No one ever gets to me

So, a positive start to 2012...

I went for a walk around where I live last night in the dark on my own. That's the first time I've managed to do it here in probably years. I'm fine walking around places I don't live but walking around here is just so anxiety provoking, the fear that he may follow me and find out where I live, even though he's atleast a town away. I feel really pleased with myself. I did it and I didn't freak out about it.

I think slowly the things I learnt or talked through in counselling are becoming a part of my daily life. I spent so much time thinking that it didn't make any difference because I didn't have a kind of epiphany moment and it was such slow going but just little things that I've talked about and got out of me do make a difference and I think I need to remember that when things get tough.

I know I need more support, or therapy, or somewhere that I can talk about things in more detail, because I'm not sure I can survive the summer without it but right now I'm making it through the days fairly easily.

It's not the first thing that I think about. I don't have flashbacks or nightmares very often and when I do I don't drink or hurt myself because of them and I have dissociated in ages. I feel like I've healed a little bit.

Speak the truth, even if your voice shakes

I hate to admit it but I'm really struggling. I should be past this. It's been over 10 years since I developed and eating disorder. I should be better already.

I thought Christmas would be okay but I spent the three days purging and since then I've been scared to eat over a certain amount. My head is telling me that it's okay to only eat twice a day. That it's okay to count calories. That it's not restricting if I eat a certain amount. That it's just dieting. I went to look for my scales and then remembered that I chucked them out over the summer and now I'm in tears because I don't have them.

I am obese. It's a medical fact. Partly down to medication and partly down to binging. I need to lose weight. I don't know how to lose weight properly. A part of me misses being underweight. A bigger part of me misses just being normal. At my sickest I weighed 97lbs, at my heaviest I weighed 196lbs, I weighed myself about a month ago and I weighed 186lbs. I want to weigh between 125-130lbs. That's healthy for my height. Not to high and not too low. But my head tells me that I should try and beat my low weight. That it wasn't really all that low. Even though I was at death's door. It wasn't that bad. I ate too much even if I didn't eat at all. I don't want to go back there but I want to be thin. Is there a compromise? Is there a middle ground? Do I have to be anorexic or fat? Is that my choice? One or the other?

My head is such a mess. It's been less than a week and already everything is overwhelming and too much and I can't cope with it. I don't want to have to worry about my weight. I don't want to be the fat kid anymore. I want to be thin. I want to be well. I want to be normal. I want to be thin. etc etc etc.

I need to lose weight I need to lose weight I need to lose weight I need to lose weight. I'm being completely open with my parents about what I'm eating. I'm not doing it in secret and they are encouraging me to diet. Telling me that I should weigh myself once a week in Boots like I used to when I was at my sickest. Telling me not to eat carbs. I don't know what to think. I've got it in my head how much I'm allowed to eat and if I go over that then it's not okay. That I have to punsih myself if I do. That I have to be strong. That I have to do this.

I don't want to be sick. I want to be okay. But my head. My head is so confused.

Help

So you did your best and faced such music as anyone cared to play

So... It's been forever since I updated, it's hard to know where to start.

I ended up in hospital after drinking a litre of gin and becoming hysterical and suicidal. I saw someone from the booze bigrade who said they would be in touch with me but never did. I managed to get myself back to a somewhat normal state by using my PRN Diazepam everytime I felt like I needed a drink. I haven't drunk on my own for a couple of weeks now, I also haven't self-harmed either.

In the midst of all this it became apparant that I wouldn't find anywhere to live in Leicester anytime soon and that whilst I was living back with my parents I needed to go back under the Nun CMHT. I was told I could go to the day hospital, and then told that I didn't fit the criteria. At the minute I have seen my old CPN, who I don't particularly get on with, and she is going to be my care-co again. She said she would refer me to psychology, but she keeps going on about me repeating DBT and I am really not impressed by that. She is leaving in a couple of months though so I will have someone new. Hopefully. There has been no mention of seeing a psychiatrist but for the most part I am happy to be on the medication that I am on.

I have finished rape counselling and feel like I have gone as far as I can at the moment, although I know I have barely scratched the surface. I know I need to go deeper. To heal. Because I don't feel healed. Although I feel a little less...heavy. I am wondering if there is a crisis centre here in Nun or maybe Coventry. I know when the summer comes around I won't be able to cope...

I have spent the last week with a good friend, travelling around the country stalking Tim Minchin. It's been amazing. That's all I can think of to describe it. AMAZING.

This will be my third Christmas in recovery from anorexia and I'm having THREE meals in as many days and I'm freaking out about it a little bit. I am also having a lot of chatter in my head about going on 'a diet' in the New Year and losing as much weight as possible. I am sick of being fat and obese. I just want to be thinner...

Anyway, that's about it, Happy Christmas everyone, I love you a lot and appreciate your support.

Some things you lose and some things you just give away

Somewhere along the line of the last few months my parents have found out that I was raped.

I am finding it almost impossible to cope with.

My Dad keeps calling it a 'suitcase' that I'm carrying around that he knows about but that I don't have to open for him, it sounds like a pretty reasonable metaphor but it makes me feel sick just the fact that I know they know and that they're finding there own ways to deal with it and reason it out when I can't do it for myself. They know I was in crisis counselling. They know that I get flashbacks. They're reading books on PTSD...

I've spent seven years trying to keep it a secret from them and I feel like I've failed.

It feels like when they found out about my Eating Disorder. I felt like sure a failure. It wasn't my secret anymore. They were watching me all the time. I couldn't escapse it because it was all around me.

