#I wouldn’t have even said anything if she didn’t try to Hurricane Katrina me so often | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

xmxisxforxmaybe · 5 years ago

Text

Decryption_Error: “Angela”

Summary: The cyberattacks haven’t stopped, and Y/N is struggling to make sense of them as she worries for her father, for herself, and for the future of the company; however, it’s nearly Halloween, and Angela has invited Elliot, Y/N, and Darlene to a costume party. For the first time, Y/N wonders if she’s really the only woman Elliot wants.

A/N: I needed some time to process the end of Mr. Robot before this story would let me continue. I finally feel reenergized and ready to update regularly, MUCH in thanks to @alottanothing for prodding me along. This chapter wouldn’t exist without her, so thank you, my friend!

Story Summary, “The Server Room, Part I”, “The Server Room, Part II” “The Long Weekend, Part I”, “The Long Weekend, Part II”, “The Aftermath”, “Undecided”, **“Decided”, “Spooked”, **“Fourth of July, Part I”, *”Fourth of July, Part II”, *“Darlene”

Word Count: 5000

Tags: @sherlollydramoine @rami-malek-trash @teamwolf2411 @limabein @txmel @alottanothing @ouatlovr @backoftheroomandnotbelonging @moon-stars-soul @free-rami @ramimedley @hopplessdreamer @sweet-charmie @polarcrystall

If you want added, removed, or if I’ve missed your request, let me know : )

Warnings: Mild sexual content/language, description of a panic attack, let me know if I missed something!

GIF: @s-k-y-w-a-l-k-e-r

I couldn’t breathe.

I was too hot, way too hot.

Too hot. Too hot. Too hot.

My eyes shot open in the dark, and I clutched my chest as I felt the thudding of my heart against my fingertips. With a gasp, all traces of sleep were gone as I flung the covers off me with such force Elliot jumped awake.

I was already in the bathroom, pacing, my hand resting on my chest as I chanted the same thing in the same song-like cadence every time I had a panic attack.

“It’s alright, it’s okay, it’s alright, it’s okay—”

Elliot opened the door slowly, his eyes vigilant as he worked to figure out what was happening.

I took a few noisy breaths, in through my nose, out through my mouth, as my lips continued to recite that it was alright, it was okay.

Elliot approached me and when I didn’t bolt, he reached out to place his hand over mine. I knew he could feel the pounding of my heart, and I felt ashamed he was watching me fall apart.

“You’re okay,” he said, his voice still raspy with sleep. “You’re okay.”

I couldn’t do anything other than stare at him, the hammering in my chest continuing as I took up my mantra again. Elliot’s lips moved along with the words, his eyes so focused on mine I couldn’t have diverted my gaze even if I wanted to.

“It’s alright,” Elliot said gently. “It’s okay.”

This time, I was able to nod. The thudding of my heart was subsiding, and my breathing was slowing, steadying in the now too-bright light of the bathroom while Elliot’s too-intense eyes bored into mine.

After a few more minutes, I found my voice.

“I’m okay—really, El. I’m sorry you had to see that.” I stepped back, embarrassment taking the place of panic.

But Elliot didn’t let me retreat; instead, he pulled me into his arms, his hand twisting into my messy hair as he held me tightly against his body.

I sighed and let him hug me as the last waves of panic subsided.

I shifted, still embarrassed, and Elliot relinquished his hold.

I glanced at his face and saw that it was filled with concern, but I needed to get out of the light and out from under his gaze.

“Back to bed,” I muttered, and Elliot followed me out of the bathroom, flicking off the light.

We settled into bed, and I pulled the comforter up to my neck as I faced away from him. I did back up enough to be touching him, just needing to feel he was there, but when I shivered, cold now that my body was returning to normal, he rolled onto his side so he could press against me and wrap his arm around my waist.

“Please don’t feel ashamed,” Elliot whispered as he slid his arm up and over my chest, pulling me close. “You’ve seen me. . .”

Elliot’s pause hung in the air and I didn’t say anything, afraid I’d start to cry.

“You’re still the strongest, best person I know.”

Well, that did it.

Hot tears fell down my cheek and across the bridge of my nose as I tried not to violently sob in the dark.

Elliot stayed quiet, his fingers twitching lightly over the skin on my chest as he held me.

“It’s the attacks,” I began, frustration mounting as I swiped at my face with the comforter. “If it had just been Colin, I think I would’ve made my peace with it and moved on. But it was Bill Baxstone and then Kurt Landley. I feel like someone close to us is trying to hurt my father—or me.”

“They were all bad people, Y/N. Don’t you think they deserved to be found out?”

“But who decided they were bad people?” I said, moving away from Elliot and rolling onto my back, swiping at the last of my tears. “Bill Baxstone raised millions of dollars to help during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina—he took me with him when his church went down to clean up. He held my hand, hugged me, when I stumbled across the month-old body of a little boy. Who decided money laundering was bad enough to erase every good deed he had ever done? I feel like someone’s playing god with other people’s lives—someone’s taking the grey and coloring it black. I—I can’t make sense of it.”

Elliot was silent for a long time as I continued to blink into the darkness, a sense of hopelessness settling over my chest and threatening to overwhelm me.

“What if Dad’s next? What if I’mnext?”

“You’re good people,” Elliot said softly.

My laughter was a bitter bark in the dark. “Sure—to you! Who knows how the hackers see us. Bill was a good person who did something stupid. If he’d been given the chance, I know he would’ve made reparations. He just did something really fuckingstupid. His entire family is devastated, horrified—once the media gets through with Bill, they’ll have to change their names.”

Elliot was quiet.

“I didn’t know you knew him so well.”

“Yeah, well, memories can’t be hacked. I’m sure the people that did this only saw what they wanted to see.”

“You have nothing to worry about. You work, every day, to protect your dad’s company, and by protecting his company, you’re protecting allthe people who work for him, especially the hardworking, average people who are just trying to survive.”

I looked over at Elliot in the dark, the outline of his face just visible thanks to the slight peek of the city lights that filtered in through a space in the blinds.

“I’m just another rich bitch who’s had life too easy. How long before they stop caring about anything other than people’s bank accounts? How long before they stop offering justification and just start fucking with anyone they want to fuck with?”

“They won’t—I mean, that’s not what drives black hats. You know that.”

“Why can’t you find them, Elliot?” I sighed, turning my eyes back to the ceiling. “If anyone could find them, it’s you.”

“They don’t want to be found. Hackers leave a mark, something for attention because that’s what they all crave. This one—doesn’t leave anything.”

“I’ve checked myself. Again and again. Nothing.”

“Nothing,” Elliot repeated.

* * * * *

Halloween was fast approaching; it had been a warm October, and until today, the chill of fall had evaded the city. Walking into CIStech, I pulled my coat tighter as a gust of wind swept through the streets. I smiled as I thought about picking out some pumpkins and talking Elliot into carving them, maybe bribing him with the promise of sugar cookies.

I felt normal, happy again for the first time since the latest hacks. It had been quiet for well over a month, and I became convinced the hackers moved on. Analytically, I knew most black hats had short attention spans; the quicker they moved and the wider variety of targets they chose, the less likely they were to get caught by forming a predictable pattern.

Black hats, like the ones who tried to hack Dad’s company on the Fourth, were easy to catch. The perpetrators of the individual attacks were in an entirely different league and all I could hope was they lost interest.

My morning was filled with meetings, so when I finally had a minute to check my phone, I was happy to see Elliot had texted.

E: Angela is having a Halloween party. She wants to meet you. I’m sure we have Darlene to thank.

Y/N: Costumes?

E: Probably.

Y/N: Could be fun—What if I let you pick my outfit?

E: Ok

E: : )

I laughed, knowing that was about as flirty as Elliot got over text. I was intrigued, though. Between Darlene and Elliot, I heard enough about Angela to feel like I knew her.

Elliot and I mostly hung out with my friends and Darlene. I asked him once about his hesitancy when it came to spending time with Angela, but he never gave me a straight answer. I suspected it was because he didn’t like her boyfriend, and Darlene felt that was it, too.

I figured I’d find out soon enough, so my thoughts quickly returned to wondering about the costume Elliot would choose.

Never, even in my wildest imaginings, could I have guessed.

* * * * *

I adjusted my long, honey blonde wig, happy with how it fit so naturally. I spent far more than I should have on it, but I think it was due to the shock of Elliot’s request.

“I still can’t believe this is what you find sexy,” I said eyeing my bright red dress and adjusting the sleeves.

Elliot only hummed in response as he wrapped his arms around my waist and looked at us in the mirror over my shoulder. We both watched as his hands splayed across my stomach, flexing as they played with the silky fabric before moving up to cup my breasts.

I leaned into his body, smiling as I watched his black-clothed head turn toward my neck. He kissed the skin of my collar bone and made his way up my neck, slowly with torturous, tiny licks and nips.

My eyes slipped shut and I sighed, relaxing into his kisses. When Elliot’s name fell from my lips, that pulled a grin from his.

“Sexy,” he breathed, his mouth so close to my ear his voice made me shiver.

“Elliot. Stop teasing.”

“It won’t be teasing if we skip the party.”

Elliot’s teeth had captured my earlobe so I ground my ass into his crotch, delighted to feel his cock pressing into my backside.

“Definitely skipping,” Elliot mumbled just as the buzzer sounded.

“Darlene’s here,” I said taking a step forward and detangling myself from Elliot. “I’ll let her in while you—deflate.”

Elliot narrowed his eyes at me as I laughed, “You started it! Don’t look at me like that, farm boy.”

“As you wish,” Elliot quietly replied, a small smile on his face.

I shook my head, knowing my grin was bordering on ridiculous as I walked out to buzz in Darlene, but who could have ever guessed Elliot Alderson considered The Princess Brideto be the perfect romantic film?

After Darlene knocked lightly on my door, I laughed with delight as I took in her costume. She was a dead ringer for Stevie Nicks.

“You look exactly like the goddess herself!”

“Too bad I can’t sing worth a shit.”

“You’d be too powerful, Dar. The universe just can’t allow it.”

Darlene fixed me with one of her wide smiles, and I offered to make her a drink before we set out.

“Oh, hell yes. Whatcha got, Buttercup?”

“Did you know this would be your brother’s idea of a sexy Halloween costume?” I asked over my shoulder as I pulled down a bottle of rum from the cupboard.

“I had a general idea, yeah,” she said with a smirk.

I rolled my eyes and plopped ice into her glass and mine. Just as I was cracking open a can of Coke, Elliot came into the kitchen.

“Hey, Zorro,” Darlene deadpanned.

“Stevie Nicks?” Elliot replied with a quirk of his brow. “Predictable.”

“At least I’m not one half of a lame couple’s costume—no offense, Y/N.”

I chuckled and shrugged my shoulders as I finished pouring the soda before sliding Darlene’s drink across the counter.

“I’m amazed myself,” I replied as I moved to Elliot’s side and placed a kiss on the edge of his jaw near his ear. “But how sexy does he look as the Dread Pirate Roberts?”

“All black—huge leap for Elliot,” Darlene said, her eyes dancing over the rim of her glass as she took a long drink.

“Got some cocaine in your boot, Stevie?” Elliot shot back at his sister. “No suspension of disbelief required for you either.”

“Fight nice, children,” I said as I finished my drink much quicker than Darlene, suddenly realizing I was quite nervous to meet Angela.

“So where is this party?”

“Angela just moved into a place with her boyfriend. Gramercy Park, I think. Do you have the address, El?”

Elliot dug his phone out of his pocket and nodded after he scrolled through a few messages.

“Well, shall we?” I asked, watching as Darlene downed the last of her Rum and Coke.

“Let’s,” she said, adjusting her top hat.

I took a deep breath, and Elliot, sensing my nervousness reached out to take my hand.

“You have everything?” he asked, his eyes examining my face like they always did. Sometimes, I felt like he was reading me, scanning me like a barcode.

“Yup—did you remember your mask?”

“I put it in your bag,” Elliot said as he handed it to me.

I smiled and moved to shrug into my backpack, but Elliot stopped me, his voice low as he said, “We really don’t have to go.”

“I want to,” I said earnestly. “I’m just a little nervous. Probably how you felt before meeting my friends. Plus, I’d never let this ‘lame’ couple’s costume go to waste.”

Elliot gave me a half-smile, “Darlene’s such a witch.”

“I heard that,” she called over her shoulder, causing me to laugh as I shut the door to my apartment.

* * * * *

Darlene was kind of right—I did feel a little lame with my modest costume as we walked up with a few people I assumed were also party guests. We were following a bouncy Playboy bunny and a rather risqué bee as we ascended the stairs, so when we were greeted by a very sexy angel who turned out to be the hostess, I wasn’t surprised.

“I should’ve known you’d eventually rope someone into playing the Buttercup to your Westley,” Angela said as she smiled and introduced herself.

“I’m Y/N,” I said with a wave, again wondering why I felt so damn nervous. I was confident, successful, attractive woman. What was it about Angela that made me feel—

“Heyyyy, Elli-man! It’s great to see you again, bro!” interrupted a boisterous devil who I assumed was the other half of Angela’s costume.

I cringed as Angela’s boyfriend thumped Elliot on the back and attempted to shake his hand. I watched, as if it were in slow motion, as Elliot took a full step back and almost knocked the bouncy Playboy bunny into the wall.

“Shit, dude. Forgot about that whole no-touching thing.”

Angela looked mortified, and yanked Ollie back, his beer sloshing over the side of the bottle.

“Ollie, this is Y/N. Elliot’s girlfriend.”

“I kinda thought you were a myth,” Ollie said, his grin reaching buffoon-like proportions. “Do you do the whole no-touching thing, too? Cuz I’m sure that would make for a—”

As my mouth dropped open, Angela interrupted who I could now definitely call her idiot boyfriend for the second time.

“Let’s get you some drinks,” she said, ushering us inside and leaving Ollie to greet the next batch of people.

“He’s pretty drunk,” Angela said by way of an apology as she glanced at me from under her long lashes.

I said nothing. I wasn’t about to make this easy on her since she just let her idiot boyfriend accost Elliot. Angela, of all people, should’ve made sure that hadn’t happened. All it took was one conversation with my family to make sure they didn’t make Elliot uncomfortable.

Angela weaved through her party guests and I glanced to see if Darlene was following, but she was long gone. Come to think of it, she ducked inside the apartment as soon as we arrived, completely avoiding Ollie.

Smart witch, I thought.

I felt Elliot’s light touch on my lower back as we reached the kitchen. He seemed to be on high alert, and my gut told me it had more to do with Angela than with the throngs of people in her apartment.

“Beer’s iced in the sink. Mixers and liquor are on the counter. What can I get you guys to start?”

“Beer’s fine for me,” I said, and Elliot nodded.

Angela dipped through two girls, a slender black cat and a vibrant peacock, and returned with two, cold bottles.

“Thanks,” I said with a tentative smile. “Nice place!”

“It feels small with all the people, but it’s like a palace after my studio. Where do you live?”

“15 Cliff—in the Financial District,” I said.

“Well, I hope you spend more time there than Elliot’s place.”

“My place is a lot closer to CIStech, but El’s apartment is cozy.”

“CIStech. My boss, Gideon, who I love, talks about you guys from time to time. He’s really down with the business within a business model, but he’s also trying to make it independently. He’s got some great ideas—we just need to land a big fish.”

Elliot must have read something into what Angela said because he stepped closer and asked her who they had in mind.

“I’m not sure I should say,” she said with a quirk of her brow and a glance in my direction.

“I’ll let you two catch up,” I said, taking the hint and feeling relieved I could walk away.

“I’m glad you got him to come out,” Angela said, a genuine smile turning up the corners of her lips.

I glanced at Elliot, who, in a move that shocked both Angela and me, leaned over to press a soft kiss to my lips.

“She’s good for me,” he said, his voice just audible over the din of the party.

I gave his hand a squeeze before I shuffled out of the kitchen in search of Darlene.

I ended up bumping into a guy I knew from school and while we chatted about the smallness of the world, I glanced around for a hint of stark white next to a void of black.

Elliot and Angela had moved out of the kitchen and were talking in a recess of the narrow hallway. Elliot’s back was to me, but I could tell from the way Angela looked at him that their conversation was intense. After a few minutes, she rolled her eyes and took Elliot’s wrist, yanking him farther down the hallway and out of my line of sight.

“So, seriously—what’s it like dating Elliot?”

Ollie’s obnoxious voice yanked my attention away from the spot Elliot and Angela had just been occupying as effectively as if he had reached out and taken my wrist, too.

Fuck me, I thought as I took in his bleary eyes.

As I fielded his questions and realized that Ollie talked far more than he listened, I focused on the feeling in my gut that had been preoccupying me all day. I wasn’t the jealous type—I always figured if I was with someone who wanted someone else then they weren’t worth my time.

Elliot was so complicated I just assumed I’d never have to worry. He didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would thrive off of juggling more than one girl at a time; in fact, I assumed his anxiety would eat him into an early grave if he ever got himself into a situation like that.

You know what they say about people who assume! my own anxiety cheerfully reminded me.

I returned my attention back to Ollie who was still talking about a party from his sophomore year of college and interrupted him.

“Have you seen Angela?”

“Huh? Oh, I haven’t in a while,” he said, his brow furrowing as he glanced around the room.

“She and Elliot must have gone off somewhere,” I suggested.

“Those two are kinda weird. Every time she’d hang with him, she’d come back all sad and mopey. I was glad when you came into the picture because they don’t talk as much.”

I looked at Ollie and the expression on my face must have prompted him to realize he’d said yet another stupid thing.

“Listen—I know how important Elliot is to her, childhood mom and dad death shit and whatever, but sometimes the past needs to just, like die, ya know?”

I figured my paranoia had gotten the best of me because what Angela’s idiot boyfriend said actually made sense.

“I think I do know what you mean, Ollie.”

“Cheers, babe! Let’s get you a refill,” Ollie said as he thunked his empty bottle against my own before leading me into the kitchen.

Four beers and a shot later, I was standing with Darlene, listening to her verbally eviscerate a cute guy who had made the mistake of saying that Flame was the best rootkit written in the past five years, when Elliot found us.

“Are we taking bets on when she makes this guy cry?” Elliot whispered, his breath disturbing the strands of my wig that hung around my ear.

I smiled and turned into Elliot’s body, leaning in to quietly reply, “I think he’s getting off on it.”

Elliot chuckled and joined the conversation, playing devil’s advocate until Darlene grew frustrated and snarled, “Who asked you anyway? Come on—let’s get me a drink,” she said as she pushed the cute guy toward the kitchen.

“Ready to go?” Elliot asked, his features schooled into a practiced indifference.

“Are you? You’re wearing that face I can’t read.”

Elliot’s lips quirked into a nanosecond smirk.

“Let’s go.”

“That’s better,” I said. “I should say goodbye to Angela and thank her for the invite.”

“She’s in the hall. We’ll catch her on the way out.”

Angela was preoccupied with a few people Elliot said were from Allsafe, the company she worked for, so we said a quick goodbye and made our way out to the street.

I took a deep breath and my body practically vibrated from the feel of having space to stretch without bumping into a body and from the chilly, fresh night-air.

“There’s nothing like space and cool air after escaping from a crowd,” I said as Elliot looked at me, his eyes filled with a happiness that only came when someone understood something that you thought only you understood.

Elliot waved for a taxi after he assured me for the third time that Darlene would be fine. I sent her a text, just to be sure, and she replied immediately.

D: I’m fine MOM. Go home and bone DAD so he learns to have some fucking chill and not be such a dick when I’m working my mojo.

Y/N: You two have very different ways of flirting lol—be safe! Text me in the am.

D: : )

As we slid into the taxi, I smiled at my phone thinking how alike and how very different Darlene and Elliot were.

“Where to?” the driver asked, his voice curt as he wondered just how drunk Elliot and I were considering our costumes.

I answered with Elliot’s address and the driver relaxed as he realized we weren’t shitfaced.

I quietly said to Elliot, “Figured you’d need to go home to your space after all of . . . that.”

“Thank you,” he answered just as quietly as he gave my knee a quick squeeze.

The rest of the cab ride was silent, which gave me time to consider how and where Elliot had spent most of the party. I did tell the driver to take us to Elliot’s because I knew he’d want to go home, but I also had an ulterior motive. I wanted him to be in his most secure place in the hopes he would be comfortable enough to answer the questions I had about Angela. Watching them interact and my conversation with Ollie did nothing but heighten that feeling in my gut.

As soon as we stopped in front of Elliot’s building, I slid out of the cab and let him pay the driver. I waited at the top of the stoop before following Elliot up to his apartment.

As soon as the door shut and I dropped my backpack onto the kitchen table, I spoke up.

“So . . . you and Angela?”

Elliot turned to look at me, his mouth dropping open a bit as he decided whether to reply or to wait for me to go on.

“You have history. That’s evident. I’m just curious about how much history you have . . . and if any of that history is not so . . . past tense.”

I couldn’t look at him when I said it, dropping my eyes and feeling ashamed for even implying he still had feelings for her. But I had to know.

God I didn’t want to know.

“Forget it,” I said quickly, opening Elliot’s drawer to yank out a t-shirt before I went into the bathroom and shut the door.

I pulled off my wig and relished in the feeling of shaking out my hair after it had been confined inside the wig cap.

I undressed, leaving my costume in a rumpled pool on the floor, and got ready for bed, slowly, hoping Elliot would be asleep or pretending to be asleep by the time I finished.

I pulled my hair into a messy bun, unable to meet my own gaze in the bathroom mirror. My stomach was still clenched in a weighted ball of anxiety as I opened the bathroom door and sent one more prayer to the powers that be that he would be in bed.

No such luck.

Elliot was on his computer when I came out of the bathroom, and as soon as he heard the door open, he swung around and said, “Come here.”

He stood up and waited for me to find my feet. I took a deep breath and crossed the room, slowly sitting down in his computer chair. I turned to face the screen, wondering what it was he wanted to show me.

Elliot opened a file and a sweet picture of Darlene, Elliot, and Angela popped up. Elliot and Darlene were grinning widely as they each had just clearly smashed a piece of cake against Angela’s cheeks, her blonde hair clinging to her face in sticky strands, the smile on her face priceless. Despite my dread, I found myself smiling at little Elliot.

Elliot’s arms were around me on either side, one hand resting on the desk while the other clicked the mouse as he showed me more pictures. I watched the three of them age until there were just a series of pictures of Elliot and Angela that stopped on the day of their high school graduation.

“She’s been my best friend for as long as I can remember,” Elliot said quietly, his face next to mine, his eyes locked on the image in front of us.

“You love her,” I stated.

“I thought we’d never be separated, but she went to college in the city and I didn’t. She wanted to get out of Washington Township even more than I did.”

“Is that why you broke up?”

“Angela and I were never really together like that—like weare,” Elliot said as he closed out of the pictures and turned his monitor off.

He turned and faced his bed, leaning on the computer desk as I swung the chair around so I could look at him.

“You never dated?”

“Not . . . exactly.”

“You’re not making this very easy to understand.”

“I’m sorry—it’s hard to put a label on it. I don’t think I can.”

“Try.”

“We had sex, but it was more because I trusted her. And she trusted me. You get to a certain age. Everyone’s talking about it, so you just do it. And I thought, maybe that was all there was to it. That Angela and I would get married someday. That I could have a life with my best friend.”

