where i have been

{a little post to let you know where the h*** i have been }

i've been watching the ice melt under my feet. 

(literally.)

i've been eating cookies

(and cupcakes)

i've been enjoying the little eccentricities of the city

i've been happy that spring has arrived

i've been indulging my shopping urges

check out those glasses!

most of all though, i've been working. a lot.

i've almost gotten so bogged down in the hum-drum no-stop pace of it all that i've forgotten where i've been, why i'm here, where i came from.

sometimes i find myself getting so wrapped up in all of this stuff.

Top 10 Colleges and SAT scores and History papers and test dates, 

and all of a sudden it becomes

really easy to just forget who that girl is who is sitting and

 holding the pencil (with her left hand, by the way-  but more on that later) because i become

so focused on the outcome or the product or the grade.

sometimes its good to get a reminder of who i am. why i'm doing all of this, rather than just going on autopilot with the hope that i can get it all done (w/ flying colors) 

and hope that the rest of my life will wait.

well, it wont.

i need to be a person. not just pieces of a person. 

not just a test grade, or a vocabulary word.

a person. a whole being. me.

this blog is part of that.

i'm back. 

sorry for the absence. i promise i'm here to stay. 

it's easy to lose yourself if you don't remind yourself who you are, why you're here.

i've learned that at least.

as for all that SAT junk...now that's a different story.

xo, Rose

have you ever gotten so caught up in something that you've lost yourself?

 how did you get 'you' back?

Save Sofia, Save Ourselves.

does anyone remember this lovely girl?

it's okay if you don't.
i forgive you. 
just go read my post: How to Save a Life. 
For those of you who weren't around or don't remember, this is Sofia.
Sofia has an eating disorder. 
She needs our help. 
Badly.
Back in October, I asked you guys to check out her fundraising page because she was trying to raise money  to get into treatment. The same treatment facility that I trust because I, personally, was able to find a peaceful place to being my recovery there. 
Starting today, I'm doing a Momofuku giveaway (scroll to the bottom of this post for details), and begging you to donate.
You see, after she did some fundraising and after Sofia's father took out money from his savings, Sofia was able to go into treatment like we all were hoping she would. Phew.
But her insurance cut out super early again. Big Surprise there, right? 
She also is still in the appeals process. It's kind of a bummer. 
Sofia has worked so hard and come so far, even in the midst of her debilitating mental illness.
Here is some of Sofia's wisdom about recovery that I think you all deserve to hear:

                                             “it was then that I realized, my moment of clarity wasn’t 

 going to come. That moment in movies where the heavens part and the addict wakes up and realizes their illness is 

going to kill them and it scares them into changing their behavior. I mean I’ve had little moments like that. Where I saw the reality of my situation and it terrified me. I’ve had moments where I come out of it enough to realize the insanity of my behavior and the seriousness of my medical status and the very potentially fatal consequences of my actions…and this is part of why I realized that I needed to reach out and find a way to come up with this money, because I will die before I'm just startled  enough to just stop."

[she is implying here that she needs proper treatment, she understands that she can't do this on her own]

And you see, all of this is why Sofia inspires me. She's a fighter.

She sets off a spark in me. 

She makes me think of this quotation:

It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. It’s not just in some of us, it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Nelson Mandela

I wouldn't ask you all to take a moment of your time, and possibly a cent  from your wallet if this didn't mean something. Sofia means something. I know it. 
But she's just one person, right?
What's the point of giving money to just one person?
You might be asking yourself this question. 
I know i did.
Here's the thing, though. While physically yes, Sofia is, in fact, just one person in this universe of ours, she means more than that. 
really, she does. 
Don't believe me?
I see myself Sofia. 
I also see you in Sofia.
Yes, you, you, the one  reading this right at this very moment. 
Sofia represents all of us when we are at the very bottom of our ropes. the end of the line. desperate. pleading. needy.
this, my friends, is not a fun place for anyone to be. But we've all been there. 
I have. I will again. 
You have. And you probably will again, too.
Your low and my low probably don't look the same. 
Maybe the last time you were at the end of your rope, it was because a loved one was sick. Or your dog was lost. Or maybe you lost a job, or a friend, or maybe you just spilled some coffee and stubbed your toe and just wanted a shoulder to cry on.

