The history of my graduate studies at Goddard College: a paper I wrote

I got to feeling nostalgic, so I went through my files and found this paper I did at the end of my graduate studies.  We call this a Process Paper.  These vary considerably between students.  Here’s what I came up with:

Flowers, Books, and the Making of a Dog Sweater:

My Life at Goddard College

 

Another vase of flowers awaited me as I returned to my apartment after the funeral.  I didn’t know their names–I don’t bother learning the names of flowers–let it suffice that, for a change, they meant something to me.  I unlocked my door, set the flowers on my table, and let my aging dog out of her crate.  She peered at me sadly.

I had been brave.  I had survived two wakes on Friday.  Hundreds of people had shown up.  I kept reasonably together at his funeral service.  Yes, I nearly lost it when they put him in the ground and now I’m a damn widow–

I stopped.  I told myself; don’t be so selfish.  Think of the family.  Think of your writing.  At least you’ve got that much.  And you have the dog.

A message on my machine.  I would listen to it later.  I stepped into my kitchen, and peeked into my refrigerator.  Nothing good in there.  In the bathroom, I ran the sink water and splashed cold water on my face.  Oh god I look horrible….

August 19, 2003.  The day my boyfriend, Joe died.  Heart attack.  I had seen him only an hour or so before he collapsed in his elevator.  What would I do?  Joe had been my constant companion, my only companion, for many years.  We had done everything together, from coffee dates to baseball games to romantic dinners, and we’d seen each other through some hard times.  You’d done things to make me mad before, Joe, but why’d you have to die on me?  Why?

I returned to the living room, picked up the phone, then put it back down.  I went through in my mind the things I had to do over the next few days.  I had to go to UMass/Boston to register for my first graduate class: a poetry survey course taught by Lloyd Schwartz.  It would keep me occupied until I was accepted into an MFA program.  I had had my hopes set on eventually attending Goddard’s low-residency program in Vermont.  But now, registering for just one poetry course–going into Boston by subway, and navigating a campus I barely knew–seemed impossible.  If Joe had been alive, what would he have said?  Would he have told me to give up?  No.  But I cannot do this thing.  I am stuck in my tracks without you.

I sat at my table, eyeing the sports memorabilia that Joe and I had collected over the years: bobble-head dolls, mini-baseball bats, cards, and on the wall, a photo of him with my dog, Tiger.  It was one of Joe’s dreams to catch a ball at a baseball game and give it to a child.  He was a ferocious ice cream eater.  We spent an occasional weekend during the summers at his family’s summer home at Humarock, a spit of land between Scituate and Marshfield, Massachusetts, one of the most peaceful places on earth.          One phone message.  I pressed PLAY.  “Julie, this is Paul Selig, director of the MFA in creative writing program at Goddard College.  I’m pleased to let you know that we’ve accepted you into the program, for the spring 2004 residency, which is in January.  The admissions office will send you a letter in the mail in a few days, along with some information….”

I slumped on my couch.  This couldn’t be true.  A dream had become reality, a dream without Joe.  The irony was too much to bear.  I grabbed a Kleenex and sobbed.

 

The winter of 2004 proved to be one of the coldest on record, especially in Vermont, where temperatures reached under 25 below in the mornings.  Being accustomed to Vermont winters–I had lived in Vermont for nine years once–I wasn’t fazed by the weather, but many Southerners at the residency were overwhelmed by the cold, and buildings at Goddard weren’t heated properly, either.  One morning during the eight-day residency we were without power.  Temps in the dorms dropped to the forties.  I ventured to the “help desk” to assist by answering phones.  People in charge considered evacuation of the campus, but fortunately, power returned at 7am.  I jumped from my seat and screamed, “Yes!” with my fist in the air.

Joe was everywhere at the residency.  I wanted so much to call him, to tell him of the beauty of the place, the long, blinding, white walk to the library–I nearly veered off the road and got lost in the woods–and the snow-topped trees.  I wanted to tell him how annoyed I was that the place was not wheelchair accessible, that he would have had trouble navigating the narrow, gravel-covered paths if he were here.  I told him these things in spirit, and was overwhelmed with grief.

I met Kenny, my advisor, who I found was also physically disabled, and I felt an immediate kinship with him.  Advising group was lively, fast-paced, and challenging; the students were bright and on their toes.  Kenny, always with a sense of humor, called me Gail by accident several times.  From then on, I was known in advising group as “Not Gail.”

I wrote up a study plan and reading list, deciding to write about “madness, not what it is, but how it is expressed.”  I was referring to my own disability, mental illness, which for now I kept tucked away, as it had not yet presented itself as a problem.  Books to be annotated included Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, the complete stories of Flannery O’Connor, and twelve more texts.  The plan for creative work was to write short stories and a novella, though what panned out was to become a novel.  I began writing immediately.  Joe, you are right here with me…see how excited I am!

Back home again, I immediately ran into snags with the reading list.  I found One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez painfully tedious, and could not read another page past about one-third of the way through.  I did, however, finish it, and wrote an annotation about Garcia Marquez’s marvelous invention of the “sleeping sickness” in which people forgot absolutely everything.  I confessed to Kenny that I had skimmed portions of The Golden Notebook, and in my annotation clearly stated that I felt that the book was much longer than it needed to be.  Kenny wrote: “I think you mistake length for what is organic and necessary,” to which I replied, “I feel the character centers her life too much on what happens in the bedroom…at her age she should know better….In the “Free Women” section it’s all expository dialogue and could contain more action.”

Finally, though, I found books that I liked, such as Jane Eyre and its complement, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.  Regarding the Rhys, I wrote, “Antoinette is powerless because she is a woman, and has inherited madness from her parents.  It is inevitable and necessary to the narrative that Antoinette should disappear.  She makes sure she has literally and fatally disappeared for good.  Considering this, Antoinette has finally claimed her right.”  I wrote my first short critical paper about two pages of Jane Eyre, dissecting Bronte’s methods of building suspense.

I was so moved by Virginia Woolf’s depiction of the mad Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway that William Styron’s Darkness Visible, a brilliant work in its own right, was somewhat of a disappointment, and this subject I took on in my second short critical paper.  One should “show, don’t tell,” I pointed out–the old adage that isn’t always a steadfast rule.  Here, I brought in The Golden Notebook, stating that Anna Wulf’s lame descriptions of her “anxious tension that [she] could positively smell, like a fog of nervous exhaustion,” noting that here Lessing had said positively nothing.  Yet I wasn’t taking into account the fact that Wulf was an unreliable narrator, that her account of mental turmoil didn’t have to be eloquent, much as Styron’s account was meant to be tamer, more methodical, and more instructional than the wild fancies of Septimus Smith.  I did, in fact, use Styron’s work, and not Woolf’s, for my teaching practicum, when I wanted to show my students examples of descriptions of mental illness.

My creative thesis was moving along at a reasonable pace.  I fashioned my main character, Irma, after my mother, who seems to have some form of ADHD.  The novel takes place at Humarock, where, as it turned out, Irma, then a widow, was time-sharing a cottage on the beach with her daughter, Megan, who has anorexia.  I started the piece in third person, and fluctuated between Irma’s and Megan’s point of view, but then Kenny suggested the switch to first person narration, which I tried and stuck with, though I wasn’t certain it was the best choice.  My creative work was not at all integrated with what I was reading.  This would not begin to happen until my third semester, which was then light years away.  Nonetheless, my writing took off under Kenny’s tutelage; he was very, very quick to point out problems with the building of tension in narrative and the discrepancies in voice and point of view.  Whatever questions he had in his responses, I had to answer in my next process letter, and correspondingly, had to make right in my work.

