I'm hungry. I don't want to eat.
This is a ridiculous dilemma. I have money. I work within blocks of lots of lovely places to eat.
But I can't get up and go find something to soothe the ache inside of me.
I know why this is. A lot of people have treated me not eating while I was upset as a separate thing, a self-contained phenomenon. It's not. It's as vitally connected to everything else that is happening inside this head as all of my other self-harming behaviors.
Actually, come to think of it, those behaviors have always been treated as self-contained things as well, as if there were no causes, no rhymes, no reasons, no sense to the rhythms of my attacks on my flesh. 'If we can get her to eat, if we can get her to take her meds, if we can pick her up and clean her off and set her upright like she should be, she'll be all right, because she'll look all right.'
But I won't be all right just because I look okay. I know what normal looks like, i can see it even from way over here. I can pretend with the best of them. I, too, have a protective coating of reassuring normality that I can pull over myself. Sometimes, I even believe my own act, the 'buck up and get it over with' attitude that I have to project.
And it seems totally bizarre from a rational viewpoint that I should use self-harming behaviors as a substitute for whatever I want that I can't have. I'm not allowed to say, "I am tired and frayed, and I need to be held." Because to say that would be an invitation to rejection, something which I've had altogether too much of lately.
So I don't eat. Unfortunately, since I'm so isolated, self-harming behavior goes unnoticed, I end up not getting whatever it is i'm actually hungry for, and it all ends with me in a pile on the floor like so much dirty laundry.
This is an incredibly fucked-up way to deal with one's life. But I knew that.
email quote for the week:
"Why is it that every single web page you make seems so elegant? I'm
frankly quite envious."
—Misha
I love you too, Misha. :)