I'm afraid today was a bit harrowing. Many of the things I planned on doing, I didn't do.

Today was an off day (I'm still working disability), so I had hoped to sleep in, but my cats had managed to nudge the door open and woke me up by throwing things off the dresser.

I love both of them (J. Catsby and Daisy Bucattan), but they can both be such selfish dicks sometimes. 

I wanted to desperately to go back to sleep, but then I realized: today I got my bonus! I woke up quickly, logged into the computer, and quickly paid back Gabe for the past two months of rent and then applied the rest to my credit card.

​In the course of 10 minutes I erased 48% of my debt.

Naturally that feels pretty good, but there's unfortunately a lot left over. My 0% APR on my credit card expires in April; by then, I'll have had to have paid off my card or sell my stocks (which aren't coming anywhere a 12% return, my CC's APR) to bring the balance down to $0. 

If disability kicks in, I'll be able to pay all of it off. 

By "all of it," I mean "all of the debt I accrued while recovering from being raped." Co-pays from hospital and therapy visits made up a lot of it, in addition to eating out (haha having the energy to get out of bed, get dressed, or make food. Yeah right), and moving so much.

​But that's what civil cases are for, right?

It's day one of a very long road. 

For starters, I decided to forgo MyFitnessPal because... well, because I decided that I wanted something new. I've done MyFitnessPal and I'm bored with it.

So on to Noom. 

​Measuring myself was really hard this morning. I weigh 163.4 lbs and my waist is at 37 inches. By all measures I am obese--I have a BMI of 30.9 (obese is 30+) and my waist-to-height ratio is 60.66, making me "highly obese." 

By any standard I am supremely overweight.

The strange thing is that I don't feel like I am obese. I mean I definitely feel like I weigh more that I should. When I bend over side-to-side my stomach folds uncomfortably. My face has lost its cheekbone definition and my neck has a crease that wasn't there before. I struggle more with walking--let alone running--around and I just don't feel good. 

I really just want my clothes to fit ​again.

I figured out today that anti-woman shit is a trigger. 

I mean, sexism and misogyny have always bothered me. I've written plenty of articles about how law and media intersect with being a woman. But now... post-rape, I feel like everything sexist is so much more personal. I notice more.

For example, I went to a Christmas party yesterday (yes, I managed to get out of the house). It was a house party with my boyfriend's coworkers--and somewhat of an odd dynamic. Gabe is a public school English teacher. The department chair is a woman, Elizabeth, and she invited everyone over for a holiday party at her home. "Everyone" really meant Elizabeth's best friend Monica, a group of male teachers, and their female attachments. 

As an aside, all of these teachers are white. They also teach for the poorest, most "ethnically diverse" (read: Black and Hispanic) school in the county. That's another issue altogether.

At any rate. after eating (boys first to the buffet, as always), the eight male teachers crowded around the TV. There weren't any chairs left in the living room, so Elizabeth, Monica, one of the teachers' fiancees Samantha, and myself were left in the kitchen. 

At one point, one of the guys wanted to flip the channel. He called to Elizabeth, who was a whole room over, to grab him the remote that was literally a foot away from him. 

One week and one day ago I was released from the mental hospital.

Before I went, I thought of the hospital like a punishment. Sort of like, "you don't have good enough control over your mental health, so we're going to throw you in a straight jacket and lock you up permanently."

Girl, Interrupted was the extent of my mental hospital knowledge. 

It really wasn't as bad as I thought it'd be. I was admitted to a partial hospitalization program (PHP), which meant that I'd do intensive therapy for the course of a work day, but then be able to go home and sleep in my own bed. 

For the sake of this blog, we'll call my institution "Golden Fields."

It's a relatively long story as to how I ended up at Golden, so I'll make it brief.

Of all the reasons I was at Golden, this was the most obvious. Last spring, I was attacked by a very-drunk old friend (like, 14-drinks-in-drunk). I was walking him to his car trying to convince him to grab an Uber when he grabbed me, threw me into his back seat, and proceeded to both sodomize and vaginally rape me. ​