If the obsession was gone...

My therapist had me write this as a starting point for deciding whether getting rid of my OCD, or at least the main obsession that is both my safety net and kryptonite, is worth it. I haven't decided. Anyway, here's what I came up with. Read at your own risk. It's uncensored and feels very vulnerable. I'll be honest, I'm a little scared to post it, but here it is.


My life without Emi... what would it look like?

I pulled back the blankets, looked outside at the beautiful falling rain, and shuffled out of bed, ready to start the new day. It was going to be a hell of a long day, but with a good breakfast and an early start, we’d make good time and be well on our way to sunny Southern California.

After a hot shower, a hotter cup of coffee, and two bowls of cereal – with soymilk, thank you – I hucked all the bags into the Jeep and we were on our way. I was glad Adam was driving, and that we were taking his Jeep; that way I could read the new mystery novel series I’d been dying to sink my teeth into, and I’d have plenty of room to stretch out my long legs en route.

“Hey baby,” said Adam, planting a kiss on my mouth before he shut the car door. “Did you get the little cooler from the fridge?”

“The one with all the Mikes?” I asked.

“That’s the one.”

“Got it, it’s in the trunk with all the duffels. You ready to hit the road?”

“Ready to hit the road,” said Adam. “Let’s blow this popsicle stand!”

I hopped into the backseat next to Deirdre and leaned my seat back to dive into the book. It was a tasty hell of a book, packed with action and humor, and babes to boot. I could just imagine them making a movie of it, staring Kate Beckinsale, or maybe Keira Knightley. I hardly noticed the first five hours flying by, and I only looked up long enough to switch to the second book in the series.

“Good book, I take it,” said Deirdre.

“The best,” I said. “It’s getting me so pumped for all the roller coasters. Oh hey Deirdre. Hand me one of those Snickers bars.”

I popped it in my mouth and opened volume two, which kept me well occupied until somewhere around Eugene, where we made an emergency stop for Laura to puke her brains out, despite her honored place in the front seat.

“That’s a bitch,” I commented, looking up briefly from a steamy sex scene.

Deirdre shook her head. “Saw that coming 400 miles ago.”

“Oh yeah?” I asked, taking a sip of my soda and turning back to Jamie and Nicholson getting it on. “I guess we’ll be here a few, huh?” I stretched out, taking in the juicy details, making note for later that night, where hopefully Adam and I would have a hotel room to ourselves.

Presently, Laura re-entered the jeep, looking peaky but relieved.

“Hey hun,” I said. “You want some ginger ale or anything?”

“No,” she said, “let’s just go.”

“Alrighty.” I shrugged at Deirdre and turned back to my book.

****

I drove past Lake Union and felt nothing… nothing but joy for being in Seattle. The seaplanes weren’t a symbol; they were part of the scenery.

I read a novel about a girl with bulimia, and I only read the vomiting scenes once, thinking nothing significant of them when the novel was over.

I wrote a story about fast cars and rich food, and nobody threw up. I wrote a whole novel and felt no need to focus obsessively on it. No characters with frail health, no unnecessary hangovers… just a perfectly understandable one here and there, and I didn’t dwell on their digestive misery, just remarked on it and carried on.

My friend got carsick on the way to the mall, and I didn’t care. I didn’t want to hurt myself. I didn’t want to join her. It just was, and then we got to the mall and everything was fine, and we had fun shopping.

I watched Ten Things I Hate About You, and nobody stared at me when Kat lost all the tequila. And I felt nothing. No adrenaline. No fear about the awkward looks. Just an admiration for Julia Stiles’ and Heath Ledger’s amazing acting talents.

I took an anatomy class, and there was nothing outstanding about the digestive system. It was just another part of the human body.

I got food poisoning, and it sucked. Physically, and only physically. I threw up and then I felt so much better, and then my day was fine. And so was the next week, and the next month, and a year later, I had no idea as to the date on which it had happened.

I moved on with my life.

****

But was I ready? Emi was the horizontal threads of my fabric, the Id, one might say. Lauren, the Ego, was only the vertical thread.

Take Emi away, and all you see is a pile of very colorful thread. One dimensional and uncomplicated.

When Lauren couldn’t take it alone, when she was scared and stuck somewhere unfamiliar, she wanted Emi to hold her hand, blind her to reality.

Who cares if my best friend raped my sister? I can ignore it and write stories where everyone is sick. That’s familiar, safe, I know how to deal with that, I’ve done it for years…

What heart problem? It can be covered up with an obsession just like anything else.

I CAN’T HANDLE HOW EVERYONE IS HURTING MORE THAN I AM. I know. I can pretend. I’ll tell Emi all about it, and we’ll obsess together. It’ll be fun, and she’ll tell me how to feel like them. I can experience it all, everything but the bile sliding up my throat… yes, I can understand… I can come so close…

But never close enough, and in the end, I’m angry at Emi. To bring me so close to Understanding and leave me on the outside, how could she?

It’s not her fault. She can’t change my physical body, only my mind.
But is changing my mind worth it when it leaves me “Miss Halfway,” tearing me further apart in the end?

But to be one direction of threads with no weave is torn apart too.

How, exactly, am I supposed to be whole?

Exercise-Induced ARRRGH!

