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6:20 p.m. - 02/17/02
hold me now and let it be. shelter me/ comfort me..
I've been sitting here feeling small and slippery, talking to myself, for sometime. I thought it would make more sense for me to talk to this journal, and, perhaps any lingering readers. Though I really don't know what I have to say.

Losing weight when you're recovering from an eating disorder sucks. It honestly sucks. My instant reaction was devastation at my own sense of failure and my fear that I will further lose trust. What, for instance, will Harriet think now, seeing hard facts muttering that I am moving in the very wrong direction?

I try to keep in mind that Tammy, my very-knowledgable-very-trustworthy dietician honestly believes and planned to communicate to Harriet and Dr. R that I'm hypermetabolic, but it just doesn't put my anxiety to rest. I felt fear, then I felt relief, and that relief spawned more fear and self-berration. The last thing I want to know about myself right now is that I feel good about having lost weight. I mean, Christ; I'm past that, aren't I? I know I'm not past having an eating disorder, and I'm not past my distorted perceptions, or thinking that I weigh too much - but I honestly did believe that I was past feeling any "joy" about engaging in ED behaviors. I know the pain of them. I know where they lead and other than the happy!recovery environments, I don't want to go to those places.

I thought about it more and touched upon my own fearful, sick reaction to being underweight, and I began to wonder if perhaps I'm not so relieved that I lost weight, so much as that I thought I was gaining weight, and being told that I'd actually lost it was a slap in Ed's face. As Tammy explained, it gives me indisputable facts to throw in the face of the distortion. No matter what it tells me now, I have a basis to not believe it. I hope that's what happened; I hope that's where the joy came from. I hope I really am hypermetabolic, and that I don't go back in two weeks looking like a skeleton covered in thinning yellow skin...

Thinking it's relief at my own strength and not false ED achievements doesn't completely put me at ease, though. (Of course not. God forbid I let myself be completely at ease...) Because the disorder can still say things like, "So you lost weight. So what? That doesn't mean you're thin now; that just means you were even less thin before." Which is disgusting considering what a liar it is, but it still doesn't put me at ease, especially because it jeopardizes my own sense of integrity, not just in relationships, but with myself...*I* am the one that suffers for the lies of this illness, even the unconscious ones, and if I am restricting, if my perception of how much I'm eating is as distorted as my perception of how much I weigh, I'm the one whose going to pay for that lack of honesty.

I hate this.

I've been really tired lately. Tired and thinking too much. I feel soft and small. I'm remembering talking to Harriet about all the different ages I'm semi-stunted at, the idea that parts of me are precocious and mature, and other parts of me are hanging onto younger selves, trying to draw attention and gain healing before they move on. I'm thinking about this because I've felt very very litl for the past couple of days. It comes and goes, but for the most part I've spent the past two or three days somewhere between two and four years of age.

I don't understand how I'm not a lost cause. I don't mean to be overly dramatic, but I just feel like these parts of me, these parts that are two and four and nine, they're so *strong* - and I don't see them going away. I don't see them integrating into a happy little seventeen-year-old self...This toddler self for instance- all she wants is love and attention and affection, *constantly.* And if she doesn't get it, she's going to cry and throw tantrums and lock herself in closets with her thumb in her mouth. She's going to bury her face in the damp fur of her more cuddly stuffed animals. She's not going to retreat.

So how am I supposed to trust that she's going to heal, when there have been many years since I was that age in which she did not? I know I'm consciously working for her now, and I wasn't during that time, but it's unnerving to think that I could go to college and still curl up in balls unconsciously murmuring "mommy..." before I know what I have the thought to stop myself.

I have noticed a few things about these "younger selves" in the past few days. First of all, they come up strongly when I feel powerless. This should be obvious considering that the two-four girl was the one who was molested and the nine-year-old is the one who was locked in a closet and told she was going to be raped. So now, when I have a fight with my mom or something, and she, in her newly discovered "parental right" determines it necessary to threaten me or pull the power card, I go into a nine-year-old insolence or a two/four-year-old victimhood.

The paranoia also escalates. The fear that I'm going to be hurt, the fear that I'm going to be abandoned, and the fear that I'm going to be painfully, eternally alone grows into a reality. Friday night I practically clawed my mom's eyes out, turned into a two year old, and then when they went out that night, I spent the time looking over my shoulder, waiting for the house to be broken into. For the burglar/kidnapper/rapist who has haunted me since childhood to finally materialize and act upon my fears...

I think also, it's the two/four year old who gets so hurt when she is attacked. I look at things that have been said about me, things that I understood at the time they were said, Billy saying that I am none of the good that I seem, Zach throwing my illness and recovery in my face, and it is she who is completely floored. I mean, who would say such cruel words to a two-year-old? I don't think she understands that I am one-week-less-than seventeen.

I don't think any of us understand each other, and that's what makes it so hard to believe that we can live peacefully in one body without an all-out war. Without casualties. She's soft and sweet, doe-eyed and lovable. She doesn't want to be the one to die.

chord
who reads too many books on DID

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