10:15 p.m. - 02/05/03
so I'll keep climbing this mountain....:/^
It's the oddest thing, to say "I made it" - when this point is just a marker, nothing more. I did make it, and I don't mean to minimize that, but all the same, it's important to take in that this is largely an opportunity, and only that. The beginning I thought of as an end. The time when I begin what I played around with until now.
It's important for me to say that this moment doesn't mark an end because right now I feel I've gone past my own means- my own allowances. I know, of course, that recovery doesn't happen on anyone's schedule, and that I don't need to feel badly for not having healed entirely in just over a year...but I still don't feel particularly proud of the time this is taking. It's odd because I'm grateful for it; I feel like it's something I enjoy doing (or at least, I enjoy the outcome of doing it) as much as it's something I need to do...but I still doubt my own right to take this time. I told the doc today that one of the me-parts wishes the work had started where I am now. We were talking about connection and isolation, socialization and abandonment, and he talked of the work we need to do in that regard. (He wants me to know that I won't have trouble finding people to love me; rather, I will have trouble identifying who will treat me kindly in that love. I don't believe this yet, not quite. I believe in wanting to believe this.) Anyway, I told him that what he was speaking of seemed a long way off (he asked me if I could drive- or ride, rather- past the DMV sometime this week, and I went into panicky-shutdown almost before he'd finished the question) and he said that some of it was. But then, I'm capable of things now that I was not six months ago, and I will, in six months, be capable of even more. I understand that- I even value it- but I told him part of me wishes we'd started here. I feel bad for having that whole surface problem, the eating disorder, that I sort of desperately put together at the point I could no longer take it. I still see my eating disorder as different, in that way especially, than that of someone like Sara. This isn't the main facet of my illness, no matter how much I talk about it. This is not my main pain. And I know that everyone has issues behind the ed, but for me- I still feel a bit like a poser whenever I discuss those ideas. And I know that what we're working on now is much more mine than issues like body image and nutrition ever were. I don't mean to say I wasn't sick, and I don't mean to minimize what I went through (though I think I'm doing both)...I just mean that the attachment/ abandonment issues are whatI feel at the core of me. They're what I know no matter what my age. They're what I feel without the slightest regard for the state I'm in; they never leave.
And part of me is sad that we couldn't have just started there. Another part of me just said so because I wanted him to say it was ok that I needed help for that other part of the illness, too. I'm so desperate for validation, currently, and I need to push myself past that. I was so difficult today, and that's so rarely a sign of actual obstinance for me. It's more a sign of how much I want it. I want to believe it so badly, so I have to share every argument, in hopes you can dismantle it and leave me safe. When I'm doing well, I can be honest about this need and discuss the arguments. When I'm doing how I was today, I end up just pitching them back at the poor Doc like the session is a ping-pong match. I feel for him after a session like that. I wish I felt for myself. I need to learn that the person most wronged when I'm not who I want to be is me. I'm not there yet.
There are many places I can visualize, but not yet call my own. Fortunately, I still remember the time I could not even decipher them on the horizon. I still remember when the horizon disappeared into the dark, and shape and form were engulfed by the void. It helps to remember the progress even from one pain to another. It helps me.
I guess I still haven't managed to forgive myself. Within five minutes of the session starting, I was fighting tears. The poor doc had absolutely fought to see me; he's terribly ill at the moment with some bug, but he said two weeks was already too long, and he didn't feel good canceling. So he came in, the sweetheart, even if it was two hours late. I waited in his office for just over and hour-and-a-half, and the people after me waited even longer. I know this because if anything, my session went long. Less than five minutes into it- already in tears. Or rather, tensing my face against them, trying to keep them back. He called me on it, and I told him I didn't have time to cry. I told him this was the one place where things were different, where I could talk and be heard and feel that someone understood me, and I felt stupid ruining it with ill-timed reticence and tears. Then, I started sobbing.
We talked about the attachment issues (not to be confused with the attachment disorder, which is so the opposite of what I'm dealing with)...and I started to cry harder, which signaled to me that his hair-brained theory about the source of my sobs might have been legitimate after all. I told him at one point that it feels like "I miss everyone I've ever met." I told him, "it's not that I want anyone to ever feel this way...but I just want someone to miss me this much."
"You want them to ache for you," he said, and I started crying again because no, of course not, of course I didn't want anyone to ache, to have this intensity beating rhythms on their ribs. But in my head, I felt like I wouldn't let that happen. If someone would just want me, I would make sure they had me fully enough. I would make sure they didn't have to ache, if I could only know they did.
He said, "This isn't mental illness; it's reality." And I started crying because reality is permenant, is rigid, Right. I told him I'd prefer it were illness because illness can be healed; I'd prefer it were illness rather than the way things are supposed to be. And he said, "What makes you think the way things are is the way they're supposed to be?" He believes that somewhere out there, a handful of intensely-attaching shy social butterflies are waiting to happily accept me, that D!@#$%^ is far from what the world intends from me. He wants me to find a better mirror of who I am, a situation better equipped to play back for me my so-called worth. He says, "Do you think, honestly, that if you called up those people from Rogers whom you have stayed in touch with, and asked them- they wouldn't say that part of what made Rogers Rogers was Mary?" He says that it came to him when he was gone, when he was entirely isolated from the world the way that I am daily: Rogers gave me a safe environment to be myself freely; it reflected back my spirit. D!@#$%^ does a shitty job of that.
