Expectations

It's 3:30 in the morning (ha, I have the Garth Brooks song playing repeat in my head now), and I've been up for over an hour.  I'm fighting, again, to find my desire to get better, the suicidal thoughts.  It's so easy to give up.  The past few days have been extremely difficult; I'm alone, feeling the loss of your parents leaving and you in Dallas so much sharper ... and I don't know what to do about us.  I've heard over and over again that I need to focus on my health, not fixate on issues not within my control, to let you ruminate over who I am today and who I will be ten years from now, twenty years, one day.  After our conversation last weekend I realize how alone I am in this.  I cannot rely on anyone to help me through my mental battle, even you, whom I hold onto to ground my wavering foundation.  I'm an exhausting person, and I want you to understand I relate to you wanting me to take the next step in my recovery.  You said yourself that you are placing unrealistic expectations on me (the irony screeching its nails on the chalkboard), because if you only knew what it felt like to live with my expectations for myself and for everyone else around me ...  I trumpet fairness, justice, exalting in the excitement of deriving "why."  Yet the second the mirror flashes before me and I am forced to look, I crumble with weakness into ashes littered with pity.  What a predicament.  I'm wallowing in self-defeat because I'm 26 years old with blinders shackled onto my face: little to no direction, difficulty swallowing any form of dairy, fat, carbohydrates, and oh, so much more, demonized by my obsessive compulsions to read, do yoga, write, walk to the library, go to meetings, count the number of letters in phrases I read (billboards, snippets from the paper, etc).  For instance, I'm reading Beach Music by Pat Conroy right now, and I'm glancing at it as I write. 19 letters.  Fucking crazy.  So anyway, here I am, beating myself up for the failure that is my life, only to now acknowledge you feel the same way.  Of course you do.  You've suffered through five years of agony, you see two months of sobriety (or abstinence - these are all ABA terms), and now you want me to take the next step.  It's logical, rational, and completely inapplicable to me and this disorder.  So I beat myself up for my elevating expectations, you are disappointed that I cannot overcome my disease to meet your expectations, and I'm lying in a deserted pool of despair because you're not meeting my expectations because you don't understand.  How the hell could you possibly understand?  No one who isn't suffering can get it.  I'm sorry for placing the same strain on you as I do on myself.  Talk about injustice.  

I just want to say a few more things: Do you think I don't want to have a 9-5 job?  Do you understand how envious I am of people that are capable of maintaining such an easy, sane mental lifestyle?  I would give everything, Mathias.  But that is not the life I was given.  I'm so fucking pissed right now that my life has to be so much harder (relative to the average workforce and happy-go-lucky American I think may still exist - and not discounting the sick, poor, deprived souls that inhabit most of this world).  But I have to accept it, and I'm learning that through this process.  It is okay for me to be sick, yet I refuse to play the role of the victim any longer.  How did you fall in love with a person who deemed themselves so unworthy?  (Okay, now I have the Sound of Music song, "How do you solve a problem like Maria" usurping poor old Garth.  I'm not one for country anyway.)

Lastly, I have made it a point to be very upfront about my ED from the beginning.  I spent my 21st birthday with you in my apartment the day I was released from Ridgeview from inpatient treatment, telling you about this eating disorder, how I had it 5 years before I met you and now tack on another 5 years and change to that.  I remember telling you that this is a lifelong disease, it will never go away, but it will get easier.  But there's no way you could know.  Maybe you were just excited to be in a relationship.  Maybe, maybe, maybe.