The Isolation Journals - Day 87

Prompt:  Wherever you feel creeping unease, where your scalp prickles or something inside of you contracts or hardens, breathe and write everything down that you are resisting saying. Do this for exactly 7 minutes straight. And then, don’t change anything. Resist your writer’s urge to skip back over your sentences with your eyes, cutting and chiseling here. If you like, read it aloud to yourself. Consider if this is something you would ever have the courage to say to someone else. Consider, too, whether it would be kindness or cruelty to say it.

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It always seems to come back to Terry Gross.  The way she asks to understand, and seems to truly listen.  Her interview subjects often remark that no one has ever asked them such a question before.  They must walk away from their headset with a deeper understanding of their own self, or at least a more nuanced one.

The other night I was washing dishes and listening to Fresh Air after dinner, because I know how to party, or at least how to disassociate from mind-numbingly boring tasks through the magic of podcasts.  Same thing.  Anyway, Terry was interviewing Susan Burton, a producer on This American Life, who just published a memoir of her disordered eating, called Empty.  She is now in her 40s and, with a lot of therapy, is well into a recovery.  She shared that she told her therapist she could never seem to stop thinking about food and arranging her life around when and what she would eat.  Her therapist told her, point blank, that's because you don't eat enough.

And that was a holy shit moment. It was like Lucy from Peanuts shouting THAT'S IT!  Just like that, it all makes sense.