Was somebody there to help you up?
Really, think about it.
Or did you do fix it, get better, get well, become happier, yourself again all on your own?
Was it the smile of a kind stranger that knocked you back into reality? Or maybe a husbands' firm hug?
Whatever it was, I hope you were not alone. I hope that somebody helped you. I hope that that inspires you to help Sofia. Sofia is in all of us. We just need to see it. 
The question then is, really, will you help yourself?


here's the link to her fundraiser: http://www.giveforward.com/stillfighting


and one last quotation from Sofia:

                       "I really don’t know what more I can do but be totally honest and be persistent…and not 

                       worry about what people think about this persistence [to raise money], because the 

                       persistence is for my life…I can tell you about my passion to help the world, I can tell you 

                       that I understand that I am just one person, no more or less important or special than the 

                       next, but that I also believe we are all worth saving."

with love and gratitude,

Rose

EDIT:
GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED, AS THE TECHNICAL FUNDRAISING TIME IS OVER. If you still feel compelled to promote or donate please, by all means, go ahead. That would be what they might call noble. ;)

failed promises

i'm sorry, my dear readers, that i'm such a poop. <---(and so eloquent)

i didn't post on sunday or yesterday, grr! I'm sure i'm much more upset about this than anyone else actually is, of course, but i'm just mad that i didn't meet my self-made challenge. I'm gonna try to tack on two extra days (this coming saturday and sunday) to make up for it, so i can see "consequences" (not that writing a blog post is a punishment, of course) for my actions. I just want to take some responsibility and keep to my promises to myself. 

This is one of my nasty-ass cupcakes from this weekend.
It might not have tasted good....but at least it looks yummy?

Anyway, how are you all today? Yesterday and sunday were kind of uneventful, but today was slightly awful until about thirty minutes ago. You see, for some reason I just had a really rough day after I woke up from a dream about someone who I really, really miss and kind of have a complicated/broken past with and then my day kind of just spiraled down from there.

I went to Dean and Deluca w/ my pops on Saturday.
Check out the fancy (and expensive!!!) hot chocolate...
18 dollars for a box?! I'll stick with my Swiss Miss French Vanilla, thanks.

I need help! I've been so messed up about my food today (and it's kinda been building all week), and I really don't like it. (Well, part of me likes it, but we'll get to that.) 

I baked brownie/cookies last night from (recipe taken from this lovely site) and could barely even get myself to taste one. Then today, when I brought them into school, I had a bite of one of my friends(we all baked stuff for an english class 'party') and i immediately freaked out and decided i needed /wanted to purge. I couldn't though, thank goodness. Then at lunch, I ate but not really enough and I didn't have any type of snack and the day was just generally bad food wise as I was spinning in my head for most of it and almost came to the conclusion that I was going to b/p after school. (I didn't). But yeah so then I had an appt with my dietitian, without whom i would be nowhere, and that went okay. Except for the end when she weighed me. I always get blind weighed, and I can always usually tell by her reaction (i've known her for three years) whether i've gained, lost, maintained, etc. Today when I stepped on the scale though, i got really nervous all of a sudden and started rambling because I could just tell by the way it felt to step on that I had lost, ya know? That's weird for me. It's not like I'm used to "hiding" my weight from professionals or anything, since, being bulimic, I never lost a significant enough amount of weight that it was really the issue, the focus was usually much more on the purging, etc. 

Um yeah I was bored so I took a picture of some toothpicks. Don't judge.

Whatever I'm rambling. But i just wanted to say that. That I'm having a hard time. Because a really large part of me right now is glad that I lost weight. (Even though it's definitely a miniscule amount). That part of me wants to keep restricting/effing with my meals, etc. It's not okay. I'm not going down this road. But i want to. No, i don't. My eating disorder wants to. Gah. 

This. Is. Frustrating.

One step at a time. I can do this. I ate dinner tonight (a good amount) and I actually just had one of my cookies (it was good!!!). Okay. Tonight is good. I'm on track with my work (can you believe i'm doing well in school- wow actually being able to focus& not being distracted by my stomach growling all the time  is really great! ;) ) I'm going to be okay. I can do this. I want recovery. 

okay. 

breathing.

