11:32 a.m. - 11/08/03
and you'll be here to see it. stand and breathe it all the day...
[Beware unfairly long parentheticals.]
Godds, I feel like I blink and days trip by without journalling. Hard as I try not to hold myself to atomgirl standards (an entry a day, an entry a day, an entry a day at the least), I find visions like "3 days ago" next to my name on a buddy list disarm me. And I can rationalize that, after all, I probably write more in here than I did in atomgirl, considering that many of those single entry days consisted solely of graffirmations. Or I can look at all the other journals and see how some of them haven't been updated in ten times as many days. (This, however, requires noticing the even greater neglect caged and nourish face, which only plummets me further into the valley-of-oy-vey.) Where have I been?^ I don't know. Sleeping. I've been sleeping quite a bit, after two rather nasty nights of insomnia. Night before last, I had the coma-sleep that (is either induced by or) always induces migraine, and even though I took unprecedented means to combat it, the migraine still won out in the end. I had some really lovely, vivid dreams to console me, though. The normal abusive aspect was almost non-existent, and the presence of people I love dearly was upped. I even talked with Dwight! - two nights ago, in a dream... and certainly that's not as lovely as talking to him in person, considering my subconscious has not been properly educated in Dwight's habits, and doesn't know the enthusiasm with which he would greet me, the hug we would meet and part with, so on and so forth. Still. Dwight. And Chas and Natalie and several thousand other people. Last night, during the same sort of sleep (which began with "a nap" after the doctor. I fell asleep at fucking five thirty - and slept long into the night. Oy) there was Stacy and Mandy, and I don't even remember everyone... There was also a really long, really shitty nightmare involving a school-like setting and a boy with a gun. The faculty was trying to see that the students stayed safe, but there was more of a focus on, "let's limit the number of deaths as much as possible" rather than - "let's apprehend this boy before anything happens." not cool.
I remember one diary review site that has no interest whatsoever in how often you write; I think they even say something about respecting people for waiting until they have something to say, rather than schlopping all over their diaries daily. I'm trying to keep that in mind, for, although I've done a little bit more than sleep the past couple of days, the points of interest have been small and building on each other, and it doesn't have to be a bad thing that I've waited to discuss them. (I will let myself off this hook. I will, I will, I will.)
Wednesday night, one of my mom's oldest friends (by which I mean, I remember visiting this woman when I was rather young, not that she no longer is) came visiting. We ran into her one night when we went to see my aunt. We didn't so much run into her as stalk her, actually. She and my aunt own shops (ok, my aunt owns a shop and my mom's friend owns a restaurant, and none of this is at all relevent so why do we care?) in the same antiquarian stretch. Generally, I prefer to stick to the current decade (or venture only about ten years back), but I made an exception that night, and when we walked into this woman's restaurant, she looked at me and said hello very courteously, (i.e. did not recognize me, at all, which only made it more amusing when she) then looked at my mom and gave the most enthusiastic shriek I've ever heard from a business owner inside their own establishment. (Actually, that minimizes the glory of the shriek. It was one of the top five I've heard in any situation, though I have a bias to those directed toward me.) Anyway, she and my mom reconnected a bit that night, after not having talked (through no real fault of their own, and certainly no decision) in a few years, and Wednesday she came over. I was talking on the phone with Beth (Ann) (whee!) and was very much confused when my mom and this woman sort of burst into the room where I was chatting. I think I stopped mid-syllable for a good ten minutes. And then Sandy, my mom's friend, who I could have named several sentences ago, and made this wreckage of a paragraph the slightest bit easier to follow, (or lead)...whisper-mimed, "Emily says hi!" and I whispered, "Tell her hi from me!", entirely forgetting that I was still holding the phone to my mouth, only to realize that a low, "Tell her hi from me" probably confused Beth Ann terrifically, if she did manage to hear it, so I finally stumbled something about people being in the room, which we all understand is sufficient enough to confuse me, and the conversation continued. (It was a lovely conversation. I felt better about the whole no-one-understands-me-and-I-don't-fit-anywhere issue. Beth and I are not clones, but we understand each other rather well, methinks. And I love having this relationship where there's a flow almost as if we've known each other for ages, and still the excitement of knowing, in some ways, so little of each other. Oooh, the mystery.)
