bitterfig

After a week of eating in the 1700 to 1800 calories per day range I’m feeling better.  Not good mind you but better.  I’m totally dragging my ass at work but at least I’ve been able to drag said ass to work which is an improvement over last weekend, physically at least.  Despite eating more or maybe because of it I’ve been very sad for the past few days and I feel revoltingly, hideously ugly.

 

I met with my new therapist for the first time on Thursday.  It wasn’t too bad, it may actually prove helpful but I’m finding it really exhausting to present myself again and again to all these different people- the intake worker, the psychiatrist, and now the therapist.  The whole experience of going to a community mental health clinic is really making me aware of my middle-class prejudices. 

 

I don’t like the fact that they have a “cash only” policy.  It seems like such an insult, like I can’t be trusted to write a good check or pay with a valid credit card.  It just seems icky to me that there’s a selection of condoms available in the ladies room.  When my therapist suggested that since I’m not happy with my job that when my depression is under control she could refer me to their “ready to work” program all I could think of was myself in a room of semi-illiterate people who have been on disability their entire lives being told things like “Don’t use excessive profanity during a job interview.” 

 

I hate myself for being sure a snob.  I know part of it is that I equate low-rent, half-assed recovery with my ex-boyfriend and his whole marginal lifestyle.  He didn’t have a bank account and he had to take jobs that paid in cash because he had all these creditors who would have garnished his wages if he’d gotten a check.  Most of our dates seemed to involve AA meetings and most of his friends were on welfare and/or disability.  I think I was finally convinced to leave the relationships when he started talking about how someday we would have a place together and when his friend June’s boyfriend got out of jail we could have them over for dinner. 

 

Basically when I go to a place like the mental health clinic I feel like I’m stepping back into a kind of life I’ve made every effort to distance myself from. 

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, pages must show.”

Charles Dickens
David Cooperfield

 

 

Four years ago today I packed my car with some clothes and kitchen wear, a blanket, a pillow, and all my Chicago related CD’s (Liz Phair albums, anything put out by Bloodshot records, the Chicago soundtrack and the vastly superior original Broadway cast album with Chita Rivera, Gwen Verdon and Jerry Orbach) and left my parents house in Milford, NY for Chicago, IL.

 

I was 31 years old.  It was the first time I’d lived in a city, my first apartment, the first time I’d lived alone, the first time I’d ever supported myself. 

 

It hasn’t been easy.  My time here hasn’t been a total disaster but it hasn’t exactly been everything I hoped for.  More like a little of both. 

 

I haven’t had any romantic relationships in Chicago or made a lot of friends here in Chicago or much impact as an artist or writer but at least I’m still writing and drawing.  For a while there it felt like I’d never write again.  I was completely blocked from the time I arrived in Chicago until February of 2006.  My plans for graduate school don’t seem to have come to anything this year (I was turned down by School of the Art Institute and though I made the waiting list at Columbia College Chicago I’m sure the semester has started by now without me), but I do plan on reapplying for 2008. 

 

Not long after I arrived in Chicago I had a several month long recurrence of bulimia which I thought I’d overcome several years before.  It marked the start of an almost constant struggle with bouts of severe depression and disordered eating.  However being in a city gave me access to eating disorder support groups for the first time and I’ve found them enormously helpful in giving me perspective and lessening my feelings of isolation and of being cut off from the rest of the world by my obsessions and compulsions. 

 

While things were initially financially stable for me in Chicago, with a job and an apartment provided by my friend Biff, I lost both in 2006.  Still, I managed to cope.   I found a new apartment and a new job.  Things are much tighter now but I’m still limping by, supporting myself.  Even with health insurance affording my medication is a continuing problem but my brother-in-law is helping me. 

 

When I moved to Chicago my nephew, Minya, was only 16 months old.  He’ll be starting kindergarten next month.  My niece, Kitten, didn’t even exist.  I’m getting to watch them grow up, which is invaluable and even though I’m not as close to my sister and her family as I’d hoped to be for a variety of reasons (I don’t have a lot of energy when I get through with work and basic stuff like grocery shopping and paying bills, also I don’t like the idea of exposing the children or their parents for that matter to too much of my depressed self and so I tend to keep distant during the all to frequent periods when I’m feeling unstable) I’ve still been able to be a part of their lives. 

 

Overall I think I did the right thing breaking away and coming to Chicago.  I haven’t been a smashing success but I think I’m more myself then I would have been if I’d continued to live with my parents.  While not quite strong, independent and brave I am stronger, more independent and less fearful than I was.