We haven’t had to move house for a long time. On purpose, because everyone knows how horrid moving house is. Well, we just did it again this month.
This move was horrid — still is actually as we’re trying to remodel the place we are moving in to as we move in to it. Long story. That, and saying goodbye to the lovely, fully remodeled house that has been our home for 8 years.
I can’t help but still notice how much easier, and less stressful things like this are when one is fully recovered. I remember a house move once before I was recovered, and it was stress on steroids. Partly because moving is stressful, but mostly because my stupid rules and rituals were all being pushed out of sync and I couldn’t mentally handle that, so I was trying to fit in jumping through all my silly eating disorder hoops and move house. It is incredible I managed it at all without having a nervous breakdown especially since I couldn’t just run to Wendy’s and grab food there at the end of a long day’s upheaval like I do now. (I might add, that I have eaten fast food or frozen pizza for every meal this past week and will probably continue to do so for a while – maybe the rest of the year – and I couldn’t give fewer fucks about it.)
So it went like this. I would get up around 3am and start packing and doing the things I needed to do super early so I could still go to the gym when it opened at 6am and spend all morning there and then come home and still do my hour long dog walk on top of that and still be back in time for when we were supposed to be loading trucks and moving stuff. And of course I would work out extra hard on those days just anticipating that someone might suggest we get fast food due to the lack of kitchen. Despite that, when some smart and normal person would do the normal thing for when one is moving house and suggest fast food, I would still say no and insist on eating something I had made and stored the day before — usually something I had saved in a tupperware and carried along with me. So everyone else would enjoy pizza or burgers and beer after a day of upheaval and I would be sitting there eating something cold and tasteless that had been sitting in my rucksack in the footwell of the car for a day. And of course no beer because beer has calories.
I love beer.
And then there is the first night in the new house, where I wouldn’t sleep because I was fretting about going for a run in the morning on new territory. What if I didn’t run the “normal” distance? What if I didn’t know what route was comparable to my usual one? Most people would be thinking about unpacking boxes and sorting the wi-fi, but I would lie awake worrying about getting my morning run in, and the fact that I didn’t yet have a gym membership.
I would also make it a million more times stressful buy insisting on trying to move all my hoarded frozen food with me. Half-pieces of bread, frozen mini-portions of my safe food. And that would add a rush on moving stuff out of my old freezer into the new one that most people really would not worry about. You know what I did will all the odds and ends in our freezer this time — I binned them. But before? No … I would have saved them and insisted that every last item was transported before it had time to defrost. Partly because I had that anorexia food hoarding thing going on, and partly because I had that anorexia money-saving-frugality-can’t-throw-anything-away-as-it-cost-money thing going on.
Some of these things, such as worrying over how to save the freezer odds and ends, are so insignificant seeming that they are hard to describe. But they all add another layer of complexity to already complicated situations that most people are oblivious to. It is like I had this additional level of things to work out and think about in my head related to food and movement plastered onto any given life situation. And because nobody else could see it, I didn’t have anyone to talk about it and help troubleshoot. That additional layer of stress was my guilty secret because I was always trying to convince the outside world that I didn’t have an eating disorder.
Then there is the mental availability and flexibility. I am able now to be available to actually be helpful to other people, such as my husband. Things like a sudden text “are you able to go in to the bank and them them X,” I can say yes to, whereas before you could guarantee I would have said I couldn’t because I was “busy doing something.” I was always busy doing something, usually movement or obsessively doing whatever it was on my rigid pre-planned daily schedule. I had no mental flexibility. I couldn’t fit helping others out into my busy day-to-day without it being a major stressor for me. Something like taking the time out to go and sit in the bank manager’s office would have caused me huge anxiety. Now, not the case. I can mentally be available and flexible, and I think that makes a whole lot of difference to my husband.
My new house is a construction site. All my possessions are in boxes and can’t get unpacked anyway until the construction is done, which will be months. But who cares? I’m happy and mostly I am happy because I am not hangry on top of everything else. And because my brain is not filled with worrying about food and exercise. I get up, I eat whatever is going, and the additional mental capacity I have due to not overthinking food means I am more present to make real decisions and handle what is actually happening. I can focus on the important stuff because my head isn’t filled with ED-OCD crap.
So while moving is still bollocks. It isn’t nearly half as bollocks as it is when I had an eating disorder.
