10:11 p.m. - 05/12/03
^^ tomorrow, tomorrow. ^^
Absence isn't in my nature. But I spent Saturday writing e-mail to the people who won't write me and yesterday, Sunday, I had to write that nourish entry three times, to convince myself she wasn't a neglected treasure. (The first two drafts were lost to my mother's thoughtlessness and the computer's appetite, respectively.) I'm here now, and I can't decide whether or not this needs to be a private entry. I'm trying to decide if I can say everything I need to say without utilizing the luxury of privacy. Can I say it all without violating what feels like law to me: that I do not tell my friends' life-stories on-line and I do not say in a journal what should be said voice-to-voice? I'm not sure. Or I am sure, and I don't want to admit that it means a third night of nothing anyone who cares about chord can see.
I didn't leave Dr. R the message that said he had an e-mail from me, and now I can barely remember what was in that e-mail, so even if he has read it, which he won't have (guessing from past experience) ... I won't remember the words well enough to talk on it myself. I remember themes. Apology, first off. I'm heavy in my grief and in that, terrified of losing everyone else. He made a point in our last session by pretending he was going to leave, and even though I saw the point, even though I recognized the pretending, it was the going to leave that stayed. The grief is higher than the rivers here, which have flooded their banks. And earlier in our last talk, he cut off a thought - one I was reciting, keeping myself safe with, one I don't believe - so quickly that I felt shut-down. It was discussion of the book - Savage Inequalities - discussion of my opinions, and when he argued with what I've been taught to say, I felt not-smart-enough again. Even though later it was liberty. Liberty to say that my pain is as bad as other pain. To read the book as if it weren't a Bible.
I know that I've been grieving and missing in the strongest senses of each word, and I know that brings me to fear I'll lose him, too. So I've been saying less, holding more back, losing track of the reality that I don't have to keep this silence anymore. That I can't keep this silence again. I've been losing track of the, "we can talk about this tomorrow or in a week or on the phone." I've lost track of the continuity, the promise that this process will continue, in my fear that he will leave. In the related insecurities about my own performance. Judgment: I am too difficult, too stubborn, too unintelligent, too worthless for him to want. He will leave. This, mostly, was the e-mail - written in the tone, though, not the words. This and, I feel like if I have him, I can get Rogers back. If only for a second. If only fractionally, for a spare moment. Grab Dave by the collar and know the answers to questions that keep me from sleeping, pink pills and all. Dave who will not tell me what I want to hear if it isn't the story that suits him. I sent the doctor an e-mail this week, and if he hasn't read it, this is what it said. I need to know that because I need to be able to initiate tomorrow. I need to tell him what I need, instead of waiting. Lately, he doesn't ask me how the week has been before we leap into working. He tells me what he's been thinking about our work since the last time we met, and I'm so caught up in the fact that he's connecting our session to our last one, that I forget I need to talk about the present, and feel safe believing in a future.
Yes, that also: I need to feel steadier in what's going to happen for us. We originally scheduled a second session in order to do systematic desensitization work - back in April. It's May now, and we haven't done any of that work, and eventually he says, we will either go back to one session or use this second one for the work we intended. I need to know something. I need to know what our plans are so I can believe, without all this effort - his and mine, that I am getting better. I need to know I'm going to get through these phobias. How. When. As best as we can define it, I have to know. Which means I have to ask, audibly. Ask in English; ask in *words.*
So grief, missing, abandonment, mutism - causing the apparent loss of what steadies me, a need to talk about what's going on currently, and to understand some of our future. I can speak that much aloud. I can.
He told me before April that the work we were starting would be rote, and if things came up during the week that were more pressing, we would address those. I didn't have to look at this phobia-fighting as the thief of my right to therapy as it had been. As I see it, the trouble is, there's always been something more pressing. I've been a wreck these past few months, and we've never gotten to the phobia work. Now I'm scared because I need some steady sign that we are fighting (and hopefully winning against) those phobias, and at the same time, they've lost out this whole time to the more pressing present, so how can I know that if we start this work, the present won't lose out the same way? And if he asked me what had gone on, what had been hard this week, there would be a lot. There would be enough to talk about, without everything else we need to do. How does that balance?
For instance: Depression. Insomnia. Migraine. My dad once again not in my house. (No explanation. Just, he's at my grandma's. He'll return Wednesday.) Feeling disconnnected from people I really love because they don't return e-mails. Feeling like I'm losing Chas, and blaming that pain on someone who doesn't deserve it. (i.e. "You're taking her away!" when they aren't.) Friends struggling. Not at RED. I have questions that need answers. I have plugs that need outlets and broken wiring, spitting electricity, waiting for repair. For the first time, I'm aware of anger at a friend for being sick. For the first time, I can hear myself think, "How can you do this to me?" and as quickly as I've thought it, make plans to take myself out of the range of their pain. Pull myself away. Go, leave, abandon. He said it would make perfect sense if I felt this; I told him I never could. He said still, if you ever were...and I didn't believe him, and it's here. Tell me how a girl whose cardinal sin is abandonment deals with such a natural, understandable desire to run.
I should know. From Crow, from Zach, from my parents. I should understand it already, but I don't. And I have to get these shoulds back out of my vocabulary, before they're burrowed into my skin again.
"There's a lot to tell you, and I haven't been. If I do now, how will I know that I'm not sealing my own poor fate, by not getting to the phobia work? A lot of what's going on is relational, and that sort of current causes tremors in all of my relationships: including ours. It has me holding back what I need to say, letting you steer us to topics that aren't prominent when others are painfully pressing, afraid that you're leaving, and preying on my own 'performance' with N*land-like fangs. I need your help."
I can say that much. Aloud. In English. I can, I will - I need to.
chord
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