When I was 17 I forgot Christmas. I was physically and emotionally unwell at the time – my eating disorder was out of control, I was self harming frequently, running away, had just been kicked out of school, and my mum wasn’t really talking to me. I didn’t understand at the time how she could think that I was just doing all of this to hurt her, and she didn’t understand how I could be so messed up that I cut myself rather than talk. Because I wasn’t in school the days all rolled into one another, and none had greater significance than any other. In December I started seeing a new psychologist, and one of our first appointments was on Christmas Eve. That was the first time I became conscious of Christmas that year. I was walking up to my appointment at the adolescent unit, looking at the appointment time and date I had written down to make sure I had it right, and it suddenly struck me that the day - December 24th – was Christmas Eve.
I’m pretty oblivious when I’m ill. When I was in York, November 23rd passed by without much trouble. I had a friend stay with me for the actual night, but my PTSD was quite well behaved. Similarly, February 8th didn’t register last year. I was preoccupied with a) food, b) surviving the week until I could go home and c) one of my friends who was very ill at the time.
I hate dates with ’significance’. I try not to give them power, I tell myself that it’s just a day, try to distract myself. In regards to today, for the last couple of weeks I’ve been aware that it was round about this time three years ago that I was admitted to hospital, but I didn’t foresee it being a problem at all – because it never has been in the past. This is probably because during February 2008 I was at a low weight, emotionally numb and too worried about starting the day programme at the local EDU for there to be room for anything else in my head, and during February 2009 I was…well, pretty much the same actually. But today, February 8th 2010, I am physically healthy, safe at home, and have nothing more pressing than my latest physics assignment to think about. And I am unexpectedly very, very sad.
I went to my counselling skills group earlier and someone asked what the date was to write at the top of their notes. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, I was having to fight back tears. I have been feeling a bit low today anyway – blasted hormones are out of whack again, I’m a week late and feel like I’ve had PMS for about a fortnight already – and I found myself sitting in the classroom feeling really slowed down, leaden, like my internal organs had been replaced by a lump of concrete. It reminded me harshly of how I felt in my OT classes before I was admitted. I tried so hard to keep going, I had a couple of days off sick but most of the time I forced myself to go into university. I hightailed it off to the bathrooms during breaks to cry, hyperventilate or self harm, but I did my best to be calm and collected during lectures and discussions. I didn’t always succeed. When I’d found out my placement location a couple of months earlier - somewhere too far to commute to, so I’d have to live there for six weeks – I panicked, blurted out in front of my friends that I was agoraphobic and would never cope, and I was so embarrassed afterwards. But otherwise I kept up the pretense that everything was fine. I even went out for Chinese with some of the other students the night before I was admitted. I only told them where I had disappeared to after I’d been in hospital for five weeks, and found out that most of them thought I was just suffering from exhaustion from training too hard for the London marathon. Only one person guessed, and she had a history of mental health problems herself. I remember feeling as if my difficulties must be obvious, that I must be acting so weirdly because I felt like utter shit and I couldn’t imagine how the depression could not be plainly visible in my face, my posture, my behaviour. Apparently not.
But back to this evening, when I was ambushed by my now fully awake emotional responses. I think I kept myself together quite well. I didn’t cry, didn’t panic, didn’t tell anyone what was going through my head. They are still strangers, how could I? I did dig my fingernails into my hand at one point, almost unconsciously, but caught myself when I started to feel spaced out from the pain and stopped. It frustrates me that that was such an automatic response. Firstly, to replace an emotional pain with a physical one, and secondly to run away from the pain at all. Fair enough, I didn’t want to get upset in my class, but I could have just gone to the bathroom for a minute, breathed and told myself that I would deal with it later. File that idea away for next time I suppose.
I like to be prepared for all eventualities. Part of the reason that my recovery has been successful this time is that I made sure I had contingency plans for anything and everything that had triggered a relapse before. I approached it like a military operation. I was going to do this, this was HOW I was going to do this, and I wasn’t going to take any insubordination from the anorexia, so go get a haircut and get back in line. Today, my low mood didn’t take me by surprise or unsettle me, because I have bad days and I know how to deal with them. I am also highly aware of the hormonal connection and that calms me – knowing the reason for my mood being low gives me a sense of a limit to it. I will feel better once my body stops messing around. Fine. But I wasn’t expecting to be bombarded with random memories from three years ago. Even more inconveniently, the group I was working in today contained a community psychiatric nurse, and she was talking about some ethical dilemmas from her time working on acute mental health wards. She talked about power mad, sedation-happy nurses, and I remembered a nurse who bullied my schizophrenic friend into a frenzy. She talked about one of her son’s friends being brought into the ward suffering from a psychotic episode, and how difficult it had been to do her job caring for him as a patient rather than as a child she knew until another nurse could come and take over from her – and I remembered the head of the OT department, who had been my supervisor when I was on a student placement at the same hospital, turning up in my room when I was first admitted. I was sitting on my bed, knees to my chest, staring into space, shaking. Seeing her come through the door was both wonderful and terrible. Wonderful because she was someone I knew, and I hadn’t even told my parents that I was in hospital yet, I had only been there two or three hours and I was still in shock. She was so nice to me. But terrible because I hated my changed role, I hated her seeing me so fucked up and vulnerable, I hated that I wasn’t coherant and together, that I was rambling nonsense at her and now whenever she saw me in the future she wouldn’t remember the student who had been so calm and competent on her first placement in a difficult ward, it would be over-ridden by an image of this…wreck.