Perfectly describes my house moving few weeks back. Its so (sadly) funny that I faced the exact same way of thinking and planing as you did…
I absolutely agree with this post. We moved about a year and half ago and all the totally psycho obsessing over saving every morsel of food and packing every last half bag of chips was top priority, it was more important than my family photo albums being safely and securely packed. It was a total nightmare and as exactly as you mentioned, anxiety and OCD on steroids! This memory keeps me motivated to run towards my fears. Thx for sharing Tabitha!
“Moving is … bollocks’: well said, Tabitha! Moving is — according to psychobabble, but I believe this one — 3rd on the “stress list” behind 1) Death and 2) Divorce.
Two years ago, my family moved house; I am a grown-up, 48-year-old, but I still live with my parents. The new house was an upgrade for us, as we were moving from 2 downtown condos (with limited square footage) in a fairly-large USA city to an actual house with a teeny bit of yard, in the same city. My parents are a bit pack-ratty, and they had two, stuffed-to-the-rafters storage units to empty out, plus two condos that were overflowing.
Most of the move seemed to fall on my shoulders, but looking back, I can see that it fell on my shoulders because my particular brand of OCD — related to the anorexia — wanted control of the organization. Thus, I was no way in hell going to allow “crap” into this new, pristine house. My particular brand of OCD/anorexia looked, superficially, like the opposite extreme of yours, Tabitha, in that I wanted to toss EVERYTHING away, not scavenge it, because I was afraid of spoiling the pristine shine and the roominess of the new house. Back in my history with my disease, I had gone through a money-saving/money-worrying phase, but at this stage of my life, my scarcity mindset was on space. So actually, the “toss everything” mentality came from the same scarcity mindset: it had just morphed into saving and utilizing every inch of space in a clean, functional manner. My parents and I had lived cramped together in 950 square feet for years, and when my sister and her family came to town, they’d explode into the other condo that we owned in the same building. I had meltdowns every time they came to town, because I could not stand the impending blast. (And as you know Tabitha, I still do kind of have meltdowns when they come into town, ha! Because, well, my sister, brother-in-law, and niece literally explode into every space they enter. They open their suitcases and it’s all Mary Poppins: a lamp comes out of nowhere, 500 pairs of shoes, a hula hoop, a guitar; you name it.)
My insistence on tossing this, tossing that, etc., led to some altercations with my parents, and for two or three months of preparing for the move and then enduring it, I lost a good deal of weight. Not surprising, eh? Another thing about stress and active anorexia: they are a perfect marriage. The more stressed I felt, the less I ate. The less I ate, therefore, the more tired physically I felt, so that the lifting, setting-up, unpacking, etc., all enhanced my stress.
Looking back now, I can see that if my mind had re-wired from anorexia and I had recovered physically, the move would not have been nearly as agonizing and stressful. It would have been a pain, and mind you, I probably still would have been the organizer, because my parents are … well, not good organizers. Ahem. However, I would have happily done frozen pizza each day with a “well done for today” slab of cake as a nightcap. Indeed, such a routine would have made the move a lot less daunting and perhaps more exciting, since we were, after all, getting more space!
I am still in the rewiring/rehabilitating phase of my recovery after starting work with you (well after the move I describe here). So, I still get a bit prickly when my sister arrives in her mushroom-cloud manner, but after some great strides in the eating-to-mental-hunger arena (e.g., loads of chocolate fudge cake), I have gotten a bit more relaxed with this kind of stuff. I may probably always be a wee bit more uptight than my family is when it comes to organization and cleanup. (And I promise, I am no perfectionist — but you just need to get a gander at my father’s office to understand the deal there — an “I love clutter!” trait that my sister inherited and happily married into.) So, I am personally equating loads of chocolate cake (and chocolate baked goods in general) with an easier time of it at home for me. Nothing is ever completely smooth-sailing, but it can be a whole lot better, if one just feels better, not to mention having a more relaxed mindset.
Finally, I want to thank you, Tabitha, for keeping up with your clients, as well as with your YouTube videos and blogs, even as the chaos unfurls around you. I feel your pain, but I am also so glad that you are taking it all in stride much better than ever. Your experience here is a great example of how complete recovery — all the nutritional rehabilitation and the “letting go” — can make some of the most stressful of life’s events that much easier, and perhaps even exciting, too, in the end…
I relate to every thing you said. You perfectly described how I have handled situations, trying to juggle all the eating disorder rigamarole whilst simultaneously attempting to appear normal in a situation. I was unexpectedly called in to work on Monday and it was so nice to not have to perform all my silly rituals before leaving. Also nice to not have to prepare safe food for my break. I do not look forward to moving but i do look forward to full recovery so the only stress I’ll feel from moving will be from moving and not from food and exercise.