Tuesday 29 June 2010

A Long Way Down


"I was begining to realise an important truth about suicide: failure is as hurtful as success, and is likely to provoke even more anger, because there's no grief with which to water it down."
- Nick Hornby

My pysch didn't think my OD was serious and that I didn't do it to kill myself because today I was able to talk about uni/the future etc etc. Then I tried to talk about seeing/hearing things and he said it was just anxiety, again, and when my Dad told him he was unhappy that I didn't get properly referred to Leicester services and that I pretty much did it myself he told a blatant lie and said that he had got in touch with a therapist over there when I know for a fact that he didn't because I had to go to a GP and wait monthss. He pretty much said that it takes a long time to 'recover' from BPD, that I need to finish DBT before they will consider anything else and that I am a lot better than before I went to uni and I've made improvements.

I got an extra 100mg of Seroquel and he said he would consider this new day hospital that they've got.

Fortunately, I just said that the summer was tough because of bad memories and he didn't push it because he said it would be unhelpful to 'go into detail'. My Dad's invalidation still hurts me a lot...

I don't know whether to feel let down or what. Maybe I am wanting more than they are able to give me. Maybe this whole process is going to take years, the rest of my life...

I don't want to die today and I don't hate life. I don't think I ever really want to die but just kill the part of me that hurts and rememebers. I don't know how to deal with flashbacks healthily, I don't know how to just sit and feel everything because it is so intense and unbearable. It's hard to go out and walk the streets when you freak out about the people around you and feel threatened and scared, especially when you are not sure what is real and what is not.

I am trying hard to make plans because plans always help. I just feel a bit like everybody has had enough of me and wants to jump ship. I don't want to be a bad person, or even a person that does bad things, but I am and it hurts.

The crisis team don't want anything to do with me, they actively ignore my calls or put the phone down and I try hard to reach out, 'in real life', and it's like no-one is listening and I know that could be just me feeling all horrible about everything but a little bit of it has come from truth, whether past or present, it's happened before. I want to be hugged and comforted and told everything is gonna be okay, but people have done that with me time and time and time again and maybe they don't have the time for it anymore. I would do anything to turn that around though, to put right all the mistakes and bullshit and rebuild my relationship with just about everyone in my life. Because I do love everyone in it immensely, I'm just a cunt sometimes.

I am re-reading a book called 'A Long Way Down' by Nick Hornby at the minute and it is helping a lot.

"Even bad times have good things in them to make you feel alive."

"Human beings are millions of things in one day."

"Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go."

"Asking the head I have now to explain its own thinking is as pointless as dialing your own telephone number on your own telephone: Either way, you get an engaged signal. Or your own answer message, if you have that kind of phone system."

"And I don’t know what difference it made, this sudden flash. It wasn’t like I wanted to, you know, grab life in a passionate embrace and vow never to let it go until it let go of me. In a way, it makes things worse, not better. Once you stop pretending that everything’s shitty and you can’t wait to get out of it, which is the story I’d been telling myself for a while, then it gets more painful, not less. Telling yourself life is shit is like an anesthetic, and when you stop taking the Advil, then you really can tell how much it hurts, and where, and it’s not like that kind of pain does anyone a whole lot of good."

"And another way of explaining it is to say that shit happens, and there's no space too small, too dark and airless and fucking hopeless, for people to crawl into."

Sunday 27 June 2010

This is Tilly

Hello, I am super cute!

When nothing works, just living hurts

I overdosed again last night but this time I didn't go to the hospital, I wanted to die.

I went through the motions, telling everyone I loved them and was sorry, but luckily I have some awesome, amazing, incredible friends who called the police and they came and got me. I lied to them, told them that I changed my mind and hadn't OD'ed. I wound up in Leicester station walking around aimlessly not knowing where I was or what I was doing. I was going to go up to my friend in Newcastle but I didn't have enough money for the ticket... I had to come home. The police came round this morning to make srue I was okay. I am okay, well I am alive and that's all that matters I guess.

I feel stupid. I don't feel like I did yesterday. I am glad that I didn't die.

But I don't know where I go from here. Well, I do, I go to see the shrink on Tuesday and have to explain everything. THe ditachment, flashbacks, anxiety, hallucinations, noise... But I don't know what happens after that.

I wish the summer didn't exist. I wish the memories didn't exist. I wish I could just sleep through the enture thing and wake up, ready to go back to uni and feel good again.

