Lysol for the soul

Right now, surgeons could operate on my kitchen floor. Babies could eat out of my bathtub. People with no immune systems could crawl face down across my living room carpet, inhaling deeply, and there would be nary a sneeze. Why?

This is what I do when things get on top of me-- I go hunting the source of my discomfort with a bottle of bleach and an old toothbrush. Surely it's the scum around the bathtub drain that's making me feel like this! Or the dust on the window sills! Or the crumb tray in the toaster! Whatever it is, I'm convinced that if I look hard enough, and scrub hard enough, I'll find it.

Right now the floors are so spotless they squeak under my feet, and somewhere off at the other end of the house, the cat is sneezing out carpet freshener from his hiding place under the bed. As for the dog, her shepherding ancestry is keeping her vigilant-- something is wrong with one of the flock, and she tails me from room to room, ears flat, eyes sharp, waiting.

I've seen my psychologist once, about a month ago, and until the end of this month, I'm to wait out scheduling conflicts and his yearly vacation, and keep a journal of my emotional responses to food, stress, all the usual suspects.

Usually journal writing is something I'm good at, and something that helps, but lately it's felt like the unsettling equivalent of milking a rattlesnake's fangs into a glass-- what do you do with the venom if you can't figure out the cure?

The journal I'm writing in has a painting on the front that used to be one of my favorites:



The full title of the painting is "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate One Second Before Awakening," and next to "The Temptation of St. Anthony," it's my favorite Salvador Dali painting. I read that what he did for this painting, and for many others, was to sit in a comfortable chair with a key in his hand, and a saucer on the floor directly beneath his hand. Then he'd nod off. When he was relaxed enough for his hand to drop the key, it would hit the plate and waken him, and he'd immediately paint whatever messed up dream image was in his head right at that moment. Hence, a woman being menaced by a rifle coming out of two tigers coming out of a fish coming out of a pomegranate with a spindly-legged circus elephant strolling in the background. Happens to me all the time.

But last night as I was unable to sleep and trying desperately to milk the venom out of my own head, I saw something new in the painting that disturbed me. In so many ways, it's an accurate picture of bulimia-- all kinds of hidden menaces rocketing out of a single piece of food and mounting a direct attack on the exposed body, a body which seems blissfully unaware of what's about to hit it. And the elephant in the background-- when you look at "The Temptation of St. Anthony," those circus elephants seem to represent all kinds of impossibly sinful decadence, the frightening excesses that tempt us all. Thin enough, pretty enough, strong enough-- the promises that draw me further and further out.

I stopped writing last night, unsure of whether it's a good idea to relax and let the key drop. What if the ultimate answer in all of this is that I'm just not equipped to handle the life I've chosen? Would I be willing, then, to let go of the compensation of fixating on food and weight if it meant I had to look harder at how I deal with stress (which seems to be the one element of the equation that's not going anywhere)?

Maybe I'm reading too much into this. Judging my aggressively sparkling house, I am reading too much into this. One thing I've learned though-- one morning of slinging bleach is no match for years of built up grime.