10:30 a.m. - 01/21/03
she's just trying to evolve.
generally, I encourage wisdom. knowledge, conceptualization, awareness; I like these things. don't I? I wouldn't have known I did yesterday. I wrote a poem, impulsively, that I didn't save, with lines like, "sight is a relative liberty"...which translates, in context to Ani's "I envy you - your ignorance/ I hear that it's bliss" which begs Tori to say, "this is not real/ this is not really happening."
You bet your life it is.
that was yesterday. the ups and downs barely registering before they'd switched, torn between extremes, unable to see. I thought I was working my way down when I faced the fear behind the anxiety in the morning. I didn't know that it was dipping down to fly up again, over and over. in the afternoon, during a temporary eye, I called Sara for the first time in months and we had a few marvelous moments that ended in "let's talk tonight"...I didn't know then that I would end up sobbing moments later, a broken, shaken mess. I didn't know that I would end up in my father's backseat, carsick and heartsick, driving to his appt with the doc to gain a few minutes of my own. braving the wrath of my ego, the wrath of the darkness, the wrath of his waiting room with its inane commercials and painful smooth jazz, to (maybe) speak. I didn't know then that she'd call just after we had left to say she couldn't talk tonight anyway, but she did want to talk soon. all I knew was that I couldn't talk to my parents, and I was breaking, and I didn't know what was wrong enough to reach out to a friends...besides, my friends are hurting without my influence, aren't they? and so when they said, "do you want to take some of Dad's time?" I said no, and meant no, but also wanted time of my own. and I ended up in a car, and then in the waiting room, and then finally in his office, a confused doctor asking me what was up.
"I freaked out today," I said, twisting my head so far to the right, I'm surprised a switch didn't flip and let me turn my face away completely; let him face my ahir. "I started sobbing, and my parents thought maybe I should come talk to you, and it sounded better than not coming so I did."
He asked me if I thought they had overreacted: I get a little upset, they ship me off to see a doctor. I wanted to say no, but how presumptuous that would be. "No, I'm really really struggling, and I really do have needs." I didn't think I could say that. So I told him I felt really awful about coming, but I didn't necessarily think they'd taken exorbitant measures. The pain was high-profile, high-intensity, awful and unescapable and real.
He told me that he had some extra time, that it was possible he could talk to me for a little while and still have a good amount of time to talk to my dad. I didn't need to feel that I was taking away from anyone else in order to meet my needs, he said. I tried to breathe, and I think maybe, I nodded him a thank-you, an "I'll try."
I tried to construct the day for him, for me, too; I still wasn't sure what had happened. I told him I'd woken up crazy-anxious, calmed down, gotten upset, calmed down, called a friend, felt crazy, started sobbing. Rollercoasters, though the metaphor is old and maybe overused. I told him I didn't know what was going on, but I wasn't sure how to handle the intensity. I was scared, scared of losing again. Scared of fragile (brilliant) friends who could, with one shift of an electrolyte, one misfiring neurotransmitter, break away. Out of reach. I told him, much later, what I was starting to realize, that the pain of losing Tracy was still so terribly intense, and I'd just sent letters to Rogers possibly never to hear back, and in the wake of that to just consider that I could lose someone else ... is too much.
I broke down. I was a mess of tears, of liquid, of sobs. I was a mess of brokenness, sitting there, crying harder than I have in months, harder than I have since the first months after Tracy died. I told him that I'd called Sara after a month of not talking to her, that it had been wonderful, and not long afterward, I'd been completely doomed. I told him that Sara feels she's starting to put what-she-had-at-Rogers back together in her life outside. I told him that for a few days now she's been doing really well, compelled to it by a frighteningly low weight discovered Thursday. She hadn't been trying to lose weight. She was just so caught up in the bulimia, she said.
I started bawling. I'd been telling myself- am still telling myself- that it wasn't just Sara. That it's everyone, those with sicknesses, those facing life problems, everyone. But it was Sara and her story that connected me to what I was feeling, that left me finishing sentences with phrases made of tears. I told him we're "closer than sisters" and the idea of losing her, of losing anyone, terrifies me. I can't do it, I said. I can't take anymore loss. Not when I'm still holding this pain of losing Tracy, this pain of past abandonments, this pain of Rogers letters that are going unanswered. I can't take anymore loss, and loss is inevitable. I'm drowning in D!@#$%^, not aided by a thousand pointless school assignments (no challenge, no stimulation, no creative thought), and I'm desperate to reach out but terrified to reach out less I love and be hurt again. Lose again. I realized yesterday, by way of some forgiveness, that some of my behavior's still compelled by what I felt the last few months of knowing Billy. It terrifies me. And it terrifies me that there's no way out of it, I already love them/you- there's no way to make it stop now, and oh how honestly I wouldn't want to. I hear those who cannot understand say, "you need to move on, find friends who are not sick" and yes, I need that- too, but not instead. There is a heritage here, in my illness, that needs to have companions also. What's more, I'm terrified because I love these girls so much. To leave them would be to lose them also, and I would never want that. Ever. He asked me if the fear was a masked wish again this time, and I started crying because it felt so wrong to hear him say that. He said I'd been working to gain independence and maybe...but I just shook my head and bawled. "It doesn't seem to fit," he said, and I said no. I didn't want this much independence, a fresh start for a slate wiped clean. I was terrified of losing. That was all. I don't want it on any level.
