on mistakes, starvation

i'm not the most careful person. it took me a long time to realize the best way to combat this is through thorough editing. but alas, i keep reading stuff i write, over and over again, and still, i find mistakes in every single go. everything i have been doing lately has felt laced with sloppiness and imprecision.

i know, i know, i only recently wrote a post about failure. yes. yes. thanks for reminding me.

but it is unnerving. i think that part of it is my starvation. both physical and emotional. i'm still having trouble eating. i am happy to report that i did just eat a bowl of soup. but i know that my sudden reduction in caloric intake has probably taken its toll on my brain cells (i remember at a student life meeting at oberlin, the nurse practitioner stressed that anorexia can actually cause weightloss in the brain. i don't think i'm nearly that far yet, but it still bothers me). i've also been pretty starved in sleep, and in rest. getting to bed after 3am has been pretty standard in the last weeks. and then i'm not really taking the time to "stock my pond" if you use a julia cameron term .

i did take a quiet moment on wednesday to visit the altar they had set up outside resistencia to pay my respects to raulrsalinas. i had gone there to give him my energy, but i feel like i came away from it taking his. i couldn't help but hear his voice telling me--in that ever so mellow yet robust tone--to chill out and take care. raul, i'm here to say thank you. i would pray. but losing my concentration in a mix of grief and fatigue.

i've spent a bunch of paper time mocking myself. you know, writing, you're an asshole, you're a fool, what a fucking shithead you are, stuff like that. and this attitude has bled into my interaction with people around me. beloved people around me, actually. i've been mean. i've been distant. i've played strange games that make sense to no one, including myself.

it's a spiral, this. because after i posted that note about raul a couple days ago, i had resolved anew that i would live. not just live, but live long and fat. i would be like my uncle, that 85 year-old codger chain smoking and handing out pithy advice. i would be the one who people would look to for survival skills. i will be the one to live and live and live and show people that you can be colored and queer and strange and creative and you don't have to die before your time is due. you don't have to be sick, you don't have to always be living on the edge of survival. i would make it look easy, so no one could question my existence. and i would laugh and laugh and laugh, even when it was sad. laugh long and hard enough that no one around me could help but laugh along.

i resolved this but two days ago. and now? i want the darkness to envelope me and comfort me. i want to find a hole in the ground just cold enough that i will begin to shiver. i want life to run away from me, so fast that i can't help but let it go.

so i go back and forth. despair. then i berate myself for my despair. i see kristina wong's show and i'm inspired. but then i go home and create problems in my head. all alone, just drama after drama unfolding into the blackbox that is my brain. i write and write, here in the blog and in my self-hating journal. but my stories have been untouched and they call out--grotesque and demanding. my mom visits and looks at me sympathetically, but she knows she can't quite stand me up. and i take her visits not as the loving omens that they are, but as some type of guilt trip--you should be working on the opera. she would never say that. she would never think it. she would just say, you're doing your best, ke-to. that's all you can do.

mistakes, kt, mistakes. i know i need to nourish myself. my body, my mind, my soul. but what do you do when the patient refuses to heal. when all she has to do is take the pill and swallow, but she won't even open her mouth?

i want to open. i want to take it. i just don't know how.