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11:05 p.m. - 01/03/03
* i am not from your tribe. {!}
Scale explody is one of the reasons I am feeeling fuzzy this morning. The post-holiday positivity at sf is so liberating. There's a balance between "life sucks" and "woot! life!" again, and that makes my time there much more lovely. I even got to make a list this morning of the parts of me that so cannot be weighed on a scale, which is a nice thing to do in the morning, when your head has a tendency to cave in mornings. Hmm, maybe I should start a morning list tradition. I managed to do regular graffirmations for a long time. Goodness knows I'm always keen on another way to procrastinate in the morning. (My correspondence course says procrastination shows a lack of motivation. I think procrastination is a chosen course of action, and a decent component of my studying technique. So, mwa.)

The ed-part of my recovery has not been too horrible lately, following some minor body image issues during the holidays and some huge image issues during the shame streak earlier this week. I do have some worry about a surfacing ..."nostalgia"?...for the eating disorder. Like I find myself missing it a little. I was thinking this morning about when I started eating broccoli instead of saltines because it was more warm food for less calories, and I thought that was so great, and then I just started feeling sad thinking about when I had all that quirky power. I was thinking about the way my friends used to laugh at me because I would just sit there and nibble, and all of the shame and the pain and the fact that their attention scared me and didn't feel good, all of that just disappears. I'm not remembering it. I'm not remembering that I was fucking eating brocolli and saltines (if I was eating at all), and I didn't choose to purge, I fucking couldn't stop, and all that shit. It's just gone, and I can't remember, and I guess part of me doesn't want to. Part of me doesn't want to go look at atomgirl and see what it was really like. Because I still know. And I'm just sad and scared and don't want it to be true. I think I don't feel special enough right now. I'm forgetting that who I am and the real power I have are way better than who I made myself out to be and the false control of the ed. Maybe seeing my friends Sunday (I think that's on) will help. Maybe being me with people who used to know "her" will help. Maybe seeing that they like me cute and dorky and funny and fed will help. Maybe I just need to get it straight in my head and not rely on me. It's starvation and vomit and there's nothing cute or fun or happy about it. Right. The no-bullshitting approach.

The truth is I want people, not my ed. The ed will push people away and shame me and keep me from feeling all the love I do have, and therefore I will be more lonely. Ed is a lousy friend. I know this. I will continue to know this. I'm going to start calling him all those mean names I used to call myself. And I'm going to start calling him "her" occasionally. Because girls have their own ways of being nasty, and boys have their own ways of being good. I need to start recognizing that.

I'm thinking about college, too. I tried to apply for NYU's Gallatin program, but I'm kind of caught because I don't have an ACT score. (I ethically oppose standardized testing, which is not why I didn't take it- I didn't take it because I was at Rogers and I came home with a honking anxiety disorder still somewhat in tact- but I would still like to apply.) I was thinking that maybe I can prepare for the ACT and apply for a few other schools for the *spring* semester, (2004) understanding that there's still the chance I'll be accepted to Hampshire for the fall, I'll be less crazy if I don't rush everything again, and not going to college until the Spring does not have to mean not leaving D!@#$%^ in the fall. I mean, I have many options outside of college, and it's good to know that. It could be very good for me, actually, to partition the challenges and learn how to live on my own before fighting the college stress. Then again, dorm life is less of an alone-life, and that could make things easier. I'm not going to pretend I'm in control of what will happen. I'm just saying that no matter what I will have choices. I have choices. As my mommy says, (in her better moments), "All manner of things are well."

And sometimes, change is for the better:


Take the What Should Your New Year's Resolution Be? Quiz


...

I'm pleased to find that I'm no longer supposed to be homeless. Obviously. I was feeling really cranky again yesterday, and I was snapping and schtuff, less a porcupine* and more a lobster or a crab or- a snapping turtle! yes, which I never really enjoy. I didn't really know what was wrong. I was feeling unmotivated and really down, like all I wanted to do was sleep, but when I lay down, I kept jumping out of my skin at every noise. Circumstancially depressed, perhaps, and definitely tense.

