Love Not Lipo ... Live a Little, Love a Lot

So everyone including me wondered if I would turn into a Bridezilla in the context of planning a wedding on top of having a job, two businesses, and the blog, but the truth is, I  just didn’t.  I wish I could say this is because I’m not a control freak, because I am one, and I wish I could predict if I will remain this calm, but in general I feel relaxed and happy about my wedding plans, largely attributed to my pure intention of marrying my beloved:

The other reason I believe I am calm, is that I am blessed to have my mom be my best friend in helping me design my wedding, and bring to life my family centered, intimate wedding in my favorite place on earth, a what a bonus that it’s my mom’s favorite too!

The third reason I am calm, is that as anyone who follows Lovenotlipo knows, I am filled with peace in Vermont not achieved anyplace else.  The other day we drove there to the venue, to meet with the wedding coordinator and discuss next steps.

I imagine that the place looks just as it will when I get married there next fall.

I’m driving home from work, my cell phone rings, and her name flashes across my caller ID.  “Her” being one of my oldest friends, you know the one, together you’ve seen it all, and for the purposes of this blog, I’ll call her Michelle.  I pick up on the phone on her third attempt to reach me that day.  “The issue is, my battery’s been about to die all day,” are the first and only words out of my mouth, and she starts laughing.  

To put Michelle and me in context: Remember the scene is “When Harry Met Sally” when Sally’s best friend Marie tells Sally stories over and over about the married man she’s having the affair with? The redundant recaps of her escapades always concluded with “Sally, I don’t think he’s ever going to leave her!” and Sally says, “Marie, no one thinks he’s ever going to leave her.” and Marie says “You’re right.  I know you’re right.”  That’s me and Michelle.  We have laughed about, and essentially lived that scene in one way or another since the movie came out in 1989.   

So without getting into Michelle’s personal identifying information, let me just tell you, she’s not having an affair with a married man, but she’s had quite a rough year.  Hoping my blackberry battery would cut us a break I listened attentively, as she had put me on notice that she needed counsel.  “Analysis” I think was her word choice actually.  So we did our dance.  She told me what the scumbag (my word, not hers) was up to, and I reminded her why we should not care.  If I’m being honest,  I think historically of the two of us, I was typically the one saying “you don’t need this loser,” and although I told her my share of stories with loser-guy protagonists, she was far more disciplined at neutrality than I.  But our common bond was the “joy of the wallow.”  She reminded me tonight how special it is to have a friend who will listen to the wallow when everyone else wants you to be over it.  Do I want her to be over him?  Abso-f-ing-lutely.  However, this desire is trumped by my knowledge that the wallow is sacred.  People do not get over pain until they have had sufficient time to wallow.  In the therapy world, we call it “validating.”  If someone is not allowed to wallow, they are not being “validated.”  If they are not validated, they do not heal.  Instead, they try to find a million different ways to describe their pain to their friends untill they’re understood.  This is the scenario when the friends get burnt out. 

So in short, wallowing is an investment in your friendship.  Nurture the wallow, and the friendship will blossom.  I told Michelle my theory about the measure of a healthy romantic relationship.  You can go ahead and research this topic thoroughly.  Read “Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus,” take every cosmo quiz, ask your therapist, ask the Psychic Friends Network.  Or you could save yourself all the work and do this simple excercise:  Get in the car.  Turn on the radio and drive.  Picture your boyfriend or husband.  Ask yourself if you relate to the angst and insecurity in 90% of songs about love.  My Ipod’s filled with ‘em.  And I spent many melancholy days driving in my car or holed up with a glass of wine and a pack of Marlboro Lights relating to ’em.  But something happened a couple years ago when I met Todd.  I stopped relating to the songs.  They’re still good, I guess, but they don’t depress me and transport me to the optimum wallow session they once did.  Herein I made the determination I was in my first healthy relationship.  Try it!  It’s fascinating.  

I’m proud of Michelle.  She’s gonna be fine.  And I appreciate through our friendship that I stay connected to my roots.  I’ve never been happier in my love life, or more grateful.  But everyone needs a good wallow once in a while.

The rain fell steadily outside this Sunday afternoon while I sat staring at my blinking cursor thinking about her. My Love walked by and asked me “what are you writing about today honey?”

“I’m writing about my friend Camilla, from graduate school,” I said. “You don’t know her, and I haven’t seen her in years.”
“Oh!” he remarked, “what’s making you write about her?”
“I’m not sure,” I murmured. “She’s just been on my mind lately.”

At a juncture in my life where my professional goals require my doing an immense amount reflecting on the past, it is really no coincidence that I’ve had thoughts of Camilla. My past was fraught with envy and emptiness, and my present exists as it does, as a result of redefining envy, and figuring out what truly fills me.

