Thoughts on recovery and treatment

I've been thinking about eating disorders and the fact that I haven't been 'in treatment' for quite a long time now; I'm five years out of hospital and I never had any kind follow up care, due to the fact that I went out of area and couldn't access their outpatient services because they were a private hospital and the PCT wouldn't fund any further treatment. Services back home slipped away as well, the psychiatrist I had before I went IP (and who I'd been seeing for the month or so before I got admitted to a NHS psych ward and the month between I got discharged from there and readmitted to Isham House) I never saw again.

I think I had a couple of sessions with a CPN that just didn't work out (family based therapy, bad idea!) but she eventually pulled out because 'I was the one making myself ill' and she literally told me that there was nothing wrong with me and that I was just being difficult for the sake of it and that I had 'behavioural problems' rather than mental health problems... (yeah, she was great <_<) she was also the same person who told me I'd be back in hospital within six weeks of being discharge so quite how two and two made four there I still don't understand...

So, I got discharged with nothing and it was over a year later that I went back to my GP's to be re-referred for my rapidly relapsing anorexia, she thought I was depressed and put me on Prozac and a few months later I went back to see the consultant who I saw right up until this summer. Unfortunately, he told me that despite the fact I was barely eating I wasn't in any real danger and didn't need treatment until my BMI was under 15... Even at my sickest literally dying point my BMI wasn't under 15 but these things tend to stick and affect the way that you think about yourself and your ED... I later had another relapse and pretty much begged to be referred to specific ED treatment and again got told that I wasn’t sick enough to ‘qualify’ for treatment, which is fair enough because treatment is limited, but at the time I did get treatment I really wasn’t ready to recover, I didn’t want to recover, and yet I got treatment from general psych and a specific ED unit and yet when I really did want to recover there was nothing out there for me...

Over the last couple of years under his care I have had quite a lot of treatment but it’s been largely focused on my Borderline Personality Disorder diagnosis; I went general psych ward a couple of more times for brief stays, did a mindfulness group therapy type thing, crisis house, day hospital, tonnes of different medication and Dialectal Behavioural Therapy. I had a care-coordinator who recently got suspended for malpractice, so working with her was nearly always counterproductive and often destructive, and I also had ‘regular therapy’ for about a year which I found fairly useful once I’d got into it but that was only really for the last couple of months before I finished with him. I did learn quite a lot from the sessions, about being good at other things than losing weight, and a lot of the day to day leftover crap that was good to talk about but I never really got to the bottom of my ED and lately I am wondering if it would be helpful or unhelpful to go down that road.

I’m doing a lot therapy wise right now, I really like the psychiatrist I see here in Leicester and find her incredibly easy to talk to and be honest and open with, I’m still in DBT (I finish at the end of April I think...) and I’m at rape counselling (thanks to said psych) and I know that the BPD stuff and the trauma stuff have some part to play on my ED but in all honesty, I see the BPD as a knock on effect of the trauma and my problems with food started years before any of that happened.

My gut reaction is that right now is that I wouldn’t benefit from dealing with what’s underneath the anorexia, talking about it would automatically make it a big part of my life again and I’m really growing to enjoy (Hell, fuck it!) LOVE the fact that it’s not a big part of my life at the minute. At least, it’s not unless it comes to my flatmate, it’s that that I seem to be struggling to cope with, rather than my own illness.

In all honesty, it has been getting on top of me but it's helping me enough to just be able to talk about it here; it's more about venting than anything else so that I'm not completely alone with this whole situation, and so that I’m not sitting with it all building up inside. I have had a couple of bad days, a few little slips, but think it just got a bit too much on those days and I feel like I'm in a better place to cope with it now because having that slip has completely reinforced why I want to keep on with recovery.

I've figured out a lot for myself over the last couple of years, I have a much better idea now of why I became sick, and one day maybe I will go back to therapy and resolve it, but for the moment I've made peace with it and that feels like enough.

Things really are so much better for me now than they've ever been. There is no way a few years back that I would have been able to live with another anorexic and not be jealous or compete but that thought hasn't even crossed by mind. I'm not happy with the situation but I am happy and proud of myself for the way I'm trying to deal with it. I guess I've got used to dealing with it on my own and in a way I feel like I have freedom and control doing it this way. I don't want to go back to the days where I would go to an appointment and it would all be about the ED... I know it's not perfect, I'm not in denial, I just want to keep its impact on my life to the absolute minimum, at least for the time being, but is that the best thing to do? Am I getting it all wrong?

I think I'm slowly learning how worthwhile recovery is and how pointless it is to go round in circles, bouncing from one behaviour to the next. In all honesty, there are still times that the only thing I want to do is lose a tonne of weight, and because I am overweight it can be easy to talk myself into it being a good idea but I really do understand how vulnerable I'd make myself if I devoted my entire life to losing weight.

It is something that I want, to get back to a healthy weight, but it's definitely something that I want to happen in the right way and for the most part I can cope with my body being the way it is. It's just much harder to rationalise the negative thoughts when you feel that they're justified ie I am medically overweight so I should lose weight or I eat too much so I should stop eating etc etc but I think I'm doing an okay job, it's been over a year since I used anorexic behaviours at all or bulimic behaviours regularly, and when I do slip and fuck up I feel awful about it rather than nostalgic and 'pleased' and since New Year I've even got a good handle on the binging, been eating regularly and get straight back up when I do fall down.

Seriously, there are things I want out of life that have nothing to do with food and weight and those things just keep growing all the time. I'm not denying that I still struggle to get that balance right and to have a 'normal' relationship with food but it doesn't impact the rest of my life like it once did. Food is food and weight is weight (whatever it is or isn't) and the everything else that's going on in my life is so much bigger than that.

Some days it gets me down or gets too much but most days it's just a small part of a much bigger picture.

NEDA Week # 4 The Media and Eating Disorders

Despite my best intentions to contribute to NEDA 2011 I have ironically had the busiest week in months! As I haven't really taken the time to sit down and write new blogs I've decided to re-blog entries I've made over the last couple of years.

I don't really want to introduce myself or the whole history of my ED in detail to people that don't know me; I know from first hand experiance that detailed accounts of what you or ate or weighed are destructive and also largely irrelevent, but I should probably give a brief oversight as to where I'm coming from. I've been eating disordered since I was 14, I was severly anorexic by 18, since then there have been hospitalisations, COE, anorexia, bulimia, anorexia, COE and so on and so for a decade. I decided that I wanted to recover in September 2007 but I never really cracked it or sustained it until late 2009. I haven't fully recovered from parts of my ED, I still have problems with COE and very occasionally bulimia but I've been free from anorexic behaviours and regular purging for about a year.

Okay, so! Today here's something that I wrote in response to frequent question of the relationship that the media has with eating disorders.

I have been working on this for nearly two days and I still don’t think I’ve articulated myself as well as I would have liked. I’m not very good at writing out of anger or irritation; I tend to come across as harsh and bitchy and completely up my own arse which I apologise for. I’m not a journalist, I’m barely a fucking writer!

Today is Campaign Day and the whole of this week had been Eating Disorder Awareness Week, as well as the 21st birthday of b-eat, the UK’s biggest eating disorder charity which is a fantastic organisation that provides amongst other things information, help lines, and pressure on the government to provide more treatment. A lot of people are writing/blogging/making videos/promoting and generally making a noise and raising awareness about these diseases that are stigmatised, glamorised and still largely misunderstood by society.

I am happy and more than willing to give them my support and to take part, and something keeps coming up time and time amongst all the interviews and articles that have taken place this week that I especially want to contribute my own understand and experience to: That is how much responsibility the media have over the development and rise of anorexia and bulimia.

It has been said that the media are not to blame and that eating disorder’s have nothing whatsoever to do with girls wanting to lose weight. I disagree.

To say that a media that consistently promotes thin as in is blameless is wrong. They are NOT the cause of these illnesses; people are born with a predisposition to develop ED’s, just as they may be to develop cancer, but the bombardment of images of skinny, successful women, of the Special K diet and Weight Watchers, of Jamie fucking Oliver and his healthy eating plans for school cannot walk away scot free from the rise of anorexia and bulimia, from the average age that they develop dropping and from a culture that gives super skinny a pat on the back and makes perfectly healthy, average sized people feel clinically obese in comparison .

