Rejected

Late last month I saw my shrink. It was one of those days where I woke up drowning in self-loathing. As I wrote about in this post, I showed up to my appointment about ten minutes late and was a sloppy incoherent mess of emotions. I mostly just cried and rambled before leaving in an admittedly abrupt and tantrum-y way. My frustration was not with my shrink, it was with myself and how dysregulated I felt at that time.

She called the next business day and left a voicemail saying she wanted to check in. She also offered a couple of times for our next appointment and said we should talk about “how you want things to proceed from here.” She mentioned that my medication seems to be more or less “squared away” and she’s wondering how this would “work best for me.”

It was a nice enough voicemail but I had a bad feeling about it. I mentioned this whole scenario to my therapist who suggested I schedule a follow-up sooner rather than later and suggested that my shrink was simply trying to open a dialogue about our work together.

Perhaps.

Honesty

You told me to be honest. Well, you asked. I don’t know, you said something about honesty.

So I told you the truth. I said I WANT to be anorexic. I WANT to prove I am someone special, someone strong, someone worthy. I am not a “dieter” – nothing so common, so mediocre, so temporary.

You said I already AM anorexic. You brought down the DSM-V from the top shelf and read out the words that I know you don’t even believe in. You said numbers are stupid and categories are dangerous.

Still, you said that my diagnosis is anorexia. That’s what you would call me: anorexic.

But it doesn’t matter.

I am not anorexic ENOUGH. Not yet.

But then you got upset. And, yes, there IS room for both my truth and yours. You pointed out that maybe your truth got a little bigger than mine and I agree. You’re allowed to be angry that I hurt myself, but I’m allowed to feel upset about your emotions.

Because this is what’s real. This is what’s me. And if you cannot sit with that…if you cannot see me in the difficult moments that upset you…

you cannot see me at all.

-River

February

I hate February.

I was born in February. Late February.

I have many trauma anniversaries. Probably at least one for as many days as there are in a calendar year. It’s hard to imagine that nearly three decades of abuse wouldn’t have covered all 366 potential days.

But something about February is always harder than the other months.

Maybe it’s my birthday. The beginning of it all.

I know there are traumas around my birthday, as there are around all holidays and celebrations. I know I was always hurt on or around my birthday. Not only by my parents.

I was date raped on my birthday in senior year of college. And there was an earlier incident…

Yesterday in session, I was flipping through an old journal. I opened the page to February 5th, 2002.

The entry is one sentence long:

New Levels of Self-Hatred

My levels of self-hatred are at an impressive and nearly debilitating high right now. I recently wrote about my decision to not weigh myself every damn morning.

That lasted one week. Or six days, really.

Then Saturday came and I’d gained nearly 4lbs. Logically I knew this was likely water weight from having my period, but seeing that number threw me into a tailspin. I was devastated. I weighed myself on Sunday and was already back down 2lbs, but the emotional damage had been done.

I’ve weighed myself every morning since, seeing anything within a 5lb range of Saturday’s number. I either stay the same or gain.

That is unacceptable.

I could tell myself it’s hormones or water weight or even muscle weight since I’ve been doing more strength training and eating more calories to fuel those workouts. I can look at my intake and know, rationally, that it is impossible for me to have gained actual fat. I don’t even eat enough to fuel my body through its basic functions like breathing and pumping blood, so there’s no possibility that I could be eating an excess that would add fat to my body.

Yet still, I see that number go up and I immediately feel fatter. I look in the mirror and just KNOW I am fatter.