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07.11.04 - 1:04 p.m.
you know you're in recovery when... although i make no claims to be always on the straight and narrow when it comes to recovery - i'm blindsided by my own ambivalence so often that, even when i'm acting E.D./S.I./B.P.D. free, my scary-twisted-negative-fucked- up thoughts would beg to differ quite loudly that i don't believe any of the positive behaviors i'm practicing. perhaps recovery is also the capacity to tell those voices to "shut up and pipe down!"; maybe recovery is even reaching the point whre i can have those thoughts, but never let them out of their black box... every so often i surprise even me, when i'm acting totally NORMAL. in a delayed flashback, i'll feel like i'm stepping outside my body and re-experiencing the long-forgotten sensations of how un-normal i once behaved with the normal behavior i'm involved in. sorry, i'm being abstract. what i'm trying to say is this: today, i know i've reached some level of recovery over self-injuring, when FIFTEEN minutes into my photo collage project, when i'm amateurishly but pleasurably using my exacto knife to slice and crop photos to fit into this multi-picture frame... and all of a sudden my mind, then my body are SHOCKED when the following realizations hit me in this order, that: 1.) i'm actually using this exacto knife for the purpose its creators originally intended; 2.) as far as i can remember, this is the first time i'm ever using this exacto knife for its intended purpose -- to complete this hobby like art project/ creative activity; 3.) three years ago, i bought this exacto knife from the art supplies shop for my OWN explicit purpose - to slice and crop my own skin artfully; 4.) i can't remember the last time i used this exacto knife for THAT self-injuring purpose; 5.) and while cognitively ,i can recognize and honor the reasons i made my own body the canvas of my own private self-destructive art...; 6.) in this moment, i can neither conjur nor re-live the intense sadness and despair of feelings that caused me to use the exacto knife to carve my own skin in the first place, or hunger and marvel over using my own blood as ink and milking my skin for blood in the first place. i cannot re-feel in this moment the perverse pleasure my own body carving project once gave me. three years is not long ago, and yet feels like eons ago.. and after the jolt, and throwback to the past of exacting exacto knife hell, i return to the present and take twohundredfold more pleasure in my project at hand - a public exhibition that i WANT all to see, which i'll hang proudly on my wall, my crudely but lovingly cropped and framed images of multiple frames...rather than privately carving up my skin, then publically fretting and masking my arms and legs so others won't see the slashes i inflicted on myself for my own private display s.i.'s the least of my problems today. sadly, i didn't ever think at that time that slicing my skin constituted a problem... except when glimpses of my scars time and again shocked, saddened, upset, and angerered my close friends and even most detached therapists... i never tried to impress them; i insist that i hurt myself for my own pleasure... but again, recovery is the realization that the Self-Injuring Mindset - that I have a right to my own body, and to hurt myself whenever and however i damn well please, is ALSO a very real form of denial: DENIAL #1: i've got no choice but to recognize that and accept that i co-habit a world where the majority of my peers, family, and health professionals disagree with my self-injuring manifesto, and - DENIAL #2: no matter how i feel about my ME-given right to mark,slice,carve myself as i friggin' please, my behavior DOES bother, effect, and often upset other people - and regardless of my philosophical intensions, if i've got a self-less or non-narcisstic bone in my body, i'll look beyond my self-aborbed cutting activity, and respect the feelings of those i love and at least not try to flaunt my behavior in their faces - or don't deny their pain, even if i deny them the right to that pain. well, i'm on recovery lane whether i feel my two feet walking it or not.... now, if only the day can come when, on some random sunday afternoon, i'll be actively scrubbing my bathroom toilet seat and the long forgotten memory of using this toilet for any other reason than sh*tting, flushing a natural's day excretion, and returning to life...will jolt me with similar surprise.
MUSIC: generic dave brubeck jazz
READING: zizeks rambling book on iraq
FEELING:crampy (the body), clearer (the mind)
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