“But?”

“Angela has a flaw. She never loves anyone who loves her. I knew that, and when I was young, I accepted that. I figured I could still be happy even if she never really loved me back—loved me like that, I mean.”

“What changed your mind?”

Elliot ran his hands through his flattened hair as he struggled to say something he knew was too heavy, too much of a burden to place on someone else.

“You did,” he said, still looking at his unmade bed.

The weight of Elliot’s statement settled over me, the silence in his apartment feeling oppressive as I waited for him to continue.

“You loved me first. And after you knew me, after you knew my . . . abnormalities. I never thought anyone would love me first.”

Months ago, I had known Elliot would never be the one to admit his feelings first, but now I knew why—he had already been in love with me, but he didn’t want me to love him like Angela, to love him only because he loved me first.

He wanted—needed—to know I loved him all on my own, without obligation.

I swallowed the lump in my throat, determined not to cry as a desperate, emotional ache filled my chest.

“I don’t think you give yourself enough credit, Elliot. Anyone who could see your heart, would love you.”

“I don’t exactly make it easy.”

“True,” I said, finally drawing his eyes to meet mine as I smirked.

“I love you, Y/N,” Elliot said with such straightforwardness that the smile fell from my face. “Please don’t ever doubt that.”

“I won’t,” I answered softly, rising from the chair to stand in front of him.

Elliot’s hands came to rest on my hips as I cupped his face, my thumbs lightly sliding over his cheekbones as we looked into each other’s eyes, both of our vulnerabilities laid bare.

A frantic, daunting thought flashed through my mind as I leaned in to kiss him and I wondered—no—somehow I knew the same thought flashed through Elliot’s:

Please don’t break my heart.

#Elliot Alderson #rami malek #elliot alderson x reader #elliot x reader #female reader #mr robot #mr robot fanfiction #rami malek character #elliot alderson fanfic

93 notes · View notes

twilight-adamo · 5 years ago

Text

Author’s Notes: Brave New World, Chapter 6: Wake the Dead

https://archiveofourown.org/works/19709434/chapters/49726988

The part of the story dealing with the investigation into Alice’s past was meant to fit within one chapter. It ended up being three, because woman plans and the goddess laughs. I don’t regret it, though - I think it allowed me to cover a lot of territory that may become important later. Some of it came as a complete surprise to me; I would hit this point or that in the chapter, and I would have a plan for what came next, and then suddenly some part of my mind would go “oh, no, it’s this” and, well, what could I do but write it?

The history of Alice’s childhood home after her mother was murdered and the family left was inspired somewhat by the LaLaurie Mansion, which I namechecked in the chapter (though, whoops, I got the capitalization wrong). Nicolas Cage, the actor, did in fact own the mansion for a few years, and lost it to foreclosure when he ran into financial difficulties. He ended up suing his business manager, who countersued and claimed Cage had made a number of frivolous purchases against his advice. It’s widely believed (and may be fact) that Cage takes so many film roles today because he’s still paying off his debts.

During Cage’s ownership of the house, he did put a sign up on the LaLaurie Mansion (or it’s generally believed he was the one, at least), and it’s pretty much the sign I describe outside the Brandon house. The LaLaurie Mansion has an extraordinarily dark history - look up Delphine LaLaurie if you can stomach it; we are talking about a woman whose cruelty toward the people she had enslaved was so outrageous that other slaveholders condemned her and she was hounded out of town. Her story has been embellished over the years, and distorted by pop culture (American Horror Story, for instance, featured her as a recurring character played by Kathy Bates, and added elements of Elizabeth Bathory to her story), but she was certainly an extraordinarily horrible person. The mansion that stands today is not the original, which was burned down in the 1834, but it is still said to be profoundly haunted. A financial corporation holds it today. I’m not sure who, if anyone, it’s being held for.

I felt quite strongly as I started this chapter that Alice needed some time to herself. The little part of my brain that speaks for her had made it quite clear she was emotionally exhausted and inclined to withdraw. Naturally this leaves Bella worried half out of her mind, providing me with an opportunity to show Rose and Emmett looking after her. A few readers have told me that Rosalie and Bella’s relationship - the close friendship they’ve turned into sisterhood - is one of their favorite parts of the story; I suppose this makes it obvious it’s one of mine, too. But I don’t think it’s just Rosalie who cares for Bella so deeply; it’s Emmett, too. I tend to be a serious introvert in real life, and nervous about getting too close to others, especially physically. It’s probably left me rather touch-starved. But I do think touch is important, not just between lovers but between friends and family, and physical comfort can do more than words ever could.

I keep saying Bella isn’t me, that I’m making a deliberate effort as the story grows stranger to divorce her from the self-parody she originally was, and then I keep bringing in stories from my own life. Yes, it’s true: in my second year of college, I lived in a haunted women’s dorm, and the broad strokes of the haunting are largely as I describe. I left out some of the more specific details; it probably wouldn’t be hard for you to figure out where I went to college if you really wanted, but I didn’t want to spell it out. My first night there, I did in fact have strange, restless dreams that I interpreted as the ghost trying to figure out what to make of me. I did indeed mix herbs into water as part of a ritual and choked the mixture down, and I was left in peace after that. It was quite disgusting, frankly, but it does make a good story.

The dream was one of those surprises I’d mentioned. Frankly, a lot of stuff has just returned to Bella far earlier than I had planned. More than that, I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to bring any kind of religion into it, but I found Bella’s spirit calling out and something answering and, well, here we are.

My personal beliefs are quite private. I’m willing to discuss them, to a point; I am completely uninterested in converting anyone to my way of thinking, and there are some elements too sacred to me to disclose. In broad strokes, the faith Bella describes agrees with my own. I do hold as a central tenet that the divine is infinite and beyond the comprehension of our finite minds. I do believe that the names by which we call the divine, the roads we travel to reach whatever understanding we can find, lead ultimately to the same place - and yet those names, the gods we cry out to, the commandments we follow, the stories we hold close to our hearts, all have a reality of their own. I do in fact worship seven goddesses whom I view as aspects of one goddess, and the titles and roles described roughly correspond to my faith. I would not invoke them in the way Bella does. I would not see them as she sees them. And if I ever do give them names in the story, they won’t be the names I call them by.

But yes: once again I’ve gotten deeply personal. Writing this story sometimes feels like writing an operator’s manual to my soul. Perhaps I keep turning back to these personal details, despite my best efforts to separate Bella from myself, because it all comes easier when I pour my heart and soul into the work. Even if that means I must submit to the horrifying ordeal of being known.

Does Bella have access to magic again, after that dream? I don’t think so - at least, I don’t think she could do magic on her own. She can help Rosalie, and presumably other witches; she can call out to her deities in prayer, but I’ve never viewed that as inherently magical. But her perceptions have broadened, just a bit, and sensation begins to return. She can feel the things she has been numb to, and see the light and color of spellwork.

Will she remember more of her old life? Not on her own, I think. I hadn’t really intended for her to recover any memories at all, and arguably she only recovered what she did due to divine intervention. Part of my long-term purpose in expanding Alice’s visions so she could look back on the past as well of the future was a vague notion that she could use this ability to help Callie and Bella work through their lingering questions about their personal history, and I certainly have further developments in mind. But I don’t see Bella becoming entirely who she once was. That person is part of who she has become, but otherwise lost.

Then again, I suppose I’ve allowed her to find other things I would once have called lost, so perhaps I can’t really say for certain until the whole of the work is done.

I really wanted to bring Leah into the phone conversation somehow - I do want more of her in this story, and an increasing number of these first chapters are focused on the BEAR world tour, meaning we don’t get much time with the folks back home. I just couldn’t see my way clear to it. This felt like a conversation between Bella and Callie and no one else.

We’re seeing some cracks in their friendship here, as Bella begins to understand that Callie is still holding back. There are likely more disagreements to come, and both Callie and Rosalie are growing more vocal about their mutual dislike for one another, which can’t make things any easier. I think things will be all right in the end, but if you’re getting the feeling the road ahead is a rocky one, I can’t say I disagree.

Six Flags New Orleans was still open during our heroes’ visit to New Orleans. A month later, at the end of August 2005, Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on the park, and it never reopened. Six Flags removed much of the infrastructure that once stood there (including some things that the city of New Orleans alleges they had no right to take), and though various development proposals have emerged over the years, none of them have led to the park reopening in any form. It stands abandoned, and though some urban explorers have gotten in, access is strictly forbidden.

I wanted to linger over dinner, but I couldn’t think of anything more to add, and I was eager, at long last, to get to the main event. So I wasted little time getting the gang to St. Charles Avenue, and into the old house, and then of course Luciana appears almost at once, as soon as Alice has gotten a good look at her past.

I think Alice saw more than she said directly in this chapter, and she’ll have more to say about what she saw as time goes on. It just wouldn’t all fit in this scene. Everything happened so quickly that I had to struggle to keep to what was immediately relevant. And honestly, I think we were all here for that last conversation between Alice and her mother more than anything.

Luciana is not, of course, La Llorona. That is a much older story that comes from farther south, in Mexico and Latin America. But as she is a weeping woman crying out in Spanish, some of the locals have confused the legends, and I did take some inspiration from the story of La Llorona in describing her behavior. In particular, some legends say that when La Llorona sounds distant, she is actually quite close - and so our heroes hear Luciana crying out distantly, and then, quite suddenly, she’s on top of them.

I had given some thought to Luciana speaking entirely in Spanish, at first - I had always imagined she was bilingual, but Spanish was her first language. Ultimately, I just wasn’t confident enough in my Google-augmented translation skills. I took Latin in school, not Spanish, and not much Latin at that. I can sometimes tell when things are really wrong, but I was worried it would come off as textbook Spanish, stilted and inauthentic, and things were coming so quickly and furiously that...well, it felt like it would take too long to find a fluent speaker willing to help me get the Spanish right. I hated to do it, I hate to say that - if I were preparing this for publication as an original work I would certainly take the time to get someone else’s eyes on the thing - but I’m going on vacation in about a week and a half and I really wanted to conclude this arc before dropping off the grid. All that said, if you’re interested in helping me with foreign languages or beta reading on this story in general, please do drop me a line; I’ve certainly made enough mistakes that I wouldn’t mind getting another pair of eyes on future chapters.

Alice’s family history was one of the first things I came up with for this book, along with the dream about the Volturi that opens the whole thing. Alice’s father was canonically a jeweler and pearl trader. Though I played a bit loose with canon otherwise, I decided to keep this, and had the notion that he married Alice’s mother for her family wealth and most importantly their access to jewels, pearls, and precious medals. When he suffered some reversal in fortune connected to her family, I figured - perhaps the mines drying up, or as I ended up describing, Luciana’s father dying and not leaving her what George saw as his due - he would become willing to throw her over for another woman, and more, to arrange Luciana’s death. The final details only came together as I was writing this chapter and the last.

Alice’s final conversation with her mother still feels short. To some extent, it’s meant to be. Once Luciana’s soul was fully restored, once she had some chance to find peace, I couldn’t see her lingering long upon the threshold between the living world and the next. I hope I got the important things down - above all else, that Alice now knows she had a mother who loved her, who loves her still and will be watching over her.

It’s not the end of Alice’s journey. But it is more or less the end of the gang’s time in New Orleans. Boston comes next, and then Ireland, and all the things that follow on from that. As I said, I’m going on vacation - I’m not sure whether I’ll get another chapter before I leave, and I have obligations to fulfill before the year is out. I hope, if there is a delay, that you all find this a decent stopping point.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

#twilight #twilight fanfiction #twilight fanfic #twilight au #bellice #the tempest trilogy #the tempestverse #brave new world

9 notes · View notes

superemeralds · 6 years ago

Note

I never understood this about Shadow, why does he even work with GUN?

*rubs my gay little hands together*

Finally it’s time for my analysis of GUN, the current GUN commander, Shadow’s relationship with both of them and speculations on the future…………..

warning: it’s actually gonna get……….. really wild. This turned out to be mainly an analysis of the GUN commander because he is the main factor that influences shadows decision but im… hoooo boy.

TLDR;

The commander is a Robotnik and the character development he went through, paired with Shadows acceptance of his judgement + forgiveness of his actions, as well as their friendly bond by the end of the game, gave Shadow the feeling that it is a good idea to join forces with GUN to keep his promise to Maria in keeping the planet safe.

( +3k words; all referenced videos and audio files are transcribed for accessibility; sources/references at the bottom)

If you have any questions or comments feel free to shoot me an ask! If you have anything to add or critique (because I’m 49320% sure i forgot half of the things i wanted to address again), feel free to add to my post!

Okay so before we can make out why Shadow would join GUN, we should establish why people think he wouldn’t.

As you said, you can’t understand his decision (very understandably so), therefor let’s sum up why you feel like this, and then I’ll try to explain how all that can actually lead to him joining in the end.

We all know GUN is responsible for Maria’s death, so why would Shadow want to join them? It doesn’t make sense!

Well, you see, it doesn’t. Things don’t always make sense. Not on first sight anyways.

First thing we should note is that the current GUN commander (I’ll talk abt him a lot now) and his family were aboard the ARK during the time that Shadow was created. We don’t know why, as there are no hints towards his parents’ jobs. There are also little hints to GUN actually having employees up there.

It is confirmed that GUN was funding the ARK project and all scientists abroad, they probably had agents up there that would live among the scientists to make sure to report back to the base frequently and keep HQ up-to-date about new findings and development of the experiments.

If the future commander was aware of that, or his parents were part of GUN, is not clear.

Speculative it is to say that he probably saw the GUN soldiers in the big invasion that killed his family (his parents either were scientists that were exterminated so they wouldn’t talk, or they were GUN agents that chose to defend the scientists, or they were killed by the artificial chaos that went on a rampage*) as heroes, since he canonically blames Shadow for everything.

He did have a deep and strong fear of Shadow since the very beginning because he happened to see Gerald and Black doom in a room with Shadow together at one point in time and associated Shadow with the alien ever since. It’s possible he didn’t know about Maria being very close to him, or he tolerated it because it was her.

Actually.

Actually hold your fucking horses everyone I’m onto something.

Okay so… You know how the commander is super inconsistent with the whole family and Maria dying deal right?

SHADOW: Damn it! What does it all mean? These memories… thedoctor’s actions and words… nothing makes sense! Wasit real?

* - The GUN Commander walks up to Shadow, and points a handgun athim.

GUN COMMANDER: It’s been a long time… Shadow.

SHADOW: Who are you?! And how do you know my name?

GUN COMMANDER: I know you… Shadow the Hedgehog. You killedeveryone I loved… myfamily… Maria. I’ve been waiting all my life for this day!

SHADOW: What?! Me… and Maria?

* - A younger GUN Commander and Maria are running in a hall on theARK. He hits his ass to taunt Maria, and she catches up to him.She holds him in place, but he starts running again.

GUN COMMANDER (voiceover): Maria was like a sister to me. She wasthe only family I knew! And because of you… she waskilled!

* - The younger GUN-C gets to the door to Geral’d lab, and looksin the glass. Inside, Gerald and Black Doom are talking nearShadow’s pod.

GUN COMMANDER (voiceover): Witnessing it all… the plan to createthat horrifying evil creature... that black creature, and that insane professor who unleashed it all!

* - As the pod starts to move, the young GUN-C starts screaming.The pod sits upright, and Shadow opens his eyes.

SHADOW: So… the professor created me… with Black Doom?

GUN COMMANDER: You don’t fool me! It’s not just about Maria.Thanks to you, everyone I knewand loved was killed when the ARK was destroyed. Worst of all, myfamily! Finally… justice is served!

I bolded everything that is important to my analysis,,,,

ANYWAYS AS I WAS SAYING.

The Commanders words about his family and Maria being killed are all jumbled. One moment Maria is the only family he had, the next everyone he knew and loved was killed. Among those people Maria and his family.

We have no canon confirmation as to who his family was and why they were killed on the ARK. (Read speculation above again if needed, marked with an *)So what if Maria was his family? What if he was a Robotnik himself?

Who says that he knew about Ivo’s parents?

He might be blood related, or adopted by Gerald.

How else would a kid end up on a Space Station that is primarily for scientific research? Maria and the future commander should logically be the only children up there, because Gerald brought them with him.

The commander witnessed Shadow’s creation and knows that Gerald was involved in it. He felt a deep hatred for Shadow, aswell as Gerald, for what happened. He mainly blames Shadow for the incident on ARK, but he also holds resentment towards Gerald for having created Shadow in the first place. (”The insane professor that unleashed it all!”)

This would imply that the commander refuses to see Gerald as part of his family anymore after that had happened, which would figuratively make Gerald “dead to him.” Maria would be the only family he had left after that, and she was killed on the ARK.

He was not there when it happened, he was escorted by GUN back to earth while Maria tried to defend Shadow and help him escape. He never got told how she died, he just, presumably, saw her on the list of victims.

This event shaped the commander into wanting to become someone who can protect the innocent from harm and prevent needless death.

We see his compassion in other cutscenes!

* - The Presiden’t helicopter touches down on the landing pad andseveral GUN soldiers run over to it. Slightly later, the GUNCommander helps the President walk to the control room. The Presidentsits down in a chair.

GUN COMMANDER: Sir, are you all right?

PRESIDENT: Never mind me… What about the people of Central City?

GUN COMMANDER: No need to worry, sir. Orders were issuedyesterday, and everyone hasbeen evacuated to the safe zone.

[…]

GUN COMMANDER: So he’s finally decided to show himself. Attentionall command units! Mobilizeall Mech battle sections! Prepare all weapons to strikeincoming vessels! Mobilize “Diablon”!

GUN SOLDIR: But sir! It’s not ready yet!

GUN COMMANDER: I don’t care!! We have NO other option!! We MUSTprotect the President, andthe Chaos Emeralds, at all costs.

* - In the White House, the President is looking at Westopolisfrom the balcony. The sky is dark red/orange. The GUNCommander and two other soldiers come in through the door.

GUN COMMANDER: Sir, your transport is ready. We must go now! Sir,please!

PRESIDENT: Once again… I have failed my duty to protect ournation.

GUN COMMANDER: Sir, it’s not over! We can continue to fight. Theblack aliens may haverendered us unable for now, but we will rally, sir. You must keep yournation strong and together.

PRESIDENT: Yes, keep the nation united. No matter what happens,we’ll never surrender to these creatures.*looks at the picture of Sonic and Shadow* This much I learnedfrom them.

GUN COMMANDER: Sir, please hurry.

PRESIDENT: Okay.

* - The President and the two soldiers start to leave. The GUNCommander looks at the picture the President keeps on his desk before leavinghimself.

GUN COMMANDER: The black creatures will feel their own bloodyHell!

Again, bold lines are important!

The commander made sure to evacuate the entire population of a major city that is based off the Washington metropolitan area with a populus of over 6 Million people within just one single day.

For reference I researched how long it normally takes to evacuate big cities in real life.

“At around 10 am on August 28, Mayor Ray Nagin declared a mandatory evacuation of the city, after Hurricane Katrina was updated to a Category 5, the strongest possible hurricane. By the time the hurricane hit, at around 7 AM on August 29, later studies revealed that around 90% of the New Orleans population left. That’s around one million people within 21 hours.

Preparations for Hurricane Katrina - Wikipedia

This is important, as we can guestimate just how long an evacuation could take, if we assume that the cities can evacuate at a similar rate to New Orleans. Doing the math, this means that New York City takes around 8 days to clear out, and Tokyo needs around two weeks or so.

Thing is, however, evacuation procedures will likely suffer because these cities are much larger than New Orleans, so you might need to add a few days to them.

So, it’s more likely that NYC and Tokyo would need at least two weeks before the cities could be cleared.”

source

So he really did something really amazing.

He prioritizes to keep the President and the chaos emeralds safe above anything else and risks unleashing a new and unreliable weapon; and against what you might think- that he’s selfish/doesn’t care about the citizens- the reason he prioritizes the emeralds over people….. 1) They’ve already been evacuated.2) If Black Doom gets all of the Chaos Emeralds there won’t be an Earth anymore. No Humanity. He can think critically and in advance yall.

Also consider how he gives the President hope, not to give up. He’s confident in his abilities as commander, and his his soldiers, to do whatever they can to keep the people of their country, and the entire world, save. And he also emphasizes that the nation themselves should not loose hope, that the President should be a positive influence and stand up against the intruders (the aliens).

He also says he’ll return “their bloody hell” to the aliens, which 1) references his association of Shadow with those aliens and his firm belief that Shadow killed Maria (and by extend his (grand?)father Gerald ?).2) references the fact that the aliens have taken countless of soldiers lives already and that he wishes to return that favour to their kind.

The commander is generally a justice loving person who will do anything in his power to do the right thing. When it comes to Shadow, though, he seems to not have his personal grudge towards him under control and he gets a little extreme with his idea of justice.

GUN COMMANDER: Shadow? Deploy the troops, NOW! And if you findShadow with the black aliens…then kill them all.

GUN SOLDIER: But sir, isn’t Shadow on our side–

GUN COMMANDER: I gave you an order, soldier! He’s evil and he’sthe enemy!

GUN COMMANDER: Alert all field commanders in Sector B. I’mauthorizing full use of alltactical weapons. I want both black aliens and Shadow stopped andburied. Failure, is not an option.

GUN COMMANDER: Hm-hm… It’s over, Shadow. You’ll finally beexposed and eradicated forthe evil that you are.

GUN COMMANDER (radio): Come in, Eclipse Cannon! He must be stoppedat all costs! Take him out... that’s an order!

GUN COMMANDER: Shadow! Damn you! It’s been fifty years… justicewill finally be served.*cocks handgun*

This emotional side of him is a great flaw in a man of his position, but also a great strength.

As we know he confronted Shadow about his hatred and literally attempted to personally kill him.

* - He fires his gun, but Shadow’s now standing behind theCommander, faced away from him, with his eyes closed.

SHADOW: If what you say is true, then I will respectfully acceptmy fate.

GUN COMMANDER: You mean to tell me that, you really don’t remembera thing?

SHADOW: But I just need some time… to uncover the real truth.

* - As Shadow walks off, the Commander looks at his gun and fallsto his knees.

Shadow admits to not remembering any of what he is saying, but that he will take responsibility for those things if it’s true (WHILE NOT EVEN REMEMBERING ANY OF IT). This means that Shadow accepts the justice the commander wanted to serve. And also that he forgives him for being so bitter about it, for being so incredibly angry.

You might think it is because he knows what it’s like to hate someone for killing your loved one and then doing everything to avenge them but…. he doesn’t remember. He doesn’t remember SA2. All he knows is the empty feeling of rage and sorrow, that he can’t really put any context on. (He remembered that Maria died and that he wasn’t able to save her, but he never remembered how she died. This had to be told to him by someone else. Either it was directly shown to him by Black Doom when he uses chaos control to show Shadow the past, or by Doom’s Eye in a cutscene before a boss fight. (iirc anyways because I’ve gone through so much cutscene and script material now that I might mix some stuff up, please correct me if I’m wrong).

Once the commander learns that Shadow doesn’t remember anything and fucking accepts his plans to kill him, he is SHOCKED.