All along, I knew I wasn’t working up to my potential.  I knew that without Joe’s encouragement, school was a shell I couldn’t crack, a world not my own.  It wasn’t that I was uninterested or bored with school.  I lacked motivation and perseverance, the two qualities that Joe admired me for the most when it came to academia.  I passed the semester, but I didn’t think Kenny was particularly happy with my work.

One struggle I had during the semester was that my puppy, QB took up much of my time.  He was a difficult puppy, and more than once I considered taking him to the behavioral veterinarian recommended by QB’s regular vet.  But I held off.  QB would improve, I reckoned, in time.  Meanwhile, the heartache continued.  I missed my old dog and I missed Joe: what would Joe say about QB?  What would he recommend that I do?

Two days after mailing in my last packet, I was hospitalized in a local psychiatric ward.  Enough was enough–the stress was too much, and my psychiatric disability was getting the better of me.  I came to my second residency with a secret plan to beg Kenny to change my grade for the past semester to an “Unsuccessful Semester.”  Failure.

But Kenny didn’t fail me, and proceeded to write up another difficult reading list for me: Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, which would count as two annotations, since the book was so long, Grace Paley’s complete stories, stories by Anton Chekhov, Janet Frame’s An Angel at My Table, Harriet Doerr’s Stones for Ibarra, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes were Watching God, and others.  I found the one teaching text, John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, useful during my third semester when I finally wrote my long critical paper, and Kenneth Koch’s I Never Told Anybody: Teaching Poetry Writing to Old People was very helpful when I eventually did my teaching practicum, years later.  And I found the old standard, Huckleberry Finn, to be an eye-opener when it came to inner dialogue, particularly when Huck wrestles with himself as to whether to turn Jim over to the authorities.

At my second residency, I was fortunate to have a wonderful roommate, Jennifer Rumford, who would subsequently become my mentor throughout my schooling.  Although Jennifer was a semester behind me, she graduated before me, and guided me along the long road toward graduation, always supportive, always there for me.

During my second semester, I couldn’t pull together the required long critical paper, nor could I successfully plan a teaching practicum.  Academically, things weren’t looking up for me, and in October, I was hospitalized again.  The grief was too much to bear.  I was able to get an extension on the semester.

I chose to attend the January residency, and was lucky enough to get permission to do so from Paul Selig.  Unfortunately, I developed a bad cold while I was there.  One night, while I was in the throes of a fever, Joe appeared to me in a dream: He was grinning. “You should see this place!” he said.  “The food is great, and they have shows every night!”

I did finish up the semester, in March, by the deadline, but barely.  One packet contained only four annotations and no creative work.  Another packet contained creative work but no annotations. It was all I could muster.  Kenny passed me.  I don’t know why.

I spent the next year in and out of the hospital.  The social worker and nurses there told me that I should give up hopes of ever returning to Goddard, and that I should attend a mental health day program, where I would attend “groups” all day long from 9:00 in the morning until 3:00 in the afternoon.  I also enjoyed knitting, so they recommended a knitting club.  These would provide the “structure,” the social worker said, that, according to her, Goddard did not provide for me, “and will give you something to do with your time.”  I argued that though the program at Goddard did not have “classes,” it had provided “structure” and I was certainly busy with it.  I became angry and despondent.  There was one nurse who was on my side, but there was little she could do to change the status quo.  “Just don’t give up hope,” she said.  “I, for one, think you’ll make it back to school.  Something has to give, somehow.”

I left the hospital feeling hopeless that I would ever improve, but something did change, suddenly and significantly.  I was put on a new medication, Topamax, and that changed everything for me.  I was able to write again and concentrate.  I began a blog, and wrote regularly in it.  I wrote furiously, and it became an outlet for creative expression for me.  After the renovations were complete on the local library, I began studying there every day, writing in my blog, and gradually the quality of my writing improved.  At last, I decided to take writing courses at the Boston Center for Adult Education, with writer Toni Amato, and finally, made the decision to return to Goddard at last.  I had rediscovered myself as a writer, no longer writing fiction, but creative nonfiction as I was writing in my blog, and I took my writing very seriously.

It was then that I made the very difficult decision to abandon my first thesis, the novel, and go on with another thesis, a work of creative nonfiction.  The novel was doomed to failure anyway.  Why?  It was because my character, Irma, was based on my mother, first of all–and secondly, it was because Joe was everywhere in my thesis.  The story took place at Humarock, and Irma’s husband was dead, and his absence filled my pages like the grief I felt over losing Joe–and my father.  I was not ready to write about Joe–yet.

My decision to change campuses came to me in a flash.  I knew I needed a “geographical cure.”  I needed a smaller situation, where I would know more people and not get lost in a crowd.  At meals at the Plainfield campus, I had generally eaten alone.  No one had bothered to sit with me.  They all had their own friends and their own little cliques, sadly.   And when I examined who was on the faculty at Port Townsend and saw the name Aimee Liu, I knew I had to make the change.

July, 1981.  I was in the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vermont, perusing the paperbacks, when one caught my eye.  I liked the title: Solitaire.  Didn’t that describe what I was doing with my life, playing against myself, constantly worrying about my weight, my body, restricting my food intake to the point of starvation?  I glanced at my bony hands that shook as I held the book.  “One young woman’s triumph over anorexia nervosa.”  And what was that?  Some kind of cancer?  I opened the book to a random page: “Already I’m as thin as Twiggy.  Kimmy’s mother is so concerned about my weight that she’s offered to send along an extra lunch to school each day for me.  I graciously decline….I will eat nothing for dinner for a month….”  I had to buy this book.  And it was not from some therapist, nurse, or psychiatrist, but from Aimee’s book that I learned that I had anorexia.  So when I saw the name Aimee Liu on the faculty at the Port Townsend campus, I took it as a sign of good fortune: I would switch campuses.  And although I never worked with Aimee directly, I always felt a special connection with her.  I felt as though she was looking out for me the whole time I was there.

I arranged with Paul Selig that I would come to Port Townsend as a G2, and subsequently complete four semesters, including a G5 semester, totaling six.  And with two extra years in the middle (it would be two and a half including another semester I took off) my entire schooling took five and a half years instead of the expected two years, which isn’t bad considering it took me nearly three decades to finish my bachelor’s degree.  I would attend a total of three residencies in Vermont and five residencies in Port Townsend, plus my graduation residency–nine in all.

Something tragic had happened, in the meanwhile, that would color my thinking every day of my life afterward: QB had become aggressive.  After a lengthy ordeal and sessions with the behavioral vet, a Prozac trial, and biting incidents, I had to put him to sleep.  I have thought of QB every day since.

Though I love airplane rides, it is traumatic to fly across the country to a different coast and a different time zone and climate.  Though I came prepared with the right medications, clothing, school supplies, and books, I was still overwhelmed because I was in a new place, Fort Worden, and my mental illness flared up every time I came to the Port Townsend residencies.  I found myself wishing that I could call Joe, and I imagined his gruff voice, reassuring me on my cell phone–but I was on my own now.  Thankfully, I had wonderful roommates, and the general atmosphere around campus was caring and supportive.  I was never completely alone at the residencies–there was always someone to help.  At one residency, I was so doped up on one of my medications that I fell asleep in most of the classes, but thankfully people were understanding and kind, and somehow, I survived it all.

