For Today - Real World

We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusion.  We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in place of reality. - Daniel J. Boorstin

For Today:  Staying in the real world is far less painful than hiding in food and fat.

This morning feels better - calmer, more settled.  The storm brewing inside has been tamed, partly by sleep, partly by meditation, partly by chocolate.  Some of the physical symptoms are from PMS - the chocolate fixes that, I don't know why exactly, but it does.  The mental clamour -- that responds to meditation and rest. 

In OA meetings, I sometimes hear members speak about how they know they cannot eat like "normies" - like normal people.  I know how I eat is not normal.  But I have not accepted - perhaps until now -- that I am not a normal person when it comes to food.  What a subtle distinction to maintain!  Such an illusion -- I'm not crazy, my behaviour is!  When I search the Big Book for illusion, this passage resonates:

Most of us have been unwilling to admit we were real [food addicts].  No person likes to think he is bodily and mentally different from his fellows.  Therefore, it is not surprising that our [addict] careers have been characterized by countless vain attempts to prove we could [eat/drink] like other people.  The idea that somehow, someday he will control and enjoy his [compulsive eating/drinking] is the great obsession of every abnormal [eater].  The persistence of this illusion is astonishing.  Many pursue it into the gates of insanity or death. [Big Book, p.30]

To the gates of insanity or death.  I know this to be true.  The illusion that I can control my feelings, my life with food compulsions is a sick fantasy, where I escape from my pain for a half hour or so, and then come crashing back to reality, with the blood sugar drop and self-hatred that comes from bingeing.  This temporary escape is killing me, slowly but surely, physically and emotionally.

The For Today reading says:

I know illusions are an escape from reality and the price I pay for that escape is my illness.  Reality is what is.  Today I do not have the illusion that I am the center of the universe, that I should try to make everyone love me, that my opinions are facts.  My illusions are being replaced with enlightenment, my resentment with serenity, my anger with love.

Please, God.  I have made a mess of things and I need help to know what to do to fix them.  I want to live in laughter, free to love, to trust, to give and receive help, free from shame and regret.  I want to leave that "lonely, frightening, painful train through hell" and accept the "gift of a safer, happier journey through life" [Big Book, p.543].