I have dreams that haunt me. I see friends from long ago and move to greet them. The look on their faces tells me that they aren’t happy to see me. In some of those dreams they turn away. In others they tell me what they think about my disappearing act. When I wake up, I’m in this weird space. Part of me is glad that it wasn’t real and that I didn’t feel their anger but part of me is sad because at least in my dream I had the chance to say I’m sorry that I messed up.
Some of these friends in my dreams are from college or just after. It was during the summer between my junior and senior year at Saint Mary’s when I became bulimic. While I don’t remember feeling depressed, it is likely. That and OCD. I think I’ve had a lot of overlap with these things.
I guess you could say I was already having distorted thinking. I couldn’t name what was going on with me, so how could I explain it to others so that they’d understand? How could I say that I can’t meet up with you because of the way I feel when I look at myself in my clothes? The discord in my mind about my body image took priority over knowing that it would’ve been good to be with them. I felt disgusted with myself, embarrassed and ashamed, because even though I didn’t know there was a word for what I was doing, I was doing it.
I’d like to think that these friends have encountered others who struggle with mental illness but found a way to share the reasons why they canceled plans at the last minute or at least had the decency to call later and explain while they were absent. I hope they think to themselves, “Oh yeah, of course, now I get it, now I see why Allison did that.”
I don’t think I am shaming myself. I know I did the best that I could at the time. It made sense to me that I didn’t want to unload my stuff on others, and my OCD made it hard to lie. But you know what I think may also be the truth? I think I was afraid of being rejected if they knew my stuff and so I rejected them first. And I am so, so sorry I did that.
I so hope they can forgive me because I’m still working on forgiving myself. There is this heaviness that I have carried over 40 years of friends I knew then and after that I hurt because I was hurting. There is this deepness in my heart. Maybe that’s why I drank and tried to fill it up with other things so that the vastness would shrink just a bit.
Maybe that’s why I keep having these dreams — hoping there will be a different ending.
Is there something you are afraid of others finding out about you?
#anxiety #hiding #forgiveness