The toothpick picture got me thinking about color...so i tried to take a picture of my
bookshelf...which is nerdily color-coated. This is only like two out of 8 shelves and the lighting is bad...
but sometime i'll try to take a better one cause it is actually kinda pretty. :)

love you all. no more failed promises. I promise to keep going forward in my recovery & to keep blogging about it.

xo

rose

Rainy Days and Mondays

always get me down...


too bad yesterday fit both of those criteria!
Yesterday was not. fun. 
Lets just put it that way.
I was super exhausted at school and hence not very pleasant to be around/felt bad about being "anti-social"/was having a terrible body-image day and basically wanted to disappear or for no one to even glance at me.
I had a really hard therapy session (which I should make a post about at some point) and then came home, slept, binged & purged, cried, and then finally got back on my feet after spending some time watching Mad Men with my parents.
It's always surprising to me that my parents tend to be the source of comfort that I am looking for when I am having days like yesterday. 
Even in their newly-about-to-get-a-divorce-want-to-rip-each-others'-heads-off kind of way of acting around here lately, last night, it was still really therapeutic for me to just spend some time with both of them, together.
Maybe I haven't really put enough weight (no pun intended) on the fact that my parents have just recently decided to get a divorce into my thoughts about how i am coping/all the stress in my life. I don't know.
I don't like to think about them much. It's kind of upsetting. Hence why i never got around to formally mentioning it on the blog a month ago when all hell broke loose/ the shit hit the fucking fan and my entire house was in shambles and we are now in process of moving those shambles elsewhere.


Okay. I didn't intend to talk about my parents marriage (or lack thereof) right now. It's just complicated and messy and boring, I'm sure, so i'm gonna go hit the books now.


Hope everyone had a better start to the week than I did. At least Tuesday has been a big improvement :) (How could it not be?!)
xo
Rose

Recovery Essay

As promised, here is my essay. It's kind of awful and incoherent and I'm really not sure that he's going to understand it but maybe i'll proof read it tomorrow if I'm a little more lucid. Or make any changes that ya'll suggest (if you do it before 1 pm NYC time!). We had to put a Huck Finn quote at the beginning as a sort of epigraph. Mine is the moment where Huck decides to help Jim get away, even though he's terribly conflicted.

Warning: It's kind of terribly long for a blog post. Feel free to skip if you don't feel like being bored out of your mind. ;)

“It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because, I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied it for a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell’ ­– and tore it up… and if I could think of anything worse, I’d do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog” (Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 223).

           

            There is no one moment that I can say it all started. No single glance towards the mirror. No stinging comments. No terrible, abusive father. I can’t give you a concrete answer to the ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’, or ‘when’, and certainly not the ‘why’. What I can give you is a lot of blurs. Blurs that mesh together and go from dark to light to dark to lighter and back to dark again. And the blurs eventually meander over to the lighter side, hopefully to stay, each step precarious, toes checking for quicksand or faulty rocks, just waiting to slide off a steep cliff.

            It’s hard to remember most of the facts. I can remember the feelings, or the lack thereof- the numbness. The pain. I can remember the frenzy to get out of the pain. I can remember the knots in my stomach as I sat in classroom chairs, staring blankly out at the world, counting the minutes until I could escape. My stomach would be twisting and turning in knots, my brain obsessing over food, my body begging me to eat something with all the power it could muster. I would watch the clock and jiggle my foot and anxiously wait until I could run out and do what I knew would help me escape. I could buy food -- lots and lots of food, and eat it as fast as I could and then throw it up. I’ll go back and forth from the mess of the kitchen to my sticky bathroom floor until my skin is pale, my temples are pounding, and my heart is racing ba-doom, ba-doom, ba-doom.   I'll go and lie face- down in bed, exhausted. Other days, I would sit alone in my room and makes lists and charts of calories, fat grams and pounds on the scale and obsess for hours. I’d make scrapbooks of pictures of anorexic models. I’d spend hours on the Internet looking at images and reading stories about girls who were sick and sad and didn’t eat. I’d stare at the mirror in disgust, seeing all the things that were wrong with me. I’d run to the scale hidden in my bathroom to hop on and hop off, clenching my jaw, hoping to see the numbers go down. I did anything and everything not to be in the world, to find a way out, to build a reality separate from everything I was afraid of.

