4:14 p.m. - 05/19/03
::: the luckiest people in the world. ;-)
So much for no energy. The anxiety of rushing to finish school and to write an essay test - and the vast amount of sugar I've consumed in the past few hours (brownies and apples and soda, oh my!) ensure that I am seriously spinning right now. Of course, I don't particularly prefer this end of the energy spectrum either. At least I did finish a respectable amount of work for Mistrandy to load into her bag today. I wish I hadn't done it with anxiety, though. I wish I'd used a different means.
There's something I've been meaning to do since I received a particularly sweet note a few days ago*, and - between depression, fatigue, school, and the rest of my opposors - I haven't. So, I think - I think I will now.
Dear Katie (and friends),
I've never been able to keep an old-school, bound-book, privacy-between-the-pages, hard-cover sort of journal at all consistently. The main reason for that, I think, is because writing has so rarely been an act of communication in my life. I never really kept a penpal, either - not until recently - and so generally, my stories and poems and attempts at journalling were all one-sided: expressions that went nowhere, that stayed heavy on the page and in my memory. When I found diaryland and tried my hand(s) at an on-line journal, I hardly understood why I was so infatuated with the particular medium. I believe now, that it is - in large part - the ability to hit that little silver "done" button and send the words away that keeps me from losing my mind to the content of my entries / my life. I'm sure you understand, though, that the value is not in sending the entries, with varying speeds and directions, into cyberspace. It's the balance between letting go and hanging on. Between pushing something out (away) for a moment, and knowing it is safe. The people who keep it safe, and through that, help to keep me safe as well, are those who read, and especially those who read and respond. So you see, every entry I write - no matter how personal, no matter what I say about attempting to keep my readers from influencing what I write and what I hold back - is a letter to those people who keep track of them. Those people who keep track of me, who read, and hang onto the words. Every one of them, you understand, is a letter to you. At the same time, it's a letter to myself, a means out of myself, a tool in my recovery, a way to hone my writing talent into writing skill, and a thousand other things. But, as you see in the content of the journal, I'm an (almost) unbearably relational person. And knowing that, you can guess which aspect is most important to me - which one I missed in those other journals, the ones bought in "blank book" sections of stores that sadly, stayed that way. Blank and unexplored.
I am not unexplored now, by any means. With my journal, with the people I've met through it, with the recovery documented here, the time at the hospital (which is missing from the entries but visible, quite clearly, through its impact), and for countless other reasons, I have worn many a track through the forestry inside myself. It's these paths I trace when I'm dialoguing with myself, when I'm searching for answers, when I'm remembering, or trying to outline my future through my past. And a significant vein, omnipresent in this journal and constantly at work inside me, is the relational orientation, the desperate need for love, the wounding of separation and abandonment, and the constant desire to hang onto everyone who shows me love, or might show me love, or makes me feel love - with a force that could redirect a current and shape stone.
That, I am guessing, is the main reason I'm responding so publicly and in such odd depth to your so-kind note. The idea that someone (or someones...) wants more than anything for me to love her stops me halfway through a breath. I know that need. I know that necessity, and even if I don't know how, precisely, I can love you or what my best course here is, I'm graced by your honesty, and it compels me to be honest in return. In the past I thought so little of myself so often, it might as well have been always. So it's difficult for me to imagine that someone feels for me what I have felt for others...but as I've felt it, I hold it gently - a tiny warm bird, whose heart and breath are beating in my hands. I do not mean to say that I have this kind of power over you or your life - I wouldn't want it - but I would want, as far as I can see, to look at my life and know that I am, within the bounds of human relation and my own limitations, giving all I can to someone brave enough to voice their needs. Especially when those needs are so heart-breaking/ -repairing, so familiar.
