FREED VERSE

The word ‘purge’ has held a multiplicity of meanings throughout my life. Because of the rollercoaster of emotions the p-word tends to take me on, I often opt for its synonyms: shed, gut, clear, to name a few. I whip out my thesaurus at every opportunity, my vocal cords frozen at the thought of admitting I have no clue what I mean when I say it’s time for a purge. 

The thing I’ve found about words, though, is that they have the most power when you don’t use them. Linguists would probably tell you this has something to do with associative neural networks or something like that, but I think all their explanations generally culminate to the same basic conclusion: use it or lose it. Use it, and it’s yours to know, or lose it, and you’re at the mercy of Merriam-Webster. It seems silly, almost, how what we choose to not say can have just as much power, if not more, as what we do say. Something about ownership. Something about free will. 

Free will: recently, it seems as though everything in my life is happening against it. Every day for the last two weeks I’ve woken up and noticed something new I’ve lost–my grandfather’s ashes, my nine-month relationship, the energy to make my bed. Social interactions exhaust me, I’m smoking more, and my weight only hits triple digits if you include the decimal place. Even flipping through a new book gives me paper cuts. 

Normally when I go through rough patches, I like employing the ‘busy bee’ approach: do more, feel less. It isn’t working this time, though. I flashed my usual fake-it-till-you-make-it smile at someone walking by the other day, but where I expected to see the corners of his lips raised back at me they were downturned. He averted eye contact with me and held his breath when I passed, but he didn’t do it in a piteous way. Not judgmental, either, not even secretly in love with me; just plain sad. 

My veneers weren’t as thick as I thought, it seemed. Single-ply linen at best.

In that moment, with the light on me (the real me), I wished I was a zombie. I wanted nothing more than to walk around with my vision blurry, my speech slurred nonsense.

Brainsssss…

Do you know how easy life would be if that was my only thought? 

Alas, though! It’s not. Far from it. But despite the overwhelming number of non-zombie thoughts constantly playing pinball between my neurons, I can actually feel myself getting dumber. Am I the only one who thought thinking was supposed to make you smarter? Not the other way around? I’m dumb and numb from trying to be something I’m not, from pushing my real (albeit unpleasant) thoughts down in a futile attempt to keep them from winning. My thoughts and feelings still appear in my head, but they’re fuzzy and confusing, too loose to be able to string themselves together into words. Unable to be translated. Unable to be purged. 

—

When I was a young girl, ‘purging’ was something laughable. It was this weird thing my mom did every couple of months where she’d tear through her closet and scrutinize every article of clothing she owned until she had trash bags filled to the brim with sequined blouses, bedazzled belts, and leopard-print leggings she’d grown out of. Once she finished going through everything, she’d motion for me to grab a garbage bag and help her pack the ‘NO’s into the trunk of her glistening white Nissan Altima. 

We took all the clothes to our local thrift store, the one connected to the church we stopped going to years earlier. While she waited for the cashier to sign her donation receipt, I browsed the knick knacks at the checkout stand with open eyes and a wily grin. I left with a pair of kitchy sunglasses or two, which I tried on in the car while imagining my future life as an undercover CIA agent or a boujee CEO cruising with the top of my convertible down and the wind blowing through my hair.

The sunglasses (and the worlds I created from them) still had me captivated by the time we got home from Twice Treasured. While I tinkered with my new favorite knick knacks, my mom swung open the house’s front door with an uncharacteristic briskness about her. 

“Doesn’t this place feel so clean?” she’d sigh. Her breath was easy, her forehead uncreased. She took a deep inhale through her nose and out through her mouth, methodically, intentionally, as if she was following directions from a yoga instructor narrating a class.

In, 2, 3, 4… and out, 2, 3, 4. 

While she was busy draining the living room’s supply of oxygen, I rolled my eyes and ran back to my messy bedroom. Exhausted from my day of play and purge, I tossed my sunglasses onto my desk and flopped onto my comforter without a second thought about how overstuffed my own dresser was. Its drawers were bursting at the seams with neon underwear and tie-dyed camp tees, but it didn’t bother me that half those clothes would never see the light of day–I didn’t get what all the hubbub about wasting space was for. Even after my mom had gotten all the extra out of her life with her purging session, the house didn’t look (much less feel) any different to me. I didn’t get the same breath of fresh air she did when I walked through the front door. 

But, then again, I wasn’t the one who had to open her closet every morning. 

—

When I was in eating disorder treatment, ‘purging’ meant something MUCH different from my mom’s strange little habit. There was no fun, laughter, or lightness in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy’s definition of purge: there, ‘purge’ equated to failure. Loss. Something that was exclusively, absolutely, abhorrently, bad: so bad, in fact, that we weren’t allowed to go to the bathroom unsupervised and every day we had to publicly confess how much we wanted to purge on a scale of 1-10. 

