Although it was fun writing about the positive side of my trip to Durham and sharing my photos, that wasn’t the whole story. There were several times when I thought ugh, this just goes to show how I ended up like I did. Mostly it was a drip-drip effect – feeling anxious about how I was coming across when I was with other people, wondering if my friends were secretly laughing at me or annoyed with me over various things. I experienced far more hassle from my eating disorder than usual because of the break from my routine and the fact that some of my friends are not very well at the moment – not because of anything they said or did, just from my thoughts. I imagined that my friends would look at me and think that they would never want to be weight restored if I was what it looked like. I also kept thinking that they must be really irritated with me, acting like I know what they are going through when I was never THAT sick. My eating disorder jumped on that one, telling me that I was never sick enough and should relapse again, beat my last lowest weight. I know, such a cliche. This is why I don’t listen to my head, I’ve met people who have come very close to dying from their eating disorders who have still been plagued by those thoughts, so I’m not going to start thinking it’s true for me. I was in a terrible state last February, I have evidence in the form of my diary from last winter and the early posts on my blog, and I still have a copy of my first lot of blood test results from when I got home from York. But that doesn’t stop having that shit running around my head from being irritating and uncomfortable.
I have said before that I am not usually bothered by bad body image, but that’s really the simplified story. It’s difficult to explain, but while I never equated being underweight with being attractive, and I never imagined that people around me thought I was fat (other people with eating disorders being the occasional exception), I do sometimes see myself as too big. Not in an overweight sense, in an, anything-more-than-emaciated-is-terrifying sense, if that makes…uh, sense. I don’t tend to look at my body much because I freak myself out, seeing the weight I’ve gained as ‘excess’. I don’t think I’m fat, I don’t think other people think I’m fat, but if I stop and think about it, my body is unacceptable over my lowest weight. Usually, the way I deal with this is to NOT stop and think about it. Some of you might think that not addressing this is avoiding an important issue, but I see it differently. I don’t think that it’s possible for someone with an eating disorder to fight this sort of thing with logic. It’s another symptom of an illogical disease, it is not going to have vanished after just three months of being weight restored, and thinking about it more would be giving too much importance to something that will, in all likelihood, fade with time and distance from the worst of my illness. It’s a predictable effect too. It barely crosses my mind on a day to day basis as long as I am not looking in a full length mirror. So clearly, going into shop changing rooms with their fluorescent lighting having gained 30+lbs this year would not be a good move. I stupidly did this on Tuesday and wanted to cry after I’d left the shop as soon as humanly possible.
As a result of all of the above, on Christmas morning I woke up with an almost overwhelming urge to start losing all the weight I’ve gained as soon as possible. I lay in bed telling myself that this was a symptom of my eating disorder, and that eating disorders are great at striking people when they are vulnerable. I think vulnerability is excusable after a week of sleeping badly and driving up and down motorways, going to places that I associate with being ill, having no routine, not counting calories, being in social situations constantly, and seeing the contrast between how happy I am with friends – the stresses couldn’t detract from that – and how lonely I am at home.
Anorexia is not the solution to being lonely or sleep deprived. When I was ill I was under the illusion that the anorexia made me stronger and more self sufficient, but it actually just made me numb and uncaring about anything other than losing weight. Really, it made me weaker, mentally and physically, less able to cope with anxiety and difficult circumstances in any way which didn’t involve self destruction. And anorexia is not a solution to not liking my body either. Bad body image is a SYMPTOM of an eating disorder, not a cause, so retreating further into the eating disorder is not going to help matters. I could use the analogy of addiction. The only immediate way for an addict to resolve a craving is to take more drugs, but in the long term this leads to more cravings. In the long term, the only way to get rid of cravings is to stop taking the drugs. Even after months or years of being clean, vulnerability and stress will sometimes make cravings appear out of nowhere and reach unbearable intensity, but going back to using will not help. Cravings are a symptom of drug addiction, not a cause. Not that bad body image is an addiction, but I think it’s a similar situation - using eating disordered behaviours rather than tolerating the anxiety just makes the problem worse.
