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8:25 p.m. - 02/03/03
marbles found.:]|
I'm bailing water (or rather images) out of the sinking ranchoweb boat via village photos. I wish I were doing it via a d*land gold account, but I honestly don't have the funds, so here I am, running to yet another free image site, until they too close down. It will happen. Andrew is one of the few site-running-people I believe when he says the service will stay free.

In other news, there's other news...

I think I've been forgetting to take my meds, which- added to the general ickiness I've been experiencing and the sleepless nights- leaves me pretty drained and hopeless-feeling at the moment. I sent my e-mail check-ins to Dr. R this morning, and I posted what I consider the "final" check-in at sf as well. (I was updating pretty regularly there about my struggles during this two-week craziness.) In other words, I tried to tie it all up neatly and proclaim myself finished struggling. I don't want to be struggling. Bad enough I considered allowing a crisis to take hold these past couple of weeks, but things are back to normal now, and it's time I be back to normal, too. That's how I feel; that's what I tell myself. The truth? Nothing's changed. There are two days until I see him, rather than two weeks. I'm stil confused, overtired, understimulated, alone, unconfident, simultaneously being forced into my future and my past.

I was tortured by my future and my past/ and even as another blow rained down on me/ I wasn't sure that I'd survived the last...

Yes, well. It doesn't matter that it's difficult; I fight it anyway. It doesn't matter that the illness fights back; I'm stronger. I will always be stronger; I have more allies than it does. I just hate how hard it's fighting, and how the barely-hanging-on that takes such effort looks so lazy to anyone who isn't me. Actually, it looks lazy to me. It looks like not enough work, not enough responsibility, not close enough to safe. But what else can I do? I'm doing more schoolwork than I was last week; that's all I can say right now. I'm freaking out about schoolwork more than I was last week also. I'm glad no one had to witness me preparing for a psych test today. I had myself very much convinced I could not possibly be ready. As usual, the test involved one short essay and pages of multiple choice. For the first time ever, I didn't even skip a question to go back to later. I was certain of nearly every multiple choice answer, something that scares me even to type. (In my head, saying you knew what you were doing means setting yourself up for humiliation when you fail.) The essay was a little less cool, mostly because I was exhausted beyond the point where I can construct at all comprehensible sentences. Still. It was nowhere near deserving of my anxiety level- my anxiety level that did not taper out afterward. And I took those meds. So I'm thinking more and more that it's time to suck up my pride and tell the doc the anxiety meds aren't working like they used to. He's been amazed at the effect of such a small dose anyway. At least I know now why I simultaneously defend meds to the death and hate myself for taking them. Maybe I can squeeze that into the conversation, as if I'll have anywhere near enough time anyway. Aigh. I'm just glad that- if he does manage to read it like he said he would- he'll know all the basic details on his own. And he can ask me questions, and I won't have to initiate a great deal of it. I can't do that right now. I even told him in very vague terms about the relationality/ sexuality brainweather, so that I wouldn't have to bring it up "cold" Wednesday. I keep thinking tomorrow is Wednesday. Tomorrow is not Wednesday. Tomorrow is Tuesday, and that is good because I need time to work on school. Blagh. And I need to sleep in...Please! Sleep! In, up, down, around, through...Sleeeeep.

I have affirmations written on my arms right now. My right arm says, in pretty letters, "I deserve only good things." My left arm says, in messy ones, "I am safe. I deserve to stay here." I wanted to cut very badly in the face of school today, and I remembered one time at Rogers when I wrote everything I thought the cuts would "say" on my arms instead. All the bad things about me that brought up cutting urges. This time, I decided to affirm slightly better messages, and it's easier to deal with the relative tattoo than it was then. It helped some. Crocheting like a yarn fiend has helped also. But urges are still high. They sleep between symptoms, though. School often brings up cutting; otherwise the purging urges are high, and I'm having trouble eating, but still doing so. For the first time in ages, I feel like saying that ever-so-unacceptable phrase, "I feel fat." I mean, Jesus. I didn't even say that in the deepest trenches of this illness. (Granted, that silence was actually part of my sickness. But still.) I've had "fat is not a feeling" internalized so deeply, I probably chant it in my sleep, and I still feel like saying it. What I really feel is scared and out of control and bigger than I can handle being, but there's a physical aspect to it that I can't describe emotionally. It's beyond bad body image. It's how I feel in my body, but to say "body" right now is like saying "sex" or "man" or some other terrifying word so I just stick to keeping my mouth shut. I'm not sure. It probably has to do with returning to sixth grade and stepping up to adulthood simultaneously. Part of me is pushing herself to stand tall, to be as adult as possible, while the other part tells scary stories of Upper Elementary. I never identified much with that concept of using the eating disorder to keep from physically developing, but damn. I feel it now. I don't want to stay a little child; I'm terrified of that incapacity, that neediness, that powerlessness, and sense of failure. That's why I never considered myself represented by that particular motivation. However. I'm also terrified of not being acknowledged as incapacitated, needy, powerless, and a failure when I am. I feel incapable, so please take care of me understanding that I am. No, I don't want to be this way, but don't make me show you how fully I am. Don't make me be an adult when I still haven't healed my definition enough to make it worthwhile.