            I remember those days in a blur. They were pain and sorrow and neediness and fear all wrapped up in my mind and made a little bit more tolerable by the insanity of an eating disorder. I don’t like thinking about, or writing about those times. Something about it feels unsafe. I don’t want to get to close. I fear that closeness may leave me teetering on the edge of a building and I can’t look too far down, or I might loose my footing, slip, and fall. It would be a long, long way down.

            What I want to talk about is the world where I live now. And how I stumbled all the way here. These days are different. And it’s taken a lot to get here. I still have a ways to go. I guess I’ll start at the beginning, although, to be honest, I’m not sure I know where exactly that is.

            The thing about recovering from an eating disorder is that it is, in fact, simple: you eat. The thing that is not so simple about it is everything that happens when you do. An eating disorder was the way I kept a precarious grip on life. It held me together, albeit minimally. When I let it go, I felt everything fall disastrously into pieces, and I was back exactly where I started, and with a few more wounds to show for it.  

            I knew that I didn’t want to die, but I also wasn’t particularly sure I wanted to live. I thought I’d give living a try, though, and if it just “wasn’t for me” I could go back. So, I ate. I ate and ate and ate. Eventually, I cried. The food filled me up and there was no more room inside me to hold back the tears.

            I remember the day that I looked at a slice of pizza and burst into tears. Rachel, a woman who was only a few years older than me, with a sweet smile and a borderline-cheesy-happy disposition, but who inspired me nonetheless, was my therapist. She sat with me when I curled up in a ball of agony, thinking of the pizza in my stomach, imagining it spreading to all the parts of my body and making me fat, as I had always feared I was. (I will learn later, very, very slowly, that “fat” is actually, in my case, a synonym for “unloved, undeserving, and fundamentally "wrong") I wanted it out. Stupid pizza. I wanted it all out. If only I could just throw up, just this one last time, I begged, I’ll never do it again. She came over and gave me a hug. She sat with me and rubbed my back. She braided my hair and told me that I was going to be okay. Eventually, I believed her. 

           Maybe this was the moment where the change happened, where the tables turn and I finally took the right fork in the road, or crumpled up the proverbial letter. I don’t know. What I do know is this: recovery, for me, was about love. It was about needing love, wanting love, and wanting to love others. In first grade, my teacher sent home a report card to my parents that said that I while I was shy, I gave the best hugs of any student in the class. I knew why this was. Whenever I hugged someone, I really meant it. I loved people so much that it scared me. I wanted to love all my friends all the time and get the same in return. When I grew up, and realized that this wasn’t “cool” or acceptable, I learned to cut down. Cut down on the love, and cut down on the food. What I’ve learned now is that I need to tell people I love them and show that when I want to, ask for the love I need in return, and eat and keep all of my food.

            Every time before, when I had wanted to return to the darkness, the black haze of sickness that had cradled me for so long, there was no one there to stop me. Now, this time, I had people who cared about me. Rachel, I knew cared about me. This scared me tremendously, I was afraid of caring back, afraid that I would lose her and be left more desolate and alone than I had before. But it was in those moments, where someone was there again and again, to rub my back because she didn’t want me to hurt myself that I learned to choose the love over the sickness. It was being loved that allowed me to eat my food. That made all the difference.

          After meals, my friend Laura and I used to go out into the backyard of the house we were living in, stand on the porch, and scream. We’d hold hands and wail until our throats were hoarse, trying desperately to get something out of us. We wanted some kind of release, because everything we were feeling was so intense. We knew we had to do this though, to let it all out, even if the neighbors wanted to kill us. It was this, or go back down below, to the numbers and voices and mirrors and porcelain. I think I’ve always been an intense person, and this probably won’t change. I don’t scream out my New York City apartment building now, though, because I’ve gotten used to all the madness that comes with eating, and with living in the world like a real person. Some days I still feel pretty insane. I can feel the intensity well up inside of me like a knot in my stomach and my head starts to go around in dangerous circles. I either find a way to cope with this or I slip and return to the obsessions and the loneliness on a cold, hard, bathroom floor. The thing is, now, when that happens I know how to get back out, I’ve learned how to peel myself off the floor, and go and ask for a hug.