He looks at his gun, as if he’s realizing just what the fuck he was doing, threatening and literally trying to kill Shadow in an attempt to serve “justice”. He falls to his knees in shame for his misguided behaviour. He realized how foolish and childish is obsessive pursuit of Shadow was.

Later in The Last Way when Gerald tells the truth about Shadow and Black Dooms relation and Shadow saves the world….

* - All of the members are cheering and yelling.

GUN COMMANDER: *sigh*

* - The President pats the Commander’s back.

PRESIDENT: How ironic… After the way we all treated him, hesaved us all i the end. We were all wrong about the professor. Let us pay homageto Professor Gerald. Let’s work to ensure peace and prosperity for a brighter future! What do you say, Commander?

GUN COMMANDER: Excellent idea, Mister President.

They feel guilty for holding Shadow accountable for the destruction the aliens caused, aswell as for what happened to Gerald. They plan to reform the way they act in homage of Gerald Robotnik (and Shadow the hedgehog).

Now, it’s not confirmed when exactly in the timeline it is, but the commander does say this, but in Space Gadget (after completing the game I assume) during the training gameplay it is possible to get a random call from the commander which says:

“Shadow, do you read me? First… I want to apologize, for the other day. Actually, I just became a grandfather last week and I was thinking of maybe having you over. I know that training is tough, but try and do your best.”

(here’s the voice file in case you want to hear it)

This confirms that the commander is trying to build a friendly relationship with Shadow now and wants him to be part of his family (again. Since they are both Robotniks.). It could either be an invitation after Shadow already had joined GUN, or, and I think that’s more likely, he wants to discuss that matter when Shadow pays him a visit and they can talk about it in person.

Now Shadow does forgive the commander for his actions, and he accepts that what happened to Maria lies in the past and that it is not the fault of anyone else but the person that shot her, so he can’t be angry at the entire human race for it. He understands it now.

The commander makes a genuine effort to keep the country, and the planet, save; and GUN is an organization that focuses on keeping the world save. Shadow knows that it is impossible for one person alone to do it, so he likely sees this as a good option for help since he’s willing to cooperate with this commander. Due to his old age he would have to retire soon, though, so Shadow would also likely want to be inside that system to have influence on the new leaders in the future, so that GUN does not stray the wrong path again. (Be it shady experiments or useless killing.)

He likely agreed upon the request under the condition that OMEGA could join along with him, as well as the condition that he, OMEGA and Rouge are an inseparable Team that will work together from this day forth.

This is how I think it went.

Yes I got lazy towards the end because it’s super hot and I’m sweaty and my laptop is literally wet from my sweaty hands its disgusting akjsfhka

sources: (take the wiki ones with a grain of salt i only referred to the stuff that is absolute fact (sourced trivia, quotes and plot line); not personality descriptions or anything interpretative stuff since the wiki is also fan made and i disagree with some of that)

http://sonic.wikia.com/wiki/Shadow_the_Hedgehog_(game)

http://sonic.wikia.com/wiki/Commander

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps2/926671-shadow-the-hedgehog/faqs/39966

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh7b_eml0EU (i used all 4 of those videos aswell as this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBisWZ8eKV0

#meta/ shadow #Anonymous #ask #long post

109 notes · View notes

zayizzle · 6 years ago

Text

Since I can't really go on Facebook and say this, I'll vent this here. This is mostly because I'm a coward and don't want my family to think I hate them. Which I don't, in fact I love them. Which is why this have to stop.

My aunt is starting to become a big annoyance to me. Which I don't like thinking of her in that way. She's my aunt and I love her. However, it don't take away from the fact she's self involved, clingy, and uses people; including me (but I won't let her anymore).

She tends to act like me and my cousin (her daughter) left her. As if we don't suppose to have lives of our own. We are adults and our time don't around revolve her. My cousin owns a online hair extension business and have a child. I'm still trying get out there in the art community. I don't have time to sit through over hour long mostly one sided, rambles of phone calls. At inappropriate times like midnight or beyond at that. I don't care if I am not asleep yet or not, I don't want to talk to anyone at that time. Which I wished she never started doing. What if there is a emergency she's in, but now I'm mentally apprehensive to answer because I'm wondering if it's another two hour drunk ramble.

In addition, she tends to bring up memories that aren't accurate or is just uncomfortable to randomly bring up without reason. Why are you randomly asking me do I remember being bullied in elementary school? With nothing to follow up why you brought it up at that. I really wanted to remember childhood trauma, thanks. In addition, my brother told my she told him she was the one that told him about our late brother's death. When she didn't know until everyone else knew, my brother learned about the death from classmates that knew our brother. Either way, it's highly inappropriate for casual conversations.

Or talking about how my late mom "spoiled" her or how if she was still here she would be doing this or that. Such as scolding me and my cousin for not calling her more, no she wouldn't. She is romanticizing and twisting my mother's legacy to be revolved around coddling her. Which she does a lot, which makes me incredibly uncomfortable. When in fact I remember my mom acting very frustrated with how dependent my aunt was on her behind closed doors and at times even telling her face to face when upset enough. At lot times she did things, because she always had a hard time saying "no" and back as a kid she did things for my cousin's sake; not my aunt.

Now she is talking about this apparent grandchild or great niece of her husband, forgot which one. That she have autism like me and likes drawing, wanting me to be some kind of mentor. Asking if I got art supplies to give her and she'll come over with the girl and all soon. No, I don't have art supplies suitable for a small child (because I surely am not giving professional supplies) nor am I buying any. That is not my issue. If you want to bring her over, do it I don't care. I'm sure she's a sweet and cute kid. However, don't treat me being a artist as being a personal Hobby Lobby store.

And don't use this child as a device to manipulate me. You already have too many times on your own.

I remember using my own money and cards so many times for her and her husband. To the point my dad said he noticed every time I'm with her, I'm spending money on something. I was growing very frustrated as why it felt like I barely have money for myself. When he said that it clicked for me, which I hate to say but made me trust her and her husband less. I still won't forgot pretty much buying all of Christmas dinner a few years back. I'm not the host and is not my responsibility, so why am I the one paying for over hundred dollars worth of food?

Nor the time I felt that her husband put me on the spot at Whataburger. My cousin was having her baby at the time and I was getting hungry. I can't drive, so he took me to Whataburger. Right when I'm finished with my order, he tells to add another burger on it. Which I did, because I felt put on the spot in the middle of the restaurant. If you knew you was hungry too, buy it yourself or if you didn't your wallet ask your wife for a for few bucks. It would be different if I offered firsthand, or he at least asked. No, he just told me to add another burger. However, back to my aunt.

In addition, treating my dad like he's some over the top over bearing father. As if he's the reason, I don't spend time with her. That I'm trapped here. No, he don't control me. While I'm still living with him I will respect and honor his house, but he don't control me. I go out plenty to the movies, events, whatever. As long as he knows I'm safe, he's fine.

I understand if she's lonely or just wanna spend time with me. Just say it, don't try to guilt trip me into it by calling me asking why me and my cousin haven't called you to spend time; but then try to it off with "I'm just kidding". I don't know if I'm wrong for thinking this way, but if I want to spend time I say so; you have to meet people half way when it comes to socializing to me. I haven't seen you since around six months on person and you live in town. Just come over or call me and ask my plans.

I remember months ago, couple of days after my birthday she called me saying "I'm gonna whoop you". No context, as soon as I answer the phone she says that. It's almost 1 am at that, so I was pretty uncomfortable and taken off guard. I think anyone would be. She said she was just "joking", but then asked why I didn't invite her to Dave and Buster's with my boyfriend and our friends. She saw it on Facebook as one of my friends posted it and tagged my name. As if I was obliged, I just wanted a small get-together with two close friends and my boyfriend. My own dad wasn't there. My birthday is the same day every year, call me up and ask my plans that day beforehand. I came back later in the day to eat cake and pizza, would have been nice for actual family other than my dad there. Even my brother spent the day after to celebrate a belated birthday, since he couldn't come on the exact day.

In addition, she lied to my dad telling him shr came over twice when I having a anxiety attack. My dad have sercuity cameras and I tell my dad personally when people come over as well. She just happened to call me while I was still somewhat stable, but on the verge of having a attack. I couldn't speak words and my hand could barely hold the phone. She told my try resting and listening to calm music. I did, then I called her back slightly better. I'm happy she coincidently called at that moment, but very disappointed with her dramatizing what she actually did with that lie.

It was so much she was suppose to do, as in commited to do though which never did. Help me get my driver permit, help me find new doctors, ect. Thankfully, info have new doctors bit that's to my dad's help. And my boyfriend's mom was previously helping learn to drive, but had to stop due just being too busy to. Point is that, she didn't do anything she promised.

I guess I just wish sometimes I didn't have grow up to realize the type of person she is. To keep those rose coloured glasses of her being zany and funny. And I do remember times where I did depend on her. However, now being an adult and having to discover this side of her really saddens me. I do love her and hate that I feel like I can't be comfortable trusting her like I wish to. She is still the same aunt that cared for me while my mom was stuck in Hurricane Katrina and helped me with math. I just want her to help herself.

0 notes

toastiko · 4 years ago

Text

An Update & A Story

Hi guys. I’m finally taking action against my weed dependency. Each day, I’m taking one less hit than the day before. I actually haven’t tried quitting since I went cold turkey, the week before last Christmas. I was only able to stay sober until Christmas day for those wondering. Aside from the one visit to my father in February earlier this year, I’ve smoked every day since Christmas, 2019.

Now I lay here in bed, mostly sober and slightly depressed, wondering, how? How did weed become the top priority in my life?

These thoughts manifested during my sober week before Christmas, but now that I’m laying here, out of weed and sober enough, I can actually put my thoughts into words. Anyway, the main reason I started to abuse marijuana was because of my move from Michigan to Oklahoma (July 1st 2017). But there were a lot of small events that also contributed to the abuse too. The beginning of the abuse started around three years ago, but before we talk about that, you need to know how I was brought up.

This next part is for my friends who I didn’t grow up with. Read it if you want, you won’t make me cry if you don’t.

Parts of the story below may sound like me just bragging. If you take it that way, that’s on you. I’m just trying to be as detailed as possible so people can get a proper understanding of how I was raised.

In 2001, I was adopted at birth in Jackson, Mississippi. (I’ve always grown up knowing that I was adopted and some people think it’s a really touchy subject for me even though I couldn’t care less. In fact, I used to joke about it before my sense of humor vanished ) I was born with my feet completely backwards, or in other words, I had severe clubbed feet. At the age of 2, I had surgery and spent a year in walking casts. During that time, my parents and I in lived in a mansion until 2005, when hurricane Katrina came and shreked everything. So we moved to Oklahoma and lived in a low class barn for around 8 months. In 2007, my dad got a job offer in Lansing, Michigan, and that’s really when my life ‘started’.

The first memory I have of Michigan is driving down our beautiful dead end street with my eyes glued to the falling snow which I had never seen before. We lived in a three story house with a front yard the size of a soccer field and a backyard half the size of a soccer field, with a lake right behind it. Yeah, I had it good, but I didn’t even realize at the time because it was normal to for us to live in big houses. Now the two houses next to us had neighbors with kids my age. JC was one of these kids. The kid was huge - not fat, but well built. He was a French Canadian American who had lived there since birth. If I met him today for the first time, I don’t think we’d be friends, but JC, though he was the same age as me, felt like an older brother. He was disciplined (mostly), goofy, and a little arrogant at times, but we always had a good time when we got together. So most days after school, instead of hanging out with my best friend who lived far, far, down the road, I hung out with JC, and that’s what my life was like after school almost every day until he moved in 2014 (2015? I don’t know)

Now let me tell you about my parents. My dad is an American Armenian who was told by his parents as a child that he was going to grow up to be a heart surgeon, so that’s what he did. He’s disciplined, hardworking, wise - he’s pretty much the smartest person I know. But growing up, I despised him. He lacked empathy and could be extremely insensitive at times. But when things would go bad for me, he always knew exactly what to say and he knew how to get his point across. But I hated him while living in Michigan because I was obsessed with ONLY having fun and playing video games with my friends and he abhorred video games. He would guilt trip me when he’d walk into my room and find me playing something. One time, he even took away my xbox 360 after I failed a test, and said he’d give it back after a week. I never got it back. Despite the negatives, he taught me to not let my emotions get the best of me, he taught me how to remain calm, how to be humble, and so much more.

My mom, on the other hand is the COMPLETE opposite of my dad. She’s outgoing, sensitive, gullible, and unlike my dad, she could befriend ANYONE she meet. When she passes homeless people, she ALWAYS gives them money out of sympathy. To make it clear how nice she is, if you sat Hitler down with her for some tea, Hitler would leave with his mustache shaved, and with a big, teeth grinning smile. She can make anyone like her. My mom spoiled me beyond senseless. She’d end my punishments early, she’d buy junkfood that the neighbors would eat up the next day, and she would buy me whatever I wanted under $200 and then say “Just don’t tell your father!” Even most of my friends at one point said, “Why can’t your mom be my mom?” However, my mom liked and still likes to live in a world where her feelings come before facts. She tends to get ripped off or scammed a lot when she bought stuff online or in person. Not to mention she sometimes follows the crowd instead of thinking critically. Ignoring her flaws, my mother taught me empathy, compassion, and love.

So having parents that were polar opposites from each other really balanced me out as a kid. I was (and still am) a shy boy, but I was quick to open up to whoever I trusted. Unless I was fighting with my parents, I rarely let my emotions control me. I’d be humble and respectful in public and or at school, and then I’d be my immature, batshit crazy and edgy self with my friends.

My school life was okay. In 1st grade, I met my best friend, Christian.

2nd grade I had surgery on my feet again and missed 6th months of school. When third grade came, my dad convinced my mom to hold me back a grade since I missed so much and they switched me over to a private school. I cried and begged them to keep me in the same grade but the answer was ‘nope’. Today, I’m glad they held me back.

Life at the private school, STM, was vastly different than the public school I’d been going to. My grade had about 20 kids and I was the oldest there. All the boys were little jocks. Obsessed with sports. I played soccer and baseball a year before but sports wasn’t really my thing. The boys were nice to me though and I became friends with them, though I barely had anything in common with them. So I turned to the girls. I befriended most of the girls, and even sat at their side of the table at lunch everyday. I had a huge crush on a girl named Casey, and funnily enough, so did all the other boys. So I spent 2nd and 3rd grade trying to slide into Casey’s DM’s and by the end of the third grade, I was in. Well, I mean, we were extremely close. I went to her house, she went to mine, and I was a happy boy. So far, life was going well.

4th grade came and I was scared. Rumor had it that the 4th grade teacher was a mean bitch, and half of my other classmates had switched schools, leaving 9 kids in the class. So I convinced my parents to pull me out and move me to a bigger private school. STA.

This is where shit went down. I went to STA from grade 4 to grade 8. One day, in 5th grade, when we were all edgy, horny boys who had sex ed coming up in a week , eight of us went outside and I recorded a video of one of my friends, goofily explaining how to have sex in five steps. I uploaded the video to Youtube in 2013 titled, ‘Nick’s 5 special steps.’

Two days pass, and I’m sitting in my homeroom with the eight other boys and suddenly two of the school’s priests come in. I remember one thing Fr. A said that day. He made eye contact with every boy in the room besides me, and said,

“I hope to see you all in reconciliation because you all have a lot to atone for.”

I thought this was funny because I was Lutheran and didn’t do reconciliation.

In a smart move, my dad made me delete my first youtube channel, epickarek, in fear that the school would file a lawsuit since the video showed minor’s faces.

After that incident, life was pretty normal and uneventful up until 8th grade. In February, 2016, I was expelled. My friends at STA abhorred me. Those who were my friends a mere two days ago started sending me death threats.

I started going to therapy and went to the public middle school in my area. Switching to that school was one of the best changes in my life. I made sure to tell no one about why I switched schools and within a few days, I had friends in every class. Not close friends, but friends that you could sit down at lunch and have a chat with.

I started hearing the rumors during my second week there. One day, in math class, the girl in front of me, Savannah, turned around and asked out of nowhere, “Did you kill someone? I heard you did.” The classroom was tiny and there were about 8 people in the class so everyone heard, including the teacher, and they turned toward me, waiting for an answer. Instantly, I faintly laughed and said something along the lines of “I wouldn’t be sitting here if I did.” Everyone laughed and the class continued. The next day, it seemed like all 200 kids in my grade were focused on me. People constantly approached me, asking crazy questions and telling me the absurd rumors they heard.

“I heard you stabbed someone.”

“Did you stab yourself?”

“What’s juvie like?”

“My friend at your old school says not to trust you. What did you do?”

The rumors drew more people to me, and ironically, I befriended most of those people once they saw that I wasn’t a psychopath.

When the summer of 2016, came, I had my first serious girlfriend. Despite my parents being on the verge of a divorce, my life was at it’s peak. I had a girlfriend, a best friend, and a whole group of friends who felt like brothers.

The next thing I know, It’s Christmas break and I’m in Oklahoma visiting family and she breaks up with me... for one of my friends. That led me to become super depressed, and angry. Very angry. Most of my friends were there for me. But talking about the breakup openly is the reason why everything went downhill from there. TLDR, My Ex, and myself BOTH overreacted.

I’m not going to tell the whole story online, but If you really want to know, I’ll tell you in person.

Anyway, to shorten a long story, I got a call from my ex’s father saying if I don’t stay away from her, her family will take legal action. So, fearful of court, I respected his demand and stayed away. The next day when I got home from school, I found a FAT stack of papers on the kitchen table labeled, Personal Protection Order, aka a restraining order. I was furious and I stupidly posted to snapchat out of rage, roasting her about it. And within the next week, my family was in court with her’s. The judge, was the same judge who was working my parent’s divorce, (I don’t know why or how that’s allowed) and she did not like my dad, but she especially did not like my mom. Anyway, the PPO said on the front page that I wasn’t allowed to talk about her, ANYWHERE. Online or in person. so that’s why I was there. The judge banned me from the internet for until 2018 and I went home.

Stupidly, I violated the PPO twice after that (The judge then banned me from social media until 2019) and after the third time in court, the judge insulted my mother for how she raised me and I was found guilty, put into a squad car, and SHIPPED.

Like I said, if you want to know more details, just ask me in person. I’m getting pretty good at telling the story.

Fast forward a few weeks and it’s the last day of my freshman year of high school. I’ll never forget that day. I watched the people in my grade throw their hands up, celebrating and rushing out the doors, and I remember just standing there thinking, “I’m never going to see these guys again.”

What’s even worse was the fact that I was going to have to leave my group of around 8-12 friends. And a few prior to the move, my best friend of 8 years ended our friendship because he was upset that I didn’t tell him that I was moving sooner. If that’s how he really felt, I don’t blame him, for I was depressed and acting strange.

My best friend strayed away from our group when he stopped talking to me so I really only had a few select people in my friend group that I could really call friends. Dillion, Josh, Keaton, Brock, (even maybe Preston) although I only spent around a year with them, we had powerful connections with each other. They felt like brothers. So when my mom said she was moving to Oklahoma, I was destroyed. I wasn’t going to let my mom move alone, but I was going to have to leave my support group. It was one of the toughest decisions I’ve ever made. I remember the week before we moved, I drove all around Lansing, listening to the Guardians of the Galaxy II playlist and feeling numb.

Then we moved

Within two months of moving to Oklahoma, smoking weed had become a daily habit. I had already been introduced to it by some friends before I moved, so I was familiar with the drug. At first, It diminished my guilt. I didn’t have to think about my friends I left or my old best friend...

I didn’t have to constantly think about the nice cop leading me out of the downtown courthouse into his car in some loose handcuffs.

I didn’t have to think about being in that dark, concrete solitary cell for two days, going crazy thinking that my white, skinny ass was going to juvie for 21 days like the judge said...

I didn’t have to think about the satanic, traumatizing things I did to that person in 8th grade that I still struggle to forgive myself for....

I didn’t have to think about anything if I just smoked my problems and sadness away.

My first three days as a sophomore were miserable. I had already been to 7 different schools (ask me) and I was exhausted with the thought of having to start over with making new friends. So me, already depressed, convinced my mom to let me do online classes at home.

By the summer of 2018, my cousin had introduced me to his group of friends and we all got along pretty well. We smoked everyday until the end of summer. As fall drew near, I was PARANOID. I was two years younger than most of my friends and I thought I was annoying to them and felt like I intruded on their group, so I distanced myself. I stopped snapping the group chat and stopped inviting them over. I pushed them away because I was paranoid. I had never been as paranoid as I was until I started smoking weed.

2019 came and despite it being the end of my internet ban, I was broken. Being high was the new sober. My highs started turning into a buzz and only a buzz. It didn’t make me laugh or smile, it just made me a lazy husk that played video games and watched youtube endlessly.

When the summer of 2019 arrived, my cousin came to spend the summer with me. Now, I don’t want to rant about other people anymore so I’ll just say this. He knew I was broken. It was clear as day; I’d wake up, sit at my desk all day, then go to sleep. Despite my attempts at open conversation, he was never willing to be vulnerable with me, even when Etika died. So when the end of summer came, we were both very condescending and passive aggressive toward one another.

After that summer, I was left still high, insecure, mean, emotionless, and lonely. I didn’t want to contact my Michigan friends because was a little bitch. I was afraid they would see what I’d become and they’d distance themselves from me, so I turned to the internet. I knew that I had fans and friends that waited two years for my return, so I started streaming. All was going well, but despite all of my internet friends, I wasn’t happy. Not knowing the source of my unhappiness, I continued to smoke and stream, slowly ignoring my internet friends over time, and I continued neglecting myself.

Then mid December came. I don’t remember how it happened, but I stopped smoking for a week. It was during that week that I realized what I just typed above. I was emotionless - I hadn’t genuinely laughed in months, I felt pressured to stream. My relationships sucked and were fading day by day, so I stopped smoking.

Christmas soon came and to simply put it, I relapsed. One small hit. That’s all it took. I took one tiny vape hit on Christmas evening and I’ve been smoking everyday since then.

I’ve wrote this not because I want pity, but because I want to help my friends understand me a little better.

To all of my friends, I know I’ve been distant from all of you. Please, just be a little more patient with me, I’m getting there. :)

Anyway... I started writing this mini essay on July 31st and I’ve spent 6 days working on this. I’ve never talked about some of this stuff openly so it feels like a weight has been lifted off my chest. My final thoughts are in my post that precedes this. Thanks for reading, I love you all, be safe, don’t catch the VID, and remember,

Dicks out for Harambe.

0 notes

whorchataaa · 4 years ago

Text

Podcast: Life with Binge Eating Disorder

At one point, Gabe weighed more than 550 pounds. Today, he and Lisa remember and discuss the extreme pain and slow healing process of living with binge-eating disorder. Gabe shares his shame in being so overweight, his intense relationship with food, the story of his gastric bypass and the difficult process of learning new coping mechanisms.

How did Gabe’s bipolar and panic attacks tie in with his binge eating? And, importantly, how is he managing the illness today? Join us for an open and honest discussion on living with an eating disorder.

(Transcript Available Below)

Please Subscribe to Our Show: And We Love Written Reviews!

About The Not Crazy podcast Hosts

Gabe Howard is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations, available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from Gabe Howard. To learn more, please visit his website, gabehoward.com.

