3:36 p.m. - 11/03/03
and I scream from the top of my lungs - what's going on!!?
[I did some dialoguing while still in the middle of the previous entry, which is surprisingly not all that long, considering it took me an entire day (off and on) to write the thing. Anyway, I'm posting the dialoguing now, with the added news that Jenna has been discharged from the city hospital. This is especially good news if she's returned to the inpatient unit at Rogers, where she still very much needs to be (obviously) to fight her ed. I'm hoping to find out tomorrow whether she's there (or where she is) and see whether or not she's talking to me yet. It's vastly bizarre to be (almost) disregarding what she says she wants (considering I spent so much time trying to please her in order to win her favor, two years back), but I can't imagine doing anything else. Seriously, if this girl wants me out of her life, she'll have to actively move me. And *she'll* have to do it when she's well enough that I know it's her, not her illness or related defenses, making the decision. I'll be clingy as Garfield to a windshield, damnit. I'm not losing her the same way twice.]

*

(And now the dialogue, as written almost directly upon arriving home from a not-so-successful therapy appointment.)

So fuck it. It isn't worth it, and it doesn't help.

It doesn't help? It isn't worth it?

It isn't helping right now. And it's not worth it if isn't helping.

It was a third bad session. Three consecutive frustrating sessions. So you told him as much.

Yes. And does that mean things will change? No. That does not mean things will change; that means I told him I'm frustrated, and now our fourth consecutive frustrating session gets to be about why I'm frustrated and why I don't feel he understands me. He doesn't understand me. Not right now. He doesn't understand at all, and I hate it, I hate him for not understanding - because he's one of the few helpful pieces of my life, he's one of the few *in tact* parts, and now he's broken. He's not working correctly.

It's a relationship. Which means it's not always going to function perfectly. Sometimes people miscommunicate or don't communicate. It happens. He seems to agree that it's happening now. He said that he agreed, that he didn't think he was quite understanding everything now.

Yes. And let's go over some of the other things he said. He said it's good that Jenna's in more intense care than residential (if she's even at Rogers, which I don't know for certain) because it will be harder for her to try and hurt herself again. Actually, he said that in that situation it's harder to attempt suicide. Unless of course, you look at the reality that Jenna got pills into the hospital and took them, in the same intense setting before. He tried to finish my sentences, and he finished them incorrectly. Sometimes he finished them simultaneously, and then he got them right, but why the hell does he have to do that? Why can't he just let me talk, and wait until I have the words, instead of trying to plant them in me? It just makes it all the more obvious that he's getting it wrong. That he doesn't understand. Which frustrates me and makes me want to talk less. I know all about this "active listening" shit; I studied it, remember? I know he's supposed to repeat back to me what he thinks I'm saying so that I feel he's actively listening, and he ensures that he has heard what I actually meant to communicate. But seeing as right now, I apparently can't communicate anything to him, no matter how actively he listens, I don't think it's appropriate. I don't want to hear what he thinks I'm saying. It's not what I'm saying. And the fucking attempt to PLACATE me. AUGH. That just has to stop. What the hell is he doing - trying to make me feel better? He has to know better than that. He has to understand that making me feel better is not his job, so why is he telling me how it's all going to be alright and shit when he *doesn't know that*. For God's sake. He kept saying how I'm in a growth spurt and my life will not be so full of crises as the past few months have been, and I'm sorry but that's just insane. He doesn't know. Don't give me that "I've seen what you've done so far" bullshit; these crises are not things I'm creating, and there not things I can avoid. Correct? Didn't he agree to that, finally? Didn't he agree that what's happening to Jenna, to Sara, with my parents, with losing my grandma, on and on and on and on and on were not crises I could have avoided? Were not crises people came to me with, that I could have set a boundary around? Were crises in *my life*? Didn't he agree to that, finally? And he's so sure that the rest of my life isn't going to be that way. It's bullshit. These things keep happening; there's no reason to think they're going to stop happening. There's certainly no certainty that they will. God. And *those* kinds of crises were the ones I was talking about when I said that I didn't know how to lead a life that honored what I've learned in recovery, having friends with this illness, being at Rogers and so forth, when every time the pain of those realities (say, having friends who are sick) hits me, I'm entirely immobilized. I lose the ability to do anything; I certainly lose the drive. And he's all, "diversification" is the key; create a life around the life you have now, with other things you are passionate about, and other people you care about, so that the tragedies are a smaller percentage of the reality. And it's like, oh isn't that all perfect and theoretical. Isn't that just dandy? Isn't it! He doesn't understand that I have no concept of how I could connect with people who haven't struggled, even though I told him, and he said, are you worried there wouldn't be enough common ground, and I said yes. He doesn't understand. He doesn't understand that I have these *people* from Rogers, these individual *people* that I connected to, attached to, and lost touch with...and having him say, go and make friends who are healthy, sounds like, as opposed to making friends who are sick. It sounds like, no, don't call Oshiana or Rae or Abby or Jenna or any of these people. Instead, go to a nice poetry reading and hit it off with someone there. Someone normal. Someone who won't hurt you this way. (And won't understand you this way. And won't be family this way.)

