The Game of Twister--Playing With Different Versions of Myself

 Mostly I struggle about what to put into those emails. How can I remain unique in a large pool of patients? What about me makes me special? 

So, yes, I remain frozen while sitting down with IP, and I have a hard time expressing myself verbally, but what about the written word? It was for this reason that I asked to be able to write him instead. (Dr. IP says that he never noticed me "freezing," but I think he was just being polite)

My essay answering the initial questions regarding my stay, asked by the team, that I sent to IP had its intended effect--better treatment, more empathy from my doctor(s), etc. In a Stanford world full of massive brains, photographic memories and grade books full of straight A's and SAT scores of 1600's, I might only be able to stand out by my writing. There are great writers at Stanford, I'm not saying I'll stand out there with them; one fine example is Daniel Mason, who I greatly admire. I'm only saying that to make myself known, maybe my best avenue is writing. 

I'm currently listening to the AudioBook called Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, and it is currently discussing how much we need as individuals to be understood. 

I am grieving and going through massive amount of emotions, and no one, short of Harry, knows what's going on. And James is having a field day with all this shit. He thinks it's all hilarious.

 At times, I am hiding from even myself. I have often considered if I'm just focusing on my romantic feelings for IP as another way of not coming to closure for Morpheus. However, coming to realization that I do have feelings for IP took a long time. Months, years. I've always been attracted to him, always gotten those feelings inside my stomach whenever I saw him, yes, yes and yes.

In short, no one is understanding me because no one knows what the fuck is going on with me. I'll try to explain to IP in an email as best I can without giving myself away, but fuck--it reminds me of that game Twister. Only I'm playing with different versions of myself.

IP: Emails and Excitement

 He seemed rather excited by the idea. 

I caught him in the hallway. "Can I talk to you briefly?" I emphasized the word "briefly." There's the hidden policy that even though the doctors walk freely up and down the hallway, they are not in fact free to chat. They circle around in their world, and we are sinking down in ours.

"Yeah," he says, and then walks a few feet to the conference door, opens it with his badge. We step inside, and he sits down. 

I reluctantly sit also. I tell him my idea about emailing him every morning with how I'm feeling, an update of sorts. It would contain just a couple little paragraphs, maybe instead, even a few bullet points for brevity sake.

"I think that's a great idea!" He replies, stirred by the prospect.

Captured by IP

 Okay, maybe I'm sick! I refuse to believe there's zero chance. The chance or possibility is so close to zero that it might as well be zero--but it is in fact not zero...Over time, days or weeks, I will become comfortable with zero, and I have such a hard time talking to him. Being around him strikes up a guttural fear. 

But being together with him, is that an impossibility? No, not as long as both of us breathe those heavy sighs in those deep chests with those weighty emotions. 

The Great Divide Between IP and Me

 

IP and I were in the conference room, alone to ourselves. He was talking with his head turned upward, seemingly staring at the ceiling, “So, I was thinking about you saying whether or not you should be in the hospital because the voices were getting worse…if it was something about being in the hospital is making the voices more intense or more frequent?” His gaze settled back on me. “We did name a couple of factors like [the psychologist] leaving…can you think of anything else that might be bothering you?”

 

I lied because I couldn’t envision us anywhere but here, in this room, I couldn’t see us in any other situation. There was too much of a divide between patient and doctor. Then the question becomes, did I ever affect him as a doctor? Was he ever swayed by me as a patient? Did I ever jostle him a little bit as he left the room? Just a little bit?

 

All in all, the man scares the shit out of me. What to make of that fear? I spent most of my day in anticipation of meeting with him for only a few moments out of the day, and then I can relax afterwards into the late afternoon. What is so terrorizing? Just a fear of intimacy?

True Affection for the Doctor

 

There could be the belief that if I truly have affection for the doctor, then he deserves to make the decision for himself on how he chooses to act. I’ve thought about this a lot, and maybe it’s just a mind trap, but maybe there’s some truth in it. This way of thinking is especially true if he also has feelings for me but is unable to act on those feelings because of legal, moral, ethical trappings, and needs me to step forward first. This is all best case scenario.

No one who truly loves or cares about someone else would ever ask another someone to give up his career for that person just so they could be together. And that’s exactly what would happen if news ever got out about IP fraternizing with a patient. That’s just a reality.

As A Human Being: Deserving of Love

 

You have to believe that as a human being you deserve love and respect and acceptance and that somewhere out in the vast, teeming world of men and women, there’s someone for you who will love you and accept you and be your friend and lover back. And that you are right in your search for that person. That it’s okay to feel vulnerable and silly and maybe even a little stupid at times as long as you keep trying to find that person.

          I gave up trying to find that person a long time ago, figuring that my love for Morpheus was beautiful and tragic, and I’d never come across a stable relationship with all those thick emotions felt so deeply for one sole person. It was psychologically impossible. You can’t love that much for that long, every day, all day, for years in a day-to-day normal relationship. It’s too tiring.

          I still believe that. It seems fitting then that the next person I turn my gaze to is completely and utterly inappropriate. Maybe it’s just something wrong with me, some psychological track laid out in my brain, making me attracted to men who are one particular way—distant and unavailable. It’s their inability to love me back that makes them so tasty and irresistible. The struggle to get them to love me is the tragedy, played out a few times in my life, most recently by my relationship with my father.