Lisa is the producer of the Psych Central podcast, Not Crazy. She is the recipient of The National Alliance on Mental Illness’s “Above and Beyond” award, has worked extensively with the Ohio Peer Supporter Certification program, and is a workplace suicide prevention trainer. Lisa has battled depression her entire life and has worked alongside Gabe in mental health advocacy for over a decade. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her husband; enjoys international travel; and orders 12 pairs of shoes online, picks the best one, and sends the other 11 back.

Computer Generated Transcript for “Binge Eating Disorder” Episode

Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.

Lisa: You’re listening to Not Crazy, a psych central podcast hosted by my ex-husband, who has bipolar disorder. Together, we created the mental health podcast for people who hate mental health podcasts.

Gabe: Welcome, everyone, to this episode of Not Crazy. My name is Gabe Howard, and I am here with my ever present co-host, Lisa.

Lisa: Hey, everyone, and today’s quote is Food is love, food is life by Edwina O’Connor.

Gabe: Ok. There’s so much to say about this. But food is life. It’s life. Oxygen is life. Oh, that’s so deep, you should put this.

Lisa: It’s profound.

Gabe: Like this is like live, laugh, love.

Lisa: Right

Gabe: You need food to survive. So we all get that you have to eat to live. But food has sort of taken on a little bit extra, right? If I give you a cupcake, it means I love you. If it’s your birthday and I don’t get you a birthday cake. You don’t need a birthday cake to live. We do these things to express love, right?

Lisa: So it works both directions, giving people food is love and accepting their food says I love you back.

Gabe: Woo! And that’s where we really sort of get into, I’m gonna go with crux of our discussion today, which is binge eating disorder. Many people don’t know, I used to weigh 550 pounds. I’m six foot three. My top weight was five hundred and fifty pounds.

Lisa: You realize your top weight was a lot closer to six hundred and fifty pounds.

Gabe: That’s not true. I never weighed over 600.

Lisa: I’m willing to bet that you weighed over six hundred.

Gabe: I did not. I know for a fact.

Lisa: The day you had gastric bypass, you weighed 554 pounds, but you’d been on a diet for several weeks and you’ve been fasting for several days. I’m willing to bet you lost 20 or 30 pounds at least.

Gabe: There is one thing that fat people know more than anything else, especially fat people who have lost a lot of weight, they know their top weights.

Lisa: Ok, well, never mind. Go back, unpause.

Gabe: No, we don’t need to pause at all. I think you should leave this in there. I want people to see how often Lisa pauses to correct me.

Lisa: You’re welcome.

Gabe: Do you think that there is a difference from a storytelling perspective between weighing five hundred and fifty pounds and weighing six hundred pounds? I mean, just I guess I maybe I qualified for This 600-lb Life.

Lisa: Yeah, see, there you go. I didn’t set the limit. Somebody else did.

Gabe: Well, I’m not going to retroactively go back and try to be on a fat-sploitation show. But just the thing that I want the audience to know is that I weighed over five hundred and fifty pounds. Now, the weight that I weigh today, which according to the BMI chart is in fact obese, is 260 pounds. I’m six foot three and I’m a big guy. I’m broad shouldered. I’m not a small person. But 260 pounds is is less than half of 550. I lost a person. I lost a person and change.

Lisa: Yeah, it’s very impressive. This was a long time back. You had gastric bypass in 2003 and you’ve kept it off all these years.

Gabe: Let’s move past how I lost the weight and let’s talk about life as a five hundred and fifty pound man. Because I thought that I just ate a lot. Like, I thought that I needed to go on a diet. And when you first met me. I don’t know. You know, the more we tell our story, Lisa,

Lisa: The crazier I sound?

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: Yeah, I’ve noticed that.

Gabe: You met a man that weighed five hundred and fifty pounds with untreated bipolar disorder. And you were like, yeah.

Lisa: You were very engaging. You Gabe magicked me.

Gabe: Gonna get me some of that.

Lisa: Yeah. You carried it well. What can I say?

Gabe: Oh, really? I just I dressed so well? You know, you get the right tailor, you can hide anything with clothing.

Lisa: It’s amazing. Yeah.

Gabe: But back to our point, I thought that I just ate a lot. I thought I was just overweight, like so many Americans and I.

Lisa: You’re remembering the story a little bit different. By the time I met you, you had already been diagnosed with binge eating disorder.

Gabe: That’s not true. That is completely untrue.

Lisa: That is true.

Gabe: That’s not true. Nope.

Lisa: That is true.

Gabe: No.

Lisa: That is true. I don’t know what to tell you.

Gabe: No, it is not true.

Lisa: I never thought that you were just, just fat. You know what I mean?

Gabe: You had me join Weight Watchers.

Lisa: Although Weight Watchers is obviously not designed for people with serious eating disorders, it is a mechanism to keep track of what you eat.

Gabe: Yes, an umbrella is a mechanism to not get wet. But would you hand it to a hurricane?

Lisa: I’m not saying that it was the best choice for you.

Gabe: Is this what you recommended, like for Katrina?

Lisa: But what were the options?

Gabe: Like medical intervention?

Lisa: You were doing that too.

Gabe: I wasn’t doing any of that. We can fight about the timeline until we’re blue in the face. But here’s what we know, I weighed five hundred and fifty pounds and I wasn’t doing much about it. Why do you keep

Lisa: I disagree.

Gabe: Why do you keep shaking your head? I love how you’re shaking your head.

Lisa: You told me not to talk. So I shake my head. By the time we started dating, you were already trying to get a gastric bypass.

Gabe: Here’s the thing, though, that I think you’re not considering. You’re tying together Gabe trying to get gastric bypass with Gabe understanding that he had binge eating disorder and those two things are not in any way related.

Lisa: You don’t think so?

Gabe: I didn’t know any of this stuff. I did want gastric bypass because I was 24 years old and I weighed five hundred and fifty pounds. I saw gastric bypass as a quick fix, which we’ll get into that later in the show. But let’s focus on binge eating disorder. Have we established that Gabe was overweight and had issues with food?

Lisa: You were very overweight and you definitely had clear issues with food. As I might have said to you at one point, you were, in fact, circus freak fat.

Gabe: You did.

Lisa: Sorry about that, that was rude.

Gabe: I don’t know how our relationship made it.

Lisa: Yeah, yeah.

Gabe: I think that the divorce was probably inevitable.

Lisa: I’m pretty sure I said that after you lost the weight, but I’m not positive.

Gabe: Let’s talk about our language for a moment. You and I weren’t, we’re not big language police. We kind of think that the goal should be communication and context, not so much the words. But I got called fat a lot. You, Lisa, saying that I was fat, it does not offend me. It does not bother me. But other people doing it, it did. As you can imagine, weighing five hundred and fifty pounds. I got a lot of sideways glances, stares, giggles, comments, and it hurt my feelings a lot. And the other reason I kind of bring this up is because why are we so cavalier about it? I know how damaging body image can be, because, again, even though I weighed five hundred and fifty pounds, even though I couldn’t walk from my car to my office desk without taking a break, the only thing I cared about was how I looked. I didn’t care that I would lose my breath standing up. I cared that I wasn’t pretty enough and that maybe I couldn’t find a girlfriend.

Lisa: Really?

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: You weren’t worried about the health?

Gabe: No.

Lisa: Not necessarily worried about the health consequences, but it wasn’t things like you had trouble getting upstairs? You weren’t concerned about stuff like that?

Gabe: I wasn’t. You know, I was 22, 23, 24, I was invincible. I cared that I couldn’t find clothes that fit me. I cared that I was ugly. I cared that women wouldn’t want to sleep with me. I’m not trying to make Lisa out to be a bad person. But Lisa and I were not exclusive because Lisa gave me a fake name when we first met.

Lisa: Well, I wasn’t going to give you my real name.

Gabe: That’s fair. I was circus freak fat, apparently. I’m just saying that these are kind of the things that went through my mind. But what I was really surprised to learn and tying it all the way back to you thinking that I was diagnosed with binge eating disorder when we met because I was trying to get gastric bypass, is my entire motivation for getting gastric bypass was wanting to look better. I did not know that I had binge eating disorder until I was in the steps of gastric bypass. One of the things that I had to go through was a psychological examination where they started talking to me about why I ate. And I ate because it made me feel better.

Lisa: Everything surrounding gastric bypass was a lot different back then. Insurance companies were paying for it in a different way. The surgery was still relatively new. It was kind of a halcyon days for gastric bypass. And there were still stand alone surgery centers that specialized in this. You just don’t see those types of programs anymore. You don’t see the ads on TV anymore. And every surgeon was doing it. Every hospital had a program. You specifically went out of your way. Well, at the time, I thought you had gone out of your way to find this really good program with really high success rates. And one of the reasons they had such a high success rate was because they were so comprehensive. They had all this psychological counseling and nutritional counseling and this really long waiting period and on and on and on. And at the time, I thought, oh, there’s a health care consumer. He has made the best choice for him. Good job. But I found out later, no, he just knew this lady who went there. So he was like, sure.

Gabe: You’re half right and half wrong. When I looked at the other places they kind of scared me a little bit. I know this is a stupid thing to say, but one of the reasons that I felt comfortable at the bariatric treatment centers was because they had wide chairs.

Lisa: I remember that.

Gabe: When I walked in, they had these wide chairs that I fit in.

Lisa: They were like benches.

Gabe: When I went to the other place, it was just in a regular, it was a well-known hospital. I don’t know. I had to pay more money to go where I went. So in theory, I could have picked the cheaper place. So.

Lisa: Through a variety of good decision making and luck, you ended up at a place with an excellent program that was very intensive in the pre surgical period. They had a lot of psychological and nutritional counseling, which most programs did not have then or now.

Gabe: So here I am, I walk in and they’re like, why do you want to have this? And I say, because I’m ugly and I don’t want to be ugly. And they say, OK, that’s what we get. Like, what are some things that you would do if you weren’t this size? And, you know, I said I wouldn’t sit in the handicapped seats at hockey games, for example. I would sit in booths instead of tables. I would ride roller coasters again. But in the back of my mind, what I was thinking is I would get laid more. I felt so bad because I felt so ugly and I tied that directly to my weight. Now, I didn’t know that I had bipolar disorder at this time. I did not know that I was untreated. There was obviously a lot going on, but those were my initial reasons. That’s why I wanted to do it. And through that process, I ended up at an eating disorder clinic and I remember my very first appointments. Were you around for that appointment or had I already gone to it and told you about it?

Lisa: You know, I don’t remember if that was your first appointment. Very early, I remember going to the eating disorder clinic. Yeah, it was just like a whole other world. It was so odd to go there because obviously most people getting treated for eating disorders are anorexics because those are the people who are most likely to die of their eating disorder. So they’re the people most likely to get treatment. And most of the binge eaters were quite large. So it was this bizarre mix of very, very small, mostly young women, just painfully thin young women and extremely overweight, you know, 20 some, 30 some year olds. And I went to one of their family support groups and the majority of the people there, their family members, family or friends, were anorexic. And they had the exact same behaviors, the exact same attitudes, the exact same everything. Even though their problem was that they didn’t eat enough. And your problem was that you ate too much. That really went to show that eating disorders were not about the food. It was about the psychological thing.

Gabe: Well, that’s interesting because while it was psychological, it was also about the food. For example, if I was feeling sad, I needed birthday cake. Because birthday cake was tied to happy memories. You couldn’t just give me 20,000 thousand calories in.

Lisa: Veggies? Salad?

Gabe: Man, that’s be a lot of salad and veggies, but

Lisa: Well.

Gabe: I needed like the foods that I grew up with. I guess a better way to say it is it was about the psychological connection to the food.

Lisa: Yeah. So I looked up the definition of binge eating disorder, because how do you know when you’re binge eating and how do you know when you’re just over eating? Binge eating disorder is characterized by recurrent episodes of eating large quantities of food very quickly and often to the point of discomfort and a feeling of loss of control during the binge, experiencing shame, distress or guilt afterwards and then not regularly using unhealthy compensatory measures such as purging, because that’s a whole other eating disorder. And this was interesting, I actually didn’t know this until today. The binge eating occurs on average at least once a week for three months. And this is how you can get diagnosed with binge eating disorder, which was not its own separate mental illness until 2013 with the new DSM.

Gabe: You know, all the eating disorders have things in common, right? And the thing that it has in common is this unhealthy relationship with food. A healthy relationship with food is that you eat to survive. You start to get into a gray area when you eat to survive but you also enjoy what you eat.

Lisa: Oh, I don’t think that’s fair. You can eat to survive and enjoy what you eat. You probably get into a gray area once you get overweight. And I am overweight.

Gabe: The goal of food is not enjoyment. The goal of food is sustenance. The reason that we get in a gray area is because who’s ever eaten that extra bite? Because it tastes so good. That’s a gray area. You do not need that extra bite. But also, why do we have foods that go with holidays or occasions? That’s a gray area, right? There is no reason on Earth that we need to celebrate our occasions with food.

Lisa: But that’s an evolutionary thing. What encourages the animal to eat? Because it’s enjoyable. It’s pleasant. Otherwise we wouldn’t eat. We’d all starve to death. So it goes together. Humans throughout time would not survive if they did not find enjoyment in food because then they wouldn’t eat and they’d all die.

Gabe: Well, I disagree with that. Why can’t it work the other way? We don’t eat, so we feel pain. We feel hunger.

Lisa: It’s both.

Gabe: I suppose alleviating that hunger provides joy. I don’t know why we fell down the rabbit hole on it’s a gray area. But I do I think that it’s important to establish that sometimes our relationship with food, while healthy, is a gray area. There is absolutely no reason that we have to have cake on our birthday. But I would venture to guess that anybody who didn’t get a birthday cake or some sort of special dessert on their birthday would feel that they were left out or that they missed something.

Lisa: Well, that could be its own separate show about the emotional relationship to food and American’s relationship with food, because we just have this ridiculous eating pattern that nobody else has. Nobody in history has had previously.

Gabe: So would you say that that’s a gray area?

Lisa: Ok, fine gray area.

Gabe: Lisa, the point that I am making, when I was sad, I ate. That is what I learned by going to a nutritionist and examining my relationship with food. And I think that everybody in America has sort of a messed up relationship with food to a certain extent. What I called the gray area, but it was just so extreme.

Lisa: When you were sad, you ate to comfort yourself. When you were happy, you ate to celebrate. When you were angry, you ate to calm down. When you were fill in an emotion, you responded to it with food and to a lesser extent, so do I. Which once again is why I’m overweight. But it was very extreme, and still is extreme for you.

Gabe: But I don’t think it’s fair to call it extreme anymore.

Lisa: Why?

Gabe: It was extreme before I got help. I don’t think it’s extreme anymore. I do think it’s outside of the normal lines.

Lisa: Ok. Well, that’s just a semantic argument, it’s much more than for the average person. How about that?

Gabe: Well, I’m just saying, if my relationship with food is extreme now, how would you classify it before I got help? When I weighed five hundred fifty pounds, what word would you use there?

Lisa: Even worse.

Gabe: Well, but we need a word here. We’re using extreme for my relationship with food now.

Lisa: Horrifying. I would call it horrifying. I think you have lost track of how far outside of the norm you still are. You are much better than used to be, obviously. But I think you’ve normalized in your mind a lot of your behavior, and it is not. This is not the way the average person, even the average American, reacts to food.

Gabe: It’s the way you react to food.

Lisa: Well, yes, but that’s not a good measure because I am also overweight. But it’s worse with you. It’s a lot worse.

Gabe: Give some examples.

Lisa: Whenever we go out, there has to be food. It’s not fun for you if there’s not food. All activities have a food that goes with it, a food that must go with it. You can’t go to a movie and not have popcorn or snacks. There’s no enjoyment in the movie if you don’t do it. You can’t go to a Blue Jackets game and not get concessions. You know, a lot of people say, oh, well, I like to have a beer while I watch the game. No, it’s a whole different level for you. You would rather not go at all than go and not eat.

Gabe: You think that’s out? Popcorn at a movie theater? Me wanting popcorn and a movie theater?

Lisa: No.

Gabe: You’ve decided that is extreme and outside the norm? So I’m the only one?

Lisa: The level at which you want popcorn at the movie theater and the level of distress you go through, if for some reason, you can’t have it. If I told you in advance, hey, the popcorn machine is broken at the movie theater. You wouldn’t go. Even if it was Star Wars on opening night. You would not go.

Gabe: I think that is untrue.

Lisa: One of the things Gabe and I don’t know if you remember this, that I think really showed the emotional relationship you had with food is a few weeks after you had gastric bypass. We were in the parking lot of your apartment building. And I don’t remember, we had argued about something. And you got so upset that you started crying and you actually said, I just feel so bad and now I don’t even have food. I don’t know what to do. I don’t even have food.

Gabe: I remember.

Lisa: The idea being that was what you were going to turn to make yourself feel better. And this was so soon after surgery that you couldn’t and you were devastated at that. You were so distraught because you just couldn’t come up with anything else to soothe those emotions.

Gabe: My mom and grandma were staying with me. I asked them to come and take care of me. You know, I was single.

Lisa: Well, you needed someone, major surgery.

Gabe: But, you know, fish and house guests smell after three days. And they had been there for a week. And I was ready to get my privacy back. And I had asked you to stay to kind of be a buffer. And you said that you were ready to go home. You’d been there for a while

Lisa: Oh,

Gabe: And I walked you out to your car. So we didn’t really argue. I had pleaded with you to stay.

Lisa: I don’t remember that part.

Gabe: Just, you know, come on, come on, come on. And, you know, you were like, no, I gotta get going. I’ve got to go back to work. So I had walked you out to your car and you asked me what was wrong. And I just, I just started crying. And then, of course, I had trouble standing because I just had surgery and I fell down next to your car.

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: And I was going through so many emotions. And my coping mechanism at that point was eating. And I didn’t have it. I had not learned new coping mechanisms yet.

Lisa: Just how emotional you were at this loss. Almost as if your best friend had died.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: And it was one of the things that really drove home to me how much your emotions were tied up with food. That there was this thing you had always been able to turn to and now you couldn’t and you didn’t know what to do or how to behave. And it was heartbreaking.

Gabe: You know, on one hand that a devastatingly sad story.

Lisa: It was.

Gabe: But the reason I’m snickering is because do you remember my neighbors walking by? And one of them said hi to you

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: But of course, as they rounded, they see this 550 pound guy hunched over in his bathrobe on the

Lisa: On the ground.

Gabe: On the ground. They’re just like, OK. I, yeah.

Lisa: When a really large person hits the ground, people, people react.

Gabe: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Lisa: And then your mom thought that you had just fallen

Gabe: Yep.

Lisa: Because she didn’t know that you’re upset and you didn’t want her to know how upset you were.

Gabe: Pandemonium.

Lisa: So she started getting all upset because she thought, well, we’re not going to be able to pick him up. He’s fallen down and we can’t lift him back up. So there was humor in it. Sort of. Looking back.

Gabe: You know, hindsight,

Lisa: Mm hmm.

Gabe: Hindsight is always funny-funny.

Lisa: Fun times. Fun times.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: We’ll be right back after these messages.

Announcer: Interested in learning about psychology and mental health from experts in the field? Give a listen to the Psych Central Podcast, hosted by Gabe Howard. Visit PsychCentral.com/Show or subscribe to The Psych Central Podcast on your favorite podcast player.

Announcer: This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.com. Secure, convenient, and affordable online counseling. Our counselors are licensed, accredited professionals. Anything you share is confidential. Schedule secure video or phone sessions, plus chat and text with your therapist whenever you feel it’s needed. A month of online therapy often costs less than a single traditional face to face session. Go to BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral and experience seven days of free therapy to see if online counseling is right for you. BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral.

Gabe: We’re back discussing binge eating disorder.

Lisa: In order to have the diagnosis of binge eating disorder, you need to have three or more of the following: eating much more rapidly than normal, eating until feeling uncomfortably full, eating large amounts of food when not physically hungry, eating alone because of feeling embarrassed or by how much you’re eating, and feeling disgusted with oneself, depressed or very guilty afterward. And when I read that, the thing that really struck me is eating much more rapidly than normal. It was amazing how fast you could eat. Like you could be a competitive eater.

Gabe: One of the things that really struck me is the things that I used to do to hide how much I was eating. Like, I would order pizza and I would say, you know, hey, I need two large pizzas. And they’re like, OK, do anything else? Well, hang on. Hang on, guys, you think two large pizzas is enough? Hang on, hang on. You got like a special for three. Go, go ahead and. There was just me. There was literally just me. I wasn’t even married. I was just. I was.

Lisa: So, you were pretending there were other people on the phone to the pizza place because you didn’t want them to know you were ordering for yourself?

Gabe: Yeah, and I would go through drive-throughs and I would order multiple value meals. Same level of, you know, I’d like a number two and number three, both with Diet Cokes. All right, what sauce do you want? You know, my girlfriend likes your barbecue. So let’s go ahead and grab that. And on that other one, I think my buddy said he wanted no ketchup. Yeah, these were all for me.

Lisa: Right. And you knew that.

Gabe: Oh, yeah. It was important to me that nobody thought that I was eating all of that food. Also, if I had, like, appointments. I was going out to lunch or something for work or business, I would eat before I went.

Lisa: You remember that night with the pizza?

Gabe: Yep.

Lisa: And I ate more pizza than him. And I thought, huh? I’m a giant cow person and I need to eat less pizza. But no, it turned out that you had ordered two and eaten a whole one before I got there. And now were pretending that this pizza had just arrived and we were now sitting down together for the first time. When you had, in fact, already consumed an entire pizza.

Gabe: Yeah, and I hid the box.

Lisa: Yeah, you would hide the box or the wrappers.

Gabe: It wasn’t even like I said that I ate. I didn’t want you to think that I was a giant fat ass. That was important to me.

Lisa: One of the things that was interesting when we went to the eating disorder clinic is you did try to hide how much you would eat, but you didn’t have a problem with eating in front of me. One of your doctors told me that was a little bit unusual, that most people literally do not want to be seen chewing in front of other people. But you never seemed to have that particular problem.

Gabe: Well, I didn’t have that problem in front of you.

Lisa: Ok, that’s fair. You want to tell the story?

Gabe: I don’t want to tell the story, but I think now you’re going to have to. The people just heard you give the punchline away.

Lisa: You go.

Gabe: We were at a pizza buffet, all you can eat pizza buffet, and I was eating and I looked up and you were looking at me and.

Lisa: I had stopped eating by this time and was just watching you.

Gabe: And I said, what? And you said, wow, you can really put it away. And I was like, that’s so mean. I’m just trying to eat my lunch. And you’re just like, I don’t know what to say.

Lisa: I remember that day because we were eating and then eventually I’m not eating and I’m just watching this because it was like watching. Oh, I don’t know, a snake swallowing its food or something. It was like watching some sort of extreme physical feat. It was amazing. Like, ignoring that it’s pizza, I would not have thought the human body could chew and swallow that rapidly, that a human being could do that. And you couldn’t look away. I do recognize, especially looking back, that was really mean. But I kind of feel almost justified in it. This thing I was watching in front of me was just so stunning and so extreme. How could I not stop and stare and comment on it? It was just incredible in a really, really horrifying way. Yeah.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: It was disturbing.