I could never cry when I was taking antidepressants. It was on the more bizarre end of side effects, along with pretty severe urinary retention, nightmares, mania, restlessness, increased impulsivity, worsened tics, suicidal ideation, nausea and diarrhoea, loss of appetite, constant yawning. They refused to fade with time or dosage changes either. I could deal with the physical stuff – although not being able to pee for 12 hours at a time was rather worrying – but the changes to my personality and the inability to cry were so frustrating. I didn’t cry when I was admitted. I didn’t cry during the first night on the ward either, despite the schizophrenic woman in the bed next to me chain smoking, listening to the radio and laughing to herself all night, making sleep impossible. I couldn’t stop shaking and I couldn’t start crying. But I would have if I could have – I felt so lonely and scared and lost and shocked. I couldn’t believe things had gone this far. The ward was terrifying and the nurses only really focused on the immediate crisis – usually either the women who thought the TV was possessed by the devil and so was always trying to break it, or a girl a bit younger than me who kept smashing windows, peeing in the smoking lounge and running away.
Most of the time I don’t think about what happened during the quarter of 2007 that I spent in hospital. I get a bit worked up if the subject comes up in therapy because some of it was quite traumatic and I am deeply ashamed of the whole…well, I’m deeply ashamed of my entire life up until last year to be honest, however irrational that may be. But hospital was worse than the general humiliations, because I was so manic and out of control. I hated more than anything feeling so helpless and powerless. Dependent on people who really couldn’t give a crap.
That admission made me scared of everything. Scared of any and all emotions, positive or negative - they might get out of control. Scared to talk to people, whether taxi drivers or potential new friends - I was a psychiatric patient for three months, they are bound to judge me. Scared to hope – too much potential for disappointment. Scared to try and change my life - if something out of my control made the depression worsen again I might not be able to avoid crashing and then I would lose everything I’d built up again. Scared to plan, to move forward, to take risks. Sometimes I feel as if I’ve been desperately tredding water for the last three years. I was barely functioning before I ended up in hospital but I DID have a life. For two years afterwards I was fighting to regain my lost power and independence in all the wrong ways. I clung on to the anorexia as if it were the only thing between me and insanity, the numbness of restriction a solution to all my other problems, whether chemical or post-traumatic in origin. It took me a long time to find the courage to risk giving life another chance without the anorexia as a safety net.
I am sad for that girl who spent her first night alone in hospital three years ago, too ashamed to tell her family and friends what had happened, confused, shaking and not aware yet that this would rip her whole life apart. This would be the start of two years of living like a hermit, too afraid to re-commit to life in case it was torn away by forces beyond her control. In the last year I have finally started facing these fears and putting my life back together, but still, I feel I was fundamentally changed by those three months in hospital, and I am still angry, and lonely, and sad.
I didn’t imagine that I would be ambushed by this today, but even if the memories do hurt they are still mine, and if I am going to feel sad because of them tonight, that’s OK. Running from things builds them up to seem far bigger and more terrifying than they really are. I can’t make it not have happened, but I can make sure I don’t abandon myself in shame again, or give up on the life I’ve fought so hard to start recreating.
My blog is one year old today! The first post I wrote is here, but I originally wrote it here before moving over to wordpress in July. I typed out my first title “Beginning with an end” whilst sitting in my room in York during the fortnight that elapsed between emailing my mum to tell her that I needed to come home, and her being able to actually drive up to get me.
“I am starting this blog with an ending: in eight days time I will be moving all my belongings back down to Dorset, and hoping that my assessment for the EDU there comes through as quickly as possible. I am sick of this illness messing up my life, and with any luck (and a lot of hard work) this will be the very last time that it does so. And so, this is also a beginning.”
It certainly was. I still don’t know exactly what made this attempt at recovery any different from previous tries, but I think I would suggest it was similar to the way I always relapsed - the changes happened slowly at first, then all at once. The right combination of internal experiences and external circumstances combined to make me able to start changing my behaviours and my thought processes. Things started finally clicking into place in my head, and I half learned and half created ways to fight the anorexia that had never occurred to me before.
A year later I am welcoming another end and another beginning. I reached my target weight range two weeks ago, marking the end of the physical aspect of recovery. And although I’m still taking things slowly, in the last month I have started putting the rest of my life together. I now have my the counselling skills evening class, the ED support group and the voluntary work with rape crisis on top of my open university studies to help me rebuild a social life and find some much needed sense of direction. Potential goals floating around my head at the moment include becoming a counsellor, switching back from physics to a psychology degree, writing a book, and getting a job in the mean time so I can move out of my parent’s house (third time lucky? Hope so 
). People in recovery from any illness seem to fall into two camps: those who want to cut all ties and move on completely, and those who want to use their experience to help others in the same situation. Neither is more right or more healthy than the other when done for the right reasons, it’s entirely down to the individual. I belong to the latter category. It’s terribly earnest and clichéd of me, but I really want to help other people with eating disorders when my recovery is older and more solid. I want a life outside of that too - I want to travel, to meet new people, to have a partner and a flat and a dog, to dust off my pre-crisis hobbies, to be able to add letters after my name. But I want to help as well.
February 2009 might have been the beginning of the end for my anorexia, but February 2010 marks the end of the initial stages of recovery and the beginning of the more nebulous pursuit of creating a life worth living. I have no obvious goals to focus on now, no weights to reach or meal plans to create, no fear foods to confront. I know how to maintain my weight. I know how to keep myself physically healthy. I know how to fight any anorexic thoughts that attempt a late-stage coup. I know how to deal with anxiety. I know what to do to cope when I am sad or angry or feeling self destructive and terrified that the feelings will last forever. I know how to laugh at myself. I can cry at sad movies, I can have fun, I can ask for help. I can change my default thought patterns. I can do things that I once thought impossible. Now I have to learn to apply these skills outside of the safety of my house, where I built up this foundation.
