Corm Before The Storm

Beautiful Cornwall.

The unexpected warmth of the late October sun; the flat, brilliantly clear light; the depth of blue... This is a place I'd really love to live someday.
My friends have been great. True friends. No terrible questions. Just simple observations and a couple of honest conversations, which in all fairness, is a lot more than I have had with most people in recent months.

I hadn't meant to eat or drink tonight, yet having succumbed to the call of alcohol, I've given in to both. I feel absolute despair right now.
I'm sure I must weigh so much.
I will never go away again without my scales.

Tomorrow I drive home and in some ways, I dread all that is waiting for me.
I wish I never needed anything but oxygen again.

Bloody Therapy

To The Woman,

This hurts me more than it hurts you.



(I hope you feel it though)

Dear Everyone...

... Although I'm not really up for saying too much, I do want to say that I've been quite... touched (*wince*) by the fact that you guys seem to be here regardless of the crap that I come out with.
I don't expect you to be and I don't mind if you're not, but it has hit me a bit and I want to say thank you, even while extending my arms to keep a distance.

It is difficult to put my thoughts out; partly because I risk being met with revulsion and scorn and partly because my mind is so full at the moment that any thoughts I have are packed too tight to breathe. It feels as though my thoughts are crammed into too small a space. Some are hunched over, defeated by silence and age whilst others feel cocooned in fragile threads, unrealised, stunted by the lack of space or daring.

Therapy has been different over the last two weeks or so. The woman sounded very pleased when she pointed out that I have been more 'well' when we have talked.
She noted the correlation between my sitting in the chair (I said I didn't want to lie down anymore) and my well part being more prominent.

My reaction is split.

I prefer to sit. I feel much more in control. The 'work' part of me comes more naturally and I am able to think more logically.
However, I don't think that she realises that the reason I have been 'well' is actually because another part of me has become increasingly UNwell.
I'm well in one part because in another, I'm abiding by stringent rules in order to have almost complete control over my body.
I'm at my lowest weight and at one point this week, I actually thought that I had cracked it.

"Well blow me down! I've finally taught myself not to need anything".

That's what I thought.

It's not true of course.
Tonight I have eaten a lot of chocolate but it feels manageable because I know I will starve and then work out for hours tomorrow and I'll lose it.

Pathetic?
Go ahead.
Pour out the scorn.

But it's working for me, for now.

My biggest problem is the parts thing... If this was a different part writing, it'd be telling you about the dread and fear. It'd be telling you about how it is to live like a hamster in a cage, running frantically on a wheel that it's forgotten how to get off.

I'm split y'see.
Split right down the middle.

Anyone got a zip?

Beyond Friday.

After Friday's session, being the mature adult that I am, I drank myself stupid.

And what better way of dealing with the desperation I was feeling?

(OK. You may not hear the irony that question is heavily weighted with... You'll just have to take my word for it. It is).

Although it feels as though almost every cell in my body has been screaming, the cries have been largely unintelligible. Trying to translate has been like walking down the street past people's conversations, catching snippets, exclamations, disjointed and unrelated.

I seem to be in very separate parts.

One part has been in agony.

Some nights have seen me curled, clutching my bear against my stomach, pressing into the pain in a fruitless attempt to make it subside.

Applying pressure to the wound, is what springs to mind as I type.

The writhing and the breathless, empty pain, reminiscent of the twisting nights where my sister's illness was so new and the loss was so raw and immediate.

That same deep and desperate ache.

The ungroaned, churning and building in the middle of me.

So, one part agony... Another, disgust and hatred.

It started the following afternoon when, despite the alcohol - induced drum, beating in my head, I stood under the shower, my inside no more than a shell. Sans feeling.

Suddenly and unaccountably, a photograph appeared in my head.

Dad and three little girls wearing white spotted, cotton sundresses.

One little girl is standing slightly in front of the others three figures. She has her arms folded across her, clutching her arms as though cold; and her face is a picture of frowning discontent.

Perhaps I was cold. Perhaps sulking.

But in less than a second, I was flooded with a disgust and self hatred so strong it might have split me in half, my body the tower of Babel and my horror as powerful as God's own rage.

It's my fault. I was the sister from hell. If I hadn't existed, she would have been ok. It must have been cold there in my shadow, playing in my head.
And that little girl, THAT little girl, she needs to be starved to death.

And she is.
I'm at my lowest weight in a long time today. It feels good to be in control of her.

A third part experiences rage.

Monday's session, which I can't much recall, stoked a fire of anger at myself.

How dare I have this... How dare I?

Everyday I work with children who have suffered the most unimaginable trauma.

Torture, rape, abuse, terrible loss.

I go and see the woman, I tell her and she listens.

She talks about me. My pain. Things that may or may not have happened and I am so, so, so angry.

