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10:20 p.m. - 11/18/03
neither black nor white.
it's another one of my early-to-bed/ narcoleptic nights. the variety offered by my sleeping habits could appeal to me, I suppose, but lately it seems like I'm more and more a creature of habit. I don't particularly like routine, although I also don't like being out of my comfort zone, and that occasionally makes it look like I'm a routine kind of gal. today I realized that I have a favorite juice brand, a favorite pen brand, a favorite on-line cd store, and far too many other things for which I could be the spokesperson. Rogers, of course, tops the list. but then, I don't want to be their posterchild right this moment. I'm working on grays and silvers (Beth says silver is grey with some spark to it, and that's the truest thing I've heard in awhile ... part of my current crochet project is even in gray and silver yarns), on not having such dichotomy in everything I do. I've gotten much better at it, actually; I see quite a bit more of the spectrum, of the in-betweens, the non-extreme possibilities. but, as the doctor put it in our session Monday, my "mean Aunt Sue" is back again and chatty. and she, being the voice that likes to beat me up as constantly as possible, is very fond of extremes. never this and always that and one or the other, not both. my mean aunt sue needs to be hit over the head with a frying pain, but being a figurative symbol and not a physical being, she's hard to attack. annoying, elusive, made-up relatives.

I know, it's been a few days again. I don't think it would bother me so much to have short periods like that when I don't write, except that I so enjoy having uninterrupted documents of day after day. that's one of very few reasons I'm here tonight, despite a combination of exhaustion, stress-induced illness, and the inability to articulate a single thought coherently. the other...I need this catharsis. I think. I was able to make myself cry yesterday, which helped some, and today I cried for a few minutes without having to induce it. but still. some things are bigger than words. there aren't many topics, but I've stumbled on a few, that are too painful to write about, too painful to force before they're ready. and I think, when I'm avoiding writing or thinking about something, I can't write or think about much else. so I haven't come here. small talk in a journal doesn't hold up well.

so. where do things stand? (or sit, or fall, or roll over, or cascade, or explode entirely?) I heard back from Rosie, a truly fantastic thing to have happen. I have a letter from her and a declaration of desire to stay in contact, which is honestly enough to make me bounce. this is one of those good things that I avoided seeking for a long time because I was so afraid it wouldn't happen (like my desire to declare to Dave that I love Rogers), so now that it has happened it seems miraculous. there's this relief of knowing, and this awe that something (something) actually worked out for the better. the only problem (and I don't mean that in a "there's always a catch" sort of way...I tried to let the letter be just-good for several days, but that's dichotomous and it made me crazy, so we're ditching that it's-all-good denial at least temporarily) is that although she's doing well now, she hasn't done well the entire time we were out of touch. I'm so relieved that she's taking care of herself now and doing so well, but when I think about the fact that she relapsed, went back into treatment, and is now doing well again...and then add to that Sara's relapsing and needing to go back, and Jenna's relapsing and needing to back...it's really very easy for Mean Aunt Sue to say, "This has all been far too easy for you. It's not possible that getting better can be this easy for you; don't you see how hard it is for everyone else? (And don't you know that you're more inept and deserve a worse row to hoe than everyone?) It just proves that you were never. really. sick." Those words. Damn those words. I am so sick and tired of hearing those words. I am so sick of analyzing how they started, what their point is, what their point pretends it is, so on and so forth, over and over and over again. What will it take for me to accept the fact that I have a mental illness (number one) and an important, just-as-real-as-any-other part of that illness is an eating disorder? When I am just going to let that be? I am tired of taking all the "you sick freak" abuse the mean voice dishes out and having all the "wow, you're really working hard and you're really getting better" credit thrown out the window because I'm not really sick. how does that work? I'm sick only so long as knowing that can hurt me. Brilliant.

I also have a hard time with the fact that Rosie, being in two 12-step programs, has a sponsor. I'm really, really happy for her, of course; I'm happy for every good thing in her life, for everything she's doing and everything she has that is helping her stay well. I've just wanted, for so long now, to know someone who's been successfully recovering for awhile now, who I could lean on in a more one-way fashion that I can my friends. I want to see it working, especially right now. I look at this disease, at the quicksand of it, pulling my friends under, stripping the air from their lungs, and I really want to know that it can happen. People can recover. Permanently. The only people I know who fit that description are a handful of RCs from Rogers, and I'm trying to build relationships not so centered on recovery with those people, I'm trying to make them more symbiotic...and my dietician, Tammy. I haven't seen her in absolutely ages, and our illnesses and temperaments are so different, I don't know if I could take comfort with her. I don't know what I'm asking for. Could someone fall out of the sky, introduce themselves to me, turn out to have views and experiences similar but not identical to mine, and be really strong in recovery (even recovered, if that's possible, which I don't feel like debating at the moment)? Could they be a little bit older and geared toward supporting me just a little more than in a balanced friendship? And could they be shipped express-mail, please?

