July 31st, 2004

Subject: wish Time: 01:13 am

I wish I knew what it was like to write beautiful things and inspire beautiful thoughts, to feel right away the warmth of a reaction and validation from the art I create. I use my pens and pencils to scratch out images on blank paper and occasionally they turn out just the way they appear in my head and I am pleased. This rarely happens with my words. They turn out ugly and clunky and pointless. Never the breath of imagination and light that I see pouring from other people, paintings swept together through strings of sentences, how a phrase can sparkle beautifully like a crystal held up to a sunbeam. When you read something, whether composed of small moments or the notation of a life-changing event, that resonates, vibrates within you; you don't even realise you're reading words but rather feel the mood, feelings and colours thrum through you like the silent aftershocks of thunder. When the experience of comprehending words is similar to taking in the vision of sun-stroked clouds at dusk: not a matter of turning each letter over in your mind to fit together the meaning, but an immediate understanding of the heart behind the language. I long for this talent, if not the talent then the ability to practice and discipline myself to put words together every single day, not just when I am called to write. I feel like I can't consider myself a writer because I don't feel that continous compulsion to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard in each 24-hour period. Because my interests are always torn, my attention never focused on any one craft, hobby, or skill for longer than a month. I don't write in my journal every day or put into a structured form the stories that play in my mind. I wish that I did, and maybe if I did I could create my other self, the unmistakable imprint of me that would indicate immediately, "She wrote this". That someone would love and cherish my words, recognise their author, enjoy them as distinct art, a definite item of my creation. These are my wishes, the newest of many on a long, scrolling list.

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October 10th, 2003

Subject: Hidden By The Fabric Time: 03:59 am

I tried on clothes for fun and frustration. There are a few pieces in my wardrobe that serve as yardsticks, measurements of a perpetual state of clawing and yearning as I fight against myself, my eating disorder, my own too-fleshy body: the red velvet jeans (the size tag says 18, and that's in Australian sizes, but I'm not sure), the size 12/14 dress, and the navy cord pants, size 34 x 34, waist and leg. Right now the pants, both pairs, fit. So does the dress. It is not flattering and since there aren't any sleeves I probably wouldn't wear it in public, but knowing I fit into it would be enough for me. The red pants have to be pulled up to midway between breast and navel (then hidden under a top, tastefully, otherwise one might look like a retiree on a beach somewhere in Florida) before they look passable, and then I have to pull my stomach in all the way - but it is, at least, passable. They fit over my hips, my buttocks, my legs, with a little room to spare. When I first tried them on, over three years ago now, in the dressing room of some anonymous mall store, it was all I could do to get them over my thighs. I don't even know why my mother still went ahead and bought them for me. Perhaps in her motherly hope she could see that some day I might get myself together and be free of the weight I accumulated. Or wished very, very hard that I might stick to some plan and lose it, whether I was ready for it or not. The blue pants were always kind of awkward - I bought them because they were on sale and I mistook the 34 for a 36. They fit but the zipper never wanted to stay up and they cut too much into my stomach, causing a spilling over of sorts. Now the zipper stays up just fine, and there is still the cut, because my body just doesn't fit pants very well. My rear end makes the back of the waist of the pants stick out, grabbing nothing, leaving space between the fabric and my back, while the front presses into my entirely too-fleshy stomach, making a mountain out of what should be just a molehill of fat. The dress is starting to fit, finally. When I bought it, it was snug and hugged every lump and bump. It still clings in places, but it is starting to be a little looser, not holding me to my imperfections as much as it used to. I wish for it to just go straight up and down, not grazing any part of me, but hiding my body completely, obscuring my shape from the world - or at least myself, in the mirror. To me, clothes that fit are clothes that are loose, that don't choke me, that don't restrict me. I received strange looks and cold treatment from the ladies in Lane Bryant when I went window-shopping there, trying on clothes that, in their opinion, were too big and didn't look any good on my body. In my head I still take up a lot of space. I feel that I do physically, as well. I am not a small person. I am tall and I am wide-hipped and big-breasted. I don't mean to be this way. I wish that I were shorter, that my structure were more delicate. I long for a small skeleton, lean muscles that pull in everywhere, a minimum of fat. I don't want to take up space. I want to be little, curled into myself, not so much of an obstruction to the people around me. I am wearing years-old jeans, the ones with the holes worn in the knees and hems, the patches of pink peeking from the curve of my behind, the thread fading down to almost nothing. On the top a blue t-shirt bought on sale by my mother, XX-large. They cover me, clothe me, hide me; keep every bulge and fold at bay. This is the way I like it, the way I want it to stay - hopefully as the size of my body shrinks down, the clothes will continue to be my hiding place.

