of dreams

It's been five mornings in a row that I've woken from nightmares.

My father murders someone that I love. This boy leaves me a voicemail as he dies, telling me of my father's betrayal. I sit terrified in my room, waiting for my father to come home. I'm trying to dial 911 with shaking fingers, but I keep getting the numbers wrong. 

My mother dies. I am sweeping the floor when I suddenly realize that she is gone. I will never see her again. All the words unsaid pile on top of each other until I break from the weight of them. I hide myself in her closet, sobbing as I run my fingers across her dresses. 

I am running up and down endless hills that are crawling with bears and mountain lions. I just have to get to the top of the hill. If I can get to the very top, I'll be safe. But with each peak, there is another valley, and I am gasping for breath.

The Mr. dies. Years after his death, I attempt to go on a date. That's when I realize that no one will ever know me like he did. I sit at a table across from a very nice, attractive man and realize that I have no idea how to talk to him. What do I say? Do I tell him the truth about me? Do I hide it? He won't know how to read my expressions. He can't gauge my emotion with a single glance. He doesn't understand the tangled mess that I carry with me everywhere. I break down in sobs before our food even comes and flee the restaurant.

These are just pieces. Vivid, broken fragments of dream that I remember. I've woken crying. I've woken in a terrified jolt. I've woken crippled by anxious dread. 

Sleep used to be an escape.

....

New Year's Eve is approaching. 

Facebook gathers your most popular posts and photos and compiles them into something called your year in review. 

Mine is full of silly posts and pictures. There is my new job. The return of one of my best friends from overseas. A vacation with some of my favorite people. Then right in the middle there is this post:

"Home is such a beautiful place to be."

I wrote that after spending 8 days in a psychiatric ward, but only a handful of people knew what I meant.

The rest continues in the same manner. Silly posts and pictures. There is no trace of the suicidal, depressed girl who one day sliced up her arms and legs with scissors.

It's difficult for me to look at it. My year in review is just sugary sweet frosting hiding the truth.

I turned twenty-six on the fifth of January. After my party, I sat on the kitchen floor in the dark and sobbed because I just wanted to die.

My weight dropped and dropped. I lost 40 lbs, but it was never enough. It is never enough. I cried every day on the way home from work. I thought about driving off bridges. I thought about stepping in front of semis. I thought about taking all the pills in the house. I thought about cutting my wrists.

I started getting drunk almost every night so I wouldn't think about food.

My smile started cracking. It took all of my energy to go to my new job every day and pretend I was fine.

And then the day came when I couldn't do it anymore.

So I spent 8 days in a locked ward on the 8th floor of a hospital.

Life could never be the same again. 

There are good things. There are wonderful things. The Mr.'s unwavering love. My friends' constant support. 

But there are hard things. Appointments. Meal plans. Diagnoses. More appointments. Meds. Med changes. Med side effects. Talking, talking, talking. 

Pity.

I want to pick and choose the things I can change. I want to feel in control of my own life. I am fighting, but sometimes I'm not sure which side I'm fighting on. 

Every day, I hear her. Just a little bit more. Just a little bit more...

I have no idea what 2014 will bring. In many ways, I am just as terrified as my twenty-six year old self. But I have something I didn't have before, something new.

Hope.

and a very happy christmas to you

It is Christmas Eve, and I wake up in a cold sweat.

My mother died. She was dead. She died in my dream, and I was sad.

I am alone in our bed. The Mr. is at work until noon. I sit up and try to orient myself. It is Christmas Eve. The Mr. is at work. My mother is not dead.

I am groggy as I stumble down the stairs and into the shower. Under the hot water, I stare numbly at the tile for too long, and when I finally get out and look at a clock, I swear. I don't have time to find my heaviest outfit. I'm already running late.

It's Christmas Eve and Christmas music is playing cheerily on the radio in my car as I drive. I pull into the coffee shop drive through and order a soy latte, two splendas. Then I cross the road and park.

The office building is deserted, but Christmas lights twinkle behind closed blinds. I push the elevator button because no one is around to see me, and I don't mind waiting. I hear the gears rumbling around for what seems like ages before the doors finally open. A rail thin teenage boy emerges and pushes abruptly past me. He doesn't look back.

The back wall of the elevator is one giant mirror. As usual, I scrutinize my legs and wonder why on earth a treatment center for eating disorders would have such a mirror in the elevator.

The waiting room is full of various couches surrounding coffee tables covered in puzzle pieces. I sit down at the Van Gogh puzzle and try to find a missing piece of yellow sky. I try a hundred pieces, but I can't find the right one. I can't stop thinking about how my dream self fell apart when my mother died.