I’m certain I’ve said this before, but I will do it, and I hope you’ll watch me 
I have had a stressful week this week. Not because of anything emotional for a change, but because of my open university course. I finished an assignment last week and now I have another one to do. I know I’ve covered similar material in the past, understood it and been able to use it perfectly, but at the moment it’s like the information is going in my eyes and out of my ears. I read a couple of pages, understand it, try to do the questions at the end of the section and I’ve forgotten it all already. Once I look at the answers at the back of the book it makes perfect sense, I want to smack myself for being so daft, but if I try the questions again later I will have forgotten again! I just got to the end of the textbook on electromagnetism and tomorrow I start special relativity. Holy crap. NONE of what I read is going in, so trying to understand Einstein’s theories is going to be torturous! My coursework isn’t so bad because I have my textbooks to work from, but the exam in June is going to be difficult if this doesn’t improve. I can only think that’s it’s a residual effect of the anorexia, because I wasn’t having these problems up until the end of 2008. Epic fail, eating disorder. At the moment my favourite theory is that it’s hormonal – do you guys ever feel like PMS knocks 20 IQ points off of you? When I have PMS I forget what I’m doing, forget the end of sentences, get words mixed up, can’t park my car (or should that be cark my par?) to save my life (yeah, yeah, I’m a cliche!). I’ve had my periods back since last July and currently feel as if I have permanent PMS, like I’m going through puberty for the second time at age 25. I’ve been at a decent weight since September, and apparently it can take about two years for hormones to get back to normal after getting to a healthy weight. Based on this, I should prepare to be stupid until sometime during winter 2011. ARGH.
Given my frustration and the fact that I have spent literally all week in my room, alternating between studying and internetting, I decided to give myself the day off. I went into town this morning, four hours before therapy, to do some shopping. I don’t let myself go shopping very often, because I don’t have much money and I worry about being in debt (do you ever get the feeling from my blog that if it’s possible to worry about something, I will do so? Lol), but I really needed a break before my head exploded! Luckily shopping really cheered me up – the weather was lovely and I found lots of nice shiny things to take my mind off of physics! Now I just can’t resist sharing
1. Food loot! I did of course buy savoury things as well, but they are boring and I always think that blogs are quite dessert-deficient so here we have (all dairy and gluten free): chocolate muffins, millionnaire’s shortbread, Lindt chocolate (my current favourite), another type of chocolate in case I get bored of Lindt, Alpro soya vanilla desserts (which I will melt chocolate into, because the chocolate flavoured ones are not chocolatey enough!), chocolate covered coconut bar, ginger biscuits dipped in chocolate and shortbread biscuits with, you guessed it, chocolate chips. I wrote chocolate nine times in that sentence. Anyone get the impression that I like chocolate?! This lot is now in a drawer by my bed. I keep them there because I am astounded that desserts can live in my bedroom without me a) freaking out and throwing them all away or b) eating them all at once. I have something from my drawer after lunch and dinner, and occasionally a biscuit in the evening if I’m hungry. Other than that, they sit in my drawer in my room and I periodically marvel at the wonders of recovery.
2. Miscellaneous loot: a green top, next month’s Vegetarian magazine, Life, The Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams (I have the other four but have been missing that one for years, then I found it in a discount bookshop earlier!), and LOTS of lovely beads from my favourite bead shop. I bought new strings of tiger’s eye and heart shaped goldstone because I love working with them 
3. The new shirt I bought with a Marks and Spencer giftcard from Christmas. I think it’s really pretty!
4. I would never have even thought of buying this bracelet if I hadn’t had the giftcard – yay for Christmas presents! I love it, it’s great for a fidgeter like me
5. When I got home I found a parcel! Inside the envelope was this pretty box – how exciting 
6. FUDGE!!! And not just ANY fudge, vegan chocolate banana fudge from Katie of Green Bean Studio! This is in honour of me getting to my target weight thank you Katie! It’s SO good, I don’t think it’s even going to last 24 hours…
I am so glad that I gave myself this day off, I think I am going to have to do the same thing every Friday to stop myself getting too frustrated. I won’t be able to shop every Friday because I’ll run out of money but I can window shop!
At the rape crisis training yesterday evening we did another ice breaking exercise. As I said before, those things make me really anxious. This one was a killer – we were given a sticky label and asked to write our name in the centre, someone we admired in the bottom left, and something we were proud of in the top right, then go around the room and talk to everyone about what we’d written. I thought about it and wrote ‘Brian May’ for the person I admire – he’s not only an amazing guitarist but has a PhD in astrophysics too! I mean, how is it fair that one person can be THAT talented and THAT intelligent at the same time?! – but I got stuck on the thing I am proud of. I haven’t done much to be proud of academically speaking in the last five years. I’ve been a serial drop out. After five minutes of sitting there like a deer in the headlights, I decided to push myself a bit. And by a bit, I mean my heart was thumping for the entire half an hour we did this exercise. Here’s my label:
HELL yeah. Now this is a new approach! I have talked about my history in various settings before, but I usually gave the impression that my problems were years ago. This time I said that I was ill this time last year, spent all of 2009 recovering and have been at a healthy weight since September. And everyone was nice, not judgemental at all! They congratulated me, asked questions and one of them even turned out to have recovered from bulimia. Note to self: people are generally not all that scary.
This photo is for Sarah it’s just of my bedroom wall. We were comparing geekiness earlier via email and I was telling her about my coveted copy of Mulder’s “I want to believe” poster. Note that it is next to my astronomy calendar, poster of galaxies colliding, cartoon about the Large Hadron Collider and long list of reasons that I want to stay in recovery. I think this wall says a lot about me!
