8:00 p.m. - 09/24/02
&&&like a bird into the sky of my brain(.))
Don't mock me just because I'm all worked up over the Gilmore Girls in something other than a "blast TV and its sensationalist propaganda" sort of way. What can I do when something about it just hits so closely to home, even as it looks nothing like my world? Damn their hopeful angst and well-timed banter; damn it all.
Angsty, yes; that's me, and I have to say I was relieved to see someone else whimper and whine for awhile, someone else who looked about as pathetic as I (helpful mind) imagine I must each Wednesday on his couch. He is implied these days; I no longer feel obligated to offer a name. I don't know where I am. Still. Thoughts get stuck inside my head sometimes, little prompts and answers repeating over and over again in my attempt to break through the depression and understand what actual emotion exists inside of me. Hopefully, there's something left, or maybe numbness would be better; on it goes.
Lately the thoughts are things like "I know I'm in here somewhere" "I can't find myself" and "what if you were happy" which I do not understand. What if I were happy? What if I *am* happy? What if this is as good as it gets? No, no, no, no, no; I will not be a Jack Nicholas movie no matter what I feel/ don't feel. I just want to be alive again, and alive means knowing my emotions well enough to be able to recover from them.
And if it's a new step, well, I don't *want* a new step. It's always been so easy: If I eat normally, emotions come up instead of food, and from the emotions I better understand myself and take control of my life. So where is it all now? I can't bring anything up, and when I start to think about all the behaviors that would feel so good if only for so short a time, I miss them. I miss the illness (fuck me and my bad example), and even though I know that I can't go back because that will just postpone what I actually *need* to learn from whatever is going on, I can't stand this time of having no idea. I can't stand rooting through my life going, "Is this it? Or is it maybe this? The sum of everything?" trying to find a problem. I want the tears right away; I want punctual tears, and I want to chart my progress by the number of sobs post-meal.
I hate adjustment. I hate becoming used to things, so comfortable that change is jarring instead of novel. I hate the idea that I'm so calm and happy in where things are that the idea of *progressing* feels uncomfortable. I don't want to keep getting better if it means doing so in a way somehow different from what I've been doing. I want to go back, back to how things were a week ago, a year ago. I want to go back in time to the day I said I wished that I could stop it, have that work. And I would never meet a handful of really wonderful people, and I would still be very screwed up in several of the old-school ways, but you know, I wouldn't have all my new problems, and the discomforts of the past seem so familiar right now.
It's September 1, 2001, and life is starting to be very wonderful. I want it now; I want to go home; I can't do all of this.
And there's so much to tell him. How do I do it all? Where do I start when I have fifteen minutes to explain each crazy topic not counting whatever time he needs to respond? How do I condense without abriding, something like, "So I'm really struggling with feeling disconnected from myself, and from my Rogers-family, and that leaves me feeling really disconnected from other people. I feel detached and that's scary, and it makes me think of what happened with Harriet; I get worried that the same thing will happen with you. On top of which, I'm just so uncertain about everything- because I can't tell who I am or what I want- that I *know* I haven't made any choices recently about how to progress with certain issues, so any steps I've taken feel like I've been pushed, and that leaves me feeling really powerless and scared. Even of you. The nice-good-doctor-man who I really would trust, or do trust rather, except I'm crazy, which is why I need a doctor in the first place. Oh and yes, there is the whole school issue, which I guess I'm doing better with, except I still feel really guilty because you know, I always feel guilty when I'm not doing as poorly as everyone else is doing, and you know what, maybe I am struggling more than everyone but isn't *that* a scary thought, and oh by the way, I can't stop needing to cry, but I never leak enough to take away the pain."
Too long. Something like. "I feel really disconnected from myself and everyone else, which hurts because I miss those I love, and which is scary because I'm afraid Harriet was right about attachment. I'm also feeling out of control in my own life, and even though I trust you, since I don't know what I want, any action I do see I attribute to you, and that scares me." That's a little more coherent right?
