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7:00 p.m. - 07/30/03
never could I leave you. at all.
I'm scared of my own thoughts. I'm scared of frightening myself or anyone else by voicing them. I know that I've thought worse and shared worse and survived worse. I've come out of times like this into wonderful life, again and again and again, but I'm afraid if I go into what I feel now here...no one will trust me to do it again. To make it through again. This is no life. Sleeping to keep myself from acting on destructive urges. To keep myself from thinking. And on top of all of it, I don't know what's wrong.

Tomorrow, I see the doctor and what do I say? When he asks me how I'm doing, how things have been? When he asks what it was I didn't bring up last week? I've been rereading journal entries and there are more unbroached topics than I can even remember, but I don't know where they begin let alone how to end them, and I don't know how to determine which one is important and squeeze it into a session. It seems like this has happened before - a million times maybe...so why am I scared like it's the first time ever?

Before I called Rogers today, when I didn't know how it would go, I told myself that the important thing was not the phone call itself. It didn't matter if it went wonderfully, horribly, or not at all, so long as I made contact because the point is to be in a pattern of making contact - and two calls is much closer to a pattern than one. I got just what I wanted; I talked to Steph, and it didn't go badly the way it sometimes does - when we focus too much on what's happening and too little on how much I miss them. It was good. I heard the voice of someone I haven't spoken to in months, someone who I used to greet nearly every morning, someone with whom I shared laughs. It was exactly what I wanted. So why do I feel like I'm crumbling, still? Faster even? It's like I'm breaking apart at an ever-increasing speed; I can't counter it, and I can't find the source of the break. I don't want to be ruins. I can't stand to be crumbs, not now, not when I've come so close... I've come close to something; I know it. How could I have been through these past almost-two-years and not be approaching something wonderful? All that progress, all the wonder I've already found... I can't lose it now. So why won't my head shut up? It's stupid thoughts. It's refusal to understand that cuts are just cuts and do no good, that refusing to eat is not the best way to communicate to your mother that you feel like shit - it isn't even a good way to guilt-trip her, if I really need to do that. So shut up, head. Shut up, SCASID, and tell me what is really wrong. That's what I want to know. Not all your stupid, cover-up lies. Not your scams. I want the truth. It can't be harder than anything I've taken up until now, and it can't be so worth avoiding to warrant dying this young, leaving this much love behind, and so much grief in hearts I'd rather hold. I want to know the truth. How else am I going to find my footing again, land back on solid ground?

Here are the minuscule, insubstantial facts as I know them. For a significant amount of time, I have not been able to "get past" loving Rogers even a tiny bit. I've alternated between trying to let it go (a tactic in which I felt/failed miserably) and swearing to hold onto it. A few months ago, Sara went back to Rogers. I was hugely relieved, on the one hand, because I knew she was struggling and I can't stand the possibility of losing her. I also felt rather empty, not jealous in the traditional sense, but just so...unfairly left to my own devices. I wanted to go back, too; I wanted to have that support, too; I wanted to be there again no matter what. (Except that I wouldn't get sick to go. Except that I had to stay well.) Talking with Sara helped me feel reconnected to the people at Rogers (I knew they hadn't forgotten me because of her), and it prompted me to get in touch with them directly. Today I made the second phone call and it felt...so normal. Almost like I could have called any friend and talked to them, and there would have been no difference. But see, that's not how Rogers is supposed to feel; Rogers is supposed to feel life-changing, supremely nourishing, sacred and moving and brimming with wonder. And as the hours have gone on, and the depression of the past few days has returned and heightened, I'm torn between thoughts. What if my consistent reconnection with Rogers is really a way of minimizing the stakes so I can move past it more? What if I forget what they mean to me? What if that's not true, and they do mean everything, and they are larger-than-life incredible, but not for me, not ever again? Now, we've gotten close to the point where Sara's leaving, and I'm thinking all the time about Rogers. I'm thinking about when I went in, and when I left, and everything that's happened since, and I don't know what to do with it. This is the most stupid bunch of crap in the entire universe. I finally found my family and they're no one I can live with. I finally found my home and it's nowhere I can stay.

I don't want to go through it again in my head. I don't want to tell you the story of how I went in, and how I changed, and how I left, and how I've stayed out - I don't want to! I just want to kick and scream and sob and pass out. I just want someone to understand the outright agony of this. The thing I hate most - this fucked up murderer disease - is hugely present in the only place I've ever felt safe. I can't go home without interacting everyday with the disease I hate more than anything. If I had stayed sick, I'd be dead. I keep telling myself that, but it doesn't stick. I can't help thinking, if I hadn't gotten better, I could still be there. If I hadn't gotten better, the presence of the illness wouldn't throw me. It only makes you crazy when you're getting better. It's only horrible and sick and boring when you've gotten far enough outside of it to see other things. Well, I'm far enough outside, and none of the things I can see are as good as what I had.

