A lot of my friends find crazy people on the street funny. Its harmless on their part and human nature, I think, for the most part. Buts its not an emotion i have ever been able to share. Crazy people make me very very sad. Because you are not born crazy. Nobody's really born crazy. You are born with the genes and more than likely in inevitable death sentence to the disease buts it pretty well hidden in most children. Its not like retardation. Which is horrible as well, but usually in that case you never knew a life without it. Your parents and your friends never knew you outside of it. Craziness is different. Imagine you have spent years of your life being 'normal'. You are probobly at most a quirky kid- weird, slightly off, not quite right but still within the confines of normalicy. And then after 18, 20, 23 years of life you begin to lose your mind. As far as i know (and i've havn't researched this or anything) most physcological diseases kick in in your early twenties. So you have spent decades of your life functioning- relatively in control of yourself, and then suddenly one day you begin to hear to voices. Can you even image what it must be like to hear voices? To honestly and totally realistically hear another person's voice in your head telling you to do things you dont like or want to do?
If you have ever sat in a car or at an office or in an interview and begged begged your mind not to take you somewhere you didnt want to go. Or lay huddled on the ground hugging your knees pleading through the tears for your mind to let you be. for the voice that tells you you are worthless and horrible and waste of space on this earth to silence- to please please just quiet. For the part of you are that itches and scratches and scrambles toward self distruction to slow. For the dispare to please please for gods sake just let up. If you have ever been there than you know how perilusly some of us grasp onto the strings of sanity. Dangling so precariously that one disaster, one strong wind, one day of forgetting how hard you must hold on- how tightly you must grasp your fingers at all times- and you can fall. and the fall is deep. the fall is far. and the journey to get back up, to get out is a hard and long one. one that some people eventually can not make. People spend years in a flux between the sanity and the insanity. Years where they go back and forth, up and down, hiding it until they cant any longer and eventually bringing those around them into the horrible amusement park that is their life. It doesnt just happen one day. You dont wake up having lost your mind. You wake up out of control of yourself today and maybe for a week. and then your ok- you break out. but there are more weeks and soon months and then at some point, for some people, if they dont or cant get help it becomes too much and they are essentially lost forever. They cannot make the climb a single time more. So for those of us that fall- but not too far and have the stength of mind to pull ourselves out each time- seeing people like that makes you want to fall on your knees and thank the universe, thank whatever being you may think is out there- thank nature itself that we can get out. that it isnt forever for us. That it is today. And today may suck. But we can get up- there's an out for us. Because there isn't for everyone.
Monday, September 29, 2008
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
3 am in the ER
Of all of the abusive things I do to myself self mutalation seems to be the hardest one for other people to understand. Sticking my fingers down my throat they follow- its not a choice they would make for themselves but they get the basic sentiment. Just about everyone in our society these days has some spoken or unspoken desire to change something about the way they look. You’ll even hear healthy women talk about eating disorders like they are a dieting option ‘oh I would give anything to be able to be anorxic for week’ is a statement I’ve heard many times. But hurting oneself is much harder for outsiders to understand. Maybe its because as humans we spend so much of our lives doing every possible thing we can to avoid pain but people just don’t get it. I don’t get it and I did it. And the fact that its socially unacceptable is only compounded by the fact that its so visable. Cuts are a difficult thing to hide. If I was in a program where they said if you throw up you will be kicked out- I would just throw up quietly and lie and say I wasn’t doing it. But scabs and scars are harder to hide. That’s why so many mutilators I know have scars on their asses and inner thighs. Places where only the most diligent guardian would take the time to check. I never hid it- that defeats the point to me. Its like getting a beautiful and personal tattoo on your back- I wanted to see the cuts. At a time in my life when everything I did was based on trying to please the people around me, I was told that one of my only coping skills made everyone sad, angry and overall very upset. So I decided to stop- before I cared about it what it was doing to my body, before I was ready, before I had found a different better way to deal with the pain- I decided just to quit cold turkey. And I did a lot of stupid, sometimes dangerous things trying to avoid the one thing they had deemed inexcusable.
