Excavation of the Mind

So, when I'm not doing great ED-wise I start to see significance/applicability in seemingly unrelated places. This passage from a (not very good) book today really stuck out to me in terms of being a metaphor for the slippery slope of relapse: 

"I remember halting before I turned the corner where again lay the Crawler, still busy and incomprehensible in its task. Unsure if I could endure the excavation of my mind once more. Unsure if I would go mad from the sensation of drowning this time, no matter how much reason told me it was an illusion. But also knowing that the weaker I became, the more my mind would betray me. Soon it would be easy to retreat into the shadows, to become some shell haunting the lower steps. I might never have more strength or resolve to summon than in that moment."

-Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

Field Dispatch, February 2015

So, I’m back. Sorry for the sporadic posting. I was having a really tough time when I started updating this again last fall, and the holiday season was so rough that almost everything in the world outside my family slipped through the cracks.

So since I last posted, my grandfather (husband of my Nana that died in November) got a life-threatening infection (from a dirty needle stick at a VA hospital, don’t even get me started) that involved two emergency surgeries, 16 days on IV antibiotics, and hospitalization over Christmas. In addition, my boyfriend’s back problems became downright debilitating, his car died on us (permanently) in the middle of nowhere on a road trip back to his city from my parent’s house, my brothers (age 19 and 21) both became more and more overtly aggressive towards everything as a way of acting out due to family problems, my parents’ marriage continued to deteriorate in front of everyone, and my dad was in a car accident the day before I flew out for my 2015 field session. We also weathered our first holiday season without Nana, whose birthday was on Christmas. We basically just didn’t celebrate anything.

So it’s almost the end of February. I’m now a month into my 2015 field season in Equatorial Research Country. Up to this point I’ve usually done decently on food stuff over here – I came back lighter after the 2013 season but willing to fix that, and actually came back a bit heavier in 2014 (not a lifetime high but at a relatively robust place for me). I’ve been here for a month of 2015 and have already lost enough that even I objectively realize something needs to change, but feel deep in enough to be scared to reverse course. And scared to go forward. I broke down today and asked my mom if she’ll help me with money to restart my Skype therapy sessions soon.

In other words, I’m being brought to my knees yet again by this thing.

Some days, the loss feels so clinically clean and efficient, and other days it feels like a hurricane inside my head is putting my body so out of balance that it will never know up from down again. C’est la vie, I suppose.