For my first two Port Townsend semesters I studied under the tutelage of Paisley Rekdal, who patiently guided me through the beginning stages of my new nonfiction thesis and some very interesting literature.  It was serendipitous that I would start out with Lauren Slater’s Welcome to My Country, because this book formed the backbone of my study of literature for the four semesters I spent at Port Townsend.  I identified strongly with the narrator, who had been a chronic mental patient and then had become a writer.  Slater writes about her work as patient-turned-psychologist.  Eventually she worked in the same hospital where she herself had been hospitalized.  Later, in my G3 and G4 semesters (fall ’07 and spring-fall ’08) when I did my teaching practicum, I experienced first-hand what it was like to break out of the role of “patient” and become “staff,” as Slater had done.  This book was also the case source for my long critical paper, “Traditional Narrative Structure in the Narrative and Non-Narrative Essay,” that I wrote during my G2 (spring ’07) semester.  I made a vow to myself that after I graduated, I would write to Lauren Slater and thank her for writing this wonderful book, explaining its significance in my studies.

My creative thesis was underway.  I started writing immediately at the residency, a piece about my very first admission to a hospital, a chapter which became the main story of my thesis.  I later called it “A Forgotten Line,” because in the chapter I forgot lines from the Lord’s Prayer, a prayer that, as a Jew, I am not supposed to know, anyway.  Because I was writing my creative thesis about my mental illness, I found Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression a particularly helpful book, because of Solomon’s lucid descriptions of his own and others’ depressions.  I also attempted to write a story about my dog, QB.  It would take three attempts to finally get this chapter right, but not for another year and a half.  I read poetry by Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell, essays by John D’Agata, Joan Didion, Montaigne, Virginia Woolf, and Annie Dillard, and Temple Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures: and Other Reports from My Life With Autism.  Susan Griffin’s What Her Body Thought: a Journey into the Shadows had particular influence on me both at the time and later on.  I asked myself how Griffin could take two seemingly unrelated stories and weave them together, integrating them and finally bring both to a single climax at the end of the book.  I wondered if I could possibly do something similar in my own work.  I attempted this in miniature in my essay, “Pro Re Nata.”  Later, I chopped up my thesis as a whole, and kept it that way, combining stories woven together to form a climax toward the end of the book.  I knew I had always wanted to write like Susan Griffin; and there I was, living that dream.

My long critical paper, upon which I finally put the finishing touches in the beginning of the fall ’07 G3 semester, used Welcome to My Country and the essay “In Bed,” from Joan Didion’s The White Album.  I wanted to show that the essay can have a climax, and can build in tension and in fact be built in traditional narrative structure.  I framed my paper using John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction and Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing.  Perhaps it was with a touch of sadness that I included Natalia Ginzburg’s essay “He and I,” about Ginzburg’s relationship with her beloved husband, which I had studied as an undergraduate at Emerson College while Joe was alive.

The other pieces I wrote that semester other than the beginning of “A Forgotten Line” include “Illness” (a piece I scrapped much later on); “Hunger,” a piece about hunger for love, God, and thinness; “At the Crossroads,” a piece about my attendance at a day treatment program; and “Pro Re Nata,” a piece about my stay at Metropolitan State Hospital and also about coping skills, which I reworked many times.  Hunger has gone through countless overhauls until it arrived at its present condition.  I also wrote a few short pieces about the drug Thorazine, that I did not use in the book.  A portion of “At the Crossroads” was published later in Swamp Magazine.

Around the time of my fourth packet, I my mental illness surfaced for a brief time.  I described the problem as “Evil Beings that lived in my head,” and the word “hospital” popped into my head–and my therapist’s head as well.  But this difficulty passed, and I wrote in my process letter to Paisley:  “It is incredibly difficult to write while my thoughts are totally scrambled.  In a future creative bit, I’ll write some about what that’s like.”

During my G3 semester, I wrote three pieces that were of publishable quality but did not belong in my thesis, Paisley and I decided.  These were “Lenses,” “Consumers,” and “It.”  The latter was about Joe, and was a very private piece.  “Consumers” was later published twice, in Pitkin Review and Breath and Shadow.  Paisley asked me to consider seriously what my thesis was about, and decide what to write based on what was needed, so as to avoid writing unnecessary pieces (though they may be quality works).  I agreed wholeheartedly that this was essential to my work, and that perhaps I should give my creative thesis a title, but I did not title my work until my G5 semester!  I also wrote “Noid,” about paranoia, which I scrapped, because it wasn’t very good, and I wrote “Locker #47,” “Walking the Line,” “Kohlrabi,” and another unsuccessful attempt at the QB story.  Kohlrabi was a two-page experimental story that was successful right away, to my good fortune.  I did not have a complete draft of “Locker #47” until the end of my G4 semester; it is about my high school life.  “Walking the Line” is an experimental piece about my illness later in life.  The piece went through countless revisions and edits even after I finally had a draft at the beginning of my G4 semester.

During my G3 semester I read memoirs by Lauren Slater, St. Augustine, Nick Flynn, and Lawrence Sutin, poetry by C. D. Wright, and short stories by Amy Hempel.  The high point of my reading for the semester was Michael Klein’s memoir Track Conditions, in which he described himself as a reckless man, doing things that could make him a very unlikable character–getting drunk, stealing a car, sleeping around–yet because of Klein’s love for horses and his general appeal as a character, I found myself rooting for him, wanting what he wanted, and even getting mad at him for making stupid mistakes.  My dream was that someday readers would react similarly to my work, and get mad at me, too.

October 2007.  _____Hospital, psychiatric day program, _________, Massachusetts.  I stepped into “group” as “staff,” not as “patient,” for the first time.  I wore a badge that had my name and photo on it and the word “volunteer.”  I was dressed up sort of.  I held my notes in one hand, a pencil in the other.  We sat in the circle.  My co-leader, J—, began, as she would every week: “This is Julie Greene, she is a student at Goddard College, and she is going to be doing a writing group with all of you….”  The students were attentive.  Some wanted to write.  Some did not.  The challenge was to keep them all engaged for the entire 45 minutes, and it wasn’t easy.  Gradually, I became less nervous and learned to be flexible and to trust my instincts while teaching, to be totally prepared yet “go with the flow” and let the class take the lesson to wherever they wanted it to go.  One exciting part of teaching was watching every single pencil scribble on the page during freewrite time.  And of course it was always gratifying to hear people share their works.  What amazed me most, though, was the role-reversal.  I no longer had to knock on the staff office door to enter.  I could hang my coat in their closet.  Heck, I was staff!

In class, I used exercises suggested by my faculty Elena Georgiou and Jane Wohl and Goddard College, and Bill Holinger at Emerson College.  I used quotes from William Styron and Andrew Solomon.  I also used a song, “Lithium,” by Amy Lee and Evanescence, in one of my classes:

Lithium, don’t want to lock me up inside.
Lithium, don’t want to forget how it feels without

Lithium, I want to stay in love with my sorrow.

To illustrate mental illness, in my teaching essay, to those who didn’t understand what it was, I quoted Elyn Saks’ The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness, and Vaslav Nijinsky’s Diary.

The next semester (G4, spring ’08) proved to be a rough one, and after the first packet, I chose to drop before the add/drop period was over.  I tried to understand the packet response that my advisor, Beatrix Gates, had written for me, but I was too depressed to decipher anything.  Everything seemed so flat and lifeless.  Still, I remembered the nurse’s words, “Just don’t give up hope.”  It was ironic that shortly after, my doctor put me on the drug, Lithium, and I was so doped up that I only woke up to do my teaching, and slept for the rest of the week.  It wasn’t until months later that I was able to comprehend Bea’s packet response and revise my work.  I came to the next residency and could barely get out of bed each morning, and slept through many of the classes.  I took myself off the drug the following August, against my doctor’s advice, and woke up.

This time, I had another, more productive G4.  I was now working closely with Dvora Zipkin, Goddard’s new disabilities specialist.  Our weekly phone calls proved invaluable to me.  We set up study schedules and modified them as I became more proficient at my work.  From then on, I worked closely with Dvora, and I can truly say that I would not have made it to graduation as smoothly–or at all–without her.

Now, with Bea as my advisor, I revised previous works and wrote some new material as well.  I wrote “Going Back,” “Jungle,” “Connections,” “The Farm,” and “Colors.”  These were short chapters.  I also finished and revised “A Forgotten Line,” “Locker #47,” “Walking the Line,” and “Pro Re Nata.”  At last I was able to write a successful version of the QB story, called simply “QB.”  “Connections” was a piece based on Lauren Slater’s Prozac Diary, asking the same question Slater asks: What happens to the creative process when a person recovers from a mental illness?  Then, I read Kenny Fries’ The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory and it blew open my whole creative thesis.

Why?  Kenny tells his stories in order, but they alternate.  The whole book is done in such a way as to leave the reader hanging at the end of every story.  I wanted to do this, too.  I kept in mind Susan Griffin’s What Her Body Thought: A Journey into the Shadows, too.  Griffin cleverly intertwines several stories in the book and then brings them together to a terrific climax at the end of the book.  The connection seems far-fetched at first but gradually, the reader catches on, and when the reader realizes the connection, he or she also reaches an epiphany just as the book climaxes.  Fries does this, too, by lining up the most climactic chapters back-to-back (his are divided into short chapters; hers are mostly divided into sections within larger chapters).  I wanted this for my own work.

So I chopped up my thesis, in hard copy, and put it back together, in “braided” fashion, like my hair.  This was painstaking work and involved the use of a notebook, lots of printer ink and paper, a paper punch, and a large table.  Not long after, my chapters were spread out all over the furniture.  Soon, though, I realized I would have to make an outline, and this would simplify the task.  I wrote an excited e-mail to Bea explaining my intentions.  To my surprise, she didn’t write back saying I was nuts.

I came to my last full residency in February 2009 excited–and a little scared–about the coming semester.  As usual, I struggled with the rigorous residency schedule, but frequent contact with Dvora, planning out how I would take care of my basic needs, and which workshops I would attend, kept me on track, and the residency panned out with very few hitches.  I sent off my manuscript–then titled Forgotten Lines: For an Occasion as it Arises, the subtitle coming from the definition of the Latin “pro re nata”–to my advisor, Darrah Cloud, and to Bea, now my second reader, to arrive February 25 instead of the assigned March 16 packet due date, because I had it ready, and was especially excited to get started on revisions!

In the meantime, I crocheted a sweater for Puzzle, my dog, a project I had been working on while on the plane to Seattle.  (I always had a needlework project to keep me occupied on the airplane.)  Then I took a leap, and began a new book–about my six years at Goddard, beginning from the moment I was accepted, and ending at the projected graduation date.  What was most exciting about the project was my plan to use my first creative thesis, the short novel, embedded in the memoir!  This, Joe, would be the book for you.  Excited about the project, I finished seven pages–then Darrah’s feedback arrived March 3.

What Darrah requested was simple: the old adage “show, don’t tell.”  What was summarized had to be fleshed out with scenes, she said.  This had to be done especially in the essay, “Hunger,” but also in some of the narrative chapters as well.  I was summarizing too much.  There were places where I was too vague, and the reader was confused about which hospital was which.

I attacked the manuscript with fervor as I had never had before.  The schedule I had set up with Dvora allowed for two hours’ study in the morning, just over an hour in the early afternoon, and two hours in the later afternoon.  Instead, I found myself working all day, usually over seven hours a day, on the manuscript.  After 17 days, I had added 7,000 words, and I had 144 pages of the revised manuscript.  I wrote to Darrah, and she asked me to send the first 50 pages.  Darrah responded by telling me, among other things, to make one of the villains “meaner.”  I turned to my journals for ideas, and added yet more text to the manuscript.  Finally, on April 17^th, I made the last chapter addition to the manuscript: “Pool,” an experimental chapter, in which the villain forces me underwater, and holds me there.  My first draft was 47,000 words long.  I now had 62,500 words, and was on my way to completion of a third draft.  I sent Darrah about 65 pages in my third packet.  She explained that my entire manuscript was centered around the theme of hunger, and that I should follow this theme.  This was very, very important.

But I had run into a snag.  My mental illness was sneaking up on me.  I had begun to starve myself.  As time went on, I ate less and less.  My concentration, mood, and motivation suffered.  I nearly fainted on several occasions.  The same theme that ran through my thesis was now eating at me.  As I had written in one of my chapters, “My hunger was secret.  My hunger was special.”

Why now?  Did I not want to leave Goddard?  The eating disorder had submerged me many times before, notably in 1981, when it caused me do drop out of school one semester before graduation; I would not let it push me underwater again!

No matter the reason, I had to take action.  What would Aimee say?  What would Joe say, if he were alive?  I recalled the time he wheeled onto the unit at McLean Hospital, when he was visiting me there, with a brown paper bag in his lap.  “I know you can’t stand the hospital food,” he said with a grin, “so I’ve brought subs.  Meatball and tuna.   I want you to eat the meatball right away, while it’s hot.  Don’t argue.”

I made some phone calls, and arranged a meeting at a local eating disorders center, where they made some recommendations.  I worked closely with my therapist and my primary care physician.  Dvora, too, had some excellent advice, explaining that one never truly leaves Goddard.  I asked for support from my friends and my brothers.  I petted Puzzle–a lot.  And I wrote.

And it was through writing–and leafing through some old Goddard papers, that I came across what I had written semesters ago: “In a future creative bit, I’ll write some about what that’s like.”  What did this mean?  Of course I knew what it meant!  Someday, I would get through this, and gain perspective on it, enough to be able to write about it.  It would pass.  Somehow, the starvation would end.

But I was scared.  I was worried that my therapist would hospitalize me.  I made up my mind that I would mail in my thesis on the seventh of May.  I had three days.

I set goals for myself. I worked extensively on “Pool,” which had become a poem. I plunged into my chapter, “Hunger,” and made numerous last-minute changes.  I read a fair portion of the manuscript out loud to myself, and was surprised at how smoothly it read.  At last, I mailed in my thesis, completed–twelve days before the due date.

In 2005 and 2006, when I took time away from Goddard and was hospitalized, doctors and social workers had told me to give up on the idea of ever returning to graduate school, and to attend a mental health day program and join a knitting club.  I have, in part, taken that advice: I have indeed done plenty of knitting.  I knitted many, many sweaters for my little dog, Puzzle.  I knitted these sweaters to pass the time during my trip from Boston to Port Townsend, Washington, to attend the Goddard College residencies.  Today, Puzzle wears these sweaters without a thought, but to me they symbolize not only a journey, but my refusal to give up, my defiance of those people who were supposedly treating me, the very same people who doubted my ability to succeed.  Well, I have succeeded.  My thesis has been accepted.  On July 12, 2009, I will have my degree at last.