Other than that, the Rosie thing is very, very good.

(I just checked my e-mail and I have a message I'm fairly sure is regarding recovery, from an older woman who is not Tammy or one of the former RCs, but someone I forgot to mention, and even though she doesn't fit what I'm asking for, for other reasons, that just seems a little odd, considering I didn't have any mail until I asked for it. As far as I know, no one has fallen out of the sky, though, which is good, as their landing would most likely be painful.)

So, Rosie. Yeay, Rosie. Need to write her back (and about twenty other people.) Jenna. I wrote Jenna one letter (card) and haven't heard back from her yet; if much more time goes by, I'm sending her another, and if she doesn't respond to that one I'm calling her. Oh, I can be pesky when I need to be. It's frustrating; I'm still not through the frustration of her not understanding why I need to be let in, or understanding and pushing me away all the same (I'm not sure)... I'm still not through a lot of what's gone on in that relationship...and yet. And yet, when I think about actually receiving a letter from her - the positive possibility, that she might actually write me - when I think about her handwriting on an envelope, seeing her signature on something with a recent postmark, my heart and my stomach move like acrobats. My throat clenches like it's swallowing something sweet, and I smile involuntarily. I did learn one rather hefty lesson (at least) from what's gone on with Jenna most recently: Anger and love are not separate. Certain anger is very much a part of love. That's a change in separating, dichotomous thought schemes even I can't believe I've managed. Maybe there's hope for me yet. (There better be. Otherwise, why wouldn't I just collapse onto a couch, and chew on gummy bears, waiting for the world to end? Which reminds me. I saw a stuffed bear holding a bag of gummy bears for sale today. And it seemed so wrong - since the bear apparently encouraged the eating of bears - and so right - because I adore gummy bears at the same time. Dear Godd. That's yet another example of both over either/or. Has my life become a thematically scripted tv show?)

Sara. (My life right now exists in terms of a handful of important girls...or seems to, anyway.) Sara, Sara, Sara. What can I say? The first few days were brutal, of course, and I had an extra hard time (self-judgment, Aunt Sue, who the hell can tell anymore) because I wasn't struggling in the exact same way I did with Jenna. I felt like I wasn't hurt and panicked enough over what Sara did, and I've felt sliced-open and on the verge of panic attacks...so...transrational, in this context, is a euphemism. I'm definitely in enough pain, and I know that. I know that the situations are different, that Sara and I have been in more contact, that I didn't find out she'd overdosed until after she was out of the hospital...and my main freaking-out time with Jenna occurred while she was in ICU, and then on the other floor, before she was discharged. I know that the relationships are different, and it's a different week, and I'm in a different place. I know that I've been avoiding it more than I avoided with Jenna, partly because I don't have a friend going through the pain with me, partly because I'm way past the limit of my pain threshhold. Still. I've felt guilty for not hurting enough. Maybe that's the new version of "it doesn't hurt as much to be at this point of recovery as it does to be at those points, so I feel guilty" - which has finally been put to rest. Even I, with Aunt Sue screaming with every bit of lung-power she has, can no longer minimize the pain of my life so much as that. I don't know what's harder or worse or more painful, but I have, for the moment, quit comparing (in a lot of ways.) For the moment, I've taken in that a lot of people really, really hurt, and those people are not positioned in a hierarchy. I'm among those people, and I have a right to be. I have a right to not be in pain like this for the rest of my life, but I also have the right to be in pain right now...because if I weren't, wouldn't we be worried? "Girl, 18, Shrugs At Year(s) of Mindblowing Difficulty." "Brave Entirely Indifferent to Excessive String of Heart-Breaking Tragedies." I'd be a little concerned, personally, if I went from being an emotional minefield to an untouchable callous.

Anyway. I'm certainly in enough pain, and though I haven't become callous, my thought process has become a bit hyperactive as it mounts arguments on why I should be doing 20,000 things at once. I have incredible urges to do the world's most pointless things. I have insights that will serve no one, not one single person, but I share them anyway. I share with my mom that I see, in my head, my uncle Jim with a wind-up voodoo doll. That's right, a wind-up voodoo doll, that he keeps winding and winding and winding. (It makes sense to me because I'm hyperactive, and as a child, that was often because he'd "wound me up"...) But does it matter? Of course not. Does it help secure the image of me as a balanced, healthy person? I'm thinking no. And even though I'm not exactly a balanced, healthy person and those sorts of silly, weirdo thoughts bother me far less than the pain related to sickness ... it's a bit unsettling.

It reminds me of something from the Monday session actually. I'd broken down and said something about how I can't be this person; I can't be The Healthy One (*choke*) "who watches her friends die..." We talked about the label, and he asked if that's how (I think) Jenna and Sara and other people view me, and I told him that Sara actually hates it when I say that. She hates it when I say that I'm "the healthy one" because she hates labels. He asked what I thought of labels, and I told him I thought they were perfectly fine, so long as they're flexible and not something you find yourself boxed into. A long list of roles you fit or ways you think of yourself, a unique list of labels, seems perfectly acceptable to me. Then he has the audacity to ask how flexible "the healthy one" is...and I have to tell him it's not. At all. I tell him how no one can see me struggle, if the struggle looks like the struggle of sickness as opposed to the struggle of recovery. He says that's worse than he thought I thought. Ouch. I told him I feel like I don't fit anywhere. "Too healthy to be sick and too sick to be healthy," I said.

"Are you sure about both of those?" he asked.

"It's how I feel," I said. "Isolated. It's just how I feel." ...He then proceeds to tell me that he thinks I have a long, long way to go (ok, maybe there was only one long) before I'll be well, to remind me that our work is far more in-depth than "simply" ridding me of an eating disorder ("which is simple, seeing as I don't have one") and to say that he doesn't agree that I'm too healthy to be considered sick. I don't remember much after that except Aunt Sue latching onto it and whipping it around as a confirmation of her "you sick freak" observation. He doesn't think I'm a freak, and he told me as much. He told me he thinks I'll be surprised at how well I fit in with certain groups and people. But he told me I'm not healthy, and instead of feeling better, I felt deficient. I don't like to say that I needed him to drill the other point (that I'm not entirely unhealthy) into my head as well, but I think I did. I think part of the reason I have ways of hurting myself whether I'm "sick" or "well" is because I'm both, and I go back and forth so often on which way I view myself. So my phrase of the week has been "in sickness and in health." It popped into my head and has stayed because of the "and." And, not or. Perhaps it's possible to be in sickness and in health simultaneously. Perhaps sick isn't the starting point miles from where healthy marks the finish. Maybe it's a little less clear-cut than that.

I'm actually doing better with the dichotomy, even though my heightened awareness of it right now makes it seem like it's worse. It occurred to me the other day that I've viewed my recovery, to some extent, as replacing certain aspects of my life with their healthy opposite. I went from mute to vocal. I went from starving to nourishing. I went from shaming to affirming. And that's all true; it's just a little less clear-cut also. I have shame thoughts, I have mute moments, and I always see them as falling back into old ways. But if the two realities in each pair aren't so much separate points as one point, a sort of hole, in which I've been working, repairing, building, rehabbing, adding knowledge...if the "deficiencies" and "unhealthy behaviors" are things I've built from rather than replaced, it's not so separate. It's not so this or that, all or nothing. There's some silver there. And I am totally proving my theory about the rituals a person with an eating disorder has around eating being consistent with the patterns of their respective thought processes. I was so insistent on separation. And the only person who ever really listened to the theory was Stacy - although it came up when I was processing a piece with Jenifer and an intern whose name I can't remember. Dave was, for some reason, insistent that I use my time at Rogers to get better rather than do research. The dork. He should have known it didn't have to be all or nothing...

Ok, I need to pick up the pace here; I refuse to sleep-type. Sara. The days since I talked with Sara have been really difficult. Obviously, coming that close to losing her, and still not knowing if I will at some point lose her to this illness, absolutely terrifies me, more than I could ever explain. A few days after she told me what had happened, she called - which was odd; we'd kind of left it with the understanding that I'd call her when I was ready. She had a few good things to say - that she was staying with her parents, spending almost no time alone, et cetera in order to stay safe - but beyond that the conversation was really, really scary. She was so intense, so not herself, so ... irrational? She was convinced that something had happened to Jenna, and so she'd called me, and I'd told her some things she'd already known about Jenna that calmed her down, and then she started apologizing for having tried to call Jenna, which was in her opinion stupid and impulsive, and having called me, which was stupid and impulsive also... It wasn't so much what she said as the way she was speaking. The only thing that I really felt we agreed on was that she wasn't herself. And that was so frightening and so isolating...to have this girl, who's a transgenetic sister, be on my phone and entirely out of reach simultaneously...was just terrifying. I thought a lot about other illnesses and the phases or symptoms they have that are similar. It's so hard to have a person you love *right there*...that's her voice, that's her voice, that's her voice...and so far away: ...but no, it's too jumpy. it's too fast, it's too loud, it's too scary. that's her voice in a fun-house mirror maybe.

distorted. gone.

yesterday or today, I started really wanting to talk to her again. this shouldn't be too hard to understand: she's a best friend of mine, and I miss her. I miss her so much. I wanted badly to call her, but I was afraid to hear her still not herself, so I was waiting. then tonight, she called me. I told her what I'd been thinking, how I'd been missing her and was glad she called; she sounded really (pleasantly) surprised. she told me she's going back inpatient, and she thinks that's good. I told her how I'd been so scared and thanked her for doing what she needed to take care of herself...because I so can't handle losing her, ever. I don't know how I'm handling the possibility. (Another doctor comment, when I kept insisting that I don't know how to deal with all of this. "You didn't know how to deal with what happened with Jenna either. You said you couldn't handle it. And now it's three weeks later. And what do we know about you?" ..."That I can get through even if I have no idea how I'm doing it. I can keep from using 'destructive coping mechanisms' and I can get through." ..."Right.")

We didn't talk long, as she was calling me just before she left. She was a little more herself, but she's still off a bunch of her meds, which is making everything harder, and she's still pretty gone. She asked for Jenna's address, and I could hear her mom in the background, voicing her disapproval of the request (Sara needs to be looking after Sara right now and no one else) ... and I didn't really want to give it to her. But I know what it's like to need a way of contacting someone, even if you aren't sure you're going to do so. And I don't think it was my place to refuse her...I think that would have been caretaking. Though I do wish it had occurred to me that I should give Jenna Sara's info instead, as that's the way one handles these situations. I always know to do that...the quickness of it all, and the fact that I love Jenna and Sara so much I forget that their relationship with each other is different from my relationships with each of them, flustered me and I screwed up. I need to remember to let Jenna know and throw an apology her way. And then I'll let it be ok because I can't undo it...and I really don't think Sara needed to hear that Jenna might not want to hear from her (even in the most out-there, hypothetical sense possible) in that moment. I just hope she readjusts her focus to herself again.

I'm scared. This time was different; this time she was doing so well, or seemed to be. She sounded different (but in a good way), she was managing hard things, she was taking care of herself. And I remember when she said that the inpatient staff didn't want to let her discharge as scheduled after they saw her reaction to Jenna's admission and then disappearance just before. I remember certain things she said that were really scary, that had me telling her over and over that she couldn't try and save Jenna... But for the most part, I thought it was going so well, and I don't know that it wasn't. I want to know what happened; she wasn't in a place to tell me tonight (though I did ask.) I want to know why what happened did. I want to hear from her how she managed to end up taking those pills, and how she plans on never being in that state again, and what she will do if she does, somehow, end up there. I guess also I worry because my doctor seems to think this was less a personal response to what happened than an illness' competition with it, i.e. that Sara had a hard time with where she was after seeing how sick Jenna is... and so when I hear her say that she's really struggled with what's happened with Jenna, I'm scared. I want to tell her it's deeper than that. It's different. I want to tell her that my psychiatrist, who's never heard her voice, doesn't seem to think so. Not entirely. And I want to do all the things I told her not to do with Jenna. I want to drive up to Rogers tonight, lie in her bed and hold her. And I don't ever, ever want to wake up to a morning where that plan of travel, lie, hold isn't possible.

...I was going to start a section with "Mary" - but this is as far as I can go without falling asleep across the keys. And that's a lot of what's gone on with and in me, anyway... I am rather relational after all. Or didn't I mention that? Oh, well. At least I'll never be mistaken for having an attachment disorder. Oh, wait...

chord

p.s. yes, I already have the new Tori CD - Tales of a Librarian - and yes, it's brilliant for reasons I'll detail later, including but not limited to the fact that the songs are listed via Dewey Decimal categorization...alphabetizing/ organizing fetish meets Tori-obsession. this is a deliciously dangerous brew.

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