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10:20 p.m. - 12/05/02
give me one reason to stay here.
Tears today. The kind I use as weapons against depression that tries to steal all feeling. The kind that are nearly as tiresome as the beast they're called to fight. I call them, yes, through ritual, through sitting in the silence of a moment stolen for myself. I flip through the experience of the past days, thought and acted through, and eventually I find a hurt, and I embrace it. Fully, if I have the strength. I let it well and sweep and sting through me, knowing that the pain, familiar and somehow sweet, will not hurt me as much as the depressive fog. Knowing that I would rather feel the worst than feel nothing. I made that choice, and since making it, I repeat it several thousand times over. I'd rather be dying than dead.

Still, it's tiring. Frustrating. Degrading, even. I feel compelled to censor my own irritation, as I know that the desire for "control"- over my situation or my mind- is something I've been trained against. Control is an illusion but power is not. My power, the power of my identity, the strength of knowing who I am, and feeling massive loyalty toward her- finally- that is not false. And I lose my power when the depression disconnects whatever links me to that self. I lose my strength, my focus, my memory, my grounding, my future...everything. I lose even the ability to surrender because I know that in time, (not my time)- I will be returned to myself. I know that these things which I feel are gone are only hidden. And so I have to wake up some mornings desperate not to leave my bed and unable to sleep in it. I have to walk through the day watching life through a cloud of confusion, separation, cynicism. And when the moment quiets and I have a second to myself, I can sit and talk my way into pain to minimize my losses. To minimize the time it takes to return to myself.

I hate it, though. I honestly do. And I don't know what step to take or what course to choose. I trust the meds; that, or, I'm too tired to try something new. So many pills. And I know they help. They have to help because depression now versus Depression Then is hardly meaningful...but I'm learning to live in the present. And I don't care that I am relatively sane. I care that I can't choose how to feel, or even ensure that I will be able to feel, at all times. I care that when my brain decides to switch off- when the stress of school, or the tension of my parents, or the function of a neurotransmitter causes a split in the wire that holds the shell of self to Self, I have no choice in the matter. I hate that even knowing myself, even recognizing my presence, I have no ability at this point to regain it. I hate feeling like there's something I can do, like there has to be something I could do, if only to keep from feeling the helplessness.

Everything gets to be so evil in its invisibility. Parents whose tactics leave you bruised below the skin, illnesses who steal your emotions, your identity. Illnesses that make any umbrage on your body seem self-imposed. Sometimes I think the most brutal part of abuse must be the part that gets inside your head and justifies it. There must be some form of torture that acts by turning the victim's mind against herself. When I'm ready, I'll see the source. I'll see who benefits by doing this to me. There are parts of it even my biology can not control.

Everything that works in my favor comes back to who I am, known most fully through my feelings. Severing me from that...it just makes everything so empty and so huge.

I've come out of it a little though. I feel it lingering in the back of my head, but it's lost the comprehensive hold it had earlier. Still a strong need to hurt myself, but that has more to do with feeling than with illness. I'm frightened by the prospect of discovering who I am. I'm frightened by the prospect of introducing mySelf to others. both of which are already occurring. My old-habits see this as a cry for aid; if I'm afraid of being me, they'll take away my chance to be. So all I know to do is fight the fear. All I know to do is to not reinforce the idea that who I am must be hidden by punishing myself for revealing her. And slowly, learning to feel safe in the revelation.

By mistake a few days ago, I sent my sister an e-mail from the address that now has my name read Mary Brave. After doing so, I sputtered cuss words and desperately wanted to hurt myself. How can what calms me so deeply inside myself bring pain when spoken aloud? I have to teach myself not to be ashamed. Not to be ashamed of my identity. Not to be ashamed of how I've chosen to assume it. Not to be ashamed that I have taken steps to fill needs my family does not understand.

Still, I was grateful yesterday that Dr. R did not reference the new name. I was grateful for more than that, actually, shocked into gratitude by the calm and gentle way with which he broached discussion of this past weekend's frantic words. He asked me how I was, and he was sitting closer, the way he has the past two weeks, and he asked it in a way that was more...reverant...than normal. A way that, rather than using the question as a means into my week's worth of tragedies, simply asked after how I feel.

I was feeling ok, actually. I'd just seen Tori, I'd slept marvelously for the first time in days or maybe weeks, and there was snow outside. I was afraid, of course, of what we had to say, but I was not feeling so frantic or so desperate. We talked about the guilt for saying what I feel, and how it makes a painful situation hurt just that much more. About how my inability to see a concrete wrong in the way my parent's treat me/ live their lives, makes it more difficult to defend the pain I feel around them. And how, ultimately, a relationship wherein a person is alternatingly kind and cruel, is perhaps the hardest to survive. He asked me how I'd feel if someone gave me a black eye and ice to put on it, and I was semi-disappointed to realize: I'd make myself be grateful for the ice.