I’m 16 and I’m scared and full of nervous insatable energy that I can’t make go away. And all I know is that if I cut it will make mom and dad sad and the therapists angry and everyone- everyone disappointed in me. And the therapists tell me to hold ice in my hands and snap rubber bands on my arms, clench my fists really hard. Which never works and only proves how much they don’t understand. And the energy grows and all I want to do is cut. All I want is to make it go away. And im a horrible unlovable person already and I just don’t want to make anybody hate me more. Don’t want to make anyone else sad. But the pain, the energy, are so much, so deep, so intense, and I cant make it stop. But I want to be a good girl- a good person. So im on my bedroom floor crouching on my knees, digging and ripping my nails through the carpet like a crazed, rabid animal. I’m ripping the heads off of teddy bears, pulling off the arms and legs, throwing the stuffing around the room like frienzied snowballs. I have memories of crushing up and snorting meds, cutting all of my hair off, piercing my eyebrow with a safety pin, giving myself a tattoo with a sewing needle and India ink. Im on my bike riding as far as I can go. Im throwing up more. Im running away in every way I know how except the one that actually works. Now im not saying that cutting is healthy and who knows if I would have kept at it if I would have done something stupid and irreparable by accident in the process. But I do know that trying to avoid it left me in an ER at 3 am with a nurse trying to shove a tube up my nose in the aftermath of the stupidest, most dangerous thing I have probably ever done.
It’s a summer afternoon and im alone in my house when the energy starts crawling inside of me. Im roaming the house aimlessly searching- for release, for salvation, for an answer somewhere to the questions that my mind is throwing at me. Whats wrong with you? And why can’t you just stop this? And finally and unquestionably- why not. I try to escape to my room and theres a scissor on the floor so I scramble out and down the stairs. I try to zone out into the tv and theres a bread knife staring at me from the brown matted family room rug. Its like a movie or a dream, its seratted edges taunting me. Like it was placed there. Like it’s a sign. Still to this day this memory is almost comically sad to me. Im huddled on the couch hugging my knees staring terrified at a random bread knife in the middle of the room. In my memory but not necessarily in reality the sunlight hits the metal in a single stream making the blade sparkle and glow. I literally run out of the room. Sat there shivering, huddled into myself until I was almost certain some part of me would lash out and grab the wooden handle without my permission, and then launched off the couch and hugging the wall, sprinted out of the room. Down the hall and into the kitchen. Which is not a good place if one is trying to avoid knifes. I plant myself on a stool in the middle of the room and grip onto the bottom of it. And somewhere in the fear, in the haste, in the terrifying energy, I decide that I will drown the pain. In medicine. .i don’t know what I expected it to do. Don’t know what I expected to happen. I guess I thought it would numb it- numb me. Carry me out of the dream. So I reached on top of the refridgerator pulled down bottles and started swallowing pills. A handful of this, a dozen of that. Prozac and depacote, Zoloft and paxil. Pills I was on combined with pills I had been taken off of. Medicine that had proved it didn’t work along with pills we were still waiting to see the effects of. Nothing ever seemed to work for me so I had been going from one dose to another to a whole new prescription for months. And I swallowed the remains of at least 4 different bottles. And then I thought about how the drs had told my brother not to drink on antidepressants because the pills mixed with the alcohol can get you very drunk very quickly which sounded about exactly what I wanted so I went searching for a beer. Which I found in a cooler in the backyard and drank a sip of and promptly spit in out. Which only shows how much I really hate the taste of beer. Plus just the act of swallowing 3 dozen pills had somehow calmed the feelings somewhat so I figured it would be enough. And my friend called to see if I wanted to go play tennis so I went off on my day. Oblivious.
And we played tennis for a little while but I felt weak and increasingly nautious so we stopped early. And I told her what id done and she seemed worried but no more worried than everyone seemed about me those days. And she dropped me off at home and I tried to make myself throw up but the bile was disguisting and it burned so I stopped. And the next thing I remember I’m in a car being driven to my weekly Eating Disorders meeting and I don’t say anything about it to whichever parent drove me there or anyone else in group even though my leg has started tapping feverishly and I can’t stop it. I also don’t say anything to my dad as he drives me from group to the theater where my boyfriend is in a play that night. I do tell my boyfriend but I don’t know if its before or after I lose feeling in my legs. Before or after the room starts to spin and I start to hear music that isn’t there. I don’t go into the theater- I don’t watch the show. I spend the next two hours in the back of his car watching the