10:28 p.m. - 03/22/03
holy cricket- good things really come to those who wait!
So I figured I would start out tonight with a bit of whining about med side effects. I mean, that always takes priority correct? But now I have something entirely too good to postpone broadcasting, except that - it's better if I set it up with the story of the past few days. So med-whining takes precedent after all. The doc raised my desipramine (anti-migraine), and last night I endured some 15 hours of coma sleep, followed by an evil migraine all day. It makes sense to me, somewhat. The meds must be working with the same blood vessels that cause migraines, so while things situate, I feel like ickshpoo. I really hope tonight and tomorrow go better, though. I was feeling all productive and excited, all wanna-be Rory Gilmore again, and now I'm a little too ill to move. It's a good thing your fingers can't get queasy, or I wouldn't be typing this.
Sufficient ranting, I think. Let's talk how I've been.
The doctor told me a few sessions back that people who perform (athletically, in a corporate setting, whatever) do better if they're able to come down from the "high" in between sets. In fact, people who can calm themselves that way, rest that way, do better than more talented people who aren't able to rest. So, I've been putting this into practice, and up until today (with sleep being all fuckity) it was working really well. I'm taking naps before I feel sick and incapable of facing the world, and it's working. I'm getting loads done, and I'm feeling lots of feelings, and for a few hours last night I knew that my continued work in that regard warrants pride. Maybe it's time to take the "aspiring" out of my superheroine description. Of course, I cried (hard) three times yesterday, and that's only if you count the multiple times I started crying in session as one. (Today, I've been too sidetracked by physical pain to do much emotional draining.) But yes. I cried so much in my appointment yesterday, that afterward, the doc prescribed me a (blue plastic) cup of water to re-hydrate. I sat in his waiting room, sipping water and crocheting what I hope will be a blanket for Mistrandy (as opposed to a screwy non-rectangle that leaves me unsure what to do for her at the end of the year.) My mom had an appointment after me, which would normally be incredibly uncool, but turned out fine, as I was so fatigued by the end of the appointment, I didn't have much sense of where I was or what was happening. Plus, all parts of the conversation I managed to overhear were about people other than me, they weren't playing the evil muzak that normally plagues me, and I had yarn. Never let anyone tell you otherwise; yarn and a hook can make any situation better. It's one of the ultimate truths in life. As opposed to one of the ultimate questions. (Why do people insist on baking cookie dough? etc.) But I was talking about something, and we'll assume, for the sake of my self-esteem, that it was important enough to continue discussing.
I woke up Friday morning feeling myself to be in not such a good place. Two things happen, and I can only remember one of them now, that had me really stuck on all my pain and love around Rogers, and the whole time I was showering and getting ready, I just cried. I was actually in a really good place to have a session, which means that I wasn't in the best of places otherwise. Not too shut down but hugely emotional. Mostly battered and raw, with a little bit of anger thrown in to defend everything. A little bit of that Who the fucking hell gets to say what is my story? Who gets to say they understand? No one. Nobody. Nobody but me. And I'll tell you if you want to know, but you'll still only know what I told you. And maybe you've been somewhere similar, but you weren't where I was, and you weren't there as me, so don't tell me who I am or what I know. Just a dash.
(And on American Idol the other night- which for the record, is so not worth watching without Frenchie, but I amuse myself with the fact that I, with all my stupid issues, am rooting for actual boys*- this girl sang a song from The Wiz, which, despite my Broadway upbringing I don't know, say, at all. She sang "Home." And in this song, she sang, "Living here, in this brand new world/ Might be a fantasy/ But it taught me to love/ So it's real, real to me," and I was like, "Hallelujah and rocking kneesocks! Yes!" Isn't that beautiful? In light of everything I've been told about RED wasn't the real world, etc. Aren't those exactly the right words? I'm getting away from myself again, but home-affirming is never an unnecessary tangent.)
We drive to his building, and the whole way there, we have to listen to all the bullshit radio commentary on the war (or as they call it here, the "showdown with Saddaam") and I'm ready to never, ever leave the house without a CD again, when we finally arrive. I ring the doorbell, we go into the waiting room, I tell Mom her session must be contained to one scheen of yarn (all I brought) and she told me to quit crocheting until she started talking to him. Not bad banter. Then the receptionist who I don't normally see came over to look at my work, and do the whole, "you crochet?!" thing, and tell me the colors are pretty (which they are.) After awhile, the Superdoc appeared, and swooped me into his office, where I sat on the couch and tried not to remember the state I was in Wednesday. He said, "So...I really can't count hours," (because he told me Wednesday, he'd see me in 32, and it was so not true) and that I should never ask him for help with my physics homework, and I told him I'd stick to using him as my psych tutor, and he seemed amused. He asked how the past how-ever-many hours had been, and I told him they'd been difficult, but not quite so dramatic as Wednesday. He didn't like the bit of self-assault in the term "dramatic" - and I told him I simply don't like being that much of a wreck, especially not publicly. And since my parents have keeping coming home just as I start to cry the past couple of days, I've been a little calmer. (Car in the driveway? Squeaky garage door? Front door opening? Any one of these three stimuli compells my instant composure. Yes.) We talked about the dynamic with my parents, the fact that I find it irritating when they interrupt my attempt at dealing with (or at least expressing my emotion), and that, nevertheless, the way they approach me when I'm upset makes me keep them at bay. He asked if I could think of a time when they'd handled something in a way that made me feel better, and I stumbled around in my mind looking for something, which I didn't find. So even as I was telling him I just can't think of anything, he could see how ashamed of that I was. I feel bad, not wanting to let them in, not always seeing the good in them. I feel bad, but I don't know how to change it. He mentioned Harriet's misstep regarding my attachments- that I have a major fear of attachment (or rather, abandonment) combined with a huge desire for it, not the ambivalence characteristic of an attachment disorder. He told me that people with attachment disorders don't feel right attached or detached, and that isn't me at all. I feel right attached. I feel almost too right. That's what makes it so scary. That- and the fact that it tends to go away long before I want it to. He said something about needing to attach to the people who were safe and consistent and (probably some other adjective I didn't hear due to the fact that) I was crying again. I forced out words. "But I found that. I found consistent and reliable and safe...and it's still gone." He said I found what I thought was reliable, and I honestly wanted to hit him. (Do. Not. Talk. Bad. About. Them.) Somehow, he redeemed himself, and we kept talking. I kept crying and crying about Rogers and missing it and not being able to go back and not being able to make it work with those people I just know it's supposed to work with and, and, and. It was fifteen months since Tracy died, nineteen months since I went into Red- and my heart finds tears for that again and again and again. I told him I need to learn how to not care about people, and he laughed and called that a "good goal" until I said that I wasn't doing so well with it, at which point he lowered his voice and whispered, "That's good." Later, I told him I'm going to learn how to not cry, when I learn how to not need people, and we talked again about how it's ok to cry but it's not ok to cry but it is, and so forth. He said that I needed to let myself grieve, and he hoped there never came a day when Rogers meant little enough to me that I could think of it and not cry. That was one of the things I imagine are pre-scripted...one of those statements to which I'm compelled to reply, "So, do you *know* that was the perfect thing to say?"
