I don't want to go up to the mountains, I don't need to go down to the sea, gonna sit right here till we unravel the mystery. ~ Marc Cohn

My anorexia was an attempt to turn everything gray into black and white, to create sharp relief where the edges of my life blurred.

Starvation simplifies everything. It numbs the constant strike of life upon the skin and dims the roar of people, places, and time passing by. Hunger gave me purpose, it made me feel as though I understood myself. I was one with my needs and my needs were all I had.

It is only as life has softened from the constant palpation of uncertainty that I see how desperately I craved a kind of clarity that simply doesn't exist. I wanted everything in its place; neatly folded, stacked, and put away. For years there was no buffer around me, no room for error, no dreaminess, no confusion. There was simply right and wrong...black and white.

I did not stray from my routine. When my car broke down after work one day, I simply called my brother and had him drop me off at the gym. Life never delivered anything more important than my bruising schedule.

One night, after a particularly long stretch of starvation, and after hours of consideration, I bought myself dinner and left it in my room while I stepped out. At the time, I was renting a room from a family, and their dog came in and ate my food. Every last bite. I was devastated. Starving, exhausted, and aggrieved, I called the restaurant and begged them to stay open long enough for me to drive back. The trip took 40 minutes, but I couldn't change my plan. My calculations were set; I had to eat that particular meal.

When I made my lunchtime salads, I counted dried cranberries and shavings of carrots. I could pour exactly 9 nuts into my hand from the bag without even trying. I weighed, I measured. Everything was precise and there was absolutely no room for variance. Anywhere. Three slices of tempeh, two teaspoons of cottage cheese, 4 rice cakes, 5 mile run, 1 hour and twenty minutes on the bike, click, click, click...

Because of this, everything else seemed so clear. It was as if my lifestyle provided the kind of lucidity I needed. I had nothing but my workouts, my job, and the management of my starving body. I didn't shower, I hardly changed my clothes, I never wore make-up, and I paid no attention to my hair. If I was covered up, I was fine.

Easing from a black and white world back into color threaded through with gray has been very difficult. I find myself holding up my hand in the middle of conversations when things feel too heavy to bear. During weekends alone, I close off for days, drive for hours, burrow into my little world where there are no people, no sounds, no chance of misunderstandings or rejection. I settle in for long stretches of just me. That's where I feel safest.

Slowly, this is changing, but the silence of my own life still draws me in.

A friend recently told me about a personal loss. I couldn't wrap my mind around the magnitude of it and realized, for the first time, that pieces of life actually splinter off and can't be reabsorbed back into the body, or into the mind or heart. We lose things. We lose people. We feel despair. Huge crevaces open up inside of us and sometimes there isn't enough to fill them and so a little bit of breeze always slips through. Life isn't a series of stones set neatly aside one another, it's a patchwork of bliss, fear, sadness, peace...blisters, glimmers, holes, tears.

This kind of understanding wouldn't have been imaginable, or acceptable, 10 years ago.

Sometimes, though, I still find myself wanting to hammer these miscellaneous pieces back into place. Shove them down and sand the edges until everything is smooth again. Wipe away the dust, shine up the wood...good as new. But I can't, and so these messy fragments join the orbiting debris that encircles me and I have no choice but to move on.

It's nights like tonight, when the gray swallows me whole, that I wish I had a roadmap. I don't wish for the numbness anymore, or for the sharp delineation that comes at such a high price, but I long for something with a bit of demarcation and topography so that I know how far the road extends if I head west, and if there are any impassable mountains along the way. Is that a shallow valley to the north, or an ocean? How can I be sure?

It's nights like tonight that I remember how much easier life was when my heart simply slept.

Over the past week I've encountered two women with eating disorders. One was young, about the age I was during the height of my illness, and the other was an older woman whose starvation was extremely advanced and long-term. Unfortunately, anorexia can persist for a lifetime. In my treatment group, I met women who'd struggled for over twenty years with the disease, vacillating between a life of freedom and uncertainty and a life of safety and control. This is a nearly impossible struggle to overcome, and one that has very little to do with food.

And yet, it is possible to move past this struggle. But how? When I see those lost and closed faces I wonder why I'm here and not there anymore. What was the piece, or pieces, that saved me? Was it my doctors who had the same conversation with me day after day, month after month, year after year, never once losing their focus or patience? Was it the nurses in the hospital who talked to me about faith and confidence and persistence and forgiveness? Was it Rich who went grocery shopping with me every day? Was it my daughter who came along in spite of it all? Was it my distant yet penetrating love for my family and friends? Was it something inside of me...?

I wish I could capture those magical and elusive circumstances, bottle them up, and hand them to the women who struggle. They'd reject my help outright, I know, but I never fail to wonder what's going to make the difference for them, if anything. I wonder what's missing for these women. Why does starvation gain a toehold and hang on for dear life?

The truth is, I know what's missing. I know the question that starvation answers. I know the silence that anorexia speaks.

It is interesting to look back on my twenties and find that my desires and passions often traveled no further than the pages of my journal. My feelings, fresh and unspoken, were somehow too shameful to share and so I tucked them away and kept them hidden. The moment my heart left its safe little corner, I grabbed it, scolded it, and wrestled it back into place. I afforded very little leeway to what felt potentially damaging and hurtful, but what, in retrospect, looks like little more than love.

