The response I cannot send
Today the email didn’t come from Barack Obama.
Hi,
I sent you a very long letter that you should read. It is not the kind of letter that will upset you or rake up anything that will set you back. It is, however, important, even crucial.
Thanks,
Dad
Dear Dad,
How highly you must think of yourself to deem yourself an accurate judge of what will upset me or set me back. You have twenty five years of contrary evidence working against that deluded assumption. I will read your letter, not because of any hope that it contains anything that will benefit me or bring me peace; rather, because I have a pathological desire to hurt myself, physically and emotionally and because reading your correspondence, without fail, reminds me of how fucked up and toxic you are and reinforces my desire to amputate you.
I wept over your email today. I am trapped. You have some sick sixth sense that must stem from our two and a half decades of unhealthy twisted enmeshment that allows you to feel what I’m feeling. You felt it, didn’t you…last Wednesday night when everyone was at G’s reading? No no else noticed my absence. You know when I feel left out and non-existent; and you feed on it. It fuels you. I can fake strength to everyone else in the world but you…you…you know somehow even though I haven’t spoken to you in nearly a year and a half. Only you know me, you sick fuck. It makes me want to hurt me, because I know you’ll feel it. I want to kill me because a part of you will die too. There’s no way out of this. For as long as I live, you will force your way into my thoughts when I’m most vulnerable. You will bring me down. You brought me into this world and you will not stop until you see me out of it.
I absolutely abhor you. You repulse me. I love you and hate you more than anyone else in the world.
-me
When is it EVER appropriate…
…to email your ex-girlfriend an article about women with Borderline Personality Disorder in relationships. Really?! Dangerous territory to start slapping DSM-IV labels on each others, in my humble opinion. And if you do cross the line of inappropriateness, don’t fucking cloak it with concern and benevolence – in hopes that I won’t put anyone else through the horrors of being in a relationship with someone as hopelessly diagnosable as myself.
You know, supressing anger and redirecting it toward myself has been an issue in therapy that I haven’t felt much progress in. Well, pat me on the back and give me a sticker – I AM FURIOUS. And not in “classic symptom of BPD” way – FUCKING FURIOUS FOR GOOD REASON.
quiet night at the Moseberg’s
J has been sleeping since I got home from work at 5:30. It is now nearly 10 p.m. and I’m wrapping up my day and about to go to bed for the night. I can’t help but think that his slumber is fueled by avoidance and passive aggressiveness. It’s making me feel really really pissed off.
I purged my dinner. Fuck. I have grandiose schemes in my head of serious restricting over the holidays. Double fuck. Yesterday may have been a bit much for my system to handle without flaring up my ED/protector parts. I hate this. I hate this. I hate this. Dinner wasn’t anything more than I’ve eaten over the past few days without purging so I feel like that is a nice bit of empirical data that tells me so much of it has to do with emotions (wait, but I already knew that). Days like these I just want to run away from my life. Parts of me don’t want to marry this man. Parts of me don’t want to join his name and mine on a mortgage. Parts of me get hopeless and start thinking suicidal thoughts. Parts of me imagine planning a trip to NC to see my mom and just not returning. But those are just parts. They have their reasons.
Where did my Self go?
A post about S-E-X.
Enticing, eh? Don’t hold your breath, you’ll pass out with anticipation. I’m not really feeling open to sharing details but J and I had a conversation about our sex life tonight. A life which has been dwindling for about 6 months and has dried to a meager sporadic trickle now. We’re not even married! Isn’t this supposed to happen around year 6 of matrimony? Not on your one year anniversary of dating?
I tried, really, with everything in me not to get too reactive, too inflammatory, too dramatic. To maintain a calm tone and speak for my parts instead of from them. But my LORD he makes it difficult. Everything is about him. Part of me feels it is utterly impossible to utter a single syllable about our relationship without him feeling judged, shamed, or altogether criticized. I attempted approximately 23 times to reframe or restate some of my feelings in a way that didn’t inflame his insecurities but then a feeling started creeping in that this was more than his self-esteem (perffect example – my use of the word “creeping” in this sentence would have elicited, “well, that is just really hurtful to me that you’re calling me a creep. no wonder I don’t want to have sex with you”). That somehow by getting so offended, he was controlling me. It is a not-so-subtle throw-back to the way my father reacts in conflict. Get so personally offended that the other part abandons their cause to try to care for you; tease out the caretaker part and make her apologize for any assertiveness or honesty she may have experienced, thereby negating her needs.
Well, fuck. Bree has said that my therapeutic work may be a bit slower because of my prime relationship mirroring some of my old ones and “stirring up” my parts. I didn’t at first want to admit that this was true, but tonight it started coming into focus. That recognition of being manipulated and feeling trapped by it. So what happens, class, when I feel trapped?? Everyone say it with me, “self-destruction”. That’s right. So first, as I fell asleep, I vowed to give up food forever (not even snacks) – just torture myself to death with a hunger strike. Then the desire to slice rivers of blood down my thighs (interesting if only because I’ve never cut before). Then came the suicidal ideation – at least it had some creativity this time – take a handful of Valium and go lay down in the snow in the middle of a field and die of hypothermia. I’ve heard that you go crazy first with giddiness from the cold and that sounds pretty appealling to me.