My confession, you ask? In the room, it was always a zero. I was never bulimic, so part of me always scoffed when people actually admitted they wanted to stick their fingers down their throat. I silently laughed when therapists asked them the standardized set of ‘Are you okay?’ questions that came when their purge ratings were too high:

“What coping skills will you use for this urge?”
“Do you commit to phone coaching?”

“Do you have a safety plan in place?”

Their responses overlapped the question marks. 

“Urge Surf.”

“Yes.”

A slight eye roll. “Yes.” 

I never understood why we had to report this all at the end of the day, in the last fifteen minutes of program time when we were all itching to get out and return to our homes where we could be with our ‘unhealthy coping mechanisms’ in peace. Having a prepared set of answers to the social workers’ questions was easier than what we all really wanted to shout in their face: 

“All your patronizing, fake-caring questions make me want to stay home tomorrow instead of coming back here, where I’m told I’m so amazing, strong, worthy, whatever grotesquely positive word is popular that week, but then I’m also treated like I’m diseased while you shove Vanilla Ensure down my throat.”

Yeah, doesn’t exactly scream I’m doing well enough to leave here tonight. The easiest way out of the questions, out of that odd mix of interrogation and babying was just to…not purge. And not want to. Purge bad, don’t do–simple as that. 

Instead, we were told that we should meet the desire to purge with the desire to accumulate. Accumulate positive experiences, close friends, once-in-a-lifetime opportunities–that was what would cover up our sinful desires. They said that there would never be a need to purge the bad in our lives so long as there was also good to focus on. It’s like a lighthouse: where you shine the light determines what you see. 

Well, that may be true. The idea of focusing on the positives in your life certainly helped many people (myself included) along the path to recovery. I’m so intensely grateful for that and proud of both myself and all the other patients I had the privilege of knowing, but the thing is…my closet is getting full now. It’s full of both good and bad, and I can choose to focus on the good all I want, but it’s still disorganized, dirty, and obnoxious to look at when I take a step back. And when the time comes where shit hits the fan and I lose the good I have? 

Nothing left but dust and bad.

Not a whole lot I’d want to shine a light on, yeah?

—

‘Purge’ is starting to take on a new meaning for me now: impetus. Not an impetus for a clean home or a destructive behavior, but for change. That being said, the idea of purging as an impetus scares me shitless. Not only does it sound far too much like ‘impotent’ for comfort, but it also feels real–like something that will happen whether I try to avoid it or not.

The idea that real change could happen for me has always seemed like a fantasy, though not necessarily because I don’t want it. I can always imagine the before and after pictures that come with a given change and know that I’d probably be better off with the latter, but it never seems like there’s a real reason for me to begin the transition between the two. Without stakes for change, it’s easy for me to stay stuck in the before. Sometimes I even delude myself into thinking I’m already in the after. 

Losing so much recently has shown me that nothing I think is mine really is, and it’s also turned my definition of purging on its head. Purging is no longer a verb: not something my mom did when I was a kid to feel better about her softcore overconsumption habits, nor something the nutcases I knew did to cope with their intrusive thoughts. Now, purging is a noun that means something much bigger than any action could be. 

Purge (n):

1. Crossroads.

A purge is a choice; a reason to act. To accept being left with nothing, or to make the conscious choice to fill myself back up. 

At this point, you’re probably getting ready for me to go on preaching about how I’m going to use this period of loss to embark on a ‘spiritual healing journey.’ Ah yes, you’re thinking, she’s going to talk about how excited she is to fill her life with meditation retreats, mental health days, and self-care advice from Instagram. Didn’t really need to write a sob story to say all that. 

But I think all of that is bullshit. I don’t want to be some cookie-cutter version of happy that makes everyone around me think I’m okay. To be left with nothing is to be left with, well, nothing, but filling the tank with everyone else’s version of ‘happiness’ kind of defeats the purpose of getting rid of it all in the first place, no?

It’s like replacing dying flowers with fake ones. Just because they look good in the vase doesn’t make them real. 

I don’t believe in signs from the universe, but life does seem to be pushing me in a certain direction right now: one of emptiness. I’ve lost not only the material things that mean the most to me, but also the people who I thought I’d take with me through the rest of my years. Everything I thought would be a part of my future has been erased from my life, and it’s sad. It’s gutting, in fact. There’s not a day when I don’t wake up and wonder where it all went wrong.

But, more than any of that, it’s fucking exhilarating.

Losing everything dear to me has hollowed out my life, but it’s also given me space. And my new confession? I don’t want to replace the flowers. I want to shatter the whole damn vase. It’s the only way I’m going to grow some roots one of these days–stick myself in the mud and soak up everything I can (sorting out the dog shit from the fertilizer along the way, of course).

The most important thing I know about myself is that I write in the margins of my books. Whether that’s because it makes me feel smart, gives me something to do with my hands, or fuels my dark academia fantasy–I do it, that much I know. It’s something definitive about me, something that puts a smile on my face for no reason other than it’s mine and I’m doing it. 

It’s about time I gave my life some margins to write in.