In my most nervous, uncertain times I am silent, shut down, afraid that one loose word will send me hurtling into the wild river thrashing its way through the canyon. And so I stay quiet, watchful, distant. But I'm learning that as I let people in, and let my heart do some of the talking, the frighteningly powerful river below thins to a gentle stream and I'm not so afraid anymore.

Maybe there is no going back, but there has to be more than standing still. There are words left to be spoken, and I'm finding the courage to speak them.

~ Katie

You may not see it when it's sticking to your skin, but we're better off for all that we let in. ~ Emily Saliers

I wasn't one of those little girls who dreams of her perfect wedding day. It was almost as if I had no illusions; a big white wedding wasn't in my future. So it's strange to me that I got married so young.

When I was 19, a good friend married her boyfriend. He was stationed at Pendleton while she and I went to school in San Diego. They moved to an apartment in Oceanside and although she finished her degree, we hardly saw her after her wedding.

A co-worker friend came over to my apartment one night during my sophomore year and told me that she and her long-time boyfriend were married for two weeks before they called it quits. A year later she met the boy she'd marry for real.

Another co-worker friend was already married with three kids. She was in her mid-twenties and supervised the college girls.

There was something about marriage that I craved. It seemed so safe, like nothing could hurt me. I don't remember imagining for even a moment while making plans to marry the first boy that we'd spend the rest of our lives together. It was as though my imagination didn't stretch that far into the future, though now I know it wasn't about the rest of our lives but about reversing a downward spiral.

Before I met the boy, I was deeply unhappy at school. I'd had a relationship during my first year that sent me into self-imposed hiding. This kid wasn't violent, but he had a dark streak that frightened me. My knees would buckle and my heart would pound in fear when I saw him on campus. Something about our dynamic knocked me too far off course, and I wondered who I was to enter into something so wrong. I stopped seeing friends and hid at home. I was always scared of running into him at a party so I never went anywhere. It was hard to explain my fear and avoidance at the time which probably had more to do with my own sense of vulnerability than with him. He didn't seem so bad...so why was I terrified?

I don't even remember falling in love with the first boy I married. In fact, I don't think I ever did. It was like a puzzle I was piecing together, trying to make myself whole again, and he was part of the picture.

During our courtship I shaved my head, pierced my nose, and got tattoos. I'd left for college as a sweet-looking girl who managed, in just two years, to strip herself of any trace of femininity. When I walked into women's restrooms I literally heard gasps.

And so, at 21, marriage intersected with a loss of self that was already well underway. When I look back, I see a girl who'd already begun to dismantle herself before starvation even entered the picture. I'd cut off my hair, stopped wearing make-up, covered my body with used rags, and set my expression in a "don't talk to me" way.

I wonder now how it was possible for the boy to even like me then. My tender fragile self was covered over by angry self destruction. I was proud and embarrassed by the fact that I didn't look like anyone else, except for the handful of kids who'd entered college either already lost or found in their own unique way.

Looking back, the depression is clear. My self hatred is apparent. I'd already gotten rid of everything that made me feel desirable, and had cut off all access points to myself. I can see now how this may have frightened my family. I transformed into someone they didn't recognize in so short a time and I didn't want help or advice or love or concern...but really, I was dying for it.

And so that morning, when I woke up to find that I was married, I'd already started down the path that would lead me straight into the heart of my illness. It would take years from that morning before the hardened shell I wore finally softened and people could reach inside of me again.

So much of what I feel now comes from that severe retreat from friendships and civility, almost moreso than from the havoc my eating disorder wreaked. Honestly, sometimes I look in the mirror and am shocked at how normal I appear. I always wonder in those moments...what am I expecting to see?

How I wish now that my twenties hadn't been so destructive! I still carry pain for that person who dropped out of everything and crawled along the margins on her hands and knees. I wish I'd had the calm serenity in my mind to carry me through the rough patches a bit more unscathed. Instead, I wore my pain like a new set of skin.

A few years into recovery, I threw away all of the clothes I'd worn during my illness because I couldn't stand to see evidence of that girl any more. The green pants, the gray sweats, the tattered blue sweatshirt with the "D" embroidered in yellow thread. I used to wear those clothes to work. In fact, I'd wear them to the gym in the morning and they'd dry out a bit while I stood on the BART train platform on my way to Berkeley. It disgusts and embarrasses me now how I used to get on the commuter train in the morning absolutely drenched with sweat while other professionals headed to San Francisco in their suits.

It's those moments, those flashes of memory, that make my skin crawl now. Feeling like an absolute alien for so long can still make me uncomfortable when I enter a room. In some ways, I've left that old awkwardness behind by reminding myself that nothing about me now is going to catch that kind of attention. I'm not displaying that horrific internal unrest anymore, not only because it isn't there but because I have the ability to smile at people on the street if I want to. I spent years unable to look anyone in the eye for fear of what I saw looking back at me.

Maybe this sounds overly dramatic. How could a cute young girl transform herself into a monster who skimmed the periphery of society hoping not to get noticed? But, that's just what I did.

