Brushing my hair.
I am starting to get scared.
I'm not able to feed my body. It feels so strange, for this to be an adaptation to my body's inability to handle food, instead of my own. I feel so tired.
I watch as my "okay" foods stash stays practically intact throughout the week. My grocery store orders are getting smaller. I can't finish food fast enough to order more, and it wouldn't help anyway. It's devastating.
Feeling alone throughout all this has been especially hard. My body is losing it. My muscles get tired, my nails fold and break, the dark circles under my eyes are shifting to darker shades, and my clothes fit differently. I am cold and on edge, dehydrated by default because fluids are hard to tolerate. Even with all that, I don't have a follow-up or planned intervention and treatment. I am falling between the cracks of a system that is letting it happen. I am starting to notice the freefall I have been relegated to. It feels more and more urgent.
It seems like it's no one's responsibility but mine.
I'm used to my body suffering, and I'm impressively skilled at pushing through pain, exhaustion, and depletion. I've gotten upset at my resilience, the one that made it possible for me to get ready for school in the morning like I did everyday, after a night where terrible things happened to me. Some nights were I could have died.
After those nightly cycles of violence, I would brush my hair. The gentleness was jarring, but it helped us forget. Our hairbrush was stringing imaginary melodies into our hair, softening our tears until there was no trace of them left on our face. Many nights I spent begging for all the pain to stop, knowing I would go back to the same routine over and over. There was no escape, nothing to reach for, no one to hold their hand out. No hand that would have been safe to grasp, at least. I was made to feel like a contaminant. Reaching out would have felt perverse and violent.
This is the parallel I make. Smoothing my hair after someone knotted it, during times where I wasn't allowed to belong to myself, feels similar to how I do my makeup every morning, more and more consistently as my state deteriorates. I patch things up with intent. I put myself together when I am breaking. I'll keep doing it, and I will resent myself for it. I don't have the luxury of displaying that pain. It will be unbearable if I have to sit with it.
I know I won't be able to ignore it for long. Something is seriously wrong with my body right now. It can't do its job at sustaining us. Until I know someone will be there to give us the medical support to deal with it, I won't feel safe enough to feel.
I am numb with fear, and a collapsing body. I take care of it well, but no amount of heating pads, PRNs, food adjustments will patch it up. It feels just as sad as smoothing our hair after violence.
The care is the saddest part of it, because it's the most meaningful.