Get your own
 diary at DiaryLand.com! contact me older entries newest entry

8:10 p.m. - 03/02/03
my truth, dadblastit, mine.
So I'm going with the "do *something*" approach to my all-or-nothing thinking, by nearly (but not quite) finishing my physics paper, which I hope to turn in tomorrow. Somehow, an assignment to write four pages on a two-paragraph article doesn't make sense to me. It's not even an essay; it's a report. So I've been looking into source material, and yes, I've learned far more about carbon-carbon panels in spacecraft than I knew at the beginning of this assignment, but it's getting ridiculous. Can the fourth page consist of photos? Or my bibliography?

Interesting google and msn searches listed by my stats-tracker have led me to interesting entries from my past. Oddly enough- other than the rare, execeptionally intriguing search- I'm more interested in what of me others' searches lead to than what their searches are. That's probably self-centered, but I've seen a few interesting parts of myself again lately. There's a beautiful entry between the YPI conference and Christmas 2001, where I'm destined for greatness in recovery, and feeling optimistic about life. It's funny, but I lost track of that time in my memory. I lost track of the time where I was doing well. Huge Rogers grief, YPI, and then...Tracy, right? No. It makes me feel stronger that I was alright (somewhat) for awhile. That I didn't go from a small lapse over RED (small, in terms of ed; huge, in terms of depression) into a more definitive relapse after Tracy d**d...

I don't know why; sometimes it's still hard to write that word...

There are other times I have lost track of, too. The doctor and I talked for sometime today about what Rogers did for me, and he remarked for the millionth (and hopefully the first of another million) times that the difference between what he saw in me after I discharged and what he saw from me before I was admitted is simply miraculous. It's not the type of thing that can be denied. it's the same sort of affirmation I felt reading Sarah-Dela's description of me in her profile. Chordchild is "atomgirl reincarnated. And more." Both of those statements mean a lot to me; the witnessing, the validation, the understanding that I am simultaneously more myself and entirely transformed, is such a gift. We talk sometimes, the doc and I, about what it means to love a group of people so fully ("and how could you not love someone that much? or a group of someones? there's a connection between people and those whose lives they've saved that cannot go away") and not be able to tell those I live with (or, actually, any of my family members) or the people themselves that I feel this way. To have it validated, to have him say that he can't *help* seeing how altered I am, can't *help* knowing what they did for me (and still wondering, still asking, *what exactly* they did for me), and that no one can take it away from me, means so much. It's one of those truths that I occasionally lose behind the fog and brambles of my illness, but I'm learning doesn't disappear. What's that stage when infants realize the permanence of their world- that objects don't quit existing when they're taken out of view? I think I'm developing that with (certain) ideas. Even when I can't access the truth, I can hang onto what I know the truth to be. I can hang onto having known it. I told him what I wrote about in one of the EDAW mails: how little black-or-white there is in my world anymore, and how it makes me appreciate the truly stable, secure, unchanging things. Like Rogers changed/saved/transformed/redeemed/rescued my life. Like I am better off for having been there. It's an unbending truth. The stronger my truths become (and that doesn't have to mean inflexible, it just means that perception must bend by my own terms), the less I'll have to worry- I think- about what others are telling me. I watched Pleasantville tonight for the first time since it came out, and the one part that really excited me (other than when Reese Witherspoon's character says she can't go on a date because she's studying, which completely triggered my Rory-Gilmore fantasies again) was when the mom, Betty, told her husband that she didn't want this part of her, this color, to go away. She didn't want to change back. I want to feel that way about every piece of information I learn about myself. I want to feel like I wouldn't give them up. I want to claim the paradoxes and the gray messes and the absolute truths and just fly. I want to let this take the time it takes and not feel less worthy in that.

To collapse it into one point...sexuality...could be...color. Could be something that opens up, expands, makes vivid my world. And I'm not ready for that, and I certainly don't *know* that, but it's just really beautiful to think that everything I'm struggling with now (for instance, that) could someday be like the eating disorder (which we'll pretend for the sake of this paragraph I'm not struggling with now. Oh, wait, can't do that- still have to eat dinner, damnit. Lost: my appetite. If found, please return to chordchild, care of Mary Brave, the Outskirts of Nowhere, Boonies.*)

I need to develop my Blossom** energy. It's amusing really; I've never been too fond of top-dog leadership positions (quiet leadership, ok, but outright power? not so much) and I entirely want to be in charge right now. Of nothing but my own life, which, amusingly is quite a bit more than what I've directed the past few years. The doc even reframed my, "Why can't I just be glad meds exist?" (and stop fretting about how many I take) into a healthy desire to develop independence acting out against my dependence on meds. I felt compelled to ask him, at that point, if he can frame everything I do so that it sounds like a healthy instinct. He said that if something I did were actually unhealthy that would not be ethical, but having clarified that- if the options are believe I'm anxious and need to get over it or have a need for autonomy, why not go with the latter? He makes sense that way.

So, yes. More issues of needing and wanting and not wanting to want and not believing I'm allowed to want to need or simply to need in itself. I felt good after seeing him, which made me feel bad for talking with him so often. I need to stay firm in the understanding that I'm feeling calmer and more stable (in large part) *because* I'm talking to him more often. That stability, that security, is not a sign that things have calmed down for me, or that I'm no longer facing massive gerbils from every side.

He even said so, and he's the one with the medical degree. (I'm the one with the crazy-introspective, instinctive knowledge of myself, who *will* learn to manage her own life.)

Interdependence, okie? That's the goal...

chord

*no worries, kids; I'm off to dinner now.

**I think that's a mark of the impending generation gap. When you read "Blossom"- who do you think of first- an animated, underage superhero or Mayim Bialik?

previous - next

about me - read my profile! read other Diar
yLand diaries! recommend my diary to a friend! Get
 your own fun + free diary at DiaryLand.com!