Anorexia treatment didn't just expose the fact that I had severely disordered eating and exercising habits, it also illuminated the fact that the body and face I'd always known had changed, too, unbeknownst to me. The bursts of clarity I've mentioned weren't just an acknowledgement of my inability to eat a raisin, they encompassed the realization that I'd become a shadow of my former self. The first chinks I'd knocked out of my exterior had been intentional, but this had gone far beyond my control and now even I didn't recognize myself.

And so, my dark decade wasn't just about eating or exercise, it was about a total loss of everything that made me who I was. It was almost as if I took a knife, at 21 years old, and slowly carved myself down to the bone, removing every bit of my spirit and my humor and my dreams in the process.

I'm grateful, at 33, to have a head full of dreams once again and a spirit that perseveres even when the world outside feels damp and spongey and cold. As the circumstances of my life continue to change I am astonished sometimes at my ability to bend with the wind instead of break. Sure, I get whipped around in the worst storms that blow through, but I'm still standing when they're gone.

So much of my strength now comes from the people I've chosen as friends. Without them, I wouldn't have a place for my troubles, my joy, my fears, my confusion. I live alone with my daughter and though we have the most wonderfully sweet, and sometimes challenging, existence, I am buoyed by the people who give me hugs and ask with sincerity, "How are you today, Katie?"

I spend a lot of time by myself when my daughter is with her dad. Sometimes I close off for entire weekends, making tentative plans that never materialize. Sometimes all I need to know is that there are people out there in the world who care about me, and then all is right within.

Over the last couple of months, I've watched myself grow tentatively into new friendships, opening up and learning how and when to trust. And though I sometimes still wear the badge of shame that exclaims I'm made up of broken bricks, I know that these people see and appreciate what I've built. And those who know I'm in the process of putting all of these errant pieces of myself into a manageable place so that my past is with me but does lead me, share their journeys with me, too.

It's pretty incredible to look around and find that everyone else is making their way through life just as I am. Despite how we look on the outside, we're all just a bunch of people with flashlights in our hands, making our way through the darkness one step at a time. And when we come upon kindred spirits, we reach out and link arms for a while and travel together.

As much as I doubt and question and worry and regret, I'm happy with my life. I don't struggle nearly as much as I used to. I'm kinder to my body and my heart and my mind now, and I'm finding little bits of sparkling pride within me that are bright enough shine through. I notice the seasons and I watch the sky. I take deep breaths and look up through the trees. And when my daughter is away I ride my bike through the hazy glow of sunset and feel just about as complete as I can.

The calm serenity that I desperately craved for all those years is slowly but surely becoming a faithful companion of mine. And looking ahead into the vast unknown of my life, nothing gives me more peace.

Life never stops giving us chances.

~ Katie

Title quote: All that we let in, Emily Saliers, 2004

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination. ~ Mary Oliver

For the most part, I've always considered my compulsion to write a curse, something I could never escape. Growing up, the need was an intricate web I fought my way through: a dense, sticky net of feeling and color and sound that stretched itself out in a flagrant, uncomfortable display. Writing wasn't something that sat easily within me, and it regularly forced its way out.

Early on, writing poetry helped me make sense of myself and the world. In grade school, I scribbled rhymes in my awkward, unformed handwriting on scraps of paper. Somewhere under my bed, in one of my memory boxes, is the first poem I ever wrote -- a tiny time capsule of my earliest dreams and humor. The subject matter: boys.

In junior high my writing took a dark, forested turn and I lost touch with the depth of my expression. In high school, I was finally old enough to carry the weight of my words and kept a notebook with me at all times.

While in college, I published a poem and wrote another piece that was incorporated into the medical anthropology curriculum. During lecture breaks, I leaned against cool concrete buildings and wrote line after line of silly, angsty musings. I sent long, languorous letters to friends afar and squeezed poetry from every inch of myself. Writing was a listless yet appropriately cerebral pastime in those days. I was a lost and wandering poet.

During the following years when my illness left me with no energy or inclination to make conversation and my mind compressed into a heavy, dead mass, the compulsion to write remained alive. The infrastructure of my poetry buckled, however, leaving verbs touching verbs touching adjectives with little or no punctuation. Messy phrases, chaotic juxtapositions, crass, weathered, profane words all intertwined with recountings of my bizarre diet: "carrot juice for dinner tonight and sixteen million brown rice cakes and sushi and peanut butter and a peach."

I can't make sense of it now: "a galloping leap of self into the space created by distance, laying down its highway in passing."

Sometimes, though, I see an attempt to make real the very, very unreal: "today it is the whipping of moods, brain-frothing switches inverting all parts (her eyes, minds, hands) once semi-solid, footing the breakage, damning serenity, but all in jest."

Some of it is sad: "The mirror doesn't reflect me anymore. I look to it for guidance, to let me know when I've gone too far. But often, it will only tell me I have not gone far enough."

And some graphic: "My insides are coming out of hiding."

But something in me changed during the final months of my treatment and I stopped writing all together. The flow of words that never ceased suddenly dried up and I was left with no inroad, no sense of evolution, no hold on space.

It was a relief to be released, frankly; no one could get to me, nor I to myself. My life cast no more ugliness. There was no drifting line in the water, no glinting lure, no net waiting by the side of the boat, only still waters lapping a calm shore, obscuring what lurked below.

