You can't be brave if you aren't scared.
Well, my dears, I must be Mary Maximum Bravery this week because I passed scared several days ago and have coasted right on into terrified today. Terrified with the added plus of communication. I saw the doctor at three today, and that's the same number of rambling messages I've left him, although the last one was quite a bit calmer; I'd stopped crying, rememebered that not only have I felt this shitty before, but I've also gotten through it before. I just feel like the ground has stopped supporting my feet when I'm this scared. I have no idea what's about to happen, how painful it'll be, how I'll keep myself safe. And even given a very strong experience to illustrate the "pain is not the opposite of love" / "pain is not the enemy" - which I rationally continue to believe, even though it doesn't do such a stellar job of selling its argument to my emotional side - I'm less than steady. The third call was also better because I called to ask him a few questions I have, which was better than the second call where I just hysterically spouted my distorted (but so, so convincing) beliefs, which was better than the first one when I just called to cry and see how close I could come to telling him how mad I was at him for scaring me so badly as to make me mad at him. The first call, I choked down the temptation to cancel all future appointments, the second I said, "see you Monday" with all the conviction of an Anglo kid reading Portuguese, and by the third I managed to construct a whole sentence conveying that I wanted to discuss these questions.
Well, mostly I want him to hand me instant, perfect, convincing, gift-wrapped answers. Discussion, for the moment, is my back-up request, and since I often end up having to settle for that (time machines, magic wands, and omnipotence being of such limited availability), I'm prepared for it as well. I just hate everything about this right now. I hate how I feel, how I think, how I think I must have looked and sounded today in his office, everything about my personality and beliefs that the fear so thoroughly skews. I don't want him to see me or hear me like I was today because I don't want him to think I'm "that person" - even if he knows me well enough to know that what I really think and what I want to believe are very different from what I'm currently able to, given the terror. I don't want anyone to think that. It keeps me from writing in here sometimes, the fear of people mistaking my own shame as a judgment of who they are. Not entirely dissimilar from all the people who attacked me for thinking they were fat upon hearing that (or witnessing instances that suggested) I had an eating disorder. My perception of myself was unfair; it was based on shame, and not only did I have a different set of "standards" for myself than for others- those standards weren't healthy. That's how it is now, too, I think. Even if I can beat myself up with a "you act all accepting, but when it's your life, your closed-mindedness really reveals itself" harangue, I know that basically everyone I know would defend me against that attack. I don't care about sexual orientation (oh, you were wondering what we were talking about? oh, yes, that's it) unless someone needs me to care, i.e. if you're fine with it, I'm fine with it, if you need support, I'll support, and so long as it doesn't invade my personal bubble, we're good. You should hear the things I think working with the idea that this could be (part of) my story. (The doctor says when its integrated it'll just be one facet of who I am, that it only overwhelms me now because it's not yet integrated with the rest of my identity. Sometimes, when the doctor talks, I expect him to turn funny colors and start reciting Dr. Seuss in Pig Latin. Sometimes, I feel a long, long way from believing him, no matter how much I may want to...) The arguments that I've debated and defended against somehow stayed in my head regarding me. Things I never heard in my oh-so-homophobic/ homohating hometown have built subdivisions in my brain. I swear. I remember something (regarding eating disorders) about how the illness is as smart as the person who has it. My brain knows my weaknesses and has no trouble using them against me...
I'm afraid that I'll end up alone, basically. No one who's been here long enough to hear me refer to Rogers has escaped knowing that. It's my cardinal fear, above and beyond everything else, the core around which basically every unhealthy part of me revolves. Monday's session sort of faltered between topics that didn't seem too important, things I don't like wasting sessions on, like why my siblings and I unanimously reject Brigadoon. Then near the very end, we started talking about this part of me that I'm so fond of pretending doesn't exist. I think I made some vague reference (i.e. "I started it and am to blame.") I wanted to talk about it when it started ... oh, I remember now, I'd had a dream where Jenna and I were supposed to have this mediated conversation in front of the whole school, and I just wanted to talk with her privately first so I could know what she was planning to say. Because if she was going to go for broke and "be honest" then I'd do so, too, but if she wasn't, I wasn't going to take the backlash of honesty either. I woke up thinking about how my dreams like to make me think something exists with Jenna that I really don't believe (at this point) actually does. I think the difference between my relationship with Jenna compared to my relationship with say, Silje or Katia or Rosie or anyone, is actuallly very small, except that there was an unspoken component, a possibility of a possibility, that never got addressed, thereby remaining unresolved. I think basically we're sisters, but we never got honest and direct enough for me to know that.
