what comes next.....

I wrote an upsetting and slightly hysterical post last week. Slightly removed from it, I am first of all mortified that I was so careless and let my shame spill out.  That I let people see, however clumsily and ineffectively,  how hard I struggle, most days, to just appear happy and stable. I am also deeply touched by some of the responses and grateful for all of the love that came my way.  I think, in re-reading it, that I made it all seem petty and silly and narrowed down to a lack of a partner or a secure job, to the same loneliness that bedevils most single women.  There is truth in those things.  I am lonely most of the time and my career is not anything like I dreamed it would be.  I haven't been on a date in years.  Literally years.  These very concrete holes in my life do exist, yet that is not the gnawing I feel ripping through my chest and into my fingers.  I feel myself spinning into a familiar yet uncontrollable place and it frightens me.  I don't know how or even if I have the will to fight my way back.  I don't know if all of the work on coping and the training that I have done over the last two, five, ten, the last twenty years is enough.  These are old battles, ones begun in the years before adolescence. I have once again made food an enemy.  I have an almost uncontrollable urge to rip off my skin.  I am exhausted during the day, yet can't sleep at night.  None of this stems from the day to day.  My daily life is, if I look at it objectively, better than it has been in a long time.  I had an amazing year in 2012 and have so many wonderful projects in the works for 2013 and beyond. Beyond that, I have gained knowledge and skill, especially over the last two years. I know how to move from this spiral of shame and hate.  I  know how. I wrote a post about a year ago to a friend's brother and said, life doesn't get better, you get better. You get stronger and smarter and you find what makes your heart sing.  I believed what I wrote then. I still want to believe what I wrote,  but there is this nagging voice. What if I was wrong?  What if I had it backwards? What if, even when life does gets better, I don't? I walk around with this false confidence that doesn't quite reach my eyes and an eternally broken heart which does.  I pretend that I am smart.  I pretend that I have healed, whatever the fuck that means.  I talk and talk and talk about eating disorders and cutting and depression and suicidal idealization, as though they are completely defanged; foes long dead and buried. I buy into the "act as if" school of thinking.  And I am lying. I know in my core that I am lying.  But, there is this; my core could be wrong.  I hang onto this one little thread of hope that says that core fear of not ever being okay is wrong and I will, once again, dig myself out of this spiral and get to a place where I can talk of wanting out as a long ago memory....of it being something I just felt once....as something from then and not from now.  I am just hanging onto that thin shiny strand and hoping, hoping that I am wrong.

I question the intelligence of writing this, in the throes of the spin. After this entry I won't continue to post about it.  Although there is a value in writing for an unseen audience, of attempting to clarify your thoughts enough for others to understand, possibly empathize a bit, and maybe, just maybe see themselves in your struggle, at this point I feel that this discussion needs to once again become private. It probably should never have left that realm. It is hard to put on your public mask when you know people are reading about your private shame and I need to be able to wear that mask, to smile and say I'm fine and have it end there.  So for now, I'm fine.  Thanks for asking.  We'll talk soon.  Love, Nancy