We talked about it sparingly, considering the pain I've felt over it. Maybe for half the session, which went long. Ambivalent me felt a bit unfinished, wanted to jump into things a bit more and rip them up and make them raw...and was also extremely grateful for his sense of time, and the caution that led us away from it before I shut down and could not speak of it again. Before another four, six, eight months went by until I wrote another therapist those desperate words: I can't do it anymore. I have to leave.

He said that as I was freaking out, I seemed rational. That my entry suggests I understood the situation very well. I was aware of my parent's struggles, sympathized, even loved them, but felt the anger and the sadness of my own situation also. At my expression, he suggested I may not have felt as grounded as I was. Truth, that. He said that I have permission to feel grateful to my parents at the same time I feel *anything* else, and even as I questioned him, I felt frustration with myself for doing so. I use the trick often, needing logical arguments to use myself when the same questions replay in my mind. I question to gain the answers. This time, though, I didn't want to fight him for his understanding. I simply wanted to accept it and have some peace again. I want to take it on faith, or in time, or without the fierce words that suggest my parent's training is still strong. I don't want to argue as if I still believe.

He asked if I could tell him where it had come up from, how the escalation had occurred. I recalled a series of small events, moving from Thanksgiving and the distaste toward my musicians into Saturday and my father's near collapse/ mother's episodic craziness. Sunday and a piece of fucking posterboard that made me feel like tearing down the walls. (Asking for a school supply a week before you find out it's still not here, when you feel you ask so little, when you can't ask all those bigger, relational, familial favors...and having not even that small need fulfilled, can set something flaming that has been brewing for awhile.) I told him about my father's brutal comments: I suggest, a little playfully, that he needs to let himself be calm. He says, "Like you? Be calm LIKE YOU?" A remark that stabs me in the tear ducts and brings a syllable like pain from Dr. R. A discussion of why-we-should-live-in-the-city prompts him to say, "Aren't you just doing what I do? Thinking that everything is going to get better if you do this one thing, and it's not." Shocked, I chose the rather firm reply, "First of all, I am not like you" followed with, "and I don't expect this to solve everything. I expect that this would help solve one problem. It would probably create a few problems of its own, also, but it would solve the problems raised by living in D!@#$%^."

The Superdoc suggests my dad's own hopelessness leads him to press the same on me. My dad can't see the point of trying when no action solves the pain inside his world. He's trying to teach me how to give up, and I don't want to give up. He's trying to poison me, when he doesn't even know that he's been poisoned. It's a horrible mindset we pass down...one we don't even know isn't true. My parents love me. To the full extent of their human fallibililty, they would keep from hurting me if they realized they were. If they realized they were and they could stop. But my dad is forever proving to us how old he is. And stodgy, aging men cannot change in their ways.

And then...we started talking about relationships. I had mentioned the glory of a community of freaks, and he had understood. I had talked about the inability of my family to see that my music is not militantly feminist or look beyond their brutal stereotypes and deprecating humor. And I mentioned quickly how challenging this just raised more questions about me, followed with the explanation of Dale's theory of why I'm sick being that I'm gay and can't handle it. I shared that I find the latter part far more offensive. And that since Dale never brought this up with me, we'd never discussed it. That I had no desire to do so, but took offense at the idea I wouldn't be able to handle it, and the minimization of the true causes of my sickness. I used phrases that are normal to me "if I were gay" and "if I were straight" without commiting to being anything in the moment. I told him that the idea of being straight scared me quite a bit more, and he used words & phrases like "men" "sexuality" "sexual" and "between men and women" that made my nerves shut down and my speech stop. I think at that point we went to a safer point in the topic again, and neared the end of our discussion. Or our time, rather.

I couldn't handle that ending, though; it was far too disconcerting. So as he went to open the door, I said, "Kind of an odd subject to end on?" a cue he took, standing with me a moment and saying, "But also kind of a cool one, isn't it? How we are in the world, how we relate to each other?" I nodded a little, and decided to try and think of it that way. I think part of me is frightened that he'll call me out on being asexual. Or even on wanting to be gay. I guess part of me is frightened that he'll tell me something I'm not ready to be told. As if therapists ever say anything direct enough to hurt.

I imagine myself telling him I'm not able to talk about this. He says, "Are you afraid your parents might find out?" and I reply, "Not nearly as much as I am of what *I* will."

This is my last dark secret, if I've calculated right. The well of relationships- of identity and sexuality and the trail of boys and girls who've challenged my dormancy...this is, I think, the last thing I've never told anyone when we were in the same room.

But he didn't kill me for the e-mail, so maybe I'll survive.

chord

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