speaking

It's been exactly four weeks to the day since I left the treatment center. 

I absentmindedly touch my fingers to the pendant hanging around my neck - four weeks / it feels like an eternity, like I've aged decades in the time since I've been away. 

I'm sitting on my porch in the sun, pen and paper in front of me, breathing in the smell of my neighbor's cigarettes and trying to find a way to displace my pain onto a blank white page. This is what they taught me to do, isn't it? To find other outlets besides my physical self to express my emotions?  "Use your words," they said, and I must learn again how to speak / how to spit out the sadness and fear and hope instead of swallowing it down or carving it on my skin.

.....

My stomach growls and I look longingly towards the refrigerator, but I can't seem to make myself eat today. Today the pain is too acute, twisted in knots in my belly, too much sadness stuck in my throat to swallow down food. And I've been pushing it away, all the grief and the loneliness and heartache, pushing it far, far away from me so I don't have to know it, feel it, be flooded with the weight of it all. I am pretending that it does not exist. To acknowledge it's existence is to make it real, to have to sit with the depth of my own deep ache.

I have been confronted this past week with the sound of my mother tongues: the languages of loneliness and fear and shame, words that were spoken to me when I was young, languages that are more familiar to me than my own heartbeat. When I hear them, I speak them back in razor blades to my skin, bruised eyes and empty bellies. Shame and fear and loneliness are body-languages, felt in hunched shoulders and downcast eyes, and spoken through scarred arms and bony-framed bodies leaning over toilet bowls.

They are asking of me the impossible: to learn a new way of communication, to begin to hear and speak differently. To unlearn the body-languages, to recognize the messages of the past, hear their sound, but respond back with my own true voice. They are asking me to verbalize my experience rather than expressing my pain and grief through my physical self. But my own true voice feels unfamiliar and strange, my words foreign on my tongue; self-denial and self-destruction taste like home. To speak with actual words, to vocalize my pain, is to make it real. And to make it real is to feel it and to feel it is to hurt and good god, I do not want to hurt.

But I am still hearing my native tongues despite it all, the voices of of shame and obsessive fear and always-and-forever-alone-ness rising above the fray. They rattle through my bones, shaking me to my core, and everything in me wants to speak them back, respond to the heaviness they bring by pouring out my pain in prolonged hunger and sharp objects on my skin.

Yes, I am being asked to do the impossible: to do something different.

It's been four days so far since I've eaten, four days and the last thing I want are calories in my body, weighing me down / filling me up with life and feeling. I am speaking, but I am speaking in the Old Languages, Their languages, living into the messages they gave me (dirty:unworthy:broken:never enough) by destroying my very flesh and bone. They pronounced destruction over me and I now I speak it over myself, a woman fluent in tearing herself to shreds.

The question is not why I self-destruct. The question is: how in the world do I stop? How do I stop listening so intently to the words I know by heart, those of age-old, haunting shame, and paralyzing fear and pit-of-my-stomach-loneliness / how do I stop speaking the Old Languages, communicating to the world only through my body?

.....

My mind is foggier today than it has been in the past few months. The number on the scale was down this morning: and I long for it, to start shrinking again, to disappear into thin air. 

I saw it coming from a mile away: the build of fear and anxiety and shame, the emotions I was stuffing down so I wouldn't have to feel them, the increasing pressure to figure out my future plans. It was hardly have been a surprise that I finally broke down and gave in to the ever present desires to deprive my body of nutrients. No, the behaviors themselves were expected. What caught me by surprise was how easy it was to slip back, how effortlessly I went into the mode of self-destruction.

That internal force that drives me is still bent on punishment and pain, still caught up in Their beliefs, the voices that speak the Old Languages. 

I know that the real me, me with a capital M, disagrees with those messages. I know that they don't fit for me anymore. Yet I am constantly caught in this tug-of-war between listening intently to the toxicity in which I am fluent, living out the shame-filled messages, and choosing the new way, the way of self-compassion and faith and wholeness and Life. The toxic voices are louder and more enticing than the new way, a siren song pulling me to the edge of the cliff, tempting me to lean further and further over the brink.

I don't know how to stuff up my ears to block out the sound, how to choose recovery on my own terms, how to motivate myself back into living in line with my values and beliefs.

I do not have an answer yet, at least not one that satisfies. 

The poet Marge Piercy writes: 

She must learn again to speak
starting with I
starting with We
starting as the infant does
with her own true hunger
and pleasure 
and rage.

I suppose that's where I must start too, with my own true hunger and pleasure and rage, things I’ve long suppressed. I suppose this is the only way to learn a language, to fumble through and stumble along like a child until one day it comes naturally, flowing off the tongue. 

Here is to new ways of listening: tuning in to the voices of self-compassion and worthiness and grace; for something besides the Old Ways / those familiar sounds of shame and fear.

Here is to new ways of speaking: articulating my pain and heartache and internal experience through my own true voice, however shaky and rusty it may be, instead of through these body-languages.