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everything is upside down and backward and sad


"You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and no one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad."



I don't want to go to my psychiatrist and put on a brave face anymore.
I don't want to tell Alex how much I want to get better.
I don't want to look into the future and see a happy, glowing, successful mother of two.
Because I don't want to be a failure.

I wrote a letter to Alex:
...There are several reasons why I made the decision to ask my Mum to use the private healthcare cover to see a private psychiatrist...
...you; because you made me realise that I can be happy, I can be hopeful, there is more to life; it is worth fighting my demons for, and because you definitely, definitely deserve better. I think, essentially, because you took away so many of my fears and brought so much sunshine into my heart, I realised that I wasn't supposed to be ill - it wasn't me - it didn't have to be that way. I could step outside of my unhappiness, I was strong enough, capable of being that girl that I should always have been, and ready to be the girl I am when I'm with you permanently....

I'm not a liar. Every word of that is true.
But is it possible?
How can it be possible when everything is upside down and backward and sad and I am so ingrained in it. That is my life.
It's so easy to act the small parts - the happy, cute, intelligent girlfriend when I'm with Alex, the vivacious, playful, compassionate friend when I'm at the Club, the mature, sensible, grounded woman when I'm at work... But they are just parts on a stage - a stage with the backdrop of a straight and narrow world - when I step backstage again, it's a dark labyrinth of tunnels filled with moth-eaten costumes, a musty, suffocating smell of dying perfume where the creatures of my eating disorder lurk like something in a twisted fairytale.
...ready to be the girl I am when I'm with you permanently.
Does that mean I'm ready to act for the rest of my life? No, I know that that would be impossible. Is it possible, is it really possible, that it's not an act, that it is happiness, that it is inside me, that I have been taking steps outside the convoluted mirror world with Alex... and that I can step outside for good?

If you haven't read Marya Hornbacher's book Wasted, I urge you to. It puts things into words that I so often struggle to do.


picture from: http://pretty-as-a-picture.deviantart.com/art/the-monster-in-the-mirror-85878360
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Comments

  1. Celia D.23 May 2010 at 14:21

    Beautiful post...in my opinion, sometimes an act is also the real thing. How do you distinguish between "real" and "made up" anyway?

    ReplyDelete
  2. minaralou24 May 2010 at 16:48

    "world's a stage and men and womean are mere actors"

    ReplyDelete
  3. avery24 May 2010 at 17:10

    your writing is so beautiful.
    just sayin'.

    ReplyDelete

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