defining moments

It’s 2:00am, and too cold to be smoking outside in skimpy pjs. But practicality’s not my style, so I throw on long fur coat and slip out the back door. I perch on the back of the bench, and use the knee-high snow as a footrest. The ambient glow of the streetlights and the full moon beaming through a cage of branches light my yard. Wispy clouds bedeck the winter sky, lit pink by the downtown luminescence. The moon and her cloudy nimbus turn the cradling arms of the trees into dark silhouettes. The brittle tinkling of a wind chime is answered by the distant wail of a police siren. Bits of an unseasonal garden ornament protrude from a snowdrift, the iron flowers hovering just above the frosty crust. Like me, the bare stems of their beings are encumbered by excess weight. When springtime comes, the flowers will be divested of their present burden. With dedication, I will be too. Exhaling smoke and fog into the bitter air, I imagine the kiss of newborn sun on a taut stomach. Alone in the still night, my bare knees flushed from the cold, I’m awash with a rare feeling: contentment.

I collect these solitary moments; they are special provenance of the sleepless. I try to memorialize them through words, save them to a folder labeled “escape.” When the swelling tide of demands and temptations and misery threatens to sweep me away, I click through them. Like Audre Lord said, “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me, and eaten alive.”

split/soul

I went on a four-day bender, not in a hot way. It wasn't a good time, and it won't be a good story. I don't believe in regrets, but yes, I regret secretly shoveling food into my mouth late into the night.  I regret eating far past the point of hunger, til my stomach was distended like a goddamn famine baby. I regret probing my windpipe with the backend of a toothbrush for the first time in so long. I regret sleeping for hours, spending what felt like days smothered in blankets and the glowing warmth emenating from the radiator. I regret snapping at everyone around me, ignoring every incoming call, letting emails pile up in my inbox. I feel like there are too many souls living inside me, too many possible futures. I don't like the one I saw the last few days. I'll do anything to keep her out. 


Maybe disassociating myself from what I did is how I'm reintroducing myself to the world. Yesterday was better, not great, but better. I ran on the elliptical, lifted weights, and did pilates. I tracked my intake, and kept the total under 1000 (my net was 672). I cleaned out my inbox. I replied to old texts. I wrote. Nothing spectacular, just one right thing after another. 


In an hour and a half, I have a therapy appointment. I'm dreading it. I've never met this shrink before. I've never gone to therapy when I've been this low before. I'm sensing disaster. But I have to show up. Just in case this most recent descent into severe melancholy was caused by my flirtation with medication. This is the ray of too-good-to-be-true that I can only look at sideways. I don't believe in easy answers, and unlike my views on regrets, I've never had to make an exception to that. 

Sometimes I wonder if what I'm most afraid of is mediocrity. Average weight, average looks, average smarts, average broken family, average self destruction and average unhappiness. My stepdad made an off-hand remark once, about how I truly want to be different from the rest. We were in the kitchen, clearing away the leftovers from brunch. I was making a serious effort to convey my shame-filled but uncontrollable aversion to deformities and ugliness. For instance, how I was afraid of the girl I saw sometimes in the dining halls who had shrunken arms. He and my mom both claimed this fear was something instinctual, something most people felt, something we must simply rise above. They were trying to reassure me, but their jovial inclusivity only made me feel more defective. 


This feeling is a familiar one, often brought on by my infrequent and ineffective attempts to communicate something deeply personal about myself. It's not that I think there's anything so shockingly flawed about me. It's that the cracks inside me are profound enough that I feel compelled to reveal them, yet near enough to typical that my divulsions are normalized, contextualized in a way that renders them banal and meaningless. 


So I bury my issues ever deeper, resist passing urges to unearth these fermenting troubles. Sometimes one forces its way to the surface, but even then, I scrub it as clean as I can before sharing. I self-sanitize, self-trivialize. I share an edited version of myself with the world. I almost never "let myself go," release the control I fight so hard to hold onto. Maybe that's why my most intimate moments happen when I'm drunk. 

nothing but the truth

Two nights ago, I tried to slice the bottom of my foot open with a pumpkin carving knife. I held the orange plastic handle tight, and pressed the ineffective blade into my skin. I didn't even draw blood.

