More Anger
I’m sorry for the lack of a real update recently. We did end up going to Washington, and, though I had WiFi access, I didn’t really have much time to use it. It was an OK trip, I guess. We went to two of the Smithsonian museums (Museum of Natural History and Museum of American History) as well as the Library of Congress and toured the Capitol Building. We also saw the Pentagon and Arlington National Cemetery (we stayed in Arlington, Virginia, which is really close to the city) and went to the shops in Alexandria, VA (home of George Washington). It was nice.
I tried to have a good time, but it was hard. The first problem was my feet. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned this before, but I have a structural problem with my feet that makes staying on them for long periods of time (either walking or standing) very painful. It doesn’t affect me much in my daily life because I’m not on my feet much, but whenever I do a lot of walking or standing it gets bad. It usually takes about as long as takes for me to walk the mall for the pain to act up (about an hour or an hour-and-a-half, I guess), and the longer I’m on them the worse it gets. I basically spent all of Monday and Tuesday on my feet, and the pain became quite unbearable. I had to miss out on several exhibits at the Smithsonian because I couldn’t stand and walk anymore and had to rest my feet, so I sat somewhere while everyone else went to the exhibit. It kind of sucked.
My mother did something regarding the whole foot pain thing on Monday that made me really, really angry. There Metro (the Metro is Washington’s version of the subway) stop that was closest to our hotel was a long walk away, so we took the hotel’s shuttle to it on Monday morning. When we came back via the Metro on Monday night the shuttle hadn’t arrived yet, and my mother decided that she didn’t want to wait for it and that we could just walk…despite knowing that walking was causing me really intense pain. Like I said, this was not at all a short walk, either. It’s like she didn’t even care that I was in pain and that she was causing me more pain. I brought it up several times (more on this later), and she never really said she was sorry. I know I shouldn’t think this way, but it just sends home the same message I seem to be getting from pretty much everyone regarding pretty much everything: Who cares if Kara suffers? It doesn’t matter. I can’t help but wonder if it would have been different if it had been someone else who was in pain. I know that’s ridiculous, though.
Anyway, I spent much of our two days walking very strangely and literally limping, and, as a result of how I was walking, I seem to have injured my right shoulder in some way; it’s still hurting me now and was killing me the whole ride home on Wednesday. I suppose I should do something about my feet. I saw a doctor about it in elementary school, and was given shoe inserts to wear, but they didn’t seem to help and I didn’t like wearing them because I could only wear them with a certain pair of sneakers and because they made my feet look fat, so I stopped wearing them. Surgery was the next option, but I figured I’d just sort of deal with it. I’m not someone who gets scared by surgery or anything (I’ve had several and never really had a problem with anxiety, and I have a very high tolerance for pain), but I didn’t like the fact that I’d miss several weeks of school because of it. (It wasn’t exactly minor surgery, although it’s not like it was something super dangerous or major like open-heart surgery or brain surgery either.) I’m beginning to think that maybe I should look into some of these things again, though. For example, I could never hold a job that would require me to be on my feet for hours at a time; it would just be too painful. I suppose I could try the shoe inserts again or something and I wouldn’t necessarily have to jump right to surgery. I should really do something, though, I guess.
I’ve been having a lot of problems with feeling angry lately. I’m just really angry at my sister for behaving the way she did last Saturday. My parents sort of just let it go, as they always do (she didn’t apologize this time and never has), but I can’t seem to be able to. I’m just so fed up with the way she acts and treats others. It’s not right at all, and, frankly, I’ve had about enough. I feel like I have all of this pent-up anger towards her that’s been building up for years, and it’s gotten to the point that nearly everything she does makes me angry, and I mean really little things, like the fact that she won’t clean her hair out of the tub when she takes a shower or the fact that she always has to say mean little remarks. I hate the person it’s making me, because it’s like I can’t even stand holding a conversation with my sister or being in the same room with her because I’m too angry. I feel like I must be some sort of monster.
I can’t express the anger, though. If I say anything to her she’ll blow up and start screaming, and that doesn’t go anywhere good, and my parents just brush it off by saying things like, “Well, that’s just how she is” and “She’s like that to everyone, so don’t take it personally.” The fact of the matter is that I’m not really allowed to express anger period. When I was really angry at my mother for making me walk on Monday, I decided to say something. I was perfectly appropriate; I did not yell or behave inappropriately in any way. When I said something, though, my sister started snapping at me and saying all these stupid things in my mother’s defense (I’m not sure why, because I wasn’t angry at her and it was really none of her business), and then my father yelled at both of us and told us we couldn’t say another thing. That was the end of that. Well, so much for trying to express anger in a healthy way instead of just letting it build up until it reaches the point that I cut myself and become acutely suicidal. Once again, I’ve received the message that that just isn’t allowed.
