I think that kind of sums up my current situation.
"I have to be numb," I whined to my therapist yesterday. "I really, really have to. It's too painful, and it feels uncomfortable and unnatural."
"What does?"
"To be feeling emotions so strongly."
"That's human."
"Well, I don't like it. It sucks."
I was never taught how to Be Angry or Be Depressed. By which I mean, I never truly witnessed anyone in my life cope with anger or (non-clinical) depression healthily. Anger and depression led my mother to drinking, which further exacerbated her anger and depression and clouded her judgment, which led her to abuse me. Anger and depression led my father to co-dependency and sticking his head in the sand. Anger and depression led my sister to convincing herself she was better than her fucked-up family, being neurotically arrogant about the entire thing, and distancing herself from all of us.
Now my mom's sober, my dad's backed off all our cases, and my sister had her Aha Moment last year when she emailed me saying how she's just as much or as little of a head case as the rest of us and that she's sorry for thinking she was the exception to the neuroses of the world. Her relationship with me has gotten considerably more... existent. And fun. Same with her relationship with my dad. She wavers with my mom sometimes, but things are better there too.
What I'm trying to say is, even though my family is better at coping now, I grew up seeing anger and depression as being very horrible feelings that led people (particularly my mother, holla atta Freud) to do very horrible things. So, gutturally, I'm terrified that if I allow my anger/depression to exist, I will lash out of character and at other people. I'll stop conducting myself and my affairs with the reasoned, direct, professional, pleasant countenance I and others are used to. I'll yell at someone. I'll throw a chair. I'll hit someone. I'll run away for a few days. I'll cut myself.
Save for yelling at someone, I've never actually done any of those things. (Well, I cut myself once or twice ages and ages ago. Like literally, once or twice. Experimentally. On my leg. I didn't understand what the big release was supposed to be, so I didn't do it again. I was never "a cutter" and I never used cutting to cope.) So they're all pretty irrational fears. That doesn't stop me from being panicked by them.
I enjoy handling everything with a healthy dose of analytic stoicism, and only when emotions become irrepressibly intense can I no longer ignore them. So I go numb. With anorexia. It's already beginning to happen (usually it takes at least a couple weeks of starvation for this particular side effect to kick in), which I guess means I didn't have very far back down the rabbit hole to go. This - is - absolutely - necessary.
You don't understand. Imagine the worst physical pain you've ever been in. Really, really take yourself there. If it wasn't a long-lasting pain, pretend it was. Pretend you'd been living with it relentlessly ruling your life for a week. Not like an on-and-off, some-days-are-better-than-others thing. I mean totally consistent. And then pretend that you found out it would be at least two and a half years before it ever fully went away. Now imagine there was an emotional equivalent to that pain. Under the same circumstances and conditions. Wouldn't you do whatever you knew how to do to make it go away, and fast?
I'm grieving. I've lost the closest friends I've ever known how to have and my first "real" family. I've lost the first family that didn't scare me or hurt me or piss me off or assign me some ridiculous "ever the parent yet ever the child" role. I've lost the first group of friends that really made me feel safe.
Because I'm not one of those "friend" people. I'm one of those friendLY people, sure, the kind who has lots of friendly acquaintances and is fun at parties and is really good at being a shoulder to cry on, but throughout my life there have been very few people that I've really shared something of MYSELF with, or been comfortable being vulnerable with. I took and took and took other people's experiences and insecurities and soaked up everything I could learn about them like a sponge, because each and every person fascinates me to no end. I gave them advice, and I gave them support, but I didn't really give them anything of who I was, anything I thought to be any sort of sacrifice. Until college, I don't know if I could have named five people with whom I shared some real reciprocity of emotional intimacy. And it didn't upset me, because I didn't know what I was missing.
But then I met my 2012 acting class, and there was something about the vast majority of them that I couldn't help but connect with on so many levels. Little by little, I started being real with them, if only for a moment at a time. I started doing what most people do when they're kids. I started making friends.
Suddenly, this whole friend/family deal has been stripped of me. Now I see these family members in between classes and I can maybe catch up with three or four of them over coffee for an hour every week if one of us isn't rushing to a lecture or rehearsing a scene. I might see them on weekends drunk at huge parties. None of these things are a suitable substitute for what once existed between us. I feel like I've lost something that I can't quite put my finger on, but something so powerful that I can't even describe it. I've never really ached like this over other people.
And then I have to contend, alone, with my feelings of complete inadequacy, failure, and ineptitude in regards to having to repeat a year. And anger about everyfuckingthing. And NO DISTRACTION, NO INTELLECTUAL STIMULATION, FUCKING NOTHING. Shit fuck damn bitch ass, it's a wonder I haven't started popping pills or shooting junk by now. I've got to get away. Everything, everything serves as a reminder of just how much of a miserable failure I am. What I had, and what I lost. My classes. With these new kids. Their faces. My professors. The classrooms. The lectures. The readings. The exercises. The scenes. How Andy reads the lines and how Bryce read the same lines so differently last year. Their friendships between one another. Everything about everything is like salted lemon juice alcohol on a gaping, open wound.
But if I starve myself... it goes away. And I am empty inside, both of food and emotions. And I can't think about the pain because all I'm thinking about is how to please and appease my eating disorder. And I can't hear the hurt because all I can hear is the voice of anorexia screaming at me. And I can't feel anger or depression because all I can feel is hungry and weak.
This is what I'm up against. This is what my Life is up against.
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