Something about the recovery process silenced me, made me hate and distrust myself and reject what already seemed like a curse. I threw away my lined notebooks and writings from adolescence on. Pages of words typed in fading ink, crudely marked with my edits and notations, went into the trash. I held onto a few journals, but only because the books were of such fine quality I couldn't throw them away. I kept the rubber-banded stack of papers from the hospital in case one day I needed a road map back to the place I'd already forgotten.

Every once in a while, though, that strike of lightening would flash on the horizon and I’d look into the distance and wonder: Is it time to start again? No, I'd quickly decide. It was easy, for a while, to lose myself in the rush and pull of daily life and ignore the familiar and growing pressure...that voice...my voice...

Last summer, however, after my world tipped upside down and everything spilled and splattered out, I sat in front of my computer for a long, long time and called for the storm. Though it brought deep pain, I let the coursing rawness move through me once again until I arrived at a single poem -- one with just enough weight to snap the lock on my emotions. It ripped me wide open.

The Gardener

with his hands
he turns over her earth,
a barter to upend convention -
plaiting seed rows,
guiding roots
downward until
her land has no choice but to
flower and sprout.

his love affair with
her soil
is clean,
rapturous -
unspooling questions in me about
my own hands,
their work,
and the seasons bringing change;
how the space between two people cannot be
harvested,
held,
understood.

and my own heart breaks
knowing
that the seeds of this life, lovingly tended,
bear seeds of their own in time that will
one day
take to the wind.

watching the reach and tangle of his devotion,
I wonder if there is wisdom
in cultivating dreams
this way,
amassing the treasures of a farmer -
fruit heavy on the vine,
bitter to sweet to rot,
single moments in perfect
fleeting suspension.

but at dusk,
after the day has claimed its newness and yields again,
I realize that
no answers grow here -

only gifts for which
we could not have known
to ask.

In the months after writing this poem I allowed the need back in, sometimes hesitantly and sometimes with punishing regret. There is nothing painless about tacking oneself to the wall for casual observation, and I often resent this ridiculous desire to drag my feelings into the light. After all, I try to make good use of my time and this seems like the worst kind of waste.

And with this vulnerability comes a rolling sense of loss, too, an unending feeling that whatever solidity I’ve offered the world is now softened and blurred by my writing. What is there of a woman if she ebbs and flows with the tide? Who is she really? I’m confronted over and over by the realization that nothing is as sure and as sturdy as it looks on the outside, certainly not me.

In Dogfish, Mary Oliver writes:

I wanted
the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,
whoever I was, I was
alive
for a little while.

Perhaps Mary Oliver doesn’t feel the same burst of shame I experience every time I push my tender thoughts and feelings out of the nest. Maybe she doesn’t squirm in the presence of her self-knowledge, or shield herself from the blinding glare of her inner beauty, dignity, grace, confusion, and despair as it reflects off of her work. But, perhaps she does.

I am always grateful, after reading bits of published poetry, that writers fight and win this war. After all, without the courage of those who take the time to explain the world and themselves in it, I would know very little.

And so I choose to share.

~ Katie

Quotes: Wild Geese and Dogfish, both by Mary Oliver (Dream Work, 1986)

The best way out is always through. ~ Robert Frost

Why this?
But because
the clouds
are too light
to carry me
away...
(July 23, 2001)

My recovery from anorexia was a dark, ugly time, yet now I experience it as one of the most beautiful, radiant stretches of my life thus far.

It was an opportunity like no other to decide if I wanted to live or die. I teetered at the crossroads for a long time, permeable to the forces around me encouraging one path over another. I listened to the rhythm of my pulse, counted my heartbeats, and measured the likelihood of my survival against a chart that hung on the wall.

I was an angry patient, railing against a diagnosis I didn't believe in, but one that kept me imprisoned. My voice was a drifting whisper in the cacophony of sound. Why did perfect strangers have the right to overrule my decisions, tearing every last bit of my control away? What made these people who didn't live under my skin more powerful than I was?

The doctor who treated me during my first stay in the hospital had an office climbing with plants, giving the room a fresh, wet smell of dirt. I would inhale the damp cool deeply and feel grateful for this reminder of the earth outside. But, I didn't agree with what the doctor had to say and I hated him for his haughtiness.

One afternoon while passing him in the hallway, I voiced a growing panic that I might die if I didn't exercise. Literally. I pleaded for a quick walk on the treadmill. Maybe only 10 minutes? How about 5? Not enough to burn off the toast I'd choked down for breakfast, but enough to ease this suffocation. Please, please, I begged, until I was yelling. I don't remember his words, but I do remember the shake of his head and quick retreat.

At one point during my hospital treatment, a fellow patient said to me, "I've seen thinner." Looking back, I'm sure she was trying to ease my mind, but at the time I journaled: "When I get better I'm going to write a book or develop a lecture so that I can expound on WHAT NOT TO SAY to a person struggling with an eating disorder -- especially if that person is sitting in a fucking hospital trying to come to terms with his/her problem."

Skipping higher
where
heaven awaits,
Fertility
breathing.
(June 7, 2001)

As I've mentioned, having a baby was the only pin that pricked my heart during the worst of my eating disorder. It was the subject my doctor would bring up when I was most deadened. She'd ask: on a scale from 1 - 10, how motivated are you to get better? I'd hover between 6 - 10. Then: on that same scale, how willing are you to get better? 2 or a 3. I knew deep down that I needed to get better, but I was unwilling to do the work...until she mentioned having a baby, and then my numbers aligned.