This probably sounds stupid, considering the fact that I am fairly open about what happened to me online, and to a few select friends in real life, my ex boyfriend, this is an open blog, if you're a friend of mine from FB or twitter or any forums I post in online then you would be able to find my blog and read it, and I am totally fine with that, I am fine with the fact that strangers might stumble upon my rambles... I am not ashamed of what happened to me. I try to be as honest as I can be with myself through writing here, exploring my feelings and the after-effects, going through the constant interal battles of blaming myself and feeling real enough of valid enough to be hurting. I will talk about my flashbacks, about nightmares, about how fucked up it makes my thoughts sometimes. I am open and honest and I accept that means that I leave myself open for people to see the ugly parts of me...

... I just never wanted my parents to find out about it.

I am fine and I'll learn to take what's mine and live without guilt

I had my initial group assesment at FDL (personality disorder service) on Friday. It was... okay. They just talked a bit about the difference between personality disorders and other mental illness, which I already knew so it was a bit pointless, and then they explained a bit about what they do and had some current service users talk about how it's been for them. It seems pretty intense, one of the programmes is five days a week for a year, then there's a two day a week one,and it's all group work, there's no individual therapy at all, and I'm not sure about it, at all, but I filled in the form to go back for an individual assesment and I'm hoping they'll help me decide what's best for me then, or atleast give me a better idea of whether or not it will be worthwhile. I really don't know what my own thoughts on it are right now.

Then I had my last session at LRC. It went well, I feel like I've achieved something and she told me that I shouldn't feel stupid because I couldn't do much 'talking' and that maybe I did all I could do at the time and that I can always ring the helpline if I need them.I didn't do a lot of hard stuff, I did talk about what happened to me but I was awkward and difficult and I didn't seem to get very far with it. There is still so much I need to deal with, to talk about, it still effects my day to day life, I still get flashbacks and nightmares and the only way I know how to deal with them is to drink or self-harm, I still can't sit with myself, I still can't see myself in a relationship, I still can't see myself trusting a man enough to have sex with, I can't see myself ever having sex again, I am still severely Tokophobic, my skin still crawls... I don't know. I agree with her that maybe I talked as much as I could at the time, but I also know that it wasn't enough, that it isn't enough, that I need more help or therapy or support or whatever to get through this, to heal, because I don't feel healed. I feel like I've taken the first step, but that's about it...

Feeling close but keeping my distance

I haven't SI'ed and the urges have gone away. I'm not sure how long it's been since I last did it, it's over a month since I threw out my tools and I think I've only done it twice since then so it's been awhile, and it's been much longer than that I haven't had to seek medical treatment, so I guess I'm doing well on that front.

Eating is a bit all over the place, binging, throwing up a couple of times, hating my body, vague restriction plans that I know will never happen, I just want to get back to being a normal/healthy weight and not feel so disgusting.

Still shaken up from 'the sighting' as much I try to calm myself down and tell myself it wasn't keep the resemblance is just making it hard to really believe that I will never see him again, and that urge to get in touch and have it out with him is so strong, I don't know how I'm resisting it, I think it's fear, the fear of him denying it, because if he denied it then I would, too, but of course he would deny it because that's just what people do... How do I trust my own memories? How do I go back to that day? How do I move on? How do I make peace with myself? Do I try to forget? Do I go into every tiny little detail? Do I just... do nothing? What do I do?

I'm struggling with knowing I only have one counselling appointment left. I've only really just started talking about stuff and now it's going to be over. I'm meant to be keeping a thought diary and something has come up in it that I would like to talk about, about how I feel manipulated into feeling guilty about what happened to me because of his actions afterwards, with the voicemail and the disappearence and then the email about 'forgetting the past' over a year later, but it seems like such a huge thing to bring up in a last session. What happene afterwards affected me a Hell of a lot more than the actual rape did, for a long time I was caught up in the emotional side of it, the huge amount of guilt I felt, the feeling that he had killed himself and it was all my fault, trying to work out what that messege meant, was it a final apology, a kind of 'suicide note' because it felt like one, I felt like that was the corner I was backed into. I carried that guilt around, that responsibility for someone's suicide, that I was the cause of someone's suicide for over a year. That broke me.

I don't know what I'm going to do. I've only just started talking about what happened, let alone exploring the feelings around it, I just don't know what to do next...

Still dancing with your demons

For the first time in weeks I have strong urges to SI. I am meant to be in London with friends but I cancelled on them and now have nothing to do but sit around and feel incredibly guilty and worthless. My mood is dropping, I hate to admit it but I can't deny it, the tiredness, the need to isolate, the fear of being awake for longer than I need to be. I just want it to stop. I want to be normal. I want to be happy.

I have one session left at crisis and I feel like I've barely even started to deal with it, but at the same time I feel like I want to leave, that maybe not going to a rape crisis centre will be a good thing because then I can go back to pretending it's not real. Maybe it isn't real. Maybe I'm an attention seeking liar. I don't trust myself or my memories at all. They seem false, or too much, or something out of nothing, and in these moments I crave a kind of certainty, I want bruises, I want violence, I want my life to be in danger. What I don't want is what I have. It doesn't seem serious enough. It doesn't seem real enough. It doesn't seem validated. I am still fighting with the urge to get back in touch with him, to see if he remembers, to see what the voice mail was all about, what he was really sorry about, does he know, did he know, will he remember, does he feel guilty, does he even know who I am anymore?

Sometimes I'm angry, sometimes I don't believe what happened, sometimes I'm scared, sometimes I feel like a liar, sometimes I feel like I'm making too much out of it, sometimes I think I think it worse than it was, sometimes I feel guilty, sometimes I feel ashamed, sometimes I hate myself, sometimes I hate him, sometimes... Sometimes I want it to happen again so I can feel validated. To say that it was violent. I was attacked. Sometimes I want it to be late at night. Outside. Some dodgy looking old man. I want to beaten up and my life threatened. Sometimes I want a real rape.