Friday 25 June 2010

Welcome to my world

I don't know how to embed this but I would urge everybody to watch it immediately

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otqLRLZ1H8Y

I have never, ever, in years of reading, listening and watching felt such a fucking connection with something. This is that it's like, this is exactly what it's like, and it fucking hurts and I'm crying and feeling all the things I don't wanna feel, that I've been trying to push away since Monday... This is me, will this always be me? I've failed as a daughter, a sister, an auntie, a friend, a girlfriend, a person... And I never did anything wrong, I never did, shit just happened and made me this way. People made me this way. My grandfather, my sister, my ex... I never used to be this way. I was happy, I loved live, I loved people and trusted people and didn't piss them off or make them hate me. People liked me and I felt liked. I knew who I was. If I was sad I'd cry and if I was happy I'd laugh. I am so fucking angry that this has happened to me, because I swear to fucking God I would rather have ANY pyschiatric condition under the sun than BPD. For a long time I've felt it was the stigma, but now I know it's not just that, it's eveything. How it feels, day after day, to live like this.

I want to be who I used to be.

No-one ever said it was easy, no-one ever said it would be this hard


It’s been a month yesterday since I started going swimming and trying to lose weight through healthy eating. There have been times when it’s got too intense, times when I have slipped up and times when I could feel myself thinking disorderly but overall I feel quite proud of myself. This week I have finally been able to cut back on swimming every day and aim for 3-4 times a week instead. My intake dropped a little too low for awhile but I’ve built it back up to 1300-1500 calories and feel fairly safe eating that amount now. I feel slightly frustrated that the weight loss has slowed down but I think my ‘fat’ is turning to muscle and my shape is changing so that’s good. I am not going to be a slave to a tape measure or a scale though. This was always going to be fucking hard, especially with the external triggers from my mum’s weight loss and I guess I still struggle with that but I have to keep telling myself that I AM ME. I am doing this for me so that I can feel fit and healthy and ready for the next round of university. I want to be completely free of binging and purging by October, there is no way I am going to move in with my friends and have that be an issue. IT DOESN’T HELP!!! Every day is a fight, in a way I feel like I’ve gone right back to the beginning of recovery, but in a way I guess I have.

I am trying SO HARD not to be eating disordered. SO MOTHERFUCKING HARD!!!

I am proud of what I have achieved this month and it is good enough.

I AM DOING ENOUGH.

Oh, I went to pick my new kitten, she's called Tilly and she's beautiful and I can't wait until she's here!

Money money money

So I OD'ed Monday night, got let out the next day (oh hai, BPD!) and since then I am so fucking impulsive, all over the place, I can't stop spending... I have spent my entire student overdraft in the space between then and now. I don't even need this stuff, I just can't stop it. It's like instead of filling myself up with food (which is what I would usually do if I were not on a diet) I'm filling myself up with material things...

THIS IS NOT ME.

I'm a fucking left on socialist and passionately so, I hate materialism, consumer whores, all that shit. I am not the kind of person who buys millions of clothes. I'm a charity shop whore and I am careful with money and always have been. Okay, so I save up money to go on tour with bands but that's my 'holiday time' and I've sacrificed loads of over shit to be able to do that in the past. But apart from that, I'm pretty low key. The last couple of days though I've been like RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH must have stuff must have stuff must have stuff spend spend spend...

I thought things were supposed to be calm post overdose?

I need this to stop but I'm scared that if I do, I'll binge or hoard pills of do something else destructive. Even though this is destructive because I am going to end up broke and unhappy that I can't do the things I love (ie gigs) because I've been a fucking idiot for three days.

I feel so fucking guilty and like I have gone again everything that was solid and secure in my life, my beliefs, my passions. I don't like it and yet, I get a buzz from it. I never understood how people could get addicted to shopping before but I kind of do now.

I just want my brain to get back on the level but that's not going to happen, flashbacks and nightmares and voices, it's in chaos and I can't switch it off!

Wednesday 23 June 2010

Nothing is ever certain

"Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain. It was that day that I knew I wanted to tell the story of my family. Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained."
- Alice Sebold

Being single is killing me right now. I need to fall asleep with someone I feel safe with, wake up with someone who is actually glad that I didn't die during the night. Someone to call me on my shit, to tell me the truth until I believe it. I have friends whom I love, who do put up with my endless amount of crap, but it's not the same and I don't want to alienate them, be a burden on them.