When I graduated from Emerson College, my undergraduate school, Joe was right there beside me.  If he were alive, he would be attending my graduation for certain, despite the travel difficulties that his physical disability may cause.  But he will not be at my graduation physically, or the graduation banquet; I am assured, however, that he is enjoying a great meal in Heaven.

Of course, I am very apprehensive about what the future may hold.  But I will continue to revise my creative thesis, now titled This Hunger Is Secret, and work on my new book, which begins with a vase of flowers.  I unlock my door, greet the dog, and pick up my message from Paul Selig, with news that will change my life forever.

 

Julie Greene

May 31, 2009

Some documents I found on my computer

I was “filing” a couple of things in my My Documents folder and found a bunch of documents I’d written and saved.  There are 13 of them, or more if I find more that were labeled unclearly.  The first of these documents was written May 5, 2011, and the latest I wrote today.  This latest one contains a copy and paste blog entry I wrote and decided not to publish.  It is saved in my drafts folder.

Let me make it clear that these documents are part of a historical record.  Most of them are in the form of letters to my T, and many of these letters I read aloud to her.   I wrote the official letter to my T stating that I was firing her on March 11, 2012, my dad’s birthday.  I saw her once more and now she is out of my life.  Of the documents that are not letters to my T, three I labeled “Dying Wishes” and put them in a separate folder.  These were written last July, last October, and then again in December.   There is a letter I wrote March 6, 2012 and CC’ed to a number of people regarding how dumb it is to put me in the state hospital.  There is a statement in July I made not addressed to anyone in particular about refusing to have a feeding tube put into me and refusing to be hospitalized for the purpose of weight gain.  The document I wrote today has two components: a copied and pasted letter to a friend, and today’s unpublished blog entry I mentioned a second ago.

I was thinking of putting these documents, in chronological order, up here and thus made public.  I believe the last one, written today I will put up here in a bit.  But maybe not.

I have to think about how people are going to react to these documents.  Though I do like to stir things up, I think putting them up here is going a step too far.  It would be irresponsible for me as a writer, specifically, blogger, to portray such a grim picture of despair and hopelessness worse than I already have.  What if it rubs off on someone?

I mean, what am I supposed to say?  That there’s hope for you folk out there but no hope for me?

I don’t think it would be right to say that there is hope for everyone, you can do it, never give up, the way a lot of websites do.  Why?  I’d be bullshitting.  It is my responsibility to be honest.  I don’t want anyone to become anorexic and the last thing I want is to encourage anyone to do the things I do.  I think that this is clear if you read what I say.  My desire to be thin is destroying me.  I don’t want to see you destroyed or on the destructive path I’m on.

That said, I don’t want anyone else to think that because I am driven to die, that anyone else should be.  And if you are, please read this page:

http://www.metanoia.org/suicide/

And check out this list:

http://unsuicide.wikispaces.com/Online+Suicide+Help

I have never seen this second page before, but I notice that the first link I provided recently updated their page.  I’ve gone there a few times and read it, and it helps.

I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve “changed my mind” at the last minute.  A lot of it was had something to do with my dog, Puzzle.

My dog Puzzle loves me unconditionally.  Let’s face it, humans never do, and never have.  Never throw yourself into the arms of another person, because it will either totally suck, or they will dump you and leave you raw and bleeding.

I had a “wake up call” recently, thanks to Puzzle.  I’m not sure what to make of it.  The problem was that once I woke up, I had to stay awake, and I can’t do it anymore.  I have had more wake up calls since leaving therapy mid-March than I had in the entire 31 years of being in therapy.

What I saw in these documents, all stored in My Documents folder, all labeled by their titles, is a steady pounding of making myself die.

I don’t want to be this way.  I didn’t ask to be this way.  I’m not doing it to control anyone else or play games.  There are a lot of “normal” people out there that have a death wish.  Everyone has one, but most people’s is so tiny that it only appears in nightmares on very rare occasions.  My death wish is fucking huge.

It would be one thing if this lasted a couple of weeks, or a month.  But no, it has been right here and of unbelievable intensity for a fucking year.  More, actually.

I have heard of four-year-olds that are suicidal.  They are wired that way.  What do you do with these kids?

And so I am 50 years older than these kids.  What do you do with me?  Is there such thing as non-retractable suicidality?  What the hell do you do with these people?

Well, most therapists won’t take them on, for one thing.  Liability.  You can discard them by putting them into the state hospital.  I suppose that’s where many end up once their insurance runs out.

Again: unwanted, unloved, rejected, excluded…which feeds into the suicidality.  Lovely.

The rest are dead.

I am not dead.  I am running for my life.  I am scared of the state hospital.  I repeat, these places are not hospitals.  They are dumping grounds.  They are prisons.  Buried alive.

The state hospital systems were built as humane alternatives to imprisonment.  People with mental illnesses were being housed in prisons and put in chains.  Someone decided this was wrong.  But the state hospital systems went astray long, long ago.  They are being closed down for this reason.  Condemned.  But people still end up there.  What do you do with the disposables?

Some, the lucky ones, run for their lives.  I am running.  Many are still running.  Some ended up in a safe, positive place.  Not a hospital or institution.  They found a safe place to build, or rebuild.

I have no clue how to do this.

So I guess I’ll just keep running.  I’ll run out of steam eventually, and then whatever happens, happens.

“Bad grammar, hideous colors”

Hey,

Someone sent in a comment saying my site had “hideous colors and that my posts used bad grammar.”  Unfortunately, Askimet (the filter) alerted me that this was a spam comment.  Sometimes, Askimet messes up, so I double-checked on this, and yes, it was a spammer.  I can’t allow their posts to show up here and infiltrate my site.  There are actually very few that have even bothered to post comments here, so deleting them has never been an issue.  I just go through  them  and x them out every now and then.

It’s really unfortunate.  I very much looked forward to putting this one through as legit, and allowing it to post.  I wanted to respond to it by saying, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

Hmm…would this be a copyright violation? Naw, it’s just one line, commonly known.  Might even be in the public domain.  Hell if I know.

You can stretch this.  Like posting links to sites that tend to allow posters to violate copyright law, not that I had any clue, but the article in the link itself is original?  Very sticky business.  You just have to pick this one apart and pick it apart and decide if linking to a domain is sustaining it by providing more hits.  I guess it depends on whether the hits bring in money to sustain the domain.

I was “policed.”  It was done automatically by computer.  I have thoughts on this one.  Not that I need therapy and pills to correct these passionate notions or thoughts deemed “wrong” because I am a little kooky in the head.

Kookiness gets policed, sectioned twelved, put on “checks.”  Weekly weight checks.  Protest marchers get rounded up.  I’ve been rounded up all my life and sent to the back of the class for speaking out.  It was kinda nice, though, because you can hide that book you’re secretly reading behind some mimeographed worksheets, and no one will know.

I do always have this fear that someday I’ll wake up and my site will disappear off the map.  I do back it up.  Contrary to popular belief, I’m not dumb.