What I really want right now, and I don't think I can ask for (and maybe I won't need once I see him Wednesday and understand that it's back on track) is to see him more often than I do. We were talking on the phone nearly once a week before he left. I'm just in enough of a mess that I need that. I need to talk to him twice, and I need to not have to do it in a state of emergency. I want to feel like it's set, like it's scheduled, like that's just the way it is. But it always causes such problems to ask for, and I'm not sure I have the courage to even voice it. Still, I just need a place to drain the blisters. I need a place to babble where the words don't just bounce off my own head. I can't make myself do any communicative writing. I haven't even responded to Stacy's e-mail, which makes me feel like sh*t. "What the hell am I doing? I'll sabotage everything!" I don't seem capable of letting people in when my head is such a mess. I want to tidy it up for them. I don't have a problem with all my issues, so long as they're neatly stacked into anecodotes and wisdom by the time the guests arrive. Grargh. I've been a mess so much of my life; I'm afraid people will leap to the conclusion that I'm back to that again (the way I do.) I try to be clean all the time, and I can't. I can't manage it. I want to break down in front of you, and in front of myself, and just understand that it's temporary. That I'm still me behind the craziness. That I do nothing wrong in struggling...

A fishy asked me why I can't struggle, and it's a question worthy of an answer. I have too many questions right now to feel safe in it, though. Maybe I'll attack, it stream-of-conscious, at a later date.

Shandi called tonight, in the midst of my feeling awful for being too young, and oddly enough I felt better afterward. Worse about N*land, but better about myself. I still care for her; she didn't do anything upsetting, but I wasn't hiding who I've become so much as I usually does. I wasn't holding back on putting in my input, or offering the wisdom I've gleaned from my experience. She talked about leaving home, which I'm not ready to do and have already done. So, I shared. I shared about the ACT scandal also, and she said what so many say, "It couldn't hurt you," and I re-explained to say very simply, "Yes, it could." I told her through several anecdotes that I now care more about being myself than I do about acting on the perfect plan or the perfect schedule. And it's by a small enough percentile that I still struggle terribly; it's by a small enough margin that I still feel overwhelmed by the old voices...but I know what I want now. I want me. I don't give a banana about anything else.

Ok, a few things. But I don't think there's anything that matters more to me than living at this point. I don't think there's anything more important than the promise to live, to evolve, to never sacrifice myself again. I've played more than enough games in my life. I've jumped through so many hoops in so few years. And I don't care anymore. I listen to her talk about where people are going to college and what there majors are, and I know that I'm so far behind in that I don't even know if I'm going to college in the fall...and yet...I didn't feel behind tonight. I didn't say, "I'm still not well, so I can't leave this fall"...I said, I wasn't sure I was ready, so I might not go; I might not leave my support and my treatment team quite that soon. I said that I was ready to look after myself first, and I realized I didn't care what she thought. I honestly didn't care if it sounded like yet another talented Lastname was throwing their life away to avoid the mainstream responsibilities. It's not the case. This is the course of a Brave. This is something I've never done, and I've never seen modeled. This is about teaching my heart, by listening to it again and again and again, that it has a voice worth using.

This is about having a life to throw in the face of N*land instead of a Tony or book. I don't want to prove that my art is worth the world's attention. I want to inhabit the world. I want to understand that I am worth my own attention. I am worth all this. So fuck how many meds or visits or freak-outs it takes. Fuck how many expletives I use instead of pretty phrases. When I live, it isn't going to be in a psych-ward-memoir sort of way. It's going to be something the self-help section has never seen. Pure velocity.

I don't want to live like someone who believes in sickness. I want to live as someone who still remembers, still hangs onto the wisdom from that time, but doesn't stock her faith there. I don't want this to be the experience that defines me. This time, it needs to be the way I find myself, not the way I'm formed. My story needs to be different- different content, different words. My story needs to be the kind you drop in on and imagine hooking into novels, but maybe never do. I need to be myself without the filters. I need to be myself as I would be.

chord

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