Originally posted on Facebook HERE
Sometimes I wonder if I’m mentally bulimic. Like, my life just revolves around binging and purging. I guess that’s what OCD boils down to – getting obsessed with something, focusing a lot of time and effort on it, until you either attain the object of your desires or find a new obsession. Or, in some cases binge for a while on something (right now, popcorn is on my mind because we just went through a whole huge batch of it), then hate yourself for doing it (all that salt, and subsequent weight gain), then “purge” – for me, that means running daily, watching what I eat and getting my weight down to pre-popcorn levels and below. Once I do that, well… a few weeks from now popcorn will sound good again and we’ll repeat the cycle. We’re also in the middle of “binge-watching” a TV show right now as well (Weeds). We’re in season 5. We’ve binge watched many shows over the last few years, it’s easy to do now with all the streaming options. But at some point we’ve probably all hit that point where you’re maybe watching one episode too many, getting to bed late, waking up tired, wondering why you’re spending so much time on such a worthless activity, and/or the show starts to deteriorate (ala “Walking Dead” once Negan entered the show), but you watch anyway, wondering “why am I watching this again? What happened to this show?”… It’s not too uncommon to cut back TV once a binge watch is over just to get some semblance of reality back. Work/home balance is another one for me, as work can really eat up a lot – really the majority – of my time if I’m not careful. I tend to work like a maniac, then totally walk away from it during vacations, swear I’ll cut back on the workload when I get back – cut back for a while, but a couple months later the workload is right back where it was. Binge & purge. It’s what I do. I’m not sure if I really have an answer here, but in my journaling this morning, I wrapped it up with this: “I need to find love in every moment – it’s all about love. I find love by being one with God, and that means looking within. Stuff isn’t the answer.” I think sometimes the cycle of binging and purging can be fueled by looking for peace where peace will never be found – outside ourselves. “Gear Acquisition Syndrome” (GAS) is a common phrase among musicians. We probably all suffer some form of it (wanting a certain piece of gear, and getting maybe a bit obsessed with it). The peace for musicians lies in making music, not in the tool that gets you there. Maybe all of life is like that. The peace in life lies in finding love within every moment, and the better we get at doing that, the more our emotions will flow evenly and the less we’ll see of the effects of binging and purging within the time we’re given.
