1:00 p.m. - 07/19/02
apples. tomatoes. rudolph's nose.
I'm completely proud of myself because I managed to fix my older entries page despite the fact that the code was all messed up, and I had to finish it from memory, instead of just by viewing the source. I think it's a little different than I had it before diaryland decided to kill the archive pages (diaryland isn't infallible! oh, no!) but at least all my entries are accounted for again.
My eating sucks lately, and I'm thinking I might want to pay real attention to my meal plan so that I don't completely freak out in NY. I haven't done anything eating-disordered, persay; I've just been eating weirdly, and I'm scared that if I keep that up, I'll freak out and end up doing something eating-disordered. I mean, it's perfectly normal to eat loads of candy when there happen to be loads of candy around and I happen to never leave the house, but I still need to find a way to feel safe doing so. And only eat candy because I want to eat candy, not because, you know, I don't want to eat breakfast.
So it seems I'm speaking English again, which is good, considering the last entry confuses even my head. There's so much to say about yesterday, that I don't even want to write it down- that I don't even know where to begin. It has been a long time since I've been able to so clearly remember how my life used to be as I did yesterday. I accessed (without wanting to) the part of myself that is so injured and withdrawn and buried; the part I called "Seven" - the part who wrote the majority of atomgirl. I fell into what I would, on most days, call depression but is really more being who I was when my life was really awful, the part so young and broken, who doesn't know she has a voice box. I watched a movie on IFC called "The Quiet Room" and I swear I must have looked seven watching it, curled up in a ball, twisting my hair, unable to speak. When the movie ended, I couldn't separate myself from the (mostly) mute character to speak to my mom. I finally managed some monosyllables, then escaped upstairs to lie in bed, cry a handful of tears, and notice that I was shaking from what it means to be that vulnerable and have people around. In that place, in that self, people are so magnified: their noise, their presence, their power overwhelms. I felt like nothing would ever be ok again; I felt like it was a year ago, and the packing I was doing was to go to RED; I felt like it was eight months ago, and I was home from RED, aware that I would never again feel anything like love. Somewhere in the midst of preparing for a trip again, and the fact that every day the weather gets closer to late-August when I left, threw me into memories too strong to ignore. I wrote that entry, I e-mailed the doctor (because I had no voice, and how can you call someone when you can't speak?), and I realized that once again I was who I was a year ago: I was sitting waiting, desperate for words that might take days to come.
The trouble with e-mail is you are waiting for an answer from the moment you hit send, but for all you know, they might not even open the message for a month.
But I'm not who I was a year, or ten years ago. Because after I'd been lying in my bed for awhile, I started to think about what I could do, how I could seek comfort, how I could reach out and feel better than I did. I started to wish that my mom would come upstairs to check on me, which she only seems to do when I don't want it. I realized that if she came up, and if she asked did I want her to call the doctor, I would nod. I would want it. And I was even starting to know what I would say. I put my hands over my face and pushed the quiet back inside and then I took a deep breath, and it was audible, and I realized that I had the power to make noise just like the rest of them. So I went downstairs, and Mom wasn't in the kitchen/ living room which upset me because she couldn't see me coming down and she couldn't ask how I was. I waited and waited for her to ask, and when she didn't, I knew I was going to have to initiate it myself. I knew I could't depend on her to read my mind. I couldn't be who I was before, no matter how much the pain drug me in.
I went over to her and I asked if she could call the doctor, and she said, "Not again!" sympathetically, thinking that I was (physically) unwell, and I said, "No - the other doctor" and she picked up the phone. It was a few hours before he called back, and I kept thinking about how sorry I was for bothering him, how I didn't have anything to say or any voice to say it was, and how bad I was for making him call. How many times have I done this? How bad I was...
But he did call, and I talked better in the beginning than I ever seem to in those circumstances, better than I usually do in his office, even when I'm ok. He said my mom had told him I was struggling but said it didn't have anything to do with NY, and I said I didn't know that it didn't have *anything* to do with NY, but it wasn't simply dread about the trip. I postulated that the feelings and thoughts I was struggling with probably would not have come up without the trip approaching, but it was a great deal more than fear about the trip, and so of course, he asked me what it was.
