Between old Looney Tunes cartoons and my multiple readings of Of Mice and Men, I vaguely recall the character of Lennie, and his Looney Tunes likeness, saying "I done a bad thing"...
While this phrase sums up the beginning of this month well, I have been on a big and long ride the past several weeks. Puts the wildest shit a tragic novelist can devise to shame... But then those
World War I ambulance drivers like Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald always really pissed me off. I know that tragedy had a very real meaning to these men, but to me, it always seemed like overkill, to the point of being just silly and absurd... For me it was never like tragedy needed absolutely everyone to suffer horribly and/or die ironically... I always favored the tortures that Kafka and Dostoyevsky devised... For, in my own experience, real tragedy is about despair and fear. Death is an easy out, the greatest torture on earth is at our own hands, nestled within the depths of the human psyche. Living with what you have done as well as what you blame yourself for anyway... that is what destroys a person.
Nearly a month ago, I really fucked up...
I had spent the 3 months prior at my Grandma's side as her second husband of 8 years shriveled into a shadow of his former self in her living room on hospice... Bone cancer had taken my Grampa the same way 11 years ago, after 45 years of marriage...
Her second husband was the one who saved her from loneliness, gave her another chance at life with another extraordinary man... I owe all of the good in me to all 3 of them... my boyfriend and I visited them constantly, assisting with his care, helping with errands, smiling, reassuring, anything we could...then things start to blur...
After Pap died, my boyfriend and I somehow managed to slip away with all of his hospice medication. I'm money situation was getting desperate and I think that we were going to sell them... I forget... Unfortunately we also decided to take some ourselves with quite disastrous and amnetic consequences... I don't remember the rosary and I don't remember the funeral.... Apparently people without cancer torturing every nerve ending in their body are not intended to take pure morphine and heavy duty opiates... The doctor came back to collect the medication after the second day and my grandma found it gone. My aunt who is an RN came to pick it up my boyfriend's parent's home, where we were staying and we were kicked out. Everyone else banned us from their houses as well... We decided to cover up on my bumper stickers, license plates, etc and rob a Pharmacy... But we wound up chickening out after casing four different ones... Apparently there were 3 other robbery attempts that night on some of the same pharmacies and we would have been caught facing felony charges.
This is where grace comes in...
The next day after nearly three days in my car without sleep, my father reached out to us and offered us a way to redeem ourselves. We were married next day and my now husband began working a couple of days later. My disability back pay from 2012 arrived and I have spent this entire month renovating my new home, which is about the size of the average kitchen... And, as they say in all southern stereotypes, is "older than Methuselah"...
In light of the unpredictable nature of trailer plumbing, I set myself a "quit date" for purging (again)... it helps that the kitchen is the living room, the living room is the bedroom, and the bedroom is the bathroom....
kind of helps remove any semblance of privacy...
"Helps" is often a term people who are prone to binging, purging, and restricting, use when they are exchanging one behavior for another.... I know that ending up knee deep in vomit and ruining our plumbing is not an option. However, I am also aware of my blatant disregard for anyone else when it comes to my ED. People who are paid to stand and watch eating disorder patients use the restroom have managed to miss the occasional purge... I've done some disturbing and truly degrading things in desperation to not gain weight... And while this new situation of being unable to purge feels extremely liberating in a way... By making it something I simply cannot do... To my husband in the adjacent room, separated only by a saloon door... To all of our hard work over the past month... To my decrepit body and rotting teeth... It cannot happen. Period.
But taking away my ability to purge tends to transform every meal into an argument... My new home essentially becomes another one of my restriction prisons... or, if you like, a battleground, upon which I will fight with every breath in my body a daily war on calories, fat, carbs, weight, and anyone who is unfortunate enough to be in the way...
I'm scared.
I'm too old and, if I'm honest, too fucking smart to still believe that there is any reason to keep these unreasonable expectations, ridiculous beliefs, and maladaptive behaviors around... I know I am wrong, I know what is true, and I know that this never lasts...never makes anything better...
I know Anatomy, I know Nutrition, I know Psychology, and I know Me...
Yet I am once again feeling like a "fuck up" is a state of being rather than an occasional mishap...
Surely, this stupidity is not running my life... STILL...
Please, Doctor... there must be some mistake...
Love and Neurosis,
Little One