pattern on the back of the front passenger seat dance and animate in circus scenes. Turn into elephants and giraffes and bears in party hats balancing on balls. I hear the entirety of a sesame street album I loved as a child blaring in my ears. I pour myself out of the car and try to figure out who would be blasting children’s music so loudly in a parking lot. Somehow in the craziness I come to the understanding that it isn’t really out there and crawl back into the car. And I wait for him, understandably pissed off, to come off the stage. And he takes me home and he takes me to my room and he goes downstairs. And he tells my mom even though by then the hallucinations have stopped and I can feel my legs again. And I hear her on the phone with someone although I don’t hear what shes saying and they tell her to bring me to the ER even though its fully 8 hours since I’ve swallowed the pills. And so we’re back at the same hospital where my ED group took place 4 hours ago, back at the same hospital where I was admitted for anerxia and depression 4 months ago. And my mom is worried and my dad’s pissed off and my boyfriend’s just there with the same scared tired look he’s had for months. Its his second time in this ER in a quarter of a year. He’s visited me in this hospital and the other one more than a dozen times. Hes been the one ive called in tears, hes held me and listened and done his best to understand when and why his girlfriend morphed into someone else before his eyes. Hes tired. And my dad who normally tries to understand- who has dealt with his own demons and by all accounts should understand has hit the breaking point from sad and worried to just plain angry. Well probably worried and angry but the anger is what I see. He sits in the waiting room not talking and stewing. He later tells me he was so angry because I sat in a car with him for 40 mins and didn’t tell him. Because I could have died- could have killed myself and I didn’t say a word. I can never explain how that thought never crossed my mind. That there was a consequence of my actions longer lasting than the immediate never entered into my thoughts. Still now it doesn’t quite sink in. when heath ledger died a few months ago and his family all stood by and said that he would never kill himself on purpose it hit me a little (don’t ask why heath ledger as opposed to any of the other celebrity or non-celebrity drug deaths made this sink in. I have no clue) People die without meaning to from doing the very same thing I did at 16 just with a different combination or number of pills. People die. But for me as a teenager I was just running. I was just avoiding what they told me not to do. I was being a good girl. But in that ER nobody saw that.
I don’t remember much aside from the anger and the humiliation and the thought that everyone was making way way too big a deal of this. Its over already. Its all gone. I can feel my legs. I can even control my legs. There is no more Jim Henson- no juggling bears in tutus. Can’t we just go home now? And the silence of my dad’s anger is defeaning. And my boyfriend leaves because its late now- I don’t know how late but its late. And my mom is an angel. My mother has handled everything to that point and even to this point with a grace and sanity I can only hope to find in myself one day. My mother is not blameless in my disease- no one is blamed more than me but no one escapes totally unscathed. But there is no one I would rather have on my team in times of crisis than my mother. She is a woman- she is a human, and as such I have seen her break and cry plenty of times but when she needs to get through something or needs to get you through something- my mother somehow has the strength to turn it off. Do what needs to be done. Get through it. You can lay down your head and cry when its over. And she does, and she did many times back then, I know. But through a crisis, when there is a task at hand- the woman is amazing. And the most amazing part is that she does it with sympathy and caring- she has the incredible ability to turn off part of her emotions while still keeping others in tact. Turn off the part that affects her and concentrate only on the wellbeing of those around her. She held my hand symbolically through much of this just as she physically held my hand that night. Held the plastic blue bean shaped tray that they gave me to vomit into, held my head up and my hair back. All the while I kept instisting I was ok- why can’t we go home now?
We can’t go home because one of the medicines, Depakote, a medicine I actually was on at the time fucks with your white blood cell count. So much so that while on the correct dosage prescribed to me I had to go get my blood checked every other week. And I took at least two weeks worth. At once. So no. I couldn’t just go home. They had to take my blood. And wait for it to come back. And while I was waiting- just to pass the time- I got to drink a cup of charcoal. I personally think this was more to teach me a lesson than for any actually health benefit, but then again we have already established that I don’t actually grasp the complications of what I did. If you’ve never seen a cup of charcoal imagine think black paint mixed with handfuls of sand and you’ll get the idea. We are not talking a small cup, a measuring cup, no we are talking somewhere close to 12, 16 ozs. Keep in mind we are talking about a girl