It's Official

The trembling walk across the flagstones.

I'm fashionably late.

I don't realise at the time, but the man in the thick designer glasses and the understated floral shirt, watches from somewhere within the brick hexagon and says to his (note scribbling) trainee, "Ah. Here comes a skinny person. This must be her".

This man, I've met him before. About sixteen years ago.
I almost want to gag at the memory of a tortured, teenage me; hunched, shaking in the back of dad's car after a one off meeting with this man, my sister's consultant, in the unit where she was incarcerated.

I remember he was kind to me.
Finally: someone who wanted to know how it was for a sibling.
Muscles held taut in my gut, I clamp my jaw; frightened his listening will force a desperate stream of projectile grief.

My mother, dressed in the small laughter of middle class embarrassment, rolled her eyes and clicked her tongue.
Stupid daughter... Doesn't know WHAT she's saying..! As if WE ever lived in denial..! As if WE would ever overlook such a thing! OF COURSE we knew what was happening! OF COURSE we knew ALL ALONG!

Choking on the words forced back down my throat, I shook all the way home.
Shook as dad glanced apologetically in the rearview mirror.
Shook as dad worriedly concurred that PERHAPS it WAS possible that I had known, long before them, the reality of my sister's terrible death wish.

I didn't recognise the man, even as I tried to remember something concrete about the session we had had all those years ago.

I would never have dreamed I would end up in front of him again. And certainly not for this reason.

*****
At the end of today's assessment: the words, "Anorexia Nervosa".

Every syllable ricocheted off the wall of my chest.

How can I know and yet not know?

"You believe me? You take me seriously?"

I am frightened and shocked and ashamed and relieved and disgusted.


The question is not, whether I believe you, he says. The question is whether you can believe yourself and take this illness seriously.

Again. Bullets.

I'm not well.

I knew that.

I need another assessment appointment. We haven't quite covered everything.

We haven't?
God.

Worst thing?

I double booked it for the woman's appointment next Monday.
THAT'S how screwed my mind was.

Now what?

Before I leave, he comments on the dryness of my hands. Says he noticed as we met and shook hands.
He noticed that? What kind of person IS this?
He suggests creams.
I admit I am frightened of absorbing calories through my skin.
"Not possible", he persuades.
I nod, gritting my teeth and flashing untrusting smile.

"Ok", I lie. "I'll start using cream on the splits".
(I have eczema)
Next he'll tell me vitamins can't make you put on weight, but they can. I read up on water soluble and fat soluble vitamins. I know my stuff.

"I'm seeing ..... (my sister's name...)... this afternoon..."
Something in me freezes over
"I won't tell her I've seen you of course... confidentiality and all that..." He tails off.

"I have no idea what she thinks or feels", I offer, lamely because I am at a loss.
He looks at me, studied, careful.
"I think she's been very worried about you". Somehow, his hand is stretched out to me.
"I think she's been very jealous of me", I sink my teeth into his hand and bite down hard. "Jealous that she's in hospital and I'm not"...

He laughs (uneasily?). Blood drips from my mouth...

"...That's the only reason she gives a toss".

I walk away, my throat and eyes stinging and swelling; the metallic taste on my bottom lip.

He hates me. he hates me. He hates me.
He loves her. He loves her. He loves her.

I want to wring my own neck as I get into the car.
Maybe her neck too.

It's eleven o'clock.

The sun shines bright and I need to do a number of very bad things to get through the despair of the day.

I do all of them but still, thirteen or so hours later, I am sinking.

And Speaking of Country... Sometimes music will reach what nothing else can.

Anything beyond work has felt very dark and frightening this week. I have been fighting to stay 'on my outside'.

I've been listening to Paul Brandt, a country favourite of mine. He has sung to me on every car journey I've made this week.
Very kind of him.

I'm posting one of many songs where I appreciate the sentiment but am uncertain about the theology. Nevertheless, it has helped to keep something in me alive and above water.

The song talks about how love will find us if we can just 'hold on'. This presents all sorts of, 'but shouldn't we take more responsibility and do the seaching rather than being pathetic and waiting to be found', thoughts in my head... But for just this week, I have had to ignore the questions and the disagreement and allow it to comfort me a little.

I used to know this love he sings about and a part of me knows it probably exists regardless of me and how I feel, but there was a time once where I felt it rather than just knew in my head.

From the album 'Risk', Paul Brandt singing a cover of Nordeman's song Hold On.

And I am...

He will find you when you've called in all your favours
He will meet you at the bridges highest ledge

So baby don't look down
It's a long way
The sun'll come around to a new day

So hold on
Love will find you
Hold on
He's right behind you now
Just turn around and love will find you

Country Music and Me!

My old sound system certainly wouldn't have won any awards in a Stereo Beauty Contest.
A black and silver Panasonic monstrosity, it was the kind of thing that even looked incongruous in the 80's, despite being designed then! You get the picture right?

However ugly, I remember that stereo because it was my first encounter with country music.

There was a channel which I used to find when I turned the tuning knob by painstakingly tiny degrees, often all the way up the red line and then all the way back down again, until I found something that sounded like country!
I don't know what the channel or the program was, but when I first heard the music, something in me simultneously leapt up and lay down, with the happy comfort of a joyful reunion. Somehow I was 'found' by country music. It made sense of something innate but unknown and it still does that.

Ok... so country doesn't get you a lot of street cred around here and it's just not cool for someone my age, though perhaps now I'm getting on a bit it will become more accepetable! Either way, I'm coming out of the genre closet and admitting to my passion for all things country! Big American trucks (for any Kendel Carson fans!) prairies, Stetson hats, ranches, the mid West, Nashville, guitars on backs, boots, harps, checked shirts, pick up trucks... Admittedly, my American Dream isn't quite the traditional one but...
(We've all got to have a dream though right? One day I'll...)

Country music gets a raw deal. It is stereotyped and ridiculed mercilessly by most people under the age of 30 and although it has made some appearances in the mainstream charts in recent years (think Shania Twain and, more recently, Taylor Swift) it is still the butt of most music jokes - You've all heard the one about what happens when you play a country record backwards...)
Bizarrely, it has even been suggested that country music is somewhat dangerous inasmuch as there have been studies which have tried to prove a correlation between listening to country music and suicide! (Steven Stack and Jim Gundlach were the men responsible for this strange idea!)

I don't think there is a way to describe it, but country often picks me up from the grey and places me on a sunbeaten dirt track with the smell of hot grasses and the sense that the world is bigger and wider and more beautiful than I can see right now.

Perhaps it's the spirituality that seems to be carried up the roots and into the core of country, I'm not sure, but it's my kind of music and in some strange way, it gives me hope like nothing else on earth.
Country music lacks pretension. It's real... about real life and real people. It is a lot about love and relationships. God, working hard, drinking hard and family life are all themes and they are written honestly and without ambiguity.
I like the way that country takes a little of our secret hopes and our inner values and makes them real.

I love it that Dierks Bentley once said that "country music has always been the best shrink that fifteen bucks can buy" (!!) because it sums it up so beautifully! Country music ministers to the broken parts and advises the longings. It will sit with your grief and pain but it will also offer light and hope. It's message is that no matter how bad it gets, you will make it in the end.