Anyway, this isn’t intended to be a super long post, I just wanted to share my random moment of bravery! Go me
I wouldn’t have gone to support group last night if I had known beforehand what we were doing.
*dramatic pause*
We were making masks. Oh, the horror. The horror!
You might find this surprising or you might not, but I HATE art therapy with a passion. It’s a bit weird because I love art. I took GCSE art at school and started the A level at college. The A level art class was where I met one of the people who raped me, so PTSD dictated that I dropped it after a term and stuck with psychology, sociology and English lit. In fact, I don’t think I’ve done any drawing/painting on my own time since then. Ooh, that’s a bit telling isn’t it?!
That’s not why I have a problem with art THERAPY though. That’s a whole other kettle of fish. Art therapy reminds me of three things. Firstly, a therapy group at the adolescent mental health services seven years ago. It was aimed at helping the four of us to stop self harming. We kind of hijacked the group from the therapists half way through though. They started out trying to teach us DBT skills, but after I complained to my therapist that the point of this rested on us actually wanting to stop self harming (I know, I was an obnoxious kid! I didn’t do it for fun though, I was just convinced I would never cope without it. Nearly two and a half years self harm free now and still not insane and/or dead, so I guess I was wrong ), she asked the other girls how they felt about it and it turned out that they were all thinking the same way as I was. So they changed the format. We did stuff on the cycle of change (precontemplation, contemplation, change, relapse), made a pros and cons list for self destructive behaviours, and we did some art therapy. I remember being pretty enthusiastic about the idea then. We did chalk pictures at one point and while the therapists were out of the room I chalked my face purple and left purple handprints on a couple of posters (um, told you I was obnoxious luckily my therapist had a sense of humour!). We did also make masks, and I took the task as seriously as anyone else. So really, that shouldn’t have put me off of art therapy. It did though, because I felt completely safe and free from the fear of judgement in that group, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt that way since.
The next association is with my occupational therapy degree. We had lectures, problem based learning sessions and skills groups. The first skills group I did was with a lecturer who worked in adolescent mental health, and everything we did was artistic. Again, I’m pretty sure I enjoyed it, and I was not the most awkward member of that group by any means because some of the women in my class were really not into art at all (although they all made the effort, which was brave of them!). But similarly to the group therapy issue, the fact that I enjoyed it then makes it more difficult for me to feel OK about it now. Anything that reminds me of OT makes me sad, because I loved that degree, I loved being a part of that year group, and part of me is still upset that my breakdown in the middle of it stole that opportunity from me. I can see good things that have come out of having to leave OT now as well, but it took me long enough to feel anything other than regret over it all.
Thirdly, art therapy reminds me of being in hospital. When I was hospitalised in 2007 (incidentally it’s three years ago this week) I avoided the OT department of the hospital like a plague for the first month, because I had worked with them on placement as a student. After a few weeks I got bored, and since by that point I was getting a bit manic from the pills anyway I overcame my embarrassment and went to OT anyway. Still, the whole time I was there I couldn’t stop hating myself for being a patient. I wondered what the OT staff were thinking of me, whether they were looking down on me, whether they were judging me for being so pathetic and not being able to cope. What they read in my medical notes, whether they thought I was hopeless and weak and would never recover. Whether I had been overstretching in trying to study OT, how I had ever dared to think I could become one of them. In hospital, whether an EDU or general psych, there are a lot of ‘us and them’ feelings. The staff are the people who insist on meds, disagree with delusions, force you to stay on the ward when all you want to do, depending on your diagnosis, is kill yourself/starve yourself/go out and tell the world that you are the reincarnation of Napoleon (actually one of my bipolar friends genuinely DID believe that she was the reincarnation of Freddie Mercury. She was more fun that the guys who thought they were possessed by the devil). But the OT staff occupied this little niche in the middle – they had their own department so people got to leave the claustrophobic wards, they had nothing to do with medical treatment or sectioning, and often people who were very volatile otherwise would behave themselves perfectly in OT because they didn’t want to be kicked out and have to go back to the wards. On the whole, people tended to enjoy OT. I didn’t. I was torn, because I desperately wanted something other to do than sit in the day room and stare into space while the doctors were waiting for my meds to work (good luck with that, they never did), but equally I had been hospitalised right in the middle of my OT degree, and going to OT as a patient just rubbed that in my face day after day. I felt incredibly vulnerable and exposed being there with people I had worked with.
A year later, when I was a day patient at the EDU situated in the grounds of the same hospital, we had a specific art therapy group on Wednesdays. I refused to take part for the first month because it just freaked me out too much. Even when I did cave and start going, I rarely did anything other than doodle. I wasn’t trying to be stubborn, I was spending those two hours feeling incredibly anxious and upset and there was no way in hell I was able to think straight under those circumstances. I couldn’t have joined in if I’d wanted to.
All of the above was basically a very long winded way of saying that I have an understandable but irritating aversion to art therapy
So back to last night. I told myself to stop freaking out and get on with it, on the premise that anything THAT distressing had to be good for me. Usually things that I least want to do are those that I should do. I didn’t want to just go home again because I live 17 miles from the group and it would’ve been a waste of petrol! And so…
As per promise to the rest of the support group, my facebook profile picture is also now of me and the mask – only on FB it’s hanging off my nose because I couldn’t resist being silly about it!
Because making masks kind of asks for this sort of discussion, at the end we had the option of discussing whether what we had put on our masks meant anything to us. I said that actually, I passed the stage of it being meaningful when I started doodling on it. I would have left it white, because the ‘mask’ I present to the world is very carefully blank. But I didn’t want to sit there for 90 minutes staring at a white piece of card shaped like a figure of eight, so I made nice patterns on it instead in fact I suppose if I were to go terribly analytical on you, I would say that I would wear this mask inside out - blank side to the front, patterned side out of view.
