Fetal Position

8 Dec

Fetal Position

There is a safety to curling up,

pulling into a ball so that you resemble

a rock, the immoveable things of the earth.

 

They call it the fetal position.

But is it really so vulnerable,

when you are curled into yourself

and tucked away, safe inside a mother

whose very body protects you from the world?

You are untouchable then, in a way.

With a life between you and everything else.

 

There’s a safety there,

knowing that somebody else

has wrapped you as completely as ever

a human can be, all curled up into

the shape of a rock, fetal position.

Tags: , , , , , ,

A Line of Paint

6 Dec

Because of my hesitant sort of love affair with using paint as a medium.

paint mug rings - edited

A Line of Paint

There is something

about the glide of a brush across a canvas,

the smooth glide of creation

where there was nothing before.

An indelible mark easily smudged

by the mere wipe of a rag corner

changeable, as easily a glaring retribution

as a wet, glistening line

where your mind has kissed the canvas

and run its tongue along the bare back

where possibility lay.

The sensual embodiment of a thought

in the mere stroke of a hand,

The shiver down a spine of bristles under paint –

that’s a touch that’s hard to prepare for,

that leaves you burnt and angry when you can’t do it right.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

The self is a funny thing.

2 Dec

Because I sat down to journal about one thing, and in the end found that I’d apparently needed to write about something else entirely.

Sort of.

Funny

“It’s funny, in a way. Weird. You sit down to write one thing, and suddenly your mind has something entirely else coming out your fingers. Funny, how you can have so many selves at the same time. The self your brain is spinning a tale of off the top of its tongue, the self you’re thinking right now. The self who thinks that this is what you have to say, this is what you have to write.

And then there’s the self that flies off your fingertips, once you start to let your soul do the talking.

Funny, being a self.”

Tags: , , , , ,

Cell Phone Towers

1 Dec

Just some wistful dystopian poetry for you all that popped into my head during what’s passing for my “this morning.”

cell phone tower

Cell Phone Towers

We live our lives of drinking reheated coffee while we get up too early or sleep in too late.
We are anchored to our reality by the tether of cell phone wires plugged into wall outlets,
letting us know when we are about to lose connection to the functionality we have made of ourselves,
when we will lose our place as one more cog in the great spinning wheel
we have made of this earth, one large machine run by the breath of its inhabitants.
I do not rue the network we have defined ourself as, not entirely,
for there’s something to it, being able to have at least the merest scrap of you,
in the sound of your voice while you are in China and I am in Belize,
but I wonder if perhaps there would not be so much distance,
if we’d focused more on how to climb tree branches instead of success ladders.
Maybe we wouldn’t be drinking so much reheated coffee,
and maybe my perfume would be the smell of you, instead of this odor to mask the loneliness.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Let’s Make Some Goats

1 Dec

All right. I try really hard not to throw promo stuff at you all too often. There are so many ad pop ups and commercials and “after these messages from our sponsors” in life, I really don’t feel the need and in fact cringe at the thought of adding to the splew of buy-this-you-need-it and give-money-to-insert-cause-here that’s already descended upon our society as the eleventh Great Egyptian Plague that God apparently forgot about until just recently.

But… sometimes, there are really cool things happening, and they’re worth talking about, and, well, they just inherently involve asking for money…

This is one of those times.

Let’s start by talking about some books. For those of you already familiar with Patrick Rothfuss and his book series The Kingkiller Chronicles, I’ll just leave you to go finish your fangirl squealing for a bit and explain what’s driven you all to hysteria to those poor unfortunate souls who don’t know about the Amazingness that is Rothfuss and his literary brainchild, Kvothe.

So, Rothfuss is an orgasmically well-spoken geek of a fantasy author who’s churned out two books of a three-book series, known as The Kingkiller Chronicles. The books’ve got a paradoxically mysterious yet entirely relatable main male character, subtly complex side characters, a couple or so Strong Female Characters who are also weak and smart and stubborn and loving and bullheaded and real. And he’s got a beautifully constructed fantasy world, a plot mercifully free of irrelevance and wonderfully full of hints and riddles you don’t even realize are there till long after you’ve read them. Basically, Rothfuss’s writing is what I strive toward as an author. If you want to know more, go look up his books your goddamn self.

Because our most beloved fangirls are probably done squealing now, and I haven’t even gotten to my main point.

So. Rothfuss, this spectacular human writer thing, is also apparently a spectacular human philanthropist thing. The Tinker’s Pack, Rothfuss’s writerly “gift shop” of sorts, donates proceeds to Heifer International, an impressively corruption-free charitable organization that turns money donations into animals – like goats – that by providing milk, labor, babies, and eventually meat give families sustainable solutions to hunger.