That was a lot. And the last lines of it- that's the first time you felt anything, this whole time you've been writing. I know you noticed.

Yeah.

Does diversification feel like moving on? Like letting go? Like choosing healthy strangers over girls you've loved and do love?

I told him I know that it isn't about abandoning the relationships I'm in right now. I get that. I get it all.

Rationally. How do you feel?

Damnit! I get it. Why won't you just take that?

Why is it so bad to understand rationally and to feel a different way?

Because I'm not being stupid here. I'm not being irrational. I'm not feeling something that isn't true. I'm not being sick or adolescentish or anything else that would minimize how *right* I am. I am *right* about this; this *is* the case, and the fact that he's all, "does that make sense?" is SO annoying. I understand English and I'm not a moron. Of course it makes sense. If it doesn't, I'll say so. I'm upset because I don't believe it, because *it's not true*, not because I don't understand. So don't tell me that it's going to take time, or call it a growth spurt or any of that bullshit. You're not listening. He's not listening when he says that. I am not clouded by anything here; this is real. And why does he have the right to know better than I do? It's my life. It's my life, and I am capable of understanding it. I don't need him to tell me what's real. He's the one who's supposed to get that. He's the one who's supposed to get that what I experience is the reality, but even that - he'd just say he knows my reality is based on what I'm experiencing, but maybe my feelings are false indicators - or some other bullshit. Something else that doesn't account for the fact that I know what this is.

What is this?

He's trying to take me away to play with the normal kids. He's trying to make me grow up and be an adult and forget everything I know. Lose everyone. I don't want to play with the normal kids! I don't want to live a normal life! I don't want to have to forget what I spent all this time learning to go and have a two car garage, house in the suburbs, and a corporate job. He's trying to take it all away.

Your tie to mental illness is the reason you have the right to live differently?

It shouldn't be. I know it shouldn't be. But when you're in school, and it's making you crazy, no one says, "It's ok. It's your temperament; you need to work a different way. Here let's accomodate that."

That's the fault of the school. That would be a better response.

But it's not the response. The response is, "What the hell is the matter with you? Shape up! Everyone else can do this; you better start doing it, too." ...And then I was "sick." Then I had a diagnosis, and it was ok - finally - to leave school, to be homebound, to finish the last years of high school in a way that didn't grate on me so badly. It was even ok to take a semester *off* and to spend a second semester working through only two classes. That was ok. The whole system changed. And when I got out of Rogers, I had to fight so hard to stay homebound. Because now that I was getting better, now that I wasn't so critically ill, they wanted me back in school. They wanted to take away the thing that worked for me, that worked *so well* for me, and give me back the "normal" reality that had been criminally abusive and so against my temperament.

You did it, though. You fought until they understood. You stayed with what worked for you. And when your parents had crazy philosophies about how you should live, you stayed away from those, too. You lived the Rogers way, the way you preferred, and that didn't mean having a mental illness.

Yes it did! It meant being in recovery; it meant pouring all of who I am into this process.

All of who you are?

I know.

You know. You do know. You've said here, you're more than your recovery. You're more than the path out of the disease through which you learned to access who you are. You're more than that. More than the means.

I don't want to go live like a normal person.

How would that be?

I'd have to start living on the schedule again. Take the ACT, get to college, live in a dorm room with one other person who I don't know at first, take classes, study-

Meet people. Why do you break down on meet people?

Because it's not possible. It's not possible for me. If I go and I try and study and learn and work, I'm not going to be able to risk that. I'm not going to be able to take risks and hang out and go to fucking parties and make friends. I can't! And no one will understand why.

You're scared of living this "normal" life before you're prepared for it. Of being put back into the "real world" before you've learned how to negotiate it. And you're...scared? angry? because you don't want to have to go back at all, and you think they're making you.