We all have problems in our lives that are at the root of our disorder; whether its trauma, bullying, low self-esteem, depression, anxiety or just the wrong thing said at the wrong time. But I honestly believe that the reason that some of us turn to food and weight loss as ‘the magic cure’ to everything is because of how thin is promoted and celebrated amongst our society and our media.

Beauty magazines promote low self-esteem, and if you’re young and vulnerable and feeling a little bit bad and insecure about yourself and the way that you look, this wall of dreams at the newsagents can easily fuel your distorted perceptions.

Every single person is an individual, with their own story, their reasons, and to say that it is never influence of the media that made someone sick is as big an invalidation to their illness as it is to say that someone is ‘too fat’ to have an ED.

I'm wide awake, it's morning

Today makes it 50 days since I last SI'ed

That seems like a really long time and like 'a big deal' but I end up in a huge fucking state when I think like that because seriously, where's the fucking news? Why should you feel pleased with yourself for not doing something that the majority of the population don't even think about doing in the first place.

Anyway, I got my new counsellor and time through for LRC and went this afternoon. It was alright, she seems nice enough because to be honest I really didn’t like the one I was seeing before because she was always bloody pushing me into 'talking about what happened' when I was halfway through talking about something else (and I don't mean something random and off-topic but just about how that week had been) I know that it’s probably way off target but I got the feeling that she was after really graphic details and going over the past which I guess is fair enough, but I only met her three times...

I’ve been finding it really hard to physically talk when I’m anxious, like when you’re drunk and think you’re saying things right but you’re not, everything I say just sounds wrong, and then I get stressed out because I don’t want people to think that I’m stupid and inarticulate, and then I forget what the Hell I wanted to say in the first place.

My flatmate’s still around but I hadn't had that much contact with her until yesterday when I was sick in bed all day with some kind of bug... she kept offering to go to the shop to buy food for me or to cook and I know that she was just being nice and kind, I do genuinely do know that, but for the slightest second I thought ‘she’s just trying to make me eat so she can watch while she doesn’t’ which is so fucked up and wrong and since then I’ve been really weepy and shaky, bursting into tears randomly, because I hate myself so much for even thinking like that, even if it's just for a second, it's too much…


[EDIT: INSERT TANGENT]

I'm just so sick of it. You get past a point where it stops being 'romantic', where it stops being some rose-tinted page of your past that you're desperate to get back, it just becomes old.

I am too old.

Since I was eight years old I wanted to be thin. I thought that if I lost weight then everything else would be perfect because it was being fat that was holding me back. Ten years after that I very nearly and literally starved myself to death because the thought of gaining weight, fuck it, just the thought of eating was so terrifying that I didn't really care if I died, I would rather be empty and dead, or thin and dead, than full, or fat, and alive. Being fat, gaining weight, eating, meant that the entire fucking universe would collapse, the world would stop...

Here I am, five long years later, and I've gained weight, I eat, I am (horror of all horrors) 'bigger than I need to be'.

Here I am because THE WORLD DID NOT STOP.

The only thing that makes the world stop is your eating disorder, or at least it makes your world stop.

You can't simplify the world, your life, your problems into 'food' and 'weight' and block out everything else, and even if you could, why would you want to? Life is so much more than that, so much more madder, and scarier, and happier, and sadder, and more COLOURFUL than that.

Life with an ED is a bit like when you take a photo of something without the memory, you're there but you're not really there, because you're behind the camera and afterwards you can look back on it and tell yourself you were there, but it's not going to be the same as actually, physically, being there. You can look back on your ED, like a photograph and kid yourself that you were there but you weren't... Photos only work when you have the memory to go with them.

Which basically comes round to it being National Eating Disorder Awareness Week...

I don't really believe in that many things, I'm a pretty ambivalent creature about almost everything, but I do 100% believe in this.

I'm definately not perfect, or on some kind of crusade to make everything better. I'm not saying that I'm particularly eloquent and articulate and able to offer huge, inspirational insights, because trust me, I'm not and I can't. To be fair, I'm even that great at 'being recovered' some days...

