What am I supposed to do??? ...You know, no one asked me to care. No one forced me to open my heart and let people into it. So, I really don't have a right to take it out on them. To take out on them my own pain over what they're doing (or not doing), my own pain of having lost Dixie to this vicious, awful, stupid, hateful illness. Having lost her! No, no - not when she worked so hard to get better, not when she was doing well, not when she went right into the hospital to make sure she stayed on track. She didn't do anything! She didn't take any pills (and Tracy...and Jenna...and it's different, it's different, and Tracy tried to make it right, too; she didn't deserve it either) - but all Dixie did was try and get better, and she died. And then there are these people, everywhere these people, who are picking up with their lives again, and what's more there are these people who are sick and dying... like this didn't even slow them down. Didn't even make them hesitate. Wonder if it's a fucking disease they should start getting fucking care for - now. It's selfish! It's all selfish, damnit! You don't have the right to take your own life; people love you. Do you remember when Paul died? I didn't even know Paul, and I sat in a room crying the whole day, imagining him dead in a cornfield with a gunshot wound to his head, imagining his brother finding him, and his little sister being told. You have no idea what people feel for you - not when you've numbed yourself out, and convinced yourself you're hateful...and...and I don't get it! What am I saying? I don't even understand. I'm going after people who are sick, but then when they die, I'm acting like they didn't do anything and didn't deserve it? Yes. No. Pretty much and sort of. I'm so hurt and *angry* at people who won't get help, which is different than just being sick; I'm angry at people who aren't working to get better... and even the ones who aren't working to get better don't deserve to die. And I don't know. Maybe they want to, maybe they don't believe they will, maybe they're as confused as I was. Am. Hell, I'm still confused, though not about that. I just don't understand how people can hurt me this way. (Personalize much?) But it is personal. It is. And so few people hear me when I say the specifics that I get lost in metaphors. Like it's a hate crime. It's Matt Shepard dead and a group of people chorusing how "AIDS cures fags" - supporting this hate crime. No respect for the person who's gone, no respect for the people who love that person, no respect for all the people, all over the world who deserve to live and don't. And the people all over the world who don't deserve this loss and have to face it just the same. Where is the heart in people? I consider myself fairly non-judgmental; I really don't see people as below me, and it takes a lot for me to even sound judgmental, to even start to think something and have to catch myself. Stop, regroup, shift direction. But this illness is killing people. You want to talk terror? (Stuck in metaphors.) My terror isn't contained to one attack, to one day; my terror is everyday, every fucking day, all over the world. It's all around me. Even where I'm not - completely far away from me, it's there. It's killing people. And I don't want to know, right now, ok? I don't want to understand. I used to be stupid and naive and think that anorexia was just dangerously advanced popularity, I used to use the word flippantly, I used to associate it with thinness, I used to think it was about food and weight and superficiality. Am I being punished? No. I don't believe in being punished. This isn't punishment for all those years of not knowing (I'm sorry! I'm sorry, ok, I didn't know!) ... this is something else, something horrible that I can't stop. I hate it. I hate it. I hate getting up in the morning and going about my day and smiling at people when I'm able to go outside, talking to friends on the phone when I'm able to answer, eating my meals and snacking and feeling - because that's the extent of what I can do. Live my life. That's the extent of my power, my choices. Not anyone else's choices, not what happens in my life, just the work that I decide to do. Well, it's not enough. It's not enough. Not because I have to do more, but because more has to be done. Don't you understand? There are millions of people I don't know dying from this, and of the handful I do know, two are already gone. Don't you see how it has to stop, it has to stop, it has to end...and it never, ever will? It won't end. It's too big. It has so much momentum, and I don't know how you get in there and work at healing people who are sick, and building understanding, and preventing others from getting sick, and educating people about the abuse by the media, and changing the social structure so that it doesn't support this... how do we do all of that? Even if everyone was with me and there weren't any other problems to heal? How could we possibly stop this?
It's not meant to be. Therefore, it should be conquerable. Wasn't there a time when this didn't exist? Wasn't there ever a world where this particular disease didn't play a part?
