february 17th: far green country under a swift sunrise

This past Christmas, my sister and I watched the entire Lord of the Rings series again. I hadn't seen it in years, and I'd forgotten about this quote at the end that Frodo says, that makes me cry every time I hear it:

"How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart, you begin to understand - there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend, some hurts that go too deep - that have taken hold."

My friend Katie and I have discussed this so many times - can we ever really be "normal" again? Can we ever really go back to being fully functional human beings? I realize there is no such thing as "normal"; I've been told this ad nauseum, whenever I've discussed this with anyone else. But I think there are levels of normal that people who dismiss normality take for granted. Things like waking up without wanting to die; breathing without having to focus on slowing every intake; communicating with others without having a panic attack; eating the appropriate amount of food to survive. When I say I want to me normal, I don't mean in an existential, socially bounded manner; I mean that I want to be able to function, on a daily basis, without simple necessary tasks taking up every ounce of energy I have.

This quote can apply to so many situations, many much more serious than mine. War, genocide, abuse and violence. What has always struck me about Frodo, though, is that in a sense, he failed. Without Gollum (another character I will need to write about, another time), Frodo would've kept the ring. I think, in the end, it wasn't what was done to him that haunted him, but the choices that he made. The others could heal, despite the travesties of war, because war was done to them. Frodo made his own bad decisions - heavily influenced by the ring, of course, but still in the end his own warped choices.

This, I think, is why it's so hard for people to feel sympathy for those with many mental illnesses. Because in the end, we do this to ourselves. We make the decision not to eat, to purge, to slash our wrists. To sit in bed and do absolutely nothing. To those outside, it seems so horribly selfish. And we see it ourselves. We know we shouldn't do the things we do; we wish we could be more appreciative, more capable, better.

It's a very fine line, between taking responsibility for your actions and blaming yourself for your disease. This is one of the things that still sticks out most strongly in my brain from treatment, that one of my favorite therapists (S) used to say to me over and over (from anyone else, I'd've gone bitchface on them. From her, it was hard to ignore.) It's so easy to say that you "just can't ____". Can't eat, can't get up, can't stop. "You can," she'd always say to me. "You choose not to." I hated her, every time, for saying this. Because so often it feels incredibly, absolutely impossible to do these things. But physically, I could put food in my mouth. My jaw could chew it. My legs could carry me out of bed. I am physically capable of these things; it's my mind telling me that I can't.*

*There are points where this logic breaks down. There are points you sink to, when your body is so malnourished, when you are so fucking hungry that the need to eat is entirely overwhelming. And I say this as someone who starved herself for 10 years, and controlled it most of the time. There is a point where that control breaks down.

"But at some point, the body will essentially eat of its own accord in order to save itself. Mine began to do that. The passivity with which I speak here is intentional. It feels very much as if you are possessed, as if you have no will of your own but are in constant battle with your body, and are losing. 

It wants to live.

You want to die.

You cannot both have your way." ~ Marya Hornbacher (Wasted)

I'm not sure S would agree with this. I'm sure many professionals wouldn't, and maybe even some people who have had eating disorders. Maybe it's something you have to experience. But I can tell you that the body will do things all on its own, when necessary for survival. It's a bitch like that.

This is important. It's empowering. It's also incredibly disheartening and shameful. It's something I still struggle with, every day; how much of this is my fault? How much of this could I turn around if I just tried harder? My current therapist has reached the end of her rope. She doesn't know what else to say to me to get me to move on with my life. Let me tell you how awesome it feels, to have a therapist give up on you. Not that she'd ever say it in so many words, but we're down to the "You just have to do it" argument. (Try telling someone with an eating disorder to just eat, I dare you.) I feel like I'm defending my depression to her, like I'm making excuses for myself. (I have this written in big letters across my binder from my first inpatient stay - EATING DISORDERS ARE AN EXCUSE. Because they are; they're an excuse not to function, not to grow up, not to participate in life. They're an excuse to feel miserable.)

