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Reading (and heeding) the warning signs Monday, January 07, 2002 9:51 PM
I spent Saturday with a friend who is 6 months pregnant. She commented that I seemed happier and more grounded than she had ever seen me before. Last night she wrote: "You were quite different the other day. It seemed to me to be in quite a fundamental way. I haven't hung around with you for so long - the change seemed radical. You seemed grounded (and happy). It was wonderful seeing you like that and it didn't seem like just a mood." I replied: "grounded (and happy)? me?. Does this mean I am perhaps getting somewhere at long last? I am not sure. Am I really grounded or merely attenuated? Am I finally almost wise or am I just almost dead? I have been reading those old journals from years ago and sometimes it seems like I have gotten nowhere at all in the past 30 years. Except I am not torturing anyone else with my problems. My major effort of late is getting used to the fact that I may well be done with being with anyone but me, and that what I already am is probably the core of what I have to look forward to. That may seem harsh, but it's almost like it no longer makes much sense to me to pursue relationships - it's like I have, almost without noticing it, begun a new phase of my life. I started to tell you about this during our visit, but never completed the thought. Here it is: Over Christmas dinner at my parents' house, a friend from childhood described a friend of hers who was working on an eating disorder - the over-eating one - who had put labels on the food shelves inside her cupboards and on her refrigerator that said: "What you are looking for is not in here!" And so she had gone home and put them in her kitchen, too, and almost at once, she had started imagining them on the foreheads of the people she meets. I'm almost there, I fear. I have been doing that for nearly a year now." |