I want my life back. I want my life back. I hate this helplessness, with people I love personally, people I love because we're people and that's how I am, people I don't even know. I hate my own sickness. I want to go back to the time when it wasn't here. Go back and make it not happen. Roll the die again; this isn't right. And it is right, it is, not because any of it's supposed to be happening, but because I always end up coming back to "I love the people in my life (including me) too much to exchange them for another version" (even if that's possible, and I don't know any way it is.) Which is true. That is true. But I'm overwhelmed. I guess I'm just overwhelmed. And I don't want to focus on my life and what I can do because it isn't enough. More people will die. I won't have the magic to save them. I won't even know about magic for them to go and seek elsewhere. More roommates will weep because, although they lost someone different, they too have this pain. And meanwhile, people will be playing around with it, toying, going back and forth. I don't know if this is even fair, but I want to go to some of my friends who have struggled with things like depression and self-injury, who have sometimes used ed behavior, and just beg them never to do it again. Just beg. Please. For me. Just don't do this one thing. And if that's too hard, then get help. Just please don't put yourself in danger; there are too many people in danger, already, and I understand that there are other ways to be in danger, that a person who isn't using an illness to cope can feel even worse than a person who is...and that needs help, too; it does. And I know that things like cancer and war are really terrible, and I just overlook them. I overlook them because this is the space where my pain fits. This is the disease that got me. The disease that took my friends. ...Because I don't have strength to fight it all. All the things that should not be. I don't have the power to give everyone the life they deserve, to help them. I don't. And I know I don't. I'm so weak, though. I mean, I'm strong, generally speaking... but I'm weak against it. In comparison. I don't have the kind of strength it would take to heal this. I don't even have the mind to comprehend what I can't do. What would work. What would fix this.
I know that every loss is an individual, and I know that every life is an individual, and so part of healing it has to be "one life at a time" - the way healing it personally is "one day at a time" ... or hour, or minute, or second... I try to believe that; I try to live that. I try to work on my life and give the support I can when I have the opportunities, but you know, my friends are dying here. Does that get through the screen? Does that stop this from just being something you're reading on-line, some unknown girl's ramblings, something that could be fiction? The people I love are dying around me. And more people are getting sick. People are fighting to get better; let's not overlook that...more people are choosing to get better right now, too. But it's hard, and it's not enough to want it. It's not enough to fight for it. Sometimes you fight really hard to give yourself a month, or a few years, and I'll never say that those days you were really alive weren't worth it, weren't still miraculous and incredible...but sometimes you fight and you still only live a very little while. Most people relapse. Maybe not completely, but they do. Most people don't get their lives back entirely. It's not ok. It's not acceptable. I won't be the minority, and that's not me saying I don't deserve it; that's me saying everyone does. Even people who make me so angry because they won't try. Or won't keep trying. Because they give up, when you can't give up, you can't. It's going to fight you whether or not you're fighting back. So, you can't stop. You can rest, you can want to give up, you can feel hopeless, but you can't actually stop fighting. You don't have to quit fighting to lose. Some really courageous, really incredible, really deserving people die fighting. It can kill you even if you want to live.
But they had a little time to live like I am living. And I mean that in a good way - oh, the confusion. That had some real, good life, though by no means enough of it. As for the other part of how I'm living - this part - I can't conclude. I don't know how to tie it up and neatly end this entry. Every time I open my heart, every time I love, every time someone I love, especially someone I'm seeing or talking to... there's this fear and this pain and this confusion. What I would do if I could, if I knew how, if I had the power...
But I don't. I don't have that. So what do I have? Tell me what to do with this heart with its unique brand of love. Tell me what to do with this heart and this heartbreak. Teach me how to live so that I help in the healing, and don't simply break in half from the grief. Please; I'm praying now, please.
It's a day and a week since I found out. And I already feel like I'm supposed to be "over" it. At least acting normal most days, with a few scattered breakdowns here and there. Not just consistently pinned down. So much for what I'm "supposed" to do...according to that rulebook anyway. I want to know what I can do with who I am. I want to take some of my power to change some of Ed's. I want my energy to change that energy. I want my life to replace that with life.
I want it, and I'm working, and I love enough...so what else now? What else do I need to do? Please, please help me know.
I love you. Oh, Dixie. I hope it's really, really nice - better, I hope it's wonderful. I hope you're nurtured and content, and I really, really miss you. I really miss you, and I'm so sorry. For all of us.
This is my life right now. This is what I'm working with...
~me