Mental illnesses are so, so hard. Because there is no cure, no single treatment that works. Because sometimes someone needs to be told that their behavior isn't their fault, and sometimes they need to be told that this exact same behavior is them making excuses - and both these things will be true. Because mental illness is, in the end, a paradox, a conundrum, an incongruous juxtaposition of states of being. It wants to live, you want to die. You cannot both have your way. The illness becomes it's own demon, one you want so desperately to destroy - but one you cater to. One you keep alive with your actions. How much of this is my fault? I feel like so much of it is hardwired into my brain, like these are the threads of my old life; they were always there, just not yet woven together completely. Maybe I can unravel part of this tapestry, maybe I can tear it to pieces, but I still have those same threads to work with when I try to put myself back together.


At the end of the movie, when Frodo leaves Middle Earth with the last of the elves, my sister turned to me and said: "I still don't get why he had to go. Why didn't he just stay?"

I was quite literally speechless. I knew that if I opened my mouth, I'd start bawling. And I had no clue how to answer her, because it had never occurred to me that someone might think that way. To me, Frodo's leaving was always a blissful, peaceful end for him. The scene where he says goodbye to Sam and the others broke me more than any other in the film, but I understood. He smiles, on that boat, for the first time in so long. He was free.

I can tell you this much for certain; if I were Frodo, I'd've run onto that boat and never looked back.

February 17th: 

(normal trigger warnings )

2005

12:25 am - I don't want you to go that way

Frell it's late. I DIDN'T EVEN GO TO GYM. Gah.

Finished my english essay! 531 words... yes! Almost done with math eval... "what topics do I want to study this semester?" sleep... Finished all my other stuff except the icky spanish oral thing >_< I hate it it's so scary even though it takes literally 4 minutes.

I want to sleep omigawd... and tomorrow is day 2 and I'm just going to die. guh.

And because I couldn't help myself... *sheepish grin* just one!... and I watched the end again. Sigh. Really need to stop obsessing... IT'S A STUPID TV SHOW! GAH! But but. But. They were so happy -_- and it made me happy and now they aren't anymore so I can't pretend. Sigh.

01:01 am - We had good times ~ I wouldn't change it for the world

mm I lied

:spazz: I'm so going to just pretend this episode never happened.

Did my spanish thing. Lost track of the time. So I'm either 15 seconds over or 45 short... oh well.

It is so time for sleep

01:08 am - ValaAerynDanielCrichton

omigawd. one last thing. does this not look like farscape?

[images deleted from original source]

aaaaaand Aeryn!

the resemblence is uncanny :mellow:

But ew. That's DANIEL. Gross

:spazz:

OMIGAWD i so need to go sleep now

09:46 pm - Cause I don't think that you know what you've been missing

Look at the timeeeeeeeee :D

So time for bed :wee:

And because they're omigawd so pretty:

But ew. I can't get the text right :spazz:

2006

03:54 pm - YAY

OMG I GOT INTO COLLEGE!!!!!!!!

Yes, it was only my safety school, BUT I STILL GOT IN SOMEWHERE!!

*bouncedance*

2007

05:07 pm - (no subject)

I'm fat.

I'm fat.

I'm fatfatfatfatfatfatfatfatfatfatfatfatfatfatfatfatfatfatfatfatfatfatfatfatfat.

I wonder if I say it enough times if it will get through my head and make me stop binging.

2008

04:13 pm - (no subject)

Who the fuck am I kidding.

I don't have an eating disorder. I'm just a pig. A fucking pig who can't keep her life together, who can't take advantage of the opportunities she's given, who is so fucking determined to ruin her fucking life that she can't seize opportunities when they're thrust in front of her face. Who can't decide what the fuck she wants to do with her life when she's got so many options and so much support. So many people would do anything do be in my place, and all I can do is piss it away.

I fucking hate myself. I'm so disgusting, in so many ways.

I have a headache.

07:35 pm - (no subject)

I really hope my mom never checks my bruincard account (our UCLA card, works like a debit card. our vending machines accept them). She's going to wonder why there are literally hundreds of vending machine charges.