Like me, this woman hears the most awful things. Atrocities. People who have suffered beyond what I would consider to be bearable.

And here I am. And here she is listening.

I can't get past the fact she must be disgusted by me.

I am invalid. INvalid. There are no explanations or excuses that justify my pain.

My propensity for weakness is astounding.

On Monday my anger and my fear is too much, and I vow not to go back to her and I am absolutely certain that I won't, because I can't justify it.

I consider an email which will ensure I am too ashamed to ever return, just in case my will were to weaken.

And now, come Wednesday, I am not sure how I will cope with not having a place to take this pain. Because I can hate it, deny it, minimise it, rage and resent it all I like. But it's still there and

it still makes me fold in half.

And I hate myself with all the raw passion of an angst ridden teenager, and all the weary loneliness of a man at the end of an unfulfilled life.

Today has mostly been a series of blanks inside.

My Very Sad Case came into my room first thing. She wanted to talk about a shock she had had.

I listened and spoke carefully. I wanted her to feel the care.

I taught my lessons, I ate some lettuce and tomatoes, I wrote my plans and I came home and curled up and slept.

Writing this post, I am again struck by the wave of disgust at myself.

There is no end to it.

Hiding Self Harm.

*****Content may be triggering******

I tried not to wince as I hauled my body onto the couch last Monday.

I had spent the day explaining to concerned colleagues that I had pulled a muscle at the gym.

In fact, I cut so badly that one of the wounds wouldn't stay sealed. Each time I showered, the steristrips peeled off and the cut was left gaping again.

When she asked where I had cut, I put my hand against it.

"The groin", she said, nodding knowingly.

(It might just be me, but therapists seem to have an extraordinarily irritating habit of nodding and 'yes'ing when you reveal something.
To my mind, this seems to be a smokescreen which hides the fact that the therapist is buying some figuring time, whilst simultaneously convincing the client that they are, in fact, omnipotent and had known the thing they had just revealed well before they said anything).

I digress.

Later in the session she announced that she was concerned I was cutting so close to a major artery.

Something in me froze.

My knowledge of anatomy not being as it could be, I had completely neglected to recall the fact that the area I cut is home to the femoral artery.

I'd only have about 3 minutes.
It's a horrible place to cut.

It only occurred to me after I left that her twisted therapists' mind probably decided that the fact that I cut there is because I have some sort of repressed sexual aggression towards my mother... or some such rubbish.

In fact, the reason I chose to cut near the groin is purely practical.
It will not be seen.
Even a (not too skimpy) bikini might hide the worst of the scarring.

Personally, I'd much rather use my feet (as I used to) or my arms.
But they are both so visible and I would probably rather die than have someone who knows me find out about self harm.
I couldn't ever go to hospital because I'd never cope with the horrible shame of someone seeing.

It has then, come as rather a shock to realise just how close I was when I cut the other night. And how close I must have been so many times before.

I looked up diagrams of the femoral artery in order to see where it is and it is hard to find something which specifically shows it in relation to the rest of the body. Suffice to say that I must have had some lucky escapes.

Ridiculously and somewhat inexplicably, I'm on a cutting spree at the moment.
It is desperate and painful and calming.

I am having to monitor the depth carefully and that is a real battle when a part of me wants to get right to the core of me.

A week later, the wound I refer to is, strikingly, a mouth.
No longer bleeding, but not properly sealed, it keeps emitting pus, despite my half hearted efforts to disinfect.
The pain from the cut is deep; which leaves me confused as to why I would find it necessary to cut again two days later, albeit far more times and far less deeply.

I suspect that even the most understanding of people might struggle to understand how on earth a person could inflict damage upon themselves in such a way.

The concept feels lip curlingly revolting to me... and I DO this!

I can well understand those who find it nauseating to imagine. I can understand the disgust and anger others may feel.

I myself have a part of me which identifies very strongly with those who may view the deliberate damage and mutilation of areas of the body as a terrible act of selfishness and hopeless self indulgence.

Ultimately, self harm is a silent, violent scream.

It is a way of putting something desperate on the outside.

It is a way of crying without heaving and sobbing and worrying about your eyes being red.

It's a way of safely taking the top layer off the toppling tower.

Therapy

If you like to read careful, well thought out, balanced thoughts, penned by the dim glow of understanding and hindsight which therapy allegedly affords us, please look away now.
In fact, look away anyway.

My therapy session...

I don't even think I can find words.
I haven't been able to think about any words she said.

She spoke about "mentalising".
(Don't ask me, never heard of it)

Apparently, according to her with the giant therapeutic crystal ball, my parents were unable to do this with my / our feelings.

So nobody heard them and nobody bore them.

Woe is me, I cry in mock distress.