It’s a tribute to just how strong my embarrassment over this sort of thing is that I am blushing like hell just TYPING that. I make myself laugh sometimes, honestly.
Today is also one whole year since I emailed my mum from York to tell her I needed to come home. Well done year-ago-me! Good decision
So, it’s Monday again! And Monday is weigh day…I was a bit worried given how anxious I was throughout last week, but I managed to maintain my weight I’m so glad, I would have been really disheartened if I’d dropped back out of my target range. Not that I wouldn’t have gotten straight back up and tried again if I had lost, but I feel like I’ve won another battle – a small part of the overall war, but these little victories add up.
A strange thing happened after I posted about my difficult week on Saturday. It was this phrase that did it: “I can’t lose any more of my life to this illness. I’ve lost enough. I have to find a way to deal with this”. Just restating my commitment to staying in recovery cleared my head. The intensity of the eating disordered thoughts has dissipated, my eating patterns are back to normal instead of undereating during the day and having to force myself to make up for it in the evening, and I’ve happily made all my meals since then without any anxiety at all. Yesterday I was feeling incredibly lazy at lunch so I had a can of baked beans – still cold and in the can, mind you! – microwaveable chips and a chocolate bar. This does not sound like the lunch of someone who is anxious about food I’ve ’shrunk’ as well, despite maintaining my weight. I look and feel the same size as I was a fortnight or a month ago.
I officially have more staying power than my anorexia does these days. This didn’t used to be the case. In the past, whenever an eating disordered thought or urge appeared in my head I would mentally discard whatever I was doing to look at it from all angles, obsess over it, plan how to apply it to my life. I would space out in class or during conversations to calculate calories for the day and work out how to cut back tomorrow. If I felt too big - and in the context of anorexia any weight at which one can survive seems ‘too big’ – I would immediately start reacting to the feeling by increasing the severity of my behaviours. I’m kind of astounded at how much things can change.
Being over confident would be stupid, it would be inviting relapse. I’m not letting my guard down. I certainly don’t think I’ve done anything particularly amazing in the grand scheme of things. But each time I come out of another bad day/week/month without self harming and at the same weight, I feel a little bit more secure. My existence might not make a big difference to the world in general, but I am so relieved to finally have the power to make such enormous differences to my own world.
Other little victories from the last few days: on Wednesday, at the end of the first Rape Crisis training session, we had to talk about positive and negatives we’d gotten from the group. This might be surprising because I’m pretty gobby online but I am very shy in person until I get to know someone. So I didn’t say anything at first, but then they all started looking at me! In the circumstances I decided that the best thing to say was exactly what I was thinking, so I told them all that a positive I had gotten from the session was that I found ice breaking activities very difficult usually because I’m not terribly confident, so I was proud of myself for joining in with them all and doing OK. I also went bright red, as I tend to do in these situations! It sounds like such a little thing, but it’s a big deal to me. Similarly, when I was at my counselling skills class earlier this evening, we were talking about the distinction between a counsellor and someone who has learned basic counselling skills. The tutor was asking for jobs in which we might use counselling skills, but in which it would be inappropriate to act as a counsellor. One of the girls worked for the citizen’s advice bureau and another is a teacher, and after talking through their examples she asked for more, so I said that I had just started volunteering for rape crisis. Again, little deal to rest of world, big deal to me. I volunteered personal information, and…well, people usually work for rape crisis for a reason, so just saying that I was involved with them was uncharacteristically open of me. It was a good example too, I need listening skills to volunteer there but there can’t be any attempts at counselling. I have also made unspecified references to being out of work due to a long term illness from which I am now mostly recovered. This is all appropriate, we are allowed/encouraged to relate the classes to our personal experiences. It’s a great arena for me to practise socialising and opening up a bit, given that I’ve been so isolated and awkward when talking about personal stuff for the last few years.
I saw my doctor this afternoon to be signed off from work for another two months and managed to say more than “yeah I’m fine” to him as well. He was encouraging about my progress so far and the fact that I’m toying with the idea of getting myself discharged from the NHS mental health services. There’s no reason for me to see a psychiatrist - I couldn’t take meds even if I wanted to – and my CPN is nice, but I see her once a month for half an hour and it’s just a quick update of my life at the moment. I wouldn’t stop seeing Julie yet but I think I could cope with not being involved with the CMHT anymore. This would be HUGE, I’ve been under their care since I was 18, so that’s seven years, and I was under CAMHS (child and adolescent) for two years before that. I’m pretty stable at the moment – mood swings and anxiety yes, but I cope with them. My hormones make me feel utterly crazy for 2-3 days a month but I’ve coped with that since my periods came back in July as well. I really want to feel more independent, being involved with the mental health services makes me feel like I’m broken in some way and need watching to make sure I don’t do anything crazy, and it would do wonders for my self esteem to try balancing without that safety net. I would obviously ask to be referred back if there were any problems and given my history I could get an urgent referral pretty quickly, but I want to try it.
I feel like I’m walking a tightrope. I’ve felt like that pretty much constantly since I was about 11, but now my tightrope is widening, becoming easier to walk across. It might even turn into a balance beam at some point. Still treacherous, still easy to lose my balance, but safer than before. All these things – my counselling skills class, my new voluntary work, the people I’m meeting and getting to know, my blog and all the support here, my friends, the positive risks I’m taking and every single thing I do to help myself – make me feel a little more stable. I get scared often, thinking that the more I build up my life the further I have to fall. But equally, the more I build up healthy aspects of my life, the less likely I am to fall.
It’s 11pm, I should stop writing and go to bed. I like positive posts, so I’m going to end on a question. Have you had any little victories lately?
