mossy ways

I am starting to think too much about an audience. When I started this blog, I didn't really intend for anyone to read it, except maybe people who knew most of my goings-on anyway. But now there's at least a handful or two of folk who glance at this, and so I find myself second-guessing what I write about sometimes. Today, I was wanting to write about - guess what - body battles, and then thought, Oh no- nobody wants to read any more about that. Then I realized that I'm taking responsibility for an imaginary audience. Apologizing to my diary. That's just plain foolish.

And anyhow, you people know how to take care of yourselves and avoid boredom when you need to. This blog is about my 29-year old brain that's caked in some thick mud. Trying to scrape off some of the mud means talking a lot of touchy-feely talk about my mental illness. So please redirect yourselves at will.

I am hating this elephant-phase of my anorexia. I'm not hating my body so much as I'm hating my mind that has let it get to this place. I feel like I'm wearing an inner tube of extraneous flesh. Water wings, a marshmallow jacket. It wasn't very long ago that I was a master of emaciation, and now this extra weight feels irreversible and cruel. The irony is not lost on me that the only time I've ever felt inscrutable and safe in my body is when I was too weak to do anything with anybody, anywhere. So much for showing the world how strong and aesthete and maybe even sexy I could be. I was sexy (or at least more attractive) without these 40 or 50 pounds I'm wearing. What am I now? I can't see through this mud, though I'm scraping away at it. Scraping away. Every week with my therapist I go looking for more roots. And re-sharpen my weapons for another week of self-self-defense. Saw my therapist (I'll call her L) today. She is so good - really demands a lot of work on my part. I am supposed to challenge every thought by asking for the evidence. What's hard about this is that I feel like the evidence is right here, is all over me. I look at my body, with what I think is careful discernment, and the evidence seems very very plain. I would not show my body to anyone right now.

It wasn't a sad or dreary night. It wasn't. I finished work late and went to the beach - sat there for a long long time, til it was past dark, appreciating solitude and slow morphing colours in the sky. I'm halfway through memorizing Keats' Ode to a Nightingale. I love this poem. There is something so balming about speaking someone else's words out loud, without having to read them off a page. I can get inside them in a different way. And it tricks my brain into thinking that it's speaking its own beautiful thoughts. That it wrote the line, "that thou, light-winged dryad of the trees, in some melodious plot of beechen green and shadows numberless, singest of summer in full-throated ease."
And maybe this:
Here there is no light
save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

Anyhow, it puts me in that place where these kinds of words come from, whether they're mine or not. I love to be alone. I love a beach when people slowly trickle away, until I am the only one left, alone to begin with, and alone to end with. It feels very familiar. I adopted aloneness when I was a lonely child, and since then have most often chosen aloneness over feeling alien in a crowd. I know that I am completely well and completely myself when I am alone and feel closer and more connected to everyone/thing. If I am not so well, the echo of loneliness gets louder and louder until it's a roar that deafens me, swallows me up in a silent black room. I have to be careful that I'm not choosing aloneness as a way to hide again.

oh- gotta stop now. g'night.

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