I also keep receiving messages that my anger, and my feelings in general, aren’t justified. I emailed Cherrie yesterday and told her that I was still angry at my sister, and she basically said that she couldn’t see why I was angry at my sister because she hadn’t done anything to me or argued with me and that she thought it would be better if I could just forget it because it would only make things unpleasant. Yeah, like it’s that easy. I saw her today and we were talking about memoir writing in the car and, specifically, how it’s hard to say things about other people that are true but that don’t paint those people in the nicest light. I brought up the example of how I briefly mentioned my father’s yelling in my thesis and how my thesis committee wondered why I didn’t elaborate on it more and if I was trying to protect my father by refusing to go into details about what really went on. This is what she said: “Well, I think that’s OK, because you were really writing about how you were feeling and your experience, so your father’s yelling wasn’t that important. Besides, I mean, every kids’ parents yell. I was yelled at a few times as a kid, and so is everyone else. There isn’t anyone out there who hasn’t experienced that.”
That last part was like a punch in the gut. She basically invalidated my feelings completely. Something that was really hard for me really wasn’t anything at all, and I have no right to feel bad about it. I’m not allowed to feel upset about it, because it’s something everyone goes through. (Is that even true? I guess perhaps it is.) It’s nothing…nothing. My father’s yelling had a big impact on my life and really affected me for many years, but apparently it shouldn’t have, because it’s something everyone goes through. It’s nothing. If everyone else gets yelled at and everyone else is just freaking fine, well, I guess I should be, too. She actually did this once before several years ago. She was telling me that her friend had a daughter (slightly younger than I am) who found high school so stressful that she ended up having to go to a difference school (a therapeutic one in Boston) because her school worked her too hard. She kept going on and on about how this girl’s school was so difficult and that it really wasn’t fair to work the students that hard. I said that I had similar problems in high school and the fact that I felt so overwhelmed in and stressed by my honors and AP classes was one of the things that led to my development of an ED the summer before junior year. (Obviously there were many other things that caused it, though, some of which were much more important than that.) She said that this girl’s school was way harder than mine and that I just went to a normal high school and whatnot and didn’t face the same stressors as this girl. Basically she had a legitimate reason to become ill; I didn’t. I started crying and tried to explain why I was so upset, and she just could not get it.
I can’t tell you how much it hurts to constantly have my feelings and experiences shut down as invalid and wrong and inappropriate. I’m not supposed to feel the way I feel. I’m not supposed to be the way I am. I have no good reason to. This is something I’ve worked on with my therapist for years and years. I feel like I have no good reason to be depressed because I haven’t experienced anything “bad enough” to cause such a severe reaction. She always challenges these thoughts, of course, but it seems like whenever I start to make a little headway crap like this has to happen. It’s no wonder I’m so stuck on starving and losing weight; its’ the only way I can feel like my suffering is legitimate and that others will take it seriously. My therapist keeps telling me that this isn’t true, but she’s always proven wrong.
I feel like crying. I feel like cutting. I think I’ll do the latter as soon as I finish writing this. I just don’t think I can make it much longer without doing something. Thank God for therapy on Monday.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the possibility that I might be borderline. My case manager at McLean was pretty sure I was last summer. He said that when someone suffers from depression and an eating disorder for as long as I have without ever really having periods of being well, it often means that something else is going on, too, and his idea was that it was BPD. I balked at the idea completely. There was no way I was borderline. I pictured people with BPD as angry and loud and mean and aggressive and manipulative (which I realize is totally unfair because I was largely relying on stereotypes) , things I certainly was not. I was completely sure he was wrong, and I made sure I let the woman who did my assessment know that. I didn’t exactly lie during the assessment, but I wasn’t exactly truthful either, mainly because I wasn’t being truthful with myself. The woman determined that I had many “borderline features” but that I didn’t meet enough of the criteria to warrant the diagnosis. My case manager kind of thought she was wrong.
I’ve spent the last year thinking about it a lot and realizing more and more that I do meet many of the criteria of BPD. I do not want to be borderline. People with BPD are seen as hopeless cases and therapists and psychiatrists often hesitate to take them on as clients because they’re notoriously hard to treat. It’s a lifelong diagnosis, though symptoms do supposedly get better with age. On the other hand, it would explain a lot of things, such as why I’ve never gotten better from my depression despite being on a dozen medications and having tons of therapy. Most people with unipolar depression don’t have it for years and years; they may relapse from time to time, but it’s not a constant thing for many, many years. When I was at McLean last summer a guy asked me how long I had been depressed for; I told him I had been depressed for ten years and he was in absolute shock. He said he had been depressed for several months, and that seemed to be the norm for most of the other patients there; they may have been depressed earlier in life, but the depressed had gone away and then come back…it hadn’t been the same for ten years straight. The only other people who had experienced that were the people with bipolar, another lifelong illness. I am definitely not bipolar (I’ve never been manic or even hypomamic), but I think something aside from regular severe depression might be going on. The more I think about it the more I realize that I do meet a lot of the criteria for BPD including, yes, being angry. I suppose it’s something to think about and research and discuss with my therapist.
Anyway, I suppose I should end on a good note. I’m going to visit two apartments in New York tomorrow. I will describe them in detail and let you all know how it goes tomorrow.