My voice professor is making us memorize poems to help restructure our breathing. It's just as well that they aren't monologues, seeing as everything else in the acting programme is saturated with proper scenes and soliloquies and shit.
I've just never been one for poetry.
OH, THAT IS A LIE. It's a lie and I'm calling me on it. I used to write poetry allthefuckingtime in elementary school. Funny shit. Limericks and the like. I was damn good, too. And then in seventh grade. Depressing shit, and songs. I was still damn good. I wrote as my eating disorder totally spiraled out of control, nearly killed me, and then I stopped. That's probably why I'm turned off by poetry now. There are too many painful memories associated with where I was at the height of my poetry days.
My poetry always rhymed, and I once harboured a great distaste for free-verse poetry. Now I'm beginning to appreciate it a little bit more, if it's good. I have friends who write really legit free-verse. Frankly I'm a bit jealous, because now I realise that while I was busy abhorring free-verse, I was really hiding behind my complex rhyme schemes to conceal the fact that I wasn't talented enough to write a really meaningful piece that stood on its own without rhyme or rhythm.
Anyway, the first poem my professor gave us to memorize was entitled "Wild Geese." I started out pretending to hate it and now can't shake the fact that I think it's really beautiful. Yes, it's free-verse. It goes a little something like this.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile, the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the plains and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clear blue air, are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination.
Calls to you like the wild geese -- harsh and exciting
Over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
My heart breaks when I read this poem. I want to believe it. I want to become it.
But even if I did believe it -- would I eat? Could I eat?
*Calorie Numbers: May Trigger (...it's a little late for that, don't you think, AJ?)*
I don't get hungry. If I do, I pang for 20 minutes or so and then it goes away. Completely. I can eat 100 calories, 150-180 if I haven't eaten all day, and feel stuffed. Maybe I'm misjudging "stuffed," but there have been a few times in the past couple weeks or so when I've tried to eat 2000 calories and my body hated me for the pain I was putting it through. Yes, I'm trying to lose weight. But I'm used to being ravenous while I do it, at least for the first while. I mean, for a little bit I was eating 2000 calories a day and feeling fine. Now processed food, greasy food, high-carb food seems to repulse my body as well as my mind.
*
Part of me gets envious when I see people eating ice cream. You have no idea the pain I would go through if I ate that. Objectively it looks so delicious. Fuckkkkkk. And then the eating disorder part of me rejoices, because evidently my body has now developed a built-in punishment system for when I try to do right by it. This scares me somewhat, because hunger upon starvation was at least a sign that my body was working properly. Now I don't know what the hell it wants or needs. What gives? Is it anxiety that's curbing my appetite? Depression? A thyroid problem? I don't have any other thyroid symptoms; in fact, the days that I've eaten 2000 calories are the days that I've cranked my A/C to generate a motherfucking blizzard and still sweat through my clothes. This bit of evidence would suggest I'm hypermetabolic, and given where I am now in terms of refeeding/percentage of weight restoration that would match up to past instances, but if I'm hypermetabolic, then why am I not hungrier?
I was in therapy this morning. 8:30 AM is much too early for therapy. One ends up letting too much slip. My therapist asked me if I thought I could continue to feed myself healthfully.
I made an idiosyncratic AJ noise that was halfway between an "eh" and an "arrrrgh," shifted uncomfortably, and said, "Probably I... won't."
My therapist correctly pointed out that if I didn't, my eating disorder would only continue to stand in the way of my dreams and ambitions.
"Yeah," I said, massaging my temples between my thumb and forefinger, "but honestly, at this point my dreams just seem so... purely conceptual. And quite unattainable."
"What makes you think they're unattainable?" she asked, and I'm sure she was expecting a response citing the statistics of actors who try to make it versus actors who actually do make it; or a self-aware statement about the politics of winning an Oscar. But instead I told her the pure, unvarnished truth, which was:
"I can really see myself dying from this."
A pause. "Why?"
"I don't want to," I said quickly. "I'm not okay with it. It's just, logically, that has become a very real possibility."
It does scare me, yes, that I feel this way. But seriously, what the hell. If I haven't gotten my shit together by now, after the innumerable "this is the last time, I know I said that last time, but this is the last time"s and the "I hate my eating disorder so much and I'm willing to do absolutely anything to recover"s and the "just one more pound"s and the health scares and the IVs and the NGs and the EKGs and the CBCs and the ERs and every rehab/medical unit in between, you'd think something would hit me and stick and that enough would be enough.
Apparently not so.
I wish I had a pocket-pal Robert Downey, Jr. that I could pull out to give me a pep talk. 'Cause if we're being honest, I basically want to do to my eating disorder what Robert Downey, Jr. did to drug addiction. And then do to Hollywood what Robert Downey, Jr. did to... Hollywood. He's the only person I know of for a fact who's fucked up at recovery more than me and come out the other side even more awesome. It's so hilarious that I thought this year was going to be my comeback year and then realised that in order to have a comeback, you have to come back from something. You can't have a comeback from the same place you were when you left, which is what I'd been trying to do. Oh yeah. Shit.
Anyway, the poem we have to memorize for tomorrow, I've heard before. Perhaps in one of the aforementioned rehabs. I don't like it as much, seeing as it seems to be about codependency, something from which I've always been too much of a bitch to suffer. But here you have it:
"The Journey"
One day you finally knew what you had to do,
and began,
though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice --
though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations --
though their melancholy was terrible.
It was already late enough,
and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice,
which you slowly recognized as your own,
that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world,
determined to do the only thing you could do --
determined to save the only life you could save.
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