But I do know that the world doesn't stop just because you eat.

-

I don't know what I'll be talking about/doing over the next week but I'll do updates on here and tumblr - to be honest it probably won't be anything impressive but I just want to do my little bit

We are nowhere and it's now

I'm so scared that when it comes to making the choice of what to do next with my life that I'm going to get it wrong. There are so many ides and options racing around my head that I can't seem to just pick one and work through it, to see the advantages of it, the disadvantages, and especially the reality of it.

I feel like I'm being unrealistic, I feel like the person that I want to be and the person that I am are a million miles apart, I feel talentless and aimless. I want to believe that I am good at things, I want to believe that I'm good at writing because it's the only path I want to ake, that I've always wanted to take, and I'm incredibly insecure and fustrated about the whole thing.

On the plus side I got a phone call from the Social Inclusion team to meet up with them next week and I'm quite looking forward to finding out what they offer and it feels productive to get back into doing something again.

On the down side rape counselling haven't go in touch with me over a week and I have no idea when I will meet up with the new worker and the longer it is the more I am talking myself out of doing it. Right now I want nothing more than to pretend it never happened because for some reason in my head that translates to me being able to get on with my life and be happy. I know that's fucked up logic but it's pretty damn convincing.

I'm coping with the situation with my flatmate suprisingly well. The disordered bit of my brain has died down a lot so I'm not triggered by it and I'm looking after myself and eating properly and trying not to think about it all the time. I still feel awkward and uncomfortable around her, and I still want to be able to say something that would make her see the light, as it were, and I feel guilty and useless not being able to do that, because I feel like as someone who used to be in that place I should no better what to say or ddo but I don't and it makes no difference. I still have this thing about making it all mean something, making all the shit that I went through into something productive and I can't

Photo # 5 A photo of you

Photo # 4 A photo of the last place you went on holiday

Amsterdam

Photo # 3 A photo that makes you happy

Meeting Tim Minchin after his Conversation With gig at Stratford last month;

The photo I have with him from Sonisphere is probably better, the light/contrast on my camera fucked up a bit so it's not great quality, I look DISGUSTING, horrible hair (thanks, epic amount of rain <_<) but it makes me smile to see his cheeky grin! Also, this gig was a complete last minute luck thing. I decided about two weeks before that I wanted to go but it was all sold out, I put a rather stupid amount of a bid on a pair of tickets from eBay and literally five minutes after someone at angry-feet offered me their spare ticket for £12!

I can't really explain what it all means; I was always the kind of person that listened to the sad songs when they felt like shit, in what was probably a rather self-indulgent and pretentious way, but laughing at silly songs has proved a far more productive, self-empowering way to deal with the crazy shit. And as ever, touring is the best antidepressent there is, I just needed to feel it again, I guess, and I'm glad that I had his shows around when I really needed that energy kick. I was so, so low towards the end of last year, desperate, I almost didn't go to the shows I'd booked up but I did and it was amazing and gave me back my lust for life, and for the live gig touring experiance.

He is also the most talented, orginal and intelligent famous person I have ever felt a connection with. There are lots of reasons why I love him as much as I do. *cough obbsessed cough* But I think that one of the best things about him is that he doesn't do what a lot of comedians do, when they tell a joke or make a statement that may come across as offensive or too close to the edge, they all tend to say 'it's just a joke' and they don't justify it beyond the laughs, but with Tim there's this whole other level of depth. With 'The Pope Song', for example, he's asking you if you are really more offended with him calling the pope a 'motherfucker', with a song that is mostly filled with the word fuck, than you are about him/the catholic church covering up child abuse; And when you put it like that it's hard to argue against, it’s so fiercly intelligent. He's not just being offensive for the sake of it, or to get a big laugh, he's taking the whole idea of offense and playing with it, to make people think about what's more offensive. It's not just a joke; it's a cleverly constructed argument.

Of course it's funny, but he has a unique ability to be as witty as he is heartfelt, to convey genuine human emotion, to take apart falsehoods that exist, whether that be in love or religion or the holding of things sacred.

And the things that really make you laugh also make you cry.