Baby Steps

“My anxiety acts like aerobics, so I get the exercise.”

I was watching Woody Allen in Scoop and he explains his ability to metabolize the bread in front of him in one scene where Scarlet Johansson’s character explains that she’d gain twenty pounds if she ate that much bread.

I felt anxious. I opened the packet of nicotine patches and looked at them. I sat down, and I looked at them. Kept on looking at them. It was the huge step for me. Stupid really. I thought of weekends out with the girls. I thought of the mornings at the café. Childish, considering all the television campaigns and graphic images of the hazards: life or death, mainly death.

I ripped open the packet, read the instructions and stuck the patch on my arm.

A baby step.

I just hope I don't develop a new addition, along the lines to a Tori Amos song, "She's addicted to Nicotine patches."

Things: A Sorta Meltdown

I’m beginning this page as a form of therapy? Silly I suppose. I have read that it helps to write down each experience, feeling and moment as it happens, especially if a personal crisis looms and change is a necessity.

Standard crisis:

Single, thirties and single.

I had a moment of temporary bliss, the kind of bliss that attaches itself to a new person or the chance of that person being a possible anything (I’ve never liked to assume things) but damn, it could have been. Bits in the new person’s life differed from mine. We had met twice before the third time, and the third time he remarked on the cigarette smell. It was as if this markedly changed his stance.

Midweek, I received news of my non-promotion, something I’d hoped would happen after putting in hours, expanded my knowledge and a younger candidate was moved – higher. She is 22, and the opposite of me. I feel 38, at 28, or felt like a bovine member of the frumpy herd. Not to say that 38 is frump city. She struts, tosses her glossy straight hair and is ecstatic about her promotion. I have three years more experience.

I could shift or evaporate the few extra pounds.

I could update my wardrobe a little, and the elimination of the pounds would mean an altogether different wardrobe; shorter skirts and tighter or fitted tops.

The moment of collision where change howls into your ear is probably up there with the most important life moments. It’s a bell that requests attention and I didn’t want to listen to it. I didn’t but I felt like I couldn’t mute the sound of thought that took hold. It was like rushing into shattered moments.

“It’s a shame, for such a pretty face.”

I decided to make changes. Changes to habits, physique and (what I hope, as a result of the former) my overall self.

I don’t want to be something that I’m not, an unrealistic figurine, but I do have things that I need to change:

Quit smoking.

Exercise more.

Find the me beneath the superfluous lead-like layers that I have made over the years.