The "Emily says hi" comment was the one I was trying, so laboriously, to reach. The "Emily says hi" comment is probably the point, even more than the two woman grinning at me from a doorway, while I stared back looking puzzled (and I mean, long before the puzzle is put together, when it's all in pieces, and the wrong pieces are stuck together and things are just horrendous; I looked *that*) that led to my complete and utter inability to remember that I was on the phone, speaking a thought. Because Emily said hi. Emily remembers me?! Emily felt compelled to relay a message of greeting, through her mother, to me?! Emily felt compelled to do this despite how many years it's been since I've seen her and how many years there are between her birth and mine...?
Once upon a time there was a girl named Emily. She was approximately my oldest brother's age, making her eight years older than me, and at the time I knew her, a high school student. My mom was teaching art classes in our basement several nights a week; I was in one with some "younger" kids, who - being about my age - didn't seem so young, and I was a constant presence at the high school class a few nights afterward. Mainly because of Emily. Because of Emily, the two scary boys - who did not have a sense of the states of those people surrounding them equal to their sense of humor (thereby defining them as "scary") did not cause me to hide in my room. There were other enticing features of the high school art class of course. There was the joy of hanging out with the older kids, an unlikely victory when it came to my siblings and their friends...There was an exchange student from Russia who once made me a crown of dandelions, which I kept long after the poor flowers had passed their prime. And there was Emily. Emily who talked to me, even just a little, while she worked. Emily who made art. Emily who drove up every week with a Barbie-doll head atop her car attenae, its rainbow hair flying in the wind. Emily who had a pierced belly-button and sewed her own Renaissance dress for the Madrigal group that was still so entirely magical to me (I had not yet witnessed its one-day director shoving a piano across the room so that it pounded a wall). Emily. Did I mention I was a little obsessed with this girl? Did I not have to? I don't know how I managed to leave her out so far, but I've managed to leave so many people out. My relational biography is serious swiss cheese. But Emily fits the bill as otherwise outlined. She was fascinating, she was older, and she took interest in me.
At the time, she also held the interest of my brother, who ended up very much hurting her without meaning to because he was unaware of some injuries she'd already suffered. Around this time, Emily came out, and then she graduated, and went away to be a chef. At Sandy's restuarant I saw a picture of the girl, - now woman - far more recent than my memories, in full chef ensem. It was next to a picture of her sister, who was for several years a professional cheerleader. (I heard from John once that Sandy describes her children thus: "I have two daughters: one's an Indigo Girl, the other's a Barbie Doll." - Emily, of course, was the Indigo Girl.)
Now to gossip my entry away, not long back I heard from John (who is related to all of this through his relationship to Sandy - he went drumming with her when we were younger, and has worked for her off and on over the years; she's a great boss because she recognizes his shaky ability to be present on the planet comes from his tendency to leave this world for the one of his musical genius - I am not exaggerating - and that works well)...I heard from John that Emily was dating a boy, news I took with my "oh, well, whatever" eyebrows and a shrug. So what? People aren't as rigid as they used to be. People become comfortable with what used to be so entirely shocking and find it's not so necessary to fight to keep it in place. For instance, I told everyone - coming out of Rogers - that the place was perfect. I believed that, and I had to defend that because it was not being accepted. When I began to feel comfortable, began to experience other people who weren't fighting me on what Rogers was, I could say...well, yeah, there was some shit. There were a few experiences that didn't fit that description. And maybe in some way, lesbians occasionally crush on boys, straight girls on girls, Delas on long-haired, elf-eared, archery kids and villainous Slytherin boys. I don't mean this as a rule, of course. I mean it as the exception. I still follow my own rule of "people are what they tell me they are; they have that right." I will use whatever word I'm told to use, on an individual basis. But. Sometimes a girl-girl dates a boy, and it doesn't change the fact that she's a girl-girl. Sometimes a girl-girl dates, and wants to marry, and because of this ends up amiably breaking off her dateship with a boy and preparing to move. Sometimes, the friend of the mother of the girl-girl, who happens to be the mother of this ?-girl and the girl-boy who didn't mean to hurt her oh so many years ago, comes to the ?-girl and says, "Emily's straight." And the ?-girl...me...sort of sputters and argues and doubts it. And then has to sputter and argue and wonder why she I did.