They are making me. They're making me. Everyone else who took time off is going to start taking classes, is applying to colleges, is moving on. And I'm not. And they're going to notice. People are going to notice if "a little while" becomes a year, becomes two years. They're going to notice, and they're not going to understand.

And you're not going to be doing it "right." You're not going to be living correctly, as you were taught, by people you don't respect.

What other kind of life is there? There is no other kind. And what right do I have to want one? And what ability do I have to *forge* one, to create a kind of life that doesn't exist? A life where I get to do the work that helps really pained people heal, without getting hurt myself? The kind where I don't have to screen my friends to make sure they aren't sick? I know that's not what he means, but that's what it sounds like. To me. I don't understand it any other way. He wants people in my life who aren't sick. And the worst thing is, I do, too.

Why is that the worst thing?

I mean look at me. Look at how glad I was when I talked with Chas, just because it was so simple, so entirely low-risk? Because there wasn't a crisis to fix or help with, because there wasn't a crisis to go through. She answered the phone and she didn't sound like she'd collapsed on herself, and she didn't tell me at any point in the conversation how poorly she's doing or how poorly someone we know is doing or how so-and-so is dying. She didn't say any of that. She said the opposites of those things. She was entirely different.

Is it so wrong to want more of that?

Yes! I know it's not, not when it's articulated like that. But...these people I'm supposed to want to know, these people who are going to put diversity in my life and lessen the percentage of tragedy...they're strangers. They're vague; I don't know them. The people I do know are in this "mentally ill" category, and they're not the ones I'm friends with, who I know I wouldn't just separate myself from for that reason. They're other people from Rogers, they're people with names, they're people I already love that I'm dismissing on the grounds that they might still be struggling.

Do you feel like you've been told not to try and reach out to people from Rogers whom you miss?

I haven't been told that. I feel like I have. I want to be told that. Because I don't want to have to admit that...I'm the one who's gotten scared and started wanting to run away from them. I'm the one who went from planning to make all these calls and write all these letters, to avoiding everyone entirely. I was thinking how great it would be to have them back in my life, just a little, and then Jenna came back and was so not ok...and I started to think how the people I want to have in my life again could be unstable. They could be sick. They could be struggling. They could be so lost in sickness, they aren't recognizable. Their presence, because of their disease, could *hurt* me. And I got scared to even check, to even see who's ok and who's not - because I can't take anymore people who aren't. I can't risk knowing anyone else is struggling. I can't risk hearing about another hospitalization, another medical emergency, another death. I can't pick up the phone when that's possible. I LIVE IN A WAR ZONE.

And you want a little distance from it. You want a bit more safety, a bit more peace. There's nothing wrong with that.

But I don't want to lose them! And I don't want to leave them in the war zone.

You can't save them.

I don't want to save them. I want them to be saved, and to stay with me, and I want things to be the way they're supposed to be. Where I'm living a terribly radical life, that I love, that's completely bizarre but wonderful, where I'm working purposefully and not feeling awful, where I'm not sick, and the people I love aren't either - but not because they're new people who I checked out beforehand...because the sickness has *stopped* hurting those I already love. That's the life I want. Everyone ok. Everyone with me, somehow. The right to live differently and knowledge of how to do so. The peace of knowing what I want, where I'm headed. I don't have that anymore. I feel like college doesn't understand me.

College doesn't understand you.

College wants me to be this young individual, who's been through some mildly rough things, is very bright, has talent and a strong desire to learn. College does not want to hear that my roommate died, that I fell in love with a hospital, that I call that place home, that my friends are in and out of hospitals, that I'm constantly grieving the instability, that my parents' marriage was as fucked up as their divorce... College doesn't want to know that I'm not a student. I'm not a student anymore. I know too much. Not about academic things, not the sort of things you learn. But I have all this "life experience." To the point that when people say to me now, "Just wait a few years" or "That will change" - I want to smack them. Because despite the fact that I will grow and change over the next few years, it will be through the difficulty and the work around that. It won't be because I matured a little or gained a few candles on my cake. For God's sake. I'm mature. Ok? I'm grown. I feel like a little kid, and I have a long way to go, but all of this pretending that people know how I'm going to change by the time I'm 20 or 25 because they're 20 or 25, and they changed a certain way...it's just bullshit. And this stuff of my life, this reality, the things I know a thousand different ways via sickness and recovery and Rogers...those things refuse to take a backseat to textbooks and testing and bullshit. They don't want to perform, to jump through hoops, to prove themselves worthy. They don't want to be forced into a system of learning about a subject in order to create some sort of life or living out of that subject. They don't want to start. They want to be able to say, look. I have this experience. I *have* this life. And I want to work on it. I want to major in *my life*. I want to be taught and guided and I want to learn from *that.* And you can't tell me that it's the same to major in psychology, to focus on the disorders I have, or the tragedies I've faced. I want to major in life. That isn't creative writing, though I write, and it isn't sickness, though I've experienced sickness. It's more specific. It's knowing Sara and Brooke and Brea and Stacy and Dave and myself; it's everything I've ever been through. I don't want to secure a degree in order to base my life's work on that degree. I want my life to center on *my life*. I want to build from what I know and from what I'm experiencing, the way I do in recovery. And I *want* friends, I want other people who are studying their lives, I want to have people to guide or support me in that work. ...Damn it all.