Gabe: When I got to the eating disorder clinic, you know, they put me through a lot of paces and I started to realize that my relationship with food was not good. I mean, my weight, you know, over 550 pounds, my girlfriend looking at me in disbelief as I ate, the side glances, the comments, not being able to fit into things like roller coasters or booths or I had to sit in the handicapped section. I needed the seatbelt extender for my mid-sized car. It’s not like I was in a tiny car. I had a Ford Taurus. A family car. And I needed a seatbelt extender.

Lisa: By the way, you’re welcome.

Gabe: Yeah, that was all Lisa. I just didn’t wear a seatbelt before.

Lisa: Because I don’t let anyone ride in my car without a seat belt and I thought, what kind of fool doesn’t wear a seat belt? And then, lo and behold, you didn’t wear a seatbelt because it didn’t fit, because he couldn’t wear a seat belt.

Gabe: Remember when I said it doesn’t fit? And you said, bullshit? Show me. You didn’t believe me.

Gabe: You’ve seen how far those things stretch out.

Gabe: Didn’t fit.

Lisa: So, yeah, that was really shocking. And just within a couple of days, we had seatbelt extenders for all the cars of everybody we knew.

Gabe: Yeah. Thank you. That.

Lisa: They will give them to you for free if you ask.

Gabe: Just call the dealership or call the manufacturer and they will mail them to you. Also side note, if you’re on an airplane, just ask the flight attendant when you get on. Just whisper I need a seatbelt extender and they will bring you one or hand you one. Highly recommend doing that as well. Very, very important. But here I am at the eating disorder clinic. I finally got a surgery date. And what was it like a month and a half before I finally got gastric bypass after like two years of fighting for it is when I went to the psychiatric hospital.

Lisa: Yeah, like two months before. But you already had the date scheduled

Gabe: Yeah. And so as I’m losing the weight, I’m also getting treated for bipolar disorder.

Lisa: Right. That’s what comorbidity is. You had a lot of things going on at one time. This is one of the reasons it’s so difficult to treat mental illness and binge eating disorder because there’s all these factors coming together. And how do you tease out what’s what?

Gabe: I guess I don’t remember the specific day that I was diagnosed with binge eating disorder. I do remember my aha! moment. I had to do a few things and one of the things that I did is meet with a nutritionist. And she had flash cards and she held up the flash cards. And she was like, what has more calories? And the only one that I remember was she held up a donut, cream filled, icing, and she held up a muffin. She said, Which one has more calories? And I said, the donut. I know this one. Muffins are a diet food. And she said, no, the muffin has more calories. And I said, how is that possible? Muffins are healthy. Muffins have less fat. But they have way more sugar. But I thought a muffin had less calories. It didn’t.

Lisa: Lots of people don’t understand the specifics of nutrition or aren’t quite sure what the right foods are to choose, etc. That’s why they have eat this, not that. What does that have to do with binge eating disorder? Why was that your aha! moment?

Gabe: Because up until that moment, I thought I completely understood what was going into my body, why I was eating it. And that was the first thing that let me know that, no, you’re just wrong. You’re just wrong. I did not understand how any of this worked, but I thought I did. That’s the part I’m getting at. If I can be so wrong about what constitutes a healthy meal, then what else am I wrong about? And she helped me understand that I don’t know what’s going on. I clearly do not have a good understanding of my relationship with food, food in general, nothing. And that opened my mind.

Lisa: So your lack of understanding of nutrition made you feel like, hey, maybe I don’t understand a lot of things about eating and how I eat, and therefore maybe I should consider that these people are telling me something of value rather than something I can dismiss?

Gabe: Sure. That’s a fancy-schmancy way of putting it. But what I actually thought in the moment is, holy shit. I don’t know what I’m eating. I do not understand food. I am putting food in my mouth and I think I am making healthy choices. You know what I used to eat and I thought it was a health food? A Snickers bar. Because the advertising was packed with peanuts, Snickers really satisfies. I was hungry and I needed a snack to get to the next meal. So clearly peanuts. I was eating a candy bar with peanuts, but I thought I was eating a nutrition bar. I thought I was eating something healthy because the advertising got to me. I did not understand what I was putting in my mouth, but I’m supposed to believe that I understand the psychology behind my desire to eat? No. That’s when I started to become much more malleable. That’s when I started listening. That’s when I wanted to understand why I was making the choices that I was making.

Lisa: Well, what did you think before, though? What did you think your relationship with food was up until then?

Gabe: I thought that I overate, like everybody, but I also thought that it wasn’t my fault because after all, I didn’t get a good metabolism.

Lisa: Oh, metabolism.

Gabe: I believed in that. Aww, my metabolism that’s broken. I don’t have good genes. It’s not that the people who weigh less or are a healthier weight or are healthier in general are making better food choices. No, no, no. They won the genetic lottery.

Lisa: It was not something that you could control. It was just this swirl around you that was impacting you.

Gabe: Right. Yeah. I didn’t believe it was my fault at all. It was bad luck. Everybody else was eating just as much as Gabe. But because of their bodies, their metabolism. Oh, well, she just has a good metabolism, and that’s why she’s not overweight. I have a bad metabolism and that. It’s not my fault. It’s just I didn’t even realize I had any control. I.

Lisa: So stuff just kind of happened to you. You weren’t directing the action.

Gabe: Yeah, I was the victim. I very much felt that I was a victim. That my body had somehow failed me. That it wasn’t in my control or my fault.

Lisa: Well, did that matter though? I’ve been cursed with a bad body, which means that I must now make different choices than other people.

Gabe: Yes. And one of those choices that I thought I needed to make was to have surgery to correct it.

Lisa: Oh, ok.

Gabe: See, I thought that surgery was the magic cure. People have said to me, you know, surgery is the easy way out. It’s not. I don’t know who believes that or why they say it. I don’t know why there is a moral value in what method you use if you are super morbidly obese like I was. But I gotta tell you, spending four days in the hospital, being cut from the top of my chest to below my belly button, opened up, having my insides rearranged, the six week recovery time, the vomiting on your mother, the crying in the parking lot, all of the problems going through two years of therapy and nutrition appointments and re learning everything, with the aid of the therapy, over the next year and a half to finally lose all of the weight and then having to have a secondary surgery to remove the massive amounts of excess skin and male breasts that I had then developed. I had a full mastectomy. So, attention, listeners, I don’t have nipples.

Lisa: He likes to get that into every conversation.

Gabe: It’s you know, it’s a fun fact. I just. Then people look at me and they’re like, Oh, you had surgery? You did it the easy way.

Lisa: Well, I think that people what they don’t understand is that the surgery is not magic in that you can still eat. You’re not somehow prevented from chewing. You can still eat. You just react differently to it. And as evidence of surgery is not the easy way out, the failure rate is really high. And what is the definition of success, you ask? Someone has had a successful gastric bypass if they have kept off 50% of their excess weight over the course of five years.

Gabe: Well, I’m successful.

Lisa: You’re very successful.

Gabe: To be fair, I went from five hundred fifty pounds all the way down to two hundred and thirty at my lowest weight. Now, my average walking around weight is about 260

Lisa: The failure rate for gastric bypass, depending on the numbers you look, is up to 70%. So after five years, 70%. It’s now been 18 years for you. So even if you gain all the weight back tomorrow, even if you weigh 700 pounds tomorrow, you have had a successful gastric bypass. And then also let’s do some approximate numbers here. Say that you had 300 pounds to lose. Right. And you lost 280 of them. You realize that you could gain, right now, 130 pounds and still be successful. You could right now weigh over 400 pounds. And when it came time to count up all the gastric bypass numbers, you would be in the success category. So when some people say, oh, Gabe had a successful gastric bypass. No, you didn’t just have a successful gastric bypass, you had the A plus, gold standard, amazing of gastric bypasses. Because you could weigh substantially more than you do now and still be a success. You have plenty of people in your life now who never knew you then. People don’t realize how much weight you have lost and this backstory that you have. They just look at you and you look normal

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: And they think, oh, there’s Gabe.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: No one’s gonna describe you as thin, but you’re perfectly normal. You’re perfectly normal weight. Nobody stares at you in public. And that makes people think that you’re done, that you no longer have this messed up relationship with food, that you’re no longer struggling. And that’s not true. I don’t think you get enough credit for that. You are actively struggling with your weight and with your eating disorder on a daily basis. And it just doesn’t show anymore because you’re not so fat. People look at you and they think it went away. It didn’t go away.

Gabe: I still want to give you a little push back on, is it OK that we’re using the word fat so cavalierly?

Lisa: Seriously, that’s what you’re going to get out all this?

Gabe: No, I, mean, thank you for all of the kind words.

Lisa: We’re both still fat.

Gabe: I kind of wonder if I was listening to the show and we just kept saying, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat.

Lisa: Well, but you’re adding the pejorative. What does fat mean?

Gabe: Overweight, I guess.

Lisa: Overweight or heavy or excess weight or more weight or something like that. Why are you adding extra words? It’s like when people say, oh, no, you’re not just bipolar. Yeah, I know. Why are you adding in words? I’m saying to you, hi, I’m bipolar. That’s not all you are. You’re also blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I know. You’re the one who added all the baggage to the word. I was just fine with the descriptive phrase, fat.

Gabe: Are we taking it back?

Lisa: Not even that necessarily. Just why are you adding in this pejorative of fat is inherently bad and we shouldn’t throw it around so cavalierly? You were heavy. You were big.

Gabe: It’s true.

Lisa: The word for that is fat. And I would like to point out, for the record, that both of us are currently fat.

Gabe: I guess that is my question. As much as I love you, Lisa, you are not the same size as you were when you were 23.

Lisa: Yeah, even then, I was not thin.

Gabe: So are you, are you fat now or would you prefer that I say nothing because I’m not dumb?

Lisa: Well, don’t get me wrong, usually I do not care for it when people tell me I’m fat because they mean it as a pejorative. But as a simple description, am I overweight? Am I heavier than those charts and everything? Or even heavier than I personally would like to be? Would I like to be smaller than I currently am? Yes, I am fat. Accept that. I’m also blond and relatively short. Accept it. Yeah, I’ve got a big nose and I’m fat. There you go.

Gabe: Your nose is gigantic.

Lisa: I know. I hadn’t noticed how huge it was until we started doing this so much and with the video and all. I knew it was big, but, oh, my God. Like a toucan. This is the part where you say something nice, like it’s very attractive or, or, you know.

Gabe: If I had that ability, we would not be divorced.

Lisa: Fair, fair. So anyway, we could talk for a long time about all the high points of amazing stories surrounding Gabe and his extremely disordered eating and the struggles of gastric bypass. And to hit a few, when he said the whole thing about struggling after surgery and throwing up on your mom. He didn’t mean his mom, OK? He threw up on my mom. He didn’t vomit on his own mother, although you actually did that as well. He vomited on my mother. That’s the story he’s telling.

Gabe: In a fancy restaurant.

Lisa: Yeah, yeah. And the reason why it makes me, people are like, oh, why are you angry about that? The poor little dear, he got sick. I told him not to eat that. I told him it was gonna make him throw up. He ate it anyway, and then he threw up on my mother. That’s all I’m saying. That’s OK. We’ll get that over now. Are there any high point stories you’d like to hit? Do you remember how you’d written that list of things that you wanted to do once you lost the weight?

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: And one of them was buy clothing in a normal store.

Gabe: Yeah,

Lisa: Sit in a booth at a restaurant

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: And ride a roller coaster.

Gabe: The roller coaster.

Lisa: And we went out. We were at the mall. He went off to go shop. I’m looking at clothes. And then he comes over to me and goes, Well, I asked them for the largest size they had and it didn’t fit me. And I thought, aww. And I said, well, honey, it’s okay. It will. You’re still losing. It’s okay. And then he goes, and that’s why I got the size three down,

Gabe: It was.

Lisa: Because it turned out that he had gone below the largest size they had in the store. He was so excited.

Gabe: It was. It was a good day. The booth. Do you remember one year

Lisa: I remember.

Gabe: For Christmas. You got me a gift card to every restaurant that I couldn’t go to because they only had booths.

Lisa: Yep. There had been a lot of places that he couldn’t go because they didn’t have tables. They only had those fixed booths and there’s nothing you can do. And yeah, occasionally he would try because someone would ask him to go to that restaurant. He’d try to squeeze himself in. And, oh, God, it was so painful to watch. You would say things like, oh, no, I can fit in that chair. Dude, you cannot fit into that chair. Please don’t make all of us uncomfortable by trying. Please stop.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: Just, it was terrible on so many levels. Yeah. I got you that for Christmas one year. I did like a ten dollar gift card to all these restaurants you hadn’t been able to go to. And you insisted, even as we were walking in the door, that you would not fit. And I thought, yeah, you’re, dude, you’re going to fit. And then you crawled into the booth and started like wiggling around to show how much extra space there was. And of course, listeners can’t see this, but the look on your face right now and how much you’re smiling like it’s just the greatest thing you could ever remember. It’s, that’s so sweet.

Gabe: Do you remember when we went to the amusement park?

Lisa: Uh-huh.

Gabe: Because, remember, roller coaster is on there. And again, I was worried. You said that I was at the right weight and we went up to the first roller coaster and I said, will I fit? And the gentleman said.

Lisa: The ride attendant.

Gabe: Yeah, the ride attendant said, I’m not sure, but we have a seat here.

Lisa: And you know, these lines can be very long. You might be in line for an hour or more. So they have one of the roller coaster cars sitting at the front of the line, so you can test it. Because no one wants to wait in line for an hour, only to be told, hey, you don’t fit in this seat. Get out of line.

Gabe: So the roller coaster attendant was super nice. I sat down in it and as he was pulling the thing down, and he said, we just have to make sure that it will latch over your shoulders because of your height. And I said, you’re testing this because I’m tall? Of course, he’s just this kid. He just looked at me like I was a crazy person. I was like, oh, my God, I just, no, I was asking because I’m fat.

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: And for real, I just wanted to, like, hug him.

Lisa: When you walked up to him and said, hey, I’m worried that I might not fit, he thought you were saying I might not fit because you were tall.

Gabe: Yup.

Lisa: It never occurred to him that you were saying because you were fat.

Gabe: I cried. This poor kid. He’s like 19 years old and he’s like, Why is this man crying?

Lisa: You turned to him, you said, oh, my God, you said that because I’m tall. And he was like, Yeah? He was so confused. And you spent the next forty five minutes repeating that. Oh, my God, he thinks I’m too tall. Oh my God, he said that because I’m tall. Yeah you did. You started to cry a little bit. You were so excited.

Gabe: That was a good day. Lisa, you touched on comorbidity a little bit. I believe very strongly that I, of course, do have binge eating disorder, but I also believe that it was driven by the excess of untreated bipolar disorder.

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: I was doing pretty much anything that I could to manage the emotional overload of depression and grandiosity and mania and suicidality. And anything that could provide me even a moment of joy, whether it was drugs, alcohol, food, sex, spending money, I would do. What do you think the intersection of all of this Is?

Lisa: Well, obviously, having gastric bypass was an amazing choice for you, and it worked out great. And who knows what would have happened if you hadn’t had it done? But I actually recommended at the time that maybe you not do it because you had just been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and everything was changing so fast. And I thought, well, hey, maybe his eating disorder isn’t actually the thing. Maybe this has always just been an almost symptom of bipolar disorder. And once he has that under better control, he’ll just be able to control his eating and he won’t need to go through the surgery, etc. And of course, you have a gastric bypass, you were losing a pound a day. Think of how delicate that balance of all your different medications are and then think about how you get that balance when your body is changing so rapidly.

Gabe: One of the things that I think about in terms of comorbidity, is mistaking feelings, and the big one is that it took a long time to be diagnosed with anxiety and panic disorder because I honestly thought that panic attacks were hunger pains.

Lisa: Yeah, you would say that all the time.

Gabe: Every time that I would have a panic attack, I would think that I was hungry. Which, of course, created a Pavlov’s dog effect where a panic attack was very much associated with food. And in fact, more importantly, the cure for the panic attack was associated with food. So every time I have a panic attack, I would have to eat.

Lisa: We’d be standing in line or something, and I recognize now that you would start having a panic attack, but what you’d say, you’d turn to me and say, I’m hungry and, oh, I’m so hungry, my blood sugar, ack. I actually thought back then, I thought, well, I mean, he is really heavy. So, I mean, I don’t know what that does to your body chemistry and stuff. Maybe he really is feeling hunger this often? And looking back on it, yeah, those were panic attacks. And you had them a lot.

Gabe: I did. I really did.

Lisa: Well, what happened? When did you figure out that it was actually not hunger? I mean, what do you do now? One of the things you told me years ago is that when you had the urge to binge that you didn’t even try to stop the urge anymore. That was impossible. It never worked. Just forget it. That what you did instead was try to substitute different foods. So instead of bingeing on chips or pizza, you were now bingeing on strawberries or yogurt.

Gabe: So, a few things, you are right, making healthier choices does help to try to put those feelings or emotions at bay in a healthier way. Some of the things that I do now when I have a panic attack is one, I understand that it is a panic attack. So sometimes I can stop them just because I am aware of what they are. And I have all kinds of other coping skills, you know, sit down for a moment, count to 10, remove myself from whatever is causing the panic attack if I can see the cause. Splash water on my face.

Lisa: All the thousand and one coping things that you have for panic attacks.

Gabe: I mean, yeah, there’s just so many coping skills. You know, salty snacks help. Once again is probably in the gray area, it’s not the healthiest choice. But, you know, sometimes, like eating saltines, eating crackers, eating pretzels.

Lisa: Pretzels, so many pretzels.

Gabe: I try to find a healthy choice. You know, sometimes sitting, drinking a diet soda, eating some pretzels, counting to ten, taking a 20 minute break. These things help. But remember, before, all of this would happen, I would go eat a large pizza. I would go eat two, three, four, five, six thousand calories in order to get rid of that panic attack. And because I didn’t know it was a panic attack, I was having multiple of these a day. This would happen once or twice a day on top of all of my regular eating.

Lisa: I tried to look at it now as kind of a harm reduction thing. It is not the greatest for you to sit down and drink that much Diet Coke or to consume that many pretzels. But in comparison to the things that you were doing to deal with this before, this is much better. In a perfect world, you wouldn’t do any of this stuff. You wouldn’t have panic attacks to start with. You wouldn’t need the coping mechanism to begin with. But since you do, this is a much better choice than what you were using before.

Gabe: I’m certainly in more control today than I ever have been in my entire life. But it’s not perfect. I still binge to this very day.

Lisa: Well, that’s a question, how often would you say you binge these days? Because it used to be daily. What is it now?

Gabe: Maybe once a month.

Lisa: Really?

Gabe: I would say that I start to binge maybe once a week. But that’s an advanced skill, right? I put all of the food on the plate. Like I’m ready. I am ready to just binge. And I realize before I get too many calories, oh, this is bad. And I’m willing to get rid of the food. I’m willing to wrap it up and put in the refrigerator or push it down the garbage disposal or just not eat and I never would have done that before, because, after all, that would be wasteful. So I’m proud of myself for being able to stop. I still order too much. I have an unrealistic view of what a serving is. One time I had four people coming over, so I ordered three pizzas. Three large pizzas, and it was you. And you said, why did you order so many? I’m like, well, there’s

Lisa: There’s four of us.

Gabe: There’s four of us. And you said, you realize that if you ordered two pizzas, that would be half a large pizza per person and you ordered more. And you have chips. I was like, huh?

Lisa: He does that all the time. You always have way too big of servings. It doesn’t matter what size pie you have. It’s a little tiny pie, or if you get, like the giant pie at Sam’s Club, you will count how many people are in the room and cut the pie into that many pieces regardless of pie size.

Gabe: I want to make sure that everybody gets enough pie. I am learning. I am learning to let people cut their own pie and to ask other people to cut for me. I also had to accept along the way that I can have seconds before I thought that I had to take all the food that I wanted now.

Lisa: So obviously food is love, mixed up with all this emotion. A lot of it, you can tell is very clearly rooted in your childhood. Have you figured out the origin story or the backstory on this? Why did this hit you? Where does this come from? Your brother and sister don’t have this problem. They’re normal weight, maybe even thin. Nobody else is at the level that you were.

Gabe: Nobody else is bipolar in my family either. There’s

Lisa: That’s fair.

Gabe: You know, I’m a foot taller than every member of my family. I’m the only redhead. For those paying attention, that does, in fact, make me a red headed stepchild. I’m the only one with severe and persistent mental illness. I don’t know. I had to find a lot of coping skills. You know, some of the questions that I asked myself is, you know, why did I gravitate toward food and sex? Why didn’t I gravitate toward

Lisa: Right. Yes.

Gabe: Toward alcohol and drugs?

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: So I think that sometimes

Lisa: Or extreme sports or any other thing?

Gabe: Or whatever. I think that sometimes there’s just no answer. I don’t know why my brother and sister don’t have this problem. Of course, they both have kids and I don’t. Why did that happen? I mean, just it just did. And on and on and on.

Lisa: You don’t really think it’s a worthwhile problem to even contemplate, then. You just feel like, hey, these things happen and. Because on TV, people can always pinpoint it to like one specific experience. Oh, it was the day that I was so sad and my great grandmother gave me cake, you know? But you’re saying in real life, no, you don’t have anything like that.

Gabe: I think that there is that. When I was sad, my grandmother did give me cake and my mother gave me cake and my mother would make the foods that we wanted on our birthday. And food is love. As you said, food is love. My family loved me a lot. I don’t know what you want. We celebrated every single success with food. We licked our wounds with food. We went to the buffets all the time. Buffets were huge, huge things when I was growing up. What do you want? Name something and I will tell you how food is involved.

Lisa: Well, yeah. But almost everyone can say that.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: Why did it hit you different than anybody else?

Gabe: I have no idea. Why does your brother ride a bike 100 miles a day and you don’t?

Lisa: Yeah, that’s fair.

Gabe: I have no idea and I don’t think you do either. Lisa’s brother, like for real.

Lisa: He’s an athlete.

Gabe: If you Google super athletic bro dude, I’m pretty sure Lisa’s brother comes up. And if you Google refuses to go out in the sun, hates to walk, Lisa comes up.

Lisa: Look at me, for God’s sakes. You think the sun is safe? The sun is not safe. I could burst into flames.

Gabe: You have the same parents, were raised in the same small town, raised in the exact same way, grew up on the same foods.

Lisa: That’s fair.

Gabe: How come he likes to ride a bike a thousand miles uphill for no apparent reason?

Lisa: That’s true.

Gabe: And you don’t like to talk about bikes?

Lisa: Ok, that’s fair.

Gabe: Remember when your husband bought you a bike and you just started laughing at him uncontrollably?

Lisa: What were we going to do with that? Oh, we can go for bike rides. That’s just stupid. Anyway.

Gabe: Lisa hates that bike so much, she won’t even use it as a clothing rack.

Lisa: That’s true. That is true. It’s in the garage now. We’re probably gonna get rid of that the next time we move.

Gabe: I think that reality television is really skewed people to believe that mental disorders, mental illnesses and issues have to have some triggering event.

Lisa: An easily found one.

