2.27.10
I am about to turn out my light and go to bed in the hopes of waking up perky and early tomorrow. "Perky" is one of my mother's words and although not completely accurate as to what I want to convey it does hold the optimism I feel when I wake up without my brain feeling like a shredded tire on hot asphalt under the August sun and my sternum feeling itself being split down the middle and my innards eviscerated. This is how I've been feeling for over a week, deciding and deciding again that I can move out of my halfway house, then deciding I can't then deciding I can, and so forth. I have felt frustrated with my conversations with Dr. M as if he is not listening to me, that our conversations are an exchange of lofty ideas and oft repeated yet unfulfilled plans. Then I realized what I wanted was for him to tell me could move out and to promise it would be ok; a fantasy along the lines of him being able to fulfill my plans for me. As he said in his office over a week ago when I said, "you really mean I can move out?!", "Oh, now we are going to pretend I am the boss?" That has been the frustration with this decision/non decision, I think--I have wanted other people not only to make it for me, but to guarantee its success, whether it is to stay here or go. I've been wrestling it in a million ways, but it always comes back to it being my decision. As I've written before, I've just come to the realization that all that lies between me and ruin is the thin membrane of myself, like the diaphragm muscle causing the lungs to inflate and separating the thoracic and abdominal cavities. My life depends on me.
This knowledge, new to the marrow of my bones at age 41, reminds me of the sessions I spent in my early twenties with my relational therapist, a young but kind and intelligent woman whom I immediately looked up to as someone of authority. We sat in her office for hours as I tried to force her to say that we are all ultimately alone. She would not say it. She hedged and qualified but would not come right out and agree with me. I wish she had, because then we could have started working on things from there--from my utter loneliness and my inability to take care of myself and my sickness or even able to tell the two apart; in fact I've just stumbled across the feeling that there is actually more to me than disease since I've been writing this blog.
I don't think I was asking her to doom me to a life of existential loneliness. I think, in fact, I was asking her to help me find a way out of it by retrieving my power from the jaws of my illness. Instead we endlessly analyzed my mother's and my relationship, with my family as I had grown up. We knocked on the door of a possible PTSD disorder but never found one. We analyzed each overdose I took, each new scar on my arm from a razor I had pulled apart and assaulted myself with, each time I refused my meds or dumped them down the toilet, each self-inflicted cigarette burn. I guess I'm saying we could have helped me so much more if we had just focused on wrestling me, my very self, out from under my symptoms and behavior. But I am honest, so I'll say it; she tried her best. She tried, in the later years, to tell me I had an illness over and over again but it I could not let it sink in, as much as I wanted to. The thoughts go like this--"If I have an illness and accept it then I will feel better then I will get well and fulfill my dreams and fly away from everyone I need and I will be all alone in the world and unable to take care of myself." This is the distortion that keeps me dead in my tracks, empty, dreams unfulfilled, meaningless. I simply can't shake it. So I could not let her help me. As hard as we both tried. My drive to be better is deep and ingrained but my attempts in the face of such backwards delusions were, and often still are, made to look Herculean while all the time I keep checking to see if everyone is looking and that I am doing just what they want me to do and will guarantee me a good outcome. It's like those scars on my arms--they are faint because they were not deep cuts; they were only communications, calls out to Dr. R., Dr. H, Dr.Y, Dr. K (all my early treaters) and my parents ultimately, to hold on to me, to not let me go. I didn't really want to be fixed, if so I would be alone and helpless my mind tells me. I just wanted to be held on to. And I have been. My family has stuck with me and Dr. M has been treating me for at least twenty years, and M. for around thirteen and I'm here at this halfway house for about three. I am being held in kindness and understanding and respect and a funny thing is happening-I am learning to make decisions of my own. I am learning, right now, that I, and only I, can decide whether to live longer here in this supported living house or to go to my own apartment. And even more important it is I, and only I, I repeat, that will live the consequences of either decision, like stains on my clothes--in inescapable.
Rereading this I am recalling a pastel drawing I made of a blue heron my uncle had photographed and published in a book and given to me for Christmas. I was in my art group and I was working on this drawing. It was hard and yet what I remember was letting all the harsh, distorted, paranoid thoughts consciously drift through my brain instead of letting them lodge there. I really started to feel like I owned that drawing. Pure ownership. It felt great.
I've been saying lately that every day is a work of art, given my illness and being in remission from thyroid cancer. Ever day is a work of art. Every day is MY work of art. My blue heron.
I'm drifting a bit here into the department where the elves start wrapping things up in nice little bows. Such completions don't exist,so I will leave you with what i have written. And just to say where i stand tonight; I am in no way ready to leave my halfway house. I am only at the beginning of building a meaningful life for myself. I know part of doing so will require me to shift my values. Instead of killing myself off just to get rid of this illness and achieve some great notoriety or something, I must let who I am change in the face of something as immutable as this illness. I must rethink what is important to me, how I value myself. A degree,a career, a husband may not be the path to freedom for me. Nor might be an apartment with cool furniture an space for an office and an easel to live in alone. I've always been terrified to change but maybe jut maybe it is the way to live an easier life.
I'll leave it at that. My butt is getting sore!