Yeah. Pretty damn awesome.

And what’s more, in an attempt to garner more traffic through the Tinker’s Pack and thus churn out more goats for starving children, Rothfuss is having a Thanksgiving sale all through this weekend, and a Worldbuilders event (Worldbuilders is Rothfuss’s name for the umbrella organization of his charitable schemes) coming up soon.

So. Yes, I am telling you to go visit the Tinker’s Pack this weekend and buy something. Yes, I am telling you to keep an eye out for the upcoming Worldbuilders event and participate in that too. But hey, by spending $30 on a cool book, or some talent pipe earrings, you get something super awesome, and somewhere a kid gets the best any-day-of-the-year-present of a livestock animal that’s gonna keep them from starving anymore.

Honestly, sounds like a win-win.

And, to incentivize you all even further, I’ll even throw in a chance to get something FREE out of all of this! FREE! Woohoo!!!

After you’ve gone and bought something from the Tinker’s Pack sale, comment below with what you got (honor code, people, no lying. let’s all be decent human beings here). You can even make a separate entry per item purchased! The give-away will run until the midnight interface between Monday December 2nd and Tuesday December 3rd Pacific Standard Time, when I’ll throw all the names into a hat (no, seriously, my boyfriend has a top hat that I’m totally stealing to do this with later) and pick out a couple. The two people chosen will receive a FREE signed copy of my memoir AND a poem I’ll write specifically in their honor. AND I’ll ship the whole shabang to the lucky winners and pay for postage and whatnot all myself.

Sounds pretty cool, hunh? Yup, I thought so. So hurry up! Get out of here! Go ravage the Tinker’s Pack! Let’s make some goats! Now Now Now!

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Thanksgiving is…

29 Nov

Thanksgiving is sitting in a dining hall full of raucous college students who’ve made too much cranberry sauce and too little stuffing, but it’s okay, because we’re really there just there for the dessert table anyway. We sit there, at tables where there is family but no tensions, where we have cooked and cleaned and tasted and refused, and somehow it’s all more grown up than what our parents and aunts and uncles are doing back at home.

There’s an odd sort of organization, to youth.

Thanksgiving is picking what I eat carefully, not dividing it into “good” and “bad” as I would have done a year ago, visiting my friends on a day off from treatment, but just being… cautious, of proportions and the decisions I am putting on my plate in front of me. Making sure it’s not too much, figuring out what I really want and how much can really all fit in my stomach. I get to the piece of pie I thought I wanted and realize that I do not, and for what seems like the first time, I realize that I do not have to eat it. There is no table of watchful eyes, scrutinizing what I eat because once it would have been a blessed miracle if I’d so much as taken a bite from that single piece of pie. Except for last year, when I would have eaten it, to make it seem like I was normal, but would have thrown it all back to the world in a toilet, saying no, I don’t want it anymore, please take my insecurity.

There will be no such trips to the bathroom tonight.

Thanksgiving is sleeping in late and laughing with the cashier at the grocery store when yells at me with that affectionate sort of belligerence to “go home!” after seeing me walk in for the second time that day. It’s a weird feeling, when you get along better with the grocery store cashier better than you do your own father. Then again, you see them about the same amount, and one of them has never been given the chance to make you feel small and valueless and wrong.

There’s a terrible irony to it, the ways in which you can be given your daily bread.

Thanksgiving is looking back a year, and feeling that one year ago must really exist in some alien land, far and distant and unfamiliar in the past. Thanksgiving is being grateful that one year ago is not now, is over and gone so that it no longer touches you even at the borders.

There may be a fair amount of denial, but the change is real, too.

And it’s nice, not having needed a holiday to realize all that.

Would you have said the same, yesterday?

Tags: , , , , , , ,

This is not different.

26 Nov

Eating disorders tell a lot of lies. There really is no area of life, whether it’s looks or self-worth or grocery shopping or fitness or school or parenting or relationships or anything else, that an eating disorder will not lie about.

Eating disorders will even lie to you in recovery.

This is because eating disorders are self-obsessed fuckers that will do anything to try to get you to take them back, to pay attention to them again. They will tell you that they’ve changed, tell you about all these new options and choices, trying to make you believe that things won’t be the same as before.

Whatever new lie an eating disorder is trying to hook you with, I promise, it is no different than before.

It’s something I’ve had to be wary of, myself, throughout recovery. I know that my eating disorder will try to come up with new images to try to get me to strive after. My ED will tell me that where I am, right now, is not good enough, that there is still something I need to do, even in recovery, to be better. Because the thing with ED’s is, as Amber of “Go Kaleo” puts perfectly, enough is never enough.