It amazes me how seamlessly and rapidly I traveled between denial and clarity, and what triggered the trips between the two.

What I'm most proud of, having just read through my hospital writings more thoroughly than ever before, is the fact that I did the hard work. The box I've held onto for all these years is a reminder of everything I thought about when it was hard to think at all. There is so much about my recovery that I wouldn't remember had I thrown away the words that were so meaningless to me at the time but now tell a story that astounds me. There is a reason for knowing this story, and perhaps for telling it.

Late last summer, I stumbled upon this poem:

Honeybee ~

Having traveled miles
with unerring precision,
he alights on mica wings,
to feed upon the hearts
of riotously exclaiming flowers.

There is doubt among those closest to me that I've truly emerged from the other side of anorexia, especially in light of my bare admissions here. Though it seems too simple and perhaps a little careless to say, I wouldn't appreciate the honeybee if I was still stuck inside.

Without a doubt, I fought my recovery tooth and nail; but, ultimately I grew tired and began to let go, piece by piece. It was during the fight and ultimate surrender that I primed myself for the lessons that would surface from the shadowy depths of real living. Had I simply gone through the motions of recovery, keeping my heart and mind disengaged, I would still live by anorexia's rules today. Of this I am 100% certain.

I know that I am miles from the girl who earned straight A's in high school and who was dubbed "Best Personality" in her senior class. I know that in making the choices I thought were right for me I confused and ultimately disappointed my family. I wish anorexia had never become the solution that it was for so many years. I wish I could go back, grab the time lost, and shove it into my pocket for safe keeping.

But...I can't.

What I love most about Honeybee is the word mica. It means thin, tough, often transparent, and usually elastic, which I'd like to think is a result of miles and miles of travel. Then, not only does the honeybee alight, it feeds, and not just on what it needs to survive, but on the hearts of riotously exclaiming flowers.

I believe that we admire in others what we most admire in ourselves, and that as I travel the sometimes strange and winding passages ahead I'll seek out fellow honeybees.

For I know that along our winged and luminous journey together, unerringly precise or not, we'll find the sweetest nectar.

~ Katie

If my ship sails from sight, it doesn't mean my journey ends, it simply means the river bends. ~ John Enoch Powell

When Rich and I separated at the end of 2008 I felt relief. When we battled over custody last year I felt fear. When the settlement agreement arrived last month I felt grief. When the divorce papers arrived last week, dated and filed, my heart finally broke.

I didn't see this coming.

Our life together as full-time co-habitating parents ended in December of 2007. A year later we were maintaining separate residences. The following year we were coordinating holiday schedules so that we could spend Christmas with our daughter. What sort of power did this little piece of paper have over me?

Last week I spun in agony, wearing tiny crystalline shards of pain on my sleeve like sequins. I cried at the office, I cried in my car. I was unable to articulate the impact of this latest milestone and closed myself off. For the new man in my life, this was unnerving and left him examining our still "under construction" relationship. Over a period of days I went from managing it all to dissolving at every turn.

And, for the first time since that late August afternoon when Rich lay crying on our bedroom floor while I flitted nervously between him and our daughter in the next room, my healthy mind and body rebelled.

Food became the enemy once again.

Luckily, I have 4 years of behavioral therapy under my belt. My anorexia doctors taught me how to beat the demon by opening my mouth and putting food inside. What I didn't have time to learn once my baby came along and I was thrust back into the working world, was how to make peace with taking those bites when the going gets tough.

The good news is that my recovery is so well established eating is a non-issue. Sure, my ability to share a meal with friends may disappear at times, but there is always eating taking place sometime, somewhere. What I haven't experienced in a long, long time is the relentless pounding of my inner critic who, thankfully, has been silent all of these years.

With the slightest bit of distance, I can see so clearly when and how the cycle begins. After the settlement agreement arrived I wasn't pleased with how I looked in my clothes, my appetite decreased, and I spent less time getting ready in the morning. By last week I was ashamed of my body, too shy to eat in front of most people, and had cut my clothing options down by half.

Anorexia starts with a spark and spreads like wildfire. It is a tenacious thief who steals good sense and reason. Once nutrition falls away everything else follows, which is why no matter how harsh and unforgiving the landscape of my mind becomes I will always eat. No matter what.

This recent storm, short as it was, raged invisibly within the confines of my mind. Perhaps the evil little dictator wore herself out too quickly; perhaps she wasn't getting the response she sought. The truth is, these tiny corrective steps I'm taking day after day are leading me in the right direction.

I'm in the driver's seat now.

But, where do I stow this grief so that I can return to my life? Maybe it isn't something I can bury and forget as I've tried to do with so much of my past pain. This ache lives under my skin. It's the reason I'm here. It's the answer I give to my daughter. It's the choice I've made and the path I'm on. It's my every breath.

Rich and I searched for peace together and apart this week. We passed our feelings back and forth and hoped, I'm sure, for some sort of closure. There isn't any. We share a small, impressionable child who needs these lines to remain open for her own health and survival. What passes through them now is goodwill, frustration, tension, hope and...still, this hurt. To give her the life and love we want her to have we must stay permeable.