I’ve seen a lot of people on facebook put up photos of when they were much younger recently, so I thought I would go through some of my favourite photos too. Other than on my blog I don’t really think about the past all that much – in fact I have an annoying tendency to disassociate myself from it entirely and forget that my life was ever anything other than it is now. Besides, I like learning more about who people are aside from their problems, so hopefully you’ll feel the same way
This was me at about nine months old I think. If you look closely you can see my dad’s foot in the background
Apparently when I was about three I went through a stage of thinking that smiling meant opening your mouth as wide as you could – but it just looks like I’m being attacked by cows! My mum put this photo in the newspaper when I turned 21. Oh dear.
This photo is kind of adorable, I do apologise if it makes you a little bit sick I’m the one with the pigtails (along with the toys - the yellow one is Spot and the white one is Gobby, so named because I couldn’t say ‘doggy’ when I was little!), the other cutie is my sister Claire
This photo is from the dressing room of the first ballet I performed in, The Nutcracker. I was six, and on the night my parents came I got so excited by seeing them that I waved at them from stage, got behind in the dance, turned around the wrong way and nearly fell over. My dance teacher didn’t have small children in her ballets again for the longest time, but ten years later she had a group of 4-5 year olds on stage in a recital and one of them wet herself! So I guess I take second prize in the ‘don’t work with children or animals’ awards.
My town has a carnival every year, and when I was about seven I was a caterpillar. My mum made this herself!
The next year I was a traffic cone – my town had a lot of road works which kept getting extended, and I think my mum was trying to make a point from l-r, that is my then best friend Kate, who is now a doctor, her little brother, me and my sister again.
I think I’m nearly 12 here. This is a slightly disturbing photo for me because I look young and kind of innocent, but I know I had been bullied really badly for the previous year and was very depressed when this was taken. Hmm.
Thirteen, and playing Genghis in Dracula Spectacular! This was a brilliant experience because by this point I already had an eating disorder and was self harming after the previous three years of crappiness at school, but this play did a lot to restore my battered self esteem. It meant that the kids in my year actually started laughing with me (Genghis is a really funny character, I loved playing him) instead of at me. I could have exploded with happiness on the first night, everyone was so nice. I even had a kitten named after me because one of the younger kids got a bit of a hero worship thing on
When I was fourteen one of the choirs I sang with performed in Eurodisney. This is the group photo outside Cinderella’s castle. I am sitting on the floor, second to the left.
I did actually get to go to ONE of the proms my school held – just not the one for my own year, the one for the year above. I was drafted in at the last minute when my friend’s older brother was stood up by his date. The girls either side of me (in the green dress) were my closest friends in year 11, they were so good about all my panic attacks and everything. I wish I could show them how much I’ve calmed down since then but I’ve lost touch with one completely and the other moved away.
This would be the last day of school in the UK we can leave at age 16 after our GCSEs. I do look rather impressed with the idea of three months of summer holiday, don’t I?! This was a couple of months before my first major breakdown, so again it’s a bit strange thinking about the context in which this was taken.
Me with another blogger when we were both about 19. I’m not going to tell you who she is though, not unless she comes on here and outs herself! Hehe. We were really, really close for about 18 months until life conspired to complicate our lives. We are back in touch now though and I’m really happy about it.
My then boyfriend and I in Barcelona after I finished my A levels, again aged 19. I still have that outfit, I loved my hippy skirts! I don’t still have the boyfriend but we are still in touch
I think this was also taken in Barcelona but I wanted to include it because this was the first photograph ever that I looked at and thought whoa, I’m actually kind of pretty. WEIRD. Only took me two decades Incidentally, that necklace I’m wearing was made out of little bells, and I loved it to pieces. I lost it at the zoo in Barcelona and haven’t seen it since. Very sad. My boyfriend bought me the necklace I’m wearing in the previous picture – it looks like strings of smarties! – to make up for it
Yes, I dyed my hair green (twice in fact, when I was 19 and 20). This is the fault of Katie from greenbeanstudio. She was a GREAT influence on me! Am I too old to do that again? It was fun!
The obligatory, “I’m eating chocolate and don’t care who sees me” photo! This was actually taken at about 6am on June 21st 200…5 or 6. Why so early, and why can I remember the date but not the year? We were at Stonehenge! I went to the summer solstice three or four times. Here I am with my boyfriend’s best friend Jennie. She was in hospital with him and they ended up forming a band. It was so much fun following them around festivals and gigs.
Aand finally, this must’ve been 2006, the last time I went to see Ben Folds. I’ve been to four of his concerts because I looove him. He is an amazing pianist and his lyrics never fail to make me laugh and/or cry. I really must go and see him again, it’s been too long.
