armor

I have certain pieces of clothing that I've come to imagine as a sort of psychic or emotional armor.

I wore one of them today. It's a dressy faux-suede vest, with a faux-shearling lining. It's long and straight and closes with clasps.

I've been feeling a little shaky and fragile these past few days - I think it's partly midwinter doldrums, partly tiredness, partly maybe something else I don't know. And today I had a meeting that I knew was going to be kind of acrimonious.

(It was. It ended a little while ago. The outcome was that we need more meetings. Ugh.)

All this morning, in my vest, I walked around thinking, "This is my armor. I will not let my feelings get hurt when I wear this. This is my armor; it will protect me."

It did, sort of. I also told myself, during the meeting, "Just keep your mouth shut. Nothing you try to contribute will help. Just observe, don't opine."

I did wind up opining, a little bit, because I can't help it. I made a suggestion. I thought it was a possible solution to the impasse we kept hitting. Several people disliked the suggestion very strongly and talked about why it won't work, and why what they originally planned to do has to be done exactly the way they want to do it.

I might have just as well not offered my suggestion.

So anyway. I'm still tired, still feeling - I don't know, a little shaky and fragile. Like I'd like to go home and heat up my buckwheat pillow in the microwave and crawl into bed curled up around it. (It's also been really cold here; unusually cold for this part of the world. And my building is an old leaky building with unpredictable heat so there are some days I just get cold at work and don't get warm again until I've been home for a good long while. And I do think being cold - being kind of consistently chilled - affects a person's well being).

And the diet-thing-that-I'm-not-calling-a-diet is starting to piss me off. Food showed up at the meeting but it was (a) richer food than I've been eating and (b) I had already eaten my plain yogurt* and rice cakes and oranges and tiny handful of mixed nuts for lunch.

So I had to be That Woman - the one I've complained about in the past - who demurred eating the Tasty Food the meeting-moderator had procured because "I already ate lunch" "But just eat a second lunch." "No, I can't. My metabolism is so slow as it is that I can barely eat one lunch." Yes, that was the actual exchange. And yeah, it was TMI on my part, I should have just said, "I'm not hungry," but I was kind of overwrought already thinking what the meeting was going to be about.

(*And plain yogurt? You are On Notice. What is up with that yellow whey crap you make? I drained you off first thing this morning and proceeded to dish up the solidified part of the yogurt into my sad little plastic tub for lunch. And by 11:30, you had separated into sort of dry-ish yogurt and more of the damned whey. I do not want the whey - it is disgusting. Please, in the future, avoid whey-making, especially when you are sitting in my lunch)

And I'm so Foo King sick of spinach salad. I've eaten enough salad these past few weeks that I can almost photosynthesize on my own.

And it has apparently been for naught - no clear loss, no looser fit to the clothes, no comments from anyone that I'm looking thinner. Yes, I know, it's been less than a month BUT it seems like on all the damn talk shows there's some fat person who comes on and Dr. Phil or whoever lays out all that they eat in a day on the table, and then tells them, "You could lose weight if you cut out one of these Big Macs and a couple cokes per day." And the person does that, and a couple months later they're back on the show, 50+ pounds lighter, through the power of Dr. Phil's shiny shiny forehead, and of cutting out one damn Big Mac a day.

And I've cut my diet to the stinking BONE, to the point where I'm barely even eating meat any more in favor of "lean sources of protein" (which, yeah, includes skinless boneless chicken breasts that have been either broiled or poached, but I don't really consider that a MEAT. It's not fun to eat like real meat - real steak or real ribs - is). And I see nothing.

And I've even substituted weak, sugarless black tea for dessert, for having an extra piece of bread when I'm still hungry, for some kind of solace when I come home tired and sad and just need SOMETHING.

So yeah. The emotional armor of a warm vest, she may help with me not wanting to run screaming out of a meeting where people are disagreeing with each other, but not so much when it comes to seeing everyone eating tasty food and me stuck with watery yogurt and listless broiled chicken and crap like that.

I'm almost ready to say "forget this mess" (except using less polite words) and just go back to eating what I damn well please, and just count on (with the annual poundage creep-up) being 300 pounds by the time I'm 70, if I make it that far.