(I came here to write a response to the prompt you can find on the news page. In the end, I wrote very little of what I intended, and a great deal more of what I didn't. I've decided to leave it all here, - edited slightly for the sake of comprehension - a small memorial to the writing process I oh-so-often work through, and another proof that rules are made to be bent, while entries exist for revision. submit a vision! ooh, submit a vision!)

*

I don't want to write at Caged. Caged is all about eating disorders, and I want to know there's more to me than an eating disorder. Or maybe Caged is all about recovery, in which case I want to know there's more to me than recovery, and I still don't want to write at Caged. Do you think I chose that question about identity and illness randomly? I wanted to be the good kind of proctor, the one who only asks questions for which she doesn't have answers. Maybe there aren't answers to these questions. That doesn't comfort the part of me that has grown so tired from asking them.

Who am I and where do I fit? I'm not my eating disorder, or even my illness at its most broad; I am definitely not just this "sick person" - let's make that clear. And if that's clear, then I want it understood that I am also not "the healthy one" - I am not the one who's gotten better. If only because I can't stand to sit at a table with my closest friends, eating and talking and laughing, and watching them die. Truth be told, there's more to it than that. Recovery, on the surface, has a lot in common with illness. It's just as easily filled with rules and rituals, just as easily made inflexible and central in one's life. I like to think I'm past that. I do think I'm past that, actually; I'm no longer recovering in the manner by which I was sick.

fajflja;dlfkjalkjdf;ladksjflksadjfl;akdsjfdslkjf;laksdjf s none of this matters/ why? / because it doesn't / more specifically, why? / because it's annoying. it doesn't sound good. and it's stupid. / you don't have to sound articulate, and you're not criticizing yourself this week remember? so it's not stupid. even if you were criticizing yourself, this is your story. it's not stupid. / that's just it, I don't want this to be my story. / then tell me what is. / I don't know. / tell me what you want your story to be. / I don't know that either. / tell me anything.

*

I want to have a home. I never thought I'd be that normal. I don't need a white picket fence, and I'll admit the 2.5 children frighten me, even with the fraction aside. I want the home, though, and the family, even if most days it's only one person. One person that I can walk through the door to find, waiting for me, busy or lazing but wanting me there. One person I can walk up behind, put my arms around, and have reciprocate. One person who, as the doctor says, will look me full into the eyes and ask with pure sincerity to hear all about my day. I'm joking, right? If this is even possible, which, from what I've witnessed of coupledom and marriage, it isn't - it's far too fairy tale for me to want. I'm me, remember? I'm weird, quirky, idiosyncratic, not normal. I don't believe there's a person out there who fits me like a corresponding puzzle piece. I don't believe in other halves. I've found plenty of soulmates; I'm not looking for that one special person. But I want a home, and in that home, I want a family. And it's ok if, most days, it's just one other person who will hold me when I hold them, who will let me sneak up from behind, and sometimes, will do the same to me. It's ok if, less often, I see the handfuls of other people who I taught myself to call family, the transgenetic loved ones who help support and shape my life. Less often, I invite them in - to this home that's probably lacking a picket fence, but if not I've most likely painted it purple - and we all sit in the same room, and lie against each other, tell stories, make beauty, buy back our happiness and make firm our liberation. I want that. I'm me, I'm quirky, I went to prom only as a freshman (and after some severe arm-twisting from my best friend), I quit going to school as a sophomore (but still graduated), I adore Wisconsin and (almost) frequent New York, I write plays and grow excited by yarn, I listen to radically independent music while crocheting, and when I think about my future (or my present) the one thing I'm truly clear on is that I need a home, which can only exist with people inside it for loving. I revel in my dorkiness, my odd speech and bizarre history, and I must admit, my clearest wish is rather normal. I want to go home when I grow up - and stay there.

The meantime, the bridge between where I am and where I want to be, is much more difficult to decipher. What will I do with my life? Will I go to a university eventually or will I start working? Or will I apprentice a friend or a stranger who helps people, using their unique identity, the way I wish to do? Yes, I want that in my future (present) also. I want to give people the gifts that have been my myrrh, my gold, my frankincense. The gifts that help me survive birth, like learning my story, learning how to speak, learning that I was more an essential force than a list of activities and roles, learning that I was fundamentally good (the exact opposite of what I believed growing up) and easily (yes, easily) loved.