In 1999, during the year of my first marriage, I considered creating a compilation of all of the things I wanted my eventual daughter to know. It is sweet to look back on my earnest yet troubled 21 year old self and imagine how knowledgeable I thought myself to be. But as young as I was, I wanted to capture and preserve something precious before it was gone -- an innocence I could see fading right before my eyes.

As I do with many dreams I nurtured at the start of my illness, I wonder what would have happened had my mind not slipped away. Would those writings have changed the course of my life as these are doing now?

Instead, I've unknowingly accumulated pages and pages of writing I'm not proud of. Notebooks full of questions and cries for help; margins packed with wild and desperate scribbles. Sentiments I hope never to share with my daughter in life or after my death. I don't know the girl who wrote them and I don't want her to either.

And yet...

On May 30, 2001, in the midst of anorexia's steep climb, I wrote:

The contents
of my story
done then
to bring about
another story.
I
am
waiting
for
her...

In these last few weeks I've plumbed far too deeply into my psyche. I've gone places that don't need to be revisited when there is peace to be found in the sun and the sky and in simply watching the trees blossom and the grass blanket the hills. If nothing else, there is so much richness in each moment with a child that no other journey need be made.

But there is a hazy, undeniable noise building within me as Rich and I pass into our epilogue. It's almost as if our river has ceded another that is forcing its way through the roughage unbound. There is a new truth to my life now and, rather than hide behind its accompanying shame and regret, I am letting it in.

This chapter is over, but the story won't be complete without it.

When I was a little girl, a doctor told my mother I was fortunate: my perpetual stomach aches were a clear signal from my body that things were not okay. Years later, my body would broadcast this same message to the world, teaching me in the process how to listen when it speaks.

These days, I may not hear anything at first, or I may ignore my body's inconvenient little lectures, but eventually the message comes in loudly and clearly. And while I may not be the first to jump when the alarm sounds, I always respond.

Over this week, as I've tried to heed my body's cry and find my sane and lovely voice again, I've realized that I have a whole life ahead of me to craft a story for my daughter. It won't stem from my innocence and it won't center in my regret. In many ways, it has only just begun.

I've often heard the phrase, "life begins at __," applied to varying decades of life. Frankly, I'm starting to think that life begins when you let it.

Dearest life, I'm pleased to inform you that nothing stands in your way.

~ Katie

The sum of human suffering is a purely mental accretion, the contemplation of which is futile because no one ever suffered it. ~ C.S. Lewis

This past Friday morning, I signed my settlement papers. Though it's been a long time coming, fresh grief knocked me over and I mourned all week in the dark stormy weather, waiting for the sun to come out.

My sadness stemmed not from this decision we've made, but from the journeys we'll have to take back to this place to explain. Our relationship isn't something we can leave behind; it's our daughter's story. From now forward, we are equal yet distant shepherds of her childhood and acknowledging where and how we once stood together won't always be easy for us or for her.

But there is more here, and that's why grief has me by the throat. The other layer, a heavy cloak that drapes me inescapably, is the fact that this isn't my second divorce...it's my third. And sorting through the shame and exhaustion of a life lived in so many iterations in so short a time is my work now.

I have to look back to move forward:

As I have shared, three weeks before graduating from college, nearly a year into my first marriage, I took a trip home. Walking 16 miles a day to and from campus, running for hours at night, eating Saltines and drinking water for dinner -- I'd intentionally lost touch with myself. I'd stopped cooking, bought a stairmaster, and faded out of the friendships I'd made in college. I lived in an apartment with my husband, spent time with my in-laws, and tried to relate to my life. I didn't know who I was. During that trip home I decided to leave it all behind after graduation. This marriage, never really a marriage but a brief and damaging experiment, was over.

Two weeks later, I returned home with my degree, a life torn apart, and my first dose of asphyxiating shame. I wasn't able to slide back into the family slot I'd left 4 years earlier for it had grown closed when I got married and would not reopen. Too many words spoken, too many promises broken, no more trust. Turns out this wasn't home either but a temporary and tolerant shelter.

During those first weeks back, I drove all of my belongings further northward -- wedding gifts still shiny and new, untouched wedding albums, favorite books, photos of my first years on campus -- and sealed them away in a closet at my dad's house where they stayed for ten years. Just last summer, after I'd barely righted my house again, my dad brought my boxes back and stacked them in my kitchen where they haunted me until I tore them open. I sifted through the sands of a life I thought had already washed away, and disposed of nearly everything.

After I left San Diego, the boy and I did the paperwork necessary to end what we'd barely even started. I went to the post office and the county offices a couple of times and then I was done. We were done.

One autumn night, three months after moving back, I was admitted to the hospital. There, my heart rate and blood pressure were checked for the first time since my illness began and I was forced to eat a cookie and drink Ensure. While the other patients slept, I scribbled in the margins of my book.

My grandfather was slowing succumbing to Alzheimer's disease during this same period and lived in a treatment facility a few hours north. On the inside front cover of my book I wrote, "Papa is out there in a place like this. His room, particularly by his bed, probably smells like urine, too...He is lost in the jungles of his own head just like I am; but our maladies have different names." I went on, "The walls here are the same color as the walls of my dormitory during my freshman year of college: mint green. The two places seem eerily similar in my mind tonight. Vacant, unfeeling rooms for misplaced persons to sleep. My dorm room, though, was encased within a University. Here, I am surrounded by Hospital. Saying this causes my mind to stir and skitter." Later, "One thing is for sure, when I am older and looking back on this moment I will feel pain, albeit distant and answered."

