Agony of Stillness

I feel:: anxious
What song is on a loop in my head right now:: Tori Amos~Cornflake Girl

I find myself feeling frustrated again. Like there is something I'm supposed to understand or see that I'm not getting. I've been this way before and I went so long with it that I wound up feeling like a failure. That had long-term consequences. I guess I should just relax and let things happen as they happen. I just want to find some answers so badly. Maybe there are none. That thought scares me. I've been restless all day and I tried to read Scripture earlier. I read 1 Timothy, 1 John and part of John. I got frustrated and quit. After that, I tried putting laundry away and watching tv, but I keep on thinking that I should be reading. Maybe I'm OCDing. I'm just so restless, but yet I don't really want to leave the house. I probably should though. It would make me feel better to take my mind off of everything. I love to brood. It's what I'm comfortable with. It's hard to change because change is scary. It's easier just to slip back into old habits. I am stuck in a movingnonmovement. I hate this feeling. I like for everything to be certain. I guess that's me wanting to control things. I know that nothing is certain and everything is mutable, but I reach out my hand and try to make it into what I want it to be. What is wrong with me?
I had a dream last night that I was driving in my car and saw my friend Libby in another car. I waved to her, but she didn't recognize me, so I rolled down my window and yelled to her to follow me. We pulled into this little park with swings, a seesaw and a jungle gym. We hugged and started talking. Then I looked up and my breath caught in my chest. There was this huge funnel cloud approaching us. The wind was lashing the trees and there was hail the size of golf balls. We clung to each other and tried to outrun it, but we couldn't. We made a decision to try to make it back to our cars. We did and drove off in opposite directions. I was so scared and panicked. I couldn't drive my car straight because of the wind. I kept swerving all over the road. The funnel cloud kept following me, never overtaking me, but just close enough to freak me out. I'm deathly scared of tornadoes.

I feel like my memories are trying to overtake me. My heart is aching and I don't know what to do. I'm thinking now about the time my mother caught me eating ice cream after school. Backing up a bit, she had gone on the Pritikin Diet back in the late 70's/early 80's. It's a very restrictive diet. The end all-be all of macrobiotic diets. I think I was about 10 when she decided to do this. Well, she thought I was too fat, so she insisted that I join her in it. (I don't think any child should be made to diet. It gives them a bad self-image. I wasn't fat anyway, I was just a normal kid with normal kid baby fat.) After about a week of this, I was starving. I came home from school one afternoon and she wasn't there. She hadn't gotten home from work yet. I was so hungry that I grabbed the first thing I saw in the freezer, which was the half-gallon ice cream box. I scooped up a bowl full and sat down at the dining room table to eat it. When I was about halfway through, my mother walked in the door. She saw me at once and got this look of utter disgust on her face. She put down her purse on the sofa and walked over to me. My heart was in my throat at this point. I didn't know what she was going to do. She started pinching me on my arms and face and in a child-like singsong she taunted,"Fatty, fatty, fatty. Want some more ice cream?" She picked up the bowl and shoved it in my face. I started to move to get away from her. I was thinking I would go to my room, but she grabbed me by my shoulders and kept singing that damn little ditty. She was pinching me on my stomach, breasts and bottom.(I did have breasts at ten. I was an early bloomer.) I finally wrangled myself away from her and ran to the bathroom where I at once locked the door. I stood there looking at myself in the mirror of the medicine cabinet with her words echoing through my mind. I started to cry. Then, I heard a male voice. I knew it had to be her cop boyfriend, Truly. I listened through the door and heard her tell him what had just happened. I heard the clink of ice as they were making drinks and heard their derisive laughter. (Truly had tried to feel me up the week before. I told my mother, but she didn't believe me.) I felt so afraid and so unloved. I felt like I wasn't even a person. I went to the toilet, bent over it, stuck my fingers down my throat and vomited. That's when I started with Bulimia/Anorexia.Oh God, that memory cuts right through me.