My dietitian calls me in, and I try not to look guilty. It's been, what? Three weeks?

"How are you?" She says.

"Great!" I say with fake cheerfulness.

"I talked to Molly. I hear you tried pasta?"

I have a second of panic. Did Molly tell her that I ate pasta so she wouldn't know how much I really weighed? Did I tell Molly that? I can't remember. My mind is foggy with lingering grief from a dream.

"Oh yeah..." I manage lamely.

"And how was that? How did you feel about it?"

I resist the urge to roll my eyes.

It's Christmas Eve, and I sit in my dietitian's office and talk about how I felt eating pasta. Then I have to talk about how I felt about eating pizza last night. She asks how many pieces I ate.

"One." I say.

I ate four.

"They were square cut." I add quickly. I'm not sure if I'm trying to justify my decisions to her or myself.

She nods and scribbles on her notepad, and I think for the millionth time that this is ridiculous.

She asks if I ate anything else afterwards.

"No." I say.

I ate candy afterwards.

I don't know why I'm lying.

Yes I do. It's shame.

She takes my weight. I step off the scale and put my boots back in, watching as she silently writes the numbers down where I can't see.

"What was my weight?" I finally ask, irritated.

She hesitates, her disapproval obvious. "107. So it's down."

I try to look repentant, but I walk out smiling.

...

It's Christmas Day, and I wake up in the early hours of the morning. I haven't been this excited about Christmas in a very long time. I lay awake, giddy, until I finally wake the Mr. up at a semi-reasonable time. We spend the morning opening gifts, drinking coffee, and eating the cinnamon roll pancakes I made. I told the dietitian I'd only eat one.

I eat two.

We Skype with my family to open our gifts from them. My mother bought me a navy blue peacoat I wanted. I put it on, and it fits perfectly. I model it for them, and I am pleased at how thin I look. I hope my mother notices. I hope she sees.

The Mr. and I brave the snowy outside world to go for a walk. Everything is quiet. The kind of muffled, subdued quiet that snow brings. The only noise is the monotonous scraping of a neighbor shoveling his sidewalk. We are quiet too, both lost in our thoughts of home. I know he's homesick before he says it. He misses his family every day, but holidays are the hardest. I miss them too, but they live fifteen minutes from my family. And my sanity is already fragile.

By the time we get back, my cheeks are burning with cold and my legs are numb, but I feel good. I feel alive. I feel free to eat Christmas candy, and so I do.

For dinner we have an assortment of fancy cheese and wine. It is two glasses of wine later that I end up sitting completely clothed in the dry bathtub and crying.

The Mr. finds me and simply climbs right in next to me. There is a myriad of explanations I could give. I ate so much food today. I miss being with his family. I hate myself because I'm so horribly fat. I dreamed that my mother died, and I was sobbing...

Instead I tell him that I looked up information on adopting a child and how I found out that they check your mental health records. 

Which makes perfect sense. They don't want mentally unstable people adopting a child. 

Mentally unstable people like me.

So I sit in the bathtub and cry because I can't adopt a little girl from Thailand and save her from being sold into prostitution and I probably wouldn't be a good mother anyways because I'd probably turn into my mother and I'm getting old and I don't want to be an old mother and I keep finding myself picturing a baby with the Mr.'s blue eyes and curly hair and I'm afraid I'll never get to meet that baby...

The Mr. just rubs my back and calmly says all the right things. This is not the first time I've had a breakdown in the bathtub, and we both know it probably won't be the last.

...

It's just past midnight. Christmas is officially over, but I am still awake. There were too many words in my head for sleep. 

There are five days left in 2013. I have eleven days left to be twenty-six. 

I started this blog in January of this year, and it became a chronicle of my spiral down, down, down. I'm not sure if I've hit rock bottom or if I have further to fall. Am I moving upwards or downwards still? I don't know. 

All I know is that I can not wait to leave this year behind.

So Merry Christmas one hour too late, and thank you. Some of you know me and most of you don't. But all of you have helped me struggle through the worst year of my life. And I could never thank you enough for that. 

It's the day after Christmas, and I am still alive. 

sugar cookies

It started with sugar cookies.

Some of my happiest memories are of baking sugar cookies. We always made a huge batch right before Christmas. Our entire table would be covered in flour and cookie cutters and a million different sprinkles and bowls of different colored frosting. All four of us kids would be sitting at the table, sticky with frosting and giggling. I didn't even like sugar cookies, but I loved making them because it made my mother so happy. I loved watching her decorate the cookies. Her thin hands moved so carefully, so confidently. She would smile as she piped frosting in her beautiful calligraphy. Her cookies looked like something out of a magazine. They were so delicate. I would try so hard to mimic her movements, but mine became sloppy red and green candy canes and smudged Christmas trees with uneven sprinkle ornaments.