Let me be more explicit about what precisely I mean by ED’s “different” lies:

1. You don’t need to focus on losing weight, just being toner!

Aah, the “toner” lie. This is the one that ED tries to hook me with most often. “We won’t focus on cutting down calories or losing weight,” ED bubbles optimistically, “we’ll just work out more so that you’ll have more defined muscles instead!” ED goes on and on about how I won’t look lazy, with all that muscle definition. How I’ll get rid of some of that treatment pudge that comes from being forced to gain weight while not working out. (You know, so the weight can turn into fat cushioning your internal organs LIKE YOUR HEART and allow for better myelination IN YOUR FUCKING BRAIN instead of just becoming muscle that’ll further metabolize you to death.)

Uh hunh. We’ll just make my arms look toner. And then my legs, and then my butt, and my abs, and to do that we’ll just cut out a little bit of dinner here, skim off of breakfast there, just to give a little edge to the muscle cutting. And then we won’t worry about how we’re tired all the time and attached to abductor machines by the hip and have maybe dropped a few pounds since this all started…

Yeah. I see where that’s going.

2. You don’t need to overexercise, just be more regimented about your fitness plan!

“Ooh, let’s download this gym tracker app!” my ED suggests. “Then we can keep track of how much weight your lifting, and how far you’re running, and how long your aerobics circuits are going!”

Yup. And then perfectionist me will see it all before me, and decide it could be better. And so I’ll lift more weights, run farther, work out longer.

And longer and longer and longer and longer.

And I’ll have to keep track of every fucking little detail, every day, looking up ways to get better…

Mhmm. I know that neuroticism. Sure, it’s just getting transferred from calories to weight reps, from low-cal recipes to track laps, but it’s still the same. It’s still an external valuation of my self-worth.

And you know, I’m pretty sure I’m worth just a bit more than how many push ups I can do.

3. You need to eat more healthily.

Uh, wasn’t this the same crap that got me into all of this to begin with? Good foods/bad foods? Eating celery instead of pretzels, a banana instead of fried rice? Sure, maybe I had a cheese quesadilla from late-night coffee house every night this week. I’ve still eaten spinach and strawberries and some more spinach too (dear college board plan, can we change up what vegetables are both offered and edible? thanks much.)

You know what? Next week, I might have a cheese quesadilla every night too. And I’m gonna be just fine.

4. You need to shape up your body some so that you’ll be more desirable.

Anybody else getting bored with? Sounding the same yet to y’all too? I almost fell into this trap over this summer. My boyfriend was away in Japan, and my ED attempted to fill my head with visions of thinner, firmer arms and six pack-esque abs. “Ah, how you’ll turn him on,” ED whispered in my ear.

Lemme tell you about how in the end I didn’t buy into that plan. Yeah, since Japan boy’s gotten back, haven’t had any problem turning him on.

Mmmm, no problem whatsoever. 😉

5. You need to prove you’re still driven.

“Remember when you got up at 7 am every day to go to the gym? Even when you’d gone to bed only three hours before? Man, you were tough. What happened to that will power? What happened to that drive?”

Um, I think I diverted it to doing things that actually make me happy. Remember that whole thing about moderation and taking care of myself and learning that “indulgence” is not in fact a four-letter word? Remember that whole thing about life not being a contest, and “proving that I’m better” than everyone else, proving that I am “extraordinary” not actually making me any stronger or safer or happier?

Oh, apparently you forgot. Well then it’s a good thing I reminded you.

 

Fellow recoverers, eating disorders are liars. No matter how good a plan whatever new proposal they’re trying to throw at you may seem, I promise, look at it closely enough, and you will find the exact same things your eating disorder beat you down with before.

Because when it comes to being “good” for an eating disorder, there is no difference.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

I Do Not Want Excitement

25 Nov

excitement post image

I am probably not your typical twenty-something. I do not want excitement. I do not long for the rush of the big city, the adrenaline of packed boxes and a newly signed lease for a shared apartment seven cities away. I do not yearn for the clunking whir of train tracks rushing beneath me or an airplane engine revving to life under the wings. I do not seek the fast-paced, the tight-scheduled, the not-enough-time-but-hey-it-was-worth it.

No, I do not want excitement. I want to be fulfilled.

Now, I don’t mean – oh god, no way in hell do I mean the little-house-on-the-prairie kind of life. I do not want monotony. I do not want the same plodding expectable, day after day, hour after hour, minute after minute. Dear lord, I would go bat shit crazy.

I think, more correctly, perhaps, I should say that I want roots. I want ties that are stable but are not limiting, that support without restricting. You see, I’ve done the whole tear-yourself-away-from-everything-and-throw-yourself-upon-the-world thing. And it sucked.