whose stomache has shrunken from close to a year of anorexia- a girl who would probably have a hard time keeping down a 16 oz milkshake or smoothie. Or anything else actually appetizing. They give me the glass of thick black liquid and when I say I won’t be able to keep it down they gave me the aforementioned plastic blue tray. My mother tries to coach me on different ways to get it down. I try to shoot it, I try a straw, I try to chug it. Your body does not want to drink 12-16 ozs of think black sandy goop. It revolts. I can barely even get any of it past my tongue and into my throat. I gear up, suck down a little and inevitably 3/4 of it comes up into my mother’s tray. The nurses have no sympathy. My father has no sympathy. The nurse keeps coming in to check on me and threaten that if I didn’t finish it she will have to stick a tube down my nose to pour it down. After a couple times of hearing her somewhat empty sounding threat I finally say ‘do it. I’ve had 3 sinus surgeries. I can handle shit being stuck up my nose. I prefer you stick a fucking tube down my throat than to have to drink this shit’ I most likely claimed it was actually impossible for me to just drink the liquid. This is when my father left. He was angry and he was fed up and he thought I was being a baby about it all. At least that’s what I thought at the time. I don’t know what I think now. I guess I still think that. So when the nurse comes back it’s just me and my mom. And my mom holds my hand while the unsympathetic nurse attempts to shove a tube up my nose. I say attempts because she didn’t actually do it- well she succeeded after a decent amount of force on her part and decent amount of pain on my part to get the tube up my nose- and even part of the way down my throat before she gave up. Just said she couldn’t do it and I would have to finish the black drink manually. I believe I was rather pissed off myself by this point and I said something- probably not calmly or quietly- about how if this when 3 months ago and I was still on the eating disorders floor she would have figured out some fucking way to get a tube down my throat if need be. My cursing and my irrateness doesn’t help garner her sympathy and she quickly yanks the tube out and leaves. And through the crying and the vomiting and the blood dripping out of my nose I keep telling my mom I can’t do it and she just keeps rubbing my back, petting my hair, and saying yes you can. In that soothing yet authoritative voice usually reserved for a 5 year old trying to read their first big kid book. I didn’t finish it all. They came back and said the tests were fine before I could muster the strength of character or stomach muscles. Whichever was needed. Sometime before dawn a woman from 5 west comes to talk to me. 5 west was the physciatric ward. I knew that because when I was on 3 east (eating disorders) there would be hushed rumors about people coming down from 5 west. Like we with our patients starving themselves into comas and throwing up into drawers so noone would see, were the sanest of the sane and 5 west were the crazies. I did not want to go to 5 west. I tell the woman this- probably in not very nice terms. She informs me that if we were in the state of ny this would be taken as a suicide attempt and I would have to be admitted, by law, whether I wanted to be or not. To which I respond something snotty about how I'm lucky that we aren’t in new york then, huh?. In the end I convince her that I wasn’t trying to kill myself and after a bunch more buracracy that I only remember as lots and lots of offices I am allowed to go. And in the growing morning light, close to 20 hours after I had sat alone in my parent's kitchen with a carcophony of pills, my mother drives me home.
I’m 16 and I’m scared and full of nervous insatable energy that I can’t make go away. And all I know is that if I cut it will make mom and dad sad and the therapists angry and everyone- everyone disappointed in me. And the therapists tell me to hold ice in my hands and snap rubber bands on my arms, clench my fists really hard. Which never works and only proves how much they don’t understand. And the energy grows and all I want to do is cut. All I want is to make it go away. And im a horrible unlovable person already and I just don’t want to make anybody hate me more. Don’t want to make anyone else sad. But the pain, the energy, are so much, so deep, so intense, and I cant make it stop. But I want to be a good girl- a good person. So im on my bedroom floor crouching on my knees, digging and ripping my nails through the carpet like a crazed, rabid animal. I’m ripping the heads off of teddy bears, pulling off the arms and legs, throwing the stuffing around the room like frienzied snowballs. I have memories of crushing up and snorting meds, cutting all of my hair off, piercing my eyebrow with a safety pin, giving myself a tattoo with a sewing needle and India ink. Im on my bike riding as far as I can go. Im throwing up more. Im running away in every way I know how except the one that actually works. Now im not saying that cutting is healthy and who knows if I would have kept at it if I would have done something stupid and irreparable by accident in the process. But I do know that trying to avoid it left me in an ER at 3 am with a nurse trying to shove a tube up my nose in the aftermath of the stupidest, most dangerous thing I have probably ever done.