And again, it's a lovely thought. It's a lovely thought that Rogers was in part, what it was because of me. It's a thought I've had at times, but don't believe at a cellular level quite yet. I said something shitty like, "So can I just go back there now?" in reply, and he said, no, I'm going to find my Rogerses outside...and I started crying because they're nowhere to be found. (I "start" crying a lot. Maybe I just pause and pick up where I left off. In which case, I think I've been crying since I was a toddler.) "You're right," he said. "They're nowhere to be found just yet."
He talked about how we need to increase my exposure so they can be found, and I felt ashamed because damnit! I should be able to do these things by now. I feel like I'm not working; I always feel like I'm not putting in effort when I "can't" face the phobias...like these are things I could do if I wanted them badly enough. The "just eat" syndrome internalized in my own head, generalized beyond the realm of food. We did come up with one phobia-challenge for the week, which I think I can do, and he upped two of my five (jesus) meds. I asked to see him again Sunday (sometimes I fear I've gone from voiceless to heartless, from masochistic to unfeeling) which he agreed to...so I suppose I'll make it through. It's a lot, though. There's still a lot, and we didn't even start on the content of the e-mails. Didn't even start on the familial/ relational shit.
I think the big issues right now are the following. 1) I need to forgive myself, and I don't even know what I'm holding against me. 2) I'm glad to be working past the issues of the eating disorder, but I'm afraid doing so means admitting they were never real and keeping silent about the struggles I am having now. (And I am struggling. I've had purging urges all day, though never when I'd eaten. That's not particularly unusual for me, though- unfortunately. There are points of life that make me feel weak, feel sick, and my response is to just give into it, to purge. My instinct, rather. My response is to white-knuckle-grit-teeth-drop-kick my way through.) 3) I'm really, really grateful to have heard back from Stacy, and to be in touch with her- but it hurts like hell that I didn't hear from anyone else. There are knives in me when I think about Dave...so let's not even talk about Brea or Steph or anyone else. Let's not even talk about it; that's always so helpful in healing. 4) I have a lot of really weird issues going on in relationships- people I love who are struggling, needing to identify myself beyond the ed with Sara (especially hard considering #2), struggles with mi familia, weirdness regarding a letter from Dixie, confused emotions over N*land friends, et cetera. Identity and relation issues, still. Who am I without illness? Why does "I'm not struggling with that now" mean "I never was"? Why is "I'm not struggling with that now" mean "so obviously I don't care about you"? Why does "I'm not struggling with that the most" mean "I can't struggle at all"?
I'm back to the fishy challenge: why isn't it ok for me to struggle? I'm back to the constant question- why don't I feel safe being healthy? And how do I let myself be free in being me? I need to loosen the reigns a bit, and that means learning where they are (and why.)
One phrase of his has stuck with me all day, and I can't seem to give it the slip. He called my ed "one hell of a detour" - when I said I wish, a little, that I had been able to start where I am. That was really validating and really funny to me. It says, "You're right; this was a dangerous but not so huge issue. Those feelings you've had make sense." But it brings up all these fears like "liar" and "faker" and "you weren't as sick" "you made it up" "you didn't really need help" and so forth. It makes me feel like my sickness was random or chosen, not justified. The ed part of it, I mean. I think I need to bring that up with him. It's important in regard to the meds, also. The idea that my desire to quit the meds comes from believing my sickness is valid only when I receive nothing in return for it. I can only claim my pain in martyrdom- so says the lie.
Obviously, this is a bunch of craziness I need to talk about more...the good news being that I have tomorrow to do assignments as I wish, with recovery time playing in pleasantly. In the meantime: I'm terribly grateful to him for not playing into my affirmation-begging without being entirely cold. (It means that I won't fall back into more permanently.) I'm terribly grateful to him for coming in, despite how sick he was. (And I'm terribly grateful to him for all the times he doesn't do it- all the times he keeps his boundaries and doesn't push himself beyond his means.) I'm terribly grateful to him for not cancelling, not rescheduling, not cutting my time short. And I'll be terribly grateful to whomever shows him love if they'll feed him soup and run cool fingers across his forehead, through his hair. He said to me today, something about wanting people to worry. I was saying that I don't want to caretake right now; I feel drained, and I want people to take care of me. He considers that progress, says I deserve to receive instead of always giving. He said that I deserve people to worry about me, and I told him I feel I used up my allowance in that regard by being sick. But he says that's a different kind of worrying. More than worrying, he just means holding me, thinking of me, wondering about me. He said he means that person who at the end of the day, will look straight in your eyes and say, "Tell me how your day was. I want to know every detail." And I grinned because it was such a beautiful idea. I was alternating between sobs and grins with a trend toward the later. I told him I feel like I climbed over a mountain only to find it's a range. He said, "But think of all the people waiting on the other mountains."
And this is why we like him. This is why he's worth the wait.
chord
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