Who the Hell would want me, though?

Someone started chatting me up in the swimming pool and I completely freaked out and stayed in there an extra half hour just so I could be extra sure that he wasn't around. I walked the long way to the bus station rather than walk through the shortcut I've used my whole life. I rang my Dad and got him to pick me up when I got off the bus... That fear is so real, so intense...

I need closeness but I can't stand anyone touching me except a few very select people. I have to jam my door shut and make sure my windows are shut no matter how boiling hot it gets. I'm scared to go to the bathroom by myself once it's dark, in the dark I see figures. I can't sleep in silence. I can't stand silence. Every horrible thing that has ever been said to me whirls around my head and I feel everything so much deeper than just memories, it's like I can feel them on my body...

It's the calm after the storm but the storm hasn't died, it just rages on and on and on.

Have you heard the news that you're dead?

I wound up in A&E Monday night, can't really remember much of it but they kept me in over night. Despite the inevitable drowsiness that comes with taking a massive amount of Valium and half a bottle of vodka I was physically fine, like every other time I've OD'd, they keep me in and then let me go. And, as always, afterwards I feel fine, better, like I have more energy and can deal with everything again. I'm not quite sure how that works out...

Right now, I couldn't even tell you what triggered it... Maybe the fact that I was hallucinating again, maybe the fact that the anxiety was getting unbearable, maybe the intesity of the memories, not just remember, but feeling it too.. Or maybe it was the whole thing about feeling that my eating disorder was being enabled and even encouraged...

I still don't understand the way these professionals work and how they just let you go but I guess I do understand it, the first thing they said was that I had a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder, and as always after those three words are mentioned, people stop giving a shit and think everything's your fault.

The memories are still hurting but I haven't got the strength to work through them.

Monday 21 June 2010

I am the shadow on the moon at night

There are few who deny, at what I do I am the best
For my talents are rnowned far and wide
When it comes to surprises in the moonlit night
I excel without ever even trying
With the slightest little effort of my ghostlike charms
I have see grown men give out a shriek
With a wave of my hand and a well-placed moan
I have swept the very bravest off their feet

Yet year after year, it's the same routine
And I grow so weary of the sound of screams
And I, Jack, the Pumpkin King
Have grown so tired of the same old thing

Oh, somewhere dep inside of these bones
An emptiness began to grow
There's something out there, far from my home
A longing that I've never known

I'm a master of fright and a demon of light
And I'll scare you right out of your pants
To a guy in Kentucky, I'm Mister Unlucky
And I'm known throughout England and France

And since I am dead, I can take off my head
To recite Shakespearean quotations
No animal nor man can scream like I can
With the fury of my recitations

But who here would ever understand
That the Pumpkin King with the skeleton grin
Would tire of his crown, if they only understood
He'd give it all up if he only could

Oh, there's an empty place in my bones
That calls out for something unknown
The fame and praise come year after year
Does nothing for these empty tears

- The Nightmare Before Christmas

I feel so fucking lost... Not just waiting for my results to see if I’ve got into second year, not just having nothing structured to do, its being at home, I don’t belong. I don’t think I am the daughter my parents wanted me to be, I had a four year gap between finishing my A-Levels and starting university and during that time they ‘had to look after me’, put up with my illness, visit me in hospital, take me back and forth to endless appointments. I was a burden to them, ruined their retirement, and there are times that the guilt I feel about all that is fucking immense. But right now I am so angry at their attitude towards me, especially towards my weight.

My mother repeatedly tells me that I ‘let myself go’, constantly rubs her three stone weight loss in my face, constantly refuses to eat whilst we are out, shouts at me when I try to help or when I try to explain how much it is effecting me and the way I feel about my body and about food and weight generally.

Yesterday was a terrible day. I woke up and my Mum said, blunt and heartless, “have you been on the laxatives again’, I was offended (because I am putting in so much effort at losing weight in a healthy way and she fucking knows that) and when I told her no she just said ‘well, I don’t care if you do””

I couldn’t get my shit together, I went to bed because sleep usually helps but it wouldn’t come, I took 50mg+ of ‘illicit’ Valium, all of my Seroquel PNR and my usual doses of Cymbalta/Seroquel. I slept for hours but when I woke up I was starving hungry, binged like a mania and threw up out of my window, went back to sleep, nightmares nightmares nightmares that I couldn’t wake up from, hitting myself and pinching myself didn’t work, I didn’t know if I was asleep or not, if I was dreaming or not. I ‘dreamt’ that I cut my breast and then when I woke up covered in blood.