Recovery is not white and relapse black, sometimes you can have thoughts without believing them, or believe them but not act on them, and even once you start acting on them the situation is still salvageable, or else no one would ever recover. For the last week I’ve fallen into the first category – the thoughts were there, but I didn’t believe or act on them. I told myself to stay focused and patient, and that things would get easier. And they have done – once I got up yesterday morning I was OK, everything I said about Christmas was true, although I think some of you may have imagined I was a little more overjoyed about the whole business than I really was 
I was not unhappy yesterday. I wasn’t happy either, but in the grand scheme of things that was fine, that was my hope for this year. Not being unhappy at Christmas is progress. Next year hopefully I’ll be bouncing off the walls like Tigger on amphetamines.
There’s a lot more I could write about last week but I’ve run out of steam! It will keep until tomorrow. I hope you have all recovered from Christmas day 
I hope everyone is having a lovely Christmas! I am relaxing after lunch and thought I’d do another photo post 
First of all, this is the carnage that ensues when eight people open presents all at once. My poor mum, it took her four hours to wrap all these presents, we opened them in half an hour and then it took another half an hour to clean the mess up again! My youngest sister (in the hoodie by the door) was the worst – she pretty much ripped hers open within a couple of minutes but she is 15, so this is excusable!
My presents – yay, I have sat nav! Now I just have to work out if/where I have a cigarette lighter in my car. Hmm.
The puppies were worn out after all of that excitement – they love presents, they get a bit crazy whenever they see wrapping paper
Once the chaos downstairs was under control, I went to the kitchen to start making dessert for myself, my sister who also has a milk allergy, and her boyfriend and my other sister who just don’t like traditional Christmas pud.
I made a flourless chocolate cake, it’s a really simple recipe and has the consistency of chocolate cheesecake when it’s finished. There is nothing remotely healthy about this though, it’s pure decadence basically, in this saucepan is 200g 70% cocoa chocolate (milk free, obviously), 120g vegan margarine, 150g castor sugar, and 1 tsp vanilla essence, then once all that is melted you mix in three beaten eggs, pour it all into a baking tin and cook at 150 C for 30 minutes.
The turkey was taking up the entire oven so once my cake was in the baking tin I put it in the fridge for a bit. After digging out my santa hat I helped mum peel veggies!
It must have been some kind of miracle, we had put everything out by 1.45pm! Sometimes we don’t eat until 3 or even 4 on Christmas day
This was my dinner - I had a veggie burger instead of turkey, roast potatoes, honey roasted parsnips, carrots and sprouts. I put some allergy friendly gravy on after I took the photo and also had some cranberry jelly once I realised it was just cranberries, sugar and water. I ended up spreading it on my veggie burger!
I ate ALL of this! When I was ill last year my Christmas dinner was nowhere near this big and I still panicked over the thought that it was the most food I’d seen in months. I think I tried to disintegrate my potatoes in the gravy too oh dear. Never mind, I enjoyed it this time! This is a slightly blurry photo of the table. I laid it all at 9am this morning – another instance in which my OCD benefits my family, lol.
Here’s my dessert – it was SO nice! Not the best photo, I should have waited until after I’d taken it to put the extra little bits on my plate, it looks like some kind of chocolate landslide occurred! There’s more left in the fridge for later, yum.
Mum had normal Christmas pudding and Rufus licked her bowl clean after she had finished! He only got crumbs and a tiny bit of cream though, raisins are poisonous for dogs.
I had to swap hats after we pulled our crackers, hehe. The joke in my cracker was dreadful, but dreadful jokes are traditional. Where do dressmakers like to live? On the outskirts. Groaaan.
So far, so good – I was a little anxious before I got up this morning, not about food, just about life in general, but I didn’t get much sleep again last night so I just told my head to shush Other than that today has been good, I didn’t bother counting calories, I had a proper breakfast and when I got hungry before lunch I ate a mince pie and the satsuma that turned up in my stocking, so I certainly didn’t restrict in preparation for lunch! I don’t feel uncomfortably full and I’m definitely not hungry. I love the presents I received and my family seemed to really like the ones I bought for them, so I judge Christmas to be a success
Now we are watching Indiana Jones and I am hoping to coerce mum into playing scrabble in a bit! Happy Christmas everyone!
