Only guilty people need to worry about looking innocent

I don't really know where to start... A few days ago, an old friend got in touch with me to tell me that the man who raped me has a wife and child who are under investigation with social services. Well, the friend doesn't exactly know what happened, but knows that we have 'a history', and for all he knows he's just passing on the latest gossip, it's not a big deal, it's just news.

I don't know what to do. I feel like if anything ever happened to the child then it's my fault, but it's also my fault that his Dad is the way he is in the first place, he never hurt anyone before me, he never had a drinking problem before me, it must be something about me that changed him. I don't believe that he's a bad person and I don't have the right to judge whether he's a bad father. It was a long time ago and it's not as if I was a kid when it happened, I was 17 and he was only in his early 20's, that's not really the same as someone hurting a child.

Even if I wanted to do something, I don't have any proof, it's just my word and that doesn't count for much. There are so many times that I don't even believe myself, how can I expect anyone else too? There are genuine victimes out there and if I said anything officially I'd just be spitting in their faces. I don't want to be the girl that cried rape. It's not as if anyone can go back in time and see the whole thing from both sides, and there are always two sides, why should anyone believe mine, why should I?

If anything happened to that child I will never forgive myself, but neither do I have the right to speak out. I don't have a strong story or evidence or proof or any of the things that matter in reality. I can't just ring someone up and tell them everything and expect them to believe me, or to leave me alone afterwards. It won't be just one phone call, it won't be just one person, and he'll know if I spoke to anyone because who else would have? He'd just tell them that I was lying and it wouldn't achieve anything, "he said, she said", it never means anything, it never proves anything, and his family is destroyed for no reason other than me. He'll pass the assesment, convince them in the same way he convinced everyone that I was lying slut, and who's to say that he's wrong and I'm right?

I still believe that he has the right to get on with his life, that I should just keep quiet and stop making up awful things to make him look bad and myself look better.

I was getting my life back together and it's just fallen apart again.

Nobody said it was easy

"No one ever said it would be so hard..."

- Coldplay

So... time for an update?

It's been a confusing couple of weeks, finding out that my old friend from the EDU had a heat attack, and then my flatmate being admitted to hospital for her anorexia... It's been fucking hard and exhausting. I tried really hard to keep myself safe, I spent a lot of time at home on and off and as soon as I knew what date she was going in I gave the flat a miss for the week. Before I left I gave her a hug and told her it'll be okay, and then I sent her a messege letting her know she could talk to me whenever she wanted... She didn't respond and in a way I do feel a bit hurt but at the same time, and I know this sounds awful, it's not my problem. And how many offers of help have I thrown back in people's faces? I don't really have the right to be upset about it.

My (bp'ing) behaviours have slipped a bit in the last couple of weeks. Slowly, slowly as always, and then I realise how much it helps to purge all the bad shit out of you life, not food, but anxiety and anger and hurt, I've had a lot of that recently, and for a split second I saw a way out of all the emotional crap... I caught myself pretty quickly, I knew I couldn't let it get the better of me, that there would no such thing as 'just one more time'...

It's really shaken me up, though, I feel so unsettled. Recovery had been going SO WELL. I was coping with being overweight and learning not to punish myself more because of it and gently trying to lose weight by eating right and not binging or restricting. It's been a tough couple of months but I thought I was coping with it okay, I thought I was doing okay... I've never been this genuine about recovery, I've never given it this much effort, I've never tried so hard to block out what the rest of the world was doing with the food and their body and just concentrate on myself. Feeling bad for having a bad couple of weeks and beating myself up about it isn't really that productive so yes, acknowledge the fact that I've been using behaviours, try and work out why and move on.

I am moving on because damn it I have never wanted life without an eating disorder more than I have these last couple of years.

Talking of life without bad habits, it's 81 days since I last self-harmed (I am quite the poster girl with my DBT therapist) and my mood is alright, I think I'm over the worst of the depression. I've even been trusted with monthly pescriptions for the first time in years! I had my outpatient appointment last week, my consultant was off sick but I saw someone else instead of them cancelling (which considering I only see her every other month is a good thing) and the stand-in was really nice and had actually bothered to read my file. I told her about how my anxiety is just as bad as before, that I'm doing the 'keep going out anyway' advise without much success and that a lot of the time I'm inside by myself I still feel on edge and how I've been feelig physically awful because of all the headaches and chest pains. She put me on Seroxat (paroxetine) 10mg to see if it helps No impressions either way as yet, apart from the terrifying internet articles I've read about it being addictive and causing suicide, (there was even a 'The Secrets of Seroxat' Panaroma) but I've banned myself from Google now.