This afternoon I got back from swimming 2.5km and my mother asked me if I was ‘going to go back tonight?’

I just feel so fucking lost, like all my struggles have been for nothing, like my parents want me to weigh 97lbs again and be hospitalised. I know those thoughts are irrational and over the top yet at the same time I do honestly feel like they’re enabling and encouraging my disordered thoughts, and it’s hard a-bloody-nough to fight the thoughts that come from my own head, let alone other people’s.

I need to watch some Christopher Eccelston Doctor Who, I miss him!

Friday 18 June 2010

You save yourself or you remain unsaved

"I live in a world where two truths coexist: where both hell and hope lie in the palm of my hand"
- Alice Sebold

I have just finished reading 'Lucky' by Alice Sebold and I'm in tears. I just can't comprehend how strong and amazing and damn determinded some individuals are. I felt angry at her friend Lila for leaving her, for me that would hurt more than anything, sometimes it's people's reactions to things that hurt more than the events themselves.

Like when my Dad said 'well, you were drunk, so what' the first time I ever tried to approach the issue of my own rape with my parents. I KNOW that they really don't give a shit, and it hurts like fucking Hell.

I also know that's so many other people's reaction if I were to divulge the 'hard facts' as Sebold calls them.

He was your on/off boyfriend.
You'd been drinking.
You were staying at his house.
Etc etc etc

They all just point the blame firmly at my feet.

Sometimes I wish more than anything that I had got attacked in the way Sebold was. A stranger in a park. Acceptence, blame, progress, all that shit would be so much easier. She didn't know him, didn't love him, didn't trust him... I lost all that and I can't get it back. My last relationship was a complete disaster partly because it fell back into the same old destructive ways, partly because I just didn't love or trust him.

And maybe I don't deserve to be loved or trusted in return.

How do I save myself when I don't even believe, or have that grit and determination and outrage... I just have regrets and unanswered questions and guilt.

As a rule, most of us never really believed we were any good in the first place


"You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and no one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad."
- Mayra Hornbacher

I feel like such shit at the moment. The only things that are keeping me sane are keeping my calories in check and swimming. I am not actively engaging in my eating disorder, but I am sort of teasing around the edges of it to a certain extent. I don't want to get sick. I am past that. But I do want the people who are supposedly looking after me to realise and accept that I have and had anorexia a Hell of a long time before I had this borderline nonsense and that most of the traits I exhibit have come after I 'recovered'. Yes, I self harmed when I was younger and attempted suicide and was depressed and very obsessive-compulsive, did restricting my eating trigger all that, or was it just one of those fairly severe cases of teenage angst?

When I became what I guess I call ‘acutely anorexic’, in 2005, I didn’t self-harm at all, I didn’t feel depressed at all, and it was only a little blip with self-harm that occurred in the months before the restriction started. The depression that I felt so acutely in the years previous never came back until way after I got out of the EDU, more than a year at least.

I wasn’t put on medication until 2007, all the time I spent in hospital with anorexia everyone always commented on how ‘happy’ I otherwise was. I wasn’t one of those depressed, agitated patients, I just didn’t want to eat or gain weight.

I didn’t start self-harming again until 2008 after a pretty horrific incident and after that everything just went to shit, overdosing, psychosis, proper chronic can’t function depressed, more hospital, then I got the BPD diagnosis and since then no-one has taken my ED into account, to all of them it is just a part of that label and nothing more. To me, it is one huge big stinking issue and I think the reason why I never really recovered, just bounced between purging, restricting and binging, is because I have never (since I left the hospital in 2006) gotten any real advice or support for my ED.

I’ve had two relapses since then, in terms of ‘dramatic weight loss’, periods of Hellish bulimia and binge eating, that I just had to cope with on my own. I have asked for specialist help and been refused to be even passed on to them because of my weight and ‘other behaviours’.

One of the biggest driving forces of anorexia is a need to ‘be seen’, but the repeated dismissive attitudes of people, either because of weight or in my case BPD, just leaves people stranded in the wilderness, alone with their thoughts of ‘maybe, I won’t eat lunch today’ or ‘maybe, I’ll just swim for another fifteen minutes’ that keep getting stronger.