When I was released, I packed a few clothes and went to live with my dad. Every day for weeks, while he was at work, I went to a bookstore and read chapters of Vinegar Hill. Then, he'd come home, I'd shrug off dinner, and sleep in the room I once shared with my sister on the weekends. I was 21 years old and had, in one short year, built a life I couldn't lead.

This next chapter is the most painful.

At 26, I got married again, to a boy who'd been a dear friend since high school. His thorough familiarity with, and acceptance of, my illness and first marriage made me feel understood and loved. I would be okay here, I thought. Maybe even safe.

Whereas the first time I had the mental acuity to register regret, my mind was now too numb to think. I don't even remember the first couple of weeks after the courthouse ceremony. In fact, I don't remember anything up to the drive we took that February night, just two months into our marriage, on the eve of my next hospitalization.

Eventually, I became too sick to work and crawled through the house we'd bought together. I ran wildly between bouts of total collapse, trying to escape the silence of my starving mind and quiet the intuitive stirring of my heart.

Rich was gradually launching his own intervention during this time and, not long after, my memories turn to noise: the doctors, Rich, this second boy who was losing hope and then throwing it away, my family, the patients in the hospital. The madness, the madness, the madness. The crying and the food. The despair and the demands. The nurse who argued that my shame, now compounded a second time, wasn't worth my life.

After my last hospitalization, when alliances changed, I pleaded to have my job back, found a tiny studio apartment in my favorite town, gathered a few things out of the first house I'd ever owned, and started again.

It seemed frivolous to mourn the little things when so much was at stake, but I missed the antiques I'd collected and the furniture I'd so carefully selected for the house. This second attempt at settling down had been a fully realized home. But, an irreversible change had taken place within those walls and I couldn't go back. In the house, I went from sick to dying and I couldn't stay.

With Rich, the intervention turned into its own attachment, and we built something different. A very complicated relationship grew out of the heightened chaos of my illness and, ultimately, a treasure we share made it nearly impossible for us to walk away when it was clear our journey together was over: our daughter. This child whose beginning was an indelible triumph, and whose tiny spirit was so determined to get here that she rebuilt her mother's body in the process.

In so many ways, I feel I've made a mockery of my life thus far. I've embarrassed myself and my family with so many false starts. With all the nets I've cast into the sky, I'm ashamed that I haven't pulled down a single star. But, and I think Rich would agree, together we found something that forever altered our separate skies for the better.

If forgiveness toward myself washes over me occasionally, it is often born of bitter frustration. I am angry with myself, yet I am tired of carrying this. I've slipped in and out of families, bought trust on credit and returned it, taken names and given them back. I don't allow many people to get close because I can't reconcile myself with, or explain, the speed and tumult of these changes. I can't admit how often I've tried and failed, and how I feel at times that I don't deserve another chance.

Here we are now, ten long and tangled years later. Years that were liquid in their pain but now live solidly in my mind. A big weighty mass that chases me in my dreams and wakes me to this latest grief.

But, the moments in my life that are beautiful now are of such heartbreaking volume they dim the insolent roar. Watching my daughter learn and laugh and play, and feeling myself grow toward the sun again...this is the music I hear.

Still, as I navigate new waters, I wonder: what do I have to give but a decade of mangled time? I am ashamed that one day I'll have to tell my daughter how many times I've fallen and how many people I've hurt along the way. And how the path I chose to move through those years nearly killed me.

But, what is the alternative?

Langston Hughes wrote:

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore-- And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over-- like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

I guess I don't want to find out what happens to a dream, or to a life, deferred.

I am 33 years old and I've been married 3 times. Why I searched for myself inside those relationships is another story entirely, but it is fair to say that as soon as I stopped looking, I began to find what I need.

During my final hospitalization, when the nurse knelt down next to me in the hallway, I told her I wouldn't be admitting the same mistake twice. My second marriage would not end in divorce; I could not bear the shame. She asked if my life was worth making the changes necessary for my survival, and I said no. Luckily, I was in a hospital surrounded by eating disorder specialists and I didn't have a choice.

When Rich and I neared the end of our road I asked myself the same question. This time, my answer was yes. I had the clarity and maturity to understand that I still need to make the changes the nurse had been referring to all those years ago. It is time to move through this and get better. It is time to do the hard work.

I'm finding that the true miracle of life is the soul's tireless ability to get up and keep moving forward, even when every sign points in reverse. I don't know what's ahead, and part of me is ashamed to wonder and to hope and to dream. But, perhaps this body that I've tortured and this mind that I've rejected time and time again, are much stronger than the will that has beaten them down.

One of these days, I will find a way to be proud of myself so that when my daughter falls and makes mistakes of her own, she'll stand up and be proud of herself, too. Yes, I'm embarrassed, and yes I'm ashamed. And, yes I'm a bit tired, and yes my faith is shaken. But, sitting here at my computer, with the sun finally coming up, my hope feels familiar and welcome.

