Hey kids. Today’s blog won’t be long or detailed. For the last three months, I’ve been engaged in trying to support and treat my youngest’s eating disorder on my own. Taking her to multiple appointments a week, doctors and therapists and dietitians. Monitoring every meal with her, coercing and begging her to eat. Lab work, consults, admissions to programs that turned out to be abusive…
I’m in the middle of it.
On Tuesday we admitted her to a better program. But it requires that I be here, in Denver, with her. Monitoring a few meals, learning better techniques, taking her in at 7 and not leaving the facility again until 7. They are long, hard days, filled with meetings and often a lot of tears over grilled cheese sandwiches. We’re lucky to have a space at the Ronald McDonald Charity house and it’s honestly been the biggest blessing. It isn’t home but they provide a safe place to be in the times we’re not in treatment.
This blog is just a reminder…that even on our hardest days and maybe especially on them, I want you, as a writer or poet, to remember the comfort and the break that your craft can be. Even a sentence a day counts. One stanza. A paragraph, a dialogue. Hell, a journal entry (man…I’ve never journaled so much in my life) can work wonders. These things can switch the tracks in your brain for just a few moments, bring you out of the chaos, and into a world you can control, into something brighter. Or make space to hold all of the hard thoughts you can’t put out into the world in the moment.
So that’s it, that’s the blog. Write. A little. Everyday. Use a hospital napkin, or the edge of that overpacked therapy schedule…doesn’t matter. Just stay connected to who you are, and that there are stories still to tell.