A lot of them on the same day.

Yeah.

2009

05:43 am - (no subject)

I very badly want to crawl back in bed and huddle there miserably for the rest of the day.

I am NOT going to let myself. Need to get up and out of this funk. I always feel better when I just go about my day normally.

But goddess, it's hard.

12:57 pm - (no subject)

I'm trying to decide if I want to go to class or not.

No, I'm trying to decide if I'm GOING to go to class or not. I already know I don't want to.

I'm so unmotivated. Ugh. I still just want to curl up in a ball on my bed. I shouldn't, I shouldn't, I shouldn't... but I want to so badly.

01:45 pm - wo shang mei er, mei xin, bian shi tou

I'm too depressed to get out of this fucking chair.

Liou coe shway duh biao-tze huh hoe-tze duh ur-tze.

My suitemate also just asked me if I was ok. She said I sounded sad when I talked to her. Fuck, I'm getting worse at covering this.

2010

07:12 pm - (no subject)

Usually I read TWoP for it's comical value. But I finally got around to reading the Caprica review, and oh my gods. Essay is so good.

( I remember now that this is why I watch this show )

As far back as I can remember I've had this dream. Not much anymore, but for a while I had it all the time. There's people on a rollercoaster and they're having the time of their lives, and it's loud and crashing, and there's the booming of the ocean and the acoustics of the wind, and they're screaming with their hands in the air, and the thing that they don't know is that the tracks stop, somewhere at a crest, just gap into nothing, and they're hurtling toward it. They think that they're safe but they're not safe.

And usually the dream gets bogged down in bureaucratic detail, trying to mobilize a team to somehow solve this problem, all the futile possible ways we could save them. Dream logic; leadership dreams. Maybe if they all raised their arms at the same counter-intuitive time, at the bottom of the hill maybe, it would provide some kind of drag. Maybe if they all unlatched their harnesses at the same moment, if they somehow all knew to do it at the same time, like in a football wave, if they could do this as they were launching into space, and off the tracks altogether, they would take flight, and we could... catch them, somehow. Everyone would be safe.
JG Ballard died this morning. He will be missed. He said "a widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction."

Karen Armstrong wrote one of my favorite books of all time, the elegant and accessible A History Of God. It's brilliant, I've read it lots of times, have bought and given away more copies than I can account for. In 2000, she wrote a sort of follow-up called The Battle For God, about fundamentalism in the new millennium.

The idea, the rationale as such, is pretty simple. We find ourselves in a complex, degenerate post-God secular world; there are no rules, the center doesn't hold, nobody's watching you or judging you. Some thrive; I thrive. But it's nervous: you're looking into an existential abyss, or you're standing in the middle of Sodom trying to avoid eye contact, or you're getting turned on and about to do something really stupid. Those are the main things. Fundamentalism is sort of like all of those things at once. Gin a body kiss a body, need a body cry?

What's most amazing about the millennial fundamentalisms, which every single religion has, is their basic intent on going "back to basics" in some fashion, while completely ignoring the fact that there aren't actually any "basics" to go back to. The stuff they want to accomplish, for all of us, the walls they want where a body meets a body, the rules be which we must abide, never actually existed. They're syncretistic fantasies about control, mental lockdown, revisions to decisions that no moment can erase. Every single fundamentalism is synthetic, reaching backwards for an imaginary grace.

Fundamentalism reaches past all that nonsense and chaos and into a primordial world where men were men and women weren't, where no decisions ever had to be made, where every single option was laid out ahead of time by a firm but loving God, where families meant a certain thing and sex meant a certain thing, and everything was easy except temptation. But that's obviously a crock. You can't honestly tell me there was ever a time when human beings were less complex, less passionate or afraid or unpredictable, less wonderful than they are now.

For me, all this was a revelation on the level of learning, as a kid, that Allah and JHVH and God were the same thing: that all Big Three monotheisms worship the God of Abraham and don't even bother hiding that fact. The idea that "fundamentalism" was a logically tortured appeal to a beautiful pure world that never existed, and that Al Qaeda and Juniper Creek are essentially parallel movements with the same agenda and arising from the same confusion and fear... Revelatory.

