10:07 p.m. - 05/13/03
::despite the damage they will still warm to the touch::
It's not going to stop / so just give in.
Tonight's season finale of Judging Amy ended with that lonely lyric. It's been a tough day, and Judging Amy is one of only two shows that I watch with real consistency and which really manages to affect me. So when a tough day like today is topped off by an episode where 1) a foster mother tells her social worker that she can't keep her son following his brother's death because she can't go through the pain of losing this boy, too; 2) a main character dies in the last minute of the episode, entirely unexpectedlly; and 3) the character in recovery (from drug and alcohol addiction) whose recent relapse has left me fuming (it was *so nice* to have a television character in recovery. It sounds so stupid, but it meant so much) told a girl he works with that he could do it: he could throw it all away, and work a job that doesn't matter, and live with someone who could be fine with that. He could do all that ("be a so-called recovering addict who only smokes and drinks"), except that he doesn't want easy. He wants her. And then she leaves him, in the corner of the stupid hospital where they work, looking at the ceiling and realizing why you never let yourself relapse a little. Because then when something really hard hits you, you're not even at sea level. You're already underwater, and this new thing- it's just an anchor, pulling, pulling, pulling you down. Me. Pulling me down.
It's not going to stop. So just give in.
Give in? To the 50 percent of my impulses to purge what I eat? To the voice ending one-half of my meals- saying no intake is complete without bringing the food back up again? To the people around me who- despite their fight- are relapsing into behaviors that can kill them? To the grief that says there will never be a safe and perfect world again? To the guilt that says, how the hell can you graduate when she never got to walk across that stage? Give in- right- to the statistics, and the need to be at Rogers, and the questions that Dave might never answer. To the uncertainty about my future, the outright fear of it, and of myself, to the constant concern over am I eating too much, too little, too weirdly. Give in to the media, and the pressures of low self-esteem. Give into Hampshire not wanting me; give into the fear that no university ever will. Give into running interference between my parents, who even with a state line between them, can't pick up the phone to talk. Give into anger and devastation and scraping, scraping, scraping by with every ounce of strength I have since the fucking day they discharged me. Give into restricting and purging and skewed electrolytes, to bone density loss, osteoperosis, heart attack, stroke, no relationships, no support, no self-love, no identifiable *self* to begin with...Give into fucking suicide. It's not going to stop, so just give in.
It doesn't. That much is true. It doesn't ever stop. Bad times come in multiples of threes. No one sits with a list of my tragedies in hand, okaying what pain can come into my life, stating to the universe when I've had enough, when it needs to hold off or change that path entirely. No one says, "oh, no, she's already grieving an entire family; she can't grieve a death as well" and no one says, "no, that won't work; she's fighting her own eating disorder- her friends can't be sick themselves." No memo arrives by my lamp in the morning saying, "These are the TV shows you cannot watch, and the lines of this book you shouldn't read. These are the safe people to call today, and these are the radio stations that will play a distressing song or ad." I don't have that sort of watchdog, and I never will. I don't get a warning about pain, let alone an exemption from it. I think by now that's pretty obvious. Isn't it obvious? That you don't hit a quota of losses? That there isn't a fixed ratio between pain and gain? I'm not trying to squander all the joy I have by minimizing it, but my God, give me one entry to outline the pain. Ok? It's not going to stop. So I can't give in - because the only way I've ever felt safe in this world that's so painful was not during my eating disorder. I've read Atomgirl. I remember it. I felt like I was on life-support. I felt like I was dead, and miraculously waking for another day that would end in numbness - not even the emotion to cry myself to sleep. It's not going to stop, so keep at what you have to do because I'll die if I don't. I'll die if I don't. Because I love my life, even though I've never been in this much pain, and I don't always believe that I can stand it.
Don't you see why they have to get Kyle back on track? Why they have to make him call his sponsor, and not fall into a stream of binge-drinking episodes and hangovers? Don't you see why he has to make the commitment to himself he was always too afraid to make? Because I have to make it, too. And it's terrifying when everyone around you is singing- just give in. Saying, really, this is just too hard. Of course it's too hard. When did that start meaning something? Of course this is impossible. When did that start giving us a right to give up?