It’s a summer afternoon and im alone in my house when the energy starts crawling inside of me. Im roaming the house aimlessly searching- for release, for salvation, for an answer somewhere to the questions that my mind is throwing at me. Whats wrong with you? And why can’t you just stop this? And finally and unquestionably- why not. I try to escape to my room and theres a scissor on the floor so I scramble out and down the stairs. I try to zone out into the tv and theres a bread knife staring at me from the brown matted family room rug. Its like a movie or a dream, its seratted edges taunting me. Like it was placed there. Like it’s a sign. Still to this day this memory is almost comically sad to me. Im huddled on the couch hugging my knees staring terrified at a random bread knife in the middle of the room. In my memory but not necessarily in reality the sunlight hits the metal in a single stream making the blade sparkle and glow. I literally run out of the room. Sat there shivering, huddled into myself until I was almost certain some part of me would lash out and grab the wooden handle without my permission, and then launched off the couch and hugging the wall, sprinted out of the room. Down the hall and into the kitchen. Which is not a good place if one is trying to avoid knifes. I plant myself on a stool in the middle of the room and grip onto the bottom of it. And somewhere in the fear, in the haste, in the terrifying energy, I decide that I will drown the pain. In medicine. .i don’t know what I expected it to do. Don’t know what I expected to happen. I guess I thought it would numb it- numb me. Carry me out of the dream. So I reached on top of the refridgerator pulled down bottles and started swallowing pills. A handful of this, a dozen of that. Prozac and depacote, Zoloft and paxil. Pills I was on combined with pills I had been taken off of. Medicine that had proved it didn’t work along with pills we were still waiting to see the effects of. Nothing ever seemed to work for me so I had been going from one dose to another to a whole new prescription for months. And I swallowed the remains of at least 4 different bottles. And then I thought about how the drs had told my brother not to drink on antidepressants because the pills mixed with the alcohol can get you very drunk very quickly which sounded about exactly what I wanted so I went searching for a beer. Which I found in a cooler in the backyard and drank a sip of and promptly spit in out. Which only shows how much I really hate the taste of beer. Plus just the act of swallowing 3 dozen pills had somehow calmed the feelings somewhat so I figured it would be enough. And my friend called to see if I wanted to go play tennis so I went off on my day. Oblivious.
And we played tennis for a little while but I felt weak and increasingly nautious so we stopped early. And I told her what id done and she seemed worried but no more worried than everyone seemed about me those days. And she dropped me off at home and I tried to make myself throw up but the bile was disguisting and it burned so I stopped. And the next thing I remember I’m in a car being driven to my weekly Eating Disorders meeting and I don’t say anything about it to whichever parent drove me there or anyone else in group even though my leg has started tapping feverishly and I can’t stop it. I also don’t say anything to my dad as he drives me from group to the theater where my boyfriend is in a play that night. I do tell my boyfriend but I don’t know if its before or after I lose feeling in my legs. Before or after the room starts to spin and I start to hear music that isn’t there. I don’t go into the theater- I don’t watch the show. I spend the next two hours in the back of his car watching the pattern on the back of the front passenger seat dance and animate in circus scenes. Turn into elephants and giraffes and bears in party hats balancing on balls. I hear the entirety of a sesame street album I loved as a child blaring in my ears. I pour myself out of the car and try to figure out who would be blasting children’s music so loudly in a parking lot. Somehow in the craziness I come to the understanding that it isn’t really out there and crawl back into the car. And I wait for him, understandably pissed off, to come off the stage. And he takes me home and he takes me to my room and he goes downstairs. And he tells my mom even though by then the hallucinations have stopped and I can feel my legs again. And I hear her on the phone with someone although I don’t hear what shes saying and they tell her to bring me to the ER even though its fully 8 hours since I’ve swallowed the pills. And so we’re back at the same hospital where my ED group took place 4 hours ago, back at the same hospital where I was admitted for anerxia and depression 4 months ago. And my mom is worried and my dad’s pissed off and my boyfriend’s just there with the same scared tired look he’s had for months. Its his second time in this ER in a quarter of a year. He’s visited me in this hospital and the other one more than a dozen times. Hes been the one ive called in tears, hes held me and listened and done his best to understand when and why his girlfriend morphed into someone else before his eyes. Hes tired. And my dad who normally tries to understand- who has dealt with his own demons and by all accounts should understand has hit the breaking point from sad and worried to just plain angry. Well probably worried and angry but the anger is what I see. He sits in the waiting room not talking and stewing. He later tells me he was so angry because I sat in a car with him for 40 mins and didn’t tell him. Because I could have died- could have killed myself and I didn’t say a word. I can never explain how that thought never crossed my mind. That there was a consequence of my actions longer lasting than the immediate never entered into my thoughts. Still now it doesn’t quite sink in. when heath ledger died a few months ago and his family all stood by and said that he would never kill himself on purpose it hit me a little (don’t ask why heath ledger as opposed to any of the other celebrity or non-celebrity drug deaths made this sink in. I have no clue) People die without meaning to from doing the very same thing I did at 16 just with a different combination or number of pills. People die. But for me as a teenager I was just running. I was just avoiding what they told me not to do. I was being a good girl. But in that ER nobody saw that.