There is only so long you can challenge these thoughts yourself, when everyone around you is encouraging or enabling them. I am being praised for the amount of exercise I am doing, I am being told that I could do with losing a stone and a bit. Over and over and over again all this positive reinforcement is sucking away bits of resolve and determination.

How the Hell do I block it all out and just concentrate on me, and what I want? How the Hell do I get treated as an individual and not from a fucking skills handbook that’s aimed at a whole group of people the mental health world as lumped together?

Thursday 17 June 2010

This means nothing to me. This means nothing so spare me the lies.

"There is nothing to me.
There is nothing though there was a time
I had felt elation before all sensation died.

I cannot breathe.
I can't deny that I've been feigning,
for you, every vital sign defied.

This means nothing to me.
This means nothing so spare me the lies.
I deny you sympathy just as I have been denied.

I cannot breathe.
I can't deny that I've been faking,
for you, every sign of life.

I died for the last lie,
and the heartbreak for the first time,
I could not take til I made you cry.

This is what you taught me.
This is what you taught - and I learned well -
to recognize that feeling easily can be dispelled.

Show your wounds I'm bored with mine.
Nothing is new.
Don't despair I rarely cry.

Oh my dear please dry your eyes.
Who could harm you?
To hurt you is to be despised, as I'd love to."

- 'Okay, I Feel Better Now' by AFI

I have just about had enough of this bullshit... I got into trouble for not ringing in to DBT for the homework even though I have explain a million times that when things aren't going too well I get this kind of pyschotic relationship with phones and find it impossible to make calls because of the SPIES!!!

Yesterday I hallucinated for the first time in forever, I am still quite convinced that there is a dead man who's gased himself in the car down the road.

And apparantly, my eating issues are just another part of this borderline bollocks.

My exercise routine is GOOD GOOD GOOD apparantly because that's what 'depressed people' need, to get more fucking exercise.

Surrfice to say, I feel like absolute shit right now, like nobody is listening...

Carol reckons I've made a radical transformation, that's me, the fucking definition of mental health recovery success stories, just because I didn't bale out on uni like everyone thought I would, doesn't really mean fuck all.

I don't give up the things that I love and want for anything, that's all that's about, being fucking stubborn as Hell.

Oh well, I guess right now I'm just 'acting out' or something, I cannot stand another year of this bollocks and my problems not being addressed or taken seriously.

If it's gonna be like that then I'll just disengage from fucking everything and live life my way.

Wednesday 16 June 2010

First poetry publication!!!

"A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep."
- Salman Rushdie

Just wanted to share my awesome news! I got an email earlier saying that a poem I'd written had been selected for publication in a uni magazine that's going to get distrubted 'into the world' as it were.

My very first publication, I'm chuffed to bits! I feel like a real writer!

Here's the poem if you're remotely interested :)

Blackout


Ophelia drowned herself
two weeks ago. Submerged,
head first, into the lake.

Air bubbles formed
at the corners of
her mouth until
one by one
they burst;

She couldn't shout.

The black ink thickens,
as she sinks.

Deeper,

Curls clinging
to her cheeks.

Her frozen pulse quickens,

and the last

beat

of

her

heart

sends ripples that disturb
the silence.

I can hear you now.

Monday 14 June 2010

Are boobs important?

Okay, so, I have no boobs. Well, I have them but they are tiny, I hardly ever wear a bra because I just don't need too, I hardly fill an AA cup.

It doesn't matter how much weight I gain they never get any bigger. Everyone else I know who has been anorexic and gained weight have got their boobs back and I'm still stuck with the chest of a thirteen year old.

It never used to get me down but just recently I've started to hate it. Even though I am not thin, the whole 'real woman have curves' campaign of thought depresses the hell out of me. I don't have curves, I gain weight straight on and off my stomach and thighs but I don't ever have hips or boobs or a bum.

I had a bit of a dissociative incident about a month back and woke up with my chest covered in scars, since then I've been obbsessed about how unattrative that must make me, how no-one would EVER want to see me naked...

I don't feel like a 'real woman' and the idea of trying to get an NHS boob job is becoming increasingly attractive.

So, are boobs important? Does having no chest make me completely unattrative and unsexualised?

Wouldn't it be nice to be Dorian Gray just for a day?