Things are confusing, lots of stuff coming at your face all the time. Sex keeps getting less and less kind, and we keep blaming more and more shit on our parents and our kids, and technology is overwhelming and even the hippest among us can sometimes feel like the world is changing so fast and flying by so carelessly without giving us more than a glimpse of itself, much less a place to grab hold. I can't say they don't have a point. But then, terrorists usually do. If they didn't have something to say, they wouldn't feel silenced, and they wouldn't pull the shit they pull. They wouldn't feel the need to scream so loudly that the whole world must listen.

For a lot of us, it's enough to have self-control and to make good choices, and not get out of hand, or take part in what's going on all around you. For others, the projected disarray is way too much to handle, and you start feeling like a rat in a cage as big as the world. Everywhere around you, the world is on fire, and everyone around you goes on like the world hasn't ended. You're on a roller coaster with everybody alive, headed for a gap, and nobody knows it but you: we're all heading merrily toward our destruction, and we don't even know it. We think that we're safe but we're not safe.

If you have that kind of information, if you know that the tracks run out and people are going to die, it's not only your duty to use it, but your purpose on this earth. To be in the world, but not of it. To help, and to heal, and to save the world, and in so doing, save yourself. Or, as a lovely harsh woman will say years from now, to fulfill your destiny: to love them, and take care of them, show them the glory of peace. To see your infinite mercy matched only by your power, and complete control. Isn't that the definition of the righteous man? The saint? The martyr? Kara Thrace, Laura Roslin, Tory Foster, Natalie Six, D'Anna Three; Ellen Tigh, in her resurrection. Gaius, Zarek, Felix. Terrorists, if Antigone's a terrorist: to give up the right to walk in this world, for a duty that must be obeyed for our souls to stay intact, unbending.

If you saw the roller coaster heading toward the gap, if you were in the middle of that nightmare, wouldn't you do anything to stop it?

It's fifty-eight years before the Fall. The Colonies don't really exist; they're just planets. Humanity settled them millennia ago, after the Galleon and the blaze that pursued it. Right now we're like Europe, little nation-states that hate each other; that see the differences more than the similarities. We think this is all there is. We've forgotten that every age is made of Pluribus and Unum, that every many is made of ones and every one is part of a many. It's a political truth but a religious one also, and every iteration of us forgets that. There's always a Jealous God, and there's always the quaint and easily secularized Gods. It's a religious truth, but a political one also, and that X marks the spot where terror happens. For you, and for me, and for all of us.


Eventually the Twelve racist children of Kobol will erupt into internecine war: that's when the toasters will get drafted. (Or is it? Does the game invent the toys, or do the toys invent the game? Do the Cylon call the war into being by their existence, by being the best tools for destruction that we're able to create?) They'll freak out and rebel so hard it'll call into being the government we already know: the Articles of Colonization, the Quorum, the President of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol. I always thought it was weird that the symbol of the Colonies was a phoenix, rising from the flames; it makes more sense now. The confederation of the Colonies, the idea of these united states: when it died, it was younger than my parents are now.
 
And that first Cylon War will last twelve and a half years, until Ellen and the rest arrive from Earth and have a culty meeting of the minds with the rebellion. And then the Armistice will happen, and we'll sit quietly for forty more years. And they'll never tender a meeting at the Armistice Station, until John Cavil's Plan goes into action. And the first words they'll say are, "Are you alive?" And we still won't know, and they still won't know.

***

Caprica's at a crossroads and they can't even see it; at the crossroads is where you meet Hecate. She has many faces, and none. One of the signs of a culture in decline is a fascination with the underworld, séances and ghosts and table-rapping, zombies and vampires; the breath of death on your face long before you realize you died miles back. This is only one of the faces of Hecate, but it's the one these kids understand, even if they don't know it: they're only expressing what the grownups are too old and cold and hard to say, to feel, to do. They were sacrificed long ago, sold out like the children of every generation that fell so in love with its own reflection that they forgot the point of children: not for your glory, but for the further glory of the world. Forget that and we're all just walking dead. They're Hers now.

