long and serious bout of pneumonia and I did seem to get things back on track for a while but my mind wasn't there for it and I lost track. It was at home that everything went on hold. I had battled for so long to get my son into the school I knew was best for him and I suspect, tuckered out from the long, exhausting and endless push of it all, I just sort fell into a funk. I knew I needed to get my helper to work a little better, but I kept putting it off. I knew I should walk my dog, but he was getting older and seemed happy to blob. I knew I should exercise but somehow could not muster the energy to do anything else after a 14 hour work day. I knew I should start figuring out the mess of bills and medical costs (learning disabilities are not covered in our medical scheme) and getting my budget under control. I knew I should not have borrowed money, more than once, to help my mother but I couldn't say no. I just kept putting things off. There were endless deadlines and tasks to do at work, plus it is very easy to just volunteer for things and therefore have even more excuses for not facing up to things at home. I was halfway through my masters and I just couldn't bring myself to do any of the work so I withdrew from it. Any residual feelings of anxiety were stuffed back down with food. Mirrors were avoided. I refused to have photos taken and if they were I asked friends to delete them. Friends left with startling rapidity and I faced a lot of empty spaces in my social life. I stopped going out.
Peter Walsh (link below) has written a book about transforming your life by decluttering. To be honest I find him a bit of an annoying man but I think he makes a really good point. In particular this struck a chord with me;
"So many of the people I work with--people who struggle with varying degrees of clutter in their homes and lives every day--have one thing in common: They are frequently not engaged in their own lives. By this I mean that much of their daily activity is conducted almost by rote. They buy things without really thinking about it, eat food without really tasting it, watch TV without noticing what they're seeing, and interact with people around them in a distracted way. Put simply, they're preoccupied by so many distractions they're just not thinking."
That was me. I was not really engaged with my life. I was doing all the right things at work because I am responsible and I have to have a job, but my life was gradually curling up at the edges like a fallen leaf.
So now what? Well I am halfway to my first 8kg loss goal with Sam. 119kg this morning. I know it is very very slow but at this point, I am OK with that because I want to take some time and get it right.
I have some trust in myself again. I took a punt with this new place, and it will require some belt-tightening or heaven knows some creative accounting of some sort but it is a nice house. It is my putting myself first for once house. It is my fitness house. I have to walk up to the third floor every time I got out and come back again. There are stairs inside. It is a 40 minute bike ride to get to school. To catch the bus I need to walk for 25 minutes. I have lived here for ten days and I kid you not - the stairs are working. I have a gym set up in the corner of the living room. I have a balcony where I can sit and watch birds and squirrels and the occasional lizard live their lives. I have room to breathe here. It may be a spectacularly irresponsible decision to increase my rent at this point. But when I was unpacking I said to my son, "It's like we got all this stuff for the house we have now". Seriously, everything fits here, like a well oiled and heavy lock clicking. The TV is gathering a bit of dust. I am listening to more music. A new helper starts on Saturday.
So this last month has been a big one. And scary. Because before I was scared not so much of losing anything (I hated my life, I suspect I secretly hoped I would lose something), but of being somehow outed as an imposter in my own life. (The resident mean girl in my head would whisper, "See her? She is pretending everything is fine and she knows what she is doing, and she doesn't have a clue). Now I am not scared of that scenario, I am nervous because I do have something to lose. I feel like I am sitting on the windowsill of a really new and fulfilling and happy life. And that makes me excited and terrified all at once- it is a lot in the hands of someone I have only just begun to trust again.
I am not quite ready for pictures of me yet. They will come. Filtered, but they will come. Instead here is what I am gazing at with my morning coffee, and in the evening after the long cycle and climb up the stairs.
http://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/lose-clutter-lose-weight-peter-walsh-book/story?id=30322571