Regarding my current writing projects and little known uncanny abilities I no longer have: “music dictation” and “grammar science”

I feel like I’m shutting humans out of my life more and more these days, and that I rather like it.  I’ve been doing a lot of my writing in my notebook and not on here.  It’s not that I don’t dare share it but that I really am not in the mood.  That plus pencil and paper are a nice change.  I am pleased with my writing.  It is varied.  I gave most of my pieces titles.  There are pieces I didn’t complete and I wrote “To be completed” and stopped, but never finished, or at least haven’t yet.  The reason I stopped, in all cases, was that I just plain got tired, and went to sleep.

Here are the titles, in chronological order: “Standing on the Rock,” “Regarding My Inevitable Uppitiness,” “Psychotic Ability,” “Why I Cry Out in My Words,” “Escape to the Mountain,” and “Lest We Forget.” The latter is a Passover piece.  Gee, I like my titles.  I like the pieces, in fact.

I think of these as historical record, just saying where I’m at right now.  Thus said, it seems contradictory to criticize what I have written or meddle or change them at a future date when I might be in a different space.  Still, if I were to make changes, I’d tighten up “Lest We Forget” a lot, lot, lot.  I can trim the damn thing to half its length and still keep the entire message and all the details in it intact.  I can even do this still retaining all the refrains.  I can even add more color.  It would be compact and explosive, just the right thing to blow Pharoah’s army to bits.  Not only that, it would fit into my carry-on….Let me not carry on with this any further or I might get into some serious international controversy…it’s nearly May and the holiday has already passed over.

“Psychotic Ability”…Well, I mean just that.  Take it or leave it.

I love the way I stuck to the metaphor in “Escape to the Mountain.”  Me?  Stick to one metaphor only and not wander all the heck all over the place? Gee.

My blog entries are for historical record and I don’t go back and edit them.  I mean, since when does one go back and…edit one’s journal?

Okay, okay, I take that back.  If I had a journal that I was going to publish verbatim….Hmm….Take that back again.

If you are a writer, I challenge you:  Do you have a journal that you might someday consider publishing verbatim?  People do this, you know.  This isn’t the same as having a blog.  When you have a blog, you are writing something intended to be “out there” and you know you’re going public.  I’m talking about that notebook thingy you wrote in many years ago that you never, ever intended anyone to see.

So say you’ve got a line in there in the middle of nowhere that says, “I masturbated today for like 35 minutes.”  Are you going to do a Wite-Out jobbie on that?

Just think about this for a second.

Those of you who have been following my blog know how I’d answer that question in regards to my own writing.  I don’t freaking care if the entire journal entry is all about how I’m moved by a piece of literature and how it shapes my writing.  I didn’t write the entry for YOU, after all.

What’s in there stays there.  The ugly, the bodily, the insane.  For the record.

In my blog entries I pick and choose, mainly for the sake of not boring you.  Of course, I know a lot of this shit might bore you, anyway.

Often, editing is censorship done for the sake of following some really dumb writing rules.  I didn’t write this rule book.  You didn’t write the rule book.  Strunk and White?  Are these old males still even alive?  MLA, etc…these are for scholarly papers.  Don’t get me wrong.  I’ve got these books right up there on a shelf within reach and I do open them often.  I like the Hacker manual a lot because my copy is spiral-bound and I like the way the index is done.  It’s the “Pocket-Style” manual and I don’t see that it’s any more “pocket” or abridged than any of the others, but simply takes up less space on my desk.

I’ve got a book by someone Zandvoort on grammar that’s right up my alley.  Why?  I was a grammar champion in…well, yeah, grammar school.  This is a little-known fact about me.  I might as well boast about it because I have no place else to boast about it.  I forget what you call this kind of story…I’m spacing out…oh yeah, “rags to riches”?  Kinda.  Naw, that’s not it.

Pure grammar is like math.  Even English grammar.  There’s this hierarchy of verb tenses, subject and predicate, nouns and verbs and objects, etc etc.  When I was a little, little kid, it was all science to me.  It was a cinch.  When they quizzed me, all I had to do was use my logic and see the puzzle pieces, and I always saw them, even under pressure.  It was so fucking obvious.

They put me in first grade a year early, deciding I was smart.  They had this “track” system.  Or I guess that was what it was called.  It was not a good thing for many of the kids, and to this day is still not a good thing.  I mean this on all so-called levels.  It’s very, very complex.  Learning is different for everyone and we all communicate differently.  Kids get classified and teased because they are “dumb.”  Kids get classified and teased because they are “smart.”  These mean nothing, actually.  What can you do?  Just tune out, I guess.

It was called Advanced Placement, or AP for short, and if you had it, it was like this status that the other kids could use against you at any time.  In my class, we had a few math geniuses, I mean, I swear they were sending these kids to shrinks who were doing studies on them to find out why they were so smart.  There was a music genius who was performing concerts publicly at like eight or nine.  I didn’t have any of this stuff that had a label, nothing public anyway.  I kept stuff secret.  Most of it had to do with music.   When I heard music, it didn’t take much for me to see how the notes looked on the page.  It was so damn simple.   The music teachers knew I was good at music, as did my parents, but they didn’t know about this secret gift, these pages and pages and pages of written score.  Occasionally, I put it down as hard copy, but a lot of it I just kept in my head, filed away.

Trust me, it was a completely useless skill until I got to college and they had us do what’s known as dictation.  That is, the music theory teacher plunks out a bunch of notes on the piano, and the students all screw up their faces and write down the notes, or try to.  I never had perfect pitch and didn’t need it for this, just a starting point.  For whatever reason, some kids with perfect pitch had brain farts when it came to dictation.

So I was kinda infamous in music school for this dictation thing, having more or less jumped through the hoop on day one and sat in on the class just as a formality. But like I said, it’s a completely useless skill other than something that I did to keep myself amused.

I could write.  That was rather sad.  You can imagine the stuff I was writing.  It was a given that anyone with the label “loser” is going to write from the bottom up.  I have none of my creative writing that I did.  It was all knocked down…by the system I guess, or by my parents.  By anyone I spoke out against.  They’d find something to criticize, something wrong with it.  Of course it wasn’t perfect writing.  Actually, I’m sure it was the content, the essence of what I was saying, I SEE WRONGS IN THE WORLD, that made them desperate to shut me up.

Is anything all that much different now?

But when it came to grammar, they couldn’t deny it, and I let it shine.  It was my chance.  I was sick of being picked on by the other kids and I was determined to show them once and for all that Julie Greene kicks ass.  Yeah, loser me.  They had this all-district grammar thingy coming up and the class knew about my weird and very useless mathematical grammar ability that no other kid had like I did.  They voted me to represent our class.  There I was, a year ahead, representing the AP class of our elementary school.

There were a bunch of eliminating matches in front of large audiences.  It appeared to be a lot of pressure but I didn’t feel pressured at all.  I was in my element.  I could hardly wait till the next time I got called up.  I never missed a question during any of these matches.  Our school, our part of town, our town, our district…we won.

2012: I feel like I’m shutting humans out of my life more and more these days, and that I rather like it.  I’ve been doing a lot of my writing in my notebook and not on here.  It’s not that I don’t dare share it but that I really am not in the mood.  That plus pencil and paper are a nice change.  I am pleased with my writing.  It is varied.  I gave most of my pieces titles.  There are pieces I didn’t complete and I wrote “To be completed” and stopped, but never finished, or at least haven’t yet.  The reason I stopped, in all cases, was that I just plain got tired, and went to sleep.