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July 18th, 2003

Subject: Safe Destruction (and The Chair That Helped Save Me) Time: 11:43 pm

My rages were never sudden. It was a continuous bubbling of anger, hurt and injustice - real or imagined, perhaps both - that stewed away just below the surface. When something would ignite in a particularly nasty way, that slow boil would accelerate and turn into something beyond my control. I had few acceptable methods of release. I longed to break things. In our house, breakages weren't uncommon - our plates and glasses were well-used, and I was clumsy, so things were lost periodically. There came a time when sometimes it happened on purpose. I remember breaking one of those smoky-glass dinner plates. I threw it against the hardwood floor and it shattered. When the plate burst, the sound and the impact seemed to release something inside of me that needed to be set free. I vacuumed up the pieces immediately, but I kept the fragments of emancipation inside, and it cooled the fire for a short while. Once I took one of my softball bats to the tree in the yard. I was scared to hit it too hard. I felt something of a kinship with the tree. Of all of the constant presences in my life, it was the most stable and dependable. It shed leaves at one time, grew them at another, and never fell in my sight during the journey from childhood to adolescence. I felt guilty taking my human frustrations out upon this other-wordly being. Later, when my father noticed the notches revealing fresh green wood peeking from between old, scaly build-up, I stopped and was never to do it again. Then there was the chair. It was a fold-up chair, metal frame, canvas seat and back. We took it and another one like it in the boot of the car to events that required bring-your-own seating, like the softball and netball games of my yourth. Those memories were but grainy echoes, and the chair was rusted out, limp, and useless. I can't remember the first time I discovered its soothing second life, but there were many times that I put it to use. Flinging its weight across the span of yard, pulling back and smashing it into the ground, and enjoying the dischordant symphony of metal against metal, the chair structure connecting with the old shed. The vibration of impact would recoil through my arms. I loved to feel it, that evidence of something real and sure that I could create. My mother revealed to me that it worried her to know that I did this. She never stopped me, though, because she preferred it to some of my other methods of destruction and release.

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July 17th, 2003

Subject: Trapped? Time: 11:57 pm

It feels like I'm bashing my head against a thick glass pane. I'm in a box. Behind me lays those formative years; ahead, life in my own hands. People tell me that I can't let the past dictate my future - but I feel thethered to it, by the very nature of myself. I am strange, inwardly angled, paranoid, insecure, shy, and in a sort of unremitting, invisible pain. These traits were shaped, integrated and distorted in the fire of years spent in cruelty - I seem to have cooled that way, like molten glass plunged into water. I want to get out of that box. I want to chip away at it, weaken it, until it can no longer contain me. I want to retread old roads without becoming bound to them, made to stay in an old, twisted house of someone else's making. I want the space and freedom to recreate my life and become someone who defies herself. I am in two places at once, I am broken and whole at the same time. I want to be better, stronger, and secure. Yet there is a security in what I was, have been, still am. Those tattered pieces of the past are still so much a part of me. How do I recover from things that are still living within me, things that not only shaped and molded but actually became a part of my structure - my core, my personality, my soul? How do I abandon them? Is there a way to pull together the negative parts of my life instead of covering them up with time, and still soldier on? Or am I to continue this hopeless fluttering, the grotesque dance of a mime behind glass, perpetually chained to the in-between?

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July 16th, 2003

Subject: Memory tangle Time: 01:49 am

When I was younger, I couldn't understand how a person could write an autobiography. With so many experiences behind her, how did a celebrity or other important person remember enough to pull together all the stories into a coherent whole? How was it possible for someone with many years on their side to go back to her childhood and form a narrative up until the present time? It didn't make sense to me. I couldn't fathom remembering everything. I realise now that there are ways to remember: personal documentation, photographs, diaries and journals. Yet even with a stack of books creased by my own handwriting gathering dust in the closet, and boxes of pictures still unsorted, it is still mostly a mystery. When I sit still and try to really think about it, my life feels blank. I look back and can't see a timeline, just fragments here and there. Flashes of colour, splinters of scenes, a few words, but never more than a few memories strung together at a time. The years resemble nothing so much as a hopelessly tangled laundry pile of events and utterances, and I don't see how I'll ever sort it out enough to know the truth of myself and my life.

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