So, I'm now taking;

Seroquel XR - 300mg
Seroquel - 100mg
Lamictal - 200mg
Mirtazapine - 45mg
Seroxat - 10mg
Zopiclone - 7.5mg (upto 3 x a week)

I feel reletively human and functionable some of the time and the rest like WTF!!! and become convinced that it's some kind of mind-controlling experiment to get rid of 'the real me'. The times that I feel human are worth it though, right? I mean, I REALLY want to get on with my life, do productive things, grow and change, and I can't do that if I'm all... Erm? Unstable is maybe the politest word.

I re-enrolled for university today, to go back in October and complete my second year of Creative Writing and English. I'm pretty sure it's what I want to do, it's what I wanted for a long time but after I had to drop out before Christmas I've been scared of making the commitment to go back. I feel like I've already failed, in a way, and that going back would be too hard. I want to give it a shot, though, I think I'll regret it if I don't.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do about accomodation, I still really want to get my own flat or something instead of student housing because I've left it too late to get a decent place because the applications have to be in by the end of the first term. I don't know how to go about looking though, I get really scared when I think about properly living on my own. I'm nearly 24 and in so many ways I feel about 84, but there are times when I feel like a child....

Anyway, I kind of want to get some shit off my chest, J* (my counsellor at LRC) is always asking if my writing is any better than my talking so...

The anxiety and trauma related stuff is fucking awful at the minute... It was getting better for a bit but now I just can't tune my brian out from it. For years I've torn myself up over it, I blame myself and at the same time I feel completely fucking violated and abused. It keeps going round in circles in my head. Is not saying no as good as saying yes? Is staying in the same room of someone that's trying to kiss you an invitation for sex? Is being drunk and stoned as good as permission? Is having a blank space where a memory should be just guilt? I'm not fucking over it. I get flashes of that night all the time, of the bits I do remember, him being kind to me and stroking my face, maybe it really was just a romantic one night stand that I asked for.... But then I just feel disgusted and repulsed and betrayed and I am so despretely trying to fill in the blanks and know what happened.

The thing is, as soon as one memory or thought gets triggered, everything else starts to crawl from my stomach into my throat and I end up feeling so confused and angry and scared. Memories that years of starving and puking and binging and cutting and burning and overdosing and insane amounts of alchohol quieten down. It doesn't work anymore, though, ever since it's been 'public' and I told my psychiatist and with now going to counselling... I don't really talk there though, well I do, I talk a shit load about everything else under the sun, but when it gets to talking about the real reason I'm there I just end up with THE FEAR and have to bolt from the room. I don't even feel like I belong there.

When I was 17, a group of us (including my ex-boyfriend) went out drinking, we always went out for drinking picnics in the summer holidays, he offered to take a couple of us back to a friend's place. The whole day he'd been all over me, but he was always drunk and I was used to it, but I guess I always went back to my own house afterwards and this time I didn't...

One of the times I was trying to get away from him my sleeves must have rolled back and he saw my SI scars and started shouting at me, screaming WHY over and over again, he was so angry, he hit me. He was very drunk, he was an alchoholic and I felt guilty for it, I felt like the reason for it. Or atleast, he always made me know how much me dumping him had fucked him up. I still don't understand why my scars pissed him off so much... He rolled back my sleeves and paraded me around the front room, in front of complete strangers, dragging me by the arm and telling everyone to look, telling everyone to tell me how stupid I was, telling everyone to feel the scars. I can't really describe how it feels when a stranger touches your scars, it's the final scene of 'Thirteen' only a million times worse because it's not someone you love doing it. I remember it more vividly than anything else that happened that night. Even now, seven years later, I still feel sick when I touch my scars.

I didn't want to be around people anymore after that, so I took myself off into one of the bedrooms. He follows me, I'm drunk and sleepy, I remember saying to him 'I don't want sex with you', but he didn't listen, he tried to get an erection but couldn't because he'd drunk so much so he used his tongue and hands on me. I started to black out, half or my memories are white noise and static and the rest are distorted snapshots of reality, pictures in the wrong order, too bright, too loud, like when you're in a nightmare and you can't wake up or move, you lose touch of what's real and what's not... I could have pushed him off, but I didn't, it wouldn't have made any difference, I was weak, most of my nutrition came from booze back then. I could have shouted out for the others, but I didn't. I could have locked the door before I went to bed but it just didn't occur to me...

I went to sleep, woke-up and left without saying goodbye. It didn't hit me until I was walking home, I thought I was going to die from the pain, trying to block out what happened in my head when my body just wouldn't co-operate.

A couple of days later he left a messege on my voicemail saying that he was sorry, that he couldn't live with what he'd done and that because of it, because of me, he was going to kill himself. I tried to get in contact with him but everywhere I looked, everyone I spoke to, wouldn't tell me anything. He'd told them some crap about me humping and dumping him and they hated me. It took him a whole YEAR to get in touch with me and tell me he was alive. For a whole year I was blaming myself for someone else's 'suicide'. I still have the e-mail he sent me, all it said was that he'd 'moved on with his life', he never mentioned that night and he never said sorry again. I kept that voicemail for years as proof that everything was my fault.....