Gabe: Whether it’s substance use disorder, whether it’s hoarding, whether it’s. The reality is, you don’t need any of this stuff. Does smoking cause lung cancer? Absolutely. But there are people who do, in fact, get lung cancer that never smoked a day in their life. Yeah. There’s not always a clear and present cause for these things. Sometimes there are. Sometimes the thing that we think is a clear and present cause isn’t. We’ve just assigned it to that.

Lisa: That’s fair.

Gabe: I work with families all the time and they’re like, oh, my God, the mental illness started when he lost his job. OK, well, let’s talk about what he was like before he lost his job. And they would tell me all of these things that are clearly symptoms of mental illness. But in their minds, it was the job loss that triggered the mental illness, even though there was a decade’s worth that they ignored. And I think we do that to ourselves, too. Lisa, what are the takeaways? I mean, binge eating disorder, it’s played a major role in my life.

Lisa: Yes it has.

Gabe: And I know that it’s played a major role in other people’s lives. And I think largely that a lot of eating disorders don’t really get the respect that they deserve. They’re dangerous and people die from them and.

Lisa: The death rate is a lot higher than you think.

Gabe: Why do we as a society not take eating disorders seriously?

Lisa: I don’t know, maybe because we live in a time of abundant food? Which has not always been the case for humanity, isn’t the case everywhere in the world. Maybe because you can’t see it?

Gabe: We take substance abuse disorder seriously.

Lisa: Probably because you can’t have an all in. Right. Oh, you’re an alcoholic? Never have another drop. That’s it, problem solved. You have to eat. That was always, because a lot of the treatment things that you did were focused on this food as addiction model or 12 steps, et cetera. When complete abstinence is not an option, how do you manage an addiction? I did not notice until after you had gastric bypass, every other commercial is for food and the food looks so good. And it’s always for food that’s bad for you. No one ever has a commercial for carrots, you know. No, it’s a commercial for fast food or pizza. And it’s so desirable looking.

Gabe: And cheap.

Lisa: Yeah, and cheap.

Gabe: And cheap.

Lisa: There’s a reason why marketing is everywhere, it works.

Gabe: One of the things I think about is the fast food restaurant that advertises fourth meal. Fourth meal is not a thing. They’re advertising it as if it’s real. Don’t forget fourth meal. And now second breakfast is a thing. The marketing is literally tell you to eat when you do not need to eat. And we’re proud of this, you know, fourth meal, second breakfast. It’s exciting.

Lisa: Well, and if you’re the average person, no problem. It’s like alcohol ads. The alcohol ads are telling you that, hey, when you’re having a good time, you got a beer in your hand. All celebrations go with alcohol. And for most people, hey, that’s fine. No problem. That’s the ad. But if you’re an alcoholic, that’s a real problem. How do you get over that? Most people look at the fast food and are like, oh, yeah, I might stop there for lunch, but for you, it’s a whole thing.

Gabe: It is, and it is very difficult. I’m so glad that I lost the weight. And when people look at me now, like you said earlier, Lisa, they don’t see it. I have deeply entrenched issues with food, things that I struggle with every day. And because I’m a normal body weight, we’ll just go with that, nobody realizes this is a problem and it makes it difficult to seek out community. I remember when I went to my first binge eating group, I was really large and the other members of the group were also very large. And in walked this man who was thin. He was thinner than I am now, and I consider myself to be a normal size. And he was lanky and he just talked about his struggle and how he ate a whole gallon of ice cream on the way there. And we were mean to him. We did not pay attention to him. We did not offer him any help. We as a group were not kind to him. And now I kind of feel like I’m that guy.

Gabe: I don’t want to go to the binge eating support group because I’m afraid that they’re going to look at me and say, you know what? You’re thin. I’d kill to look like you. And I understand. I understand why they would want to have the success that I’ve had over the last 18 years. So I don’t know where to get support or. I’m very fortunate that I can afford traditional therapy and that I have a therapist and I have good supports. And of course, the online communities are really, really helpful. And I’ve advanced to a stage where I don’t need as much support as I used to. But I do remember. I remember what an asshole I was. I don’t think I said anything, but I certainly didn’t put any effort into trying to help him because in my mind, he didn’t need it. And that’s an important lesson I want to get out there. Binge eating disorder is not dependent on your looks. It’s not dependent on your weight. It’s not dependent on your size. It’s dependent on your unhealthy relationship with food.

Lisa: And the important thing is that you’re so much better now. The struggle isn’t over. You’re still struggling with it. But it’s night and day. You are so much better.

Gabe: I love it when we have microphones. You’re so much nicer to me when we have microphones. I’m just going to carry around.

Lisa: You know I think you’re better.

Gabe: A podcast kit and just every time you get, like, mean to me, I’m just gonna, like, thrust a microphone in your face and be like podcast time.

Lisa: To think we’ve been arguing all these years for free. How wasteful,

Gabe: Ok. Listen up, everybody. Thank you so much for tuning in. Obviously, the whole world believes that food is love, but you know what else is love? Subscribing to our podcast, sharing our podcast, rating our podcast, telling everybody that you can about our show. The official link for this show is PsychCentral.com/NotCrazy. Share it everywhere and subscribe on your favorite podcast player.

Lisa: Don’t forget, there are outtakes after the credits and we’ll see you next Tuesday.

Announcer: You’ve been listening to the Not Crazy Podcast from Psych Central. For free mental health resources and online support groups, visit PsychCentral.com. Not Crazy’s official website is PsychCentral.com/NotCrazy. To work with Gabe, go to gabehoward.com. Want to see Gabe and me in person? Not Crazy travels well. Have us record an episode live at your next event. E-mail [email protected] for details.

from https://ift.tt/2ZKw15l Check out https://peterlegyel.wordpress.com/

0 notes

ashley-unicorn · 4 years ago

Text

Podcast: Life with Binge Eating Disorder

(Transcript Available Below)

Please Subscribe to Our Show: And We Love Written Reviews!

About The Not Crazy podcast Hosts

Computer Generated Transcript for “Binge Eating Disorder” Episode

Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.

Gabe: Welcome, everyone, to this episode of Not Crazy. My name is Gabe Howard, and I am here with my ever present co-host, Lisa.

Lisa: Hey, everyone, and today’s quote is Food is love, food is life by Edwina O’Connor.

Gabe: Ok. There’s so much to say about this. But food is life. It’s life. Oxygen is life. Oh, that’s so deep, you should put this.

Lisa: It’s profound.

Gabe: Like this is like live, laugh, love.

Lisa: Right

Lisa: So it works both directions, giving people food is love and accepting their food says I love you back.

Lisa: You realize your top weight was a lot closer to six hundred and fifty pounds.

Gabe: That’s not true. I never weighed over 600.

Lisa: I’m willing to bet that you weighed over six hundred.

Gabe: I did not. I know for a fact.

Gabe: There is one thing that fat people know more than anything else, especially fat people who have lost a lot of weight, they know their top weights.

Lisa: Ok, well, never mind. Go back, unpause.

Gabe: No, we don’t need to pause at all. I think you should leave this in there. I want people to see how often Lisa pauses to correct me.

Lisa: You’re welcome.

Lisa: Yeah, see, there you go. I didn’t set the limit. Somebody else did.

Lisa: Yeah, it’s very impressive. This was a long time back. You had gastric bypass in 2003 and you’ve kept it off all these years.

Lisa: The crazier I sound?

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: Yeah, I’ve noticed that.

Gabe: You met a man that weighed five hundred and fifty pounds with untreated bipolar disorder. And you were like, yeah.

Lisa: You were very engaging. You Gabe magicked me.

Gabe: Gonna get me some of that.

Lisa: Yeah. You carried it well. What can I say?

Gabe: Oh, really? I just I dressed so well? You know, you get the right tailor, you can hide anything with clothing.

Lisa: It’s amazing. Yeah.

Gabe: But back to our point, I thought that I just ate a lot. I thought I was just overweight, like so many Americans and I.

Lisa: You’re remembering the story a little bit different. By the time I met you, you had already been diagnosed with binge eating disorder.

Gabe: That’s not true. That is completely untrue.

Lisa: That is true.

Gabe: That’s not true. Nope.

Lisa: That is true.

Gabe: No.

Lisa: That is true. I don’t know what to tell you.

Gabe: No, it is not true.

Lisa: I never thought that you were just, just fat. You know what I mean?

Gabe: You had me join Weight Watchers.

Lisa: Although Weight Watchers is obviously not designed for people with serious eating disorders, it is a mechanism to keep track of what you eat.

Gabe: Yes, an umbrella is a mechanism to not get wet. But would you hand it to a hurricane?

Lisa: I’m not saying that it was the best choice for you.

Gabe: Is this what you recommended, like for Katrina?

Lisa: But what were the options?

Gabe: Like medical intervention?

Lisa: You were doing that too.

Lisa: I disagree.

Gabe: Why do you keep shaking your head? I love how you’re shaking your head.

Lisa: You told me not to talk. So I shake my head. By the time we started dating, you were already trying to get a gastric bypass.

Lisa: You don’t think so?

Lisa: You were very overweight and you definitely had clear issues with food. As I might have said to you at one point, you were, in fact, circus freak fat.

Gabe: You did.

Lisa: Sorry about that, that was rude.

Gabe: I don’t know how our relationship made it.

Lisa: Yeah, yeah.

Gabe: I think that the divorce was probably inevitable.

Lisa: I’m pretty sure I said that after you lost the weight, but I’m not positive.

Lisa: Really?

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: You weren’t worried about the health?

Gabe: No.

Lisa: Not necessarily worried about the health consequences, but it wasn’t things like you had trouble getting upstairs? You weren’t concerned about stuff like that?

Lisa: Well, I wasn’t going to give you my real name.

Lisa: I remember that.

Gabe: When I walked in, they had these wide chairs that I fit in.

Lisa: They were like benches.

Lisa: Veggies? Salad?

Gabe: Man, that’s be a lot of salad and veggies, but

Lisa: Well.

Gabe: I needed like the foods that I grew up with. I guess a better way to say it is it was about the psychological connection to the food.

Lisa: Oh, I don’t think that’s fair. You can eat to survive and enjoy what you eat. You probably get into a gray area once you get overweight. And I am overweight.

Gabe: Well, I disagree with that. Why can’t it work the other way? We don’t eat, so we feel pain. We feel hunger.

Lisa: It’s both.

Gabe: So would you say that that’s a gray area?

Lisa: Ok, fine gray area.

Gabe: But I don’t think it’s fair to call it extreme anymore.

Lisa: Why?

Gabe: It was extreme before I got help. I don’t think it’s extreme anymore. I do think it’s outside of the normal lines.

Lisa: Ok. Well, that’s just a semantic argument, it’s much more than for the average person. How about that?

Gabe: Well, I’m just saying, if my relationship with food is extreme now, how would you classify it before I got help? When I weighed five hundred fifty pounds, what word would you use there?

Lisa: Even worse.

Gabe: Well, but we need a word here. We’re using extreme for my relationship with food now.

Gabe: It’s the way you react to food.

Lisa: Well, yes, but that’s not a good measure because I am also overweight. But it’s worse with you. It’s a lot worse.

Gabe: Give some examples.

Gabe: You think that’s out? Popcorn at a movie theater? Me wanting popcorn and a movie theater?

Lisa: No.

Gabe: You’ve decided that is extreme and outside the norm? So I’m the only one?

Gabe: I think that is untrue.

Gabe: I remember.

Gabe: My mom and grandma were staying with me. I asked them to come and take care of me. You know, I was single.

Lisa: Well, you needed someone, major surgery.

Lisa: Oh,

Gabe: And I walked you out to your car. So we didn’t really argue. I had pleaded with you to stay.

Lisa: I don’t remember that part.

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: And I was going through so many emotions. And my coping mechanism at that point was eating. And I didn’t have it. I had not learned new coping mechanisms yet.

Lisa: Just how emotional you were at this loss. Almost as if your best friend had died.

Gabe: Yeah.

Gabe: You know, on one hand that a devastatingly sad story.

Lisa: It was.

Gabe: But the reason I’m snickering is because do you remember my neighbors walking by? And one of them said hi to you

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: But of course, as they rounded, they see this 550 pound guy hunched over in his bathrobe on the

Lisa: On the ground.

Gabe: On the ground. They’re just like, OK. I, yeah.

Lisa: When a really large person hits the ground, people, people react.

Gabe: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Lisa: And then your mom thought that you had just fallen

Gabe: Yep.

Lisa: Because she didn’t know that you’re upset and you didn’t want her to know how upset you were.

Gabe: Pandemonium.

Gabe: You know, hindsight,

Lisa: Mm hmm.

Gabe: Hindsight is always funny-funny.

Lisa: Fun times. Fun times.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: We’ll be right back after these messages.

Gabe: We’re back discussing binge eating disorder.

Lisa: So, you were pretending there were other people on the phone to the pizza place because you didn’t want them to know you were ordering for yourself?

Lisa: Right. And you knew that.

Lisa: You remember that night with the pizza?

Gabe: Yep.

Gabe: Yeah, and I hid the box.

Lisa: Yeah, you would hide the box or the wrappers.

Gabe: It wasn’t even like I said that I ate. I didn’t want you to think that I was a giant fat ass. That was important to me.

Gabe: Well, I didn’t have that problem in front of you.

Lisa: Ok, that’s fair. You want to tell the story?

Gabe: I don’t want to tell the story, but I think now you’re going to have to. The people just heard you give the punchline away.

Lisa: You go.

Gabe: We were at a pizza buffet, all you can eat pizza buffet, and I was eating and I looked up and you were looking at me and.

Lisa: I had stopped eating by this time and was just watching you.

Gabe: And I said, what? And you said, wow, you can really put it away. And I was like, that’s so mean. I’m just trying to eat my lunch. And you’re just like, I don’t know what to say.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: It was disturbing.

Lisa: By the way, you’re welcome.

Gabe: Yeah, that was all Lisa. I just didn’t wear a seatbelt before.

Gabe: Remember when I said it doesn’t fit? And you said, bullshit? Show me. You didn’t believe me.

Gabe: You’ve seen how far those things stretch out.

Gabe: Didn’t fit.

Lisa: So, yeah, that was really shocking. And just within a couple of days, we had seatbelt extenders for all the cars of everybody we knew.

Gabe: Yeah. Thank you. That.

Lisa: They will give them to you for free if you ask.

Lisa: Yeah, like two months before. But you already had the date scheduled

Gabe: Yeah. And so as I’m losing the weight, I’m also getting treated for bipolar disorder.

Lisa: Well, what did you think before, though? What did you think your relationship with food was up until then?

Gabe: I thought that I overate, like everybody, but I also thought that it wasn’t my fault because after all, I didn’t get a good metabolism.

Lisa: Oh, metabolism.

Lisa: It was not something that you could control. It was just this swirl around you that was impacting you.

Lisa: So stuff just kind of happened to you. You weren’t directing the action.

Gabe: Yeah, I was the victim. I very much felt that I was a victim. That my body had somehow failed me. That it wasn’t in my control or my fault.

Lisa: Well, did that matter though? I’ve been cursed with a bad body, which means that I must now make different choices than other people.

Gabe: Yes. And one of those choices that I thought I needed to make was to have surgery to correct it.

Lisa: Oh, ok.

Lisa: He likes to get that into every conversation.

Gabe: It’s you know, it’s a fun fact. I just. Then people look at me and they’re like, Oh, you had surgery? You did it the easy way.

Gabe: Well, I’m successful.

Lisa: You’re very successful.

Gabe: To be fair, I went from five hundred fifty pounds all the way down to two hundred and thirty at my lowest weight. Now, my average walking around weight is about 260

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: And they think, oh, there’s Gabe.

Gabe: Yeah.

Gabe: I still want to give you a little push back on, is it OK that we’re using the word fat so cavalierly?

Lisa: Seriously, that’s what you’re going to get out all this?

Gabe: No, I, mean, thank you for all of the kind words.

Lisa: We’re both still fat.

Gabe: I kind of wonder if I was listening to the show and we just kept saying, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat.

Lisa: Well, but you’re adding the pejorative. What does fat mean?

Gabe: Overweight, I guess.

Gabe: Are we taking it back?

Lisa: Not even that necessarily. Just why are you adding in this pejorative of fat is inherently bad and we shouldn’t throw it around so cavalierly? You were heavy. You were big.

Gabe: It’s true.

Lisa: The word for that is fat. And I would like to point out, for the record, that both of us are currently fat.

Gabe: I guess that is my question. As much as I love you, Lisa, you are not the same size as you were when you were 23.

Lisa: Yeah, even then, I was not thin.

Gabe: So are you, are you fat now or would you prefer that I say nothing because I’m not dumb?

Gabe: Your nose is gigantic.

Gabe: If I had that ability, we would not be divorced.

Gabe: In a fancy restaurant.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: And one of them was buy clothing in a normal store.

Gabe: Yeah,

Lisa: Sit in a booth at a restaurant

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: And ride a roller coaster.

Gabe: The roller coaster.

Gabe: It was.

Lisa: Because it turned out that he had gone below the largest size they had in the store. He was so excited.

Gabe: It was. It was a good day. The booth. Do you remember one year

Lisa: I remember.

Gabe: For Christmas. You got me a gift card to every restaurant that I couldn’t go to because they only had booths.

Gabe: Yeah.

Gabe: Do you remember when we went to the amusement park?

Lisa: Uh-huh.

Lisa: The ride attendant.

Gabe: Yeah, the ride attendant said, I’m not sure, but we have a seat here.

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: And for real, I just wanted to, like, hug him.

Lisa: When you walked up to him and said, hey, I’m worried that I might not fit, he thought you were saying I might not fit because you were tall.

Gabe: Yup.

Lisa: It never occurred to him that you were saying because you were fat.

Gabe: I cried. This poor kid. He’s like 19 years old and he’s like, Why is this man crying?

Lisa: Yeah.

Lisa: Yeah, you would say that all the time.

Gabe: I did. I really did.

Lisa: All the thousand and one coping things that you have for panic attacks.

Lisa: Pretzels, so many pretzels.

Gabe: I’m certainly in more control today than I ever have been in my entire life. But it’s not perfect. I still binge to this very day.

Lisa: Well, that’s a question, how often would you say you binge these days? Because it used to be daily. What is it now?

Gabe: Maybe once a month.

Lisa: Really?

Lisa: There’s four of us.

Gabe: There’s four of us. And you said, you realize that if you ordered two pizzas, that would be half a large pizza per person and you ordered more. And you have chips. I was like, huh?

Gabe: Nobody else is bipolar in my family either. There’s

Lisa: That’s fair.

Lisa: Right. Yes.

Gabe: Toward alcohol and drugs?

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: So I think that sometimes

Lisa: Or extreme sports or any other thing?

Lisa: Well, yeah. But almost everyone can say that.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: Why did it hit you different than anybody else?

Gabe: I have no idea. Why does your brother ride a bike 100 miles a day and you don’t?

Lisa: Yeah, that’s fair.

Gabe: I have no idea and I don’t think you do either. Lisa’s brother, like for real.

Lisa: He’s an athlete.

Gabe: If you Google super athletic bro dude, I’m pretty sure Lisa’s brother comes up. And if you Google refuses to go out in the sun, hates to walk, Lisa comes up.

Lisa: Look at me, for God’s sakes. You think the sun is safe? The sun is not safe. I could burst into flames.

Gabe: You have the same parents, were raised in the same small town, raised in the exact same way, grew up on the same foods.

Lisa: That’s fair.

Gabe: How come he likes to ride a bike a thousand miles uphill for no apparent reason?

Lisa: That’s true.

Gabe: And you don’t like to talk about bikes?

Lisa: Ok, that’s fair.

Gabe: Remember when your husband bought you a bike and you just started laughing at him uncontrollably?

Lisa: What were we going to do with that? Oh, we can go for bike rides. That’s just stupid. Anyway.

Gabe: Lisa hates that bike so much, she won’t even use it as a clothing rack.

Lisa: That’s true. That is true. It’s in the garage now. We’re probably gonna get rid of that the next time we move.

Gabe: I think that reality television is really skewed people to believe that mental disorders, mental illnesses and issues have to have some triggering event.

Lisa: An easily found one.

Lisa: That’s fair.

Lisa: Yes it has.

Lisa: The death rate is a lot higher than you think.

Gabe: Why do we as a society not take eating disorders seriously?

Lisa: I don’t know, maybe because we live in a time of abundant food? Which has not always been the case for humanity, isn’t the case everywhere in the world. Maybe because you can’t see it?

Gabe: We take substance abuse disorder seriously.

Gabe: And cheap.

Lisa: Yeah, and cheap.

Gabe: And cheap.

Lisa: There’s a reason why marketing is everywhere, it works.

Lisa: And the important thing is that you’re so much better now. The struggle isn’t over. You’re still struggling with it. But it’s night and day. You are so much better.

Gabe: I love it when we have microphones. You’re so much nicer to me when we have microphones. I’m just going to carry around.

Lisa: You know I think you’re better.

Gabe: A podcast kit and just every time you get, like, mean to me, I’m just gonna, like, thrust a microphone in your face and be like podcast time.

Lisa: To think we’ve been arguing all these years for free. How wasteful,

Lisa: Don’t forget, there are outtakes after the credits and we’ll see you next Tuesday.

from https://ift.tt/2ZKw15l Check out https://daniejadkins.wordpress.com/

0 notes

brentrogers · 4 years ago

Text

Podcast: Life with Binge Eating Disorder

(Transcript Available Below)

Please Subscribe to Our Show: And We Love Written Reviews!

About The Not Crazy podcast Hosts

Computer Generated Transcript for “Binge Eating Disorder” Episode

Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.

Gabe: Welcome, everyone, to this episode of Not Crazy. My name is Gabe Howard, and I am here with my ever present co-host, Lisa.

Lisa: Hey, everyone, and today’s quote is Food is love, food is life by Edwina O’Connor.

Gabe: Ok. There’s so much to say about this. But food is life. It’s life. Oxygen is life. Oh, that’s so deep, you should put this.

Lisa: It’s profound.

Gabe: Like this is like live, laugh, love.

Lisa: Right

Lisa: So it works both directions, giving people food is love and accepting their food says I love you back.

Lisa: You realize your top weight was a lot closer to six hundred and fifty pounds.

Gabe: That’s not true. I never weighed over 600.

Lisa: I’m willing to bet that you weighed over six hundred.

Gabe: I did not. I know for a fact.

Gabe: There is one thing that fat people know more than anything else, especially fat people who have lost a lot of weight, they know their top weights.

Lisa: Ok, well, never mind. Go back, unpause.

Gabe: No, we don’t need to pause at all. I think you should leave this in there. I want people to see how often Lisa pauses to correct me.

Lisa: You’re welcome.

Lisa: Yeah, see, there you go. I didn’t set the limit. Somebody else did.

Lisa: Yeah, it’s very impressive. This was a long time back. You had gastric bypass in 2003 and you’ve kept it off all these years.

Lisa: The crazier I sound?

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: Yeah, I’ve noticed that.

Gabe: You met a man that weighed five hundred and fifty pounds with untreated bipolar disorder. And you were like, yeah.

Lisa: You were very engaging. You Gabe magicked me.

Gabe: Gonna get me some of that.

Lisa: Yeah. You carried it well. What can I say?

Gabe: Oh, really? I just I dressed so well? You know, you get the right tailor, you can hide anything with clothing.

Lisa: It’s amazing. Yeah.