I want ignorance. Sometimes. I want to make it unreal. How easy it must be for them, I thought. How easy it must be for those people who really don't understand. All those guidance counselors who were able to look at the pain in my posture, in my eyes, and see something so foreign, something that could simultaneously call to the surface and ignore. How easy it must be to shrug off the media, the sexism, the highest-mortality-rate statistics, when you don't have to know. When you don't know the way a friend knows and the way someone who's been there/ is there knows. Some days, I crave that. Bless me with oblivion, if only long enough to let me rest.
When I started crying my dad said, "Mary, I wanted to tell you; if you saw a magazine with a girl in a bikini when you were looking in the trunk" [for a missing pack of Popples stickers] "it's not mine, it's Joe's." I almost laughed, painfully, shaking my head. It's not about you. It's so rarely about you. It's not about you and your prejudicial speech, your patriarchal (for lack of a less overused word) practices, your outdated schemes of thought. And sometimes, when you guess, it's amazing. It's amazing how you manage to give me just one more piece of information I don't want to know. Joe told John he's buying a Shakira poster because his "apartment looks like a gay guy's apartment" and he needs something decisively masculine. I hate the world sometimes. I hate what we've made of it.
We eventually found other connections/ "explanations" that fit better than his initial masked wish theory did. Things like the height of grief right now, the way one-year-one-month sneaks up in the wake of just one-year, the height of vulnerability with that and with the pack of letters sent not long ago...the reasons I didn't call Sara, my own vulnerability, and the pain of loving her so much and being scared of her situation. I feel like a poor friend, not being there for her in a situation that I understand so well. I forget that I *am* there for her, that she knows I am, that I don't have to risk my own health to hang onto her. That it wouldn't be fair to either of us if I did.
I feel guilty for my fear. I'm so terrified; I couldn't believe how fearful I felt yesterday, desperately afraid. I kept telling him that it isn't fair; they don't deserve to be sick. Not that anyone does, but they don't, and he would echo the "they don't"s with me, and say how scary it can be. I kept telling him that I'm struggling too, yes, but still, the things I'm struggling with aren't so immediately dangerous. Facing phobias can't kill me. Growing up can't kill me. It can terrify me. It can't kill me, not when I don't even want it to, not when I don't even realize how close to the edge I am. The behaviors, the behaviors that women like Sara are still fighting every hour of every day, can kill you without a second thought. And they don't deserve that. And I can't deal. I feel like a horrible friend for being afraid because I feel like it's saying I don't trust that she'll get better, and oh God, if I could explain the extent to which I believe in her here, I would. But I know this illness, too. I know and hate and fear this illness, and I don't minimize the brute she's fighting against. I don't. It killed my roommate. On several levels, it killed me. I don't have the luxury of ignorance anymore. And with something so impossibly violent, it's true: you have to fear what you can't ignore.
He said early on that I needed to be heard, and that was the majority of what happened in the forty minutes or so I spoke with him. He placed small phrases here aren there, planted tiny thoughts to germinate inside the pain. Things like: "Right. Because you have it so easy. You've had *such* a *struggle-free* recovery" and (this is the best one) "Do you think that on some level your friends who are struggling see how hard you're working and how little by little you're gaining back your life? Do you think maybe that just watching you gives them some hope?" Well, actually I tend to think they must hate me for having it so easy, but wouldn't his be a lovely perspective to believe... I thought of my own pain over the individual struggles of my friend, and the collective fragility of everyone I love, and I realized what a gift it could be to know that I will be ok. If anyone could really believe that about crazy old me, maybe it would be a gift. Because I am ok. I am safe. I make it through.
and then on the radio on the way there, a journalist previewed a focus story to be shown that night: how eating less makes you live longer. I wanted to reach through the wire and strangle her then and there, but I wasn't even close enough to change the station. it comes down to, there are so many things I need people to understand hope whole-heartedly they'll never have to know. how much pain does it take to change a society? what else do we need...? hope, maybe...maybe hope.
chord
"i walk in stride with people/ much taller than me/ and partly it's the boots but/ mostly it's my chi..." -ani
(i am tall as Tracy in these boots.)
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