So, as it happens, of the two IVs I failed to obtain -- the nursing fail that launched a thousand words of self-recrimation, though, by the grace of God, no episodes of self-injury or kitchen-floor meltdowns -- the oncoming nurse and her protégée failed to get one and forgot to even try to get the other.
In an effort to externalize some of my broodery and forestall another bout of inside drama, I said, "See, that's why I was so offended when you gave me a hard time for not getting it!"
Reader, she did not even recall the conversation in question.
Appropriately enough, I've been simultaneously reading Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose and the latest in my Christian-mommy-blogger reading list, Jennie Allen's Anything: the Prayer that Unlocked My God and My Soul, which, if you know me, may do much to explain why I am blogging less lately, because honestly, I'd be less embarrassed to advertise that I'd been spending hours of my finite existence reading the Twilight series.
But there it is: the challenge of my life right now is getting over my eating disorder, and all the subsidiary craziness that I've managed to keep with me as I've gained weight and "made progress" -- what we like to say when you're still kind of crazy, but not so much as to demand immediate intervention.
If you know addicts, and if you really know me, you will understand and believe me when I tell you that, at least in my life, anorexia and bulimia function much more like cocaine addiction than like your average diet.
This is the thing about the eating-disordered, and it's why the cultural expectations and narratives we impose upon women are so high-stakes for me: to everyone else, the problem is that I don't see that I'm thin enough, or I don't feel I deserve to eat -- forgivable little foibles that, insofar as they align with our general love of the insecure waif who doesn't "see her own beauty" and the self sacrificing mom who puts her needs last, actually make me seem more likable rather than less. My eating disorder has always seemed to me to be the most "feminine" thing about me -- my last best hope at being something other than the intense, focused, outspoken, demanding, ambitious child I was, a child, it was clear to me by about age eight, who was unacceptable in her natural state (see above, and ask yourself what a girl would need to do to have those traits and not be vilified for them. Lead the free world, maybe? Cure cancer?)
In point of fact, though, my eating disorder makes me a self-centered, irrational, miserly, withholding, petty, immature, angry person, one for whom everything -- relationships, values, goals, the need for the kid to get to school and the laundry to get picked up and life to happen -- comes second to whether one can see my abs more easily or less easily than they did yesterday and whether or not three pieces of toast is "too much".
Was I "hungry enough" to eat them? Well, that's a hard question to answer because it does not mean anything. But feel free to ruin everyone's morning over it.
In my efforts to be both less altogether and specifically less of all the masculine, ugly things I am (loud, certain, the kind of person who had to fight long and hard to insert those ubiquitous question marks at the end of each sentence), I actually overshot and just became, well, like an addict. So much like one that, even when I am in recovery, rather than in active crisis all the time, I act like your average character on some sort of biopic regarding the dissolution of some sort of eighties band. Some mornings, all I need is some sound equipment and a roadie to hurl it at.
All of which is to say, insofar as I have any kind of story worth telling right now, I believe it is this one: a story about how, disastrous as I am, I am also saved. Saved in the epicly embarrassing vocabulary of the church in which I grew up, the stuff of camp songs and oil-on-the-head anointings. Saved in the sense that I believe in and talk to this Jesus like he's a guy, though I remain unwilling to commit to any specific set of beliefs about when and how he rolled as a physical guy in the first century.
And it makes it easier, and better, and possible. My life, I mean. Whatever it is I experience when I experience God is the same thing that allows me to write blogs and take my kid to school and keep going back to the unit when, from another perspective, every experience I have there is just a story about my total failure at life and the sadistic nature of the world, to put such a worthless person as me on it. In my head, see, all roads lead to starving or vomiting or killing myself, except this one.
I've been trying to write about my faith without writing about my faith, because it isn't cool, and I believe I don't have the right to believe uncool things, and that I won't be liked if I do. I think of people who know me and don't believe in God, and I feel like I have to sidestep or joke about this part of me, because no one wants to be friends with That Girl. Like the loudness and the insistence and the ambition and the drive to Always Be Doing Something, Christianity isn't a part of the person I want to be seen as. And when I started to lose weight, back in high school, it became apparent to me that I actually have a chance of being a cool and well-liked person if I just tone down these things about myself.
But as great as it feels to see myself as something other than a loser or a pariah, to be located at the right lunch table -- or, at least, in the cafeteria rather than waiting out lunch hour in the school media center -- that story is lame when I tell it. The Phi Beta Kappa mom with words for Lena Dunham and words for Taylor Swift and words for everything that takes the risk of being obvious, cliche, or twee -- her story is awesome, but it's not really my story. I bet that was cool. I ride a bicycle.
You guys, I write in a prayer journal. I have written more than one entry about whether or not it's okay for me to have second breakfast. I not only need Jesus, but I need him for a host of super-lame failings regarding the amount of peanut butter I am allowed to eat in a given day.
The only actual story I can tell is this one, in which there's this God, and not the cool postmodern God, but, like, Jesus God. And I pray to him about my meal plan and give money to Donors Choose because I really believe this is what he wants, what his kingdom looks like. And that's who I actually am, "even though I'm so smart" and even though I love science so much. I am a person who, crises of faith aside, feels that God is real, and attributes the good things in my life -- my recovery, such as it is, included -- to that God.
So, fair warning: I'm going to keep writing, because it's one of the ways in which God is saving my life. And because, if you, too, can fuck with the Jesus, or if you can avoid being off put by the basic premise that God is at least there enough to be healing me, I do think it's worth reading, this story about how my addiction set up camp in my brain and keeps trying to kill me with its bullshit, and instead, I live and become a nurse and a mom and a person who -- intrinsic loud-mouthed-ness and certainty and perfectionism and declarative statements aside -- starts to see and love the world and the people it contains as something other than a stage for my personal version of Intense Inner Drama All the Time: the Oft-told Story.
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