Inner stirrings of joy
I’m amassing a stockpile of journals and colored pencils and fantastic books and quotes and ammunition for a collage and pretty turquoise stationery on the kitchen table – a surface previously reserved for credit card bills and insurance EOB letters, for receipts and to do lists.
These are the liferafts in the dark sea of emptiness, the arctic waters of lonliness. Where once I wallowed and panicked, I can create and explore. Without expectation of quality or quantity of performance, I merely intend to invite some joy and contentment.
What if today was a little bit normal?
What if I just ate breakfast because my stomach is growling. And then a snack the next time my stomach growls. What if I just didn’t purge and had a reasonable amount of exercise. How would my mood and outlook on life change if my body was feeling nourished today? I could do this. I know I could. Just for one day. Then tomorrow I could decide what to do with tomorrow’s body. I want want want to do that for myself today. But it would mean missing out on that feeling of pride when I eat my first morsel of the day at noon. When my stomach is growling on my 5 mile run on the treadmill tonight. What does that feeling mean to me? Why do I prize it so much? Where else is there a source of that feeling that I could access?
Beginning last night, I felt I was teetering on the edge of some sort of mini-breakthrough. Primarily emotionally but that always spills over into the ED behaviors’ territory. I’ve read Lola’s lastest post three times now trying to draw from the positive vibes. I’ve squinted and strained to decipher Lee’s letter to her ED. I want so badly for momentum to be on my side and for this consideration of a day of normalcy to tip the scales toward a few days of normalcy. But I’m scared. I don’t want to lose the ground I’ve made. Don’t want to be normal and unspecial as so many who deal day in and day out with these disorders report. A part of me is desperate to be sick sick sick. I don’t lose weight to look “good”. I lose weight to look “sick”. To elicit concern. How can I compromise with this part of me that needs concern and attention? How can I get it what it so desperately needs without the harm to myself.
Important questions are coming up. Not questions of coping strategies or distraction techniques. The big shit. The big WHAT IF’s that will help me in the long run. What if I could get these needs met from a source other than disordered self-torture? I really believe it’s got to be out there. Do I wait for it to come to me, find its way into my life? Do I “work” and “search” for it? How far away is it? Will I need help from others to find it or, once it’s in sight, to reach it?
One thing I am becoming acutely, painfully aware of is how alone I feel on the social front. I really really need some good friends. Relationships that are maintained weekly. Dependable folks to call and have coffee with. People who I feel safe to delve below the surface with and who do the same for me. People who allow the space for words like “scared”, “hurt”, “alone”, “suffering”. That’s why I love the Buddha – who unfortunately is not available for coffee any time soon. Because the first thing he wants to talk about is the suffering. The yuck. The pain. The darkness. He knows that acknowledging that shit is a prerequisite for getting to the good stuff. The hope and the meaning. I need friendships like that. That are based on the honest acknowlegement that life is suffering. And then that lead me around to the flip side – that life has value. Again – do I wait for these people to come to me, entering my life serendipitously? Do I seek them out and work at it?
For all those who’ve taken the curve today – around the bend of despair and are starting to see signs of life and normalcy and meaning up ahead – please share this energy. I really think I’m in an open space to receive it today and want it in bulk.
The awkwardness of being human
J just had the most wonderful insight as we laid in bed chatting about our crazy families of origin and the possibility (albeit a terrifying one to both of us) of a family of our own.
“Everyone just walks around acting like everything’s normal. No one ever talks about the awkwardness of being human. It’s really weird to be a human.”
That, folks, is why I love that man.
I had an extremely weird human experience tonight at the gym. Some sort of weird waking vision – like a dream, only on minute 18 on the Stairmaster. I got this imagery of my father doing surgery on me in our living room and harvesting my organs. It was so disturbing and vivid that I got very rattled. Unsure of whether to hop off the 814th floor of my imaginary building and head home, to cry while pounding away on the pedals or to open my book and pretend the whole thing never happened. I wound up spending the next 12 minutes pouring sweat into puddles on the floor directly below my elbows. I decided to stay with the image but was so uncomfortable that I cranked the machine up to level 20 and began sprinting. It felt strangely like whatever was coming up, bubbling up from the pool of yuck inside me and was somehow important. Probably very painful but valuable. I came home and later wrote about 3 paragraphs of it to get it out of my head. It is truly bizarre, a visual metaphor for my relationship with my father. It feels too fresh and twisted right now to share on the blog but that will likely happen soon. Just need to give the emotional dust a few days to settle. Need to talk about it in therapy Thursday.
Yoga was pretty solid for me tonight. I felt comfortable and present. Heavy through the soles of my feet (I guess that’s what they mean when they say “grounded”). Still purging but at least I feel like it’s for good reason – like some of the yuck is making its way up and of course I don’t know what to do with it. I do feel like I’m getting just a little bit closer to knowing. Like maybe I’m on the cusp of something. Maybe. Please, maybe.
Impermanence
“In Zen practice, the process of identifying and reducing our attachments to our own beliefs, ideas and opinions is sometimes called ‘putting them down’. Just as we would put down a load that has gotten too heavy for us, so too can we put down our heavy load of self, which we identify with our personal situations, ideas and beliefs.” – Mel Ash from “The Zen of Recovery”
I certainly am carrying a load that has gotten too heavy, but what I can’t seem to get a unified answer from my own mind on is : is the load my eating disorder or life without it? Which do I need to “put down”?
I read Zen teachings, listen to podcasts of Dharma talks and generally try to immerse myself in Eastern philosophy on those days when pill bottles and high bridges start to look appealing. And I find a spot of comfort. For a bit. Then those ED voices start their menacing twisting of things, whispering deviously in my ear.
I find myself asking, “what if it all fell away?” – the job, the wedding, the family, the friends, the adulthood, the getting out of bed. What if I just wasted away into a living non-existence, got shipped off to residential or stuck in a hospital room. Buddhism (filtered through my ED mind) would tell me that the trappings of life such as these identifiers (occupation, age, gender, relationship status) are actually distractors from what I really am, what existence really is. So, releasing into the abyss of this disorder, the depths of sickness wouldn’t really change who I am or what the world is based on. Which is liberating to my ED side but also frustrating. What is at the bottom of the abyss. Whether I let the sickness overwhelm me or I fight like hell to get out of it – what is the point? Who am I underneath it all? What is beneath my daily experience (regardless of whether said experience is recovery or disorder)? What am I fighting for? To be healthy so I can work? So I can have a family one day? So I can visit my mom at Christmas?
More importantly, what am I fighting for on the days when those things lose meaning?
In summary, if you have found the meaning of life, please share it in a comment.