I don’t remember much aside from the anger and the humiliation and the thought that everyone was making way way too big a deal of this. Its over already. Its all gone. I can feel my legs. I can even control my legs. There is no more Jim Henson- no juggling bears in tutus. Can’t we just go home now? And the silence of my dad’s anger is defeaning. And my boyfriend leaves because its late now- I don’t know how late but its late. And my mom is an angel. My mother has handled everything to that point and even to this point with a grace and sanity I can only hope to find in myself one day. My mother is not blameless in my disease- no one is blamed more than me but no one escapes totally unscathed. But there is no one I would rather have on my team in times of crisis than my mother. She is a woman- she is a human, and as such I have seen her break and cry plenty of times but when she needs to get through something or needs to get you through something- my mother somehow has the strength to turn it off. Do what needs to be done. Get through it. You can lay down your head and cry when its over. And she does, and she did many times back then, I know. But through a crisis, when there is a task at hand- the woman is amazing. And the most amazing part is that she does it with sympathy and caring- she has the incredible ability to turn off part of her emotions while still keeping others in tact. Turn off the part that affects her and concentrate only on the wellbeing of those around her. She held my hand symbolically through much of this just as she physically held my hand that night. Held the plastic blue bean shaped tray that they gave me to vomit into, held my head up and my hair back. All the while I kept instisting I was ok- why can’t we go home now?
We can’t go home because one of the medicines, Depakote, a medicine I actually was on at the time fucks with your white blood cell count. So much so that while on the correct dosage prescribed to me I had to go get my blood checked every other week. And I took at least two weeks worth. At once. So no. I couldn’t just go home. They had to take my blood. And wait for it to come back. And while I was waiting- just to pass the time- I got to drink a cup of charcoal. I personally think this was more to teach me a lesson than for any actually health benefit, but then again we have already established that I don’t actually grasp the complications of what I did. If you’ve never seen a cup of charcoal imagine think black paint mixed with handfuls of sand and you’ll get the idea. We are not talking a small cup, a measuring cup, no we are talking somewhere close to 12, 16 ozs. Keep in mind we are talking about a girl whose stomache has shrunken from close to a year of anorexia- a girl who would probably have a hard time keeping down a 16 oz milkshake or smoothie. Or anything else actually appetizing. They give me the glass of thick black liquid and when I say I won’t be able to keep it down they gave me the aforementioned plastic blue tray. My mother tries to coach me on different ways to get it down. I try to shoot it, I try a straw, I try to chug it. Your body does not want to drink 12-16 ozs of think black sandy goop. It revolts. I can barely even get any of it past my tongue and into my throat. I gear up, suck down a little and inevitably 3/4 of it comes up into my mother’s tray. The nurses have no sympathy. My father has no sympathy. The nurse keeps coming in to check on me and threaten that if I didn’t finish it she will have to stick a tube down my nose to pour it down. After a couple times of hearing her somewhat empty sounding threat I finally say ‘do it. I’ve had 3 sinus surgeries. I can handle shit being stuck up my nose. I prefer you stick a fucking tube down my throat than to have to drink this shit’ I most likely claimed it was actually impossible for me to just drink the liquid. This is when my father left. He was angry and he was fed up and he thought I was being a baby about it all. At least that’s what I thought at the time. I don’t know what I think now. I guess I still think that. So when the nurse comes back it’s just me and my mom. And my mom holds my hand while the unsympathetic nurse attempts to shove a tube up my nose. I say attempts because she didn’t actually do it- well she succeeded after a decent amount of force on her part and decent amount of pain on my part to get the tube up my nose- and even part of the way down my throat before she gave up. Just said she couldn’t do it and I would have to finish the black drink manually. I believe I was rather pissed off myself by this point and I said something- probably not calmly or quietly- about how if this when 3 months ago and I was still on the eating disorders floor she would have figured out some fucking way to get a tube down my throat if need be. My cursing and my irrateness doesn’t help garner her sympathy and she quickly yanks the tube out and leaves. And through the crying and the vomiting and the blood dripping out of my nose I keep telling my mom I can’t do it and she just keeps rubbing my back, petting my hair, and saying yes you can. In that soothing yet authoritative voice usually reserved for a 5 year old trying to read their first big kid book. I didn’t finish it all. They came back and said the tests were fine before I could muster the strength of character or stomach muscles. Whichever was needed. Sometime before dawn a woman from 5 west comes to talk to me. 5 west was the physciatric ward. I knew that because when I was on 3 east (eating disorders) there would be hushed rumors about people coming down from 5 west. Like we with our patients starving themselves into comas and throwing up into drawers so noone would see, were the sanest of the sane and 5 west were the crazies. I did not want to go to 5 west. I tell the woman this- probably in not very nice terms. She informs me that if we were in the state of ny this would be taken as a suicide attempt and I would have to be admitted, by law, whether I wanted to be or not. To which I respond something snotty about how I'm lucky that we aren’t in new york then, huh?. In the end I convince her that I wasn’t trying to kill myself and after a bunch more buracracy that I only remember as lots and lots of offices I am allowed to go. And in the growing morning light, close to 20 hours after I had sat alone in my parent's kitchen with a carcophony of pills, my mother drives me home.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Please just get me to the car
its always like this.
