Hey buddy, where's the fire?

I saw this secret on Post Secret today and it pretty much sums up how I've been feeling lately. Some days I don't even feel like trying. I feel like my life's already over. I feel like at this point even if I do lose the weight and get to some sort of "healthy" point, I'll still be plagued by all the irreversible damage that's been done already. I know that things can get BETTER, but the all-or-nothing perfectionist in me doesn't want to do it at all if I know I can't get it back to the perfect body. There's still all the loose skin, all the plaque in the arteries, all the damage to my organs caused by diabetes and 30+ years of abuse so even if I was perfect every day from here on out, my body would always be flawed, at best.

Why can't being alive be enough for me? When I'm laying in bed some nights and I get a weird feeling in my chest and my mind starts to wander about what it will be like to never be able to see my friends again, to never laugh again, to never talk to my brother again? I get sad and anxious. I know I don't want to die. So why can't I make the most of what's left of my life and live it to the fullest and stop killing myself everyday?

Some days I appreciate so much about life. I go outside and feel an autumn wind and I'm so fucking happy that I can enjoy this moment. Other days, I lie to friends who invite me out just so I don't have to get dressed or leave my apartment. Especially lately, so close to 400 pounds again, I feel myself turning back into a hermit. Making up excuses just to be left alone so I don't have to put on uncomfortable clothes and be ridiculed in public just to have a night out. So we order in and don't leave the couch all night and it feels all miserable and shameful but I still do it weekend after weekend.

But I'm still trying to get better. The one consolation is that I haven't given up on myself no matter how many times I wanted to. Still in therapy, still taking pills, still trying to eat less, still trying to make myself do things outside of my house. It's usually a little easier this time of year, because at least it won't be hotter than the surface of the sun outside my door for TOO much longer...hopefully. I do love fall. I love Halloween. I've been Halloween shopping seven times already and it's not even October yet. Borderline obsessive? Uh yeah.

Then comes the dilemma of facing yet another Halloween as a fattie. Let's see...witch or zombie...witch or zombie?? Didn't I have that stupid pep talk to myself LAST October telling me to stick to my diet so I'd have more options this year? Pretty sure I did. Okay fat, you leave me no choice.If pep talks and health scares and thoughts of your impending doom aren't enough to get you outta here, then maybe I can embarrass you out? One night at a bar in a 5X Sexy Cop uniform and I'm pretty sure I'll diet like I've never dieted before! OR...everyone I know will be suddenly blind and it won't matter anymore? Either of those options would work for me.

Eh, just kidding. I'll prolly be a clown so I have an excuse to make balloon animals all night. But the badge was a buck and I couldn't resist. I'll use it to seduce Jeff and then continue being a lifelong virgin. Adios, dudes.

Blame it on the A-a-a-a-a-ambien.

There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call The Ambien Zone.

So that psychiatrist that I see for like 5 minutes about once every three weeks thought Ambien would be a good idea for my long sleepless nights. I voiced some concerns that I had heard some "weird" things about the drug, but he poo-pooed me mid-sentence and said it was all media hype and that the side effects were very rare, blah blah etc. He likes to cut me off and make me feel like some gripey old man when I start to complain about one of his precious drugs.

Anyway, because I have little to no willpower and I DID want something to help me sleep, I decided to give it a try. And truth be told, those little fuckers work. My head hits the pillow and what normally would have been about a three hour process of shutting down the ol' thinker is now like 4 minutes of mumbling to Jeff followed by the sawing of many logs. And it's kinda nice not to have to lay there thinking about all the crappy stuff that happened that day and how I could have done things differently if I weren't such a screw-up and all that negative business that usually keeps people like me up at night, you know?

But then the weird shit started happening...

Suffice it to say that you do not want to suddenly be awoken from a deep Ambien sleep because you will be FUCKED up. Nothing seems real...or everything seems HYPER-real...I'm really not sure. Alls I know is that it makes me really stupid. The first time it happened was purely Jeff's fault.

He got up in the middle of the night to go pee and left the door to the bedroom open. Of course no late-nite pee would be complete without a monster bong hit before returning to bed. And like any real pothead knows, you have to like cough, man, and like, open up the airways, man and like, let it get all in your lungs and shit like that, you know, man? So it's nearly 3 in the morning and I hear coughing. My eyes open and I smell smoke and see this white haze and this glaring light coming from the other room. Smoke, light, coughing, OH SHIT, FIRE! I jump outta bed, start putting on pants, throw on a tshirt, run my big ass down the hallway and happen to see from the side of my eye Jeff standing in front of the toilet taking a pee and still coughing.

"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?? WE GOTTA GET OUTTA HERE!!"
"Wha? Why are you up?"

