Bad times and chocolate coping

It's been tough recently.

A loved family member died this morning. He was diagnosed with cancer only about a month and a half ago, nobody had any clue before then, and we made plans for me to go visit him over Spring Break, and guess what, today was the last day of my quarter. My flight there is on Monday. His wife's birthday is tomorrow. It just all sucks.

Having to watch this happen over phones and internet during the last two weeks of my quarter when I had all kinds of papers and midterms and play performances was pretty rough. I've eaten quite a bit of brownies, candy, nondairy ice cream the past couple of days. I sort of know this is an excuse. I'm about 60% sure I wouldn't be responding to stress/grief by eating if it weren't a total trope that I've read about so much over the course of my weight loss journey. But I don't care that much. Probably, when this Lent thing ends, I will go straight back to smoking pot and do that instead of eating. That's not a great coping strategy either and kind of kills the point of abstaining for a bit - kind of, not entirely - but I don't really care about that either. It's all about not caring. About dropping all the put-togetherness and saying fuck it, I'm just going to throw myself into something I feel like doing, something that's supposed to be comforting, because even if it's not, it's at least distracting, and it feels like... like a certain kind of power to allow myself not to worry about, not to constrain and control myself. Because shit fucking sucks and one way to reduce the stress is to not hold myself to high standards about stuff that isn't that important in the short term.

I talked to one of my classmates yesterday about it and she said that last semester she had someone important die too. I made a joke about chocolate and she said yeah, she gained about 2 pounds in brownies when that happened. That really brought me down to earth about the food thing. 2 pounds, so what if I gain 2 pounds? I've lost 50. It's not as though a week or two of throwing caution to the winds is going to ruin my whole project. It's not as if I won't be coping with this through exercise, too. It's not as if I can eat 500 calories in excess several days in a row without feeling yucky. Even if I'm logging quite a few positive calorie balances these days, it's not going to have a huge impact immediately.

So there's that. Oh, and I won't be counting calories next week because I'll be away and because fuck that and because it's another "test" although based on what I said above who cares if I "fail" it. Meh.