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02.15.04 - 12:48 a.m.
"talk to her" i went to the key party, but came home to myself. i'm relieved that my housemate's over at her boyfriend's apartment tonight. i'm living in a big house that's subdivided into three apartments, and the walls are so thin i can hear both downstairs neighbors having sex. [dial-an-orgasm menu, anyone?: for moans from apt. #1, sit in my bedroom; for moans from apt. #3, sit in my living room]. i'm not a prude. i crank up the music rather than beat on the floorboards. more than pity myself for being alone, i'm terrified of even letting myself get turned on by the commotion. arousal's fine, but not when it's brought on from my intentional eavesdropping. eavesdropping is what is on my mind these past few days. or in webspeak, i guess i'd have to plead guilty-as-charged for the act of "stalking". except, i didn't feel as if i were "stalking" someone i cared about, when i clicked on to the locked/friend's only site of her livejournal. i can't explain how i'm comforted to just see the calender that marks that she's written in her journal that day. i don't want to read her journal...i've felt waves of sadness and also resentment, that the way to keep up with her day to day life and also the only access to her beautiful skillful writing style [she's a creative writer/poet/fiction writer] is to start a livejournal and ask her, "would you add me to your friend's list?" i don't really care for livejournal's layout - i don't want to have a menu of journals to scroll through. and i just don't like that webpage calculates how many friends you have [circling has 88 friends; 88 friends of]. and yet on the flip side, if i've known this friend for over 2 years, and used to DATE her for part of that time, i don't want to be just another friend. and yet, why would she be willing to divulge her honest thoughts to 88 people, and not be willing to share them with me??? so, since last year when i had downtime (as in, when i wasn't shitdeep in writing my ph.d. candidacy exams (70+ pages/3 month process) or fellowship applications, or preparing and traveling for 5 conferences...basically, when i was feeling depressed or missed her or still had an insatiable need to know what i'd meant to her, i'd click on her livejournal. but there's more - because i'd also figured out that she posted on TF and lunchbox (one of many E.D. webforums). and it's complicated because i didn't know these boards existed until a huge ny times magazine article on them. and she happened to know these two women interviewed (future bird, and chaos), at least on line. and my fascination with these world was both awe -- because i hadn't involved myself with e.d. websites since spending maybe 6 months on somethingfishy in 1998) and terror - because these boards were moderated and run like nothing i'd ever seen. that these boards allowed an option of finding support for recovering OR staying sick ["sweet stasis"]. and technology had advanced so that members could exchange photos, or post numbers of all kinds (goal weights, heighest weights, current weights, lowest weights). and i just knew the forum wasn't for me and i've already written about why - i felt too old, too out of touch, and mostly, i'd already formed core relationships with somethingfishy friends that had boon times of mailing postcards and gifts, and eventually dwindled away. but i kept on reading through the TF forum, because i'm still sick with bulimia...now going on 18 years...i still purge. i still compulsively over-eat. and even when i don't binge, the thought crosses my mind. and only drastic measures like freezing food after i eat it, or depending on my guilt that my roommate is home, prevent me from acting on my thoughts. i do feel as if my heyday of bulimia is behind me, when i was an undergraduate in college, and purging an average of 12 times a day. i felt like i had the right to register as a TF member, even though i didn't feel as if i belonged there. ...she definitely felt like she belonged there. and i think what pulled me back to the forum, and looking out for her posts, is that i desperately wanted an honest, naked glimpse of how she interacted with others she felt comfortable with. two women both battling with eating disorders, in the same small town with very few therapists/medical staff who work with e.d. patients, don't stand much of a chance of sustaining a relationship. we were both symptomatic and without recounting that awful year, i let myself drift apart because it hurt too much to have E.D. stuff/doctors/meds always competing for airspace in every conversation. i started to feel ashamed of myself for not having her symptoms. i couldn't get over my envy that the same university treatment team that i walked away from (and who let me walk away), were so heavily involved in her life, her recovery, and so obviously cared about going to any length to stop this disease from killing her. i walked away because i feared that she would die and i couldn't do anything to prevent that from happening. i walked away because i wanted HER to fear for my dying, to go to any length to keep me alive. so i walked away. i stopped calling and writing in real time. after finding out that she had registered on the lunchbox forum on the same day as my birthday, and after reading her post that she was feeling sick (partly?) because she had been fasting for at least four days beforehand, i accepted at she chose that community over me. and i felt hellbent on getting to know this community, and why they were so much more important than me. and with that, jealous that she could be more intimate with all those online people (relaxed, witty, generous, OPEN) than she could with me. and last week, when she happened to be in town (she's since moved away), i told her that i had registered on TF, and i'd read her posts there. and it feels heartless to admit that part of healing myself was to be able to read the truth about her symptoms and not fall apart myself with guilt, or worry, or try to do anything to fix her situation. it's no longer about me searching for discrepancies between say, how many days she said she was purge-free vs. what she 'really' purged. i really don't care. i'm not keeping tabs on her calorie intake. but she's incredibly upset, much more than i ever thought she would. i've invaded her privacy, which has been incredibly hard for me to wrap my head around because i don't relate to the web, or even d'land, in the same way. but i have to respect her definition of privacy, and with that, own up to and apologize for invading her privacy. i would never ever ever EVER open up a handwritten journal of hers if i saw it laying right in front of me. i now understand that i've done the same thing, by reading these posts. and, so now i do feel "sneaky", "shitty", "bitchy" and all the other names TFers call people like me. but what is the next right step? and am i dishonest now for not using this d'land journal record and log the number of times i've purged or binged? i don't want to write in here for the purpose of drawing attention to just my struggles with bulimia. so hard to explain, that i write in her for the practice of putting my work before a public (anonymous) audience, but i'm not invested in necessarily receiving always feedback. (another reason i don't use livejournal. i don't want to have a comments option to my journal). and in fact, when i posted regularly on somethingfishy, what fucked up my self-esteem the most was the value i put on the number of posts i'd made, or how crestfallen i became when others didn't respond to a post that i'd put lots of time into writing. i don't know what's the next right step? i knew that i needed to "talk to her," but now what? how much do i really want to talk to her about the nitty gritty of how i'm doing (intake, purging) etc? and what if, how i measure 'how i'm doing' is now based on my levels of depression, what time i woke up and got out of bed today, or how intense was my self-loathing when i taught my students, or spoke to my advisor? and what about even deeper troubles, like how often do i "feel" so badly that i wish i could take my own life, but how much worse i feel that i absolutely cannot? and i say i want to talk about things other than "mad issues", like things to laugh about? and again, how do i talk to her when i've gone through two months of bouts of seriously not being able to laugh much at all?
MUSIC: Talk to Her: The Soundtrack (Pedro Almodovar)
READING: my own words
FEELING: speechless and confused
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