First day back

and i can't wait to hit the sack.
Sorry, I couldn't help myself.
When the opportunity presents itself for me to rhyme- i just have to do it! It's too fun!
Oh god i'm such a nerd...
Anyway, what was I saying?
Right, okay, so today was my first day back at school.
It was the school that I went to my sophomore year of high-school (the year when i was really really sick with bulimia) and then didn't go to last year because first I was at boarding school (long story) and then spent the the second semester in treatment. So now I'm back as a junior while all of my friends are seniors.
And, in short, it kind of sucks.
Not only does it suck that I'm not a senior with them, but it also sucks because I just felt super awkward, out-of-place, and disconnected from everybody. I felt kind of estranged even from my closest friends and it was just not cool at all.
I had a lot of nice people in all my Junior classes though, so I mean, maybe i'll make some friends, which would be lovely. We'll see.
Luckily for me, I had therapy right after school today, thank the fucking lord, because if i hadn't i would have been a huge mess tonight.
It really made me feel so much better. 
The first thing she D said was "No day is going to be worse than this one"
And that, I hope, is true. And so, so comforting, if i choose to believe it.
She said (very flippantly, I might add) that today was like "Ground Zero"* of days. And i mean she's so right. There's no way anything could be worse than this. So it HAS to get better...right?
Anyway, I hope everyone else had a MUCH better Monday than I did, and here's to tomorrow!
xoxo
rose


*Never-mind the fact that immediately when I heard this my brain automatically went to the debate over the Mosque at Ground Zero that is going on right now and then I tried to figure out what the hell that means in terms of my situation at school- what is my proverbial "mosque" but then I realized that I was doing that weird thing where I'm sitting in therapy but I'm like staring at the ground and just being silent and awkward and I quickly pulled myself out of it- and decided not to take the "ground zero" comment too literally- for my own sanity's sake.

Daddy's Little Girl?

It just occurred to me tonight that I will never be able to do enough to please my father.
I had a really good day and was in a good mood when I met him for dinner.
It was at a really great restaurant that focuses on all different ways of serving mussels, which I love.
Our dinner conversation was really okay for the most part. We were getting along.
We ended up talking a lot about college, and a project that I might (note: may or may not) work on this coming year, in regards to my academic interests and so forth. He really loves this kind of conversation because I was open to discussing the project with him, and he thinks (and is probably correct) that if I do later undertake this project, and if I do it well, then I have a better chance of getting into a top-tier school (which is something he has always wanted me to do).
Anyway, this conversation made him really happy, because the man is obsessed with achievement (that's another story) and would like to have a daughter who continues in his "successful" footsteps.
I felt good talking/thinking about this project, too. (Aside from the huge knot of anxiety that was growing in my stomach while I considered all the work it would entail...) 
I was a little mad at him at dinner because as always happens towards the end of our meals, he started getting anxious cause it was late and he wanted to get the check and go home. At this point, he tends to just zone out and seems completely uninterested in me,  and he just sits back and looks bored.
When we walked out, I told him that he was all out of his bread that he likes to have for breakfast, so we went to the nearby supermarket. He's a picky dude, and there wasn't any of the stuff he really likes, so I offered to just get some of it for him tomorrow afternoon, but he said it didn't matter. We finally got in a cab and he was obviously tired, so I offered to walk the dog for him. He said yes, that would be nice. (Even though I've walked the dog twice today so it's technically his turn). 
When we got home, I was feeding Willy before we went out, when Dad came in and started freaking out because there was no cold water in the fridge. I had taken the large bottle with me this afternoon when I went to the park and forgotten to replace it. He started stomping around the kitchen muttering to me about how it's "not fair" and "why do you always take my water?" and "can't you ever do what I ask you to do?" before he just stomped off to his room.
I broke the fuck down.
I went into my room and hysterically for a few minutes.
It occurred to me that I could try and try and try to do everything I thought would make my Dad happy, but it's never going to be enough. Even if I do get into a top school, and act like the nicest, sweetest most loving daughter and do all the chores I can, there's always going to be something that I just can't do to please him. 
In some way, I'm never good enough for him. 
I need to figure out how to just be "good enough" for myself, because otherwise, I'm going to be like a hamster in a wheel, running and running and getting nowhere.
When I came back from walking Willy I literally cleaned up the entire kitchen (it's been getting messier and messier these past few days cause my mom is out of town and I've been procrastinating doing them and my Dad couldn't ever possibly be bothered with something as trivial as dishes!) 
It just makes me sad that I'm never going to be able to please him.
In a way, though, I'm also glad that I have come to my own realization about this finally, because I think (hopefully!) it will save me a lot of suffering in the future.

