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9:25 p.m. - 10/21/02
and if you go chasing rabbits.....]
first off, it's the 21st, and that needs to be said. I love her. I love her, I'm scared, I'm upset, everything hurts, and I can't make any of that stop. I want to know she's safe, and I can't know. I want to find a clear connection to whatever sort of "god" exists, and I want to know, for certain, that she's safe. then, maybe, I can be safe, too. can I be safe, too? this paragraph was not supposed to be about me. this paragraph was simply supposed to say, it's ten months today, I still love her, I still miss her, I hope she's ok. please be ok.

as for my personal okayness, I'm close enough for now. I have the flu, which has left me feeling all icky inside and cold outside; my hands in particular are freezing, which makes it hard to type. emotionally, I'm not exactly here; I've kind of gone inside myself to that quiet place where I feel safe but can't let people in. and maybe I don't feel safe there either because I don't want to be alone. I've been feeling really vulnerable today, escalated by the level of sexual content in the hour of shitty television I watched tonight- and probably also by the last few journal entries which I desperately want to delete. I won't though. I can't.

it's not as if there's anything in them I can't say; I'm just so afraid to have any of this out in the open. I didn't realize how afraid I was. I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to mention it. I don't want anything to do with anything even closely regarding the topic. I'm so scared, and I'm not even certain what I'm scared of. scared to have a sexuality barely makes sense, but scared to talk about this fear? that seems like a little much.

I don't want to be writing this. if I write it, the words will come back to haunt me. these are words I'm not supposed to say, and if I write them, they will boomerang back at me, full speed. I don't want to tell anyone how scared I am, lest it gives them ideas. if I say how terrified I am of this, maybe it will come true. I'm so scared to be hurt by it; I hold my breath and hope it all blows over. maybe human sexuality is just a passing phase? I want a place for me that's safe, and this can never be safe. how can it ever be safe to even talk about?

it makes me want to close the journal, just to write this here. it absolutely terrifies me to put this out in the open, more than anything I can remember in the past. more than how sick I was, how much I hated myself, how much I'd been hurt. this is the topic whose smallest references keep me up at night. this is the thing I can't get away from and have no reason to be feeling this about. but then, there has to be a reason, doesn't there? if the feeling exists, it is by definition, justified...? if I feel this, I have reason to. the problem is, in order to devine that reason, I'd have to speak about it somewhere, and I really don't know how. I really would just rather hold my tongue.

hold my tongue. hold my breath. hold it all in; that's how I keep from finding out there's more.

my mom talked to me yesterday about the stomach pain I had as a child, about which I was constantly tested and monitored. she talked about how much she wished they could have pegged it, that they could have understand how all the anxiety welled up in me, and put such pain inside me. she said they'd touched on it but never followed through; after all, I was only sick in the calmer moments, and I never said I felt emotional pain, only physical. she said my kindergarten teacher told her that, "Mary is too good. She never lets loose, and I'm worried about her." I don't remember much of this. I didn't know I was anxious because I wanted the pain to be "real" and emotions weren't real. I didn't want to be lying so I couldn't let myself know that I was 'just' scared. I do remember feeling like if I talked about the darkness in the world, it would take over. like maybe if I kept my mouth shut, nothing else could slip inside. I have that same fear now. that if I talk, it will take over. I'm so small when I deal with this, you would not believe. my seventeen-year-old will balk at heightened support or supervision, but the part of me that's dealing with this will be overwhelmed without it. I can't go into it with him; I can't. I don't even know why I'm scared of it, let alone how to not be.

I know I don't have to talk about anything on any sort of time-schedule, or ever for that matter, but I know this is important, and relationhips are all I have been thinking about lately. What do I talk about if not where my head-et-cetera has been?

after Laura cancelled, I felt really lonely. I felt really sad and alone (again), and I was struck by the fact that, as I felt this, I started to withdraw. I was hiding in my clothes, I felt bigger than I am and wanted no one to see me, I wanted to sit alone and not speak. it didn't make sense to me because after all, if I'm crying because I don't want to be alone, why would I withdraw? I guess it could just have to do with getting hurt again and not wanting that to continue. I thought I pulled myself out of the feelings, but they stewed all day and by the end of it, I was experiencing my very-rare pseudo-ocd.