Anyway, my dreams like Jenna's symbolic potential, and I don't blame them; that girl is powerful poetry. So I told the doc about the dream, and I told him what I just mentioned about my newest thoughts on the relationship I'm so desperately trying to have with the girl (or more accurately, the relationship that I had with her at Rogers), and even though we only used our vague euphemisms, we ended up talking about sexuality. It wasn't bad at first; I wanted to talk about all this crap in my head, but then as it wore on, I started to shut down, become less the bright-eyed optimist. He said I looked more like I had the previous Friday (rather hopeless) and less I had throughout the session. He said he knew I was leaving in kind of a rough state. I didn't really know how rough. I knew I wished I hadn't brought it up, just like I always wish after I do, and I knew that I felt like a complete and total freak, but I didn't know how bad it would be. It was bad. It was beyond suck.
The rest of Monday and Tuesday, I just felt this desperate sense of caged emotions, feelings and thoughts that I just needed to scream out, by I didn't know what they were, and I couldn't even manage to cry - which always helps when I'm feeling that bristly. By Tuesday, I'd connected it to my isolation-fear. I realized that when I thought about the possibility of (I have totally regressed on this whole call it what it is front..."it" sounds a hell of a lot better to me than "sexuality" or "homosexuality" or "gay" or "same-sex" or anything else right now. Who's up for pronouns?) being um, girl-oriented, I imagined a small crowd of other people who were, um, compelled toward same-gender coupling, but all a few decades older, somehow visually unlike people with whom I tend to click. And as for real people with whom I have clicked who would fit into this group if it were at all factual? Absent. Entirely. None of my friends were there. I imagined crossing into this practically barren relational world, into this group of people, and being cut off from everyone else, and I thought, "You'd just better know for sure. You'd just better have a damn good reason and you'd better be certain before you go and put yourself in that group." That group of those people. That group is ridiculous! Just like the thought that being gay means I like what happened with Chelsie is ridiculous. Just like the idea that I'm less normal if this is the case is ridiculous. It only occurred to me a few days ago that there's nothing abnormal about this, really. Being in a statistical minority doesn't make something less valid. It seems ludicrous to say so in terms of race or religion, like people of racial or religious minorities are somehow less people, less normal, than anyone else. But what I know when I'm nineteen and intelligent and emotionally steady and what I know when I'm freaking out are two very different things. On top of which, the doctor completely lost the entry in his memory log regarding what happened with Chelsie. I know I've told him this. I know I've referred to this since talking about it. And I had to tell him the whole fucking story again, followed by what happened when I first spoke about it - at Rogers - and then with Harriet, and why I haven't told my parents, and blah, blah, blah, blah. I almost got sick, as I'm sick already, and he responded with words like "curiosity" and "exploration" which I told him in rambling phone message number two I absolutely cannot stand. ("Experimentation" and "sexuality" can also die, so far as I'm concerned.) I also told him in the message what I'm scared about in terms of the Chelsie-thing's effect on me now, which he sort of guessed and tried to placate with a hypothetical "some people are afraid of this, and if you were one of those people, I would tell you" sort of statement. That we aren't so malleable as to have our sexuality created by any one incident or even a series of incidents. That it's highly unlikely. Still, I think it's better I told him (when we weren't in the same room, and I could do so while only mildly hyperventilating) what about some of my specific fears are. I told him about how I didn't like it (and my voice caught, and I could tell it was the truth, and he would know that and hopefully stop asking if it brought anything up in me, if I was more scared of my response than what was happening, blech, blah, blech, and so forth. I was totally confused and even more totally - yes, that's possible; we have different arithmetic principles in my world - afraid. I need him to understand that.) I also told him the happy little "I have a sexuality" equals "Feel free to come and r*** me" equation. I can't believe I'm even considering talking about this again, but I feel like when I do, I need to help him understand that it's not just homosexuality that scares me, it's sexuality. If he can understand the powerlessness, the inability to understand sex as something other than violence, maybe I'll feel less like passing out the next time we talk. It's just so incredibly hard.
It's like those two weeks he spent out of the country, except this time I'm talking to him. It's like when the plots of my novels finally started to be reflected in my life (meaning all the worried people pushing me for details)...I felt like I would die. I imagined it a million times and wanted it, but to actually have it happening, to have no way to turn it off or back, to have it real scared me so badly I was sick. I'm remembering the first time I was pulled out of a class to talk to a social worker, and the similarity of the feeling is unreal.