The first time I actually spoke to Camilla was two weeks into my first year of graduate school. She approached me in the bathroom on September 12, 2001, the day after the terrorist attacks in New York. Our guest professor decided to process yesterday’s events in an open floor format in lieu of her planned lesson. Class had just wrapped up, and Camilla and I found ourselves standing next to each other at the sink, washing our hands. “I really liked what you were saying in there today, you really got me thinking about some things in a different way,” she said, shaking off her hands. What I said in class that day I don’t remember, but I do remember that up to that moment in the bathroom I was envious of Camilla, and frankly a little scared of her.

Camilla was a natural beauty. She was tall with thick dirty blond hair, green slanted eyes, and a light sprinkle of freckles across her golden skin. She carried her books around in a warm brown Coach tote, “toast,” I heard her call it one day, and she frequently moisturized her hands during class with orange scented lotion. She wore beautiful scarves. Although I didn’t truly know her, our tiny graduate program, by design, promoted self-disclosure, so I had a rough outline of her life. She grew up in a wealthy suburb outside Boston, was Ivy League educated, had a tight knit circle of girl friends from childhood and a summer house in Nantucket. Her dad was a doctor, and her boyfriend, whom she met freshman year in college, was named Alexander.

I don’t remember how exactly she and I first started socializing. Knowing my insecure mental state of affairs at that point in my life, my guess is it was thanks to Camilla. I don’t believe I would have made that first move. I have a number of prominent memories of our friendship over the last 10 years chronicling careers, kids, breakups, cross country moves (two of them) and recovery. One heart to heart talk of many occurred early on, in a subway car bouncing along the Green Line, one autumn afternoon. She explained to me how at one point in her life, her proclivity for Jennifer Aniston and Victoria’s secret catalogues planted a seed of self doubt that slowly began to negatively manifest in her eating habits and self image. She believed that her therapist nipped the potential for full blown pathology in the bud, with one simple statement. “You’ve got enough on your plate with your dysfunctional family Camilla. Do you really want to go there and add Anorexia to the mix? We can do it, but honestly, do we really want to??” Camilla claims her eating and body image issues resolved themselves from that point forward.

I learned a lot of personal things about Camilla on those subway rides back and forth to school, and while my baseline was perversely dubious about such things, I slowly began to accept that life had been far from perfect for Camilla, and her down to earth, seemingly stable place in the world was on the heels of many years of suffering and self exploration. Because Camilla is a person who was brave enough to show vulnerability when her veneer was so convincing that she really didn’t need to do so, I was able to be real for the first time in my life with someone who intimidated me. I let Camilla in to the dark, shadowy corners that were my life at that time. I told her about my eating disorders, I told her about my drug addicted boyfriend. I told her about my tortured entanglement with alcohol, and my early established belief that intoxication = warmth and intimacy. I told her that I had fears that I was a person who would end up alone, who would never have the gifts in life that she had. I did not go so far as to tell her that secretly, I didn’t think I deserved them.

There are moments in life when something happens. Someone says something that forever alters your trajectory. It’s one of those statements that make you catch your breath with its newness, and all of sudden becomes an intrinsic part of who you are from that point forward. Camilla and I walked in tandem, our feet pressing fresh fallen snow into boot-prints along the Boston sidewalks. Our chatty breaths melted the fluffy snowflakes floating down around us. She pointed her long delicate, perfectly manicured finger my way, her semi-new engagement ring glittering in the luminous winter twilight. “You know what I envy about you Claire? You are a person who never ever stops working on yourself,” she said. And I never have since.

Another 1.8 pounds gone! It’s a funny, exact number to happen two weeks in a row. Perhaps it’s because I eat basically the exact same thing every day! Such a creature of habit I am. This brings me up to 12 pounds lost since July 5th.

A couple weeks ago I had purchased a pair of jeans which just didn’t quite fit. Normally, I am philosophically completely opposed to such purchases due to the fact that generally you’re either sick of the item by the time you can fit into it, or you never do fit into it, and you just feel bad about yourself, and a little bit poorer. In this case, I had been searching for months for a new pair of very light blue cowgirl jeans. The crotch split in my old ones,and I sadly deposited them in the trash back in May.

When I finally found the near perfect pair, I broke into a light sweat in the dressing room wiggling around and sucking in my gut to squeeze into them. I reluctantly purchased them anyway, because they were the only one of their kind I’d been able to find anywhere, and I assessed that in general I was feeling pretty grounded about my weight and body image issues. I tucked them in a bag, with the receipt, on the floor of my closet. Yesterday I was digging through through my closet looking for my white skinny belt, and I saw the bag of jeans on the floor. I stood there for a moment deep in contemplation, then slowly pulled the jeans out of the bag and slid them on. The jeans fitting perfectly: pure pleasure. Forgetting the jeans were in the closet because I’m too busy growing up: priceless.