Gabe: But back to our point, I thought that I just ate a lot. I thought I was just overweight, like so many Americans and I.

Lisa: You’re remembering the story a little bit different. By the time I met you, you had already been diagnosed with binge eating disorder.

Gabe: That’s not true. That is completely untrue.

Lisa: That is true.

Gabe: That’s not true. Nope.

Lisa: That is true.

Gabe: No.

Lisa: That is true. I don’t know what to tell you.

Gabe: No, it is not true.

Lisa: I never thought that you were just, just fat. You know what I mean?

Gabe: You had me join Weight Watchers.

Lisa: Although Weight Watchers is obviously not designed for people with serious eating disorders, it is a mechanism to keep track of what you eat.

Gabe: Yes, an umbrella is a mechanism to not get wet. But would you hand it to a hurricane?

Lisa: I’m not saying that it was the best choice for you.

Gabe: Is this what you recommended, like for Katrina?

Lisa: But what were the options?

Gabe: Like medical intervention?

Lisa: You were doing that too.

Lisa: I disagree.

Gabe: Why do you keep shaking your head? I love how you’re shaking your head.

Lisa: You told me not to talk. So I shake my head. By the time we started dating, you were already trying to get a gastric bypass.

Lisa: You don’t think so?

Lisa: You were very overweight and you definitely had clear issues with food. As I might have said to you at one point, you were, in fact, circus freak fat.

Gabe: You did.

Lisa: Sorry about that, that was rude.

Gabe: I don’t know how our relationship made it.

Lisa: Yeah, yeah.

Gabe: I think that the divorce was probably inevitable.

Lisa: I’m pretty sure I said that after you lost the weight, but I’m not positive.

Lisa: Really?

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: You weren’t worried about the health?

Gabe: No.

Lisa: Not necessarily worried about the health consequences, but it wasn’t things like you had trouble getting upstairs? You weren’t concerned about stuff like that?

Lisa: Well, I wasn’t going to give you my real name.

Lisa: I remember that.

Gabe: When I walked in, they had these wide chairs that I fit in.

Lisa: They were like benches.

Lisa: Veggies? Salad?

Gabe: Man, that’s be a lot of salad and veggies, but

Lisa: Well.

Gabe: I needed like the foods that I grew up with. I guess a better way to say it is it was about the psychological connection to the food.

Lisa: Oh, I don’t think that’s fair. You can eat to survive and enjoy what you eat. You probably get into a gray area once you get overweight. And I am overweight.

Gabe: Well, I disagree with that. Why can’t it work the other way? We don’t eat, so we feel pain. We feel hunger.

Lisa: It’s both.

Gabe: So would you say that that’s a gray area?

Lisa: Ok, fine gray area.

Gabe: But I don’t think it’s fair to call it extreme anymore.

Lisa: Why?

Gabe: It was extreme before I got help. I don’t think it’s extreme anymore. I do think it’s outside of the normal lines.

Lisa: Ok. Well, that’s just a semantic argument, it’s much more than for the average person. How about that?

Gabe: Well, I’m just saying, if my relationship with food is extreme now, how would you classify it before I got help? When I weighed five hundred fifty pounds, what word would you use there?

Lisa: Even worse.

Gabe: Well, but we need a word here. We’re using extreme for my relationship with food now.

Gabe: It’s the way you react to food.

Lisa: Well, yes, but that’s not a good measure because I am also overweight. But it’s worse with you. It’s a lot worse.

Gabe: Give some examples.

Gabe: You think that’s out? Popcorn at a movie theater? Me wanting popcorn and a movie theater?

Lisa: No.

Gabe: You’ve decided that is extreme and outside the norm? So I’m the only one?

Gabe: I think that is untrue.

Gabe: I remember.

Gabe: My mom and grandma were staying with me. I asked them to come and take care of me. You know, I was single.

Lisa: Well, you needed someone, major surgery.

Lisa: Oh,

Gabe: And I walked you out to your car. So we didn’t really argue. I had pleaded with you to stay.

Lisa: I don’t remember that part.

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: And I was going through so many emotions. And my coping mechanism at that point was eating. And I didn’t have it. I had not learned new coping mechanisms yet.

Lisa: Just how emotional you were at this loss. Almost as if your best friend had died.

Gabe: Yeah.

Gabe: You know, on one hand that a devastatingly sad story.

Lisa: It was.

Gabe: But the reason I’m snickering is because do you remember my neighbors walking by? And one of them said hi to you

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: But of course, as they rounded, they see this 550 pound guy hunched over in his bathrobe on the

Lisa: On the ground.

Gabe: On the ground. They’re just like, OK. I, yeah.

Lisa: When a really large person hits the ground, people, people react.

Gabe: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Lisa: And then your mom thought that you had just fallen

Gabe: Yep.

Lisa: Because she didn’t know that you’re upset and you didn’t want her to know how upset you were.

Gabe: Pandemonium.

Gabe: You know, hindsight,

Lisa: Mm hmm.

Gabe: Hindsight is always funny-funny.

Lisa: Fun times. Fun times.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: We’ll be right back after these messages.

Gabe: We’re back discussing binge eating disorder.

Lisa: So, you were pretending there were other people on the phone to the pizza place because you didn’t want them to know you were ordering for yourself?

Lisa: Right. And you knew that.

Lisa: You remember that night with the pizza?

Gabe: Yep.

Gabe: Yeah, and I hid the box.

Lisa: Yeah, you would hide the box or the wrappers.

Gabe: It wasn’t even like I said that I ate. I didn’t want you to think that I was a giant fat ass. That was important to me.

Gabe: Well, I didn’t have that problem in front of you.

Lisa: Ok, that’s fair. You want to tell the story?

Gabe: I don’t want to tell the story, but I think now you’re going to have to. The people just heard you give the punchline away.

Lisa: You go.

Gabe: We were at a pizza buffet, all you can eat pizza buffet, and I was eating and I looked up and you were looking at me and.

Lisa: I had stopped eating by this time and was just watching you.

Gabe: And I said, what? And you said, wow, you can really put it away. And I was like, that’s so mean. I’m just trying to eat my lunch. And you’re just like, I don’t know what to say.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: It was disturbing.

Lisa: By the way, you’re welcome.

Gabe: Yeah, that was all Lisa. I just didn’t wear a seatbelt before.

Gabe: Remember when I said it doesn’t fit? And you said, bullshit? Show me. You didn’t believe me.

Gabe: You’ve seen how far those things stretch out.

Gabe: Didn’t fit.

Lisa: So, yeah, that was really shocking. And just within a couple of days, we had seatbelt extenders for all the cars of everybody we knew.

Gabe: Yeah. Thank you. That.

Lisa: They will give them to you for free if you ask.

Lisa: Yeah, like two months before. But you already had the date scheduled

Gabe: Yeah. And so as I’m losing the weight, I’m also getting treated for bipolar disorder.

Lisa: Well, what did you think before, though? What did you think your relationship with food was up until then?

Gabe: I thought that I overate, like everybody, but I also thought that it wasn’t my fault because after all, I didn’t get a good metabolism.

Lisa: Oh, metabolism.

Lisa: It was not something that you could control. It was just this swirl around you that was impacting you.

Lisa: So stuff just kind of happened to you. You weren’t directing the action.

Gabe: Yeah, I was the victim. I very much felt that I was a victim. That my body had somehow failed me. That it wasn’t in my control or my fault.

Lisa: Well, did that matter though? I’ve been cursed with a bad body, which means that I must now make different choices than other people.

Gabe: Yes. And one of those choices that I thought I needed to make was to have surgery to correct it.

Lisa: Oh, ok.

Lisa: He likes to get that into every conversation.

Gabe: It’s you know, it’s a fun fact. I just. Then people look at me and they’re like, Oh, you had surgery? You did it the easy way.

Gabe: Well, I’m successful.

Lisa: You’re very successful.

Gabe: To be fair, I went from five hundred fifty pounds all the way down to two hundred and thirty at my lowest weight. Now, my average walking around weight is about 260

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: And they think, oh, there’s Gabe.

Gabe: Yeah.

Gabe: I still want to give you a little push back on, is it OK that we’re using the word fat so cavalierly?

Lisa: Seriously, that’s what you’re going to get out all this?

Gabe: No, I, mean, thank you for all of the kind words.

Lisa: We’re both still fat.

Gabe: I kind of wonder if I was listening to the show and we just kept saying, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat.

Lisa: Well, but you’re adding the pejorative. What does fat mean?

Gabe: Overweight, I guess.

Gabe: Are we taking it back?

Lisa: Not even that necessarily. Just why are you adding in this pejorative of fat is inherently bad and we shouldn’t throw it around so cavalierly? You were heavy. You were big.

Gabe: It’s true.

Lisa: The word for that is fat. And I would like to point out, for the record, that both of us are currently fat.

Gabe: I guess that is my question. As much as I love you, Lisa, you are not the same size as you were when you were 23.

Lisa: Yeah, even then, I was not thin.

Gabe: So are you, are you fat now or would you prefer that I say nothing because I’m not dumb?

Gabe: Your nose is gigantic.

Gabe: If I had that ability, we would not be divorced.

Gabe: In a fancy restaurant.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: And one of them was buy clothing in a normal store.

Gabe: Yeah,

Lisa: Sit in a booth at a restaurant

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: And ride a roller coaster.

Gabe: The roller coaster.

Gabe: It was.

Lisa: Because it turned out that he had gone below the largest size they had in the store. He was so excited.

Gabe: It was. It was a good day. The booth. Do you remember one year

Lisa: I remember.

Gabe: For Christmas. You got me a gift card to every restaurant that I couldn’t go to because they only had booths.

Gabe: Yeah.

Gabe: Do you remember when we went to the amusement park?

Lisa: Uh-huh.

Lisa: The ride attendant.

Gabe: Yeah, the ride attendant said, I’m not sure, but we have a seat here.

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: And for real, I just wanted to, like, hug him.

Lisa: When you walked up to him and said, hey, I’m worried that I might not fit, he thought you were saying I might not fit because you were tall.

Gabe: Yup.

Lisa: It never occurred to him that you were saying because you were fat.

Gabe: I cried. This poor kid. He’s like 19 years old and he’s like, Why is this man crying?

Lisa: Yeah.

Lisa: Yeah, you would say that all the time.

Gabe: I did. I really did.

Lisa: All the thousand and one coping things that you have for panic attacks.

Lisa: Pretzels, so many pretzels.

Gabe: I’m certainly in more control today than I ever have been in my entire life. But it’s not perfect. I still binge to this very day.

Lisa: Well, that’s a question, how often would you say you binge these days? Because it used to be daily. What is it now?

Gabe: Maybe once a month.

Lisa: Really?

Lisa: There’s four of us.

Gabe: There’s four of us. And you said, you realize that if you ordered two pizzas, that would be half a large pizza per person and you ordered more. And you have chips. I was like, huh?

Gabe: Nobody else is bipolar in my family either. There’s

Lisa: That’s fair.

Lisa: Right. Yes.

Gabe: Toward alcohol and drugs?

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: So I think that sometimes

Lisa: Or extreme sports or any other thing?

Lisa: Well, yeah. But almost everyone can say that.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: Why did it hit you different than anybody else?

Gabe: I have no idea. Why does your brother ride a bike 100 miles a day and you don’t?

Lisa: Yeah, that’s fair.

Gabe: I have no idea and I don’t think you do either. Lisa’s brother, like for real.

Lisa: He’s an athlete.

Gabe: If you Google super athletic bro dude, I’m pretty sure Lisa’s brother comes up. And if you Google refuses to go out in the sun, hates to walk, Lisa comes up.

Lisa: Look at me, for God’s sakes. You think the sun is safe? The sun is not safe. I could burst into flames.

Gabe: You have the same parents, were raised in the same small town, raised in the exact same way, grew up on the same foods.

Lisa: That’s fair.

Gabe: How come he likes to ride a bike a thousand miles uphill for no apparent reason?

Lisa: That’s true.

Gabe: And you don’t like to talk about bikes?

Lisa: Ok, that’s fair.

Gabe: Remember when your husband bought you a bike and you just started laughing at him uncontrollably?

Lisa: What were we going to do with that? Oh, we can go for bike rides. That’s just stupid. Anyway.

Gabe: Lisa hates that bike so much, she won’t even use it as a clothing rack.

Lisa: That’s true. That is true. It’s in the garage now. We’re probably gonna get rid of that the next time we move.

Gabe: I think that reality television is really skewed people to believe that mental disorders, mental illnesses and issues have to have some triggering event.

Lisa: An easily found one.

Lisa: That’s fair.

Lisa: Yes it has.

Lisa: The death rate is a lot higher than you think.

Gabe: Why do we as a society not take eating disorders seriously?

Lisa: I don’t know, maybe because we live in a time of abundant food? Which has not always been the case for humanity, isn’t the case everywhere in the world. Maybe because you can’t see it?

Gabe: We take substance abuse disorder seriously.

Gabe: And cheap.

Lisa: Yeah, and cheap.

Gabe: And cheap.

Lisa: There’s a reason why marketing is everywhere, it works.

Lisa: And the important thing is that you’re so much better now. The struggle isn’t over. You’re still struggling with it. But it’s night and day. You are so much better.

Gabe: I love it when we have microphones. You’re so much nicer to me when we have microphones. I’m just going to carry around.

Lisa: You know I think you’re better.

Gabe: A podcast kit and just every time you get, like, mean to me, I’m just gonna, like, thrust a microphone in your face and be like podcast time.

Lisa: To think we’ve been arguing all these years for free. How wasteful,

Lisa: Don’t forget, there are outtakes after the credits and we’ll see you next Tuesday.

Podcast: Life with Binge Eating Disorder syndicated from

0 notes

erraticfairy · 4 years ago

Text

Podcast: Life with Binge Eating Disorder

(Transcript Available Below)

Please Subscribe to Our Show: And We Love Written Reviews!

About The Not Crazy podcast Hosts

Computer Generated Transcript for “Binge Eating Disorder” Episode

Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.

Gabe: Welcome, everyone, to this episode of Not Crazy. My name is Gabe Howard, and I am here with my ever present co-host, Lisa.

Lisa: Hey, everyone, and today’s quote is Food is love, food is life by Edwina O’Connor.

Gabe: Ok. There’s so much to say about this. But food is life. It’s life. Oxygen is life. Oh, that’s so deep, you should put this.

Lisa: It’s profound.

Gabe: Like this is like live, laugh, love.

Lisa: Right

Lisa: So it works both directions, giving people food is love and accepting their food says I love you back.

Lisa: You realize your top weight was a lot closer to six hundred and fifty pounds.

Gabe: That’s not true. I never weighed over 600.

Lisa: I’m willing to bet that you weighed over six hundred.

Gabe: I did not. I know for a fact.

Gabe: There is one thing that fat people know more than anything else, especially fat people who have lost a lot of weight, they know their top weights.

Lisa: Ok, well, never mind. Go back, unpause.

Gabe: No, we don’t need to pause at all. I think you should leave this in there. I want people to see how often Lisa pauses to correct me.

Lisa: You’re welcome.

Lisa: Yeah, see, there you go. I didn’t set the limit. Somebody else did.

Lisa: Yeah, it’s very impressive. This was a long time back. You had gastric bypass in 2003 and you’ve kept it off all these years.

Lisa: The crazier I sound?

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: Yeah, I’ve noticed that.

Gabe: You met a man that weighed five hundred and fifty pounds with untreated bipolar disorder. And you were like, yeah.

Lisa: You were very engaging. You Gabe magicked me.

Gabe: Gonna get me some of that.

Lisa: Yeah. You carried it well. What can I say?

Gabe: Oh, really? I just I dressed so well? You know, you get the right tailor, you can hide anything with clothing.

Lisa: It’s amazing. Yeah.

Gabe: But back to our point, I thought that I just ate a lot. I thought I was just overweight, like so many Americans and I.

Lisa: You’re remembering the story a little bit different. By the time I met you, you had already been diagnosed with binge eating disorder.

Gabe: That’s not true. That is completely untrue.

Lisa: That is true.

Gabe: That’s not true. Nope.

Lisa: That is true.

Gabe: No.

Lisa: That is true. I don’t know what to tell you.

Gabe: No, it is not true.

Lisa: I never thought that you were just, just fat. You know what I mean?

Gabe: You had me join Weight Watchers.

Lisa: Although Weight Watchers is obviously not designed for people with serious eating disorders, it is a mechanism to keep track of what you eat.

Gabe: Yes, an umbrella is a mechanism to not get wet. But would you hand it to a hurricane?

Lisa: I’m not saying that it was the best choice for you.

Gabe: Is this what you recommended, like for Katrina?

Lisa: But what were the options?

Gabe: Like medical intervention?

Lisa: You were doing that too.

Lisa: I disagree.

Gabe: Why do you keep shaking your head? I love how you’re shaking your head.

Lisa: You told me not to talk. So I shake my head. By the time we started dating, you were already trying to get a gastric bypass.

Lisa: You don’t think so?

Lisa: You were very overweight and you definitely had clear issues with food. As I might have said to you at one point, you were, in fact, circus freak fat.

Gabe: You did.

Lisa: Sorry about that, that was rude.

Gabe: I don’t know how our relationship made it.

Lisa: Yeah, yeah.

Gabe: I think that the divorce was probably inevitable.

Lisa: I’m pretty sure I said that after you lost the weight, but I’m not positive.

Lisa: Really?

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: You weren’t worried about the health?

Gabe: No.

Lisa: Not necessarily worried about the health consequences, but it wasn’t things like you had trouble getting upstairs? You weren’t concerned about stuff like that?

Lisa: Well, I wasn’t going to give you my real name.

Lisa: I remember that.

Gabe: When I walked in, they had these wide chairs that I fit in.

Lisa: They were like benches.

Lisa: Veggies? Salad?

Gabe: Man, that’s be a lot of salad and veggies, but

Lisa: Well.

Gabe: I needed like the foods that I grew up with. I guess a better way to say it is it was about the psychological connection to the food.

Lisa: Oh, I don’t think that’s fair. You can eat to survive and enjoy what you eat. You probably get into a gray area once you get overweight. And I am overweight.

Gabe: Well, I disagree with that. Why can’t it work the other way? We don’t eat, so we feel pain. We feel hunger.

Lisa: It’s both.

Gabe: So would you say that that’s a gray area?

Lisa: Ok, fine gray area.

Gabe: But I don’t think it’s fair to call it extreme anymore.

Lisa: Why?

Gabe: It was extreme before I got help. I don’t think it’s extreme anymore. I do think it’s outside of the normal lines.

Lisa: Ok. Well, that’s just a semantic argument, it’s much more than for the average person. How about that?

Gabe: Well, I’m just saying, if my relationship with food is extreme now, how would you classify it before I got help? When I weighed five hundred fifty pounds, what word would you use there?

Lisa: Even worse.

Gabe: Well, but we need a word here. We’re using extreme for my relationship with food now.

Gabe: It’s the way you react to food.

Lisa: Well, yes, but that’s not a good measure because I am also overweight. But it’s worse with you. It’s a lot worse.

Gabe: Give some examples.

Gabe: You think that’s out? Popcorn at a movie theater? Me wanting popcorn and a movie theater?

Lisa: No.

Gabe: You’ve decided that is extreme and outside the norm? So I’m the only one?

Gabe: I think that is untrue.

Gabe: I remember.

Gabe: My mom and grandma were staying with me. I asked them to come and take care of me. You know, I was single.

Lisa: Well, you needed someone, major surgery.

Lisa: Oh,

Gabe: And I walked you out to your car. So we didn’t really argue. I had pleaded with you to stay.

Lisa: I don’t remember that part.

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: And I was going through so many emotions. And my coping mechanism at that point was eating. And I didn’t have it. I had not learned new coping mechanisms yet.

Lisa: Just how emotional you were at this loss. Almost as if your best friend had died.

Gabe: Yeah.

Gabe: You know, on one hand that a devastatingly sad story.

Lisa: It was.

Gabe: But the reason I’m snickering is because do you remember my neighbors walking by? And one of them said hi to you

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: But of course, as they rounded, they see this 550 pound guy hunched over in his bathrobe on the

Lisa: On the ground.

Gabe: On the ground. They’re just like, OK. I, yeah.

Lisa: When a really large person hits the ground, people, people react.

Gabe: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Lisa: And then your mom thought that you had just fallen

Gabe: Yep.

Lisa: Because she didn’t know that you’re upset and you didn’t want her to know how upset you were.

Gabe: Pandemonium.

Gabe: You know, hindsight,

Lisa: Mm hmm.

Gabe: Hindsight is always funny-funny.

Lisa: Fun times. Fun times.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: We’ll be right back after these messages.

Gabe: We’re back discussing binge eating disorder.

Lisa: So, you were pretending there were other people on the phone to the pizza place because you didn’t want them to know you were ordering for yourself?

Lisa: Right. And you knew that.

Lisa: You remember that night with the pizza?

Gabe: Yep.

Gabe: Yeah, and I hid the box.

Lisa: Yeah, you would hide the box or the wrappers.

Gabe: It wasn’t even like I said that I ate. I didn’t want you to think that I was a giant fat ass. That was important to me.

Gabe: Well, I didn’t have that problem in front of you.

Lisa: Ok, that’s fair. You want to tell the story?

Gabe: I don’t want to tell the story, but I think now you’re going to have to. The people just heard you give the punchline away.

Lisa: You go.

Gabe: We were at a pizza buffet, all you can eat pizza buffet, and I was eating and I looked up and you were looking at me and.

Lisa: I had stopped eating by this time and was just watching you.

Gabe: And I said, what? And you said, wow, you can really put it away. And I was like, that’s so mean. I’m just trying to eat my lunch. And you’re just like, I don’t know what to say.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: It was disturbing.

Lisa: By the way, you’re welcome.

Gabe: Yeah, that was all Lisa. I just didn’t wear a seatbelt before.

Gabe: Remember when I said it doesn’t fit? And you said, bullshit? Show me. You didn’t believe me.

Gabe: You’ve seen how far those things stretch out.

Gabe: Didn’t fit.

Lisa: So, yeah, that was really shocking. And just within a couple of days, we had seatbelt extenders for all the cars of everybody we knew.

Gabe: Yeah. Thank you. That.

Lisa: They will give them to you for free if you ask.

Lisa: Yeah, like two months before. But you already had the date scheduled

Gabe: Yeah. And so as I’m losing the weight, I’m also getting treated for bipolar disorder.

Lisa: Well, what did you think before, though? What did you think your relationship with food was up until then?

Gabe: I thought that I overate, like everybody, but I also thought that it wasn’t my fault because after all, I didn’t get a good metabolism.

Lisa: Oh, metabolism.

Lisa: It was not something that you could control. It was just this swirl around you that was impacting you.

Lisa: So stuff just kind of happened to you. You weren’t directing the action.

Gabe: Yeah, I was the victim. I very much felt that I was a victim. That my body had somehow failed me. That it wasn’t in my control or my fault.

Lisa: Well, did that matter though? I’ve been cursed with a bad body, which means that I must now make different choices than other people.

Gabe: Yes. And one of those choices that I thought I needed to make was to have surgery to correct it.

Lisa: Oh, ok.

Lisa: He likes to get that into every conversation.