Holden is wrong

My night ended up being okay.

The reason? Relationships.

R (my therapist from my old tx center) called me at around 9, right as we were all finishing dinner.

It was so nice to talk to her, even though it wasn't for long.

I think it just made it more clear to me how so much of everything that i'm struggling with right now has a lot to do with my loneliness. 

I love her so much.  I love just being on the phone with her. I always feel so connected and understood. I told her everything that has been going on with me and she said that it made her really sad to think of me, walking to the gym today, crying because I was so lonely and thinking that going to the gym was all I could do to avoid that. 

 She's so crazy also. She started telling me about how she's recently become obsessed with HGTV. Like, what? Ha, that's why I love her. She's just so real. She's such a friend. After I talked to her I didn't want to throw up anymore. Having that relationship is more important to me than throwing up.

I just finished re-reading The Catcher in the Rye. Oh god how I love that book. Holden Caufield, such a sad guy. There's this part where he goes into a phone booth and realizes that he has no one to call. That's how I feel most of the time.  Like I  just want somebody to talk to, somebody to feel connected to, but then I look in my phone and I can't think of anyone who would really want to talk to me at that moment. In the last line of the book Holden says "I think I even miss that goddamn Maurice. It's funny. Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody". 

That's wrong though. That's Holden's (and my) fear. That if you get close to people you're going to miss them too much, because you will lose them. But part of recovery is learning how to open up and let people in, even if it's scary. You have to take the risk that you will miss them and feel lonely sometimes, like I did this morning (and like I do most of the time, quite frankly). But you have to do it anyway. You have to love people and let them love you. That's all you can do. 

And the best insights always come early in the morning

i fell asleep at around 9:30 tonight.

And then woke up at around 2:15, confused about what day it was.

Lying in bed, I started thinking about bingeing&purging loss.

Well, for the sake of full disclosure, at first I started thinking about food, naturally.

I thought "What's in the kitchen? I want food!" and then "Am i really hungry? What do i actually want?"

And my honest answer to myself came easily this time:

I want something to fill the fucking ginormous hole inside of me. 

I feel hollow.

I feel like there is a huge fucking hole in my chest where people used to be.

I literally feel like a walking void.

I have lost so much.

I think I am finally, really really clearly able to see how & why I am so accustomed to just filling this void with food. 

An excerpt from my journal tonight...

"So here I am left with a hole in my chest and all I want to do is fill it with food. Well..chests aren’t made for food but I guess they can be confused with stomachs sometime. Basically, it’s not going to solve the problem. It could trick me into thinking that it has solved the problem, cause a filled(and then consequently, of course, empty) stomach could be easily mistaken for a chest full of love, however, it’s not going to do anything for the long run. But I guess the struggle is sitting with this empty chest. This really just sucks. I don’t know, I may or may not go into the kitchen now, but either way, I feel like it finally makes sense, and it feels a lot like loss."

All of this loss and pain recently finally makes sense. 

All of the pain that i felt about losing R when i left MNV ( & I'm lYk $O tRendy w/ My SYmbolz) was really just built up pain of all the loss that i had experienced before. It's not ONLY about her. It's about the multitude of people who i feel I have lost in the past. Except before, I was actively bulimic, and so i never really allowed myself to feel the pain or the weight (pun intended...) of those losses. This is an unknown, unfamiliar pain. 

{So, it's kind of like being hit on the head with a ball- it hurts the same amount as it would if i knew beforehand that i was going to be hit with a ball, but it's just more shocking this way (without warning), so the pain feels worse.}

I hate to admit it (and by hate, I mean, like...it basically goes against my religion to admit that the therapists are actually right sometimes...) but my relationship with R really was like a microcosm of all my other relationships!(shocker...eh?)

I'm not going to go into it here but I really have had a lot of loss in the past few years. Most of these losses were friendships that were really dear to me, and I never really was given the chance to grieve them, because I was too intent on being bulimic and avoiding actual ingestion of food feelings at all costs. 

