I made so much noise this morning.

It’s no secret that I wake earlier than Jason. He has the amazing ability to stay up late, and I tend to experience a hard mental shutdown between 10 and midnight. Although I try. I try to stay up later as that’s when he plays games. I strive to pay attention as it provides a point of conversation. The games can also be fairly interesting, depending on the story and graphics.

But, back on point, I tend to cherish my mornings. I need the alone time and the solitude. It also helps that I can clean the house a bit and, lately, been riding the exercise bike. The little bit of extra exercise helps my mental health and, I believe, keeps my arthritic hip stretched out. I’ve become a bit obsessed about that.

It’s not that I fear physical pain – far from it. I’ve undergone and will continue to not feel quite right for the rest of my life. Although, I’m sure I would crumble like anyone else if stuck in an oubliette or placed on a rack. But, dull aches and sharp pains, to a degree, are endured and sometimes welcome – to a degree. Pain shows that something works and there could be something wrong. I know that there are things wrong with me.

If the pain wasn’t there, I would be worried.
I guess the ache is an annoying sister. I wouldn’t like talking to her but would worry if she disappeared.

Anyway, this morning, I wanted to clean the house a bit before getting on the bike. Specifically, I’ve been meaning to use the steamer on the floor. It’s a dark wood laminate. I sweep it at least once every day but it looks dirty to me. It has spots from soda and water. Smears appear from when I tried to clean it up with a paper napkin I stole from restaurant or a bit of toilet paper from a park. Cat stomach acid graces the floor from the occasional accident.

Well, I was over it and today I wanted to break the floor steamer to clean and disinfect. I guess I’m kind of big on keeping down the germs too, although the house is still partly wrecked from unpacked moving boxes.

This particular steamer is a Han. I’ve had it for a long time and like it. It works fine and the cleaning pads can be washed and reused. It’s just a little noisy. When the water heats up, it starts this ticking sound. I guess that’s the pump pushing water out of the reservoir and downward, so it’ll go out of the pad. More tricky is that there’s a metal bolt missing. The shaft of the steamer has two parts and was held together by this bolt that was lost to the ages years ago. So, when using, I have to be careful not to pull on the shaft to hard or it goes slamming into the bottom part. This makes a loud metal clanking.

Fortunately, I avoided that this morning. No clanking.

But, when I went to remove the pad, I picked it up by the top and the bottom dropped down.
Boom followed by a lot of cursing.

Jason didn’t wake. I was lucky. But, it was still embarrassing and felt like all of my efforts were undermined.

Anyway, here I am on the exercise bike trying to minimize my movement around the house. There’s little use to steaming the floor if I’m just going to track it up with my footprints. It should be almost dry at this point.

This week went by quicky.

Highlights:
— Jason had a job interview at a local accounting and payroll form.
While it only employees 25 people and doesn’t offer insurance, it would provide a paycheck and non-governmental experience he greatly needs to move on to bigger and better things. (Please call this week. Please. Please. Please. Take pity on his stained teeth and increasingly unruly curly hair. Give him a paycheck and a career.)

— I had a physical meeting with Dr. S.
Dr. S is the main psychologist – providing that is the proper term. She’s a highly paid professional who has the ability to dispense severe mind-altering drugs. I’m talking about things like Prozac, Abilify, Gabapentin, and others. I think her rate is somewhere around $150 an hour and I’ve been seeing her for years. Well, at least five years and inching closer to six. I visited her about a month before I was placed in the House.

I strive to be honest with her about how I’m doing. I feel like I got to be with someone, and, for some reason, I like her. It’s also really nice that the patient-client confidentiality is in full affect. While I don’t say anything different or new to her than I would to Jason or my mom, I find it helpful that she (hopefully) has a clinical take and I’m not concerned about nagging, judging, or coercion. That last one gets me, even if it isn’t implied. If I think someone is going to try to force me to do something, even if it is for ‘my own good’ or not even implied…. If I perceive it, I tend to react in the opposing fashion.

For the past two and a half years or so, our visits have been Zoom. Thank you, Covid.

After two years plus years of not seeing an anorexic and all of the changes that I’ve endured over the past couple of months, I think it’s understandable for her to request an actual meeting.

Jason and I made the trek to Seymour, and I had my ten-minute visit. I guess it was more like fifteen.

As expected, the first thing she did was take me into a small back room and weigh me. Seriously not surprised. But I was that I weighed nearly the same as from the cancer appointment a couple of months earlier. I was .25 less. Just a quarter of a pound and that could easily be explained by clothing, my pockets stuffed with napkins and Splenda packets, and the different weighing machine.

The rest of the visit was just chatty stuff that she took an alarming number of notes about. Dr. S pounded into her laptop continuously while trying not to break eye contact.

I guess she still didn’t like what she heard as I have another physical visit in the first couple of days of December. I suspect that it will start with a weigh-in. 1110000000000% sure it will.

That’s okay.
I don’t have anything to hide.

However, apprehension abounds.

If I weigh less, much less, I think that she’ll push for me to return to the House or any house for reprograming.
This is a very real fear that can have far reaching consequences.

– I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to work.
While my classes aren’t sufficient to pay nearly any bills, they are a small form of income – income that is needed.
– Jason would be alone for multiple months.
– I think I would run the risk of disappointing my mom and family.
– Health reasons. While a lower weight helps my back and hip, I’m sure it aggravates the osteoporosis and mild heart condition that developed from last time.
– I’m certain that I would have to take the Covid vaccine.

When I left the House, I was in a sorry mental state. Drugged on various herbs and mind-altering modifiers, I was exposed to views that I wouldn’t normally consider valid or even reasonable – primarily liberal and ultra-religious.

By the end of my term, I was happily accepting many of these and developing my own as I felt that it provided security, it was expected, and — again — I didn’t want to disappoint family or make them worry even more. These behavioral modifications were like a shield. It was a way of showing that I had changed, and they didn’t have cause to smother me.

I was a new and improved person although that wasn’t me.
That was someone else who just looked like me.

Of course, the secret fear is that I need to return to a House. There is something wrong with me and the only way to remedy is through a tightly controlled environment with all of the mental modification trappings. If I can’t sense it, I can’t change, and self-repair is out of reach.

Or, maybe, it’s just part of me. It’s a cancerous lesion that has formed on my psyche and soul that can’t be removed.
It just needs to be accepted as part of my being and I admit defeat that I can’t change.

But, I guess, that’s neither here nor there.
I’ll have to see what next month brings.