Maybe we don't go to hell for the things we do, maybe we go to hell for the things we don't do.

I found out that one of the girls I was in EDU with had a heart attack last week. I've stayed in regular contact with another girl who's really, really sick again. I have no idea about the other girls I was in with, one of them went on to a personality disorder place, the other completely cut contact with everyone from hospital which I always take as a good sign, that they're letting go of that part of their life completely, and I really hope that's the case. Then there is my flatmate...

Where did I go right? Why have I made it through when they haven't? Everyone thought I was gonna be a 'revolving door' patient, because I was discharged and re-admitted within the month, but I wasn't and I've been out of treatment for five years. Sure, I've had a couple of bad relapses where I've been really sick again but I pulled myself out of them pretty much on my own, my anorexia has been under control for about two years now. I'm not saying things are perfect, I occasionally eat and throw up when I'm really stressed out, but atleast I'm aware of the fact that it's triggered by what's going on inside/around me rather than food/weight, and binging and excessive weight gain is unhealthy and disordered but at the same time it could easily have tipped me right back to starvation and it hasn't, I've coped with the fact I'm overweight and accepted the fact that I need to get rid of all my ED'ed behaviours, not just swing from on to the other. For quite a long time now, I've been painfully aware of the fact that I'm still quite young, yet have been ill for over half my life.

Something else that I've had to terms with recently is the fact that other people will still be disordered around me, that people I know will still be under 100lbs, restricting, binging, purging, self-harming, overdosing, etc and that I can’t do anything about it, I can't stop them or save them and I can't keep going over the fact that 'it used to be me' and that ‘comparing’ myself to them out of some misplaced nostalgia is only going to make me miserable. I am no longer jealous of other people's eating disorder and that in itself is a great feeling to have. I no longer feel like I've 'let myself go' but have let go of something that was out to kill me, that's ruined my life in ways I will never be able to repair. I don't want it back.

For the most part, I've got out, my happiness doesn't depend on what I eat or what I weigh, for the whole of my depressive episode late last year, and the anxiety and flashbacks and rape counselling that's on-going, I have never once had the thought that 'this is happening because I am fat' or 'this will stop if I don't eat and lose weight' for a long time everything that went wrong in my life I blamed on the fact that I was too fat and ate too much, these last few months I've known that it has nothing to do with that and that I would be exactly the same no matter how much I weighed or ate.

Well, that's not quite true, there was quite a chunk of time where I felt much safer being obese, it became a kind of comfort blanket, I was so convinced that I looked so ugly and vast that no-one else would want to even look at me, let alone anything else... Since the start of the year I've tried damn hard to get that under control and just a couple of months on things are already so much better, my mindset and attitude to how I look have had a complete revamp. I do need to lose weight but I just make a real effort to eat decent meals and distract myself when I want to binge, but I don't spend all my time on the scales and if I want to eat chocolate or crisps or whatever then I do, I just don't eat it and eat it and eat it.

I don't want to be underweight, I don't want to be sick, I don't want to starve... But I really don't understand how or why and I've never felt more aware of the fact that I still don't really know what I'm doing, what's keeping me going, and I feel so scared that it could all disappear in a heartbeat.

I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human

First things, first...

I am not expecting people to give a crap about anything I say, write or do.

I am not the owner of the monopoly on fandoms, illness, recovery, bands, songs, shows, people or anything else I write about.

I am not on a mission to enlighten, save or inspire.

I am not on a mission to upset, offend or hurt.

Okay, so, what’s the fucking point? Why am I suddenly talking like a pretentious twat? I don’t actually know to be honest, but a part of me has suddenly decided that spending time writing in a vaguely considered and careful manner about life, the universe and everything is a lot better than sitting around waiting for the poetic muse to descend. Ideally, I would be drinking tea with Oscar Wilde, constantly wasted on absinthe and writing fifty eloquent, insightful poems a day. Unfortunately, I’m a little too late for the tea-drinking, decent absinthe isn’t for sale in Tesco Metro and I average a couple of poems a month, none of which are remotely insightful or eloquent.

I’m incredibly lazy when it comes to ‘creative writing’, I hate forcing it, I hate editing, I hate writing to please other people (mainly because I hate people, but that’s not the point!) and I really hate writing ‘for the sake of it.’ Deep down, I know that I should sit in front of a blank screen for hours, tearing up paper and agonising over commas; but there are DVD box sets to get through and gigs to go to.

I do need to write, though, and I've really enjoyed the occasional writing for awarness weeks/days I've done over the last year, so I have come to the conclusion that if I start to take this whole ‘blogging’ thing a bit more seriously and regularly, and not just off-load/moan, then maybe it will fill my time a little more productively than endless ‘IT Crowd’ marathons and backcombing.

Photot # 6 A photo that makes you laugh

Back to the 30 day photo challenge!

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.