Gabe: It’s you know, it’s a fun fact. I just. Then people look at me and they’re like, Oh, you had surgery? You did it the easy way.

Gabe: Well, I’m successful.

Lisa: You’re very successful.

Gabe: To be fair, I went from five hundred fifty pounds all the way down to two hundred and thirty at my lowest weight. Now, my average walking around weight is about 260

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: And they think, oh, there’s Gabe.

Gabe: Yeah.

Gabe: I still want to give you a little push back on, is it OK that we’re using the word fat so cavalierly?

Lisa: Seriously, that’s what you’re going to get out all this?

Gabe: No, I, mean, thank you for all of the kind words.

Lisa: We’re both still fat.

Gabe: I kind of wonder if I was listening to the show and we just kept saying, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat.

Lisa: Well, but you’re adding the pejorative. What does fat mean?

Gabe: Overweight, I guess.

Gabe: Are we taking it back?

Lisa: Not even that necessarily. Just why are you adding in this pejorative of fat is inherently bad and we shouldn’t throw it around so cavalierly? You were heavy. You were big.

Gabe: It’s true.

Lisa: The word for that is fat. And I would like to point out, for the record, that both of us are currently fat.

Gabe: I guess that is my question. As much as I love you, Lisa, you are not the same size as you were when you were 23.

Lisa: Yeah, even then, I was not thin.

Gabe: So are you, are you fat now or would you prefer that I say nothing because I’m not dumb?

Gabe: Your nose is gigantic.

Gabe: If I had that ability, we would not be divorced.

Gabe: In a fancy restaurant.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: And one of them was buy clothing in a normal store.

Gabe: Yeah,

Lisa: Sit in a booth at a restaurant

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: And ride a roller coaster.

Gabe: The roller coaster.

Gabe: It was.

Lisa: Because it turned out that he had gone below the largest size they had in the store. He was so excited.

Gabe: It was. It was a good day. The booth. Do you remember one year

Lisa: I remember.

Gabe: For Christmas. You got me a gift card to every restaurant that I couldn’t go to because they only had booths.

Gabe: Yeah.

Gabe: Do you remember when we went to the amusement park?

Lisa: Uh-huh.

Lisa: The ride attendant.

Gabe: Yeah, the ride attendant said, I’m not sure, but we have a seat here.

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: And for real, I just wanted to, like, hug him.

Lisa: When you walked up to him and said, hey, I’m worried that I might not fit, he thought you were saying I might not fit because you were tall.

Gabe: Yup.

Lisa: It never occurred to him that you were saying because you were fat.

Gabe: I cried. This poor kid. He’s like 19 years old and he’s like, Why is this man crying?

Lisa: Yeah.

Lisa: Yeah, you would say that all the time.

Gabe: I did. I really did.

Lisa: All the thousand and one coping things that you have for panic attacks.

Lisa: Pretzels, so many pretzels.

Gabe: I’m certainly in more control today than I ever have been in my entire life. But it’s not perfect. I still binge to this very day.

Lisa: Well, that’s a question, how often would you say you binge these days? Because it used to be daily. What is it now?

Gabe: Maybe once a month.

Lisa: Really?

Lisa: There’s four of us.

Gabe: There’s four of us. And you said, you realize that if you ordered two pizzas, that would be half a large pizza per person and you ordered more. And you have chips. I was like, huh?

Gabe: Nobody else is bipolar in my family either. There’s

Lisa: That’s fair.

Lisa: Right. Yes.

Gabe: Toward alcohol and drugs?

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: So I think that sometimes

Lisa: Or extreme sports or any other thing?

Lisa: Well, yeah. But almost everyone can say that.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: Why did it hit you different than anybody else?

Gabe: I have no idea. Why does your brother ride a bike 100 miles a day and you don’t?

Lisa: Yeah, that’s fair.

Gabe: I have no idea and I don’t think you do either. Lisa’s brother, like for real.

Lisa: He’s an athlete.

Gabe: If you Google super athletic bro dude, I’m pretty sure Lisa’s brother comes up. And if you Google refuses to go out in the sun, hates to walk, Lisa comes up.

Lisa: Look at me, for God’s sakes. You think the sun is safe? The sun is not safe. I could burst into flames.

Gabe: You have the same parents, were raised in the same small town, raised in the exact same way, grew up on the same foods.

Lisa: That’s fair.

Gabe: How come he likes to ride a bike a thousand miles uphill for no apparent reason?

Lisa: That’s true.

Gabe: And you don’t like to talk about bikes?

Lisa: Ok, that’s fair.

Gabe: Remember when your husband bought you a bike and you just started laughing at him uncontrollably?

Lisa: What were we going to do with that? Oh, we can go for bike rides. That’s just stupid. Anyway.

Gabe: Lisa hates that bike so much, she won’t even use it as a clothing rack.

Lisa: That’s true. That is true. It’s in the garage now. We’re probably gonna get rid of that the next time we move.

Gabe: I think that reality television is really skewed people to believe that mental disorders, mental illnesses and issues have to have some triggering event.

Lisa: An easily found one.

Lisa: That’s fair.

Lisa: Yes it has.

Lisa: The death rate is a lot higher than you think.

Gabe: Why do we as a society not take eating disorders seriously?

Lisa: I don’t know, maybe because we live in a time of abundant food? Which has not always been the case for humanity, isn’t the case everywhere in the world. Maybe because you can’t see it?

Gabe: We take substance abuse disorder seriously.

Gabe: And cheap.

Lisa: Yeah, and cheap.

Gabe: And cheap.

Lisa: There’s a reason why marketing is everywhere, it works.

Lisa: And the important thing is that you’re so much better now. The struggle isn’t over. You’re still struggling with it. But it’s night and day. You are so much better.

Gabe: I love it when we have microphones. You’re so much nicer to me when we have microphones. I’m just going to carry around.

Lisa: You know I think you’re better.

Gabe: A podcast kit and just every time you get, like, mean to me, I’m just gonna, like, thrust a microphone in your face and be like podcast time.

Lisa: To think we’ve been arguing all these years for free. How wasteful,

Lisa: Don’t forget, there are outtakes after the credits and we’ll see you next Tuesday.

from World of Psychology https://ift.tt/2ZKw15l via theshiningmind.com

#World of Psychology #child psychology

0 notes

democratsunited-blog · 7 years ago

Text

‘They Come After Me Because I’m Effective’ – RollingStone.com

https://uniteddemocrats.net/?p=5548

‘They Come After Me Because I’m Effective’ – RollingStone.com

As the countdown to November commences, with Democrats desperate for a moonshot, Nancy Pelosi sits atop a three-stage rocket, full of possibility and danger. If all goes according plan, the first stage, fueled by America’s revulsion to Trump, will lift Democrats to control of the House. The second stage, powered by a robust Democratic majority, returns Pelosi to her perch as Speaker of the House. The final stage – perhaps the most combustible – sees her unifying a fractious Democratic caucus to check President Trump and deliver on sky-high voter expectations.

Executing this launch sequence would tax the powers of any politician. Pelosi’s task is made more difficult by the ideological divides roiling her own party, and by a GOP that has made her the face of its attacks on Democratic candidates. Pelosi is unique among current congressional leaders in being weaponized against her team – she’s been featured in more than 16,000 attack ad airings through May. “We haven’t seen the Republican leaders singled out in this sort of way,” says Erika Franklin Fowler, a director of the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political ads.

Pelosi is one of the most powerful women in global politics. She gets credit for securing passage of much of the legislation in the Obama legacy, including the Recovery Act, Wall Street reform and especially the Affordable Care Act. “Nancy Pelosi has been one of the most transformational figures in the modern Democratic Party,” says Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez. Pelosi also spearheaded the takeover of the House a dozen years ago in 2006 – an achievement that has become fodder for her critics. “Leader Pelosi has talked about how we need to do what we did in 2006,” says Rep. Seth Moulton, an ambitious Massachusetts Democrat who argues for a “new generation” of House leadership. “I mean, we barely had iPhones in 2006 – it was a different world.”

But for all the talk about Nancy Pelosi, less time has been spent actually listening to her. Rolling Stone sat down with Pelosi for an hour on a May evening in Des Moines, Iowa, where she was raising money for the local Democratic Party. At the fundraiser, standing before a wall-sized American flag, Pelosi sought to flatten the difference between President Trump and GOP candidates. “He’s their guy,” she says of Trump. “Make no mistake: This election, it’s not – well it’s about him in certain respects, we can’t ignore that – but it’s about them.”

Both the fundraiser and the interview took place before Trump began separating families at the border, which Pelosi describes as “an utter atrocity that debases America’s values.” This conversation informed the profile of Pelosi in the latest print edition of Rolling Stone. What follows is an edited transcript.

I want to dig in on 2018 and understand how you’re thinking about the election and how the angles break. When Hillary didn’t win, people said, “Can you win the House?” And I said, “I’ll tell you in a year.” Because it matters where the president is a year out. If he’s under 50 [percent approval rating], we can win it. Just to put in a little historical perspective. In ‘05 and ‘06, [former Democratic Senate leader] Harry Reid and I said, “We’re going to win the Congress.” People said, “No way. It’s going to be a permanent Republican majority.” Bush had just won. In January of ‘05, he was at 58 percent in the polls. The war in Iraq; people in the streets; he’s at 58 percent in the polls. We would have to bring his numbers down. And he gave us a gift: He was going to privatize Social Security. [That] helped take his numbers down, into like the 40s. What other difference did we want to emphasize? It was “Drain the swamp.” That was ours. [Trump] stole it from us. “End the culture of cronyism, incompetence and corruption.” That was our thing. They were getting indicted, subpoenaed all over the place. And then Hurricane Katrina: Cronyism and incompetence. Thirty-eight percent in September.

With Trump, he’s done the heavy lifting for you? We can’t take credit for taking his numbers down, but for taking advantage of the opportunity it presented. To keep [his numbers] down we had to make sure people understood what Republicans were trying to do with the Affordable Care Act, what they were doing in terms of inequality and the disparity of income. Anyway, he was at 38 to 40 percent a year before the [2018] election. So, they get the retirements. I think it’s 46 today. And we get the A-Team on the field. We would like to say we recruited [our candidates]. Trump recruited them for us. [Laughs.] We’re in a very good place now.

Trump dominates the media. Do Democrats risk getting drowned out? I don’t like the fact that everything is concentrated on porn stars and this or that. It’s hard to break in and say, “Wait a minute. He’s terrible, but his policies are worse. He is terrible, but who cares? His policy means something in your lives.” I think people should care that he’s terrible. But evangelicals, they seem to think it’s OK as long as they get a Supreme Court justice [to rule] on a woman’s right to choose and LGBTQ marriage equality.

What’s the Democratic message? We’ve had for a year, working with the Senate, our agenda: Better Deal. Better jobs. Better pay. Better future. It took eight months or so to put it together, to come to agreement. The members shaped this. It wasn’t something where I said, “This is what I think it should be. Now sell it.” It was: “What do you think it should be?” It’s very important that it spring from the members.

And when people say, “Well, it doesn’t inspire me”… It inspires me. Because it’s about the economy. No matter the other stuff we disagree on, the financial stability of America’s working families is the unifying force in our caucus. That’s why these people are Democrats, not Republicans.

What’s your thinking on impeachment? I think it’s a gift to the Republicans.

Expand on that. Because people really want to know how we will improve their lives. We don’t really know what Mueller has. We have a responsibility, if we have information, to act upon it. But we don’t know what Mueller has. Republicans in the House have completely blocked any investigations – to a stupid extent, in my view.

But when I was elected speaker, people wanted me to impeach Bush. In the streets [chanting]: “Impeach Bush!” I thought the war in Iraq was sinful. I was Adam Schiff [the ranking member on the Intelligence Committee] at that time, going into the war. So I knew everything that they had. And they didn’t have anything that said Iraq was developing nuclear weapons. They didn’t have weapons of mass destruction! It would be like me saying there’s 20 puppies on this table. It wasn’t there! Nobody could show it to you. It was a complete lie. But nonetheless he got re-elected.

Going into the [‘06] election, I said it’s off the table. I didn’t mean it’s off the table if you had some goods. If somebody has information, then we can act upon it. But from what we know now, it’s off the table.

Just to make sure I understand: You were saying that impeachment was “off the table” in relation to Bush? Or with Trump? Even with Trump. If you got something, show it. But I’m not going after it. What we’re going after is the economic security of America’s working families.

Liberal billionaire Tom Steyer is spending millions on a pro-impeachment campaign. Trump is out on the stump warning impeachment is the Democratic agenda. It’s going to be an issue in the campaign – This election cannot be about impeachment. I don’t think it’s in the interest of America’s working families to focus on that, unless we have more to go on, which we don’t at this time. You get the power of subpoena, you don’t know where it takes you. I wouldn’t not impeach the president for political reasons. But I wouldn’t impeach him for political reasons, either. That’s just not what it’s supposed to be about. I think it’s not unifying for the country.

So that’s my message to Steyer. He’s my friend, former neighbor – I just completely don’t agree. I wish he would spend the money pointing out the horror show that the tax bill is. [Read Steyer’s response to Pelosi here.]

So if the election is not about regime change here at home, what is your vision for checks and balances? Would a lot of the next two years be about boxing Trump in? It’s about who has the leverage. Like, we killed them on the Omnibus bill. You know why? Because we are united, and they are not. They need our votes; that gives us leverage. They wanted to put all this money into defense. And we said, “We have to have the same amount of money domestically – parity in the increase.” They just don’t believe in domestic investment. Even though the domestic agenda is one-third security. They didn’t want to do it. But then they had to [because House Republicans couldn’t agree on a budget that could also clear the Senate]. And when we got that money, we were able to do much more for opioids, the National Institutes of Health and all these other investments. So unhappy were the Republicans, 90 of them voted against the bill. Just to show how well we did.

If we have the majority, it’s a different negotiation with the president of the United States. He’ll know we’re in a different place.

He’ll know that he has to play ball? He’ll know that we have the leverage. The gavel. [Picks up a knife, bangs its base on the table.] The gavel makes all the difference in the world … I didn’t mean to pick up the knife. [Laughter.] The awesome power. The speaker has awesome power.

You had a bad experience with DACA. It started well enough – with headlines touting Trump’s negotiations with “Chuck and Nancy.” But it went sideways quickly. Did that experience color your faith in the president as an honest broker? We presented DACA… Chuck [Schumer] and I presented to him, saying, “We look forward to working with you. One value we hope we share is to protect the Dreamers.” [Pelosi puffs herself up, impersonating Trump] “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah. Protect the Dreamers.” And then we just have to work out the commensurate border security. We have a responsibility to protect our borders; what is commensurate for this number of people to be protected?

It goes to the speaker [Paul Ryan]. The speaker says, “I put together a task force on our side that’s going to say what we can live with – it’ll be ready in a week.” It’s a week. Then two weeks, three weeks, a month, two months, three months – nothing. The speaker says, “I couldn’t make anything come of it.” And the president, I said to him: “Are you in charge!?” I don’t know if the president ever was sincere about it. But if he were, we could have made it happen.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)

Realistically, what are Democrats going to be able to do with Trump as president? When we talk about leverage, it’s not just leverage within a bill. It’s leverage within the context of a legislative agenda: You want this? We want that.

A big infrastructure bill is something that we think we can achieve. Because it has so much popular appeal. And we’ve always done it in a bipartisan way. This partisanship on infrastructure only started when Obama was putting something forward. Of course, then they didn’t want anything he did. We can’t not do what we’ve asked the speaker to do now, to bring up a gun safety bill. Because it will save lives from day one. [A bill to protect the] Dreamers – it’s not asking them to go out on a limb. Nothing that we’ve been asking doesn’t have overwhelming public support. It’s just that they don’t believe in governance. They don’t believe in science, facts, data, evidence, truth. They don’t believe in any of that. If you don’t want to govern, it’s important not to know anything, so you don’t have to act upon it.

We’ve seen consecutive Republican speakers flame out, essentially, because they couldn’t deal with the insurgency on their right flank. What is your secret to keeping Democrats united? I’m really good at what I do. I’m a legislative virtuoso. I really love legislating. It takes knowledge, and experience, institutional memory. I was forged in the Intelligence Committee and especially the Appropriations Committee. I know how you can reach agreement.

Let’s turn to the elections – the mechanics. You have something like 104 districts that are more favorable than the Conor Lamb district Democrats won in Pennsylvania. That’s probably too big a playing field to be serious about funding races all across it. How do you narrow it down? Civilization as we know it today is at risk in this election. We have to win. We have to win. So you can’t spread your money too thinly, because you can run the risk…

If the election were today – no question we would win. But you have to be aware of the undercurrents. Because you don’t know what can come along – and what comes along eclipses what you’re doing.

People say, “Is it a wave? Is it a tsunami?” Well, it’s a lot of droplets that make up a wave or a tsunami. But they are all close – these races are all close. So it’s not like a presidential [election] where someone might get momentum and get a great big vote. I don’t want people to think that there’s a wave coming so that they don’t have to work very hard in every single district. Because you could have a wave that earns you 20 seats big and you miss 30 seats small [leaving the GOP in control of the House].

So, say we have 104 [competitive races], and say we want to go down to 70 [that the party contests fully]. It’s a motivation to you, if you are one of our candidates, to work your heart out. Because if you’re not doing so well, we’ve got others to draw on. You see? Everybody in the 70 has to really perform, or else they know we’ll go someplace else.

It’s not about them. As I say to people, “It’s not about you, deciding that you don’t like to work on Sunday.” It’s about the one in five children in America who live in poverty – one in five who go to sleep hungry at night; one in four in some states. That’s what it’s about. It’s about fairness, it’s about our country, it’s about our values.

And besides which, we don’t even have to win 70. I’d like to win half of that – 35. We only need 23. I’d take it today in a second, the 23. But we want more than that.

You’ve been weighing in on primaries in a way that’s gotten some people’s noses out of joint. [Pelosi shrugs.]

The concern is that party leaders are substituting their judgment for the will of the voters. How do you respond to that? The fact is we just want to win based on our values. We haven’t, frankly, weighed in that much. The chairman made a decision to weigh in in Texas, and people got all upset because the Bernie people got upset. In the beautiful tent that is the Democratic Party, we have a lot of people, and the districts that we have to win are pretty moderate-to-conservative districts. In a primary, which is a multi-candidate field, it is likely the most liberal candidate will win – who doesn’t have the faintest chance of winning the general election. Now everyone’s had a chance to show their stuff. Nobody did this from day one. I’d rather take the heat from somebody saying, “Oh, they thwarted the enthusiasm,” than take the heat of people saying, “Why didn’t you weigh in, and now you’ve lost.”

Republicans have made you a central campaign issue. What do you make of that? They come after me because I’m effective. I’ve made some very powerful, rich enemies. Whether anti-government people in terms of the Affordable Care Act, whether it’s Wall Street reform, going after them on climate, in terms of the fossil fuel industry. I’m pro-labor; they want to destroy labor. So they put up the money and go into these districts. I don’t think we should allow the Koch Brothers to choose the leaders of the Democratic Party. But that’s what they’re trying to do.

You don’t see any value in spending money to bring your own poll numbers up? I never have. People that I raise money from – other people – say, “Let me create a fund; you should be spending money on yourself.” And I say, “I’d rather spend the money on the candidates who win rather than getting into a tickle contest with a skunk over some of this stuff.” I just want to win the election.

Your critics say you’re too liberal– I’m LGBTQ, I support those issues. I’m proud to. But they use that – they go into these districts and they say, “Too liberal.”

San Francisco values– Which are the values of Saint Francis – “Make me a channel for thy peace.” You have a problem with that? I’m proud of all of that. I don’t think the [Democratic candidates] who say, “I’m not going to vote for Nancy” are disassociating themselves from the progressive agenda, or LGBTQ equality. They’re just responding to an ad in their district.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi in the 2018 San Francisco Pride Parade on June 24th, 2018.

And that’s OK with you? I just want them to win the election. But I do think that there are some districts where this isn’t as important as it was in Conor Lamb’s – that was a 20, 21 point Trump district.

Looking at the poll numbers, it looks like what those ads do is animate the Trumpiest of the Trump folks. But I think they said in Conor Lamb’s district it was down to single-digit, the people who cared. The first issue was Medicare was at 43 percent, and then it went down to the teens for campaign finance, which was a big issue in the district. And then to single digits for other things. The public knows what is important. And most people want to know what you have to offer. So I think it shows the bankruptcy – they really don’t have any ideas. Their tax bill is failing them because it’s a fraud to begin with – and people understand that it’s a scam. And we’ll keep that pressure on them.

But I don’t think for a second that we should allow Republicans to choose the leaders of the Democratic party because they put money in with their – what’s the word I want to use? Making a caricature of somebody. I mean discriminatory. They discriminate against LGBT. That’s just who they are. It’s a funny thing about them: They do not share our values. You might find one or two or something.

And then John Boehner leaves and joins the board of a marijuana firm. Transactional. Transactional.

Let’s look ahead to the speaker contest that would follow the election. What do you make of the Tim Ryans or Seth Moultons who’ve called for a new generation of leadership– Inconsequential. They don’t have a following in our caucus. None.

Is it frustrated ambition on their part? I don’t know. I think there are lots of people who have worked very hard, and are more in line for what will happen one of these times. But they’re not to be considered [among] who those people would be. I mean, there are people who work very hard to win the elections, who have been in legislative battles. People who paid their dues. Not to put anybody down. Anybody is consequential. But I have great support in my caucus. I’m not worried about that. And I’m certainly not worried about them.

Have you ever been tempted to step away? If Hillary had won and the Affordable Care Act was protected – I feel very proprietary about the Affordable Care Act. She’d be a woman in charge, the Affordable Care Act [would be] protected. I could have happily gone home. Nobody in California gets Potomac Fever, believe me. So it’s not about wanting to be there. It’s just a question of, “Who can fight this man who’s in the White House? Who really knows the territory?” None of us is indispensable, but some of us have more experience and confidence in how to get the job done.

And I can’t even think that they [her prospective male challengers] think it’s a good idea to say, “We have the first woman speaker, and now we’re going to say, ‘We’re not going to do that’” I mean, no. No.

Is there a margin you need to secure that gavel? You talked about wanting to win 35 seats.

No ,no. You only have to win [the leadership vote] in your caucus – and then you go to the floor [for the speakership vote]. People vote for the Democrat or they vote for the Republican. So I feel very comfortable about that. But I don’t feel like talking about it. My time is money, and mobilization and the rest. Part of it is messaging – and talking about me and what happens to me is the least important part of all of it.

I think some of it is a little bit on the sexist side – although I wouldn’t normally say that. Except it’s like, really? Has anyone asked whatshisname, the one who’s the head of Senate?

[Aide Jorge Aguilar who is sitting beside Pelosi] McConnell.

McConnell. I mean he’s got the lowest numbers of anybody in the world. Have you ever gone up to him and said, “How much longer do you think you’ll stay in this job?” Nobody ever went up to Harry Reid and said that. Nobody ever says that to anybody except a woman. But it’s a thing.

And you know what? You get the upside and the downside of it. The one thing I want women to know is that you don’t walk away from a fight. You don’t let them make your decisions for you. I don’t mean to sound arrogant. But I am confident. I am confident.

Read full story here

#Democrats

0 notes