 

Isolation

I’ve been writing a lot of stuff, just don’t feel like sharing it.  I might record some it as audio posts.   I like my writing.  I keep coming up with more and more ideas.

It’s very difficult being around people.  I have dared to experience in-person human contact twice since my retreat from the world.  I begin this on April 13 (2012) on.  But really, for the entire month of April, I have had human in-person contact, that is, actual conversations beyond brief exchanges at cash registers, five times.  It’s the 23rd.

So you can imagine. It’s weird what happens.  Very.  Words out in spurts or like a flood or I make no sense at all.  No, there is no pill for this (not that I’d want one) and I am not cognitively lacking, nor am I manic.  I have a deficiency in human contact.  Place me in a conversation and I might have a lot to say all of a sudden.  That plus it’s been a while and I’m not up on the latest etiquette tips nor am I well-versed on how to win friends and influence people.  I used to be polite and kind and in general I’m not anymore.

That plus losing it more and more, that is, how shall I put it…I’m just plain crazy and don’t give a shit.  Not making the effort.   And when I look back and ask myself if I’m suffering any more now than any other time of my life, I guess you can say there is no way you can compare.  How can I compare what is going on now compared to times that were happening when I was half my current age?  You can’t.  Time passes. Worse off?  Yeah, definitely.  If I am going through pain and suffering, my experience of this is a whole new ball game now.  I’m detached now.  I step aside and see it from afar.  Not everyone has this ability or ever learns it.

Detached…losing reality…entirely necessary right now.  I celebrate my ability and don’t want or need a pill for it.

Amazing new way

So I wrote another new piece in my notebook after walking Puzzle.  Something I figured out.  I will share this by copying it over here, but not right away.  I need a breather.

In brief:  Okay, I was told that I’m different.  I’m far out there.  There are people who are different, right?

Some people who are different seclude themselves for a time.  Like Moses, for instance.  He went up onto a mountain by himself and then did something that no human witnessed, and then showed up with two tablets.  There are many figures who seclude themselves for long periods and then come up with the Key.

Writers seclude themselves in order to get their writing done. This is the beauty of writers’ retreats.  They are quiet places to be in a little space by yourself, such as a cabin in a place in, say, the woods, and write and write.

So I’ve been secluded all this time.  And came up with something incredible.  An answer.  Not for everyone, but just for me.

I fear going into therapy and having this Key shot down as hogwash.   I ended up on this path.  There is nothing I can do to reverse the passage of time.  I can look back but I cannot step there.  I choose my goals.  No one will force-feed me, ever.  I picked up the fork because I saw a wrong in the world and realized I had ability to change it.  Today I discovered another reason why I did this.  The fact that I stand out in a crowd and am singled out as Other, a situation for which I did not ask, gives me Power, inner strength, and amazing ability.

Later.

Amazing writing

I just finished writing a piece and I am so excited about it that I ended up reading it aloud again and again and patting myself on the back for a job well done.    It started out as a journal entry but it reads aloud and begs for an audience.  It dances with my voice as if we were an old couple after wine and cake, so compelled to swing in each other’s arms that the dishes and crumbs will be forgotten until tomorrow.

So I’m likely to do this one as an audio post.  Tomorrow…er, today…it’s way, way past midnight of course!  First, I’ll post a bit of background info on what got me started writing this piece, or, shall I say, what I was reacting to. I don’t always do an intro to a piece but I think it’s always good to remind myself, even if I’m being repetitive, that the act of writing is life-affirming.

Update…written in verse

Many times, when I begin to write a piece, I promise myself, “I will be brief.”
This is one of those times.
But usually I end up going on and on, and this inconveniences me
Even if what I end up with is halfway decent.

I think everything I write these days is really my swan song
My last chance
So I have this need to get down everything I can
Before it’s too late.
Maybe I’m an idiot for thinking that what I have to say
Is at all important or useful.
But the fact I have been writing my song for years
And my body is not dead yet
Is very annoying to me.

I could slow down the words
But I don’t.
The words keep pouring out of me.
Sometimes, this feels like a gift I don’t deserve.
Or maybe I’m writing with the last drop of ink that’s left.

There was one last single drop of oil in the lamp kept the Temple lit for eight days
And for this we spun dreydles and talked about miracles
Watched the wax drip down off the menorah
And the candles blend together, as if they were one candle.

If no one was looking, I’d grab a bit of the wax
And it would make a mold of my fingerprint.
This was a tangible record of me.
Maybe that was enough.

Body dysmorphia on this so-called beautiful day (take that, xojane.com)

I looked at weather.com and swore.  Anything over 55 or so meant I couldn’t hide in my big bulky long down coat.  I was wicked pissed at myself for not biting the bullet and taking Puzzle out earlier, headache or no headache.  Now, I couldn’t even hide under a wool hat, and baseball hats seemed to make my face look even rounder.

I have this yellow jacket that is a blessing.  It dates back to way back when and it’s just a shell, so big that it touches none of me, doesn’t frame my hips or show boobs or anything.  When I get really scared that my stomach shows, I can put my hands in my pockets, and stick them out to form a tent-like shape out in front of me that protects me from peering eyes.

I wore this yellow jacket and got Puzzle ready.  I didn’t bother putting on any more clothes than necessary, because everything I put on I bulged out of anyway just like I bulged out of my skin.  Maybe my brains bulged out of my head and that’s why I had this headache, just too many thoughts running around all the time.  I reached for my keys.  I don’t know what happened.  A bunch of water came out of my sleeve from I didn’t know where.  I looked up at the ceiling to see if there was a leak.  My upstairs neighbor ran water all the time and forgot about it, so it was my gut reaction to look up and check.  I checked everywhere for leaks.  My jacket had been hanging on a chair all night, so I checked there.  No leak.  It was such quantity that handwashing alone couldn’t have caused this much water to form on my sleeve.  I checked my arm and wrist.  No, no water was coming out of it.  No, I was not Jesus, nothing like that, not yet anyway.

Walking Puzzle is no longer the pleasure it once was.  I used to escape into our walks and listen to music and wrote all the time about how Puzzle and I were in synch at those times, and how it was the high point of my day.  Well, no more.  I can hardly wait to get out of the outdoors, where I am visible to the world, and get back inside where I am again safe and not seen.  It is when I walk Puzzle that I worry so much about my weight.  I worry that people look at me, stare at me and point and say, “She’s fat!  She’s fat!”

Sometimes, I stop eating for a bunch of days, and I feel okay enough to walk our old route again.  But still, I feel embarrassed because I seem to be so chubby.  Long shadows no longer comfort me the way they used to.  No matter how I look at myself, I can’t be thin enough and empty enough.  There is still this horrible fat inside me that I can’t get rid of, like this filth or scum or contamination I can’t describe.

I had to take off the yellow jacket because the sleeve was drenched.  I hunted around, but everything else was too revealing.  I finally settled for a size XXXL light fleece vest I have.  It’s black and bulky and you can’t tell I’m fat in it.  My shirt sleeves were long enough so you couldn’t tell how jiggly and flabby my arms were.  I dread the day my arms aren’t stereotype anorexia arms anymore.  The day that happens, I think I will kill myself.

So Puzzle and I took our walk.  I felt awful.  What a fucking beautiful day.  My head hurt.  We didn’t go far.  Maybe later, Puzzle.  Sorry.