This will turn out better than that did. This doctor has a better idea of what he's doing. (I just wish my head would stop feeling like he's arrogant when he tells me what he knows. I guess I need to remind him how painfully unable to believe these things I am right now. So I can stop feeling like this is a math concept I can't quite master and start dealing with the reality of it.)
Reality of it? Reality of it? But I was just kidding, when I wrote about it those times; I was just pretending when I thought about it. It was just novel, an idea; it was never supposed to have this power. ...I'm a little comforted by how completely similar this is to that day they pulled me out of class, that day and the weekend following. I survived that, eventually. I survived that long enough to get real help and more fully survive (live even.) I am so beyond scared, though.
The entry I wrote Wednesday was entirely for real, and I knew when I wrote it that the memory of feeling that way would continue to have power after the feeling passed. (I didn't fall for the "hey, I've had an epiphany, and I'm never going to feel doubt or shame or disconnection again!" pitch.) True to my past (my present, and that eighth grade girl) the whole train of thought was prompted by Tori Amos and followed with much Tori Amos sensory-saturation. I even bought a copy of "Scarlet Stories" - my first ever ebay purchase. (Ebay scares me.) Major shopper's guilt ensued, which was fucked up considering I haven't bought anything (except the little bit of clothes - nothing present-like) in weeks and certainly deserved it, could afford it, and so forth. Thus ended my happy revelation time. (Stress had piled up, and happy revelation time took a rain check - snow check - "wintry mix" check. Whatever.) The next day I entered round four of the evil virus that has decided to nest in my throat and mouth (regarding which I've finally caved and will see a doctor about next week - if time were going to heal this insanity, I think three weeks or so would have been sufficient), distracting me from emotional pains, and today I went to the doctor (after nearly cancelling, out of the usual "don't want to spread my germs" concern as well as "really want to sleep this 'off'" contentions) expecting to talk about some eating disorder unhappiness. (Eating disorder related, rather. My eating disorder can be so unhappy it refuses to associate with me, as far as I'm concerned.) There've just been a few little things, like the fact that my brother, who went home today after nearly two weeks convalescing from the overdose (just long enough for me to get used to him, though the space is nice; we're going to try and see each other more, and he keeps saying "I love you" which is so great because I always knew it, but it's still something to hear) awakens some, "You can't do that! That [eating-disorder-like-thing] is my territory!" You can't have that, too! I'm very much afraid of John, who my parents originally neglected me in attempting to attend, developing the illness that finally caught my parents' attention. (In a scared, sick way, as well as the I don't want anyone to ever have an eating disorder *ever* way.) On top of which, a mouth and throat infection leads to really shitty eating habits, and yesterday especially, the (still) familiar feelings of being empty and so hungry and not able to eat washed over me until I started crying. I don't want to be hungry like that. I don't want to feel anything like I felt when I was starving to death. And that sense of deprivation, that little voice that's just like, "Why won't you let me eat?" pushed me over the edge. I know how far from eating-disordered this is (although I also know how quickly something can morph, and am keeping an eye on it), and I'll happily give up the infection and take up real nutrition again. I don't ever want to stand in a kitchen, my body suddenly begging for food, and not be able to eat again. Ever. And I don't want lack-of-balanced-meals-induced migraine either. I fought the pain of eating almost-real-food to avoid that migraine pain today. I was successful, too. I like being successful.
So, a few days ago, I felt really good inside a miracle. And Monday when I told the doctor I feel like a freak, he said, "Isn't that amazing...when you seem...so human and unique - to me?" which was terribly sweet of him. And today when I came home ready to rip my brain out of my head and/ or join a fundamentalist Christian group in its homophobic propagandizing, the show that's sometimes good enough to make me feel I can admit I watch it - Joan of Arcadia - made yet another stand supporting the gay community. And this kid broke down and said a lot of the things I have and haven't said (but have felt) over the past week.
Soon, I need to tell someone. This isolation theory would have less power if this topic wasn't labeled "off-limits" for everyone in my non-modem-enhanced-life. I even like the idea of telling someone. It's more the concept of having them know that troubles me. I still feel like if I keep my mouth shut, it'll blow over; if I don't talk about it, it won't be real. Tell me - can you see me when I close my eyes?
When I put my hands up in front of my face, don't I disappear?
~m