I got back home three hours ago and I have already had lunch, showered, unpacked, done my washing and sorted my Christmas tree out. Sometimes OCD comes in handy
I am glad I waited until after all of that to post, because earlier I was feeling really sad, tired, confused and worried. Post-holiday anticlimax at it’s best! I think I am suffering from lack of sleep - I drove for ten hours yesterday from Durham to Fi’s parent’s house, then gave up and stayed there for the night before setting out again at 9.30am this morning and getting home two and a half hours later. The traffic wasn’t bad at all, which was unexpected and much appreciated, but it’s still been exhausting! My head spent a couple of hours beating the crap out of me while I unpacked, telling me that I was probably weird and rude to Fi and her family last night and this morning because I was so tired and anxious. But Fi phoned me a little while ago to apologise for being grumpy this morning (which she was not) so I apologised for being weird (which apparently I was not either), so we got to laugh at our mutual paranoia I REALLY hope I sleep well tonight!
I have lots of stuff that I want to talk about, but for now I am just going to post the photos and the highlights
Saturday
Fi and I met Jessica! I was so excited, I wish I lived closer to Jessica because I think we would be really good friends in ‘real life’ as well as via email and blogging. This photo has Fi on the left and Jessica on the right
Haha I look a bit tired here too :P I got to Durham on Friday, so on Saturday I was still recovering from 8 hours of driving the previous day! But Jessica has a lovely smile so she makes up for me!
While we were walking back to Fiona’s house it started snowing really heavily. The snow was all clumped together, it looked more like it was snowing snowballs than snowflakes! My home county gets very little snow so I was really excited by this and made poor Fi and Jessica hang around in the freezing cold while I took photos. Sorry guys!
Sunday
This was the view out of the window in the room I was sleeping in the next morning
Here are our cars! Mine is the big blue one and Fiona’s is the mini
And this is one of the photos I took of Durham. It’s a beautiful city
On Sunday we went to York. We took the train because we thought the roads and the traffic might make things difficult!
Fi and I had lunch at my favourite restaurant, El Piano. I went there once while I was living in York when my mum and sister came to visit, but the anorexia got in the way of the potential enjoyment. I went again in July last time I was staying with Fi and it was much more fun This time I had falafel (DEEP FRIED!!!) and sweet potato mousse, and Fi had aubergine bake and Aztec tofu (we are still not sure what made the tofu Aztec!). I had sticky toffee pudding for dessert and forgot to take a photo, but it looked the same as the last time I ate it (only with pieces of banana instead of strawberry) so it’s no huge loss
We also met my friend Jon in York. Jon was in my classes while I was at the university so I haven’t seen him since February when I left. It was really good to catch up I should have got him on camera too but I forgot because I was too excited! So here’s York Minster and The Shambles instead:
On Monday Fi and I went to Newcastle. We got totally lost looking for the cafe we had planned to go to for lunch, so we ended up getting lunch from Marks and Spencers instead. Next time we will take a map Afterwards we went to The Life Centre, which is a bit like the London Science Museum. We spent a good couple of hours trying out all the activities and acting like small children!
Tuesday was my last day in Durham, so we kidnapped Jonathan again and went to Teesside Park. We originally intended to go to the cinema but I wasn’t feeling well so we just wandered around the shops instead. It was the last trading day for Borders so Jonathan raided the store there and came out with about 20 books! In the evening we all went to the carol service at Durham cathedral, where I again made like a tourist and got in peoples way while I was taking photos
I really enjoyed the service – I love carols and I love cathedrals, so what’s not to like?! I am not particularly religious so this might be a little odd of me, but I find the sense of history and the atmosphere in cathedrals really moving. I am a big fan of choral music too and the carols sung just by the choir were beautiful. The carols for the congregation included O Come All Ye Faithful and Away in a Manger which are two of my favourites, so I was happy
Wednesday morning we got up at 8am with the aim of leaving by 9.30. I thought the ice crystal patterns on my windscreen were pretty so I had to take yet another photo
Fi had left her camera in York on Sunday so we stopped there on our way down south. Luckily for me she had left it in El Piano, so we got to go back there and get takeaway for lunch! This time we both had falafel and mixed salad, and I had carrot cake with orange sauce afterwards
The motorways were pretty clear but we stopped four or five times, and finally got to Fiona’s parent’s house at 8pm. I was tired and it was raining heavily so I asked if I could stay there for the night. It was funny waking up on Christmas Eve so far from home! It didn’t take too long to get back though, and I’m glad I waited because it wouldn’t have been a good idea to drive for another two or three hours last night. After I’d showered, unpacked and put my washing on, I decorated the Christmas tree in my room (oh look, one of Jessica’s dalmatian paintings is in the top right hand corner!)