"I knew that I had come face to face with someone whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself."
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

I spent a lot of last night looking through my livejournal and trying to pick apart moments and place them to actual memories that I have. For most of them I couldn't do it. I just physically could not remember the events. I don't know if it's because memory is not an essential bodily function, and so if your body starts to shut down, it stops rememebring things, or if it's like trauma and it just shuts itself away from it.

A part of me thinks that if I could remember it in vivid detail then it would be enough to drown out all the voices, if I could remember the scenes of horror that I wrote at the time then surely I would run as fast as possible in the other direction.

But it doesn't work like that, and my brain doesn't work like that.

Another huge row, Mum finally admitted how verbally abusive her Dad was towards me when I was a kid, constantly bullying me about my weight and calling me fat, fat, FAAAAAAAAT! Then I try to tell her that her recent three stone weight loss has triggered up drama for me but she just refuses to get it. Then she says that she thinks I've been misdiagnonsed (despite the fact that I do have most BPD traits/behaviours) and reckons that I've got Bipolar coz the way she sees it I'm always either high or down. Surely if I had anything as serious as that they would have picked it up by now?

But then again, they never picked up on my obbsessive-compulsive traits, the fact that I would sit there and be counting words in my head, gotta end in a five or a zero , that I have to go round switching off plugs or else I feel like my heart will explode from the anxiety. The way that I swim, same locker, same changing room, same routine of ten laps breststroke, ten laps mixed, repeat...

Everything is so fucking uncertain right now. I've gone from having no routine whatsoever, to being at uni, to going back to nothing again. I'm looking for a job but there's so little out there at the minute. I'll be better once I know for sure that I've passed first year and got into second, everything will feel less intense then.

Sunday 13 June 2010

It's all this cold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy


“That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose.”
- J. D. Salinger

Friday was pretty shit. I got kicked out of the bar that I go to ALL THE TIME because I only had my student ID and not my passport on me, she wouldn't give us the money back for our round of drinks and started threatening me so I went a bit mental at her and now I'm barred from town, apparantly. Fuck it, I'll be back in Leicester in a couple of months... I didn't handle the aftermath that well and ended up taking a shitload of Valium and drinking myseldf stupid for the first time in a month... <_<

I haven't been swimming since Thursday so I'm hoping that when I go back tomorrow I won't feel so compulsive about pushing myself to the limit. I feel terrible about it but I know that it's better to feel like that than get caught up in it...

I started to feel like it was going over my head a bit so yeah, take a break and try again?

This would be so much bloody easier if I was a healthy weight. Then I wouldn't have that knowledge that I 'need' to lose weight hanging over my head.

Friday 11 June 2010

Can't stop growing old

So, apparantly, I'm 23...

I don't feel like it, I feel like a child half the time and an old, old lady the rest. My anxieties and fears are incredibly childlike, my thinking goes completely magical (if I do this then this won't happen, I NEED to do that so something bad won't happen etc etc) and the opposite of that I guess is the giddy excitement that certain things bring me, yet I feel like I have age in my heart. So many people close to me have died or left me or betrayed me or just plain got sick of me. I am on a constant edge of fear and loneliness.

It's been a decade since I started to develop problems with food, it has probably been longer as I am only just becoming aware of how my childhood affected me and possibly caused the weight gain I experianced. I have hated my body forever.

Yesterday, we went out for a meal. On my eighteenth birthday, five years ago, we did the same thing. Being in the grip of anorexia I only ate a salad. Something in me yesterday wanted to prove something, to show that I am not that person now, I am not that stress and worry for my parents. I ate a whole meal and half of a dessert. I wanted to purge, but I didn't. I came home and went swimming. An extra half a kilometre to ease the anxiety that the meal left me with. To undo any possible damage to my diet.

A part of me is still that person, a part of me always will be, and maybe that's why I feel like a child half of the time, because I was only a child when I started to deprive myself, judge myself, focus on food and weight and not the 'real world'. My personality never developed past that point.

Sunday 6 June 2010

If I'm honest with you, will you be honest with me?


"To conquer oneself is the best and noblest victory; to be vanquished by one's own nature is the worst and most ignoble defeat."
- Plato

Okay, so I don't really know how to go about writing what I need to write, this might be a bit fractured and not make a lot of sense.

About a week ago I weighed myself in Boots, I had a BMI of 28.5 and decided that I couldn't carry on like that. I couldn't keep pretending that I didn't care about being on the heavy side, I didn't care that I was overweight, drinking like a fish and eating (binging) constantly.