Too bad, maybe. Maybe it would have been a way to spill out some of the badness metastisizing inside me.  Without some kind of release, it leaks out in unpredictable and worrying ways. I hear echos of that badness when my little sister calls herself fat and turns down dessert. Maybe I'm self-glamorizing, casting myself as the star in a story that has nothing to do with me. I'm lost in a morass of maybes, the ranks of things I know are true are dwindling every day.

But there's this: the number on the scale. For the last eleven mornings, I've seen a subtraction. It's my totem, a reminder of the one truth I always come back to. And maybe it'll be my way out of the morass, like the string that led Thesus out of the maze. I'll spin my own yarn, using only realities, discarding whatifs past and present. I will discard all badness, all unwanted excess. My tautly-stretched strands of truth will led a distilled me to a better future.

pull your sore ribs in

I'm trying to pull my tangles out.

This morning, I ran immediately after waking. I wish I always had the time to ease myself into the world via forty minutes of escapist physical exertion followed with a well-deserved shower. Living in my own skin is nearly intolerable. The only reliable means of escape are throwing myself into an all-consuming workout or getting wasted. Obviously, neither can really be done in tandem with the any of the items cluttering my to-do list.

I can't literally run away, so I'm doing my best to approximate the feeling. God, I wish I could think of a way to get some painkillers. The constant, buzzing discontent inside me is unendurable. I'm playing a dangerous game, letting things slide and waiting to see if I'll have the nerve to bury myself. So far, I've always evaded that seemingly inevitable fate. Except for rare moments of confession, no one's been the wiser.

Right now, January is my watchword. Distance and distraction won't solve anything, but if I part my hair artfully enough, my rat's nest of unresolved problems will be hidden away.

a break from reality

Escape, the six-letter promise I keep breaking. I'm more fragmented than usual; my alpha self keeps pinching the rest of me to forestall the encroaching tide of apathy, inappropriate urges and daydreams. It doesn't always work. I'm having trouble being polite in public, so I write rules for everything. Back to basics, like washing my hair at least every other day, making the maximum number of yoga classes possible per week, keeping to a calorie limits and other concrete things. I'm trying not to let too many commitments slide, but it's so hard when I feel like I'm slipping away with them. This is the worst break from reality I've ever been on. My shrink (ex-shrink now, I think) hit the nail on the head when he described his emotions during his semester off as "dead." It's like I'm haunting my possible lives.

I hate this maudlin nonsense. I literally need to get my meds adjusted, but the effort required is daunting. Like, they've succeeded in dulling my misery, but the subsequent blandness, dry mouth, nausea, insomnia, exhaustion and complete disconnect from emotion are not really an acceptable substitute. I'm going to run through the samples Dr. C gave me in a few days, and the chances of me filling the scrip are about as low as the chances of me making back into the Clinic. I feel completely unconcerned about the potential outcomes, no way that's a good sign.

There's got to be a way out of this, but right now I have to try so hard just to keep up appearances. I've formed a shell-life from the small actions usually taken for granted, like getting out of bed in the morning. I am so stereotypically depressed, ew. I hate talking about any of this to anyone, but I've confessed a little to Emma and Erica and Katherine. And of course, they all say variations of the same thing: wait til you're back at Smith. I'm so scared though, what if my time away changes me so much I don't fit into my old place when I finally find my way back?

Retourner

My insomnia is back. Apparently that's the room-of-requirement prerequisite for finding this blog. I feel slightly guilty for editing and changing this, it was such an un-retouched encapsulation of who I used to be. But changing it is like distilling myself, sifting through the pretensions and passing fancies till all that's left are the bones of my being. I've always thought bones are beautiful.