I never minded though. She was happy.

This morning I turned on some Christmas music. I cleaned the kitchen. I addressed the last of my Christmas cards. I even ate lunch.

And I felt so normal.

So I decided to make sugar cookies.

Halfway through, I just stopped.

I was standing in my kitchen. The Mr. was upstairs. I could hear him humming, but I was suddenly struggling to breathe under the crushing knowledge that I was so alone.

I tried to reason with myself. I wasn't alone. I knew that. The Mr. was just one floor above me. Sure, my siblings had all traveled the thousand something miles to my parent's house for Christmas, but they weren't gone. Yes, my best friends were all out of town, but they weren't gone either.

I couldn't understand it then, and I still don't now. I didn't just feel it, I knew that I was completely and utterly alone. It was like the floor had dropped out from under me. Everything had inverted. I was upside down.

I was curled up on the couch, unfinished sugar cookies covering the kitchen table, when the Mr. came downstairs. He looked at me, then at the table, and I could see him trying to put the pieces together.

"I'm tired." I said.

He offered to make the frosting, and I let him. I watched him measure the sugar and the milk and debated throwing the entire batch of cookies into the trash. Instead we frosted them together, and I smiled and laughed to keep from crying.

Until I couldn't anymore, and then I just cried.

So the Mr. held me as I cried, the table still a disaster of brightly colored frosting and rogue sprinkles and a million different bowls.

"You were so happy earlier." The Mr. finally whispered.

He didn't make it a question, but I knew it was one anyways. What happened? I was happy earlier. I was almost convinced that I was normal.

Then I made sugar cookies.

of flattery

"You look good in pictures. You're very photogenic. Well, you're really thin. You know they say the camera adds ten pounds. In your case it's a good thing. You know most actresses are so skinny. You see them on the screen and you think they look good, but then you see them in person and they're skin and bones. They look sick..."

I am still smiling, but my mind has frozen.

You're really thin.

The camera adds ten pounds.

In your case it's a good thing.

"...almost like they're dying, you know?" My client is still talking, smiling good-naturedly. I am nodding along.

Skin and bones.

A good thing.

He makes a face like he's eaten a piece of moldy bread. "Like they're in fucking chemo or something."

I can't tell if he's trying to tell me I look like one of those actresses.

I am more flattered than insulted. 

something like cheating

"That's good! That's really good!"

Molly was beaming at me from her computer chair, but I couldn't really bring myself to smile back. She'd asked me about my weekend, so I'd told her. I told her about all the things I ate. Things I haven't eaten in a long time. Things like pasta and bread and hot dogs and macaroni and cheese. I knew Molly saw this as a breakthrough, but more truthfully it was something like cheating.

This week came with the doctor and dietitian appointments I'd finally scheduled. I stacked them on the same day, hoping it would ease my anxiety. My weight has continued to slowly drop, and I knew things would get ugly if those numbers showed up on their scale.

So I did something I have never done before.

I ate with the intention of gaining weight.

I ate with the intention of gaining weight.

But...

And there's always a "but," isn't there?

But I promised myself I was not going to keep it. And maybe that's bad. Maybe that's the opposite of everything I'm supposed to be doing. But that promise is the only thing keeping me from losing my shit. It's why I only slammed my arm into the doorframe once. 

So I'm just gonna keep holding onto it.

Monday night, I was so full and bloated and miserable that I skipped dinner. I was sure I'd done enough. I was sure I'd gained twenty pounds. 

Tuesday morning, the scale read one pound above my lowest weight. One pound. One fucking pound.

This is where I found myself searching my closet for the heaviest sweaters I owned. It'd come to this. What was I going to do next? Sew weights into my pockets? Fuck.

I layered like I was about to journey to Antarctica on foot. At work, I let my boss buy me beef noodle soup for lunch. I ate the whole thing. And then I ate a piece of bread. And then I ate a cookie. I tackled food like it was the bar exam, and I hated my dietitian and the doctor and the treatment center and pretty much everyone with each bite.

It was after lunch that I got the voicemail. My appointment with the dietitian had been cancelled. I was horrified, then furious. I'd been preparing for this. They couldn't just cancel things!

At least I still had the doctor appointment. At least I hadn't gained weight for nothing. At least I didn't have to talk about fucking meal plans. 

