the city that cries at least once a day

i think about seattle quite a bit, lately.  about how i've come to really love the concept of seattle in my mind despite how difficult it was to be there a year ago.  i hated seattle while i was there.  at least, i thought it was seattle i hated.  after the passage of time has dulled the experience slightly, i've been able to separate the experience (which was something close to hell) from the city, which i distinctly remember falling in love with (at some moments).  i miss it, i'll be honest.

what really keeps my attention though, when i think of the whole three-and-a-half months that was my adventure on the west coast is how impossible it was to write.  sure, i tried.  for the first few weeks, i woke up early and wrote while i was eating breakfast.  and then i started work, and then i started feeling less and smaller and not enough.  and then i stopped eating breakfast and stopped running and didn't wash my hair for days and days and days at a time.  after which i stopped writing altogether.

several times i've heard eating disorders described in a nutshell as simply not-wanting-to-feel.  yeah, there are a multitude of other things that go along with it, but if i had to boil it down to one thing, at this point in my life i would say the same thing.  the desperate suppressing of emotion, to the point that everything becomes distorted and simple tasks like getting out of bed and dressing yourself are. so. impossibly. difficult.

during the past five years, my struggle with food has dragged me underwater several times.  sometimes it's been a fight to keep my head above, and every so often i've had a short period where i simply floated.  in seattle i was drowning with my hands tied.

and that's why i stopped writing.  once in the cycle of negative emotion, numbing and food abuse, it makes complete sense to do all you can to stop feeling the negative emotions in hopes that you'll be able to feel happy and function normally again.  so i stopped writing because in order to write i had to open myself up.  i had to be vulnerable and ask myself what i was thinking about and what i was feeling.  and i couldn't do that without risking the start of the cycle all over again.


so i stopped.

it's still a wonder to me that from a place so void of self-compassion i exited my stay in seattle with something akin to determination.  toward the end, there was healing.  or the seeds of it.

but it's taken me longer to be able to write again.  at first, the idea of writing at all was daunting.  i didn't want to be that vulnerable ever, ever again.  old habits die hard, i guess.  i've always loved to write and after forming a three-year habit of writing several times a week, a summer-long hiatus didn't break it.  i started writing about every day things, common things, at first.  in places no one would ever see.

but i'm getting braver.

and if there's anything i've learned from my experience in seattle and the relationships that spanned over and through the dark time, it's that you can't bury those emotions forever.  they'll always find a way out.

so i'm going to start writing more about my adventure on the west coast.  because it's been on my mind.  and because i'm working on feeling again.  and because a lot of things happened in seattle that most people don't talk about. and because we'd all be a lot better off it we did talk about those things.

so here goes.