8:40 p.m. - 08/31/02
||this is today-]
still hanging on by embroidery threads. still doing everything I can to conceivably survive in the face of pain I spent nearly a year avoiding. god. nearly a year...
yesterday's appointment was definitely a good risk on my part; I'm ever so glad I asked him for it...but I'm far from "better" today. I don't go there expecting even temporary cures, though the reprieve of being able to talk openly is easily confused for one. still, there has been notable enough improvement in some aspects of my past day to warrant giving myself credit. I've done a hell of a lot of schoolwork without being terribly compulsive about it. I worked on my psych, sci fi, and government this morning, took a little rest during which I did some reading and succeeded in being beaten *by my father* at checkers (very, very disturbing - perhaps I was too cocky from having just beaten my mom.) I did a little more work, and read nearly all of The Time Machine for class. it was odd to work on school without having the same feeling of crazy desperation and caught-up-pedness that I spent the past week in. It was a relief, to be intellectually stimulated, without having my brain run around trying to keep away from its more menacing shadows. things were interesting but not so overwhelming. I started to feel like, if Mistrandy really does come to see me on Labor Day- when we, perhaps mistakenly, planned to meet- I will have enough work finished. I started to remember that her approval does not make or break my happiness, and it's perfectly ok if I only give my best to school. not my obsessive best. my I'm-interested-in-this-but-if-you-think-it's-my-first-priority-you're-sore-mistaken-best. I'm a recovering perfectionist. I give one-hundred percent, but my first concern is my own welfare. I'm learning to be selfish and I love it.
mwa.
I still can't think in fully-formed sentences. I feel like my writing is off lately, and I'd guess it's because my thinking is off. my resources are scattered between keeping the different areas of my life somewhat in-tact (in not completely avoiding everyone, in taking time for myself, in crying/ avoiding tears, in schoolwork and play) and I can't seem to organize them into words. I still feel uncertain about putting this into words. All those times I wrote about missing RED, I knew it, but I didn't go into it. Now I'm living with it, every day inside it like this place is only half my world, and it's hard to risk the words. In all my storytelling, I've only written one piece- a poem- about what I felt there. And in all this journaling, I've stuck to how desperately I miss it. I haven't been able to attach the two, to talk of how my missing makes the beauty of it feel, or how the beauty makes the longing oh-so powerful.
In my ED, I keep my food in separate corners of the plate. Even if I eat, I move the morsels cautiously, keeping them categorized, and generally untouching. Natural combinations terrify me, let alone the risky or obscure. The first time I poured milk into my cereal at Rogers, my hands shook to the point I nearly missed the bowl. And all along, I kept saying, hey, hey, hey. If we have the same illness, why do you mix your food, and I can't stand to use just this one plate?
My last week there, I processed a piece with Jen, the art therapist, and one of the interns, whose name has left me (sore). Their big comment was that I'd made the long strip of paper a collection of disconnected images, that nothing touched, and nothing went together. They could see the common themes, the self-destruction, the pain, the grief and abandonment, but the piece itself did not acknowledge these as themes. I wasn't willing to let the story piece itself together; I had to stay safe by way of separation.
So when I do this with my thoughts now, I know better. But I know also that I've always done it to survive. That the pain of having lost Rogers is enough without fully connecting that the place I lost was the place I loved. It's overwhelming to sob and scream for Tracy without realizing that she's somehow "more gone" than Katia and Rae and Jenna, that the girl I lost was the girl who went so gently through my drawers and picked from them the blue sweater I never wore. It's difficult enough to know I'm in this pain, to stay here, without asking myself why. There are breaks in the avoidance when I'm with the doctor, when I feel safe enough to break through, but the only other place I can imagine being honest is the one I cannot call. The only other place I can imagine feeling safe to call up tears, is the one who gave me them. I forget that I can't call RED to talk about this. I start to think how nice it would be, just to talk with so-and-so...but then...I remember long enough to stop.
I want the day when every reminder of my time there is not pain. When my mom can buy crochet yarn and I will not lose my breath.
a tilted
chord
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