the battles never end

Seeing the Dr. yesterday left me...
Embarrassed for one thing, as I made lame excuses (are there any other kind?) for my weight loss. Ten pounds over a year and a half may seem like nothing to others but my minimum just-got-out-of-the-hospital-and-resemble-a-skeleton is 140 so 155 is not so good and, admittedly the cheeks look a little hollow.
How strange to worry about weighing enough in a society of obesity, where my boss, who looks healthy, is obsessively judgmental of weight in others and herself. Luckily I now have one colleague who is also hideously thin, but she's getting past a history of eating disorders. She says she's past it. That finality seems suspect.
--I once came to tears in an acting class because I thought I'd gotten past being "in my head" and the instructor had used that exact term to describe me. When I gave the reason for my sudden flush of emotion she said, "Frankly, that's terribly naive." Ah, acting instructors, such delightful sadists.--
The question of why I'd lost ten pounds stuck on me bringing up memories of an anorexic ex-GF (it's not about appearance, it's about control) and my needs for control, the distance I've retracted from the peace and ease I had following the four week acting intensive this winter.
I've forgotten how to be human again. I resemble my father more and more--awkward, tightly wound, flailing out in inopportune moments, living in the world inside my head, disconnected from everyone else's perception and experience just enough to be off-putting.

I had been thinking I'd quit ragging on Sunhole--good practice. Truth be told I can't tell you today what those significant differences are between the cultures of the east versus the west, but I know they're there. Dr. gave me the big test on that, first question: you're new here, how are you liking Sunhole? I tried to be relatively positive but failed. Ten minutes of conversation about Sunhole culture and he says "I really think you should stay". It makes me angry. I can understand civic pride, but why force it on others? If I could understand that evident need in this town then maybe I wouldn't be so angry when faced with it.

The curious discovery in all this (though I've known it for some time I haven't fully appreciated it before) is that I like the next town over quite a lot. Gattaca's tiny, overwhelmed by its university. Why is it more appealing? Does it have to do with the fact that downtown Sunhole resembles nothing so much as Disneyland? That even the river can be turned off and on--currently off for renovations--they're building artificial rocks to change the low-water season flow! Gattaca does seem more real--surreal maybe, given its moonscape of a landscape. It doesn't put on any airs whatsoever.

Let's wrap this up neatly and suggest that, despite my intense focus on integrity I still go in for a lot of image control. I'm not past that yet. Being more like Gattaca and less like Sunhole is a life's work. We never stop being (anorexic, alcoholic, in our heads, our father's sons) we can only hope to stop doing by doing something else.
Maybe that's too facile but I've got wrap this and get to work.