I like it here, too.
Nevertheless, I'm not sure why I'm here right now. An hour ago, two hours ago, even three hours ago, I knew I was awake because the idea of sleeping at six o'clock, already having slept a portion of the day away, was too dehumanizing to face, even given the circumstances. A bedtime of early nine o'clock might not beckon pride from within or anything, but I've certainly escaped to sleep at that hour in the past, on other bad days.
I remember when bad days first stopped happening, when bad days changed into bad afternoons or mornings, bad patches, rough patches, rough moments. Rough moments started to coexist with brilliant ones; sometimes they even tied together to further confuse me, and, I suppose - to teach me about the complexity of my new life. My new life. I'm still contending, then, that this life is not the one I had before I lived at Rogers those three months. I thought as I was preparing this journal for its grand opening that there's another argument for Beth's quasi-long-ago theory that Rogers is my church and recovery my faith: I have, in some ways, adapted a parallel time structure to the Christian B.C./ A.D. motif that determines what I type in those two small white boxes above this one. Except in my version, b.c. is b.r. - before Rogers, and a.d. stands, I guess, for After-Discharge. One thing I like about this, other than the serious dorkiness of basing my whole system of time around that place where my heart's still stationed, is that - like in Christianity, the miracle of what had begun only really became apparent a.d. The miracle was confirmed, for those who believe, in the loss of it, and instead of Christ's death meaning the end of the end of the end^, it meant an even greater life and everlasting love. I'm not even Christian, and I find that belief astonishing. Beauty, yes? I like to think that the good has flowered here, that my discharge was as little an end as that death, but I don't always believe it. It's just hard to believe. I wonder if those women who share my name, who hung out with Jesus way back when, had a little trouble with not being able to have him over for coffee or lemonade or something, after he died. If that's a crazy thing to wonder, I take comfort in sharing it with Dar Williams.
Talk about tucking a tangent anywhere you like.^^ Did I have a point I was getting at?
Bad days versus rough times. Bad days happen when my thinking enters its all-or-nothing stage and refuses to recognize paradoxes and continuums. I'm definitely en route to win an award for dichotomous thinking, if recent events are any indication. I'm aware of it; I can see it affecting every area of my thinking, (see, that would be "all") but I'm not able to counteract it effectively (by which I mean completely, so that there is "nothing" left to evidence the black-and-white thinking.) Oy. I keep pushing myself to mark options c), d), and e) into my brain, along with the ever popular "other: ____." At the moment, I'm terrified that I'm growing up; I've had a heightened awareness of my body (and I feel sick typing that word, and what does that tell us...) recently, occasionally qualifying as really shitty body image. In those moments, my body feels separate from me, and what's more, it feels against me, an enemy playing for the other side. I've noticed lately that I look different; I'm sure it's barely evident to most people, or maybe they see it, too - I noticed when my siblings had their final major growth spurts, and I recognized when Shandi visited that she looked physically more adult. I don't know how to explain what I'm seeing; it's mostly a squarishness I don't remember, unnecessarily obsessed over by my ed-ridden brain. I keep telling myself that it isn't weight gain; it's just that the weight's distributed differently. Unfortunately, my ed cares more about its inability to control my body than it does about what exactly is happening to it. And any attempt to placate it with, "This is supposed to happen! Ok? I'm supposed to be growing just like I was supposed to be growing when I was eleven and twelve and thirteen... This is just part of becoming an adult!" backfires miserably. Tell me I'm an adult, tell me I'll be one soon, tell me I'm on my way there, and you'll see such a desperate, crazy fear you won't believe how easily you triggered it. It's not just what I've seen and heard from other people - for instance, what my sister said about a really horrific experience during medical exams, and how she still had to get them because one just has to; or what my brother said about people commenting on how he's "gained weight" when really he's just gained muscle and begun to look less like a lanky teenager and more like an adult male who could take you down... it's about me, too. I think that's how it's getting so powerful. The idea that I'm growing up triggers all of these feelings (yes, feelings; there are feelings below all that bullshit of thin and small, et cetera), and the feelings send me running for the "only alternative available." I have two options: be alive or be dead, be well or be sick, grow up or have an eating disorder. We know the first options win the majority for the first two pairs; why on earth would the third push so heavily toward the latter? I think, honestly, that I feel completely unsafe when I think about growing up. For whatever reason, I equate it with complete independence/ isolation (this girl is an island; she'll do it on her own), incapacity in every regard (no ability to do what adults do...like work, have relationships, pay fucking taxes), and a sudden engulfment by everything that terrifies me. All of my nightmares, all of my what-if-I'm-alone's and what-if-I'm-a-grown-woman's, tackle me from above, and I can't see myself surviving that. The littlest fears - paying taxes is a real example, so's shopping, so's just about everything - separated from everything else can terrify me into desperation. And desperation's extremely difficult to guard against. So far, I've managed to do it; behaviorally, I haven't done anything in this past month, and that's seriously fucking impressive...considering. I remind myself that not being able to do something now doesn't mean I never will; feeling fear about an idea now doesn't mean I'll always feel that way. These are the line segments I force between the dots of black and white. Right now, the things I'm talking about have fourteen years (or more) of agoraphobic terror wrapped around them; in the future, I could know skills of how to deal with them. I could become proficient with those skills and choose, consistently, to implement them. Let's say I don't run away just yet...because when I look around, this room is still a kid's, as is this life (at the very least, in terms of expectations), and if I don't have to do any of those scary things right now, I may as well wait and see if - when I am expected to do them - I've learned how.