Im moving through life. Im doing fine. Probably not amazing I’m probably not beaming, not dancing on air.
But im standing
im moving.
and then im huddled on the floor of my mind. Suddenly the world is spinning around me and all im thinking is get a grip. Hold it together. please don’t cry.
Not here.
Not now.
Not in this grocery store, not at this party, not during this interview. Please just get me back to the car, back to the house, just hold on until I can sit down.
Alone.
Away.
Safe.
It is always sudden. And you would think by now it wouldn’t be – id hear its footsteps, feel its presence, before. Before it took over. But no. it takes me by surprise every single time. There are triggers. I know there are triggers and I know the names and faces of many of them. But they change so often and so quickly that its hard to keep a complete catalog of them. And they aren’t always triggers. Some days I honestly can eat like a normal person. Relatively speaking.
I don’t eat like a normal person. Ever. I am aware of that.
But some days I am better. and im given to believe that those somedays always possess the possibility of becoming everydays. So if I can sanely eat a piece of chocolate a day for 5 days in a row I suddenly believe that this is how it will be. That I am ok with chocolate. We’ve become friends. we’ve made our peace. And then on day 6 I eat the rest of the bag in 10 mins and end up on a bathroom floor crying. And in a pool of tears and rage and hatred for being so nieve, I berate myself for falling once again into foods trap.
Food and I are not friends- we will never be friends. Especially not a food such as chocalote. Or bread, or ice cream. And obviously if you’ve a problem with bulimia perhaps it is a good idea to stay away from chocolate, or bread, or ice cream.
And I do.
Most of the time. Or least most of the time that I can feel the restless energy burning inside of me. I can tell a lot of the time when im ok and when im not- ive learned through the years how to tell whats bubbling beneath the surface. I generally know safe and unsafe foods. And there are times when they stay within their determined catagories and I stay within mine. Safe/ unsafe. Sane/ insane. And when everybody is categorized and contained me and food can function somewhat well. As long as I stay in the sane colomn and only eat from the safe column we’re all ok. But even if I start on sane one taste of unsafe can thrown me across the room. Some days it isn’t that way. Some days I am so locked into the sane category I can eat a piece of chocolate and not be knocked around. Some times even for 5 days in a row. But if on day six I wake up with even one unnoticed toe curiously pointing over the line, testing, tasting- then the first bite will send me over the edge.
So maybe- maybe I just shouldn’t eat from the unsafe side? Even if I could get over the bleak forcast for a lifetime of meals lacking all dairy, wheat, fat, and sugar it still wouldn’t work.
Because they switch sides too.
Things that are safe one day are precariously dangerous the next. Today it was popcorn. 98% fat free popcorn. Popcorn and I are normally ok. But today as I stood and stared at the ile my mind got caught in the mosaic of boxes. it sent out a warning. I thought nah its just my old friend popcorn. But as I put it in the cart my chest seised. The world got wobbly.
Suddenly.
Always suddenly.
I could feel the tears welling up- the familiar internal voice‘’just hold it together’.
I couldn’t take it out, I couldn’t put it back. I don’t know if its because im stubborn or because I have immense authority issues even when the authority is myself, but sometimes, a lot of times in this situation I cant back down. Cant put the raisin bran, the dried pineapple, the 98% fat free popcorn back. Because its not fair, its not right, because damn it it was in the safe category yesterday. Yesterday I could have eaten the popcorn and been fine. (well relatively) yesterday I would not be almost crying in the grocery store. So why are you fucking with me today?!
Yesterday I chewed gum and held back tears while everyone ate cake around me. Cake that smelled fucking delicious by the way. So haven’t I earned this? I held it together in a situation that made sense. I understood yesterday and I made a choice and I stood up like a big girl and chose to do what should have made me healthier. More mentally stable. And now? Now im standing in a grocery store with the walls spinning around. Im picturing myself giving up huddling in the grocery cart. Im trying not to cry. Really? Fucking really? This is what I get? This is what I get even when I exert all of the self control in the world? This is what I get 12 hours later?! I get berated and I get abused and…fucking traitors.
The popcorn.
My mind.
I thought I was ok today. But this? Come on really? And mike’s asking if im ok and im standing in line burrowing my face into his shoulder. And hes paying for the popcorn and the diet soda and his dinner. And we’re walking out the door and my legs don’t want to hold me up. Don’t want to move anymore. im picturing myself huddled in the cart with him pushing me through the parking lot. And I’m mentally taking to myself in an all too familiar voice- Please don’t cry, hold it together. Please, just get me to the car.
