No Such Thing As Dragons

So, you may or may not recall my post about dragons. They seem to be popping up all over the place to me now.

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Friday night, I took my DD trick or treating at the mall. What a great idea!!! While there, we stopped in the bookstore. I got her a couple really cute new books. She chose this one: There's NO Such Thing as a Dragon. It's actually an older book, published in 1975, I believe. I had to laugh to myself when I read the book. It's about a little boy who finds a tiny dragon in his bedroom one morning. He tells his mother about it and she insists "There's no such thing as a dragon" so the little boy ignores it. And the mother ignores it even though it's growing and growing. Eventually (see book cover photo), it becomes the size of the house. The little boy tells his mother emphatically that there IS a dragon and she finally sees it. And then the dragon shrinks back down to the size of a kitten. The mother says she can deal with a dragon that size and wonders why it had to get so big. The little boy says "I think it just wanted to be noticed."

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I think this book is awesome! My DD enjoyed the entertainment factor. But of course I saw the adult side of it....how something tiny can grow so enormous when you don't deal with it. How it can shrink back down into something manageable when you finally admit you see it. And, thinking about my childhood, also how the adults in the house could manage to maneuver their way around the "dragon" day in and day out, even though it filled the house in a palpable way, without ever acknowledging it was there. Not just ignoring it, but also convincing the child that they need to ignore the "dragon" as well; it's not *really* there. Yeah....it's all in their head.

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Saturday AM I went to counseling. I was feeling pretty calm since I'd made some good realizations this week about the snowball effect and needing to take time for myself. I'd also had a good appointment with my Dr, going over my labwork. And I'd called the eating disorder clinic, so I'm one step closer to that. T asked me how I felt about the whole prospect of weight loss. I said I kindof felt on auto-pilot about it. I'm not really wrapping my mind around that right now. I'm thinking more about just getting through what I need to get through as this year wraps up. I'm thinking more of the concrete tasks ahead first. And I'm not so much thinking "weight loss" as I'm thinking about a whole new way of life.

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It's SO amazing to me how the simplest question can bring about a whole new realization. T asked me when do I do my binging? What goes along with it? I said I do it at night after DD goes to bed and while I watch TV, catching up on my TiVo'd shows. I never thought about the two actions going together...TV & binging. I just thought of that as my time of night. So I've decided to shut off the TV before DD goes to bed and keep it off. I will then do the things that need to be done around the house with music. I'm going to call Cable and have them add TiVo to my bedroom TV. So after I'm done with chores, I can get in bed & watch my shows because I never bring food upstairs into my bedroom. What a simple change of routine that may really help me in breaking an aspect of my programmed cycle!

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So my weekend was fairly productive. I chose to stay home and attempt to reorganize my world. Presently, it's more of a mess than it was when I started.....but I'm making progress. I have a few big bags of garbage to take out. I have a huge moving box of stuff to bring to a childrens consignment shop and another several bags to bring to GoodWill. And then I have to finish a few more projects. All in all, I'm happy with how it went. I have a cold which sortof interfered with my energy level but it was a nice balance of doing a project & then snuggling with DD. We even took a nice nap together on Saturday afternoon.

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Interesting note that last night, I did sortof follow my "new routine" of no TV on while getting things ready at night. I went up to bed pretty early for me, around 10, and watched TV in bed. I even fell asleep fairly quickly. I awoke at 3:30am with a severe migraine, possibly the worst I've had to date. I was disoriented and just in excruciating pain. I made my way downstairs to find my medication and started vomiting from the pain. I lay in bed just writhing for the next 2 hours, sweating, chills, nausea, pain, pain, pain. It finally quieted down a bit and I managed to sleep from 5:30 til almost 7am when DD woke me up. I came into work late. But it got me thinking....for me, migraines are generally stress induced. I had a very low stress weekend. But I didn't follow my "routine" of binging.....did that stress my mind out to the point of a migraine?