Perhaps I was just forced upon it with the wrong footing. You see, every time I’ve been forced into an unexpected journey, a total life reorganization, it’s because I was sick. I had to pluck myself out of where I was and ship myself off to treatment, often without parental support or any idea where I was going. I just had to leave. That was all.

And then, when I returned, chose to come back to where I had left rather than stay in treatment longer because I felt that I learned what the journey had to teach me and my heart was aching for the friends I left behind, I realized, finally, that it is not a what or a where, a something doing or somewhere being that really define my happiness. Because, you see, I grow my roots in people.

And then they all graduated. Or went away, for some reason and for some time or other. My roots were torn up, leaving me gasping for air and starving for the water that had been holding me up. It’s hard to enjoy adventure, when you can feel yourself withering through the whole thing.

Excitement becomes mere pain, new becomes a strangeness that rubs and chafes the heart. Adventure is no high, wild dream but a slowly executed torture.

I do not mind exploring. I just want a home base to come back to. I want to know that there is still a place – even if that place is not so much somewhere tangible – where I can still know that I belong. I would not mind the packed boxes, the newly signed lease, the road trip, the excitement, the strangeness – as long as through it all, there’s a hand holding mine.

Because then, home becomes a place that can be carried with you.

Because then, home is the place where you are not empty, but fulfilled.

Because then, home is the place where you are not alone.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Envy

21 Nov

I am envious, sometimes – most times – of those who get recognition. Evanna Lynch, who “beat anorexia” to become Luna Lovegood. She is praised and lauded, called determined and strong.

What of all of us still out here, who know that you don’t just “beat anorexia,” that you fight every fucking day just you can hope for a life where maybe you won’t have to think about this fucking disease, day in and day out, in fear that if you ever drop your vigilance, it will get past the years and years you had covered over it, and in the end it will kill you, by making you destroy yourself. What of all of us who are still fighting, who know that your own mind is not something that can ever truly be “beaten?” What of those of us who still fight? Why for us is there no acclaim, because we did not become the lucky one, the movie star?

Or there’s the friend I drove to my tattoo parlor, helped her pay so she could get her first tattoo. One simple word, “strong,” inked over the scar where months ago she’d carved “weak.” The tattoo artists called her brave. They congratulated her on having overcome. Her struggle was obvious, and so was her cure.

They didn’t say anything, the two times I’d been there before to get my own tattoos. Just images – one to remind who is really me, one to remind me that I have flown from those chains that I once let define me.

But to everybody else, they just look like a dolphin fluke and a butterfly.

The artist who’d tattooed my arm had said nothing about my scars.

Where, then, was my recognition?

I know I should not care. But I think that’s what this has really been about, all along. The need to know that on some fundamental level, I am important. I have spent a life trying every fucking day to prove to everyone – and after that, the trickier part, to prove to myself – that I am good enough. That yes, I am strong. That yes, I am capable. That yes, I am beautiful and so because I am beautiful I can be looked at and loved, instead of ignored or cast off. I wanted to be worth noticing. I had to know that I was worth noticing. And so I tried to become extraordinary enough that people would be able to just look at me, and know I had proved it.

And then there was the pain. I was clawing for a way out of myself, out of the web of distrust and lies and abuse that I was caught in, because I had to call it my family. I talked and I talked and I talked, but no one listened. I told people I was hurting, and it changed nothing. I was not heard. I was told, actually, to shut up.

And so I shut up. But that didn’t change the fact that I still needed a way to keep screaming.

Because the pain wasn’t over yet.

And so the scars came.

“Can’t you see that’s something’s fucking wrong?” they asked.

Or – “What’s wrong with you?” they would scream, at me.

“Somebody, anybody,” they said, “can’t you see I’m hurting.”

They’re all scars, now. Old and white, some smooth and some still raised above my skin. They are ghosts, now. Sure, all ghosts show a story – but I think I’m the only one who can see it.

Can’t you see that I have hurt? Can’t you see that I have fought? Can’t you see that I have fallen apart and sewn myself back together so many times you can’t even know where the stitch marks are anymore? Can’t you see all the fucking hard work I’ve done, all the tears I’ve cried, all the sacrifices I’ve made and injustices I’ve put up with, just so that I can finally get to a place where I, at least, can look in the mirror and think that I am beautiful, and that I am important, without killing myself for that in the process?

Can’t you see any of that?

I envy those, whose struggle and triumph have donned them heroes. I envy those, who get the recognition.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Weather Haiku

19 Nov

The Weather Haiku

There’s never any
telling, if the weather will
burn inside today.

– Miceala

memories haruki

Tags: , , , , , ,

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →