And here it is, Black Friday, thought by some to be the busiest shopping day of the year (unless you have ever worked in retail, in which case you know that the busiest shopping day of the year is the Saturday before Christmas, unless that day is Christmas Eve, in which case it is the Saturday before that). And here it is, also, the day after Thanksgiving, a day filled with food and fun and family. It's like a one-two punch.
So if you have an eating disorder, Thanksgiving is a mine field dotted with triggers and good intentions. "Oh, look how good you look! You have lost so much weight!" (Yes, I have been starving myself. Thanks for noticing.) "Wow, you look so healthy!" (Yep, weight restoration worked, but now that you mentioned that, I think I will go back to restricting tomorrow.) "Why are you eating so little? Wow, you can sure pack it away! So now you're a vegetarian? Good for you!" Any comment can wake up the beast that we call ED. We might enter the dining room intent on enjoying our food and tasting everything we put in our mouths and stopping when we are full so that we don't have to hate ourselves later. But then the meal is over, and we aren't sure where the time went, and our plates are empty, and we are looking around to make sure we didn't eat everything, and that warm flush of shame makes its way up our chest and to our face, but it's easy to blame that on the wine.
And then, as a reward for getting through that day, you wake up the next day on Black Friday. Sales are EVERYWHERE. Maybe you will just LOOK. Check out the deals. There might be something that you "need." After all, Christmas is coming, and you have some gifts to buy. So you hit up one popular website, and there are deals galore. So you fill your shopping basket, mostly with things you don't really need. One of the things is a gift, but you have to spend $50 to get free shipping! So you fill the basket with a few more things to meet that goal...and just as you are about to hit "buy," you remember that you have made a promise not to shop. Cold turkey, remember? So you delete everything and close the web browser.
But then you think of something that you have been looking for, something that you could probably argue you need. And maybe the deal today will be worth making the purchase. There is a bit of wiggle room in the budget. The cable bill can be paid a couple of days late. So you make the purchase...a $200 item that will be here in two days. Amazon! Love it! Another great thing about Amazon...they have a "cancel" button. So nine minutes later, you are back on the website, cancelling that order because, although you do eventually need to make that purchase, it does not have to be today. And the deal is not really that great.
I wish I could say that all of my shopping endeavors went that well today. However, instead of spending $400 on stuff that I really didn't need to order today, I kept it to under $100, and I bought a couple of gifts, and I should still be able to pay my cable bill on time, so I guess that is a draw, even if it's not a win.
Anyway, that's a peek at the last two days of life as someone with an eating disorder and a compulsive spending disorder who is supposed to be avoiding all shopping (cold turkey!) and whose eating disorder has risen strong as a response to that plan. So the expectation is that I am working on changing my thoughts and behaviors and moving toward recovery. The reality is that I am back at home on my couch, hermit-ing the rest of the night away and wondering how I will make it through the rest of this festive season relatively intact. And wondering if this is something that I will talk about in therapy this week or if it might be time just to start "I'm fine"-ing everyone again.
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