“Dame” Kiri :'(
So, as I’ve alluded to in a previous post, quite a bit of my current angst is to do with this kitty pictured above in the highly inelegant pose. I’ve picked this picture because it makes me smile, albeit sadly, because this is how I’ll remember Kiri, not as she is now. Here was about five years ago. She was old even then, around 13, but still in good shape. As you can see from the picture, she loved her food (and, no, that’s not because of her owner – the other one eats normally, so maybe they’re all just different like humans are) and on a hot day, she would lie like this under an umbrella I had outside on the unshaded “patio” I had at this particular flat, cooling off that giant belly by exposing it to the world. Seeing that now, it’s hard to believe how different she is today. She has lost so much weight that I would say she is barely 2kg now, whereas there she was 5kg or more. She is raggedy and grubby looking and I don’t think she knows anymore that cats are actually meant to be clean creatures, because a few weeks ago she has just stopped washing herself and grooming herself. She has lost the sure-footedness that is the hallmark of the feline species. Way too many times lately I have seen her jump onto things and fall off, and every time I see it I wince because she is so thin that she could hurt herself and break something. I know she has dementia just like an old person because she wanders around a lot, seemingly without purpose. It’s like she gets up and goes to do something, and forgets what she was wanting to do, so she just stands there and if you can say an animal looks confused, she absolutely does. Sometimes she will utter this rather disturbing miaow as though she doesn’t know where she is or what’s happening. All of this has been really hard to see the last few months but I cannot deny that the deterioration has accelerated since late last year. So today I mustered up some courage and I finally took her to the vet to discuss the options. And to cut a long story short, it’s time. I know it. I knew it when I put her in the car and brought her there, crying the whole way, because she has always hated car trips, however short, but today she didn’t utter a sound except one tiny miaow. I doubt she even knew what was going on. 😥 The lady vet could not have been nicer or more understanding and she looked as though she wanted to cry too. She told me that she didn’t think Kiri is suffering per se, but also that there’s nothing that can be done that will help her teeth (which are awful), and that anything she could be given to help her arthritis would just send her kidneys into failure. It’s just time, before things get any worse and she really does start to be miserable and sick. So I’m going to make an appointment and do what has to be done because I love her and I don’t want to see her suffering. We can’t do that for human beings who are in terrible pain and don’t want to live through it anymore, but at least we can take the pain away for our beloved pets. That is the only thing that is keeping me going at the moment, the thought that it is the kindest thing to do and that keeping her around just because I’m going to miss her so much would be cruel.
I honestly cannot believe how much grief this has already caused me. I’m wondering if maybe not having her in my life is sort of like the end of an era. You see, she was my first ever pet that I got for myself. At the time I bought her as a tiny six week old kitten, I was living in Townsville up north. I was only a young thing of 30 and I was very happy up there. I had a job I liked, a good social life (probably the best I’ve ever had, on reflection). I was doing a lot of singing and hoped that in the next few years I could “do more with it”. I named her Kiri after Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, one of my favourite singers at the time. I was single but I was hopeful that that would change and my Mr Right was really just around the corner. It turned out that a nice man did come into my life three years later, and that was T. Kiri loved him too – in fact, I distinctly remember being a little peeved early in our relationship because once she moved in with us, she seemed to far prefer him to me! He went out of my life six years ago and she stayed. She has been THE mainstay of my life for 18 years, moving from place to place with me, always a fixture sitting out the back and then driving me nuts in winter by constantly trying to sit on my shoulder – she never was one for laps like a normal cat! I know next winter when she’s not here, I’m going to wish so hard that I had that “fur scarf” again.
I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I feel that in saying farewell to my poor old girl, I’m saying farewell to a lot of other things too. I do have a tendency to live and dwell in the past and I know that. I think this lesson has come along at this time to remind me that life goes on and we need to grow and change with it, not get stuck wishing things were like they were once upon a time long, long ago. That happy era of my life is long gone and so has the person I was then. My little tiny kitten is now a very old, frail animal who won’t be with me much longer. My heart is breaking. But I’ll be OK. I’ve got a lot of tears still to cry, but I’ll be OK.
Just give me a reason
Yes, three posts in the one day. I reckon this might be a record. I obviously had quite a bit of mental stuff stored up and this is the third on my list to be blogged out of my head. Boringly, though, it’s about my old “favourite” subject of weight loss. Sigh, here we go again.
Right now, I wish I had had some great experiences of being thin in my life. I think if I had those, I wouldn’t be where I am now. I think I would have wanted to head back to those and recapture some of the old thin me before I get too old to do it. My problem has never been that I can’t lose weight, because I can. In my 20s, one of my many thousands of diets (with an early version of Jenny Craig, by the way) got me to within 10kg of my current goal weight. So why didn’t I keep going and hit and surpass that mark once and for all? Why on earth do I keep half-doing this? Why am I so worried about a life where dysfunctional eating isn’t a huge feature, where my weight is just a physical expression of how much mass my body takes up and not something which tends to blot out almost everything else like a total eclipse of the sun? What the frack is it going to take?
I realise that is a very non-inspiring and negative paragraph, but it is an honest one nonetheless. I have always said this blog is not going to be like the other ones, where I’ve stopped blogging as soon as things go pear-shaped. If it’s happening in my life, it’s going to get written about, come hell or high water. But I just feel really out of step with society – well, I pretty much always feel that way, but more so than usual. Everybody seems to want to lose weight. Most people I know who do, their reasons are all about looking hot or looking better or wearing a bikini, etc, and it’s so hard to look to them for support because that just isn’t where I’m coming from. It might have motivated me a little once, but as I lose weight this time my body is not assuming quite the shape I remember and that is causing extra angst, because now I’ve started to think, well, if I put all this effort in and end up as a horrible misshapen blob without even the fat padding out the wrinkly bits to make them look slightly better, I’m not going to like that one bit – and yet I know that’s very likely what will happen, and all because I’ve been so stupid and slack and dragged the chain and went about this in a half-arsed manner when I was still young enough for things to bounce back. Am I angry at myself about that? Hell, yeah. Is it helping? Not one bit.
I started taking all of this seriously because of a health scare with my heart. That proved to be an excellent motivator and it’s spurred me on to get where I am today. I’m still quite a bit down on my heaviest weight and what I have done appears to be enough, for the time being, for my heart to settle down again, and for that I am thankful. But that doesn’t mean I want it to come back, or that I want to regain more and undo all of this hard slog. I really don’t.
So here I am, firmly stuck in limbo land with both feet in quicksand on either side of the fence, immobilised by my current lack of purpose. The title of the post says it all – I need a reason to do this, or I can’t do it. Maybe I need several reasons. And it turns out that running away from something only works to an extent. If you don’t know what you are running towards, or even what you’d like to be running towards, of course you’re not going to get anywhere. And I honestly don’t. know. I think I need some serious psychological help. And the expert that I see for my weight loss, he would rather that I take antidepressants so that I can get this done. I don’t agree. Unless I plan to take them forever, sooner or later I just HAVE to deal with this stuff, or I will never overcome it.
The other day I found out there is a book out there which I simply must read. The girl who wrote it is a lot younger than me, but when I read an article about the book a spark ignited inside me, because she has actually dared to write about a subject which no weight loss programme pusher would ever let see the light of day. And that is, what if you lose all the weight…and you are STILL not happy with yourself or your life? We’re programmed to think and believe that you WILL just be happy, because, well, why wouldn’t you be? You’re not fat anymore! You should be dancing in the streets for that reason alone! But to believe that’s true is a chronic oversimplification of the facts. Here is a link to an article about the book.
One of the things she said really resonates with me. ““It’s the most shocking thing. You pin your hopes and your dreams on ‘When I’m thin, I will… fill in the blank.’ You think everything will be better once you lose the weight. And it wasn’t.” And so did this: “Mitchell had never been a depressive person before — the food was a numbing agent against those feelings. Now, despite losing the weight, she was sadder than she had ever been before.” Wow. I’m pretty sad now. How sad might I be if I didn’t have food to numb what sadness I do feel? 😦 And I’ve been telling myself, “When I’m thin, I’ll_____” for the last 25 years or so. Yet, here I am, not thin. And I’m starting to think a normal weight is just not something I’ll ever be able to achieve because the idea and the process still overwhelms me.
Maybe I should only be aiming to lose 10kg, and then deciding, when I’ve done that, that I might like to try for another 10kg. Maybe I need a lobotomy. Maybe I need a new support system. Well, I know I do, because the one I had doesn’t exist anymore. Someone I thought was a good friend has temporarily lost her mind, it seems, and decided to run away from her home and family to some random person met through (of course) Facebook. Maybe we will end up friends again (although right now I doubt it, because there’s been breaches of trust and those are hard to overcome) and maybe we won’t, but I cannot rely on this person for weight loss support anymore. I told my friend about this yesterday and his opinion was, well, things happen for a reason. Maybe she wasn’t a good weight loss support for me because we’re currently both in a failing position, but as long as we are both there, we both tell each other it’s going to be fine. And when I think about it, he’s right. We’ve been doing that for the past four years. We’ve gone from both being successful, to me failing first, to her failing four years ago and also putting all the weight back on, and we’ve both been stuck ever since. In fact, the weight loss support system I used to have when I lost 45kg those few years back, I still am in touch with those people too. And I don’t know why. It’s yet another reason I am backing away from Facebook for a month. Maybe I need to sweep a new broom through all of this and just finally, once and for all find a different way of making this work. Because the things I’m currently doing aren’t working. Not a surprise when you realise they are the things I’ve been doing for years.
Well, I’ve just read through all of that and it’s one confusing post. I’ve just blurted it out to get it on paper, or at least out of my head. Right now I don’t have the answers I need, but I am going to read through this again later, and tomorrow, and I’m going to actually make a plan. I have five weeks of holidays starting on Wednesday 28th, and if I so choose this can be the healthiest holiday of my life, when I have the chance to put into place some great strategies, good exercise routines, food menus, etc. What a pity it would be if I didn’t use that time as well as I can, without the all-consuming spectre of working my strange hours looming over it all. So I’m determined not to waste the time. I just need to actually, for once in my life, make a plan and stick to it, so that I’ve got something, ANYTHING, to sew my days together into some kind of recognisable pattern with intention to it rather than just aimlessly floating along, all too easily thrown off course by the storms and rapids of bad days, stressful situations, sickness, etc.
Here’s to new ways of doing things.
Mens sana in corpore sano 