This second part took place Thursday. I'd ventured out with my mom to this Evil Gallery that I usually refuse to frequent - mainly because I wanted to get out of the apartment. I was feeling all free and ready to begin living a life that was more me, more fully me, more in keeping with all of who I am. It had finally occurred to me that I do need to build a routine here, as I've thought for so many months without being able to do so (crisis after crisis after crisis)...and that routine needs to take place, at least partially, outside of my apartment. (Ooh, insight.) Hello. I live in the city. Time to make proper use of that. The gallery was made an acceptable stop because the very cool framer (who just weeks ago was becoming squonky because my mom likes him so much, and well, he's a guy, and if my parents are divorcing...? - et cetera - but Mom has since brought him up specifically in a general conversation of, "I'm not interested in that. It used to be that - because I was married - people assumed I wasn't interested, and now, people will start assuming that I am...but I'm still not" which I believed...whether that faith will bring me pain later, only my steadfast readers will share in knowing...::cue suspenseful music::) my mom takes her work to, happens to suffer having his shop below this Evil Gallery. it was on our way into the gallery that Mom began discussing Emily's sexuality, on the grounds that she wanted to let Dale know...
how do I fully convey my feelings here. let's see. aiyyiyyuiyughniygnicknooooooooo....no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Mom says, "well, I just think about what Dale has said to me, about his pain around that time, and I'd just like to let him know that, she's figured it out, and she's ok."
And I say, "Well, can't you just let him know that she's ok?" and my mom says she supposes she could in an but I'm certainly not *going to tone, and I mutter something about not even knowing why *I'm* fighting her on it...I just don't think it's a good idea. She mentions that Emily and Dale are both older now, and they're states apart, and she thinks it would mean a lot to Dale to just know that Emily's ok, and I try to understand that - I even do, a little - but at the same time, I wonder: will this put it to rest for Dale? or make it a possibility again? And is that even what I care about? Let's face it. It's not Dale I'm worrying about. It's not Dale, so much, that I'm protecting, or trying to protect. I'm trying to protect the girl I barely know, the girl who after eight or ten years still made the earth shake under me with an indirect hello. I don't want him to unintentionally hurt her again. And oh, what an awful sister I feel myself to be, typing that.
I feel myself to be. That is a very cool phrase, convoluted as it is. And at least it underlines that how I feel is not and never will be the equation for who I am. (Whoa-oh, freedom! Whoa-oh freedom!...) That little breakthrough's worth quite a bit to me.
Where the hell am I?^^ Ah, yes. Trying to have a discussion with my mom in a very small gallery, in front of its unstable owner, while spinning stationery racks. (Did I mention this is more boutique than gallery these days? "Evil Boutique." ...No. That needs a better adjective.) I told her several times that I didn't think it wise for her to tell Dale the news, and she told me several times that she thought it was a good idea, so that a few hours later, when we were out for the second time that night, for the second time doing nothing of interest, and for the second time rushing home (twice- for the same meeting- which my mom still didn't manage to make. Arg) she walked a little bit a way from me, and then back again, as if to say "I don't want to look like I'm doing this behind your back" and told Dale, who'd just called her cell phone. I fumed and furied and tried to let it go. I have no idea how the boy responded. Something tells me the news was not as freeing as Mom intended. Even if he has moved on entirely, which he very likely has, to bring up anything related to a time of such pain has to raise mixed feelings. I don't see him running joyfully through his home shouting, "Wheeeeee! Huzzah!" and so forth.
Anyway. She told him. So that little mystery is done with. Mom never made it clear to me whether she had heard the label "straight" from Emily's mom, (i.e. indirectly from Emily; Sandy's too cool to put rewrite a label without being informed to do so) or had herself put that word into the story upon hearing that Emily had been hoping to "settle down with" this boy. The point, of course, is why I care, and one answer to that is obvious. Because I'm confused, and questioning, and it throws something in me off-balance to know that this girl I so admired and wanted to emulate, this girl I was so drawn to all those years ago, maybe isn't the right ideal for my focus. And it's weird, even though I know that...when I talk about this (and get all sweaty and scared doing so), I talk about connections to girls and women that I *knew* (and know) are straight...it's weird to be told someone I knew was gay is actually not, right now, in the midst of everything.
Would you like to hear something *really* amusing? This is one of the *back-burner* confusions in my brain right now. This is not even the focal point. Doom and damnation.
