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9:50 p.m. - 01/22/03
thoughts right now.
All I can say is that the one forum I know I have an attachment disorder in is layout-design. And I simply can't make myself like anything with a decent degree of red. So here we go again. I hope it doesn't look atrocious on your computer, as it looks good on mine. And if it does, fear not, as I'm bound to change it sooner than later, if the past predicts correctly.

Today. Today has been, up and down, sometimes simultaneously. Part of me feels optimistic, capable, ok; part of me could curl up and relive the early days of Atomgirl (almost.) There's a lot of pain, and I'm not the only one who feels it. It helps not to be alone; it hurts to know that more people feel this pain. If I knew what to do, I would do it. I would throw all theories of "it means so much more because it's your own" to the wind and just magically fix it all. I would. I would take away your power if I could; be glad I can't. But please, please, help me understand what you need. I'll give it. Maybe I'll even calm down and be a better friend if there is something I can do. It's hard to lean on someone who's so terrified as this.

I cried a little again today, seeing him, talking about it. He said the tears are good, that it's horribly painful, and he can't imagine what it would be like to bottle it up inside without an outlet. I postulated that perhaps it would be like the week outside his office, but it's not entirely true. I don't bottle it up so much here, either. I journal. I chat. I try to survive.

I had a snow day today, and that helped.

I told him how horrible I feel about feeling scared. What a disappointment of a friend I am. I believe in Sara (for instance; she's been on my mind so much) completely. I absolutely know she can beat this. She has the strength, the heart, the courage, the skills, the acceptance, everything; she can do it. I trust her. I don't trust the situation. I don't trust the illness that took another girl I never doubted once and threw her out of reach. I can't trust that. And I don't know the difference; I don't what made what happened to Tracy happen to Tracy and what's happened to me happen to me. I don't know. It's terrifying not to know. It's terrifying to understand it completely and not understand it all. I've been there, I am there, I'm clueless. Maybe I need to tell her that. Maybe we need to start saying, "You know what? We owe it to ourselves as individuals to speak our differences as well as our common ground. We each have the right to explain our experience, to not assume we understand another just because the diagnosis is the same. We're already bonded beyond what can be taken away; we know that. So, please, love; tell me who you are."

I want to know that, I think. I know I want to know that; I don't know if I have the courage to say so. I don't know how to say, "I'm scared it will kill you, too" without sounding faithless. I don't know how to say, what Dr. R said, that "your eating disorder is killing me" without sounding like another person completely oblivious to the pain. I know she's as out of control as I am, right now. She feels as unable to help herself as I do to help her. I know that pain. I can't possibly bear adding to it. But I can't bear losing her either; I just can't.

Codependent much?

You know what the doctor says to that in my head? He says, "Codependent? Or...attached?" And it's true, there's a fine line sometimes. Maybe I'm attached but unsure how to act on it healthily. Maybe I'm attached to the point I'm terrified, and that fear is pushing me back into things I know, when I look at it "objectively" aren't helpful. I know what it means just that she's taken in I love her. I know what it means that we talk. I know what it means that I understand a good portion of her experience through mine and listen openly to the parts that differ. I know what it means that I treat her like a person, that as desperate as I am, I don't blame her. I would never say "what you're doing to yourself" hurts me. What the illness is doing to her hurts me. And she is the one with the strength to overcome that. But I don't want to "let myself off the hook" that way. I know how much more it hurts when people try to live your life for you. But I also know that the idea of losing Sara is like waking up tomorrow to find that the entire Eastern hemisphere split from the West and disappeared. It's shattering. It's bad enough that I have to consider it, that it's real enough to be a possibility less vague then, "well anything could happen to anyone at any time. I mean- dude, car accidents..." This is something visible, something daily, something we know is coming, and do everything in our power to ward off. And I still don't understand why sometimes it's enough and sometimes it's not. I don't believe God (for lack of a better word) is making those decisions. I don't know what to believe.

The girls you try to do it for die. They have to learn the strength is their own. They have to know they can do it no matter what monster shows up when they're alone.

I know. I still can barely breathe.

The doctor is officially gone for two weeks, out of the country, out of reach. I asked him how I am to keep from going crazy; we were both low on ideas. He suggested I chronicle the days and keep him updated by e-mail if I like, that he'll make sure to check it before a week-from-Wednesday. I asked him if he could take my parents with him on the trip, as I think I could do alone better than alone-with-them. I took it back a second later; I wouldn't do that to him...

In the time between my codependency and the appointment's end, we talked some about relationships. He asked how I see myself in college, if I see relationships. I see myself on the outskirts of amazing people. I see incredible possibilities I can't get anywhere near, and that's what I told him. I don't have the initiative, and I don't believe anyone would take it with me. I don't believe anyone would bother to figure out me. Talk of where-on-earth-did-that-come-from led me back to grade school relationships, and the desire to be someone's "favorite" after Brooke and I went in differing directions. Someone's first choice, best friend. I told him that, despite the handful of "best friends" I had, I never felt secure in it (post-Brooke.) I always felt like people wanted to be with someone else over me, that I was everyone's second choice. And that wasn't entirely awful; I mean, being everyone's second choice is almost as good as being one person's favorite, right?- but I never felt entirely peaceful in it. I told him that I'd make friends, bring them into my "group" only to have them befriend someone else "over" me. He said maybe it was more sexual tension/ attraction between people than avoiding me. Maybe it wasn't entirely random or based on personality alone.

And I was like, huh? to which he said, "You're an extremely accepting person, and accepting people tend to be around other accepting people. Maybe these relationships that were called 'best friends' were really something else. Adolescence is a time of experimentation." To which I said, "I was completely isolated by adolescence. I mean grade school."

But in the meantime, he told me I'm accepting. He raised the weirdass possibility that statistics about sexual orientation hold true even in Neverland. He came closer to asking me the question I realize now he can't directly ask. He must know that I don't have a direct answer. He'll keep his questions vague enough to fit my confusion, I suppose. Though sitting at home tonight, I started to think maybe it's not so complicated. Or more accurately, maybe on one hand it's extremely complicated and on another it's entirely simple. Maybe on one level there are all these amazingly bizarre characteristics of same-sex relation and heterosexual relation, and of any one relationship within those two categories...and maybe on the other it's as simple as knowing yourself and how you relate to people and staying true to that. I think the complicated questions are things I'm figuring out in order to complete the simple task. I think maybe it's not this difficult thing. I mean, it's love, right? It's continuing within it that's difficult. I should know by now that connecting to begin with, risky as it is, is not the difficult part.

My big question right now is, to what extent does my slight obsession with glbt issues have to do with being a liberal from a small town with a high dose of oppressive policy, and to what extent might it imply that I actually fit somewhere in that category. I was thinking again about the time I asked Scott that, asked him, "Why does this bother me so much?" and he said, "Because some day, it could be you." And that's pretty much just another way of stating the question isn't it. Is it, "they could come after me the way they've come after you" or "I realize now that this is also me." I think maybe we've simplified it too much, but that could be just because I'm still cold in the physical department. But to me, it seems like we've stopped letting it be about ourselves. I think I've stopped letting it be about me. I'm trying to protect myself from my life rather than just living it, to know what I'm up against, so I can take the blows.

And the truth is? That's more of a blow than I can take. Than I would want to.

Sometime soon: Mary's relational autobiography, as inspired by an assignment at Rogers and the semi-recent happenings inside her mind.

love
chord

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