What?

I want Rogers. I want to be the subject in a setting where the material to be learned, to understand, and ultimately to change...is me. With other people who are doing the same thing. That's not college. That's the fucking hospital. My God, how am I ever supposed to have a normal life? How am I ever supposed to live normally, given...

Given?

Given the fact that I have this different experience, and it's not going away, and it's not meaning less, and it's refusing to be historic. It wants to be the driving force. Society isn't set up for people to care that much about an experience. Experiences are what you have as you're going through the ropes of the course that will truly educate you. Experiences are supplementary, often irrelevent. Who you are is not something to be majored in, and you can't help anyone if you don't have the right degree. ...I don't want to be like my mom. I don't want to hover from field to field, trying to help people, going back to school for degree after degree. Thinking therapist, no, spiritual leadership, no, spiritual companionship, no, art therapy, no... I don't want to create a niche for myself; I want there to be a place for me already. I am tired of challenging and changing the system. I am tired of working to put what I need into place. Of having the fact that I write and act be handicaps. Having to work against the grain because I'm creative or poetic or set up for a different way of learning. I just want that to be ok. And it's more than Hampshire now. It's more than an individualized liberal arts program. That program wants me to look at who I am and use it to decide what path I'll take. And that's a huge step up from, "Pick a major." It wants me to design the path, not sign up for one already set in place. But that's not good enough. "Psych" or "creative writing" or "women's studies" aren't right. They're pegs for me to hang on. They're little blobs of color on the Twister board; I can stretch and contort myself carefully enough to touch them. There is something in my story that resembles this, but only something and only *resembles*... What about my whole life? Doesn't my whole life count?

I believe this is why you are not in college at the moment.

But I have no idea. If I'll ever feel able to do that. Both in terms of my stability and in terms of...the fact that in becoming stable, I become more adamantly invested in who I am and where I've come from. I want to apply my life to a subject. I don't want to study a subject and then work to fit it into my life. I want to start with who I am, not come back to it periodically. I don't want to study what's already learned, and I don't want to create a new course. I want to live my unique life, be my unparalleled self, and I have absolutely no idea how to do that. What job do I get? If I don't go to college? If I do? What do I study in college? I'm eighteen; I'm supposed to know this.

You're not 18. That's a vicious rumor. You are far too aware of yourself and what you care about to be merely 18. (And "supposed" is a synonym for "should.")

I'm not going to know less at the end of this year. And maybe it'll be like the ACT, and I'll change enough over the course of the year that, while I still stand by my ethics, I'm willing to slightly compromise them as I choose, so long as it doesn't actually hurt who I am, doesn't hurt the person who has those ethics. Maybe it'll change, and I'll feel like college is something I can do. But I don't want something I can *handle.* College is supposed to be the reason I take the ACT, despite my feelings against it: because I desire to go to college, because it's necessary to be on the path I wish to try. But if I'm no longer wishing for college... What do I wish for? What steps do I take? How the hell do I apply to be me?

I'm thinking this is less and less about the doctor. Can we come back to it after you've rested/ refreshed a little? And you can tell me how all of this fits in with where Sara and Jenna are, and where the confusion about college and the fear of diversification overlap?

Ok. I'm somewhat rested and refreshed.

How are you feeling?

Better. I feel like I understand better what's been going on. He said something today that seriously offended me- something about how maybe I didn't want it to be painful. I was offended because obviously I expect it to be painful, obviously I've been in this process long enough to know that it's work, and it's difficult, and it brings pain to the surface. When I said to him that I usually leave his office feeling better, I didn't mean that I feel good. He knows as well as I do that I leave his office in tears about 90 percent of the time. But the pain I'm usually in is the pain of hard work, and this has been the (thankfully) less common pain of misunderstanding and miscommunication. I'm relieved because now that I see some of how we've been miscommunicating, we can somehow get back to a place where I safely call him Superdoctor and feel like the work I'm doing is the work I need to do.