I have this issue, which hardly ever surfaces, with germs. it helps that I'm extremely lazy and hate to clean, but every now and again, I flip out about the inability to make things *clean.* Or rather, to make myself clean. It's complicated because it stretches to the world, but it starts with me. I freak out thinking that I'm dirty, or that the place I'm at is dirty- which means I'm threatened with the prospect of being dirty, and this feeling that I'm powerless to fix it. It's sort of like this: my hands are so not clean. I have to clean my hands. I have to. I have to make them clean. but I can't. because the water is dirty and the soap is dirty and the towel is dirty. the soap is dirty. that's how it grows. I start to be really afraid because I can't figure out how I'll ever be clean. I also feel really ashamed of my dirtiness. if I were, in that moment, to refuse to shake your hand, it would not be a fear of your germs, but rather a fear of contaminating you. I'm really really scared during those times, that if people touch me they will see it.

all of this is scary, however rarely it happens, because it's so so similar to my eating disorder. the shame, the monster self-perception, the belief that others know, and the need to find some way to calm myself, if only for a second, to make myself feel clean. with the ed, it was purging; I believed in a correlation between my poisoned self and the food material I purged. I was trying to keep myself from becoming more poisoned, and I was trying to purify. with the dirt-issue, the only sense of cleanliness I can find is chemical. I only believe something is clean if I can smell chemicals- ammonia for instance. I wanted really really badly the other night to scrub myself with bleach. I figured, if I did that, I would kill off all the bacteria on me that was making me dirty, and I would be clean, for just a little while. then I could do it again. I looked through our cleaning products, but all the labels said they irritated skin. I figured you weren't supposed to wash yourself with bleach, but I couldn't shake the feeling. I took a shower and I scrubbed myself vigorously, but the anxiety didn't really calm. I don't want this to escalate into something else; it happens almost never, but it terrifies me. I don't want to believe I'm bad, or poisoned, or unclean. Part of me must still believe this if I have those feelings. Part of me does still believe this; my self-esteem lately is non-existent.

I guess the part of me that feels hurt by the betrayals and the abandonments and the lonelinesses still justifies them by saying that I'm bad and deserve to be left. It doesn't say it so loudly anymore, and I catch it more easily, but it's still there, to some extent. I'm scared to end up in a hospital again because I've developed some crazy form of ocd/purging/self-injury where I constantly try to purify myself through chemicals, vomiting and wounds. I have a correlation between hair and dirtiness, too. (in myself.) I think if this escalated I would start pulling out my hair. On my head, on my arms. I wouldn't be able to deal. I know I have someone now who can help me keep any of that from happening, but I'm also scared to not have it happen when these feelings are here. otherwise, they aren't justified, I'm not safe, pain like this just happens. and that's scary, too.

I'm scared of invasion. I'm scared there's something in me that makes me not good. I'm scared that something dangerous is going to touch me, get inside me, make me all poison and pain again. I'm scared of invasion and sex is invasion, that's how it comes into this, that's how dirt comes into this. I'm scared that no matter how careful I am, I am incapable of making sure that I am at all times safe. Safe from what is or is not bad in me, safe from the danger outside, safe from having outside danger put inside me. and even if I did have the courage to talk about any of this (I'm not even sure I can post this...) what can anyone say? "you're safe"...are you kidding me? strictly speaking about sex, the numbers are going up, not down, and one in three is not the type of margin that makes a girl feel good at night. I spent my entire childhood racing through rooms, training myself so that I would stand a chance of outrunning an intruder intent on harming me. I've spent my adolescence trying to keep myself as "clean", as restricted, as possible in case the danger is in me. I'm just completely lost, exhausted, and on top of it, this is all just the symptom, the manifestation, the fears that come from deeper experiences and beliefs.

the problem with working on the issues that actually caused all this- the abandonment and so forth- is that there never seems to be a victory. these aren't issues I work through within a few weeks, or even come to a new level on. it just keeps going, keeps happening, the same feelings, and the same experiences. and now I have this other side of it he hasn't seen that isn't even down to that layer of issue. recovery is supposed to be a process, a journey, but I can't look at this part and say, "hey, look where I've come to." what I'm dealing with now is the same thing I've been dealing with for years, and what happened to me years ago is still happening now. people still leave, they still hurt, I still feel like I'm at fault for this.

it's like...it's hard enough believing I'll never be safe again, without also believing that I'm not right now. and that's what it is. I feel vulnerable, threatened, scared. I await the intrusion at the same time I experience it. I go over my fear again and again until it's nearly as real as experience, as memory. I need help. I need an alternative to bleach, index fingers, and warm spoons. I need a marker that says, "you have come to something" and "you can go to something even greater." I guess I feel like I've gotten to the point now where all that's left is pain, is fear. I don't want to go into this because if I do, I'll see that it really is real, and then I won't even be able to hope for safety. It'll be impossible.

I felt that way about the shame once...I know this, but so much of what I know seems disconnected from right now. I learned that from Stacy, and where is Stacy in my life? I started questioning because I felt safe; where are the people who brought me that safety? Where is my home?

My psych teacher threw me a bone today, spoke solely on the content of the paper I wrote for her on my illness/ recovery-thus-far. It was a very kind response, and it made me wish I was around that kindness all the time. There's nowhere I can go, is there, that would be only good...

There's no Red left in the world.

chord

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