Here's a little, very uncensored, piece I wrote earlier today. Warning: extremely whiny, self-loathing, and painfully honest. Yeah. Apparently I'm suffering from depression... so say the five dffferent self-tests. Anyway. Here's this:


Is This Vulnerable Enough?


I feel like I’m ruining everything I touch.

I started researching asthma as a way to get away from the vomiting obsession. I thought that would be a good way to redirect my attention so that I could do something else with Tory’s poor health, thus not making her throw up all the time and feeding my obsession.

So. Asthma. Totally different. Perfectly logical alternative, right? No.

It was fine at first, but then, just like with the vomiting, I became afraid to say the words, became more likely to dance around the words, just like

Throwing up and motion sickness and nauseous and all those words I don’t want to say out loud, because then I’d be talking about it. The thing I obsess about. Shouldn’t talk about it. Humiliating. Foolish. WEAK.

So then I didn’t want to talk about asthma that way, even though it had no history. No phobia. No old obsessions. No Zac Hanson having trouble breathing on stage and me flipping a bitch about it. Just an idea, a diversion to get me away from the real obsession. But now I can’t talk about it either. It’s become another fucking keyword. And why? Because I tried to fix the first one. What next? Will I torment someone with chronic headaches and become unable to say the words “headache, ibuprofen, pain”? Or maybe a fear of heights. Or snakes. Or anything. I could touch anything with my attention, make anything my distraction, and then kill it, make it any damn keyword, another thing I can’t say, another thing I get both giggly and panicky about when it comes up in conversation, online, on the silver screen…

But then I had an idea. Maybe it was a good idea. Maybe it was just that stupid empathy attacking me again. I’m a terrible runner. Terrible. Can’t run for more than a minute or two without wiping out. Feels like I can’t get enough air, no matter how easily it slides down my throat. Not satisfying. Can breathe, yes, but can’t obtain enough oxygen. Maybe asthma, a mild form, of course, was attacking me while I ran. Yes! It had to be true. It would make sense of everything, the shortness of breath, the chest discomfort I had always blamed on my heart, and been told over and over again was not anything to do with my heart. And my cousin had just been diagnosed with exercise-induced asthma, for the burning pain in her trachea, just like mine, and it all made sense, I was so sure…

But it wasn’t. And now I feel completely invalidated. I need a REASON for being such a horrible runner. I hate that no matter how much I run, swim, I still am no good, I run a TEN MINUTE MILE, not even sure I could do that well now… and it’s not my heart, and now it’s not my lungs either? THEN WHAT THE FUCK IS IT? The only reason I can come up with is that I am really as pathetic as I seem, that I really am in such horrible shape… that I am no better than my whiny little sister that always says she can’t do it, she’s gonna die, no more exercise, boohoo I’m a fucking wimp. Am I the same as her? Does everyone feel like I do when I run, but they just deal with it and I can’t? Am I that pitiful? It’s not my heart, it’s not asthma, so what other answer do I have?

Or worse… do I just want to have it the way I want to have every other damn problem so I can understand? I have a hell of a history with that one. I want to understand motion sickness. Understanding on an intellectual level isn’t enough. I have to feel. I have to experience. I have to truly get it. It was the same way with eating disorders, cutting… as ashamed as it makes me, the fucking empathy is probably half the reason I did any of those things in the first place to understand… not because I was a cutter at heart, or anorexic, but because I wanted to feel what it was like… so I did.

At least I think so. It’s a fuzzy line now. One cut is all it takes to fuel an addiction. I may have done it out of empathy, but now it’s done, and I want it, I want more. I want to hurt myself more than anything right this minute.

Actually, I would rather know what the hell is wrong with me. But if the answer is still NOTHING than I would gladly settle for slicing into my skin over and over and over with the sharpest razor and drinking my blood until I throw up, and then I’ll have experienced everything. Maybe I’ll even panic so much I’ll stop breathing for a minute and then it will ALL make sense.

But I’m not going to do that. I promised too many people I wouldn’t. Including myself. But it doesn’t mean I don’t want to. I do. I want terribly to cut right now. I want to cut because I hate all of this. I hate feeling pathetic, like my sister, I hate not knowing, I hate not understanding, I hate that I want to understand, I hate the empathy, I hate how fucking obsessive I am, how I draw everyone’s problems into my body, as if my own weren’t enough.

They’re not, right? My dad moved to California and isn’t paying for college. But he never hit me. He wasn’t the abusive alcoholic absent father many kids suffer. I have a weak stomach. So what? Some people are allergic to everything in the grocery store, or are handicapped, or have cystic fibrosis, and I’m complaining about a little sensitivity to dairy? So the fuck what? Nobody cares!! My complaining is useless! Sure I have problems. But there are NOTHING next to the misery I see all around me… and that’s what makes me so fucking miserable… the fact that everyone else is. I have to be miserable too… or else. And yet I hate it. I hate this empathy. I want to feel my own feelings, be glad that I can read in the car and breathe the free air, and I can walk where ever I want without a wheelchair or anything, but instead, I’m crying about that tiny ounce of fat over my stomach, the fact that I have no breasts, bad skin, am too tall… does any of this really matter when I could have NO legs, eczema, Marfan’s syndrome? It shouldn’t! But here I am feeling sorry for myself! Wanting to HURT myself. What the fuck is wrong with me?