Suddenly I realize, there's no fire. Just pee and bong smoke. What in the hell just happened? One second I'm making a valient effort to remember the cat on my way out the apartment door and the next second I'm standing in the hallways staring at Jeff's balls with a puzzled yet clearly disturbed look on my face. Not cool, man. I just couldn't understand how it was so easy to convince myself the place was on fire while still being in such a sleepy haze. It's like having sound and reason, but only to make the most assenine conclusions of all time. "hmm, it's cold in here, I MUST BE STRANDED ON ANTARCTICA. LOOK AT THAT PENGUIN CAT!" Shit makes no sense. Goddamn Ambien.

The next time it happened, I forreal thought I was dead. I was home alone so I can't even blame Jeff this time. I don't know what made me suddenly wake up, but when I did, I was just surrounded by beaming white light, everywhere. This is it, I thought, heaven. No one was more shocked than me. Surely it must be my reward for never having any filthy dirty raunchy sex...the bright white beacon of light leading me home. So I got out of bed and started to walk around. Heaven was SO BRIGHT and FULL OF HOPE and FILLED WITH WONDER and ...strangely had the same layout as my apartment.

Hey, what the fuck, this IS my apartment. My apartment is heaven?? What a shitty shitty terrible heaven...no one even bothered to clean it. It was somewhere between the kitchen and the living room that the light started to fade and I realized it was just my awful dirty apartment with no cool lighting and nothing different at all except for a fat naked Tricia walking around the living room like some lost confused cherub.

Turns out opening your eyes mid-Ambien makes everything all white and bright and crazy. Things that would have been good to know before my freak-outs and before I booked that full-page obituary talking about how awesome I am/was. Oh well, the world still needs to know.

Truth be told, waking up thinking you're dead a few times a month is worth all the good sleepin' I been getting lately. Maybe the dosage could use some tinkering so I'm not taking like six hour naps every Sunday afternoon, but for now I'm grateful for the zzzz's. Hopefully I don't wake up and walk off a cliff or like sleepily drive into a 7-11 one night, but in the meantime, I guess I'll start putting some clothes on when I go to sleep...just in case.

Don't sink the boat that you built to keep afloat.

It's not that I don't miss blogging. I do.

I just don't like blogging the hard times, and well, I've been having hard times. I wanna be the funny girl with the snappy wit and the perfectly timed f-bomb. Not the girl who comes back three months later to report that she gained back the thirty pounds she lost and that once again, it's back to square one. Unfortunately, that's me today. Well, pretty close. I'm at 394.8, which puts me pretty firmly back to the beginning.

Four antidepressants and two sleeping pills and thirty pounds later and here I am again. Maybe a little worse for wear, but still here. I guess I'm a little upset that my magic pills didn't make me "normal." I still have the compulsion to overeat all the time and spend the day in my pajamas and only get off the couch when I TOTALLY HAVE to. I'm still me. For better and for worse. The good times are maybe even a little better but the bad times are still pretty fucking terrible, and there's still plenty of them. The older I get, the less magic I believe in. I'm not even sure Magic Johnson ever really had HIV. Publicity stunt!

I got really sad when I found out Garrett died. I don't deal well with death, you know? I spent the last couple months pretty much ignoring all things Blogger and that included most of my blog friends, and for that, I am sorry. Garrett was a really nice guy to me and we talked on the phone pretty often and I got all pissed at myself that I haven't talked to him in a couple months and now I never can again. It pisses me off that his name's still in my cell phone, but I know I can't call.

I went through this for a while when my niece died. She had this shitty modem that would randomly connect and disconnect for no reason. So at 3 in the morning on a Tuesday, I'd be online in my lonely apartment playing online Scrabble against the computer and suddenly my dead niece would sign into MySpace. That never went over well with me. I genuinely miss people when I know they're not there anymore. I don't even know what happened to him. I hope it wasn't anything too terrible. I just know I was really sad and pissed off and now here I am talking about it and feeling weird. That either means therapy's working or not working, so I dunno.

I was talking about it with my therapist today though. I mentioned that I had a hard week because a friend died. I said I didn't know what happened, but I mentioned that we had talked before about our relative obesity. She asked me about how big he was and I said "I don't remember exactly...somewhere just above 500 pounds, I think." She got this wild look in her eyes and said "Isn't it so sad that someone can get to that size?" Uhhh. "It's not all that hard, really, I'm 400 pounds." She said she thought I was around 200 pounds! I could tell she felt bad, I mean, the whole thing was kind of a shitty exchange, but I really wasn't all that offended. I can't expect someone who's probably weighed 95 pounds her entire adult life to understand the concept of 400 pounds. I barely understand it and I live it every day. I think she's a nice lady and she's compassionate about my problems and she just didn't know. I let it go. I didn't wanna talk about him like some number or some lesson to be learned. He was a good friend to a lot of us. It just sucks.

But seriously...200 pounds. Gimme a break, lady!

Anyway...I'll try to update more often. Thank you SO much for all the nice cards and gifts I got in the mail and all the encouraging comments and emails. They made me smile and it's nice to feel like people all over the world care about me even during the weird times that I don't care about myself. Seriously, it means a lot.

Dina, kindly get off my ass now.