Analogous
I wonder if Anorexia is like this. You're hungry all of the time, but you struggle with thinking that being hungry is bad, that food only leads to bad things, to self destruction, so you have to do everything you can to avoid hunger, to avoid food, to avoid feeling healthy. So everything attached to it...comfort, being full, social engagement through eating...it all, by association, becomes bad, becomes a draw, a temptation.
I would imaging that finding your way out of that mess, that maze, is just maddening.
I'm consumed constantly with these feelings, this desire, this hunger, and I can't act on it, shouldn't think about it, shouldn't have anything to do with it. It's easy enough for others, after all.
But everything is connected. Things aren't in separate boxes, and just because it was a switch that got turned off for her doesn't enable me to not feel, to not want.
"You can't drink ice water anymore, but you can occasionally put a piece of ice in your mouth for 10 seconds. But I don't want to know about it."
I feel guilty when I think about people getting a drink, or wondering what about it means to them. I do everything I can not to think about being thirsty, to not think about how empty I am, to not want.
But if I do that, i cut off every other aspect of my life that requires the water, that requires some sort of icy closeness. If I do one, I'm open to another.
I'm adrift on a vast ocean, and especially on weekends, it's a glass bottom boat.
Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.
...
When I talk to pastors and other leaders about this, the thirst, they're remarkably powerless to give me constructive answers. I think that in many cases, it's because it strikes at their own fears, but it's also because we don't talk about this thirst, about water, within the church.
We talk about how you should only drink from your own faucet, and don't even think about other people's faucets. But we don't get anywhere near what to do when your house no longer is a water using household.
It's sort of like having leprosy. Like having this terrible, private disease that's always at the back of my mind, haunting me through every situation. I want to ask people, do you have this disease? Are you haunted too?
A friend of mine complains that she hates when people assume that her life is perfect, that she hates to hear "oh, you wouldn't understand, you don't have problems like this". And I suppose this is sort of an inversion of this. Most people don't have this problem, unless until they get to an age where water is hardly a concern in their household, and those who are young enough to still need water often find other options.
I have friends who are concerned or even outraged over my lack of water, over my ongoing thirst. They tell me about how they wouldn't stand for it in their own household... but I often think that they still seem thirsty, a lot of the time. They aren't sated, the need is still there, even within the conditions they've set for themselves.
Maybe everybody is thirsty. Maybe the water doesn't really do it's job, and we've just convinced ourselves that it does, and that's why we're as thirsty as we are.
But I get these men who are rendered helpless and speechless. They ask me, "well, have you resorted to doing this terrible thing to compensate?" And I haven't. And that sort of leaves them without an option. If they can't counsel me on my sin, then...they have no answers. They have no grip, no way in to the situation.
It's funny listening to podcasts on this stuff. They're very clear on how they'd never get their water elsewhere, on how that's damaging and dangerous...but there's no way they'd go longer than a few days without a long cool drink at home. As if it's a given. As if, to think otherwise is simply bizarre. They take for granted that that's how it works for everybody.
...
I often hate water. I hate that I'm thirsty, that I have the capacity for thirst, that I can have emotions tied to thirst, to the beauty of water. I wind up hating emotions, because they leave me empty and drained and frustrated, and there's no beneficial way to focus them or deal with them, they just build and overwhelm me...and I'm still thirsty.
When I'm out disc golfing, and I see how the discs behave in the wind, within physics, within how they're designed, and I see how nature is, and it's beautiful, and I breathe in the air, and feel the scents of the world, and it fills me, and I feel very physical and connected...and I get very thirsty. Because this is real, this is here, this is now. And I have to slam down the walls inside, and disconnect myself from feeling real, from feeling thirsty, because there's no beneficial to it. The water is a lie, it's something other people drink, it's something that happens in another world.
I can only be real as long as that reality is divorced from the physical me.
...
Sometimes, I shake with the rage, with the frustration. My mind trips across an image of water, a path that would lead to cool lakes, and I shake, I flinch, I turn away as fast as I can. I wonder if, seeing me, people think that I have Parkinson's, or seizures, because I twitch and shake so much. It's involuntary at this point, I'm programmed not to go there, not to pursue. I'm so wound up, so twisted, and it just is, there's no way out. There's only thirst.
...
The thirst isn't there for some. TI doesn't occur to them to even think about thirst, unless something happens that reminds them that others feel thirsty. Then they may feel a little guilty. But it's so far beyond them now, they has so many other things, other issues, other problems to concern them, to consume them. Thirst is simply not a problem anymore. Water isn't an option. There is no cooling outpouring, it's an alien concept.
Separate paths, separate directions, lead us to be people with different needs and issues. The analogies fray and part, and we're living in different novels, different narratives, and maybe there's no understanding or explaining them at all.
...
Friends tell me about God's intent for the marriage and the consumption of water, how it's part of His plan, but this really seems like rationalizing bs much of the time. We figure out how to package our desires into our normal situation and rationalize how this is how it's supposed to be, even if how it's supposed to be has no bearing on how things work, on how people work, on how things break.
On how people are thirsty.
...
I'm constantly so empty, so thirsty...when I stop to think about it, to really consider my feelings, to actually be present in the moment, I want to die, to do anything not to feel this way, to know that I'm trapped in amber, that there is no passing beyond this moment. This is where the fork in the road led us, and now I live in the desert, burdened by the memory of the possibility of vast oceans and cooling rains.
The cooling rain is a lie, here in the desert. Comfort and connection are a distant memory; there are only voices and echoes across the canyons, the sound of lonely canines crying out to the moon in the arroyos of my life.