How have you been miscommunicating?

I didn't understand what was going on well enough to understand what he was doing that hurt me. What was so grating about his comments and his attitude. Now, I feel like some of it makes sense to me, and I understand how, given what I think I know now, I could be hurt by what he said. It's not that he doesn't understand or that he's incapable of understanding. It's more like, we're both telling truths, and they're important ones. They're valid. And in some manner, they're like puzzle pieces, each very important in its own point in the picture, but painfully misplaced when one attempts to snap them together. I feel like, if I can explain to him about how confused I am about not knowing where I want to go or what I want to do or how I want to be who I want to be, if I can start to explain that again (because we did try and talk about it today), and add the connection to, I'm afraid I'll lose Rogers if I make this move, whatever I decide this move is. I feel like I'll be acquiescing to a life that won't allow me to love them, to esteem them as I do, to need them as I do, and to be who I am. If I can explain to him how his diversification project feels like another attempt to take away what makes me who I am. I connect Rogers to mental illness, I connect people I love who have illnesses to mental illness, I feel like he's another force - like college - trying to take them away. Trying to rid me of those parts, or make them matter less. Actually, he wants the tragedies and the crises to have less power in my life, which is kind of him. And I need to tell him that part of the reason I'm so furious and so defensive around this is because I want it. Because I want to hope for a life like he believes I can live, and it feels so naive to do so. Because part of me, though not the essential part, wants to run from what is painful, and other parts of me really want to stay, and are really ashamed of the part that wants to leave. Other parts of me are throwing the anger at myself for considering a world outside sickness at him. And on another random note, I had that really sweet phone call with Dave. And since I'm missing my dad's presence (even though both the doc and Dave are significantly younger and significantly different from my dad), maybe I put some of the longing for my dad toward Dave and some of the anger toward the doc. I'm not sure about that last one, but the others I believe. The others are important. ...I don't understand how to make the only life I can imagine finding peace in, happen. I have no idea. And like the spirituality which is more shaky as I focus on what I don't believe, my thoughts on the future are more shaky as I focus on what I don't want. I tend to stick to what I don't want because I fear that what I do want is impossible or will also bring me great harm.

Do you know why you're thinking about this now?

Not really. I know I had started thinking about it by last Sunday, the night before I called Rogers and spoke with Dave. The opposing needs were starting to tear my head apart, and I felt like I had to choose. He said it didn't have to be that dichotomous, that I could find the grey. ...I don't know why it's coming up now. I suppose some of my excitement around learning has resurfaced and I've had a little more energy (this week as opposed to last) so I'm feeling compelled to start "studying" again. To read and learn and write and change and grow. I'm fiending for hours in a library, that sort of thing. And that makes me think about college courses, assigned studying, tests. It makes me think about what I will do with this information when I have it, what I will do with this talent when it's further honed. And that leads into the fear.

I think this is very good for just a couple hours after speaking with him, for starting out so furious and stuck in the defense. I think you've realized some really important things.

You aren't going to tell me to give myself a hug or quote Stuart Smalley or anything like that, are you?

No. But I am glad that you didn't just let it fester in your head. And I think Friday's session will be less frustrating, even though it might be difficult. In the time between now and then, you'll better understand what you've said here. And you'll do other random things that keep you bright and peaceful-like.

I miss my home. All I want to do is recreate it. Recreate that consistency, support, love, evolution, and purpose.

Remember that. You want to re-create. Rec-reate. Remember that similarity when you're beating yourself up for being 'lazy' or 'not productive.' Remember re-create and rec-reate.

I didn't answer your other question. About how Sara and Jenna play into this.

You know how Sara does. You'll most likely understand Jenna soon as well. I'd guess you're still very frightened by what's happening to her, frightened enough to want to run away, hating that you want that- even partly, aware of what happened to her at college, even though she deferred a year. It's not surprising this feeling escalated below the surface of the pain that's directly-linked.

She's discharged, you know.

I know.

From the city hospital. I hope she's back at Rogers. I really, really hope that.

Me, too.

And I don't envy her. I don't want to be back there, sick or well. I have so much of them without being there, without having to bear the sickness.

Remember that. And hold onto that, tightly. Because if you can have them and not be there in the pain, there's grey. That's an example of the grey you will build.

I thought grey was supposed to be depressing.

It's calm, dear, calm. It's early morning sky, fog lifting in winter. It's highly underrated.

Grey...

*

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