When I was 20, I moved in with my mom ( I still ask myself why I did that.). I had been living with my dad in Camden because I had gotten so depressed at college that I had had a suicide attempt. I didn't tell dad about it, I just told him that I wanted to come home and that I didn't want to go back to school for the next semester. He was very dissappointed with me and over the months I lived there, he began to get mean. He would say things to me that would just send me spiraling downward. Once, I spent about 2 hours walking in circles in the kitchen repeating,"It's not my fault. It's not my fault." So, to get away from him, I moved to Little Rock with my mom. (Out of the frying pan into the fire.) After I moved, I got two part-time jobs so I could save money to get my own place. One night after I got off work, I came home and passed out on the sofa. (I didn't have a bed.) I was awakened to the sounds of banging and shouting coming from the kitchen. No sooner had I shaken off the sleep, when my mother came stumbling into the living room. Gesticulating wildly, she screamed,"Did I wake the baby? Oh, I woke the baby. So sorry! So fucking sorry!" She turned to go back to the kitchen after that still banging pots and pans together. So, I was freaked out. I thought to myself,"I am so fucking out of here!" I went to my room and started grabbing clothes. I didn't even take them off the hangers. I was just in a rush and throwing them into the trunk of my car. I just kept thinking,"Get your stuff and get out before she gets any worse." She caught me outside at one point as I was trying to go back inside to get more of my clothes. She went to my car and started throwing my everyting that had been in the trunk in the street while screaming incoherently. So, I went inside and proceeded to get the rest of my belongings. I figured I would just pick up the things in the street when she had gone back inside. She stopped me in the living room as I was about to go outside with an armload of clothes. She wrapped my hair around her hand (my hair was waist length at that time) and jerked me off my balance so that I landed in the floor. She then hit me wherever she could find a spot open. She hit my breasts, my back, my head, my face, my legs. I don't know how, but I managed to get away from her and pick my stuff up from the floor where it had fallen and make it out to my car one more time. When I came back inside, I couldn't see her anywhere. As I walked into the hallway, to go back to my room she rounded on me screaming about calling the cops because she said I was going to kill her. So, I yanked the cord and jack right out of the wall. I told her, "Call them now, you fucking bitch! I dare you!" She dissappeared in her room for awhile after that and I had unfettered access to my things. On my last trip inside, she confronted me in my room and was saying things to me like I was fat and disgusting and that I would never make it on my own. Then, she started with the hair yanking again. Well, after the beatings, the taunts and her general psycho-ness, I lost my temper.. finally. I grabbed her by her shoulders with more strength than I thought I had and pushed her back against the wall so hard that I could feel the floor shake. I got my face just inches from hers and then I screamed. I screamed for all of the things she had done and said to me. I was having all these flashbacks and I couldn't control them. Everything was just spewing out of me. When I ran out of breath and couldn't scream any more, my mother started singsonging,"You are Satan's Child! Satan's baby!" I blacked out. The next thing I remember is sitting in the middle of the street in front of her house crying hysterically. My clothes and other things were scattered everywhere. There were about 6 cops there and a couple of them were putting my things into the trunk of my car and one was talking to me trying to figure out what had happened. I told them everything. They were dubious at first and were giving each other doubting looks. Then, I told them that she had all these illegal drugs in her bedroom. Their eyes got sharp then. I told them that she had been working for a psychaitrist as his secretary and had stolen some of his prescription pads. She had been writing her own prescriptions for months. They asked me if I had any more stuff in her house. I told them I did, so they escorted me to the door and she answered it and spoke to them through a tiny crack. She wasn't going to let them in, but she had called them and now that they had suspicion that she had been illegally writing prescriptions, they went in. What they found was a cornucopeia of drugs on her nightstand. There were so many bottles of pills that they covered the entire top of it. Then, they believed me, not her. She had been telling them that I had tried to kill her. They just looked at her like she was a crazy woman and arrested her. She called me the next day and told me that I had beaten her pretty badly. She said that she couldn't move her right arm or turn her head. I said,"So what. So fucking what. You don't even exist to me." I didn't see her or speak to her for a year after that.