So here I am, left with this emptiness. I know what I used to do with it. And I know that eating to fix my loneliness is just about as effective as brushing my teeth to "help" my anger- it wont actually address the problem and, in the end, i'll probably just fuck up my teeth. I also know what I can do with this. I can choose to just sit with this emptiness and feel the hollowness and know that this just comes from years and years of loss, and only now am i able to feel it. I have a choice to make.

Aside from that though, it's nice to feel that things are making sense. Everything has felt so chaotic in my mind recently , and it feel like a relief to have my pain at least make sense, for once.

I'm feeling poetic, so here goes:

And the best insights always come early in the morning

or, as some would have it, very late at night.

The matter is, i finally understand this feeling

and, to describe it, well, - it feels a lot like loss.

xxx

Rose

How To Grieve

That is my latest google search. 
Genius, right?
I kind of came to the conclusion today that a lot of my sadness and pain (and hence, eating disorder shit) is the result of me really really really freaking really missing my therapist from my Tx center, R.
And that really sucks.
First off, it sucks to admit it. It sucks to admit that I am that vulnerable, that I care so much about her, and needed her so much, and trusted and liked and loved her so much that I can feel this much pain because that is gone. It's embarrassing. Its as if I don't like people knowing that they mean that much to me. I can't tell R that she means that much to me, that, again, would be "too vulnerable". 
It sucks because I almost feel like i don't want to grieve this loss. I don't want to admit that it's necessary. That, my friends, brings us, I think, to the first stage of grief: Denial. It's like i want to just stay in this little bubble of "not caring" (which is, and always has been, my default when i sense ANY pain) rather than just accepting that fact that I feel this way, and that I need to really deal with this loss and the pain, vulnerability, and embarrassment that it brings me. 
The second stage of grief is Anger. And yep, I totally feel that. An excerpt from my journal tonight:

"I miss R so much. I feel so angry at her for not being here. I am so angry at her for saying what she said tonight. I’m pretty sure the only thing that she could’ve said that would NOT have made me angry would have been 'I love you too and I miss you too so much and its okay for you to miss me because I can still BE in your life'. But she didn’t say that."

And the frustrating, simple truth of the matter is this : she CAN'T say what I wish she would say (the one thing that would NOT make me angry) because that's just not possible. She legally and physically and also, probably, emotionally, cannot be in my life anymore, except in little tidbits that to me, feel vastly insufficient. 
The third stage of grief is Bargaining, or "attempting to make deals with or begging, wishing, or praying for the loved one to come back". I don't think I've done this yet and I really don't think I will. But, hey, seeing my track record --- I might very well soon call R and beg her to fly out to NYC and live with me, eh?  ;)
Next, number four, is Depression: "overwhelming feelings of hopelessness, frustration, bitterness, self pity, mourning loss of person as well as the hopes, dreams and plans for the future. Feeling lack of control, feeling numb. Perhaps feeling suicidal."
Well I know what that feels like...and I'm pretty sure I'm already in/moving through that one.
And finally, the hoped for numero cinco : Acceptance. "a decision to be at peace with the way things are.  To know that no amount of denial, bargaining, anger or depression is going to recover our loss.  We begin to accept that loss is part of life.  It's not good or bad...just how it is.  So we decide to go on, to find joy in our lives and to bring joy to the lives of others. "
I know I've heard of Radical Acceptance, as is discussed/taught in DBT (dialectical behavioral therapy), but i have never been very good at it, and so i suspect that number five might be a little bit of a toughie for me, but i know its something i need to work towards.
A final excerpt from my journal, which has some insight, along with some big questions...


"But isn’t fighting that suffering, that missing her, going to make it worse. Isn’t the rejection of suffering the cause of all suffering or some Buddhist shit like that? Then doesn’t that mean that I’m just making it WORSE by trying to find some way to not feel that? Yes. Yes it does. But how do I feel that? How do I allow myself to feel that much pain, and just let it be okay, and know that it will pass, even when I’m not really sure that it will. It just feels like more pain than I’ve ever sat with before. It feels like the biggest pain ever. Maybe I’m just being impatient? I think I kind of have a hard time with acceptance because I feel like…okay---I've accepted it…now what?"