Present Imperfect

I loathe text messaging, think I am a better person when I spend less time on social media, love ink-on-paper letters, and bemoan that few people get dressed up to go places such as the theatre or the ballet. I often joke that I was born in the wrong century. Is that why I find it so unbelievably tough to be in the present?

I am awash in regrets and resentments (living in the past) – and I am the world's biggest daydreamer (living in the future). And if I am not plotting a binge or bingeing to escape the present, my mind, I realized, is very busy doing anything but being here and now. I am making to-do lists, or I am coming up with elaborate plans to reinvent myself: how I will get the binge weight off, how I will do the 100 pushups plan, how I will read more novels, how I will write fiction every morning, how I won't ever binge again. I think about how much weight I could lose or what I will wear or what someone will think when he sees me. I am so busy thinking about what I might or could or should become that I very rarely just am. It is me worrying about getting a picture of the moment for posterity – recording that I. Wuz. Here, as we used to write on the cubbies in summer camp -- instead of just being in it.

What does this have to do with bingeing, you ask? Bingeing is an escape from the present – usually when I feel trapped. But if the rest of these things also are an escape, does that mean I feel trapped in my own life? I guess I feel trapped in this cycle that there is not enough and I am not enough – this constant need to either fix myself or find someone (preferably a boyfriend) to do it for me. And when those don't work, as of course they don't, I eat.

***

Today was another tough day.

I woke up at 6 am, resentful (that word again!) that I might end up eating breakfast early. It's hot and I'm too fat again and I am waiting for all these things and Sundays are tough at the best of times and now I'm also going to have to deal with being hungry all day, I wanted to whine. (Oh, and yet again I get to feel that I have left London at the wrong time. Yes, I know Murray lost, but I cannot help feeling sad about all the British events I've missed in the past year, like an inside joke I can't get in on after the fact.)

I decided to try to hold off breakfast until 7, and so read my book – and fell asleep at 6.45 until about 8. Still I was full of pettiness all morning: I snapped at the guy at the gym who wanted photo ID to confirm I was on the guest list (problems with my membership that can't be resolved until tomorrow; who would pretend to be someone else to get into a gym, for heaven's sake?). At a meeting later in the morning, I deliberately avoided eye contact with a new-ish not-sure-she's-a-friend who was back in town from her graduate school program – I'd been feeling resentful about a few weird, rude, possibly selfish and definitely un-friend-like things she did just before she left, and that she hadn't answered any of my e-mails or texts. But she texted me during the meeting, and – I cringe admitting this -- like something out of junior high, I debated whether to leave off the exclamation point on my "welcome back" (I ended up including it).

There were other disappointments, small and, well, slightly larger. There was anger and sadness and frustration. But somehow today passed. I had lunch with friends, I read my book, but not much of the Sunday paper (or any of the three Nancy Drew mysteries I couldn't resist on a sale table I walked by). I cleaned some malware off my computer, something I've needed to do for ages. I saw a crummy movie and had dinner with the not-sure-she's-a-friend, who I'm now fairly sure is not.

And now it's nearly midnight, and I have not binged. That's day four.