What does she want me to do?
Throw a pity party for myself? The much loved, much encouraged, much adored eldest child who, by comparison to most of the population on earth, barely knows what it IS to suffer?
Does she want me to be upset because my parents, in their love and their desperation to bring us u to be moral and responsible members of society, deemed it okay to smack us sometimes?
Does she want me, in my comfortable Western world lifestyle, to weep and wail because things didn't work out quite the way they would have done in an ideal world?

I disgust myself and today, she disgusted me too.

I walked in today and she just pointed a gun at me and fired repeatedly until I told her that I couldn't take it anymore and I wanted to leave.

She stopped firing but somewhere, something had curled u during the shoot, hands over ears, feet drawn in tightly.
I don't even know what I felt, or if I felt at all.

I'm a mass of contradictions, she says.
I nod.
I'm caught in absolute extremes, she says.
I nod.
My parts are totally opposite extremes, she says.
Haven't you already said that? I nod.

It's because nobody could hear the feelings.
I stop nodding.
Nobody could bear them or make them manageable.

I don't believe this.

Okay, look at the evidence.
So I do.
And yes, it seems to be there, but I CAN'T reconcile it. Not with what I know about how loved we are.
I can't.

I'm not even touching the throbbing pain I have in my chest.
It sickens me as it pulses.
I breathe through my nose as nausea beats in waves, my mouth shut tightly.

Today her kindness made me want to snap myself into small, sharp pieces.
I hate her for it.
I don't want it. It will make me ill.
She will take it away and I will be left, a small, curled skeleton in the back of an hollow shell.

Sitting Tight

Sometimes I have to stay very still and keep away from reflection... From my reflection, I guess.

It's been like that lately.

Even in therapy I have stayed as far away as I can.

I call it, "staying on my outside".

It can be a strange place to be because, once I'm there, I find it very hard to believe in any of the things I struggle with. I even believe that I am lying and that nothing inside really exists.

At the moment, I am not sure.

What I have been struggling with a lot is the selfishness I see in myself.

I feel as though therapy, with its emphasis on me, has caused an increasing preoccupation with SELF.

I have reached new levels of self disgust lately.

Again, SELF.

Hence I have been staying on my outside.

On the outside I function very well because it is all about the needs of others.

I haven't been here at all lately and so haven't read anything. I'm trying to catch up on lots of blogs posts I have missed.

Bear with me...

And Gail...

yes.

Warning.

If you could see beyond the iron,

the posion spikes, curling wires

the skin ripped red and white

gashed, gnashed, wept upon

in fury, in agony, in hatred

raw, numb nothing

numb

nothing



You think your kindness

your prayer, your touch

would soothe

would stay

would answer.



Ha!



If you saw beneath my skin

Your lip would curl in the corner

and then twist,

Your tongue screaming in surprise

expecting citrus sweetness

sucking, now curling,

rancid overflow of bitter scorn.

Your hand would scream

scaulded, scabbed, scarred

whipped away, withdrawn

revulsed, repulsed

spattered with acrid pus of greed,

of need.



Inside,

I am putrid

How can truth exist

in such decay?



Stay away

I will infect those

who refuse to stay

on the outside.

I am afraid

that if kindness doesn't kill me,

Me will kill kindness.

No 'Nice' Here.

I'd love to write with the grace and maturity of someone who has gained the much sought after emotional wisdom and perspective that sometimes seeps from the recollection of pain.
I'd love to maintain a cool and collected distance from myself. For the feelings I have to be something I could hold away from my body and walk around, considering what they show me and what I can learn from them. (Picture some pretentious guy walking around a piece of abstract sculpture, head cocked to one side and forefinger deliberately curled over the crescent of his chin).
I'd like to be able to paint my inside as a wave of detached blue and green maturity, sculpt it in smooth, round curves or chisel it in cool, quiet marble.
I want it to look like the understated elegance of silk, smell like the comfort of fresh white cotton and sound like the words of a beautiful song.

But.
It's not like that.
It's not looking or sounding how I want it to.

Instead it is the image of the screaming red child thrashing the floor. It's reds and blacks painted in blood. Heavy handed strokes from a graceless brush.
It is unsanded wood, splintered and charmless. Curses and ineloquent stammering, an ear clutching dissonance of petulant rage.
It is a mesh of shameful scribblings and blots, the retching stench of maggot ploughing flesh in the attic corner.

Too much, I know. I was just getting into it.

I jest, but in all honesty, all the melodramatic metaphors an similes in the world couldn't really touch the how I feel now.

I want to surround myself with fifty foot walls and then wrap barbed wire around and around the perimeter.
I told my therapist this in today's session and she asked which side she'd be on.
I didn't know and she suggested that perhaps she would have ease of access.

Yes. I thought.
Until you go and f*ck it up.

I so don't want to be this pathetic but it I'm being swallowed alive and I'm too disgusted by myself to even explain why.