I started going swimming and eating around 1500 calories a day, if I ate under 1200 I would force myself to have an extra bowl of cereal or some toast. I felt confident in my ability to be healthy and sensible, even though the voice of anorexia was there, telling me I wasn't doing enough, I ignored it.

I lost 6lbs in a week and felt elated, then horrible because I was still overweight. I know, it's stupid, it's irrational, that it takes time to lose weight in a healthy way and that it was never going to happen in a week but still, that voice, was there.

I am getting the fear from the silliest, little things.

If I don't swim 1k a day I feel guilty as Hell and like I am going to get fatter just through missing one day of exercise.

If someone offers me something to eat I get angry, I snap at them like I used too because I think they are trying to sabbotage my efforts of dieting.

Thankfully, I do KNOW that those thoughts are wrong and I try as much as possible to ignore them but the fact that they are there and that they still linger really, really depresses me.

I want to be normal. I want to lose the weight so that I can be NORMAL. I am tired of eating chaotically and disorderly, too much and too little. I am doing this to try and escape the very idea of having an eating disorder. I don't want the indentity anymore.

But the face that I still have those anorexic voices and that I have to make a real effort to challenge them, that sometimes they seem almost rational and reasonable for a split second. It's like, how do I get away from it?

I want to leave my eating disorder behind me, but I am not prepared to stay at this weight.

I trust myself not to go crazy, to not slip, to not fall back into that pit, but is that trust itself a delusion?

Thursday 3 June 2010

Love hurts (I know)


"You're not friends. You'll never be friends. You'll be in love 'til it kills you both. You'll fight, and you'll shag, and you'll hate each other 'til it makes you quiver, but you'll never be friends. Real love isn't brains, children. It's blood. It's blood screaming inside you to work its will. I may be love's bitch, but at least I'm man enough to admit it."
- Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Oh, my heart is aching in unimaginable ways.... I want to be with her so fucking much it hurts. Seven years is a long fucking time to be in love with someone but fuck me, I'll be feeling this till the day I die!

I am in love with this swimming lark! I've got upto 1km (1 hour) in just five sessions, am aiming for stamina over speed, it's not like I'm gonna do competitions of anything.... And I went into Boots to weigh myself and I've lost 6lbs in a week! That's with having drinks on Saturday AND eating properly (1200-1500 cals)... I'm a bit shocked at how much I've lost because it's like, with the anorexia and everything, I don't trust that I can eat over 300-500 cals a day and still lose weight, so I guess I have proven to myself that I don't NEED to starve myself to do it, that I can do it with exercise and sensible calorie control!

Oh, and a certain Steve Hewitt messaged me on Facebook and offered me eight guest list places for the LAR Scala show next Wednesday because he had noticed that it was on my birthday.

How amazingly nice is that man!?!?!?!

(if you're around London on the 9th and fancy it then give me a yell coz most of my friends have already got tickets so don't need it!)

Wednesday 2 June 2010

The rest of the world lives to eat, while I eat to live.


"The tragedy in life doesn't lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach."
- Benjamin Mays

I hate these feelings, this vulnerability, this nagging fucking voice! YOU ARE NOT DOING ENOUGH! It's nonsense, it's stupid, I am doing enough, my intake and my exercise are all perfectly normal for someone who is on a diet. I AM ON A DIET. I am not on a mission to starve myself to death. Just get with the fucking programme, brain! ANY weight loss is good enough, is a success, it doesn't have to be that magic number you want to see tomorrow that you can't even admit to in serious honesty for you to have done well.

You haven't binged, you haven't purged, and you haven't restricted.

You should be so damn proud of yourself for that. You should be proud that you haven't self-harmed since last Thursday. Proud that you are doing something about your weight in an appropriate and healthy way. Proud that you are resisting and fighting every God damn anorexic and bulimic thought that crosses your mind.

But you're not, are you?

You'll only be proud if you get on the scales tomorrow and it turns out you've lost as much as you think is good. I need the strength to fight that thought because I know that it's anorexic, I know that it's wrong, I know that I am expecting too much of my body.

I fucking know all of this but the voice is still there. Maybe the voice will always be there when it comes down to it, my ED did indeed start of as a diet and turn into something else. This is my number one triggering situation in a way.

If only it was as simple as being too fat, being overweight and just going on a diet. Eating less and moving more. Why can't I feel like every other dieter out there?

Why do the voices linger when the disease is gone?