Since the cat is out of the bag

I made a commitment, begrudgingly to TGF that I would go see our therapist one time to talk about these things. Writing that Mercury post was one of the more painful things I have done, I was half crying the entire I was writing and for a few hours afterwards. Since I don’t really cry much, that’s big. I seem to be doing a lot of painful things the last couple of years. Growth – it brings pain. TGF was deeply troubled by what I wrote but, I think, glad I am doing some work on this issue.

Of course I keep thinking of other twisted things I have done or thought in regards to my eating disorder. While it’s true I never made myself throw up, I did try and was bummed I didn’t have the nerve or ability, which ever to actually do it. I tried adopting any habits that I thought might work, especially if they were done by people with worse variations of this crap than me – because, well they were actually thin. Things like I would not touch the fork with my lips. Like any addict I have hidden the evidence of my crimes, burying ice cream pint containers down into the layers of the kitchen trash in such a manner that if one was doing a timeline like they do in archeology it would be all screwy – along the lines of the placing the iron age before bronze, history would be messed up forever.

I feel like if write every unreasonable odd ball thing I have done, it will make it more real. I have said in a casual way for a long time that I have an eating disorder but because I have never really met the criteria for anorexia or bulimia, you know an actual “condition” it’s like I don’t really have one. Of course now that I have the DSM sitting in my office I could read up and see if I “officially” qualify. But if I did, or perhaps more importantly, if I didn’t, what would that change. Since I don’t have insurance, it’s not like my therapy would be covered if I had enough of the qualifiers. If I don’t have the markers established by the APA, it’s not I will wake up tomorrow “normal”, with all this free time available in my head to get the rest of my life together and orderly.

Perhaps the reason I never talked about it therapy was because it seemed so indefinable, on some level not severe enough, not real. I had that sort of thing happen with my very first therapist, a wonderful woman named Nohmie Myers. Like all mothers or mother figures they are flawed creatures, as we all are, and they let us down. She let me down in a very profound way. I spoke of something I had held in for years and years. Because I had no actual clear memories of abuse, she wrote it off. I remained silent on the subject for years. Now I that I write this out, it makes sense that here is another invisible topic so, no, no thank you I don’t want to talk about it. I can’t have another therapist say something isn’t real. However I am older and wiser now, I know L. wouldn’t think of not exploring this further. In fact with my luck she will say that I certainly need to do more sessions; that one is not enough. Just what I want to hear. NOT. It’s scary. What if I do deal with this? What if I become “recovered” in some fashion? What would it be like to live in my brain then? It is so foreign, such a huge unknowable – it frightening to consider what that would be like, what I would be like then.

To quote Scarlett: I can't think about that right now. If I do, I'll go crazy. I'll think about that tomorrow.