At my appointment, the nurse took my weight and hid it beneath a yellow post-it note as she always does. And I hated that she did it, just like I always do. My anxiety mounted. The nurse tried to talk about my shoes. I did not want to talk about my shoes. The doctor finally came in. She wanted to talk about how I felt. I did not want to talk about how I felt. So I smiled. I said I was great. I said I was eating more. I said I wasn't restricting as much. 

Finally she got to my weight.

"I am slightly concerned because you've lost one and a half pounds since I last saw you..." She said, flipping through her notes.

I did some frantic math in my head. I hadn't gained enough. Slightly concerned? What would slightly concerned get me?

"I guess it has been a month." She finally concluded. "And you were just recently sick. So you're probably still coming back from that."

I breathed out.

"Probably." I lied.

....

There have been a lot of wonderful, encouraging comments on my blog lately that frankly I do not deserve. I'm sorry I haven't been responding lately. I do appreciate them so very much, I just haven't been able to wrap my head around saying anything back. So please know I am thankful and sorry and I will try to do better.

lies

There is a point when numbers lose all meaning and reflections lie. 

I watch the numbers go down on the scale. My new jeans slide down on my hips. I am swimming in last winter's clothes. But when I look in the mirror, nothing has changed.

I hear a lot about intensive treatment these days. I find myself thinking of ways to lie. 

...

My little sister is beaming. She looks so beautiful, so radiant. She runs her hands down the ivory lace and glances over at us. 

"I think this is the one." She whispers, and then she laughs because she can hardly believe it.

Her friends agree and I do too.

She twirls and giggles and hops, clapping her hands. "This is my wedding dress!"

Her friends laugh and cheer, but I am trying not to cry.

She is so beautiful.

I remember her as a toddler. Her bossy little voice was so raspy. Her strawberry blond hair stuck out at every angle. Even then she was fearless and always smiling. 

I am suddenly exhausted. There is a flurry with measuring tapes and shoes and veils and everything is so loud. I end up face to face with my mother thanks to the power of technology. I try to screen her comments, but I soon realize it's a pointless battle. All the noise drowns her out. I can tell she is offended that no one is listening to her. Everyone else is talking over her. She wanted my sister to go shopping with her. Instead she went shopping with me. My mother presses her lips together and frowns. My face on the screen looks worn, dark circles under my eyes.

"Are you going to cry?" One of my sister's friends teases. 

"I don't cry in public." My sister flippantly declares. Her friends snort so she rolls her eyes in a perfect imitation of our mother. "Fine. Unless I'm at a soccer game..."

Sidelong glances are thrown my way. I smile dumbly and pretend I don't know they're talking about when my sister got the call that I was in the hospital. 

I drive home too fast and go to bed without eating supper. The Mr. wants to know what's wrong. I don't know. I am happy for my sister. I truly am. I will be her matron of honor in her wedding. Her dress is perfect. She is in love.

I don't know why I'm so sad.

i am fine

It is the coldest December I can remember.

I cough as I scrape the layers of ice off my car in the morning. The air is so cold that there is no moisture left in it. It rushes into my lungs, dry and crackly. It creeps through my many layers, past the long underwear I wear beneath my jeans, and into my bones. My elderly neighbor is painstakingly shoveling her sidewalk, her entire face wrapped in a scarf. We are both silent, slowly growing more and more hunched as the cold weighs down on us, but we continue on. Her with her shoveling. Me with my scraping. There is nothing else we can do. 

"I am struggling with depression...again...still." Bill texts me. He is living in a city shelter now, despite a handful of grand plans to move across the city, across the country, across the ocean. 

I can't escape it either, and I tell him so. The beauty of his response catches me off guard. 

"We are caught between two worlds."

I am here. I am not here.

"I feel like you're slipping away." The Mr. whispers in the dark. I roll over and wrap my arms around him, trying to be reassuring. But that's not what he wants. He wants me to talk to him. 

"I never have anything new to say." I tell him.

I'm not even sure if that's true. I am standing in a corner, facing the wall, as my thoughts clamor behind me. Sometimes I steal a glance. I try to focus. How do I feel? What am I thinking? But the words never reach my mouth. They just loop round and round in my head. 

I get a voicemail from the psychiatry clinic. They have decided to increase my anti-depressant. Again.

In the news a college girl gets dropped off at her house after a party. Drunk, she stumbles up to her porch only to find the door locked. She falls asleep there on the porch as the temperature drops lower and lower and lower. By the time they find her, her hands have frozen solid to the wood. She will wake up to discover both her hands simply gone.

Worried faces blur until they mean nothing. Everything seems to be in hyperbole. Everyone is telling me my hands are gone, but I am looking right at them. They are right here. I am wiggling my fingers. I am clenching my fists. There is nothing wrong with me.

I am fine.