7:00 p.m. - 11/28/01
how wrong it felt to leave is how right it feels to go.
I don't know quite how it happened (considering that *as always* I forgot to take my 5:00 anxiety med), but somewhere between deciding it really was time to pack and actually getting a good start on doing so I decided that my whole life makes sense. After days (weeks, years, who's counting?) of feeling trapped, confused, and misplaced, my life is suddenly pointed once again in a direction I can understand. And all it took was closing my bedroom door, turning on some music, and running around like a crazed rabbit, cleaning and packing and packing and cleaning.
There is something extremely cathartic about cleaning my "new room." (I do not live here, I do not live here, I do not live here.) What I meant to say is there is something very cathartic about cleaning the room I have here. Perhaps it's simply because I haven't done it too often, but I feel so much better as I'm doing it, moreso than I do cleaning anything else, and I think the dim lighting, the fast-paced tidying, and the calmer vibe reminded me of cleaning my room at red. I just looked up at one point, caught my face in the mirror, and realized I was smiling. Realized I was feeling so close to peaceful.
Because it just *makes sense.* For me to be packing to attend a playwrighting conference in NYC, one whose winning scripts I used to read while I ate breakfast in grade school. It just makes sense that in a few days I will ditch my mother (the "few days" time lapse, doesn't make sense, but leaving that be) and be beautifully autonomous and independent again. I know it will be hard, I know I'll get anxious or sad or shamed and things will get difficult, but it just makes so much more sense to be working my recovery *there* than here.
I'm thinking about being in a hotel room my parents don't have a key to...I'm thinking about having a schedule they don't chauffeur. I'm thinking about being who I'm supposed to be today on the way to who I've always been supposed to be, without anyone saying to me, "Do you realize how many calories are in that?"
And these aren't "young people" - these are young *playwrights* - which means, very stereotypically, they are not normal adolescent beings. What normal adolescent writes plays? Thus, using the geometric transitive theory, if they are not normal adolescents, and I get along with adolescents who are not normal, than I will get along with them. (and they me?!) *And* to make matters even less stressful, non-normal adolescents do not care about clothes or looks except in a distracted, slightly arrogant, analytical sense, which is to say Ed cannot tell me that they care in order to convince me I must.
Ah, logic. How I adore you.
Anyway, I'm all excited and stuff, even though I'm more tired than should be legally tolerated. It just feels so right, and maybe I was kidding (to keep myself sane) when I told the folks at IOP that I'm not coming back, but tonight, I want to think of it as true. How much more sense would it make for me to be in a room that was parentally-inaccessible, eyes lit by the slightly bizarre glow of a computer screen, while someone like Brea or Karen sat on the bed reading Beckett?
Not to imply that there are other people like Brea or Karen because that's impossible...just to say that someone as wonderful as a redlove or a cami,julie,chas,and mandy love is who should be lying on the bed behind me right now.
See it occurred to me, in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart in what I will politely refer to as !Fucking Nowhere! that I really *do* need to get a life. What I said I want for Stephanie, that existence above basic abstinence, that something so much greater than life only one step above being tubefed in some psych word, I want it for myself as well. I want *people* again, I want *purpose* again...
I want my pride back.
chord <- whose c is really capital in a backward sort of way
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