***

They're just children, playing. That's faith.

***

"Where does the Athenian Academy stand on the question of monotheism, Sister?" She scoffs, asking if they're under investigation now too, but gives him the official line. "The Academy is dedicated to following the path of the Gods, the Goddess Athena being our patroness. We are, however, open to all forms of worship, including belief in a singular God." That's interesting. Jordan agrees. "That's very tolerant. And how many of your students are practicing monotheists?" No comment. "It doesn't concern you, Sister? That kind of absolutist view of the universe? Right and wrong determined solely by a single all-knowing, all-powerful being whose judgment cannot be questioned, and in whose name the most horrendous of acts can be sanctioned without appeal?" When you put it like that, terrorism almost sounds sort of fucked up. Clarice points out that he's pretty well-informed about these monsters, and he nods. "Know your enemy, Sister Clarice."
She grins. It's terrifying, but particularly gratifying as well: "Love your enemy, Agent Duram." She rests her case. Any way you look at it, that was fabulous.

***

"Most of my family, including my parents, died in the Tauron Civil War. So my brother and I came here as orphans. When we arrived, they drove us to this orphanage. I remember this field of wildflowers on the side of the road. It might seem strange to a Caprican, but there are no flowers on Tauron. Not one. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen in my life. All the colors, the petals, the softness... And I wept openly, for the first and last time. So I guess that's what I'd tell Tamara. To find those things in life that make you cry, that make you feel. Because they're what make you human. I guess that's what I'd tell Tamara if I could."

***

For all his atheism, Joe's a pretty essentialist fellow: "No, it's an illusion. You said so yourself." True. She's a copy. But a perfect copy, in every way, he says. (Not the point.) "Still doesn't make her your daughter," Joe says, which is closer to the truth. "There's an axiom in my business: 'A difference that makes no difference is no difference.'" Nice wordplay, and of course the only way he can approach this and stay sane, but I'd say it's closer to "A difference that makes no difference is a zebra." Or I mean, instead of zebra you could say, "Killing machine with an identity crisis."

(Can't leave out the snark *g*)

***

"The children of Caprica are lost, Daddy, okay, we are all lost if we don't turn to the light. Listen to me, okay? When are you going to realize that later is too late? When did you ever listen, ever want to listen? You and Mom, you knew it all. Your arrogance was killing your daughter. And that's how you lost her. Not to some bomb." She walks off into the dark, and he's all alone in the nothingness.

09:20 pm - crash crash burn let it all burn

No matter how many breaths that you took you still couldn't breathe

(As the days go by the night's on fire)

There is a fire inside that has started a riot about to explode into flames.

The riot inside keeps trying to visit me

No matter how we try, it's too much history

Too many bad notes playing in our symphony

So let it breathe, let it fly, let it go

Let it fall, let it crash, burn slow.

Every day that passes I more publically self-destruct and I wonder how far I can push it before something gives. Something's gotta give. I think I'll probably die first. It's become almost a game, a thrill to see how far I can go, how much I can get away with. Push it a little farther every day and the world doesn't end so I push it a little farther.

I'm so far out over the edge right now I don't know how I haven't fallen.

Everyone is deciding what they're doing with the rest of their lives. I should be doing this. I've reached that point in college where you're supposed to apply to grad school or choose a career but I'm just stagnate. Existing and nothing more. I was never supposed to live this long. A life beyond school? That was never supposed to happen. I have absolutely no idea what to do with myself because I never ever envisioned this point in time actually occuring. I shouldn't be here. The world is moving on past me, my friends are growing up and moving on and I'm stuck in this hole I've dug for myself with no means of getting out or moving on.

I'm terrified I will be left behind and I'm terrified that I will live until tomorrow.

You're dancing snow dirt into the snow

while others look at you on show.

You're dancing dirt into the snow

while all around you people grow

and watch you bleed.