I am blessed. I have a great family, healthy children, a loving marriage, a career that I (mostly) love, and many good friends. But I still have things that I worry about, there are still things that are far from fine with me. Despite a 22 pound weight loss on my previously mentioned program (woo!), I am still obese and now that I am "graduated" from the program, I find the bad habits slipping back in and pounds creeping slowly back on. I eat when I am stressed. I am stressed a lot. Therefore (logic 101) I eat a lot. I wish I ate a lot of vegetables, or even a lot of fruit, but mostly I eat a lot of pasta. It must release some kind of serotonin, because it calms me like nothing else can (except wine, and I *really* don't want to go down that slippery slope, you know?)
I'm worried about our country's path, our future, my children's future. What the hell is going on with our politicians...all of them? Our government is so perverted from what our founding fathers originally envisioned. It is almost laughable, but worse, it is scary. I am scared to death about freedoms and rights that are being stolen from us right beneath our noses in the interest of some kind of unrealistic, Utopian "greater good." Many of my friends "get it," but there are also many that don't understand what I am saying or seeing, and it drives a wedge in these friendships.
I am worried about the future of my profession. I can see what is coming down the pike in the coming years. It is ugly and is going to get uglier, and I'm pretty sure that physicians had a hand in sealing the demise of our profession as we know it by being the types of people that physicians are...altruistic to a fault. While I'm doing what I can on a local level, I feel helpless to change the runaway freight train that is the bureaucracy surrounding what should be built on a case by case (patient to physician) basis.
So, I fret, and rage against the machine, and beat my head against the wall trying to get people to understand what they refuse to try to understand in both my personal and professional life, and I eat. I recognize that I am self-medicating...but what? Frustration? I'm not clinically depressed. I do have some anxiety and OCD tendencies, but nothing that has been interfering with my daily life. I am just using food as a crutch, instead of healthy sublimation like exercise, I am raising fork to mouth to push down my feelings, my fears. It isn't working for me. So today, after having pasta for breakfast after a particularly harrowing weekend call, I got off of my arse and went for a walk. The hardest step is the first step out the door. Right?