I came in and fed her and my head hurt real bad and I thought about how much I wanted to die.  Ever since I went over 90, I had felt like my life wasn’t worth living because of my weight.  I had to be honest with myself.  It was always the same deal.  Always.  Everyone tried to tell me to accept myself from my therapist on down.  Now, I was being made to feel like it was bad or immoral that I didn’t like my body, hated my body, in fact.  People were telling me that I was “sick” because I didn’t accept my body.  I went to websites that said that this was a society sickness.   Of course, it is my eating disorder, which is far, far deeper and much more complicated than anything outside of myself such as this relatively superficial media and fashion problem, or at least it is superficial in my own life.  Was I ever one to read a fashion magazine?  I didn’t even know fashion magazines existed until I was nearly twenty-four years old.  I hadn’t seen TV for years.  I developed anorexia to keep men away, not to attract them.  I wanted to be pure and empty.  I wanted to be filled with God’s love.  I still want these things.

What is fat and what is thin?  People keep telling me it is unhealthy for me to be skinny, and that people who are too skinny will die.  Now they are saying it shows skewed values to be skinny, that I am bad and sick for wanting this, that I have a lot to learn.

Back when I was twenty-two, I felt guilty for asking God to help me lose weight.  I felt like this was something too trivial to pray for.  If there is a God, then who am I to judge what is trivial and what is important in God’s eyes?  How am I to know, when all is said and done?

Thus said, who can tell me what God values in me?  Some guru touting body acceptance?  Some therapist?  Who said I had to love my body?  Who said God gave it to me?   Who said anyone gave it to me?  Yeah, I was born with it.  I live in it.  That’s bad enough.  When I think about someone giving it to me, then I have to worry about hurting someone’s feelings if I want to take it back to the store and exchange it for something else.

I accept that I don’t love my body.  I enjoy writing pieces like this about my feelings and being honest, instead of lying, and putting up with my body and struggling and struggling and denying and forcing out the words, “I love you,” like a faked orgasm.

And maybe I do think about death a lot more than other people do.  Maybe I am obsessed.  It’s true that people die from eating disorders all the time.  I may or may not live to see 2013.   I make promises to myself and break them all the time, and it’s hard to keep promises when you don’t know if you’re going to live from one day to the next.   On the other hand, you may not see 2013, either, and maybe it’s time we quit making promises altogether.  My body is my body and your body is your body.  We see things different ways because we have different eyes.  And now that you’ve been looking this way a little while, we might as well say hello.  I even might take my hands out of my pockets, and let you pet my dog.

 

What’s on my Post-Its

I get all these writing ideas.  Too many of them.  It’s a curse.  I live in a shoe-sized apartment and these Post-Its are going to fill and overflow my two rooms very soon.  It will be so crowded with Post-Its in here that Puzzle will have to eat her way out.  Puzzle sometimes eats paper.  She’s funny that way.

So I have been home for a few days with this headache and generally feeling very yucky and sick.  I have never had headaches, migraines, or chronic pain in any part of my body and I’m not one to run around complaining about this sort of stuff and go from doctor to doctor about it either.  So I have been spared that.  This with the exception of the Mysterious Unexplained Knee Injury of 2005.

Let me insert a bit of an aside here.  There is this weird association with chronic pain.  Or shall I say covert assumption in the medical profession and maybe in society that maybe it happens to hysterical females.  Have you noticed this?  Have you noticed that doctors tend to dismiss women’s complaints of pain more quickly as “attention-seeking” or “medication-seeking” or “marital problems” or “needs therapy” or “midlife crisis”?  Let me go a step further.  When an overweight person is in pain, it is up to, say, a competent specialist in body structure (such as orthopedist) and the patient together to determine if the pain is caused by stress on the joints due to excess weight.  It is not up to a person on the street to look upon this person, judge this person, and without even asking, state that this person suffers pain because he or she is overweight and “it’s his/her own fault.”

Let me go a step further (off-topic?  Heck, it’s a topic, isn’t it?) and say that when a person who is on public assistance or impoverished seeks medical or dental attention for pain, often the professional assumes that the patient is lying about the degree of pain just to leave with a prescription.  For myself, I have not lied to doctors.  I can see how a person on Medicaid might, in desperation, lie about pain to get to see a dentist.  Why?  In some situations, you don’t get covered by Medicaid unless you are in pain.  If you have an abscess, and you don’t get something done about it, you can die.  There have been cases of people, children even, who have died because of non-coverage.

I don’t really remember.  It has been a long time since I read the article about this kid.  Did he know he might die of this infection?  He looked and looked for a dentist that would take him.  They couldn’t interview the kid after he died.  They never found out.  It is a lost story.

Many of us get lost.  Many of us get forgotten.  There are people in the state hospitals right now that have been forgotten by their families.  Even people with eating disorders.  There are people with eating disorders who have died in state hospitals.  There are people with eating disorders who never got treatment and died and were forgotten.

There are people with eating disorders who kept these disorders secret all their lives.  Are you one of these people?  Are you reading this right now?  I am writing this for you.  I am thinking of you.   Tonight when I go to sleep I will remember writing this for you and you are not forgotten today.  You are not forgotten today or tomorrow and you can walk proud today and tomorrow and always knowing that I am right here.

I was one of you.  I kept it secret for a while.  A year, actually.  I went into therapy.  I told my therapist.  For a long time, therapists were the only ones that knew.  I would say it was only recently that I have “come out” very, very publicly as a person with an eating disorder.  I’d say four years ago, only a few people knew, though many, many people knew I had a “mental illness.”

The heck with it.  Come out, come out, wherever you are.

Anyway, my Post-Its are coming out of the woodwork here.

I have some kind of note about “Throwing the first stone” but I don’t understand the note.  It’s too vague so I don’t remember what the idea was.

I am going to write a brief fiction piece, meant to be spoken aloud, about a person with an ED.  That’s all I’ll say about that because I plan to use this piece as introductory at a reading if it comes out the way I want it to.

I want to do a piece on publishing, whether to seek publication, reasons for publication, ins and outs, and a new view on it (or so I’d like to think), and things I’ve done.

A piece on body acceptance

A piece on what I have seen of the body acceptance movement.  These last two may be combined, but they are on separate Post-Its right now.  Both Post-Its are blue, for what it’s worth.  The packet of blue Post-Its happened to be on the top of the pile.

A piece on money and downsizing

I wrote a piece called “Poops and Roses” the other day that I want to copy over and put in here.  It’s about dog poop.  I like the piece.

Oh yes, I want to write a piece about getting rid of my breasts.  I Googled “Breast Donation” and ended up with Breast Cancer Donation” and where to donate money.  Not quite.  Then I found “Breast Tissue Donation” but I meant the entire breast, not a teensy piece.  I Googled “Breast Transplant” and found out about how they take a piece of hip tissue and make breast tissue out of it.  Nope.  I want to give these to someone else.  I never wanted them in the first place.  I guess they don’t do this.  Well, I’m starting to write the piece now, which was not my intention, just wanted to say what it was about, just a hint of what I will write.

Is there no end to the Post-Its?  Is there no end to the posts?  Will I ever get around to doing something useful, like feeding the dog, or will she resort to eating my words?  Or, as I mentioned previously, will she eat the Post-Its themselves?  Will I end up eating the Post-Its, too?  How will I ever burn off the calories?  Can you burn a Post-It at both ends?

The End.