8:15 p.m. - 09/15/03
the ocean will hold me.
I'm thinking just now of the time, so long ago (it seems), when I had just stumbled into Diaryland via a random link at a teen poetry website. I'm thinking about how new it was, all this unexplored terrain, thousands fewer diaries, and so many less options than now. All the people I didn't know, all the entries I hadn't yet written - over 1300 - all the memories I wouldn't have saved. A journal remembers differently than one's actual memory; I know that much. It remembers the facts as they stood in the day or two surrounding an event, without the emphasis imposed by what came afterward. Some of what I've documented here, I would recall as little as if I'd never experienced it, without having the words ready for reading. Some I remember through the entries themselves, like a story I learned about myself as a child, memorized but not remembered. And then there are the memories I do hold, held simultaneously by this small and so-important (to me) piece of the web, and somehow there so different from each other, the journaled memory and the encoded one. I doubt I'll ever have the capacity to translate exactly what I emotively experienced into plain and simple words. But then, this journal serves like a witness, a record of everything I might forget in the hectic of current and future days, and a confirming nod of everything as I remember it. I read the entries differently than I wrote them, of course, knowing what will happen afterward, feeling the passion of truth, and knowing that specific feeling - that particular passion - will wane. Will leave me. Maybe even remembering how it did. One of depression's greatest weapons is its ability to barricade the brain. It's the state-dependent memory that can't help forgetting and minimizing all that has ever been good, and all good that has ever been hoped for... This is what rattled me so thoroughly Tuesday, what the doctor had to remind me, and ask me to believe, was a *symptom* of the *illness*, giving inaccurate reports. Despite that knowledge (though I can't ignore its aid) I've continued to battle with the barricades all week. And today, inspired by all the incredibly kind notes left in my guestbook lately (you wonderous, gorgeous people) - I reread the account of my first few weeks after leaving Rogers.
It amazed me. Stunned me. I remember that time as weeks of uninterrupted grief; I think of them as static, each of the days the same as the one before it, until eventually the trip to New York for YPI interrupted things, and I started to pull back on track. (Going off it again, of course, through January and February, before regaining some hold - and some hope - in March.) It doesn't read that way. Within a handful of entries, there's a defiance that sparks up, a bit of Bravery, an insistence that this will not be. (That I will not surrender to what everyone seems to want. That even if it's the most unhealthy thing in the world - and I've come to equate health with all things positive, good, moral, et cetera - I will not let go.) Even as I'm moaning about how no one understands and groaning about my inability to go back, I'm refusing to give up the reality of what I had there, and I'm simultaneously staying alive in the present, while refusing to let go of the (so recent and so rendering) past. And it didn't seem to matter. I barely noticed it. I didn't notice it. I compared how I was doing to how I'd been doing, how I felt to how I'd been feeling, paying no attention to the fact that someday this would be my story of survival and of transformation. No attention to the fact that, this too, was growth. It does matter every time I wake up with mean voices in my head and take care of myself - a meal, a shower, a venture, a rest - anyway. It does matter each time I challenge what I'm being told, so that I have the ammunition to fight what's in my head and the certainty that I really do believe what I say I do. It does matter that my entire world can collapse, ever more completely, and I can grieve, struggle, and stay able. I had it right when I said long ago, that to struggle is commendable. I wish I didn't hesitate to call up anyone (including Rogers) and say, "I'm struggling" with the pride I know to be in the statement. To say, "This is what Pluto" (an astrologically inclined friend of my mom's sincerely suggested that we blame Pluto for all the maladies of these past months) "has cast down on top of me, and I struggle back to the top of it, back to the side, back into it for understanding, out again for air. I am queen of my own compost heap, and I'm getting used to the smell.^"
I need to understand, and maybe I will, maybe I'll read this in a year and see myself already knowing, that I have a right to reclaim with great pride, my recovery, my progress. I have a right to free myself of all guilt regarding the existence of my illness in the first place and still feel the pride in my work to overcome it. I want to know that. I want to understand that, just as no one would say to a former cancer patient, "Well, it's about time you got that under control. Are you going to start being productive again now?" no one has the right to say so to me. I deserve pride, not punishment. What the hell is productivity anyway? What do I care about a product, a worthless product, a meaningless 'success'? I have managed to recreate a life; of something shaky, worn, torn, beaten down, I've built a better life. I had a ghost of life once that I nearly lost; now, I will live in all dimension, shape, and color. I will call this success. I will call this better than productivity because life is no product. I cannot create life. A child, grown in my body, does not receive life because of me. I will never be able to tell anything but the story of my grandmother; I cannot give her life. I cannot give Tracy her life, though I want to, for the most selfless and selfish reasons. I can write poems and plays and sit up nights weaving words for any who will listen, but I cannot create life. I have one, and only one, that I can define: and I have taken a fading, endangered sketch and built a true blueprint from it. And from this blueprint, perhaps, in a year, two years - a sculpture. A model. In three or four an organic reality. In five, absolute truth. It's happening as I'm typing, it's happening in my sleep, it's happening in my hopelessness, and having this journal has let me see it, has let me say, "Don't you understand that you have felt this hopelessness more than a dozen times in two year, and who knows how, and who has the justification of why, but you have survived, succeeded, and continued on?"
