Reasons To Be Disappearing...

Point 1 - Eating a substantial quantity of frozen yoghurt after 10pm is quite literally a "bloody stupid" thing to do. Blood this morning - 7.9!

7.9 used to be just fine and dandy for a British diabetic. Then there was a re-think, probably largely based on the increased ability of people to sue for medical malpractice, and now 7.9 is on the outs, and you'll probably die with your bits dropping off or something if you maintain a blood sugar of 7.9, and it'll be all your own fault, so nehh!

So - notsomuch with the yoghurt after 10 at night.

Had a text from Tig last night:
"Can you tell me your reasons for doing the Disappearing on your own, rather than through a group or somesuch?"

Thought about it. Came up with this:
1. Firstly, embarrassment. When you're as big as I was, you can easily get self-conscious about walking into a room, let alone walking into a room full of people with whom the only thing you have in common is that you're all, on some level, fat fucks.
2. Secondly, it's important not to underestimate the degree to which I do not play well with others. I'm really not a people person. You - even though by now I think I know most of my regular readers, because probably only my friends would bother tuning into this stuff  - are different from that crowd of people. You're anonymous, and possibly non-existent, so it's freeing to use you instead of a crowd of real people.
3. The Curse of Internal Monologue. It's important of course to understand that people in groups are probably very nice, supportive people. But my internal monologue wouldn't let them be that. My internal monologue would convert the thoughts inside their nice heads into something between contempt and pity, both of which I'd despise being that target of (even though I probably wouldn't have been). What's more, because internal monologues can be perverse things, feeling like that's what people felt towards me would make me react by feeling that for them "too" - and you know how demented I can be. Being contemptuous and pitying of a group of other people would have been, frankly, too bloody exhausting, and would probably have stolen or broken my concentration...There's a line in CS Lewis' Screwtape Letters, where the senior demon is advising his nephew on how to distract the human they're trying to damn from "the right path to Heaven." Get him into church, he advises. Get him to really look around at the people he's there with. Get him to see their faults, their frailties, their falsehoods. Get him to focus on how truly small their goals are, their hearts are...and he'll forget the grander purpose of his being there.

Let's just say I need no help from demons to see all those things in any human being I care to look at. I can see most people's bad points - including of course most of my own - like hairs on thier head or zits on their foreheads. Putting me in a room with a bunch of people, with all of us raving over a pound here, two pounds there, and making excuses for each other's foibles and failings and fall-backs would have made me lose patience with the whole wretched thing in half the time, because it would have held up a mirror to my own smallness of mind and aspiration.

4. Fourthly, the way I started this was as a test of my own stubborn bastardy. I was all set to say yes to surgery. I had admitted that I had a problem, which they always say is the first big step, but I was about to take what I (inaccurately) thought of as the "easy way out", of laying down and letting someone slice me open and change my life and my capabilities forever. But something wouldn't let me do that without trying at least to combat my problem with my own stubborn bastardy. That I've gotten even this far proves to me that I'm stubborn enough to a) get the whole way, and b) do any other damn thing I genuinely set my mind to. Which when you've wanted to be a writer since you're 16 and haven't become one by the age of 40, is a pretty bloody important lesson to teach yourself, late in the game.

5. And finally, growing out of point 4, the idea of giving any group or methodology the credit for my own stubborn bastardy is a giant slap-in-the-face to my enormous ego. By not having to sympathise with anyone else's failures or cheer their meagre triumphs, I ensured that no-one (except my close friends and my closest, d) had to do the same for me. Which, ultimately, means I had only my own bullshit to listen to. Being generally an impatient fuck as well as a critical one, that's also been crucial so far. How you cope with all my bullshit, I don't know, but then of course, I'm pretending most of you don't exist, so I don't have to think about it. And so I say again...nehh!

Don't know why I felt the need to write all this down of course, and I have to say again, groups and programs clearly work for lots of people - they worked for "Slinky" Karen and her Brian. They seem to work for Ma. They work, all in all, for probably a lot more people than the simple, bug-eyed stubborn bastardy of the Disappearing Approach. But there, for what you find it worth, you non-existent people you, those were my reasons for doing the Disappearing Thing 'alone'...without a prgram, with just an understanding wife, some true friends and an almost-anonymous blog to help me through.

Worked for me.