Yeah, the tree looks better in real life
I feel so much better for having relaxed for a couple of hours! I’m off to make dinner now, then I’ll be wrapping presents and making a dairy/gluten free dessert for tomorrow for myself and my sisters. Well done if you got to the end of this post, it got a bit long!
Happy Christmas to all of you and if any of you are finding it a bit stressful and need a laugh, have a look at today’s post on Cakewrecks…hehe
I left the cable that connects my phone (I use my phone as my camera, it’s better quality than my actual camera!) to my laptop at home, so my posts will be sadly photoless until Thursday. But even though you can’t see me having fun I am Fi and I met up with Jessica yesterday afternoon! I was so excited, I love meeting new people and Jessica is one of my favourite bloggers. She was just as lovely in person as she is in writing, and I hope her impression of me hasn’t changed now because I tend to ramble on about utter rubbish when I’m nervous. It snowed really heavily as we were walking back to Fiona’s house and obviously this got me even more overexcited – it hasn’t snowed properly in Dorset since I was two years old, so I don’t remember ever seeing real snow that didn’t melt as soon as it touched the ground.
This morning, Fi and I went to York. We caught the train because I don’t have much experience of driving in the snow, and I thought it would be less hassle. York was beautiful, albeit rather sludgy. We had lunch in my favourite restaurant, El Piano. All of their food is vegan and gluten free. I had falafel and sweet potato mousse, followed by their ridiculously amazing sticky toffee pudding (which I also had last time we went there). It is such a novelty to go somewhere and be able to eat virtually whatever I like from the menu! After lunch we met my friend Jon who was another student in my classes at York university (see the last-but-one paragraph of this post from June). I hadn’t seen him since the day before I went home in February – he took me out for a cup of tea, and it was much appreciated because I was sitting around in my room waiting for my parents to turn up going crazy with anxiety. It was so nice to see him again, I’ve missed him! We sat in Costa for a bit, then walked around the market, mourned the loss of Borders (sob), walked up to the Minster and then Jon had to go and catch his train back home for Christmas. I found a lovely present for my sister in a shop near the Minster (and listened to the possibly crazy owners discussing their plans for Christmas dinner – one of them was planning to sculpt something potentially very offensive out of soysage!), then bought Fi some new slipper socks because hers have holes in them, and that’s all my Christmas shopping done! When we got back to Durham we had dinner and then Jonathan came over to play The Clinic, Uno and a rather dodgy not-drinking game (‘I never’ confessions which established that I have no moral character, but without the drinking bit). I just got back from driving him back home, and…well, now I am writing this enthusiastic but slightly incoherant post I think I need to go to bed!
Aargh I wish I had my USB cable, I really want to put my pictures up! Never mind it will just help to string out the excitement for a bit longer when I am home again. Tomorrow Fiona, Jonathan and me are going to Newcastle to wander around the shops. I am probably going to drive, so this could be interesting. Wish me luck!
Ignoring weather reports and prophecies of doom from my father, I got up today at 7am and drove for eight hours to Fiona’s house in Durham :) I’m glad I DID decide to take the risk, because the weather and the roads were fine on the way up here (in fact the roads were virtually empty, both of snow and other people!). I am here until Wednesday – tomorrow we are meeting Jessica, on Sunday we are going to York, Monday is…I don’t know, shopping day? There must be some shopping in there somewhere! And Tuesday we are meeting Jonathan and another friend, Hannah, to go to the cinema and then hopefully to a carol service in the cathedral during the evening. I had never driven either on the motorways or in the snow before today so I was a bit scared, but I decided to look at it as an adventure, and it WAS fun! I like motorway service stations. It’s been snowing up here, and being a southerner I never get to see snow! Jonathan came over to say hi after I got here, and I think I scared him when I drove him back home I was distracted by the snow and the threat of losing grip on the road, overexcited at seeing him and Fi again and tired because I’d been up since 6am and already been driving for eight hours, and I somehow managed the impressive feat of freaking my passengers out whilst driving at 20 miles an hour!! I think that takes some skill.