A part of me throughout this whole hour+ ordeal was screaming inside, “You had one hell of an emotional night. Now is just not the time to be getting into this with J.” Another part was shouting, “Fuck you, dude. Don’t ever say, “no wonder i don’t want to have sex with you” to me!!” And a third, “You are a narcissistic prick just like my father.” But I thought better than to speak for these parts.
Could someone please define recovery?
What does it mean to be “in recovery”? I was feeling quite proud, even cocky of myself over the past year for so quickly rectifying such an embarrassing little problem as an eating disorder. I even told J early in our relationship that I just stopped it… just made a rule that I wouldn’t do it anymore. Just as easily as I cut out foods and decided to purge anything of substance, I flipped the rules and decided to be healthy. The weight came back on (to a “healthy” weight – grrrrr. no word sounds more revolting to me right now). I made it all seem so easy, such an act of will power. So can I still pride myself on my self-will and perfectionism when I’ve purged at least once a day for about 12 of the last 14? Am I still recovered? Okay, maybe I don’t want an answer to that question. Or, to clarify…I do:
-The self-righteous recovery part wants to hear that this is merely a “setback” due to the enormity of progress currently made in therapy. Uncovering my past, feeling my feelings, expressing my true Self…
-The disordered part of me says that clearly I’m coming back on-board although this hardly counts as “real” eating disordered behavior and I better get my shit in gear and start losing all this disgusting “health” that I carry around and pack into clothes that used to hang on me.
-The dissociative, analytical and altogether curious part of me says, “No, really…am I sick or well? Disordered or recovered?”
I received email #2 of the week from my dad complete with graphic details of my grandfather’s last dying days. This, from the father who I have told for greater than one year NOT to contact me. The one who does not have my address since I moved to Vermont. With whom I have neither initiated contact with nor responded to in almost exactly one year. Who sent his “final” email (translation: more dramatic and manipulative than all the rest) in July and promised not to contact me any more if I did not respond. And who lives about 7 states away from said dying grandfather but somehow can describe in great detail his facial pallor and thready pulse (he is a novelist, afterall). My father has borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder and I have, for the past 27 years, held the priveledged position of the primary focus of his toxic sickness and manipulation.
So, um, that may have been a little triggery to receive an email from him. That and hunger. And fatigue. I swear sometimes I purge because I’m tired and it gives me a little “pick me up”. I’m too tired to eat but I do it so I can get all buzzy after I kick the digestive system into reverse.
So since I’m on the daddy issues, which I never really discussed on my previous blog because of familiarity with readership, I’ll continue. There are 2 people outside of professional therapists who I have told about this and one of them is NOT my brother. When I attempted to “pause” my relationship with my dad because thinking about him made me purge and talking to him made me have panic attacks, he began a campaign of deception, guilt and general cruelty to elicit contact from me. With each successive attempt, he got more bold and more hurtful. Fuck, when I heard that he was diagnosed with cancer I was absolutely certain that it was a lie to get me to call him (okay, so maybe this one detail was true – he did, apparently have cancer – colorectal…hah…ironic for him to have asshole cancer. admittedly cruel to joke about someones cancer. guilty as charged). But even that diagnosis didn’t suck me back in…. so about 4 months into this attempt to differentiate myself and salvage some level of mental and physical health my dad wrote me a 4 page handwritten letter – addressed to my work address (which he googled because no one would tell him my new address post-move because they respected my need for space). In this letter, in addition to describing in gory detail a near-death experience of rectal “bleed-out” (yum) and saccarine admonitions of love “maybe too much”, he admitted to watching me shower as an adolescent and being caught by me one day. I have absolutely no recollection of this incident, nor of much of my childhood.
So, how is this little venting session relavent to my current situation? I think I’m sabatoging myself. I think that recovery and therapy and progress is all hunky dory until shit starts hitting the fan. We can talk about my mother’s emotional constipation, about my needs not being met emotionally, about my perfectionism and disorganized sense of self. But we canNOT, as far as I’m concerned start dabbling in issues of my father and why at such a young age I started feeling really fucked up inside (gratuitous use of the word fuck in this post. please accept my aplogies.). And I am absolutely paralyzed with fear that as I make “progress” in therapy and re-connect to the really fucked up hurt child inside of me, I will either (a) have a flood of disturbing memories of sexual abuse, or (b) come to the conclusion that my dad is lying about being sexually inappropriate with me -which is a relief in some ways and in others is completely fucked up in its own right. And I have a really amazing therapist who I know wants to “go there”. No way. Let’s go back to dealing with how to cope with urges to restrict and purge. Let’s bullshit some more about my mom. I didn’t sign on for this and I’d like to keep all this tucked away neatly inside. But I can’t tell my therapist all this shit because I’m a perfectionist in therapy, too. I’m the perfect patient. Really, she mentions a book – it arrives on my doorstep care of Amazon and is filled with highlighter marks by the next session. And she’s too good to continue to fake it with. I would like to be, in no specific order, perfectly recovered, perfectly disordered, perfectly compliant in therapy, perfectly safe from any yucky feelings whatsover (save the yucky feelings inherint in eating disorders). So it’s really a conundrum I’m in.
And I had intended to keep this post both short and superficial. FUCK.
