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.