10:50 p.m. - 05/06/03
:some are being born:
It's late enough now that I could sleep, but I feel like it's important to write tonight; maybe I'll actually sleep until morning if I let a few thoughts bunk somewhere other than my mind. Earlier, I was thinking that what I needed was someone to braid my hair, to just sit with me and not talk much, and pull my hair back into two tight braids by way of two gentle hands, that maybe grazed and loosened my shoulders now and then as well. I'm worn out, honestly. Too worn out for banter or small talk or even my favorite introspective pastimes. I'm tired, and my solution to that is to stay up a little longer, worsening the physical fatigue while perhaps relieving the mental and emotional. It would be nice to have that gentle-handed person, though.
The session today went well. It's difficult for me to say that. I'm so blessed with who I'm seeing and the progress that I've made that I occasionally (generally) want to believe that therapy is all warm and fuzzy (all the time), which tends to keep me from seeing accurately what hard work it is. Some days it doesn't feel good, and I'm getting better at recognizing when that's a sign of hard times/ hard work and when it's a sign of miscommunication, but I still pout occasionally when I don't walk out feeling like a personified teddy bear with butterflies flittering about me. It's amazing actually, how many warm-fuzzy sessions I do have, but maybe that has something to do with me. I like psychology, self-improvement, introspection, my doctor, geeky jokes, and so forth. I guess it is "fun" for me often, or at the least, refreshing. I tend to feel revitalized, rather than beaten. Though occasionally, I'm so physically drained (and I do me *drained* - through the tear ducts) that all I can think about for hours afterward is water and sleep. Those days make me think sometimes of Judie. I think of going to see her in the mornings, leaving school for it, and then lobbying with my dad so I could just go home afterward. It was so impossible for me to consider making it through school with the combination of low energy and vulnerability I had afterward, at that point. A lot of what's going on right now is actually reminding me of earlier times in my illness, a phenomenon both frightful and comforting. I'm comforted because I realize that I've gone through some of these tunnels before, gotten through them, been better off for the questions faced, can probably reread journal entries on the very topics I'm stressing about, et cetera. It's frightful because the illness is traumatic. Flashes of memory of that life can melt bone. They liquify my insides, and make my organs cold. So when I feel like I can't contain my own reality, like I have to somehow push it out, and my fingers start to graze my lips ever so lightly, I get scared. I remember. But there are other forms of purging now to replace the one I've stopped. Forms that bring me new life, instead of risking that I have. Forms that construct stepping stones instead of walls. Yesterday, I cried so hard and as I did, I just started pushing air out - exhaling vigilantly. Somewhere between a hiss and a cough. It was like a vocal exercise, like punching the air with my breath, but added to the tears, it did some good. It's what I need, you know, a way to let things out. Eventually, it came close to prayer, something that has (again) been missing from my life. (The store of faith in my pantry's rather low.) I realized: I talk with myself, and other people, and my travel-sized* versions of other people so often, that in my prayer, it's almost less effective to use words. And what I needed yesterday, really and truly, was to release energy. I said yesterday that I need to know the world is not my burden, but I had a world of energy on my shoulders and filling up my lungs. I was drowning in that burden and to push it out, give it back to the universe that can hold onto all of it and at the same time onto me, honestly did help. Of course, by this morning, a lot of it had climbed back in, and in the meantime, questions about what prayer means to me at this point, and what spirituality I do have announced their surprise visit with a knock on my door. That's not all bad, though. I get tastes of what I've believed in the past- the comfort of not being on my own, the faith in how Tracy is - that make me want to bring that aspect back up in my life. It just always tends to come with impeccable timing. It's a light in a dark tunnel, but it's a complicated light.
So what is going on? It's a little hard to articulate, for me, because nothing is really *happening.* "Things are coming up" rather than "things are going on." I've been feeling really helpless, really insecure, compelled to caretake, terrified that I can't solve things, overwhelmed with the weight of needing to... I've been having a harder time with food, and the grief-meter has issued more warnings than the weather channel (which, with a stream of tornadoes and several severe thunderstorms over the past thirty hours, is saying something) - has been levelling pretty off the charts. I'm homesick. I'm thrown between my need to keep them real and simple, to stay grounded in how human that place was/is - the same way I need Tracy to simply be Tracy, not what happened to her, not what she stands for in this or that metaphor but "just" herself- and this huge grief I have that magnifies things not inaccurately, but ... dramatically. It's hard to balance "the most important thing that's ever happened, the only home I've ever had" with "people...therapy...process...home." And with Tracy, too. I can preserve her and grieve her as much as I want to, but that doesn't mean the other details of her story slip away. That doesn't mean she and my encounter with her story don't stop having meaning on levels far beyond the two of us. It starts to feel like two extremes experienced simultaneously.
That barely outlines what's been going on and doesn't quite touch the intensity, but I'm tired, so I'm summarizing. I told him today that I can't do this. I'm amazed he heard me; I choked it out after a long stream of tears (which had fought hard against my pride to be let out...) He didn't say anything for a minute; I just cried and felt all the ways in which that was true, and when he said, "You can and you will...with a little help," I was ready to hear it. Some of where I'm at right now feels like the really bad times, it's true- and I've said that over the past few weeks. It feels familiar to the worst periods of pain. And that is hugely, hugely difficult, but at the same time, the times I'm remembering are times I've gotten *through.* The issues I'm dealing with again are issues that I've made some progress on; the times I'm recalling are not my everyday life or the future I'm creaitng for myself. So maybe memories don't hold me down/ some of them even make me laugh out loud ... I've got some kind of something happening inside me now.** Well, that much I know. And what I said to him, I needed to say. It's not that I believe it; it's that when I feel it, I have to say it out loud. Somehow, saying I can't do this, and feeling someone else hear that is what makes me know I can.
It is a lot. And I'm small to have so much inside me. I'm young to face as many shadows as I do. But I'm strong and capable and crazily supported, too. And as for youth, the way I see it, I'm going to have a lot more good life to live, getting through this some decades earlier than most. Though, as a technical teenager, I do need my sleep as well. Hopefully, some memory of the session will remain in my brain for detailing tomorrow. And hopefully, Mistrandy will consider my completed work commendable and tell me again, "You're so good," so that I don't have to care (too much) about school on top of everything else. But in some ways, that's a blessing, too. I'm so used to hard work with unsure schedules that to *know* that I will, in one month, be entirely free from twelve years of something so horrible is rather beautiful. I'm downright gleeful over that. Any school-pain is the last school-pain I am ever enslaved to endure. I'm starting to have hope about my life again. Which must mean I believe somehow that I can do this, or even that it can be done. The second statement, if less personally powerful, might be more of a declaration for me. This can be done. I can and I will do this, with a little help. that would be progress, also - to believe not only in my own tenacity, but that of my friends as well.
chordlle
* ;-)
** M. Ferrick
�
�
