8:22 p.m. - 03/24/03
i think life chose me.
Status: Floundering.
I worked on school all weekend, did almost nothing else, even after the raised desipramine threatened to rip my insides out, and eventually began struggling with food. I haven't worn fitted clothes in a few days, and I burned in the springish weather today, rather than show my arms. Not the best of times. I need to turn it around. I need to turn it around. I ate a good dinner tonight, so maybe that's the start of something. The problem is, it's only the start of something, and I can't know what until after I do (let's assume that) follow through. Can I just say that I hate this? I hate caring about my stomach and my arms and my thighs. I'm a perfectly hugable, lovable, splendiferous girl, who doesn't deserve to care about such shit. Anyone considering advanced abusiveness should try mind-control. There's nothing better than thinking that all the pain you're in comes from you, yourself.
But it doesn't. It's a disease. And I'm not superficial, and I don't have to relapse, and the more I take care of myself, the better I'll feel about her. I've proved that in the past. It needs to be a given now.
I want to do something again. I don't feel right not sending e-mail, not writing letters, not trying to rewrite the world. I don't feel right keeping my story within the confines of my experience. I want to kick it up a notch, break through to the universals. I want connection, and I want change. I think it's good that the world is overpopulated. Those of you who feel passionately and have the energy to do so can fight what's going on in Iraq, and I'll stick to the wars in which I'm already immersed. So much so. I feel like a casualty sometimes. Tonight I was watching my melodrama, and this woman on it was really upset because she has (all of a sudden) a history of spousal abuse, and this teenage girl was about to marry her abuser. And at one point, someone said to her, "You know, that girl...she's not you. That's never going to be you again. You know that right?" I teared up. At this screwed-up drama that's done nothing but annoy me for weeks. Actually teared up. Sometimes I forget this illness is in itself traumatic. How's that for unfair: to deal with trauma, you develop a disease, which ends up traumatizing you also? Why else would I have almost had a panic attack when I felt nauseous yesterday? The past few days have felt so much like bad times- like sophomore year, right after Rogers, or the Jenna-missing. It feels like a time-warp; just put back that one piece. Everything else has already gone back to its painful reality; just put the ed back in place. Bulimia. Anorexia. Self-hatred. Shame. It'll make you feel better...
Sometimes, it's so hard to hold out for the other way.
I told the doc Friday about how impossible this all feels. How can there be this Thing- this evil, awful thing that took away Tracy, and terrorizes Sara, and almost killed me- this thing that I absolutely beyond any ability to express it despise...that I still want to turn to sometimes? That I still wonder about. I got help because of what they saw in the ed. Does that mean it saved my life or started enough balls running so that I could do so? How can there be any benefit in this thing that's so despicable? How can I feel both sides simultaneously?
He suggested I hate it for being so effective, which is, of course, a stroke of brilliance. But I was sobbing as we talked about it, all the same. Hate it for working. If it didn't work, we wouldn't keep it up. If it didn't work, we wouldn't die doing this. It there had been a better way- for Tracy, for Sara, for me- we would have chosen it. So hate this damn disease for working, the way an eye works in a hurricane- seemingly calming things so that people are even more at risk. Hate it for its backstabbing effectiveness. Effective enough to kill one in every ten individuals who has it. Effective enough to keep me up at night, afraid to call friends lest I hear they're no longer alive. Effective enough to have me scared of my own body, my own life. I hate you, you goddamn beast. I hate you for being all we had. I hate you for keeping us from getting what we really deserved. I hate you for standing in the way of what would have really worked, what would have been even more effective, for zero the price...I hate you...
It's never going to be me again; I know that, don't I? I'm never going to be terrorized and abused and neglected that way. Never again. I won't let it happen, even if there isn't an alternative; I won't let it work this way. Even if there's nothing else to do, and I have to feel every damn feeling and symptom until I go entirely crazy, I won't choose this. None of the above. None of what happened before. I didn't choose it then, though. And I didn't mean to be choosing it the past few days. I just want to know I'm never going to need it again. I just want all the tools and all the insight and all the support now. I just want to be safe now...
It's more than this- but I just don't want to be in this house anymore. I have to get past the panic, but what if I can't? I'm so scared to start that with him. I'm so scared to live a boring adult life and never have what I had at Rogers. I'm so scared I'll wake up magically well and entirely, despairingly alone. And if I don't? What if I can't live up to my own hype? What if I can't be the poster-child, the recovery queen? What if I let down the people who saved my life? I can't do that. I can't. I can't be anything less than awesome after them. I've got to shine. I've got to. After everything, we deserve that much. After everything.
I'm so sorry this happens. In the bottom of my stomach sorry. I'm so sorry that years of our lives are spent enduring this abuse, this fucking abuse, built into our own minds for god knows what reason. In the 1890s women, restricted to the breaking point, turned their hyper-emotional and weak image to their own advantage. They created hysteria and managed, through illness, to take a little of the power and the spotlight and the control back. We stand in our imprisonment and create the best weapon we can. But it's not as good as real power, and it's not as safe, and it's still illness in the end. In the end, you have all the worries of the cancer patient- wondering if that's a telltale sign or just an erroneous worry...with the added bonus of your guilt. With the added bonus of forgetting that this disease wouldn't *work* if you didn't think you'd chosen it. It would be one more out-of-control oppressor. It has to seem like your idea, your strategy, your scheme. It has to...for its own goals. Which have nothing to do with survival. Nothing to do with health. Nothing to do with you, blessed and poetic you...
Just no more. Can't I put that into effect somehow? Can't I stand in a hallway with a camera and say, This has gone too far. I love you all more than that. You deserve better. Someone will be over soon to help you. Can't I just play God for a few minutes and straighten out this one wrinkle? Yes, recovery saved my life from more than my ed, but damnit, no more. I want to go back in time and have skills I couldn't have had. I want to be in a thousand homes at once, helping other people hone those skills. I want the person who just died from an ed to be the last one ever, and I want them to be known and loved and grieved and understood. I just want this over. Poof! The concentration camps are under new management, are opened, we are free. I don't want to be going through this; I don't want anyong going through this. God, when is it going to stop hurting? When is it going to stop hurting that I can barely live my own life? We have to live. We have to.
We have to live and change so it can never again be the way it was or is or used to be. I have to stop feeling sick on my own tears.
chord
�
�
