Dissociation + loneliness

Here is an anxious response my mind sometimes produces: The sensation that I am possibly inside a movie, alone, and this movie is all that exists, and no one else in it is real. I see sort of from the camera's perspective as well as from my own. If I put on my headphones and the right/wrong song, my mind wants to go swirling out the top of my skull.

(Is that tiresome of me to talk about? Possibly. Bear with me.)

The feeling of being alone lingers. The world sometimes this very large and silent thing that I rattle around in.

Tonight on my train ride home I am thinking, Alone alone alone and feel so sick and sad of it that for once I stop and think up another thought to correct that one and dissipate the mood it brings — Supported and loved, and exploring my freedom and space, and tonight honestly, yes, it does help, and honestly it is more accurate too.

Ghosts and nostalgia / dancing and panic

After a hot shower, which is the best thing one one has a head cold, as my hair was drying, I lay on my bed in my underwear and listened to "Two" by The Antlers several times through, wanting to catch that part where he sings, Two ways to tell the story, because I needed to hear that part today.

I have always loved watching the play of afternoon light across my ceiling, no matter where my bedroom was. And there is something very soothing about the exercise of beginning a sentence with that phrase, "I have always loved..." or "I have always liked..." Something to say, I am here, I am all of me here, all twenty-three-and-a-half years, I have not been made new and thrown away every year — if I have been inconstant and filled with fear over the years about the ways in which I seem to leave myself behind, tear myself away, the days when I feel like someone has sent my body off walking without me and sent it back with unfamiliar clothes, a haircut I do not recognize — well, even then it has not been quite as terrible as I thought, not so terrible as to keep me from being able to remember and describe myself, my constancy, in some ways.

When I am confused in those ways about what I have done, the ways I fear I have flown off away from myself or whether I have, I practice telling the story in different ways, in stages, a different version for each friend, a different version to mull over each day. Was this what happened? and each time, hesitantly, some statement of truth about myself to try on.

1.
I was full of love and hate. Hate, and I loved it. I did exactly what I wanted. I wanted everything.

2.
Just some fun. Just a laugh.

3.
I feel myself floating away under the memory of strange hands. Empty flesh. Bold and stupid. Throwaway girl.

/

November 24, 2012, 4:49p

Some of the pieces

Some things your brain will not permit you to think about until you are in a place where it is truly permissible, where you have free mental space. I have gained some of that recently.

Forgotten:

• In the spring semester of my freshman year, when I myself am in the beginning of a year-long depressive episode, three alumni commit suicide. At least two of them are gay.

• The trigger for the last major relapse of my eating disorder there: being set up with a friend of a friend.  A cool and respectable Wheaton dude; I didn't know why it made me feel so terrified and despairing, but I promised myself I would get sick again and make it go away.

Waiting to be discovered:

• That professor with the fresh, shiny, postmodern explanation for why gay people don't really exist that all the more liberal students swallowed so eagerly? He based his argument entirely on concepts appropriated directly from queer theory, but failed both to give credit and to mention that the gay scholars who created those concepts had found it possible to follow them to different conclusions.

Ruts and fears

Running, I feel neither empty nor too heavy.

I think about when I used to take Irish dance, and about watching the championship dancers at competitions after my section was done. Reels and slips jigs and treble reels. Like having a good kind of fire in your body, like something between singing and yelling.

Now that I am finally able to run again, I could do that too, at some point.

And I think about my first winter at college, when I still hoped to continue taking dance lessons. That January I found a school that I liked and took a class, and the teacher invited me to come back to try a higher level's class, but I never went back, because it was so much work to travel by train and bicycle in the middle of winter to an unfamiliar place after a day full of classes. I just wanted to be cozy and safe, and it was dark so early, by 4:15 or 4:30.

I think now that if I had kept going to those dance classes, I would not have gotten quite so depressed that semester and had such a hard time that year / the rest of my time at that college, really. But I did the best I knew at the time, I believe.

I'm still like that. I prefer to be at home; I prefer to be in familiar places. Doing easy familiar things. Though I get bored easily, I also get anxious easily. So I walk the same routes over and over again. The library, the produce store, the thrift store, the mailbox. I watch a TV show or movie and then a few days later begin again from the beginning, and then again, until it's like white noise, white sugar, the cheap replacement for real silence. I ponder how long I could live taking the same seasonal data entry job each year. I clean my room.

Here in Australia I am meeting people I've only met once before, when I was twenty and too well prescribed to worry. I am less sparkly than I was then, but I don't mourn that self. I carry myself better now, maybe with less self-confidence but definitely with more steadiness.

I want you to know that I am not a terribly brave person. It's just that it's the mundane things that frighten me.

Guest post: Some words I wish you heard more often

Thank you for struggling.

Thank you. Thank you for crying so hard that your tears and snot and drool all pool into the tissue. Thank you for the objects you have thrown at the wall. Thank you for the days that you have gotten out of bed, and the days you’ve slept through to stay safe. Thank you for the shallow breath that sustains you when you’re absolutely numb. Thank you for the crap food you eat because it takes so little effort to prepare. Thank you for surfing the Internet, when it’s less “surfing” and more “dead man’s float.” Thank you for the times you spend on autopilot. For the times when you check in. Thank you for screaming — and sobbing — so hard that the words you are screaming and sobbing out do not make an ounce of sense. Thank you for going to sleep when waking up is not something you are sure of. Thank you for your cries for attention. For your vague, unsettling status updates. For the e-mails you send when you don’t trust your voice to function. For your mistakes. For your unsettling drawings and your emo poetry, for your journal and the music blaring from your headphones. For how hard you try when no one — yourself included — thinks you are trying.

Thank you for still being alive.

_____

This post comes to us from Mary Maxfield Brave, a blogger whose insights, logic, and passion I deeply respect. It was originally published on her blog Miss Mary Max. Some other pieces of hers I recommend: "Enough with the Good Enough," "Note on Recovery," "Logic Worn Thin: On Obesity as an Eating Disorder," and "Not Offended, Oppressed."

Sadness vs. depression

Sadness surprises me. It is unfamiliar. I have been anxious, angry, and mildly to severely depressed over the past four or five years, but rarely just sad.

I became insensible to sadness during the Year of Depression and the Year of Joy, or I forgot about it — and when I felt it again, I didn't recognize it. It bewildered me. I tried to chase it away at first, worried that it could bring a relapse into depression.

But depression and sadness are different. Not even related, really. Sadness has a more translucent feeling to it. It does not wall you into yourself. It passes. It needn't hurt less than depression, but it hurts differently, less unnaturally: it is not the pain of being constantly attacked by your own thoughts.

Not a numb, solid weight, but a slick of grief. Maybe tears. It can be borne without alcohol or starvation or antidepressants. The warmth and scent of tea, even swallowed alone in the dark, bring comfort.

Your surrender is significant: reprise

Sui asked me for permission to republish an older post of mine on her site, Cynosure. I admire her and her work has tremendous resonance for me, so of course I agreed and took the opportunity to revise the post accordingly.

She also (a surprise and an added honor) took a series of fantastic self-portraits to accompany it.

You can read the updated version with the accompanying images here.

Echoing

Bitterness: As soon as you consciously wish to forget something, it becomes almost impossible.

It's hard for me to remember physical pain once it's passed, but I can remember how it felt to be profoundly depressed, and re-collecting the original pain, holding it whole again in my hands — old, but whole — strikes an echo hurt, a meta-pain.

Melissa wrote [trigger warning for eating disorders] that this grief for the past self and for those unforgettable things is a good sign, even when it hurts deeply. Because it means that sympathy has grown where the hatred used to be.

You should read Lexi's post too, about the mean reds vs. the blues and "it's like depression has its own version of ptsd." I'm grateful for her brain.

In what sense can you leave it behind, the days of leaving scars, of wanting to be dead? And how, without forgetting, without pretending that I don't still have to watch against depression?

I want to say, Too much lost. That's part of the pain.

What lost? Some innocence, I guess. Hatred and violence and hopelessness put an end to a certain type of innocence, and those have had their place in parts of my saga with depression.

And so much to leave behind.

Theodicy. Is it the essence of evil, that suffering is meaningless?

"Humans, including women, construct meaning. That means that when something happens to us, when we have experiences, we try to find in them some reason for them, some significance that they have to us or for us. Humans find meaning in poverty and tyranny and the atrocities of history; those who have suffered most still construct meaning; and those who know nothing take their ignorance as if it were a precious, rare clay and they too construct meaning. In this way, humans assert that we have worth; what has happened to us matters; our time here on earth is not entirely filled with random events and spurious pain. On the contrary, we can understand some things if we try hard to learn empathy; we can seek freedom and honor and dignity; that we care about meaning gives us a human pride that has the fragility of a butterfly and the strength of tempered steel."
– Andrea Dworkin
  Intercourse

The evangelical in me says that that's what grace means here, that this will all mean something, and that it's not just self-illusion to think so.

I have to believe that. In an integrity of experience and purpose that will be clear in the end, with enough distance, or in those rare minutes. That there will be a story to this, to me, and that it will not be senseless.

Read in July 2011

1. Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems, by Diane di Prima
Wild and thought-provoking, a strange simultaneity of squalor and loveliness.

2. The Water Tower, by Gary Crew
WHOA strange and freaky-deaky story in a unique picture book layout. It took me several read-throughs to decide what I thought it was about/what had happened. The plot is enigmatic and quiet, but very creepy.

3. Veronika Decides to Die, by Paulo Coelho
I thought from the beginning that I would really like this book, but I found it tiresome. It questions our ideas of sanity/insanity in a very cliché way; it has this gimmicky and unsurprising little twist at the end; also, the turning point in the character's inner journey is this absurd exhibitionist masturbation scene. Oh, and that quasi-inspiring IMAGINE IF YOU HAD ONLY A WEEK TO LIVE, HOW WOULD YOU LIVE? premise. Blah. It reads like an early draft.

4. Eurydice, by Sarah Ruhl
Quirky and poetic. See it on stage if you ever get the chance. I saw it in February at my college and it kind of devastated me.

5. Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, by Lewis Carroll
I don't know how to appreciate this, or Alice. Not saying there's nothing to appreciate about them; I just, ah, have no idea.

6. The Will to Change: Poems 1968-1970, by Adrienne Rich

7. Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004-2006, by Adrienne Rich

8. Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, by William Styron
This was quite dark, and it could be very triggering to people with depressive tendencies.  For some reason it was just what I needed, though — a reminder that when I'm facing depression, it is real and serious and urgent, and something that a lot of other humans are encountering too. This is a cliché but I mean it: if you haven't experienced depression, reading this book is the closest you can come to understanding what it is like. I recommend it for that reason.

9. Three Guineas, by Virginia Woolf
She is so freaking smart. It felt like work to read this, but the text is its own reward. Sharp sharp sharp, sarcastic, stimulating. Nonfiction: musings on capitalism (wage labor), war, and the place of women in her society, especially middle-class women in Western societies.

10. Traveling Light: Poems, by Linda Pastan
Have a taste for yourself, here.

Goodbye, July

A mediocre month. It brought Havel, Virginia Woolf, thick fog, and finally employment. Ravens came and left. I spent it rather at the mercy of my brain — back and forth between an obsessive buzzing mood and a numb, heavy, tending-towards-despair. But sometimes it's just a matter of riding it out. If you can continue to get out of bed, eat, go outside, write, those things, if you can just wait for it to subside and protect yourself from (doing) things that would make it worse, then you'll be okay. That's how you can practice hope when you don't feel hope.

Summer classes are over now, thank goodness, and I'm looking forward to this month. August has always been my favorite flavor.

Freckle-dressed

Today we played a money/trading game in one of my anthropology classes, and we had to talk about how it made us feel and what values we saw reflected in the different interactions and responses, and my answer although I didn't say it was IT MADE ME FEEL EXISTENTIAL DREAD. Because he never told us the objective of the game, yet everyone else was still milling around, transacting with the strange required gestures and counting their money. But apparently needing to have a goal is a cultural thing.

You know, a stranger will give you some amazing thing if you ask in the right context? You should do that.

For lunch I cooked brown jasmine rice and mushrooms in my rice cooker and had that with curry and yogurt, and then I ate the rest of the mushrooms with some Parrano cheese. My room still smells great. College is hopefully the only time in my life that I will have to slice mushrooms in my bedroom.

I haven't seen my digital camera since Friday. I'm trying not to be upset by that.

Also I typed up this freewrite from last January:

--

One of my Twitter friends asked what is your favorite beach memory. I've grown up perched on the edge of the Pacific, I have so many to choose from. But I didn't have to think long, it was the time we went to the beach last August. We rode the streetcar down and you talked about college, leaning against the doors. We got coffee, this was before I knew lattes were fatty, also before I realized that that sweater looked bad on me. Ocean was quiet and gray, the sky was low and white, foggy looking up and down the beach. I always think of August this way, a colorless sky and a quiet gray sea.

We sat drinking coffee and digging holes in the dark sand with our restless elbows, grains stuck in the rib of my sleeves. You took a picture of something with your phone. I had my camera along and I wish even more now that I had taken a picture of us, not so I could remember something I've forgotten but so I could see what was in your face, what was in my face, eyes, what did I think then standing at the edge of what I am now standing in?

I was bored with the end of my latte and poured it out into the pit I'd dug. You took off your shoes and rolled up your pants and padded down to the water's edge (I couldn't I was wearing tights).

What you said to my sister at my house, which block we were on when I tried standing on your skateboard, what you wore, but most of all how I hadn't made our friendship so weird and sad yet, I remember and I taste all this through the thick now of how sorry I am.

--

At the top of that page, I had written, "Interests: August." That part still holds.

NaPoWriMo revision

Wading out into a great tree's shadow
and its conversation of angles, the sun's billion-mile speech
to tree, whose reply printed on earth
this needle-done reply, touches also me
kicking its lace around my ankles:
you remember that
these wrists are same shadows, dark blood-
branches of your own April-pale person

I wonder if I could feel the raveling patterns under my skin
and do they graze the tree's when I stand here, fall into any accordance?
(as if I could be picked apart by robins'
feet. as if I couldn't be.)

When everything is stirring into life like this,
it's hard to prefer other. I could be hungry
and still, mays mights mustn'ts of grass stamped
onto my thighs,
I could be my own
hopeful pretentious self unfolding here
beneath these trees.

Being beneath these trees, blue under my skin,
sun over my skin, the thin lines of ink bleeding
from the letters you left across the back of my hand:
Mourned English subjunctive, cast my eyes
back onto this earth.

This was not recent

Starting in February, there were these nights when I couldn't sleep because I got mad depressed as soon as the lights were off and I was alone with my thoughts. The first time it was because I had had too much espresso too late, so I just sat there heaving sobs until my roomie woke up. She was the best. She would distract me, tell stories or read aloud or pull me out to walk to the neighboring elementary school's playground. Or not distract me. Whichever helped. We came back at four in the morning and burned incense and boiled water for tea to spell away the demons. By then I'd be tired enough to fall asleep, tired enough that I'd almost fall asleep on the floor while my tea steeped. It was some kind of rose flavor, stolen from our cafeteria, which I later found out was artificially flavored. Raspberry rose. Anyways that was kind of a shame. And the next day we'd both be dead on our feet, sleep as soon as we got out of class, as much as we could afford before starting homework, and wait until we had to do it all again. Night depression is the worst thing I've ever been through and I'm grateful I didn't deal with it often after that semester. She was the best, though.

Heartache

I went to the doctor today about a minor concern, just a little inflammation in my heel.

I was sitting next to a tweenish boy and his mother in the waiting room. My ears are a little too sharp, maybe, or too curious.

I heard her say something like, "So you feel like you have to do these exercises?" and thought, Eating disorder. But not very seriously, just my brain skipping around.

But they kept talking and it turned out I was right. These little tidbits: You made yourself throw up. Grandma told me about how you were running around the parking lot and not eating very much. She sent me a picture, I could see your face was different. Push-ups in particular? Were you surprised to find out you'd lost weight? Dr. So-and-So the head of the eating disorders unit. You're thirteen now, what about down the road, if you were giving a concert, you would pass out on stage.

Thirteen. Murmuring, long legs, young face, big feet in Converse. Going to be admitted to an eating disorders unit. When I heard that, a little part of me was running away and sitting down somewhere small and hiding my face and crying hard hard.

I still have to assemble something called "Lake part three" because that's how I am, but today I only want to say, I am sad. Not about my life, but about other things in the world. I know there are glimmers of redemption everywhere, but I am sad that our world has to be so broken. I am sad that a thirteen-year-old person has be in so much pain.

I'm not Catholic, but I'm lighting a St. Jude candle lately when I pray. Patron saint of the helpless and alone, of hopeless cases, of things almost despaired of. Ore por mi, pues estoy solo y sin ayuda...

I light it for who I sometimes am, for the kid in the waiting room, and I light it for you. I do not know who you are, but you know who you are.

Negotiations

I made a pancake today,
and cut it up into
two four eight sixteen thirty-two little animals mostly squarish
who maybe would have roamed
somewhere with the deer and the antelope.
Desert-colored little animals with smooth warm hides.
But I fenced them in on my plate,
concentric seventies solemnity,
locked them up
behind the smooth weighty tines
of my fork.
Later
they will gallop circles in my belly.
Stampede behind my eyeballs.

Interviewed

I completely forgot that this interview was going up today, until I saw it come across my reader and went, "Oh, hey, that's me. Ack."

Sarah Von interviewed me for her True Story series. It was a bit scary for me to let someone else steer a conversation about something this personal and achey (I must have emailed her four or five times with small edits to my answers) and I REALLY didn't want to write the typical eating disorder confessional.

But judging by the comments so far, it was a good idea, and it was a good exercise for me to try to tell the thing from beginning to end. Or middle, or wherever this is.

It's not everything, but it's a lot of it.

Good medicine

I thought I'd compile a list of my favorite places to find people who are talking about body image, eating disorder recovery, etc.

Internet fiend that I am, I could hardly ignore the interwebs as a potential source of good body-image medicine for myself, and having done the finding, why not share?

Also stuck a few favorite relevant books on at the end.

If you know of something that should be on this list but isn't, please drop me a comment!

Body image:

• Already Pretty
• Operation Beautiful
• REVOLUTION OF REAL WOMEN flickr pool
• rvxn
• Sociological Images 
• Weightless 
• You Are Remarkable

Eating disorder recovery:

• ED Bites
• Men Get Eating Disorders Too
• rvxn
• The Support Letter
• Voice in Recovery  
• Weightless

Recovery support: 

• MentorCONNECT: mentorship and moderated forums for eating disorder recovery
• We Bite Back: "post-pro-ana" site and forum

Blog posts:

• Empty Bellies Do Not Beget Genius 
• How Do You Embrace & Celebrate Your Body? 
• How To Practice Major Mega Supreme Body Love...Daily!
• It's All Good. No, Really. *All* of It. 
• How to Survive a Case of The Uglies 
• Another Reminder 

Books:

• 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food, by Susan Albers
• Intuitive Eating, by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch 
• North of Beautiful, by Justina Chen Headley
• Traveling Mercies, by Anne Lamott
• The Beauty Myth, by  Naomi Wolf
• The Good Body, by Eve Ensler 
• Life Inside the "Thin" Cage, by Constance Rhodes
• The Diet Survivor's Handbook, by Judith Matz and Ellen Frankel
• Shannon Cutts' list of nonfiction recovery books
• Sui's list of 8 books to transform your body image and eating

And on Twitter, my list of recovery/body image tweeters.

The myth of the creative depressive

This passage was so gratifying for me to read because it expresses an idea that's been percolating in the back of my mind for a while. I think Elizabeth Wurtzel says it just right.

"Madness is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression....The word madness allows its users to celebrate the pain of its sufferers, to forget that underneath all the acting-out and quests for fabulousness and fine poetry, there is a person in huge amounts of dull, ugly agony...

"Why must every literary examination of Robert Lowell, of John Berryman, of Anne Sexton, of Jean Stafford, of so many writers and artists, keep perpetuating the notion that their individual pieces of genius were the result of madness? While it may be true that a great deal of art finds its inspirational wellspring in sorrow, let's not kid ourselves about how much time each of those people wasted and lost by being mired in misery. So many productive hours slipped by as paralyzing despair took over. None of these people wrote during depressive episodes. If they were manic-depressives, they worked during hypomania, the productive precursor to a manic phase which allows a peak of creative energy to flow; if they were garden-variety, unipolar depressives, they created during their periods of reprieve. This is not to say that we should deny sadness its rightful place among the muses of poetry and of all art forms, but let's stop calling it madness, let's stop pretending that the feeling itself is interesting....Depression is such an uncharismatic disease, so much the opposite of the lively vibrance that one associates with madness.

"Forget about the scant hours in her brief life when Sylvia Plath was able to produce the works in Ariel. Forget about that tiny bit of time and just remember the days that spanned into years when she could not move, couldn't think straight, could only lie in wait in a hospital bed, hoping for the relief that electroconvulsive therapy would bring. Don't think of the striking on-screen picture, the mental movie you create of the pretty young woman being wheeled on the gurney to get her shock treatments....Think, instead, of the girl herself, of the way she must have felt right then, of the way no amount of great poetry and fascination and fame could make the pain she felt at that moment worth suffering. Remember that when you're at the point at which you're doing something as desperate and violent as sticking your head in an oven, it is only because the life that preceded this act felt even worse. Think about living in depression from moment to moment, and know it is not worth any of the great art that comes as its by-product."

- Elizabeth Wurtzel
   in Prozac Nation

This rings very true to my own experiences with depression, first- and secondhand. I think for some forms of mental illness, de-romanticization is the necessary companion to destigmatization.

Thoughts?

In no order [walking free-write]

Today I crushed a snowflake between my fingertips

No

Tonight I stood in the lights outside the church, whispering profanities because I could see snowflakes on my scarf and they had six points, they had feathers and were more complicated than paper snowflakes, and so small even my super-macro setting couldn't focus on the best one, crying profanities because I have been a good evangelical and those are the words left to me when there are no words left

This is me having no answers, me not knowing anything but what happened. Paint can stroke with no answers, can I write this way? Will you allow this?

Striding in a fury of wonder to the library at night
Retching in glory, my heart seizing with you and with me-ness
But "it is ever so easy to go"
But I wanted to follow no one
This storm of words in my skull
Vitamins and a vial of lavender oil in my coat pocket,
where there was a brownie where I hallucinate its grease

Stop, stop looking at yourself
No, that's not it
Stop, what is the wonder of a snowflake compared to a human?
Would you thrust your fingers down your best friend's throat?

I was dishonest. Age thirteen, I wrote about eyes meeting in the rain, water in eyelashes
Am. Age twenty, I sketch in my head about my bloody wool-stockinged heels, my eyes in love, my swallowing throat.
Nineteen, I dreamt a girl vomiting blood and that I said nothing
Last night — no, the night before, there was a girl vomiting. I couldn't see her face and I laid the back of my hand on her bare shoulder blade.

"No history but"

Bones to me used to mean jutting bones. Too-skinny. I wished my bones (hipcollarribschest, wristspineshoulderblades) would jut. To say...? I would guess: "I have anger in my belly like emptiness; I don't believe any of this is ever going to be okay."

I lay in bed with my thumbs on my hipbones listening to minutes pass(thumbs left scars, not many still to see).

Bones mean different for me now. I want skin and fat around them, but I want to know where they are too. Bones are: memory, things that don't hurt anymore. My center, the parts of me which are inalienable. "To the bones." What holds me up and together. My Ellie and I lined two of our prettier bones with stars—me to remind my fingers of her and of strength(our strength).

I have this odd habit now of pounding my hipbones lightly with the fleshy end of a fist when I'm thinking hard. You can echolocate your way around a waist this way: flesh, flesh, flesh, bone. There is one point which if you hit just on, it thumps down to your marrow.

A little bruise there....I don't know why, but it reassures me.