I'm slowly getting to know your diary, entry by entry. There's a cute nostalgia in it for me, which is interesting to find in a new venture. I grew up in what we like to call a "scary Christian town" - not because Christians in general are scary (though I have retained a slight prejudice in that area, which makes it the hardest religion for me to remain calm around), but because in this town where I grew up, there were perhaps ten people who were not Christian. And by Christian, I do not mean "of some religion encompassing a belief in Jesus Christ." Rather I mean all but these ten or so citizens were of one or two denominations of fundamentalist Christianity. Many condemned other Christian religions (Catholicism, for instance, was largely suspect because it involves praying to specific saints for specific needs, and who needs all those saints if you have Jesus?) along with any non-Christian religion, and I was told only several thousand times that I was going to hell, either for my beliefs, my lack thereof, or my practices. I was also pushed into uncomfortable situations (almost amusingly in retrospect, a great deal of the "peer pressure" I experienced was to attend youth groups, sex-separated Christian meetings, and church activities - I was never once offered drugs) and was afraid to learn, until later in my life, what I actually *did* believe. (Still working on that, of course.) And now that I've made it all sound so horrific, you're probably wondering why I referred to a cute nostalgia. It's the same reason I haven't completely cut myself off from the entire Christian population and that I channel a great deal of effort into countering (and hopefully dismantling) the generalizations based on my past. In a town where all but ten or so people are "very Christian", where you live for a good (or not so good, depending) fifteen years, you're bound to befriend people who are Christian. Indeed you're bound to befriend, and adore, and really honestly love people who are *very* Christian. One of these people (my best friend during a really rough freshman year) was Katie.
Oh, Katie! This Katie was a bouncing, five-foot, cheerleader (figuratively speaking) of a girl, who still managed to quiet down and listen just the right way when we would drive around, late into the night, talking about our deepest pains and most saving graces. Indeed this Katie- who quoted Bible verses in her cards, started Power Lunches at our school, and majors in religious music- was one of my saving graces. Not simply in the moment, when I desperately needed a lighthouse in the dark ocean of my suffering (she liked lighthouses, so I'll use one here), but even now, when I start to jump to the wrong conclusions based on the tension that still jumps up at words like "Lord" and "Jesus" and "Christ." Katie is one of several "very Christian" and very, very wonderful people I met in N*land who keeps me from running at the sight of words that once meant pain. So it's been nice, even in the beginning, to see another Katie find such familiar strength. It's been nice, even for a girl like this one, forged from atoms, who has bystepped religion in an ever-continuous search for (a more concrete, more detailed) spirituality. And I've decided, that if Jesus Christ can compel a girl to discard an issue of Cosmo, I have to tip my proverbial hat to him, and give a crooked smile. Any foe of fashion magazines is a friend of mine.
This letter grows silly because I need silliness right now, not because I need to sidestep something serious. I've realized that what is true does not always have to be serious, and what is true is that I'm strongly linked, and honored by, and grateful to my readers. Including you. Knowing what it's like to want love, knowing what pure love you've been in my life up until this very comma, I have to feel the depth and truth in this. So know that even when I'm silly and even when your name is not at the top of an entry, this journal depends on (and is meant for) you. For the first time in my life, (these past 20 months) there are answers to the pain. Notes and responses are no small part of that; this journal, which works in large part because of those beautiful, brave souls who catch its words and keep them safe, is no small part of it either.
So thank you, and know that it's ok to really, really need love, and to really, really want to help someone. I really need it, too - and I am getting help. I'm finding help in every corner, crevice, nook, and cranny inside my spirit and out, and that's no raw deal, I assure you. Hang onto yourself, and continue to voice what you need. Your faith is beautiful, no matter what fears I've learned regarding it. You are beautiful, without condition.
So love, to you (and all)...and to this crazy, random Diaryland that has given me so much joy over the past ... is it nearly three years? How is that so much and not enough time simultaneously? And how come that anniversary - our anniversary - is safe from the ambivalence that invades *every other aspect of my life*? I do not know. But I can say: finding love in simple script revives me...and it's really a blessing: to be sustained without it and still have it- waiting, tasting like well-made dessert.
huggle-snuggle-cuddle-love,
the chordling
*since notes aren't dated, I'll point out here that it's the one beginning, "I love nourish" that started this whole babblement - and speaking of that statement, the proximity of nourish to a Bible, for someone to whom the latter means so much, is intensely touching.
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