I am a bit brain dead after having such a long day but I had to update quickly to say that I got here safely and that I am enjoying myself already! I will take lots of photos tomorrow
…or not.
“I wish you a hopeful Christmas
I wish you a brave New Year
All anguish, pain and sadness
Leave your heart and let your road be clear
They said there’ll be snow at Christmas
They said there’ll be peace on Earth
Hallelujah, Noel, be it heaven or hell
The Christmas you get you deserve”
Oh, Greg Lake – you had me right up until that last line. I love that song, it’s so atmospheric and emotive…but I can’t get over “The Christmas you get you deserve”.
I’ll tell you about some of my previous Christmasses and you’ll understand.
Christmas age 11. My best friend had just moved 500 miles away and I was being bullied at school. Being away from school for the holidays didn’t help much, because after just a few months of being insulted every day I had started to hate myself right along with the rest of them. I was seriously depressed – fantasising about suicide, having trouble getting out of bed, unable to find any enthusiasm for life. I would have argued otherwise at the time, but as an adult I can’t see what I could possibly have done to deserve that.
Christmas age 13. I was very depressed, anxious and bordering on psychotic. I frequently worried that my teachers had put electronic bugs on me and were sitting in the staff room, laughing at everything I said. I refused to go into shops because I thought the person at the till would laugh at me for being ugly. I walked with my head down, barely speaking to anyone. Certainly not my parents, although they begged me to tell them what was wrong. No, I deserved everything that the people at school said and did to me, I should just get over myself and stop being pathetic.
Christmas age 14. After a six month period of anorexia over spring and summer I started to binge and got stuck in cycles of restricting for a few weeks, then bingeing for a few weeks, then restricting, and etc. I was cutting myself as well. I went to the Christmas party of an amateur dramatic society I belonged to with my parents, and mum insisted that she wouldn’t eat if I wouldn’t. She caved by dessert. I ate nothing but binged in private later on.
Christmas age 17. The shit had hit the fan during the autumn – I had lost a lot of weight, started cutting myself more severely and frequently, was having panic attacks constantly, had been hospitalised twice, run away from home twice, and was finally thrown out of school because I was a ‘liability’. I swung back from anorexia to bulimia over the holidays as I started bingeing and abusing laxatives and overexercising to compensate. Getting up at 1am to run on the spot, going on walks that took up half the day, stealing my little sister’s chocolate and swimming for two hours afterwards, stealing a box of chocolates from my mum – getting caught, being told to move out, that I was not her daughter anymore, I was an unwelcome lodger. I didn’t realised how close Christmas was until I noticed the date on the 24th. Opening my Christmas presents filled me with self hatred – my parents didn’t want to give me presents and I didn’t deserve them, it was all for show to keep my brothers and sisters happy. I planned to kill myself but started seeing a psychologist for the first time in December, and decided to give therapy a chance before I gave up.
Christmas age 18. Having worked incredibly hard to sort my life out and get back into my education over the spring and summer, I was raped a month before Christmas. I have one memory from this year. I was wrapped up in my dressing gown, clutching it like it was an essential barrier between me and the world, sitting curled up as tightly as possible on the sofa, trying hard to smile but feeling like I was seeing the world through a fog, like my arms were encased in concrete, like my brain was full of sand and everything was so slow, so unreal.
Christmas age 20. I was home from Cardiff uni, knowing I didn’t want to go back there, that I couldn’t face another term of lying awake all night too scared to close my eyes, of living in halls of residence surrounded by other people my age but not feeling able to talk to them beyond “how about this rain, hmm?”, of waking up from three hours sleep every morning wanting to cry because I couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t go to lectures, couldn’t stand living like this. I agonised, went back but finally quit in March.
Christmas age 22. Coming off of citalopram, withdrawal effects making the depression I was barely coping with worse. I wanted to die and I had a plan. Confessing this to my CPN a couple of weeks later in floods of hysterical tears led to the first hospitalisation of 2007.
Christmas age 23. After spending three months of the year in hospital, dropping out of university again, having my digestive system pack up and breaking up with my boyfriend in November, I was at a low weight, terrified to eat half through emetophobia and half through anorexia, and trying to get to grip with my newly diagnosed food allergies.
Christmas last year was just a month before I finally realised I couldn’t carry on at York, so the anorexia was running the show. I don’t really remember details, just that I freaked out about maintaining my weight over the two weeks I was at home, and that things reached a new level of hell as soon as I got back to York.
And those are just the highlights it’s kind of embarrassing, I feel like my life has resembled a particularly bad soap opera at times. Basically, the last 14 Christmases have been unmitigated disasters, all filled with a combination of starving, bingeing, self harming, drinking too much, depression, PTSD, anxiety and suicidal ideation. I know it’s just a song, but every time Greg Lake’s ‘I Believe in Father Christmas’ came on the radio I felt sad, guilty and angry with myself. I was convinced it was my fault that I was having a terrible time. If I would just eat more/eat less/quit drinking/not cut myself/get my ass out of bed and smile for a change everything would be fine, right? I didn’t have a problem, I WAS the bloody problem.
Now I’ve managed to extricate myself from the anorexia I can see things a bit more logically. I would never have told any of my similarly unwell friends that they had brought all their shit on themselves, so why did I apply one set of rules to myself and another to everyone else? Being chronically mentally ill was not something I dreamed about when I was five years old. I hoped that I might be a famous ballet dancer or a vet one day, but I didn’t imagine trying to starve to death, covering myself in scars or being incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital for months. I didn’t ask for any of this and I didn’t deserve it. Because nobody holds a gun to your head and tells you that you must not eat, it can feel as if this is something you are choosing and so any pain you cause yourself or your family and friends is your own fault. But that’s just not true. If the alternative is so terrifying that you can’t imagine choosing to eat even to save your life, that’s not a choice. Your genes, brain chemistry and personal history can hold you captive just as efficiently as another person could.
Barring sudden tragedy, this is going to be the closest approximation to a happy Christmas I’ve had in a very long time, and I’m looking forward to it. I will still roll my eyes at the last line of that song, though. I’ve worked hard to get to this point, but equally other people will have be lonely, stressed and sad over the holidays, for many different reasons and most no fault of their own. I am grateful that I had the opportunity to turn things around, and I won’t take my new found ability to eat Christmas dinner without having a nervous breakdown for granted.
And I wish all of you a hopeful Christmas, and a brave New Year.
Yay, I got my assignment finished and posted!!!
…and now all I have to do by Thursday evening is finish 5oish pages of reading and making notes, make, write and post my Christmas cards, wrap the presents I bought for my family (probably no time when I get back from Durham next week), make sure I have enough food for my trip and for Christmas (I am NOT going shopping on Christmas Eve!), do my washing, hoover my room, change my bed, go to the ED support group this evening, go to therapy on Thursday, fill my car up with petrol, pack for Durham…
Oh…pants.
Sorry about this, but I’m unlikely to write anything sensible on here or on anyone else’s blog this side of Christmas I am thinking of you all though!
A few months ago my therapist asked me what my response was to obstacles. Some people, when they come up against a brick wall, get easily overwhelmed and give up. This isn’t because they are lazy or lacking strength of character, it’s usually because they have no confidence in their ability to solve problems or to cope with stress, and also because trying and failing is a LOT scarier than not trying at all. I guess I have had this problem in the past, because up until this year I made several half hearted attempts at recovery, but it never stuck because I was always so terrified that I would put my life back together only for something out of my control to throw everything into chaos again. That’s what happened when I was raped – I had just spent a year after being thrown out of school trying to sort myself out and then all my efforts were destroyed in the space of 12 hours – and when I was admitted to hospital in 2007 – my life then was perfect in every respect other than the fact that I was suicidally depressed, for no apparent reason at all. It turned out that I was wrong about the lack of reason, I had very good reasons, I was just trying very hard not to think about them – but still, these experiences scared me. In 2008 when I was coerced into gaining weight by my therapist at the local EDU I kept relapsing because I couldn’t get over the fear that I would actually make something of my life that I enjoyed and wanted to hold onto, and then it would be taken away from me again. I felt that it was easier to stay numb and to continue letting the ED screw my life up, because if I had nothing to lose I…well, I had nothing to lose, I couldn’t be hurt or disappointed.
