All Hallow's Eve

Anorexia nervosa is a serious, occasionally chronic, and potentially life-threatening eating disorder defined by a refusal to maintain minimal body weight within 15 percent of an individual's normal weight. Other essential features of this disorder include an intense fear of gaining weight, a distorted body image, denial of the seriousness of the illness, and amenorrhea (absence of at least three consecutive menstrual cycles when they are otherwise expected to occur).

There are two subtypes of anorexia nervosa. In the restricting subtype, people maintain their low body weight purely by restricting their food intake and, possibly, by excessive exercise. Individuals with the binge eating/purging subtype also restrict their food intake, but also regularly engage in binge eating and/or purging behaviors such as self-induced vomiting or the misuse of laxatives, diuretics, or enemas. Many people move back and forth between subtypes during the course of their illness. Starvation, weight loss, and related medical complications are quite serious and can result in death. People who have an ongoing preoccupation with food and weight even when they are thin would benefit from exploring their thoughts and relationships with a therapist. The term anorexia literally means loss of appetite, but this is a misnomer. In fact, people with anorexia nervosa often ignore hunger signals and thus control their desire to eat. Often they may cook for others and be preoccupied with food and recipes, yet they will not eat themselves. Obsessive exercise that may accompany the starving behavior can cause others to assume falsely that the person must be healthy.*

Yeowza, I'm tired and I'm not even done with today yet.  Right now I'm hanging out in the basement with Phoenix whilst my parents hand out candy to trick-or-treaters.  In a little while I'm going to the local haunted house (and touted to me the best one in Colorado), Frightmare.  I haven't been to this one in a long time, so I'm excited to go.  I don't think I've ever gone ON Halloween night to a haunted house before, either, so that's cool too!

We had a soccer game at freaking 9am this morning and good heavens it was cold!  It didn't look that cold outside, and I locked my bedroom door before I left, only to remember that the key had broken off in the lock when I unlocked it on Friday after the movie, so I left in a t-shirt and soccer shorts, no sweatshirt or pants, to go hang out outside in like 40 degree weather.  My hands were numb most of the first half.  Anyway, the game was really fun, most of our regular players showed up today and we killed the other team.  One of the things I like about our team is that after we've scored around 4 goals or so, the guys sort of drop back and push all the girls up on offense so we have a chance to score.  I had a couple opportunities today, but Jen was the only girl to score.  We won at least 7-1.  They scored the last goal after Pancho (the league and field director) came out and played with the other team for the last 10 minutes of the second half.  It was a fun last game of the season!  I thought today about how I'd like to be in shape for the beginning of the spring season next year, so that's something I would like to strive for.  We'll see.  

After the game, I went and bought a couple pumpkins and then took Phoenix to the dog park.  Today was another disgustingly gorgeous day in October in Colorado.  I don't like winter, but I'm getting a little sick of seeing the sun every single day!  Which is really stupid to say.  Phoenix got attacked at the park, by a yellow lab.  The lab and a great dane came running up to us on the trail, and almost right after the initial sniff, the dog just went at Phoenix!  That is the first real fight Phoenix has been in since I got him.  I would like to think that he's just a pacifist and not submissive, but he almost always just lies right down when a dog becomes aggressive with him.  He's so much like me!  Although it's taken me a long, LONG time to be able to stand up and fight for myself; I used to just let people yell at me and insult me.  Hopefully he'll get a little more defensive as he gets older.  I told him I'd have to start knocking him around at home so he'd know how to fight back.

After the dog park, we carved pumpkins, and here they are: 

 This one is supposed to be Jack Skellington from the Nightmare Before Christmas.  It got a little messed up but it was way harder to do than I thought it would be!

 Here are the barfing pumpkin and it's brother, I did the top one and my dad did the bottom one.  I submitted it to 9News and they said they'd try to get it on the 10pm news tonight!

This is the one my mom did (freehand), and I added the witch hat.  I think it's perfect for the expression!

On a slightly more serious note, it has been made apparent to me that Former Bestie has been in contact with at least one of my friends to express her concern for some of the things I write about here.  She's not concerned with the writing, she's concerned about me.  My initial reaction is to be mad at Former Bestie.  I don't like that she won't come to me with her concerns, although I have to blame myself a bit because the last we spoke (via email, because that's how our relationship works), I told her I didn't really want her to be proud of me and the progress I'm making at the moment.  I think that I don't want her to feel anything for me right now because I'm so unbelievably hurt - stung is a good word to describe it - about how things are turning out between she and I.  It's as though I don't want her to be supportive of me if she can't do it AS my very best friend in the whole world, the person I depend on the most, the person who knows me better than anyone else.  That makes no sense.  In fact, it's very immature, to react that way.  But I can't help it.  In some aspects of my life, I'm entirely capable of being "the bigger person," keeping my mouth shut and walking away until I can come back and do things sensibly and logically.  However, I was so involved in her life, and she in mine, we were seemingly inextricably hooked to one another, and for one or both of us to walk away without so much as another word to each other, I want to react so as to elicit some kind of reaction out of her.  I even began to pick a fight with her via text today.  I don't know what I expected to happen, but I received no response.  I was thinking about it a little, and her usual excuse (at least since The Boy entered her life) is that she didn't have her phone with her, or her kid was playing with it and lost it, or basically she somehow just lost track of her phone altogether.  As sad as it is, I am pretty attached to my phone.  It is the lifeline to which I cling because I have so many different friendships with so many different people.  I'm getting random texts and phone calls from people all over the place at any given time, and I love it.  It makes me feel loved.  And I began to think - how sad for her that she is so absorbed in her life with her Boy and her kid, that she has no one else in her life with which she wishes to communicate on a regular basis.  And how sad for me that I wasn't important enough for her to keep track of her phone in case I needed her.

I have such a confusion of feelings over the ostensible end of this long and interesting friendship, and confusion is a good word to describe both the jumble of feelings and the trouble I'm having sorting through them.  A very tiny part of me feels relieved because if the friendship really is over, I don't have to worry about the decisions she makes and the effects those decisions will have on me, on her child, and her family.  I'm also so unbelievably angry about the causes and disagreements that were able to seemingly end a strong friendship, but I also feel like the things we have said to one another were a long time coming.  Mayhap I just required a trigger and her rapidly blossomed relationship with The Boy may have been it for me to finally voice things that have been in my head for awhile.  

Of all the different crap things that are going on in my life - the situation with my older sister and the inadvertent dragging of the entire family into said situation, the feelings I have for a certain guy in my life and the lack of reciprocation of those feelings, and the apparent end of my longest and closest relationship with my friend, I'm the most upset over the loss of the friendship.  While I'm angry (and angry is good because it means that I care enough about myself to be mad when someone hurts me instead of just lying down and taking it), I'm also extraordinarily sad.  It's almost as though someone has died.  It's not fair that someone I was so close to and so much dependent upon is suddenly not there, and I feel so very lost without her.  She and I have told one another that it's probably a good thing that we not be so dependent upon one another, but I feel like I have no one to depend on at all, for anything.  I'm mad because I feel like The Boy in her life has suddenly shoved me out of the coveted place I had as The Important One, and she can't see that I'm really hurt by it.  I agree that perhaps we should not depend on each other as much as we did, but now she's fully (and when I say fully, I mean fully - financially, emotionally, physically) dependent on him and I'm dependent on no one but myself.  How did that happen?  

People used to joke with us that it's like we were married, and we even joked with each other that we were (we said we were common-law married since we'd been so close for so long).  I felt like no matter what man passed in or out of my life, that I'd always have a best friend to sort of love me unconditionally.  I was never in love or infatuated with her (and I'm shocked that anyone would suggest that, but it has been suggested), but I did love her like she was a sister I wasn't born with but was meant to have.  And yet the fights I have with my actual sisters never end with the possibility that I'll never see or hear from them again, I know that we'll come back together by force because we are family.  I really truly thought that about she and I, but it looks as though that is not the case, and it's beyond disappointing.

That's a lot of in-depth analysis and detail for a post that started out so lighthearted.  I'm trying to fill the time I might have spent talking to her or joking with her or long-distance-TV-watching with her by doing other things, and I've said before that I'm really putting a lot of work into nurturing the other friendships I have, but nothing can replace the closeness we had without ever actually being close to each other.  I feel that sadness and loss 24 hours a day.

*Berkman ND, Bulik CM, Brownley KA, Lohr KN, Sedway JA, Rooks A, Gartlehner G. "NAMI | Anorexia Nervosa." NAMI: National Alliance on Mental Illness - Mental Health Support, Education and Advocacy. Web. 31 Oct. 2010. <http://www.nami.org/Template.cfm?Section=By_Illness&template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=102975>.