Or thought I had. What if I'm wrong? What if I'm just obsessed and it's really nothing special? That's not possible, right? I mean...Dr. R says they couldn't have brought on real healing if what they said and did wasn't genuine, and what they said and did seemed wonderful. I wouldn't have gone from zombie to superheroine in under three months if they weren't for real. But everything's all messed up in my head, and I can't find my way out. I can't go back, and I certainly can't go forward. Not until the house sells...and then? I don't want to be in an apartment with my mom. I don't want to learn how to lead a normal life. I don't want any life that isn't them.

They thought I was crazy when I came back saying that. The stupid outpatient program...they thought I was nuts. And I just kept on, not wanting anything to do with any of them, hating them all for trying to make me live a life here, when it was so obvious I'd left my life behind, back where I formed it, back where I buried my heart, in tact for the first time.

I want to go home and I can't because home is rotted away by eating disorders. Why does this disease have to steal everything from me? It takes my friends, it takes my safety, it tried to take my life, and now it's going to take my home. My distance from them isn't the fault of my recovery. It's the fault of eating disorders. It's the fault of that stupid awful illness gnawing away at the one safe place I ever knew.

I'm tired of this. I'm going to lose my mind if I have to say these same thoughts one more time.

And what if they're right? Are you happy, Dave? You've thoroughly confused me. You've thoroughly shaken my reality. It wasn't enough to open up a whole new view of what happened with Trace - you had to go and screw with my reality, too. Why? Why is this happening? This was my one strong thing, the one unshakeable fact that got me through the days. Even Steph said it- just this morning: "Rogers is still Rogers." Rogers is Rogers, just as I knew it to be. But I'm lucky not to be there? No. That's not true. That's the stupid illness getting in the way of what really mattered about it. That's the stupid hospital layer that they have such trouble seeing past.

Do you really think I would grieve for years over weigh-ins and schedules and doctors appointments and supervised meals? Do you really think that's what I miss?

And what about the other side of it. What if I really do want to move on, and all this other stuff is just bullshit because I'm afraid to do so? I don't, I don't, I don't want to move on. But if I don't, why am I questioning it - my one steady, pure-good thing? I could question and my faith could be stronger for having done so; it could prove itself worthy for the millionth time. But if it's going to break under the weight of my doubts, I don't want to have them. What is this "moving on"? Where did that come from? Is it discharge? Is it that phrase she used, the one they always use, "out in the [real] world", "living your life"... I remember this fear. I remember this confusion. This is the fear and confusion I felt when he told me the date was probably set...November 10th. This is the desperation and the confusion and the inability to act, to choose a direction - any direction - and move that I felt in the couple of weeks before I left. Before they made me leave. Begging to be adopted, begging for a little longer, begging them to understand I couldn't go. Not yet. You understood everything. You were supposed to understand that. You were not supposed to fail me at the very end.

Did I really just type that? Did I really just suggest that you...

It's not that it undid any of the good you gave to me. Look at me. I'm in horrendous pain, and I'm sitting here typing. I got better amazingly, in a way that doesn't even make sense to me. The day I set foot on your property, I quit purging. I've never slipped. Into old schemes of thinking, into restricting, but I've always come back out of it, and I've never purged - not once. But I don't know. Did I do it for the right reasons? It isn't hard to find the snag in yesterday's logic: it's not just that I want to live in your image; it's that I want you to love me. If I recover well enough, maybe I'll be granted you again. And who are you, Rogers? Who the hell are you? You're a bunch of fallible people who don't quite understand; why is it that added together you're better than perfect...you're everything? Why is it that people can leave- can go work other places, can up and go- and they're still Rogers? Why is it that I don't just miss Stacy, Brea, Sara, Karen; I miss you. I miss the overall blanket that held everyone. Including me. I miss home. That particular home with those particular people.

And you've never even said you love me, Rogers. Not once.

Sara's discharging soon, and I am, too, I guess. It's coming up on the time of year when I went in, and not long after we'll come upon the time of year when I left. And I don't know how to handle the memories and the doubts and the questions and the phone calls that go just as planned but leave me bearing questions I don't want to think. Like, did I just dream you better than you were? Did you grow more wonderful in retrospect?

I knew when I was there I wanted to stay. I said it over and over again, that it was the only place I wanted to be, the best place I had ever been. I recognized it as soon as I was well enough to see clearly, and I hung onto it with all my might. I went in dying and came out living more than most people who have never had their lives threatened that way. So tell me it isn't true. Tell me I made it up. Tell me it's not sacred ground, when I'm a walking, talking, living breathing, doubting, calling miracle?

Sometimes I feel like I could lose my mind debating this, and truth be told, it's still the lesser loss.

chord

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