I have a photo gap after that – nothing taken during the latter half of 2006, all of 2007 and early 2008. This was because I spent it all being very depressed/in hospital/having a hard time with the anorexia. I started taking photos again in late 2008 when I was at a healthier weight, then quit when I relapsed, then began again in March 2009 when I started trying to recover for the last time. I see a pattern there
I’ve actually done some pretty cool things in my life. Obviously there were a lot of gaps in between those photos where nothing much happened other than school, but when I was younger I was always on the stage, I had few but very close friends and the three years I spent with my boyfriend when we were both healthy were amazing – the fourth year when we were both ill was more stressful, but overall I have no regrets. I danced, acted, sang, played in concert bands, went abroad, went to festivals and rock concerts, hung out with my friends. Very different to my life since the beginning of 2007. I know that I wasn’t happy during the times these photos were taken – the final ten photos were all taken while I was depressed, self harming and using eating disordered behaviours, but even so, I had things to look forward to and experiences that were like little rocks to cling to in the middle of the ocean of crap (nice metaphor there ). Now I’m kind of in the opposite position – much more stable but seriously lacking a life! Still, I’m getting out far more now and hopefully in future photos, my smile will be more congruent with what’s going on in my head. For a start I really want to go on holiday again. Anyone want to come to mainland Europe with me?! I haven’t left the UK in far too long
This week has probably been the hardest of my entire recovery so far. The intensity of my eating disordered thoughts and urges fluctuates a lot – some weeks I have no problems at all, others I have to remind myself of my motivations for staying in recovery quite frequently. But this week trying to do that has been like trying to hang on to fog. Some of the highlights were telling my therapist that I felt like I was wearing a fat suit (!), actually wanting to cry when eating (this hasn’t been a problem at all during this attempt at recovery – it was in 2008, but this time I was surprisingly calm about food itself), ‘accidentally’ undereating by a few hundred calories during the day and having to force myself to make it up in the evening, having my anxiety completely overrule my appetite so I’ve felt sick instead of hungry, and fighting with myself over a pair of shorts that I really like which have gotten too small – the anorexia wants to put them in the wardrobe ‘just in case’; I keep insisting that I’m not going to EVER be that small again, and they are going to charity. No arguing or negotiating, just stating my position. The worst moment was when I was having a bath – something which normally calms me down and kills time like nobody’s business, once I have a book and a couple of hundred litres of water I can usually stay there for hours. Instead I just had this incessant chatter in my head about not eating my evening snack, not eating tomorrow, not eating ever again, or maybe not because that wouldn’t be sustainable, maybe cutting down to Xkcals tomorrow then X less next week and so on, then I should lose so many pounds in such and such amount of time, aaand etc. I did my best to ignore it and read my book but it was so hard trying to stop myself from being drawn into it.
I freaked out to lesser extents at other weights, usually other ‘milestone’ BMIs. I find it strange when this happens given that while I was actively anorexic I wasn’t driven by bad body image at all, the thought processes were more OCD related, associating weight loss with ’safety’. Most of the time in recovery I’ve not had a problem with how my body has changed either, with the notable exception of one week when I got upset over looking more curvy and getting more attention from men, because it upset my PTSD. But then I was anxious because I was becoming more attractive to the opposite sex rather than feeling fat. This week it’s like my brain has been possessed by the sort of anorexic that exists in media stereotypes. At least I haven’t developed an all consuming admiration for Victoria Beckham I suppose.
I do know what the problem is. Well, there are two that I can pick out. First of all, when I was under my target, even by a pound, I felt like I had permission to eat. I had clear, logical - scientific even - reasons for picking this target range. I was giving myself the best possible chance at recovery, and until I got to this weight I knew I was hanging on to a little bit of the eating disorder, because it was only the eating disorder which made me scared of being at a healthy BMI. Eating enough and gaining those last few pounds was essential to show the eating disorder who was boss. And now I’m actually here, the eating disorder is indeed kicking the crap out of me. It is insisting that eating isn’t essential anymore, it’s not justified because I am at my target and I showed everyone I could do it and now, continuing to eat just makes me greedy. This doesn’t sound like a very logical thought process to me, because it’s not like you could eat all your calories for life in one go and then not eat for the rest of time :P but while I may find this amusing in a detached sort of way, it’s not so amusing that it’s been screamed at me over and over every hour I’ve been awake this week.
I think what’s going on is a pretty common experience. I’ve heard some people describe this part of recovery as a sort of extinction burst. You get so close to kicking the last little bits of the disorder out of your head and your life, and a part of you is terrified by that, so all of a sudden the thoughts and urges come back full force when they might have only been barely present for months. This is the second cause of my problems this week that I can think of. It’s understandable, because eating disorders give the illusion of being highly effective coping mechanisms. The physiological effects of the behaviours and weight loss make people feel calm and safe. When you come close to letting go of it entirely, you have a voice in your head whispering, what if I can’t do it? What if I can’t cope with life? What if I go crazy? I’ll have no excuse for having bad days, no eating disorder to blame sickness and anxiety on. All that’s left is me. And what if I don’t like what’s left? What if she’s weak and pathetic and needy? What if she’s too much, for me and everyone else? What if? The temptation is obviously to retreat back to the eating disorder, lose a few pounds, create a new struggle for yourself to avoid having to face the issue for a few more months. The issue being…reality, I suppose, or getting on with your life, and fear that you are not up to the task.
The reality is that I could still see that I was small in November, then I gained 1.5lbs during the first three weeks of December and another 2.5 since Christmas. This is not enough to make a huge, visible difference to my body shape. My current weight is not the problem because of how it looks on my body, whatever the eating disorder says to the contrary. The problems are that I feel lost without the knowledge that eating more than the absolute minimum I can function on is essential because I need to gain weight still, and that I am scared of not being able to survive without my crutch.
The permission issue isn’t too hard to find a logical answer for really, and in the past, once I have gotten these sort of solutions firmly in my head, whatever the problematic thought process of the week is has quite frequently stopped being a problem anymore. The answer is that I need to carry on eating as much as necessary to maintain my weight because recovery does not end with GETTING to your target – you have to stay there too. Brain chemistry and hormone levels don’t settle back to what their baselines should have been for a good couple of years after weight restoration. I need to keep myself at a healthy weight for a long time yet before I can think of myself as transitioning from recovery into recovered. This answer lessens the intensity of the second problem a little as well, because while I am still in recovery I am not recovered, ergo I do not have to put pressure on myself to be immediately OK. But now I just feel like there’s a clock ticking somewhere, counting down until I am expected to function like a normal adult.