Yesterday, Friday, was the session with the doc. The fourth session, the one that was supposed to break the pattern of ickiness through good communication and a re-instated feeling of "I'm understood." It did so, actually, (yeay!)...though not without a slight agony on my part. It was a tad hard for me that this time when the little train ran off its track, it wasn't because the doctor didn't understand me. It wasn't really a failing on his part. It was my own confusion and my own inability to express/ communicate what was real for me that caused a lot of it. And that was hard. Because generally, it's been the other way around. When I walked into the session, he even said something about the past three being frustrating, and how he doesn't seem to be understanding me, and Monday I tried to give him an "out" with - "not that I understand myself at the moment"...and I latched on immediately and said, "but I don't." And really, that has been a main factor this time. A huge factor.
I was so...fragile...last night. I was like a small child or an injured puppy. I sat on that couch and we talked about my mixed feelings about diversification, starting with the extremes, the "yes, let's do everything, and let's do all of it right now!" and the, "let's not do anything ever...there's nothing else to me, and there's no point in cluttering my life with activity just for the sake of activity." He agreed with the second point and stated something about how my desire not to do so was protective, wasn't so much against diversification as against unnecessary additions to my life. I told him there was another, more openly defensive, part that was against diversification. Against the idea of it, entirely. A part of me that didn't want there to be anything else to me, other than recovery. He asked for a definition of recovery, and I told him, "pretty much...everything the past few years. Everything I've learned to help me do better with the depression and the anxiety and the eating disorder. ...And everything I've learned to just...help me with...life."
A pretty broad definition, he said. "When does it stop being recovery and just get to be Mary?" he asked. I started crying. That's exactly what the third part of me does not want. It can't stop being recovery. It can't ever stop being recovery. "Why not?" Why not? Because then I lose Rogers and therapy and everything that has helped me so much. Because then I have to be normal, which terrifies me. Because through this process termed "recovery" I've gotten to know my essential self, and if I give up that word and/ or that process, I'll lose that girl. I already feel like I have. I already feel like I haven't the slightest idea who I am.
And I want to go home. I want to go home.
"Of course you do," he said. "That's what people want when they're scared and confused, like you are now. We want to go home."
I told him, again, about the conversation with Dave. This time I told him how different it was, even then conversations I've had with RCs up until then. It was different from the continual reconnection I feel is necessary to maintain my sanity. It was a reminder that Home and Family are not words I arbitrarily attributed here. I felt like a kid, far away, overwhelmed, who called home and was just instantly...grounded. And he talked about how my relationship with Dave has changed, and how I'm the one who's given him a better and better picture of who Dave is, who Sara is, who Jenna is, and who Tracy is, over the years. I told him it was weird to me, to think that he had these concepts of people based only on what I've said of them. (I was remembering a similar comment from Harriet, which scared me.) I didn't feel capable of helping anyone get to know these people, these people whom they hadn't even met, who I maybe didn't even understand. He said it was a question of my reality again.
"Oh, that." I said, trying to breathe again. "That's kind of disappeared recently." My reality. My reality. Aren't reality and I two separate, warring beings? No. No I suppose we're not...We haven't always been. We don't have to be. We aren't.
He asked me what I missed most about home, and I started to bawl. I cried so forcefully, I thought I might strain something; at the same time, I'd been straining everything not to cry, for days. He said, perhaps it was too painful to say, and I wanted to say, no, no, I can say it...I didn't want to just cry and not tell him, but every time I started to tell him, the tears took over again. Finally, I said, "I miss being able to fall apart...and have someone there to hold me." And then, rushing on as if I could quiet the storm of that statement by adding others, I said, "And I miss knowing who I am. I wasn't confused about it then."
"You weren't confused then?"
"Not about this."
He asked if I remembered the developmental rule we'd discussed and I told him no, I didn't. He said that, as a person develops, they do not lose anything. They grow, they change, they gain depth and breadth, but - short of an injury to the brain - nothing they've ever gained goes away. And so what I knew of myself at Rogers, what I had there, will always be. It's in me right now, even though I can't quite find it, can't quite feel it, through the circumstance.
"But some of it has gone away," I argued. "Some of what I had there has gone away."
He said, people have gone. People have moved on. He said, people have died. I knew he was going to say that one, and I didn't want him to - but did I want him to leave it out? He said I still have who I am, and what I know of them, and I have the life that is going to be greater than the loss, a point I fell into and slept in for a good two minutes.