I froze. The words that I'd come up with, listening to that part of myself and asking the intellect to translate into speech didn't want to come. So I said *that* - I told him the words were hard to find. And then, slowly, in pieces slowly, it started to come.
I told him that there was this part of me, and that she was really young and injured, and she almost never felt safe or happy- and she never had. I told him that this part felt hollowed and broken and scared, and the only time that wasn't true was when someone was taking care of her, and since no one ever took care of her, the only (extended period of) time she didn't feel hollowed and broken and scared was at Rogers, and that since Rogers ended, since I was sent home because- having been taken care of- she was happy and seeing that happiness they thought she was done, I was convinced she would never be ok again. Her being ok was contingent on people taking care of her, and only people who consistently took care of her were professionals, the people at RED, him. I told him that even though this part felt safe sometimes with him and felt like she could talk and be ok, she was thinking now that he would not stay in her life. At one point or another, he would leave because he was doing a job and jobs end, and since the only reason she was ok (at all) was because he was doing the job, she would not be "healed" when he quit, she would be sick again. I told him that I was in pain right now because the part of me that hurt most could never be healed because she needed to be taken care of, and as soon as she was, people would leave and she would be alone again.
And finally, finally, for the first time ever, I talked to him about what it was really like to leave RED.
I remember those days. I don't remember much of my time there, the way you don't remember many specific incidences during past school years; it fades into routines, and only the extraordinary stays preserved. But I remember the last week: when I cried non-stop, when I walked out of the dining room and ran into the woods because I had to know (I *had to know*) that they would still come after me even though in a week, I wouldn't be their business anymore. I remember my last check-in, bawling and saying that I wanted to just stop time, how Heather came into the center of the room and put her arm around me. I remember weeks earlier, reading my relapse nightmare which specifically said, I don't care if you call this a fabricated world; I live half my life in fiction and I'd rather be here than anywhere else, even if it isn't real. I remember the day I glanced down at a note in the office that Dave was scribbling and saw my discharge date. I remember starting to shake, saying to him, "That's just - tentative- right? That doesn't have to be real?" and he said that it was tentative, yes, but it was also very likely. And I cried.
I spent the last two weeks crying. I went into the office and cried because I would never see it again, and Stacy took illegal Poloraids of it for me, and Leann came in and hugged me- she said she'd adopt me. Sara, (tres), the manager, came upstairs and held me, and I felt like this was home- the place not just the floor, and I wanted to jump off a bridge because there was no way to explain to them that as upset as I was to be going 'home', I was more upset to be leaving it.
I told him how when I came home, no one understood. The only person who even sort of understood was Tammy, and she and I didn't really talk about it. I told him how my parents were so hurt that I would rather be in a hospital than with them, and everyone else was just "yeay! you're home!" and no one understood that I had *been home* for the first time in my life, and now I never could be again. I told him about the two weeks before NY, when I slept sixteen hours a day and spent the other eight lying in bed, thinking about how much benedryl I would have to take to sleep whole days away. I told him that I'd thought about running away.
It all came pouring out. How I go on and on about them being perfect because they are, but also because they made this Huge Mistake and let me leave, and I can't deal with the pain of that when there's no one to tell, so I pretend they're perfect to make the problem disappear. I never say how angry I am at them for making me leave, how I feel like they tricked me, how I have to doubt myself now- how I have to think that Seven or whoever she is can never get enough love because in the perfect place as soon as it was gone, she was hurt again. I have to think her healing is conditional, that it is not a successful process. There is not treatment she can undergo; there's just a daily regiment of meds. I told him all of this, and he said to me, "I think your discharge was premature."
I cried.