Oh dear. I think I’m overthinking. I think I am taking things that are actually completely illogical and driven by the ED or OCD, and labelling them as fact. Rule number one of my recovery has been to separate eating disordered thoughts from reality, and to label the former as symptoms to be discarded. This works beautifully most of the time, but this week it’s been like trying to organise a mess of papers into a complicated filing system while a rock band that you hate is playing in a stadium next door at a decibel level likely to make your brain melt. I need some metaphorical heavy duty ear plugs. Anyone know where I can get some of those?
I am good at problem solving. I am especially well practised at solving the type of irrational problems that my brain throws at me. So my posts usually go along the lines of: 1) this is what is happening, 2) this is why it’s happening, 3) this is how I’m going to stop it happening. But I must confess, I am at a bit of a loss here. This just isn’t a problem that I’ve ever had to deal with before. Every time I got to this weight or intensity of eating disordered thoughts in the past I conceded defeat to the anorexia and started losing again. I can’t let that happen again, I can’t lose any more of my life to this illness. I’ve lost enough. I have to find a way to deal with this.
I got a rather disturbing comment yesterday from someone who reads my blog. She basically said that I seem to repeat details about my history a lot (actual words: “I’ve read the same ‘version of events’ sooooo many times” – were the inverted commas REALLY necessary?), and do I do this to justify myself (how am I supposed to intepret that?! As in, am I trying to convince other people or myself that I’m ill rather than a pathetic waste of space who needs to get a grip and a job?), because I’ve been in therapy a lot, or because it’s a story/fantasy I tell myself to make myself feel better (again…seriously? What?).
I wouldn’t usually pay any attention to something like this because we all get weird comments sometimes, but I just want to make one thing clear. I am aware that I do repeat things sometimes and it does make me anxious, because I would hate to be seen as someone who goes out of their way to make sure that everyone knows their lowest weight, how terribly ill they’ve been, how they almost died!!!! etc, because it is pretty much my worst fear that someone would think I was melodramatic or attention seeking. I repeat things purely because I am not arrogant enough to assume that everyone would remember all the details of my life – I imagine that you all read a hundred other blogs and have better things to fill your heads up with than the life histories of everyone you know.
I don’t write this blog for anyone but myself. I mean, of course I want to make friends and it’s lovely when I get nice comments, especially when someone says that I’ve helped them in some way, but essentially this blog is a way for me to get shit out of my head. Nothing more. My posts don’t feel complete unless I’ve explained something properly, and sometimes that means going over things I’ve said before. That’s partly an OCD thing and partly just the fact that I find it really helpful to get things down in black and white, where I can see them in their entirety, because my experiences make more sense to me that way. I have never lied or exaggerated anything on here. I don’t have a pathological need for attention and I don’t want everyone to feel sorry for me because that wouldn’t get me anywhere – I want to solve my problems, not moan about them, and writing helps me with that. I was a pretty average anorexic if there is such a thing (as Marya Hornbacher said, sicker than some but not as sick as others, and certainly not as sick as Marya!), and I don’t think I am special or worthy of attention due to my illnesses. I am just me. I don’t see the point in pretending to be anything else – how would that help me change anything?
You can either believe all of this or not, but if you don’t believe it, please don’t bother reading. And for goodness sake, commenter who shall remain nameless, don’t tell me I’m ‘protesting too much’ so there must be some truth in it, because I’ve had quite enough pop psychology for one 24 hour period - I was really hurt by this and I’m still pretty upset. Wouldn’t you want to check to make sure none of your friends were harbouring similar thoughts?
I bought this for my sixth form prom when I was 17. Unfortunately I was in the middle of a breakdown at the time, and after being asked to leave the school due to a few particularly interesting incidents (involving destruction of self rather than others or property – I was sad and/or mad, not bad!) I was too ashamed to ask if I could still go to the prom. This dress has been hung in my wardrobe for the last eight years, and I’ve never worn it. Luckily it still fits!
The reason I ended up trying on the dress is that I decided, after my freak out yesterday, to get rid of the clothes that didn’t fit me anymore. I WAS giving away/throwing out clothes as I went along (some of you will remember my pyromanic 100th post ), but I stopped gaining weight in September and only started going for the last 5lbs just before Christmas, so I wasn’t torturing myself by hanging on to my too-small clothes, I’ve literally only just grown out of them. Or so I thought. I did find things that I genuinely had grown out of while I was doing this, but most of them were summer clothes – things I haven’t worn since I was a good 10lbs less than I am now. Once I got to my winter clothes – the ones I had convinced myself were all too small now – I quickly came to a conclusion that made me feel like a complete idiot.
The problem with my ‘healthy’ clothes from previous years is not that they DON’T fit me…it’s that they do. Those red cords I mentioned yesterday (uh, actually this morning – I posted that just after midnight!) are the only pair of trousers that still hang off me, not the only pair that fit. I haven’t worn clothes that fit for three years and it didn’t even cross my mind that some of the things I own are supposed to sit around my waist and others a couple of inches below, but that NONE of them are supposed to fall off my butt every five minutes.
I’m feeling a little bit stupid however, my debit card is probably breathing a sigh of relief.
I am wondering how to get over the anxiety that wearing properly fitting clothes causes me. I don’t like things touching my waist, but it would be ridiculous for me to go out and buy clothes a size too big again just to appease my eating disorder. Once again I am really wishing I knew someone who was about a year ahead of me in recovery so they could give me some advice. Hmm.
This dress I have worn and now I have an actual figure I will have to get it out of my wardrobe more often!
(Just as an aside, my right arm is very heavily scarred – I think the pixelation of the prom dress photo hides it quite well but you might want to avoid enlarging it if you’re sensitive about such things! Thought it only polite to warn people)