My mom had a class to teach yesterday evening, so after she left, I stripped off my sweater (which was making me feel uncool-ly hidden, like I was in middle school or something) and started talking to the Imaginary Doc. I was obviously very pissed and very sad, and all I could explain was that I was, very simply, going crazy. I had dialogued with myself earlier, and I knew that the shame I was experiencing had to do, at least in part, with invalidating the needs I didn't feel I could meet. i.e.- I'm craving safety more than anything in the world, and safety would mean all these things, and some of "these things" I can't see happening, so rather than feel that, I'll decide I don't deserve such things. Not deserving means not feeling their absence, means not feeling sad or unfulfilled or angry. Or at least, stuffing that down-deep. (Oh, Mary. Stuffing is for turkeys not for feelings!)

Yes, I'm in a dorky-recovery mood. Sue me. Sf is happy today, and I saw pictures of a scale autopsy. I so want to participate in one. Except I want sledgehammers and hard brick walls and such. I want baseball cleats or combat boots. I want baseball bats. Definitive violence. Yeay, violence. (The preceding statement was meant only in context of stupid machines that attempt to quantify personhood via mass x the pull of gravity.)

Anyway. I had felt a little better after the dialoguing, as in I didn't feel shamed, but the craziness I'd been avoiding started to escalate. After a little screaming and a little tearring (I'm so sick of saying crying) I realized the source of my insanity. You can probably guess. It's all over this journal. It's written like an expletive. It's a place where they send social deviants. It is, in a word, D!@#$%^. D!@#$%^ is gradually stealing my mind. D!@#$%^ is one of my many mortal enemies. D!@#$%^ is pure evil formed into a rural hideaway. I must escape the refuge. I must escape now.

I told the Imaginary Doc that people say to me, "how have you managed to survive that place? let alone get better there?" And the absolute truth is I Don't Know. Silje says you can get better in a paper bag once you've gotten a taste of it, once you've gotten the support you need, and maybe that's an explanation. But this place is bad for me. It isn't just that I'm not helped by my surroundings; I'm *hurt* by them. You do not exile a social creature to a place like this. You do not put an alive-for-the-first-time-ever adolescent under house arrest. And you certainly do not put someone with social anxiety disorder in a place where they *never* experience social exchanges. I see my mom (most days), my dad (two days a week), the doc (once a week), and the teacher (generally three days.) Boo. This doesn't help me. This is painful.

And you know what? The fact that I have social anxiety disorder does not excuse it. It makes it worse. Excuse me for the bias, but I think it's worse to put someone recovering from an eating disorder in a house with no food for a day, than it is to put a healthy person there. A healthy person will probably be pissed, cranky, tired, sick. An eating disordered person will risk total relapse. My parents justify making me live here with the fact that I "probably wouldn't" utilize the opportunities of a city (or hell, town) life anyway. Which is shit. That is basically telling someone with an eating disorder we're not buying food because you won't eat it. For some reason, all of this makes better sense to me (as being evil) when I talk about it in terms of a more concrete disorder. I guess I don't yet realize that socialization is as valid a need as food. But, hey, I realize food is valid! Go, me.

And I would utilize the opportunities. If I lived in a place where I could hop a bus or a train and go to a library, a concert, a coffehouse, a store, a class- I would do so. Yes, I would be terrified. Yes, I would cry some tears, shake some tremors, hug some animals. Yes, I would learn to do it. I would teach myself, if I lived in a place where I could teach myself.

The fact that I'm 17 (I just wrote 27, ha- I'm so many silly ages)- I've decided- is also not an excuse for their behavior. I've decided I'm done letting people tell me that everyone suffers in high school, that living at home is always hard, that everyone stagnates a little prior to receiving their independence, blah blah blah. I've been told that my entire life, and I realize now- they're lying when they say it'll quit being the case when I turn 18 and/or when I leave home. They're lying because "they" will continue to tell me that, if I let them, for my entire life. People can commiserate on any age bracket, damnit. And they will. I can spend my life being told why it sucks to be my age and why I have to endure it, or I can just *stop* enduring it. I can stop putting up with the bullshit.

I'm not exactly sure *how* to change it, but I know that I don't have to believe what I've been told.

