Burned

Seven years is a long time to be unhealthy, and for it to only get worse each year... I wouldn't know how to be healthy even if I were. I've unlearned the healthy life, and I worry what it would be like to suddenly be healthy. That sounds pretty crazy, even as I type it, knowing full well it's something I think about all the time. 

Even if I have a "good day" where maybe I could get out of the house for an hour, I don't even know what to do. It's actually something I am supposed to be figuring out for therapy. Where to go if I do feel well enough to go somewhere. We discussed how I would either go to Borders or Target. Well, Borders is gone and i dont want to go to the mall to go to Barnes And Noble, and, well, I easily spend money I don't have on things I don't need when I go to Target, and frankly, other than more deodorant and face wash and mouth wash, I need nothing. I don't even remember what it is like to need nothing. But it's true. 

I lived like that after I read Blue Like Jazz and Through Painted Deserts for the first time. Oh, to be able to go back and read your favorite books for the first time....that would be perfect. Is it sad that's what I would use a Time Machine for? ;) But Don and Paul taught me so much about money. 

There is part of Blue Like Jazz when I think Don is supposed to be writing, but he wanders into the living room or somewhere and realizes the room needs Feng Shuid. How dare they not Feng Shui the house! Haha. So he rearrages a lamp. He moves it to a more balanced spot in the room, but realizes it won't reach an outlet. Well, darn, now they won't be able to use the lamp, and to think the room had such a great energy now. Oh wait, Don realizes, an extension cord! Now he is well aware there is probably an old one in the basement, but who wants that? He wants a new extension cord, with a timer! Well, he will just have to go to Home Depot tomorrow to look for one. 

A while after this whole insane, yet very sadly familiar incident, he realizes they don't need any of that. The room did not need to be Feng Shuid. The lamp could easily use the old extension cord, and they did not need a timer for crying out loud. He had orchestrated this whole crazy scenario simply so he would have a reason to go to Home Depot and buy a bunch of stuff he didn't know he didn't need but definitely wanted simply as a way of feeling something different about himself and lighting up some of the pleasure centers of his brain.

Now, this where you all should be laughing because you have all done something similar. Come on, go ahead. Just admit it. I've done it. I still do it. But after reading this whole story a few times and reading Through Painted Deserts where they live, Paul and Don, on less than $5.00 a day between both of them, I couldn't be at Target anymore, and when I was, I started doing what Don told me to do: ask yourself if you really need a fifth pair of jeans, or if you are just doing it to feel different about yourself and to light up the pleasure center in your brain. 

It was awful. I would have so much cool and fun stuff in my cart, and five minutes later, in another department of the store, I would be staring at those jeans, going, "crap." and I would pull them out of my cart and leave them in the cereal aisle. I felt so bad for leaving the jeans there, but I felt good I didn't buy something I didn't need. And if I didn't get it out of my cart right then and there I would have talked myself out of putting them back. It was self defense giving them more work, I swear. They must have been upset, but I had to do it. I wish they knew that.

And I had forgotten this concept for a few years now. Buying what I wanted and not just what I needed just to make myself feel better for about five minutes. And I got sick of it and begged God to help me with my spending money on crap. Well, now I want for pretty much nothing. It's...I don't know what it is. It's odd. And empty and satisfying at the same time. I want to want things, but I know I shouldn't. But yet, I should. And now I just lost you all for good.

A character has to want something in order for there to be a story. Everything I want I don't believe I have to have. To drive cross country for a year. To live illegally in a forest in Oregon with a bunch of hippies who go to NYU, one of which is an epic poet. To move to the PAC NW, and I can't tell you why I shouldn't ask for that for a while....

The every day stuff, to go to the mall, to go to the grocery store--I don't remember the last time I went grocery shopping! To go...I don't know. I don't know where! I don't know what I want!

I've lost everything I ever wanted within about two years of being diagnosed with Stills Disease:

An education/college experience

My dream job

Living in the PAC NW

Independence

Friends/family 

My health

A lifetime to figure life out

Everything I ever wanted....gone. How does anyone dare to expect me to want for something else! Only to lose that too. My heart can't take much more loss. It truly can't. 

If you touch the stove and burn yourself you realize its hot and you dont do it again, right? Well, my emotional self has learned that hoping for a better future is like touching a hot burner over and over and over and burning myself worse each time. And that burn scar wont go away. It hasnt completely healed. Im so afraid it never will. 

How can you ask me to touch the burner again just to find out if it is hot or not? How? Would you touch it for me? You can't, can you? Even if you loved me enough to try, you just can't. I'm the only one who has to put my hand on the burner and wait for what happens next.

I've spent the last seven years teaching and demanding myself to stop caring about wants. I've demanded I only focus on my needs. Which God has already provided and always will. I often feel, like...how dare I ask Him for anything else, especially something I don't need. How dare I? 

And yet, I know that's not an absolute. I know exactly what I am supposed to do...

As I learned on Project Runway: Always hope. Never expect.

And yet. I'm scared as hell that burner is going to be even hotter this time. I'm so scared.