I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
A couple weeks ago, I decided to go see my doctor about my weight gain and my increased drinking. These things happened during the seven months after I started seeing Ray. Before that, I was drinking infrequently. My mother and daughter had been living with me, and neither of them drank. I wasn’t seeing anyone for two years.
Ray and I got into the habit of having dinners together each week, complete with a bottle of wine that we would split. It was lovely, at the same time as it damaged my psyche and my health.
I was uncomfortably fat and I had all but stopped sleeping. I couldn’t keep living that way.
For me, men and drinking have always been intertwined even going back to my first romance. Somehow, being intoxicated with both alcohol and infatuation increased the enjoyment of that intoxication tenfold or more.
It wouldn’t be wrong to say I lost my marriage as much to drinking as to my infidelity. Both the drinking and the infatuation made me feel alive again and took away the tedium of my days as a working mother of three children, married to someone who was managing an incredibly stressful career change.
I was also perimenopausal, which, I think, was a major factor in my unraveling and that of my marriage.
It’s not easy to write about these things. It’s a little bit reckless to share so much about myself. I’ve always been willing to share about myself online though, and no reason to stop now, I guess. Perhaps I ought to write a Things Men Gave Me essay about the affair? At least one friend has asked why I haven’t yet.
Why? Because I feel ashamed of myself.
The physician’s assistant I saw at Kaiser wanted to record our appointment with AI. I asked her not to and she replied with an irritated voice, “Why not? I’m just going to type everything into your chart anyway.”
I agreed to let her use the AI; what does it matter what’s in my chart? (Well, it could matter, but I wasn’t there to fight with her. I was there to get a prescription).
I told her I was looking to curb my overeating and overdrinking and to get back to my usual adult weight. I didn’t actually qualify as overweight by Kaiser’s criteria, but I was close enough for her to prescribe me something.
I’m not sure people know that GLP-1s are not the only weight loss and cut-your-drinking drugs available. She told me Kaiser usually uses phentermine as a start for someone who’s only overweight not obese. It increases various neurotransmitters in the brain, and suppresses appetite. They also sometimes use Topamax (topiramate), an anti-seizure drug. That drug increases GABA in the brain which provides a calming effect.
I had been on Topamax before, for migraines. I did lose about ten pounds on it, but it also gave me terrible cognitive side effects. For example, I stopped being able to easily back out of my long driveway. And on a bowling expedition I was unable to throw even a single ball down the lane rather than the gutter.
I asked, instead, about Contrave, a brand-name drug that combines bupropion (brand name Wellbutrin) with naltrexone. One of my sisters had been using Wellbutrin to good effect, and I am aware that sometimes picking something that a close relative has found useful works well. I had used naltrexone back in 2018 to curb my drinking via the Sinclair Method.
When the PA heard I had used naltrexone that way in the past she asked, “how long have you been abusing alcohol?” which was exactly the kind of phrasing I didn’t really want in my chart.
No one talks about “abusing food.”
The introduction of GLP-1 drugs has shown that overeating and other overindulgences like overdrinking are often a matter of individual biochemistry and personal history, not a relative lack of will. But somehow moral judgment creeps in anyway. “Abusing” is not a neutral word to use.
She prescribed poor woman’s Contrave for me — one prescription for bupropion XL and one for naltrexone.
I’ve been on generic Wellbutrin for two weeks now. It created a radical shift in my body chemistry, and in my mental state as well as my behavior. I suffered bad headaches at first but they went away within three days. I’ve used the naltrexone only infrequently, sometimes before having a glass of wine, Sinclair Method style.
Immediately, my tolerance for and interest in caffeine went down. I went from a pot of coffee a day to half a pot. I was able to get back to an intermittent fasting routine, eating only two meals a day and no snacks. Wine tastes terrible to me now, and even one glass makes me incredibly hungover, so much so that I have zero interest in imbibing.
I’ve lost ten pounds. I’ve all but quit drinking. I’m now sleeping through the night again after months of not being able to (alcohol screws with your ability to sleep).
But this change to my neurotransmitters has had some unwanted effects. I no longer have much interest in food or drink. And I don’t have much interest in spending time with Ray either, especially as food and drink were one of the main things bringing us together. I didn’t want to go skiing this week with him — but that probably had as much to do with the poor snow conditions as my new medication regime. I would have gone but for the icy patches.
Meanwhile I’ve developed a compulsion around checking Twitter and Marketwatch and my Schwab account. Because large, infrequent, social hits of dopamine are no longer available to me, I’ve turned to instantaneous infinitesimal hits throughout the day.
I also haven’t been able to get back to painting in any way that produces paintings I’m happy with.
I consider this just part of the adaptation to the medication. I don’t think that long-term I’m going to want to do without companionship and painting. Certainly long term I’m not going to wile away my days refreshing X. It’s okay for now as I’m adjusting though. I’m very productive besides that — writing every day, showing up in my painting studio (without much to show for it, but at least I’m there), getting my house cleaner than it’s been since I had professional housecleaners.
In Tarot readings recently, I’ve been drawing the Queen of Pentacles repeatedly. The Suit of Pentacles represents the element of Earth — material manifestation, physical security, finances, work, and stability. It is the suit of The Real that I have lately been turning towards.
In Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, Tarot interpreter Rachel Pollack writes of the Pentacles:
Our culture has a long history of despising the physical world. We see Adam’s creation out of clay as a humiliation – ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’. We insult people by ‘treating them like dirt’. Emotions and abstract thoughts are seen as ‘higher’ than anything which actually exists. And yet, just as a painting is the end result of an atrist’s conception, so we can see the mortal world as the product of God’s creative force. For us, creation means the world of our senses. However far we may travel in spiritual meditations we must begin and return here – or lose ourselves in the process.
The Queen of Pentacles sits in the outdoors with mountains in the distance. She is surrounded by roses on the vine, and there is lush greenery at her feet. She looks lovingly at her Pentacle, “intensely aware of the magic in nature and the strength she derives from it,” writes Pollack. She is intensely aware of The Real, and she taps into the power of it as it flows through her life:
If the King stands beside the Fool then the Queen belongs with the Magician. Like him she wears a red robe over a white shirt; leaves and flowers frame both of them; a yellow sky shines behind each. Where the Magician manipulates the forces hidden in the world, the Queen of Pentacles joins herself to those forces, allowing them to flow through her into daily life.
I’m not ready to give up The Real that is Ray, that is painting, that is skiing. With him and with those activities, I experience being embodied rather than just being a brain in a vat that’s always thinking and thinking and thinking more.
I know that it takes weeks to adapt to a medication like Wellbutrin. And the reality is that all it’s done is get me back to habits I had before I met Ray. I don’t actually need Wellbutrin to live like that. But it sure makes it a lot easier!
What I do need is a way to synthesize my embodied experience of Ray with the healthy habits I had before I met him. I think that will come in time.
For now, I’m thrilled to be sleeping through the night.