I don't think I have to endure anything else. I think I've reached my quota for suffering. Which is not to say that I won't go through anything else horrible, that I am not going through horrible things right now, or that I think I am somehow beyond going through them. I think, very simply, that I am not meant to suffer. I am not letting them convince me that suffering is normal. I watch that in my culture, I watch that in my family, I watch that in my friends. That's part of why I want to know more people who are deep and real and not going through hell. I know very few, and it's not that I love my friends any less for their struggles (do I love myself less? come on, now- I am who I am because I've struggled/fought)...I just need a point of reference. I need a less lopsided world.

Suffering is not normal, and D!@#$%^ is suffering. With my shame quieting down a bit, I'm realizing- people like me. The truth (the honest truth) is that people have always liked me. I can count on one hand the people who have developed an outright vendetta against me, and over half of them were people who used to love me and got pissed when I cut things off to recover. Over half of them are online-boys and the other two are teachers, who probably didn't hate me (except maybe my geometry teacher who has no heart anyway, so we'll forgive her. It must be hard not to have a heart.) That's mean, but I need to say it. I'm not going to let that handful of people convince me it's not ok to be mean. It's ok to be angry, to be violent, to be an animal sometimes. It's ok to have needs, too. To instinctively protect myself, be it through stingers or through claws.

I think I'm going to let there be a difference between being violent and acting violent. I think I'm allowed to have less-than-merciful thoughts, understanding that I would never choose to act on them. It's not that I'm not motivated to be violent, sometimes. It's that the thought of *actually* hurting someone, even in my most intense feelings, disgusts me.

I don't know if this is making any sense. And I've "tucked a tangent" into my original thought which was people like me. People *like* me. I know this because I have never in my entire life been without friends. Despite my shyness, I've never had trouble making friends. I've always gotten on really well with people, even those I wasn't actually "friends" with...I remember so few people that I could not get along with, and so few people who couldn't get along with me. And most of the time, it's better than get along. Most of the time, I like/love and am liked/loved in return.

This is the first time in my life I've ever been without people to cuddle and joke and have deep conversations with. And that's hell. Yes, I'm shy, and I'm an introvert, and I don't agree with the high school social structure- none of this means I don't need daily interaction with good people. I need a balance between time for me (alone) and time-for-me (with others.) And you know what else I've realized? That *isn't normal* in my family. My mom's social life is nearly confined to work. All the friends she's made through have happened through work. We have people over, often because she's teaching a class. She makes phone calls to friends and they talk business. My dad is positively miserable in Narnia. He sits in a chair and watches television every night. Then he comes home to D!@#$%^ and does the same. My oldest brother does most of his socializing online, which I suppose is fine, but he chose to live where he does, and he spends the nights watching movies by himself. My other siblings are better, I guess...Joe is most likely the most social creature of all of us, and so the time he's spending on his own now seems more like a choice to me, though I still think it must suck not to know people where he is. But he's new there also, and it's not his pattern, so overlook Joe momentarily. John really wants it, but he, too, has kind of learned not to have it; he typically spends his time with one really good friend, who has less time now that he's a music major. And Sarah, God bless her, lives in the city and goes out all the time, and would completely be the exception to this theory except that she kind of cancels herself out. Just because I'm so used to modeling myself after her (and I so don't want to now) that I need there to be *another* example that says, "You can do this, and you can do it in *your* way. You don't have to do it Sarah's way." But yes, isolation seems to be patterned in my family. Which is why my last name is Brave now. Circle, square, circle, square, circle, square, trapezoid. I will change the pattern; I will break the mold.

So, I don't know what I'm doing yet, but I'm happier realizing the craziness is valid, isn't me. I think it's been playing into my anxiety, too; I've been so very anxious about school starting again. I think it's anxious about getting back into that world, that world without the holiday get-togethers, where I interact so rarely, if it isn't a smile at a stranger, or "no, thanks, I'm fine" chat with a store employee. God, I need a life. I deserve a life.

Out of my baggy sweaters today and back into myself. Hallelujah.

happy old year
chord

*porcupines are my angry totem. because I think they're terribly cute, but obviously no one should get too close. I tell myself I'm "feeling a bit bristly" and that's ok. I actually have a doodle of a porcupine and a small grenade with that caption. and it makes me happy. in an "I'm angry" sort of way.

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