He said that he really believed there would have come a time when I would have been ready to go, and the fact that I hadn't been able to *get to* that time for whatever reason ("I had to go to New York") seemed to have been actually traumatic. He talked about how the environment I had there was something I had never had, and likely, something my parents had never had and therefore couldn't give to me.("Which is hard when they're basically the only people in my life.") He said that he thought it was awful that I'd been told that world was fabricated because I had just ended up feeling like the good things I'd experienced weren't real and couldn't be accessed in reality. I told him how happy I was there, and they had told me they I had to go into the real world, had to go to NY, had to be a writer, use my gifts. How it made me hate the writer part of me again because writing gave me 1/100 the peacefulness of being among them. That it just made me doubt the realness of everything I'd been through. They couldn't really care, they couldn't really love me, they couldn't really have meant what they said. He told me that it's impossible - impossible - for someone to give you that kind of healing and transformation without it being completely true. You can't be healed with lies, with pretend caring, and that made so much sense to me, I was feeling "yes" before I could even say it. The pain of leaving them, of being forced to leave them, is very real, but also - they had to mean it. Because I've never been able to affect someone's mood without absolute integrity, and surely that's the same for them.
He said that it wasn't a fabricated world, it really wasn't. He said that it was a world created to give people something they hadn't had in life, and to teach them skills for reality, and I'd been cheated in a way because my feelings about all of this kept me from using those skills in the Real World. (if those skills only worked in a fake world, I won't apply them to here. for instance, I can't get out of my neediness because people here can't love me if I love myself; that only works at RED.) He said that no one would say breast feeding a child was fake sustenence just because that wasn't the way they'd be expected to eat in the future. And I thought about that, about how I'd been an infant they'd help nurse, and just because things are different in a hospital didn't make them less real.
He said a lot of amazing things that I hadn't thought of, and things that didn't mean as much until someone else said them out loud. But mostly, the real change was that I was talking. I was talking about *pain with red* which I guess this journal shows better than anything, is not something I discuss. I felt such a need to defend my love for them when I got home, to hide it so no one would challenge it or take it away, that I couldn't let it leak out that they hurt me when they wouldn't let me stay. When they told me to go to New York and be a playwright instead of staying with them and being Mary. When they told me to go write books and be famous rather than come back and work for them. It was like the pressure of those emotions had been bottled in me, building up, and I thought if I let it out my whole world would explode, but really it just leaked out slowly, fizzed, and I felt relieved. Like I could breathe again. It's been so long.
Premature. Trauma. I couldn't believe he used words like that. I couldn't believe that he really thought my needs hadn't been met, that staying had been a rational need, not the illegitimate desire of a girl who would always want more than her share. I couldn't believe that maybe, if I'd stayed long enough, I would have been ready to go. I wanted to say, Really? Promise?...I wanted to ask if I could go back for awhile, travel in time and make myself happy again. I wanted to know that I could fix this even though I don't know how to work a tesseract.
He said that it was like sitting down at the table to eat and being asked to leave before I was full. That I would always be hungry that way. I thought about the people Geneen Roth works with, how they always say they can't eat out their hunger because they'll eat the entire supermarket, and that's just how I feel about my need for people and comfort and love. But if it's like food, then really, there will come a time when I am full. There would have come a time when I felt I was getting enough love.
There's a graffiti exercise in Appetites where she wrote, "In the cafeteria of life..." on a chalkboard and during the day someone scribbled, "I will never have a big enough tray." I thought about what my own response would be, thought about the cafeteria, the tray, the food selection. It was, "In the cafeteria of life - I will always sit alone." I'm so sure that there everyone will leave or that no one will come. And the truth is, I'm not just scared that there is no place out there like RED. I'm scared that even RED was not so perfect as it seemed. I'm scared that even RED went away, even RED "left"...and when I can, I want to write them about that. I think they should know, that if they teach a girl to trust her judgment, they should trust it as well. That of course we all need pushes, but when a girl is plastered to you, her hands cuffered around your neck her lags wrapped at your waist, you do not cut her away, and ship her off. You don't. leave. me. You don't.
I said I wanted to deal with grief, well, here it is. I didn't even mean this grief, and I certainly didn't mean this honestly, but as usual, the things I expect to come up, are a bare fraction of the things that actually do...
I miss them so much. But I feel more alive today. Knowing I'll be given love/ I'll be taken care of... Knowing that it should not have happened so violently as it did.
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chord
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