It's impossible to grieve in an eating disorder. Your head is so heavy and your body's so hollow that you can't possibly think. The most you can concern yourself with your heart is to see whether or not it's still beating; the idea of actually checking what it feels is out of range. And it's unnecessary because it feels pain. Always. No matter what the occasion is, no matter how much reason there is for joy. There's a thin layer of joy, a short moment of it, and then you're crashing down again, and you don't know why but you're crying and you're shaking and you can't do anything the right way. If you can't feel or worse yet you can't feel effectively (you're so stored up with pain that anything at all sets off that switch) you can't grieve. You can't do the hardest thing in the known universe, with your resources entirely depleted through some half-baked solution that works well enough to make you think the pain it's causing is what it's come to heal. You can't cry because you know what it's like to think that every single person you love is going to disappear, in an instant, so you have to get out - now - before you lose them, before that one thing you can't bear becomes reality. You can't cry because someone with a script and a paycheck and a whole other life that isn't fiction says that the solution is just to keep going, and you know with everything in you that is all you can do. You can't respond, when something in your head says, "Someday, it's going to be nine years since she's gone, and you can't possibly deal with *that*...with nine years," with, "Can I get through the night? Yes? Then I'm just going to focus on that. I'm just going to focus on not having her here tonight." You can't do that in an eating disorder. You can't do that when you're cutting. You can't do that when you're in the troughs of depression or the crests of anxiety, when you aren't talking in your therapy sessions, when you aren't letting your secrets out before they grow toxic inside of you. I have to get better for the exact reason I want to relapse: life is too hard. Life is too hard to step back into a position where I am even more frail, even more ill-equipped, against even more pain. Life is too hard to set myself up in anything but the best-possible position for the next boon and the next blow.
Dr. R said, in a voice practically crowing with sincerity, "I'm thrilled that you're stubborn." And I'm starting to understand why? Do I even see what I'm up against anymore? Do I even look at it and think, my God, how am I doing this? How have I lived for all intents and purposes alone, with the added bonus of two emotional children and their chronically ill marriage, cut off from all society, culture, and support other than phone or web, with the heartbreaking reality that the one place I loved most doesn't even know that, and certainly can't say to me, "it's ok that you claim us as home" - that a girl whose sleep I listened to for months that meant what years mean can no longer be found on Earth, and so many of those I love could follow - easily? Do I even see anymore the impossible opposition? No. I don't. Because somewhere along the line impossible started meaning, "something I haven't done yet" and it's going to stay that way. Somewhere along the line, after I realized that there were hundreds of thousands of reasons to relapse, I realized there weren't any. Realizing how many reasons I have to get sick again, I can't possibly do so. Do you know, sick people can't grieve. Sick people can't feel. Sick people can't pick themselves up off the sidewalk and dial the phone, type up an e-mail, take the right number of pills. Sick people can't hope, act, hope, act, hope, until it's time for sleep again.
I can't live if I'm not allowed to feel how much this hurts. These things that are not going to stop. I can't live if I'm not able to know exactly how terrible this is, do something to (impossibly) get through it for another hour, another day, another week - and then again. I'm in way too much pain to get sick again. Life is far too hard; pain is far too sharp.
...I told him everything and he told me that, he's "stubborn, too. Relentless even." And, "do you really think I'm going to say, 'ok, you're at your target weight, and these other issues- well, you can't get through them, so let's just call this done'? Do you really think I'm going to settle for that?" He told me that, he's glad I don't take everything as truth instantly, that I wait and feel it out and challenge it, until I know it's true for me. And now, all of a sudden, I see a lot more of his points. I need to be thrilled I'm stubborn. I need to be glad he won't settle for anything less. I need to take in that I went in there, sleep-deprived and migraine-waning, (we'll start there on Thursday), I still did what has to be done. Because the only other option isn't one.
chord
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