But then I'll have to say to him, "It's not that you've done anything wrong necessarily, it's just that I feel so less able to talk. I feel like I'm getting further away from you instead of closer, like it's harder and harder to get my voice to a volume you can understand. And I don't know, maybe because I feel powerless in other places, I'm really freaked that how much you know and the fact that you see my parents are going to combine to hit me face-first. My mom told me that you said that survey I took showed that my parents *had* been there, and hearing that knocked the wind out of me. And then with this whole please-go-talk-to-school thing. I know she came to you and asked you why she was going up to talk with the school, and even if you intended well, whatever you told her was more than she knew with me, and that just scares me. I don't want her to have any information. Ever. And maybe that's not the healthy, progressive place to be, and maybe you want really badly to challenge it, but the thing is, my whole life is challenges and up-in-the-air-ness right now, and if I don't have you calm and apparently (even in my head) on my side, then how on earth am I going to feel safe long enough to realize I want the same thing you want me to want?
"See, it's not that I don't trust you because I really do. I just trust so minimally in general that my 'really trusting' you might seem a little uncertain, but I'm uncertain of everything, so hey, that's fitting. I don't know. I'm just so scared already about what's going on that I feel like if we aren't doing exactly what I know I want, which granted will be minimal, I'm going to become even more scared, and I'm going to pull away, and detach, and somehow manage to sabotage this the way I feel I might have done with Harriet. And I just can't handle that. I can't handle having to start over or just not having this because I need it so badly, and let's face it if you go away, I just have to catch a train out of state because I don't have anyone short-distance left. I need this to feel safe because it's all I have (right here.) Ok?"
Translation: I need to feel safe, and I need to feel like that safety is not in jeopardy. I need to hear that my mom will know as little about me as any other client of yours, and I need to know that I am ultimately the one in control (without having to resort to any ed behaviors) of my life and the work we're doing, so that I don't feel scared and withdraw further. I need to feel safe about what you're doing in order to do what I need.
Once that's established, once I stop feeling like I am unsafe speaking in that room, I might tell him how I'm really afraid that I'm going to be alone forever, and I'm really afraid that I'm not ever going to regain contact with RED, or more simply, that I'm not going to do it before the anniversary of my three-month stay is over. I might tell him that I'm not sure about what I want, that when I asked him how I could move forward if I still wanted any part in illness, I poked a pinhole in the brick wall hiding all my illness-want. That now it's leaking through, and soon it will break through in doors and windows and everything will flood. I'll tell him that I started restricting after I saw him last week, not because I saw him just after, and I felt really sick because being a little sick reminded me what it was like last year (pre-red.) And even though I know I don't want that, I don't completely (or even minimally) believe that I will ever have anything remotely like what I had there again, and if I can't have that I'd rather be sick to get it in three-month stints. Maybe I'd rather be guilty and ashamed then alone. I'm not sure, and that's the pro-con list I'm building now. At the same time I'm looking over my shoulder, hoping against hope, that somehow there will be a third alternative. An alternative where I get to be fully alive and fully loved in the same space. An alternative where I have people to hold and a phone with RED on speed-dial. That's what I really want, and I know that getting sick or pretending I don't want to be (at all) will not bring me to that option...but...what if there's no way to get there? Isn't a temporary solution better if there will never be a long-term one?
Somehow, thinking of the other times- theater, eighth grade- that I've had versions of this love and grief made me feel a little better. Each time it's gotten closer to what I really feel I need, but I'm scared because each time it's also ended, and I don't know why. Yes, shows finish their run. Yes, middle schoolers move to high school. Yes, hospitals are not meant to be homes. But? Why are these the only places if they can't be real? The solution that pops into my head is that I have attachment issues (damn her) and so am neglecting to cultivate the attachment that could be good for me. I'm neglecting my family; I'm telling him I don't under any circumstances want my mom to know anything. But you know? I don't. And he says that I don't have an attachment disorder, that I have justified pain around attachment based on past experience, so I feel a little better saying my family isn't right for me. I mean, isn't it fairly common for a person's closest intimacy to take place outside their blood?
Brea said to me once that her life became much easier after she realized what she could and could not expect from her mother, and that's a credo I've lived by in a lot of ways. I don't want to think that my mom could provide more than I'm letting her, or that I'm not justified in being as stubborn and scared as I am. Julie and Cami were barely here two days and they caught on to her. So? I just don't understand why, if I'm so quick to invest in my relationships (but not *so* quick that it's dangerous, not anymore) why they always end, leave me alone? Why can't I have a home that stays a home?
Stray cats and runaways. After awhile, being shifted from one home to another, the alley looks as good as that next door. At least there's a similarity in the city; you can pretend your bed is whole blocks long. At least the roads stay in one place, and it's your decision, which turns you take, and how quickly you move.
stray/chord
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