I listen to the sand hissing across my mind, and I shiver, and I pull the covers tighter around me, and I try to go back to sleep, but sleep, like water, eludes me.
I would imaging that finding your way out of that mess, that maze, is just maddening.
I'm consumed constantly with these feelings, this desire, this hunger, and I can't act on it, shouldn't think about it, shouldn't have anything to do with it. It's easy enough for others, after all.
But everything is connected. Things aren't in separate boxes, and just because it was a switch that got turned off for her doesn't enable me to not feel, to not want.
"You can't drink ice water anymore, but you can occasionally put a piece of ice in your mouth for 10 seconds. But I don't want to know about it."
I feel guilty when I think about people getting a drink, or wondering what about it means to them. I do everything I can not to think about being thirsty, to not think about how empty I am, to not want.
But if I do that, i cut off every other aspect of my life that requires the water, that requires some sort of icy closeness. If I do one, I'm open to another.
I'm adrift on a vast ocean, and especially on weekends, it's a glass bottom boat.
Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.
...
When I talk to pastors and other leaders about this, the thirst, they're remarkably powerless to give me constructive answers. I think that in many cases, it's because it strikes at their own fears, but it's also because we don't talk about this thirst, about water, within the church.
We talk about how you should only drink from your own faucet, and don't even think about other people's faucets. But we don't get anywhere near what to do when your house no longer is a water using household.
It's sort of like having leprosy. Like having this terrible, private disease that's always at the back of my mind, haunting me through every situation. I want to ask people, do you have this disease? Are you haunted too?
A friend of mine complains that she hates when people assume that her life is perfect, that she hates to hear "oh, you wouldn't understand, you don't have problems like this". And I suppose this is sort of an inversion of this. Most people don't have this problem, unless until they get to an age where water is hardly a concern in their household, and those who are young enough to still need water often find other options.
I have friends who are concerned or even outraged over my lack of water, over my ongoing thirst. They tell me about how they wouldn't stand for it in their own household... but I often think that they still seem thirsty, a lot of the time. They aren't sated, the need is still there, even within the conditions they've set for themselves.
Maybe everybody is thirsty. Maybe the water doesn't really do it's job, and we've just convinced ourselves that it does, and that's why we're as thirsty as we are.
But I get these men who are rendered helpless and speechless. They ask me, "well, have you resorted to doing this terrible thing to compensate?" And I haven't. And that sort of leaves them without an option. If they can't counsel me on my sin, then...they have no answers. They have no grip, no way in to the situation.
It's funny listening to podcasts on this stuff. They're very clear on how they'd never get their water elsewhere, on how that's damaging and dangerous...but there's no way they'd go longer than a few days without a long cool drink at home. As if it's a given. As if, to think otherwise is simply bizarre. They take for granted that that's how it works for everybody.
...
I often hate water. I hate that I'm thirsty, that I have the capacity for thirst, that I can have emotions tied to thirst, to the beauty of water. I wind up hating emotions, because they leave me empty and drained and frustrated, and there's no beneficial way to focus them or deal with them, they just build and overwhelm me...and I'm still thirsty.
When I'm out disc golfing, and I see how the discs behave in the wind, within physics, within how they're designed, and I see how nature is, and it's beautiful, and I breathe in the air, and feel the scents of the world, and it fills me, and I feel very physical and connected...and I get very thirsty. Because this is real, this is here, this is now. And I have to slam down the walls inside, and disconnect myself from feeling real, from feeling thirsty, because there's no beneficial to it. The water is a lie, it's something other people drink, it's something that happens in another world.
I can only be real as long as that reality is divorced from the physical me.
...
Sometimes, I shake with the rage, with the frustration. My mind trips across an image of water, a path that would lead to cool lakes, and I shake, I flinch, I turn away as fast as I can. I wonder if, seeing me, people think that I have Parkinson's, or seizures, because I twitch and shake so much. It's involuntary at this point, I'm programmed not to go there, not to pursue. I'm so wound up, so twisted, and it just is, there's no way out. There's only thirst.
...
The thirst isn't there for some. TI doesn't occur to them to even think about thirst, unless something happens that reminds them that others feel thirsty. Then they may feel a little guilty. But it's so far beyond them now, they has so many other things, other issues, other problems to concern them, to consume them. Thirst is simply not a problem anymore. Water isn't an option. There is no cooling outpouring, it's an alien concept.
Separate paths, separate directions, lead us to be people with different needs and issues. The analogies fray and part, and we're living in different novels, different narratives, and maybe there's no understanding or explaining them at all.
...
Friends tell me about God's intent for the marriage and the consumption of water, how it's part of His plan, but this really seems like rationalizing bs much of the time. We figure out how to package our desires into our normal situation and rationalize how this is how it's supposed to be, even if how it's supposed to be has no bearing on how things work, on how people work, on how things break.
On how people are thirsty.
...
I'm constantly so empty, so thirsty...when I stop to think about it, to really consider my feelings, to actually be present in the moment, I want to die, to do anything not to feel this way, to know that I'm trapped in amber, that there is no passing beyond this moment. This is where the fork in the road led us, and now I live in the desert, burdened by the memory of the possibility of vast oceans and cooling rains.
The cooling rain is a lie, here in the desert. Comfort and connection are a distant memory; there are only voices and echoes across the canyons, the sound of lonely canines crying out to the moon in the arroyos of my life.
I listen to the sand hissing across my mind, and I shiver, and I pull the covers tighter around me, and I try to go back to sleep, but sleep, like water, eludes me.