Im moving through life. Im doing fine. Probably not amazing I’m probably not beaming, not dancing on air.
But im standing
im moving.
and then im huddled on the floor of my mind. Suddenly the world is spinning around me and all im thinking is get a grip. Hold it together. please don’t cry.
Not here.
Not now.
Not in this grocery store, not at this party, not during this interview. Please just get me back to the car, back to the house, just hold on until I can sit down.
Alone.
Away.
Safe.
It is always sudden. And you would think by now it wouldn’t be – id hear its footsteps, feel its presence, before. Before it took over. But no. it takes me by surprise every single time. There are triggers. I know there are triggers and I know the names and faces of many of them. But they change so often and so quickly that its hard to keep a complete catalog of them. And they aren’t always triggers. Some days I honestly can eat like a normal person. Relatively speaking.
I don’t eat like a normal person. Ever. I am aware of that.
But some days I am better. and im given to believe that those somedays always possess the possibility of becoming everydays. So if I can sanely eat a piece of chocolate a day for 5 days in a row I suddenly believe that this is how it will be. That I am ok with chocolate. We’ve become friends. we’ve made our peace. And then on day 6 I eat the rest of the bag in 10 mins and end up on a bathroom floor crying. And in a pool of tears and rage and hatred for being so nieve, I berate myself for falling once again into foods trap.
Food and I are not friends- we will never be friends. Especially not a food such as chocalote. Or bread, or ice cream. And obviously if you’ve a problem with bulimia perhaps it is a good idea to stay away from chocolate, or bread, or ice cream.
And I do.
Most of the time. Or least most of the time that I can feel the restless energy burning inside of me. I can tell a lot of the time when im ok and when im not- ive learned through the years how to tell whats bubbling beneath the surface. I generally know safe and unsafe foods. And there are times when they stay within their determined catagories and I stay within mine. Safe/ unsafe. Sane/ insane. And when everybody is categorized and contained me and food can function somewhat well. As long as I stay in the sane colomn and only eat from the safe column we’re all ok. But even if I start on sane one taste of unsafe can thrown me across the room. Some days it isn’t that way. Some days I am so locked into the sane category I can eat a piece of chocolate and not be knocked around. Some times even for 5 days in a row. But if on day six I wake up with even one unnoticed toe curiously pointing over the line, testing, tasting- then the first bite will send me over the edge.
So maybe- maybe I just shouldn’t eat from the unsafe side? Even if I could get over the bleak forcast for a lifetime of meals lacking all dairy, wheat, fat, and sugar it still wouldn’t work.
Because they switch sides too.
Things that are safe one day are precariously dangerous the next. Today it was popcorn. 98% fat free popcorn. Popcorn and I are normally ok. But today as I stood and stared at the ile my mind got caught in the mosaic of boxes. it sent out a warning. I thought nah its just my old friend popcorn. But as I put it in the cart my chest seised. The world got wobbly.
Suddenly.
Always suddenly.
I could feel the tears welling up- the familiar internal voice‘’just hold it together’.
I couldn’t take it out, I couldn’t put it back. I don’t know if its because im stubborn or because I have immense authority issues even when the authority is myself, but sometimes, a lot of times in this situation I cant back down. Cant put the raisin bran, the dried pineapple, the 98% fat free popcorn back. Because its not fair, its not right, because damn it it was in the safe category yesterday. Yesterday I could have eaten the popcorn and been fine. (well relatively) yesterday I would not be almost crying in the grocery store. So why are you fucking with me today?!
Yesterday I chewed gum and held back tears while everyone ate cake around me. Cake that smelled fucking delicious by the way. So haven’t I earned this? I held it together in a situation that made sense. I understood yesterday and I made a choice and I stood up like a big girl and chose to do what should have made me healthier. More mentally stable. And now? Now im standing in a grocery store with the walls spinning around. Im picturing myself giving up huddling in the grocery cart. Im trying not to cry. Really? Fucking really? This is what I get? This is what I get even when I exert all of the self control in the world? This is what I get 12 hours later?! I get berated and I get abused and…fucking traitors.
The popcorn.
My mind.
I thought I was ok today. But this? Come on really? And mike’s asking if im ok and im standing in line burrowing my face into his shoulder. And hes paying for the popcorn and the diet soda and his dinner. And we’re walking out the door and my legs don’t want to hold me up. Don’t want to move anymore. im picturing myself huddled in the cart with him pushing me through the parking lot. And I’m mentally taking to myself in an all too familiar voice- Please don’t cry, hold it together. Please, just get me to the car.
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