Looking back, I do feel the distant pain my young self prophesied in the margins of my book. But, I don't have all the answers yet.

Early in my hospital journaling, I asked,"Will I meet people in the future and refer back to this time in my life?" I guess time has answered that question, but why I refer back I'm not entirely sure. Perhaps I need a few more years to figure that out.

In the meantime, I've got a life to lead.

~ Katie

(1) Annie Dillard on C.S. Lewis in "For the Time Being"
(2) Langston Hughes, "Dream Deferred"

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

On January 27th, 2008, I moved to Chico. It has now been two years since I could travel in any direction and know exactly where I was; two years since the ocean fog lived inside my bones and traffic ate up my time; two years since I woke up each day to a husband and child…two years since “normal.”

Now, not only is everything new, it's becoming newer every moment, and I don’t recognize one day from the next. I say to my life: Hello, have we met before? We have? Oh, pardon me, I didn't recognize you! Sometimes, I’m still surprised that the sun streams into my bedroom from the right.

New job, new community, new friends, new industry…and now someone new in my life…

These days, I find myself wishing I could hit the pause button and familiarize myself with my surroundings before proceeding. But, life doesn't work that way. It plows ahead whether I'm running alongside it or doubled over ten paces back, winded and drained.

Last year, as the shape of my life shifted and my sense of security ebbed and flowed like the tide, I was equal parts strength and fragility. My power surged while my knees buckled. The constant expansion and contraction of my world was necessary but exhausting, leaving me eye-to-eye with my kitchen floor more than once. I don’t know what I would have done without my pink bathrobe, my pillar people, and the command center in my head demanding I put one foot in front of the other.

I am not the same mother I was before we packed up and left the Bay Area. There, I did what I thought should be done; here, I do what needs to be done. When I want something, I don't reach out, I reach in. My house is a glittery, pink nest of blissfully chaotic order, and life is just plain different.

My daughter doesn’t sleep in her bed anymore, but in a “blanket bed” on her floor. And morning doesn’t come without her snuggling in next to me. We didn’t decorate our Christmas tree with ornaments but with projects from preschool, and a four foot witch wearing sparkly red antlers stood in our living room until just last week. Candles and art supplies clutter every room, and a grinning paper Eskimo lives above the recycle bin in the kitchen. A mechanical pumpkin and holiday wreath decorate our porch year-round, and we have collections of acorns, large and small, in plastic baggies all over the house.

This is our life.

We are finding our own rhythm, the two of us, establishing new traditions and routines. We cuddle, we bicker, we share lip gloss, we tie our scarves the same way. We need to watch “Martha Speaks” in the morning to feel we’ve started the day out right, and we need to read together at bedtime to feel the day is finally done.

Her universe is expanding to take in these changes. She asks questions I can’t believe are in her mind, and I answer them from my heart. She inquired, a year into our new life, why mommy and daddy don’t live together anymore. By then, I could give her an answer.

Today, I am more in love with my life than I've ever been, but the tough times are a little bit tougher. Some days I’m desperate to share the load, even things out, smooth the wrinkles, soothe the tears, share the laughter. But in the absence of someone else, I’ve stored these moments inside of myself. Written them down. Laughed with friends. Lived my life out loud.

In order to do all of this, to make these disparate ends meet and keep our sails turned toward the wind, I’ve had to find a new kind of peace within myself. Sharing these chapters of my life in writing has allowed me to move more easily within my memories, and see more clearly the distinction between then and now.

And yet, I’ve hit the wall I knew was there all along. On one side live the pieces of myself I can hold up to the light; on the other live the shadows I don’t acknowledge. I’ve wondered: can I share with my new friends all the things I wish my old friends didn't know?

I can’t just yet.

But, I’ve realized in documenting this part of the story, and in releasing some of my nastiest demons, that shame thrives only in dark and hidden places. If what makes me ugly when I look in the mirror continues to fester unseen, the shame will remain.

Still, everything in its own time.

I am looking at a photo of myself and a good friend, both of us 19 years old, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder at the Oakland Airport. He's holding a shoe, I'm holding a magazine, and we’re leaning in toward each other. I hadn't yet made the myriad of mistakes that would drive us apart, and he still adored me. Two years later he pulled me aside at my wedding to tell me I looked beautiful. Five years after that I called him from a pay phone in the hospital only to hear him refuse to visit. His heart was broken and mine was breaking again. That is one of the last times we spoke.

One of these days I’ll have to forgive myself. With enough distance and time I'll find empathy for the young woman who didn’t think twice about smiling straight into the camera before ruthlessly barreling into her life too fast, too soon. Perhaps I’ll see that same fire in my daughter’s eyes one day and will accept and love it then.

I've always thought I'd build right over those years, simply tear them down and start again. But, now I'm not so sure. Rather than erase the evidence, I'll think I’ll pour this next foundation just a little to the left so that I can still observe my first attempts at constructing a life. And, when my new home has withstood the test of time and weathered life's storms, I'll glance out at the work of my younger hands and cherish it for what it was.

Two years into this new journey, I’m finally ready to put down roots. I’m learning to let go of what might have been, and celebrate what is.

It’s good to be home.

~ Katie

(with inspiration from Emily Dickinson: "We turn not older with years, but newer every day.")