"I'm just...trying to imagine anything...greater than the loss."
"Stronger, healthier relationships," he said. "Even with the same people."
That second point was a spark, a light, and insight, an "oh-my-godd, you mean it?" Even with the same people. So healthy doesn't mean severing myself from those I love. Even with the same people. So you believe that sometimes people come back, and it's ok to throw my arms around them and hang on? Even with the same people. So it's ok with you...if I don't ever let go?
He talked some of all that's gone on while we work through things, all of the crises that have overwhelmed our discussions. He said, (he actually said), "We start talking about sexuality and...Jenna reappears." And silly, silly me, wanted to say, "Wait, you saw that, too?" You got that? I didn't know you saw how weird that was. We talked about the pain in how she's reappeared, in everything she's going through...with the ball in her court, I don't this moment, even know where she is. He talked about those relationships, and how I could have them, and I just exhaled deeply and said, "Wow."
"You look stunned."
"I am stunned...I am...I'm...Sometimes the things you say, they're still so different from what I'm used to. And they're wonderful...they're just...it's like they're from an entirely different world."
"They feel foreign...?"
"Not in a bad way."
He said they feel foreign. He said, but they aren't foreign. He said, it's not his experience he mirrors for me, it's my own. Everything that he says, everything that he shows me, I've shown him. He's not the one with these insights into the people I know or the life I'm living; he's the one showing me again and again what I've shown him. ...And I wanted to say, is that how you do it? Is that how you almost always know the exactly right thing to say? Is that why you seem psychic so often I swear you read my journal? Because you're listening so intently, you can respond to me almost as I would, were I clear of momentary confusions and complex pains...?
I kept listening to him, really listening to him. Listening for magic and salve and things I've stopped counting on in him - because I've needed them less, as I discover the crop inside me. I listened, and every now and again, before I disputed a comment I needed to dispute, I let it register a second time. I felt how I would feel it if they'd been Dave's words. Odd, to be in a time where Dave is so rare he seems somehow more priceless than the doc. He's not in actuality. I don't dare compare the two; I think I'd go (entirely) crazy if I tried to pick one over the other. (At this point. It is generally less dramatic to work with the doctor, for equally dramatic change.) But needing the sweetness of home so dearly and hearing a voice I hadn't heard in so long put such stock in every syllable. It was good, I think, to listen to the doc again that way. It's good to not need him so dearly as I did, to be able to better care for myself by myself, but it's also good to hear his words as phoneme-by-phoneme gifts.
And I told him I'm scared not to be "recovering", not to be "mentally ill." I told him I don't want to have to be normal, and he said, "Who says you have to be normal?" and I cried really hard, which I think helped him understand that, while I wholeheartedly agree with his reply, I'm really upset at the possibility. He said for someone who doesn't want to diversify, I've been doing it at light-speed over the past few years. And I told him, I do want it. I do want to grow and change and all of that. I really do; I always have. I just don't want to change so much that, if I could go home again, I would no longer fit there. I don't want to change to the point they might not understand me.
"You want them to still be home," he said. And I cried. And he told me again that no one gets to take any of it away. It's mine. It's all mine for always, and no development can take away the developments up until that point. I may think I'm in some way the opposite of how I was, but the truth is I grew on that point. I gained depth and dimension and ended up somewhere that seems strikingly different, even opposing. That isn't. The last thing he wants for me is that I be homeless again. The last thing he wants is to see me, by some black magic, returned to the girl who walked into his office nearly three years ago.
And maybe I was that fragile last night. But I wasn't that hopeless, that mute, or that numb. Maybe I was that afraid and that lonely, but I wasn't the same girl. He called Rogers my blossoming, and said that I've gained strength and petals. I'm still the same essential Mary plant, that doesn't change, but I'm growing...like a tree grows. It's not a different species; it's not a different tree. But it has ever more circles to its trunk and new leaves every season. I think I could maybe learn to accomodate that sort of change. The kind that lets me stay, sturdy, in one place as one being, with all sorts of room for development.
I want to be like a favorite strip of city street, where the shops have been the same for years, but every minute different people pass by, every day the weather changes, and every season the displays in the windows change, and the light feels different glinting off the sidewalk and the street. I want to change so broadly, but so quietly, as that. With the same sorts of weather but wholly new petals, year after year after year.
chord
^Where was I?
^^Where am I?
...And where is it I'll go?
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