Boundaries Without Borders

I like it: Boundaries Without Borders. I need to figure out what exactly I mean by it. Boundaries internal, borders external. Let me think on it.😎

I've been feeling so much better since I admitted my addiction to Twitter was THE problem for the moment and so applied the simple solution of quitting it. I even got my hair cut short to celebrate, to look how I feel - sprightly.💇

I have limited emoticons with Blogger and don't have the tech skills to add more, if that's even possible. If anyone reading can help with this I'd appreciate it but only if it's a simple fix. Otherwise we'll all just have to put up with it.💩

The medication I'm on continues to work well, although I'm also a Sober Sally, and paying particular attention to not over doing it in all other ways now too. I'm behaving more rationally, less reactionary.😇

Three examples:

1) I painted a room over several days instead of doing one coat one day, a second coat two days later.

2)  One day last week I realized I was tired and so had a nap.

3) Someone made a comment on a Facebook friend's post with which I disagreed and I just let it be.

That may not sound like a big deal to you but it is. We're engaging far too much with each other in online speakers' boxes designed by techno-fascists to drain us of our souls. Mea culpa. To each poorly articulated meritless opinion posted we line up like Pavlov's dogs to respond.🙀

The other day I spent some time studying the comments posted on a Facebook group from my hometown to do with unhoused citizens addicted and living with mental health disabilities vandalizing public and private property in search of money and goods to pawn.

Also looking for a place to poop.

You'd think the Sault was Hell on Earth and not a typical Canadian city stubbornly refusing to elect citizens who want to adequately fund other citizens willing and able to do the work required to repair the by now gaping holes in our social safety net responsible for this relatively recent and imminently solvable problem FOR OUR UNHOUSED CO-CITIZENS WHO OBVIOUSLY NEED OUR HELP.😢

Did people become fascists during the pandemic or are they just expressing fascist opinions online?😱

It's a low dose of fluoxetine I'm on, as I've mentioned before, Prozac of Prozac Nation fame.👼

Pause for Wikipedia rabbit hole about Elizabeth Wurtzel, widely criticized for her best-selling confessional memoir, Prozac Nation, at age 27, and who I did not know died of breast cancer at age 52 in 2020.😢

She apparently wrote two other confessional memoirs after Prozac Nation that were even more widely criticized, albeit with the odd critic describing them as good and/or honest, and one describing her third book as, "the best thing she ever wrote".😐

However, at least one critic stood out for me as more seriously disturbed than the others. Come on down Paul Kurth, a contributor to Salon, who ended a scathing review of "Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women", with: "Sorry, Elizabeth. Wake up dead next time and you might have a book on your hands."😲

Imagine. Of course my beautiful and brilliant friend, K, who died of (inherited) Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and who wrote a few book reviews herself, told me "a book review is really about the reviewer". So as I would say of Paul Kurth: "Line up forms to the right, ladies."👺

But that's not what this entry is about because this entry is about eating disorders, and whether they're really about food, weight, control, yadda yadda blah blah, while still trying to work out what I mean by "Boundaries Without Borders".

I've been thinking a lot about eating disorders, my own in particular, mostly during my teen years, after reading "Unmasking Autism" by Devin Price, and being referred to a therapist who specializes in eating disorders as a complement to my fluoxetine prescription (for anxiety and panic attacks if you're a first time reader).😟

By the way, my partner of some 20 years doesn't have a doctor, as so many Canadians don't, so please allow me to acknowledge my privilege to have inherited one.

It's absurd, failing each other like this, so penny-wise, pound foolish in the wealthiest most enlightened time in Canadian history.🙈🙉🙊

But back to the start of my eating disorder when I realized after a night running around Toronto at age 14, due to getting off the Greyhound from the Sault at York Mills? and not downtown, I had lost weight, which I continued to during a visit with my older sister as she introduced me to pot and inadequate calories (particularly for an athlete who ran 2.5 miles 6 nights a week and 5 miles on Saturdays).😨

There in spite of siblings go I.💪

Anyway, Kate Moss famously said, "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels", revealing herself to be more than a bit of an asshole, but also it's really not true. Gram's butter tarts tasted better than skinny felt, so my older sister turned me on to other tricks. And I employed them all, although not to a life or serious health threatening degree, and not without awareness of what I saw when I looked in the mirror.💃

I did generally eat enough healthy calories, although I lost my period for a few months, so I shouldn't downplay it, either. Still, I was dieting, not suffering from a mental health disorder.😉

Wow. Another breakthrough. I do hope my confessional memoiring is as good for you as it is for me. Perhaps Paul Kurth will take notice and grace me with a scathing review one day. Although probably not since I'm doing it for free, unlike Elizabeth Wurtzel who became a best-selling author at 27, no doubt enraging more than a few older male book reviewers.😇

Trust me, other writers are the worst.👹

Anyway, as I look back I can see how one immoderate behaviour led to another and so on and so forth and more of the same etc etc until I started having panic attacks last spring, i.e. a paralyzing sense of alienation accompanied by overwhelming nausea and the belief only purging would bring relief. But when even purging didn't do it, because, of course, it had nothing to do with food, I finally went to the doctor. Then I went again because I hadn't been assertive enough the first time with regard to how debilitating the panic attacks were and he prescribed medication to address the baseline anxiety behind the panic attacks.😰

So here I am, feeling better, thank you for asking.😷

Then I read "Unmasking Autism" by Devon Price, sent to me by my son, and started thinking more about neuro-diversity and transgenderism (Devon is trans) in the context of my eating disorder (also substance abuse/hamster wheel brain/obsessive compulsive tendencies/control freak issues/chronic indecisiveness/fill-in-the-blank).😜

If you're still reading, you get the picture.

Still, I don't identify as Autistic, or being on the spectrum, but my immoderate behaviour could be put down to being neurodiverse and trying to fit in with a neurotypical world.👾

The therapist who complements the medication (every Canadian could and should have access to the help I'm getting, so why are we letting governing politicians get away with pretending we can't afford it when we can?) suggested if the medication is working, the anxiety and panic attacks may be the result of a chemical imbalance.💣

This strikes me as likely. Certainly I no longer feel the need to "take the edge off" as they say, not because I'm numbed on prescription medication (I'm actually thinking more clearly) but because there's no edge to take off. I don't feel apart from our world, with an edge between me and it, I feel a part of it, with every right to be in it, just like everybody else - including my unhoused co-citizens addicted and living with mental health disabilities in Sault Ste. Marie, not to mention right here in good old educated public servant dominated Ottawa.💓

I guess what I may mean by "Boundaries Without Borders" is, boundaries are for me, I make them to protect my time and energy, we all do, but borders are set up against us and so should be transgressed. Which brings me back to Twitter and the Facebook page I mentioned hours ago now. These "places" have borders, but the borders can't be transgressed and the only boundary we can set to protect ourselves is to stay out of them. I've tried. The right thing to do was stop trying. And looking in from outside as I was the other day I just felt bad for the well-intentioned citizens having their souls drained engaging with citizens so addicted to anger they've become fascists.😟

So I don't have the answer but I do know we need one because online fascists got offline long enough to take over my downtown (Ottawa) in February 2022 with help from fascists in our political parties and police services and if my last look in at one of those techno-fascist designed speaker's boxes is any indication, the anger addiction fueling them has only gotten worse.💔