That's the healthy thought the doctor's spent months coaxing into my mind. I don't always have hold of it, but I do grasp it now and then. And I want to believe it, like so much of what has come before. I want to believe that he's right. I have my own fear that the terrors will light down before I'm able to deal with them; that fear pushes me to want to escape, but it's possible that - while I do not have control over my body - I do have power in my life, and with the doc's guidance and my parents' continued indulgence, *cough*, support, I might choose when I strike out, have support, and know - to the extent that there's mystery but not outright darkness ahead - what I need to face. I guess right now isn't the best time for me to gauge how much power I have in my life; I'm still reeling from the endless attacks against my friends - and against me. Truthfully, I suppose there's hope in that. There's hope in the idea that nothing worse than what has happened/ is happening can possibly happen (this pain could continue, it could be met, but it could not be raised...even the addition of more circumstances that hurt this much wouldn't change my threshhold for pain or the fact that, since it's life and not sickness, it lifts for a reprieve, eventually. Always. It's just difficult to convince myself that I have a great deal of say in the life I've been living the past few months. Then again, how much say did I have and how much time did I spend planning prior to going to Rogers? Relatively little. I'm due for some good, right? Even though the pain is tied to people I'm blessed to know, people who are the good that balances, I'm due for some outright, easily spotted, no analyzing it in search of a speck of hope or triumph, good.
Like...tomorrow, I finally, finally, finally see the doctor again...? Oh, I wish it could last twelve hours. I have no idea what I'm going to tell him, and the only thing I'm certain of is that I won't be able to tell him nearly everything. On top of Christmas, his absence, Jenna's-eating-disorder's letter, Sara's hospitalization, Sara's forward movement, Dixie's hospitalization, my own increasingly more annoying struggle (by which I mean, my own increasingly-difficult struggle and the increasingly obnoxious Aunt-Sue voice that comes in more loudly as more aspects of the "sick" dot appear), there's also this whole horrid body-growing-up thing. Which of course ties back into sexuality, which we were talking about before he left, just before we started talking about agoraphobia. Along with the fairly new realization on my part that I expect myself to be sick. I'm thinking back over just the past couple years - leaving out the years upon years of missing school for sickness - and realizing how, when I first got treatment, I thought about what it would mean to have an illness I didn't have any real power in overcoming until I basically expected to get one. When I had all those tests done to rule out scarier possibilities and certify that I was dealing with the bloody evil, but somewhat harmless, migraines, I expected to be told of some horrible physical malady from which my life would be in peril. "Freed" from that false alarm, I ended up having nightmares - consistent nightmares that are still happening this week...so...er...they've been going on awhile - about paralyzed limbs and heart problems. Unlike most other nightmare themes, I'm still afraid of this one when I'm awake and chance to think of it; it's not like the snakes or bees (yes, lately, bees...) that I brush off as soon as I'm awake. I have no idea why this is such a constant theme in my dreams; I've analyzed it about a million times (which is difficult because I have a different dream every time; there's just a similar point, and even the symptoms of the malady shift), and I've often thought I'd finally busted through the symbolism and freed myself. Now I wonder if I'm not holding onto the heart-fear in part because I need to believe I'm in serious peril. It sounds so stupid when I say it, but I can't dismiss it as a thought. Unless I relapse significantly, I really do believe (knock on hope) that I'll survive the illness I do have. I mean, that's what I put every day's energy into... But surviving means still being around to turn twenty, and twenty-one, and thirty, and forty. Being around to grow up, to live a life, to do what seems eternally impossible for the very good reason that right now it is. If I'm going to make it, I have to find ways to make "making it" less dreadful, less terrifying. I need to love the prospect of another decade or eight of life as much as I do life right now. (And considering all the shittiness in life right now, the fact that I love it is no small success. So. Maybe I'm up to the challenge of the Present-Yet-To-Come...)
This is why it's very good to postpone drastic measures with sleep, reading, neutral fantasy, or...just about anything that isn't drastic. I end up here. And here, I'm happier having written about everything that's made my day icky - or, rather, everything that's given it some rough moments - than I was before. I didn't see that coming. Still, when I go to sleep at night, I rarely see the dawn. That said, the streetlights are a clue. They stand in the parking lot the whole night through, nightlights for the cars. And light is light. Even a scarce, artificial source can remind a girl what's possible.
~said girl (well, one of them)
^to borrow a moment from Rainer Maria
^^to borrow, this time, from Melissa Ferrick