What I did reply was more along the lines of...I don't want to grieve them because I don't want to claim this loss. If I start grieving this, then it really is gone, and I can't do that. He said grief is one of the miraculous parts of humanity; it allows us to honor those we've lost and heal simultaneously, and he said that he wants me to grieve for the loss as I feel it, today, or yesterday, or whenever it is in the moment. Grieving, or crying, doesn't have to mean anything about five minutes from now. What happened with Rogers wasn't a death. I have no certainty about what will happen in the future, and neither does he. So we grieve when the feelings are there and understand that the future is still open and people could come back in, even as we're grieving. That's something I've never known. When I started my sketches of Rogers-memories, I was trying to love and remember and let out the feelings, without saying, "this is finished"...but...I didn't know it well enough. I didn't know it viscerally, and maybe I don't now either, but I'm close. And this concept of, "feel what you feel now, and don't bother with whether it will change ten minutes down the line" makes more and more sense. Maybe someday, I'll understand it entirely.
I asked him if he knew how many hours there were between the end of our appointment and the beginning of the next one (to be silly) and said it was too many days, but somewhere around 100. And now I'm seeing him Tuesday instead of Wednesday (which is cool because it means that there's not such a long stretch between appointments) so it's even less. Which means these meds better start being good for me; otherwise he has something less than 100 hours to put together enough excuses and charm to dissuade me from smacking him. (My oh-so-violent tendencies, you know.) Otherwise I'll have to go in singing the bad** Pink song, and that will just be scary on so many levels. He'll be traumatized, which leaves basically my entire family screwed.
(As if they aren't already. The third bout of tears yesterday was as I raged and ranted to an empty house, pretending the walls were my parents. I was really upset with myself, and the situation- in part. It had to do with the trip to New York in April, and the fact that even though I'm eighteen and actually enjoy flying alone, this war business has me far too shaken up to do so. I hate being dependent, especially on people I don't trust. I hate not being able to assert myself away from my parents and sister - who doesn't fit into that list of people I don't trust, for the record - especially now...On top of which, I was *truly* mad at my mom and even more so at my dad. Do you believe the man didn't say one word about his three day disappearance? I have no clue where he was, and now he's gone again, and I don't know where he is now either. He didn't storm out this time, just didn't come home. I think my mom knows where he is, but she's asleep, and I forgot to ask. But what really gets to me is that he didn't apologize. Some women wouldn't put up with being left over and over again that way. I think I'm one of them. And I don't care if it was his relationship with my mom that caused him to walk out that night, when he did so, he walked out on me, too. And he had better regain the necessary brains to apologize for that. Sheesh.)
But obviously home is more important than all this soap-opera-ish-"home" stuff. And I'm still trying to think of boundaries as a hug and believe that you can work in relationships to say how far away the other person can get as well as how close they can come. I did send Mandy that e-mail, after all. And you know what? I got an absolutely beautiful response today- from my Mandy! - with lines like, "You own a huge piece of my heart, and I'm not planning on giving up any of the space to anyone else ever" and "You have a strength and inner spirit that is far to precious to give up on." I'm sure you're having an incredibly difficult time discerning why I love her, even when she's a goof and stays away for months on end. I have permission to write her every three minutes if I need to, and she's sorry I thought she abandoned me. Just two days ago, I was thinking, "Hmm...sent that e-mail about the lack of reply, and what was the response? A noticeable lack of one." Sometimes, it's really, really good to wait an extra month.
Or (drum roll please) an extra few months. There's a letter in my inbox and the subject line's "from Brea." My goal for the rest of the night is not to hyperventilate, but I make no promises about the extent to which I'll bounce. You may have a really, really good idea of how much this means to me...but relatively, you still have no clue. Ahhhh! I must learn to distinguish between bouncy-heart-syndrome and cardiac arrest. I so fear mixing up the two.
Love and hugs and happy bouncing-
chord
*Clay and Reuben
**just lyrically speaking, it's so awful...
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