I sat with my psychiatrist today, an absolute mess of a girl. I needed about six more layers of clothing to feel shielded from his eyes, and I withdrew into the space around the conversation, into the position of observer, just outside the scene. He did most of the talking, guessing correctly about so many things. The hugeness of my inferiority (my feelings of inferiority), the inability to live up to what seem like but are by no means modest standards, and my shame (therefore, and in the ed, and regarding the ed - the illness I cry and swear I'd trade for any other because I hate myself so hugely for "caring about" the topics with which its symptoms play), all came into the session, though I spoke little of them. At one point he told me the eating disorder would be with me my whole life, and I began to sob. I wanted to bargain - anything to be rid of just this one part of my illness, anything. And even though I knew, for a fleeting moment, that it's the shame regarding my ed I need to be rid of, not the presence of the illness in itself, (and certainly not my astounding recovery from...yes I'm exaggerating my feeling, here, but maybe I'll get the point across to myself), I wanted to bargain, and the inability to do so made me sob. I wanted redemption, which only means I need to find some way to stop, for always, the association between shame and having (or having had) an eating disorder. I don't need to erase the illness from my past, and there: there's comfort in that...I don't have to despair. I don't have to alter history; I have to alter my understanding of it, and in that, my future.
It's all so very theoretical. Don't worry, I'll be my usual hyperemotional trick by morning. But this is important, too. The last thing the doctor said to me today was, "We will get through this" and after a moment of silence, added, "and I can be sure of that because - you have, in the past, done a lot more with a lot less." I gave him a real nod, a surprised but believing nod, for the first time that day. I wasn't just agreeing; I was remembering. Remembering the truth. If I could do what I've done up until this point, how can I not believe in the life he talks of my having? How can I not be kind to myself, in the meantime - understanding that I'm where I need to be and so forth? I remembered today something I've said more than once about leaving Rogers for D!@#$%^ - that I had to relearn everything I'd known at Rogers once outside. I had to practice it, again, instate it as the reality, and of course - of course - that's happening here. Of course, I need time to adjust, and to transfer what I know into my new surroundings. Transfer who I am. And what of that? After all the pain lately, and all the eating-disordered idiocy (not my own idiocy, you understand, but that of those voices...some of which have been very vocal about my lack of exercise while passing joggers, runners, bikers, and powerwalkers in the park we live so near), it occurred to me that the time will damn well come when I am pedaling over those same sidewalks, glorified by the breeze and the speed, the effort and the reward, as I learned to do in D!@#$%^, the first summer of my exile... Of course the cycle will come around again, and I'll be better equipped, better aware, better at my life. I'm artist and art here, sculptor and sculpture both. The doctor said it's extremely difficult to work without experiencing a reward; it's difficult to continue in a case like this when the reward is often so delayed, graduated to the point of invisibility. I work, and I will be the reward. I have trouble meeting his eyes, but I know they are lit with belief when they tell me about the life he believes I will live. He's certain because of what has been. And a glimpse of that certainty, of that past and its predictions, is the second-greatest gift of keeping so steady a journal as this. The first of course is the sum of individuals I've known, fleetingly or deeply, for one moment or three years...who have offered me their kindnesses and perceived my own. Who have been grateful for my life, such as it is. Just as it is. Including the belief of what it will be...
I haven't written, and what I have I've made private, because of the intensity and relentlessness of pain the past few days. But in large part, this struggle is still accessible, at all of its extremes. I'm scared of that, sometimes; it's difficult, needing so badly to see others getting better, to illustrate the price of health. There is a price. There is pain. But I think of the cost of my health and the cost of my illness, and cost no longer matters. What did I buy? What was the purpose of my pain? I may not know it everyday, but when I know it, it's almost without (one single trace of) doubt: I live. I meet someone I'd never have known, I taste something I'd never have tried, I walk a street I'd never know. I read a new book. I sleep. I have a dream I never had before. I see a loved one reenter my life. I see hopelessness dismantled by reality, by life.
I see the past become the present and all the reason I have to stay present in it, even in a time like this...when the doctor says, "That [perfectionist] voice in you needs a talking-to" and "Tell it to quit interrupting you. You're on vacation." When he says, for four weeks, let's meet doubly often. The next time we double our sessions up (after this four week installment) will be to fight the agoraphobia. "Do you think it's by chance that we haven't started that yet? It's not. It's because what you're doing right now is enough. You're doing fine. If anything, you're doing too much."
And I don't have to believe it to want to. I don't have to remove all doubt to keep an eye out on the horizon for some evidence. On the horizon, yes, and when it's blank - on the past, documented and redrawn.
chord
^Ani, "Swan Dive"
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