7:45 p.m. - 01/25/02
consider this. even if it don't make sense...
I keep hearing Judy Garland rushing through my head- that scene from The Wizard of Oz where she's locked up with the crystal crying, "I'm frightened, Aunty Em." Over and over: "I'm frightened..." And it's in her exact tone that the word rushes through my head, and because I was woken too early by shotguns and frantic geese (I live in a world where hunting is an excused school absence) I start to wonder if perhaps an older Judy heard that line rushing through her head when the pain was spiraling faster than any storm...?
Fragments and run-on sentences comfort me...
I stumbled across this quote from Girl, Interrupted which left me wondering if I hated it simply because, although Susanna Kaysen and I both thought ourselves crazy and found ourselves in hospitals, we're so *different.* Even in our diagnoses- borderline personality disorder is often characterized by promiscuity, and I may be a polyffectionate cuddlewhore, but I'd really be hard-pressed to deny how anti-promiscuity I am. I'm sitting here in a hooded-sweatshirt (gray), a long-sleeve t-shirt (gray), and *overalls* for Christ's sake. I mean, promiscuous?
"And in the heat of the moment, though he had never given her a second glance, he found himself helplessly drawn to the uninhibited sexuality that burned in Diana's overalls..." <--wtf?
Oh, dear, I feel "frightened, Aunty Em; I'm frightened!" Dear God, I hope I don't remember writing that the next time I have a day when I don't have to go anywhere and feel compelled to dress like a pudgy farmboy. It'd probably be good for me - imagine, wearing clothes that fit...
*sigh*
The real quote, which I suppose got buried in all that rubbish was, "The longer I didn't say anything about it, the farther away it got, until the me who had been in the hospital was a tiny blur and the me who didn't talk about it was big and strong and busy." It left me wondering if it was really *her book* so much as *my reading?* I mean, could I *ever* be like that? Could I ever not introduce myself as, "Hi, my name's Mary, and once upon a time I lived in this place that was like peaches melting over ice cream, I mean, home"? Will I ever be able to cover myself with a facade that is busy, active, strong? They taught me to feel at red; they didn't teach me to lie in corners bawling...although, no one stopped me when I did. Talked to me, yes, but stopped me? Oh, God, the beauty of those moments when Brea and I would have our kidgrief talks, and after a few hours I would say, "I think I have to go cry now," and she'd nod and smile a goodbye (see you later, she would see me later) and I'd go off to the room that ...tracy... and I shared to bawl on the hospital-issued bedcovers.
By the time I left school I was so wrecked that all I did while there was cry, panic, and withdraw, and now the same things happen and I call it "feeling." Look at me, not even stifling my tears. Look at me crying, crying, crying. I'm starting to wonder if that fucking "d" word isn't back; how I've fought with saying that. Depressed. Shit. I know it must be obvious (depression *is* after all the leading cause of suicide but...) when you're swallowing three capsules and one pill each morning you want to believe they help. I want to remember the days last January when I went into school, did something shameful, and waited for a crashing in my head that *didn't* come. Those first days when the meds started to activate, when I had hope that it really was some seratonin silliness after all, that I wasn't poisoned, that the Collect was wrong and I was one of them...
I'm thinking about being openly obsessive and reading _Rose Garden_ again only a few days after having finished it (the second time). I clutch at these half-realities, daydream about climbing into the television in hopes that I can be the one that worried look is turned to, that I can crawl below those covers and have them stroke *my* hair. My mom has been all touchy-feely lately, and it leaves me wondering if she's not right on some level about paying to get me the support I won't accept from her. Therapy is more than that, yes of course - but my leaving, all the things I want in a house, what if I have them here?
There is a stabbing pain in my chest when I say that, and I don't know what truth it's pointing toward... My heartbeat is a stabbing pain, a reminder, the guilt of the survivor.
Tracy...
Meanwhile I am cheating in my daydreams, two-timing Harriet with new therapists, trying to determine what I need. What does it mean? I know she's competant, kind, caring...but this system of hers, this no-buts-about-it therapy is just so - hard? I don't quit things because they're hard...oh, wait, that isn't true. I do. I guess the reality is that I don't want to not work with her simply because I don't feel *connected* to her because there were people at red who helped me a lot when I worked through my not feeling connected to them. (Dave, Lainie.) It taught me a lot about myself, and I really don't want to run from that, but in my current semi-reality? where I see a total of approximately five people, two of whom are my "toxic" parents, one of whom is my depressed brother, then Dr. R who mostly works with said parents, and her?
I don't want to start over again; I don't want to have lost two months with something that was wrong...odd that I can feel some connection to this even though I claim I can't comprehend it's a process. Maybe that's just the separation anxiety, or maybe I was lying, I don't know. Either way it feeds into the "not enough time" philosophy...imagine having to explain these things all over again?
But then - I have been, haven't I? I've been explaining them again and again, the simplest things, trying to recreate myself into someone she would like because I'm so afraid of her?
I really really liked her those first times; I remember she made me feel like I was decent. It's the opposite now and it leaves me wondering about how much she wasn't what I wanted when I left Judie. I was looking for someone less-mother, more-peer; someone who I could talk to the way I talked to the RCs at red, and as I start to type that, I feel a craving in me that has nothing to do with breakfast, and I realize I'm still really aching for someone to help me in the healing of that hole...
I wish there was a way I could find that person and work with them and not *leave* Harriet. I don't want to give up whatever I could gain from my relationship with her, which just leaves me completely torn. I mean, am I wanting to *leave* for fear of her power and wanting to *stay* for fear of leaving? Would I really be leaving for fear that my needs would not be met there or for fear that she knows them better and is hitting hard chords? I thought in all this time that I'd learned the difference between productive pain and the useless kind, and after two months, I'm still confused.
I guess that's why one goes to therapy. To figure these things out...I just hope I'm still in big enough pieces to put together (with *anyone's* help) after this appointment. 2 1/2 hours and counting...blargh...
sickchord
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