I want to help others find those gifts. It seems bizarre to those around me, sometimes, those who are close enough to think they know me, but not enough to see how right I am about this path. It seems bizarre that I would brush off my obvious talents instead of taking them through an obvious route. I've been known as The Writer since I was seven; why am I not in school as such? I've been known as The One To Talk To for nearly as long, and that's the title that always brought the most pleasure to my heart, so why am I not earning a clinical counseling degree? Why am I not in psych 101, preparing to attach my listening and advising abilities to my experience with one of several psychological disorders, and enter a career where I could help heal the very illnesses that put me in need of healing? To many people, people who didn't question the appropriateness of a traditional path in their lives, who don't want anyone else to question it, or who simply can't understand why someone who can tell such stories and weave such phrases has no desire to write the Great American Novel, (or even the once-printed, barely-noticed, but-still-on-the-shelf-at-your-local-library opus) my insistence on taking time to determine a path I believe in, a path from which I've all but struck these options, seems devoid of logic. To me, it's rather simple. I don't have a normal history - even on the surface, even for people who can use the word normal, without feeling mandated to qualify it - and I don't have a normal perspective of who I am. I worked (and work) incredibly hard to understand and keep in tact every blessed part of my being, every experience, every preference, every talent, every inability, every relationship... I have a bizarre loyalty to who I am, based mainly in the fact that, despite everything, I haven't lost myself; I'm living out my second, or twelfth, or fiftieth chance - to not be sick, to not simply not be sick, to not die prematurely. I honor every part equally. I care just as much about my ineptitude fitting a key into a lock as I do for the way I decorate envelopes before sending them off. I care as much about the specifics of my life, the specific loss of a specific friend to a specific illness, as I do about the broader categories with which these experience make me familiar: depression, eating disorders, suicide. I refuse to pick and choose from my identity and my bank of experience; I refuse to choose writing over psychology or psychology over the specific moments of life that have made it matter to me.

My indecision frightens me. Talking with friends at various universities, having to answer the inevitable, "and what are you up to?" question that has no better answer than mess's "me, oh, I keep busy at haunting myself," - no better answer than nothing and everything, recovering and living, being sick, being alive, memorizing the city and crying in frustration because I can't leave my apartment, dealing with impossible tragedies that have proven possible and tracking guilt-free laughter, - can unravel me a bit. I know the schedule I was trained to be on, and I know the very degree and second to which I'm off it. But the work I'm doing right now matters. It's important that I don't run off into my future without securing myself against the inevitable "impossible" tragedies I'll have to face. My home, if I/ when I find it, will sometimes shake with storms, and I have to know I can withstand that; I can tend to its disrepair. I can keep moving despite its imperfections; I can keep moving because of my own. Because all my quirks and inabilities create a force strong enough to propell me, and I want to live the life that no one else can ever live: the one based entirely on the entirety of who I am. I'm not in college right now because I can't major in myself. I'm not working a job because my incapacities require my attention; they prevent me from considering that a possibility and thereby demand exploration. I'm not writing about illness right now, about illness' effect on and interference with identity, because the topic bores and hurts and frustrates me. This isn't the entry I intended to write, just as this isn't the life I intended to live. But it is my entry and it is my life, and there's grounding in that. There's a sense of home in knowing who I am, and - in those places where I don't yet know - knowing that I've made a commitment to discover and understand who else I am. Knowing that I stay loyal to my commitments, despite wanting to do a million things at once and having the energy for zero, despite my impressive abilities with procrastination and excuses, despite the fears I still hold about knowing, really knowing, who I am. I stay loyal to myself. I write the entry that seems right, even if it doesn't fit the question - because that's the entry that's in me for the moment. The question was on identity; this is the best indication of it. This is what I wrote when I quit telling myself what I meant to say.

I do plan to make my illness (only) as important as my preference for orange starbursts and my love of feather boas. I do plan to recover, entirely, what I have lost to this sickness, and where I cannot recover, to remember and rebuild. I do intend to keep both my illness and my recovery from overwhelming the picture of who I am, and making very important truths - like my penchant for kneesocks or the fact that Fozzie and Ralph are my favorite muppets - seem minor. I didn't intend to write or live this way, and ultimately, I believe that's just another element in the profile of the Life inside this Girl. I don't want to tell you who I am; I just want to be. And as I do that, I'll throw out stories and one-liners, some fictional, all true, so you can start to feel and recognize my presence. I have a bizarre history, or at least, I like to think so. But what I want in life remains oddly simple. I want to be understood, entirely. And that means writing, even at the Community Against the Glorification of Eating Disorders, about all of who I am.

I maintain my hope that all this will make sense to you (and I adore Tori Amos, friends, and treasure trolls.)

-Mary

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