I don’t give up so quickly now. The having nothing to lose business has a flip side – since, back in February this year, I had reached a point in which my life meant nothing to me, I decided that it wasn’t as if giving recovery an honest chance could possibly ADD to all the crap! Now I feel a lot more confident in my ability to cope with stress and anxiety, and it’s good to know that I can sit with those feelings without hurting myself. It makes me feel self sufficient in far more genuine and concrete sense than the illusory version I felt when I was anorexic. I think this is probably a basic building block of self esteem and self acceptance – trusting that you won’t turn on yourself every time you run into problems. But this does not mean that I am some kind of ostacle busting genius now. I have got to the stage now where I feel like I run up against a brick wall, work hard on kicking the hell out of it, break it into tiny pieces – then by the time I’ve gotten to the other side of it I’m so exhausted I sit down and cry! I have been known to do this in the past too. My A levels were a nightmare, I was very ill during them and only pulled myself together in time to teach myself the entire two year syllabus for my three subjects in ten weeks. I got A grades in all of them, but fell completely to pieces afterwards. A similar thing happened with my GCSEs, and when I went to York. I worked incredibly hard to get myself ready psychologically to cope with the difficulties of moving away. I was agoraphobic up until that summer, and I put myself through hell trying to get it and my PTSD under control. And when I got to York I sat in my room and thought fuck, I did it. What on earth am I supposed to do now? And I relapsed into the eating disorder.
My psychological difficulties followed this sort of pattern all through middle and high school. I would spend a few months being incredibly anxious and bouncing off the walls, then it would be as if I had exhausted my brain and I would fall into depression for a few months. My depression was often very somatic – I would feel slowed down, like I was underwater, trying to breathe liquid and see through a blur. My cognitive processes would be similarly affected. It was hopeless trying to concentrate. I would lose my appetite, lose weight, lose sleep but want to spend all my time in bed, lose the ability to tolerate being around other people, and so on. Then my brain would come back out of hibernation and I would have mostly anxiety related problems again. I imagine it to be some sort of cycle of neurochemical exhaustion. When I was raped I went through the same thing – three months of the most intense anxiety I have ever felt, followed by six months of utterly black depression, then more of the anxiety, then more of the depression, and etc.
I’m writing this now because all through this week I have found myself thinking ‘oh God, I’m tired of this’. I need to learn to catch myself before I burn out. My recovery this year has been like a miniature version of this cycle. Weeks of gung-ho, I-can-do-anything, I ROCK at recovery attitude – then weeks of feeling sad, wanting to cry all the time, going through the motions, becoming overwhelmed by every little stressor. Sometimes I wonder if the psychiatrist I saw when I was in hospital was right – he diagnosed me as bipolar II, but later decided to watch and wait to see if my manic episodes continued once I was off antidepressants (those things made me hypomanic every. single. time. I’ve taken them. It was a complete pain in the ass that it took my doctors seven years to notice this and to agree that I shouldn’t take any more). After coming off the antidepressants I relapsed into the anorexia and there was no way that anyone could tell if my cycles of hyperactivity and depression were to do with malnutrition and restriction or if they would be happening anyway. I guess now I’m physically healthy again, this is the point at which I find out. I am not the biggest fan of putting people in diagnostic boxes because there are a lot of problems with the diagnostic criteria, with stigma, with labelling people with certain diagnoses hopeless and untreatable – but I also think there is some help in knowing that things you go through that previously seemed indescribable and freakish have a name, a treatment and that others have the same experiences.
In the meantime, what to do with myself? My sleeping patterns are all over the place. I cannot for the life of me get to sleep at night. I feel full of energy, but not in a good way, in a rather disturbing overexcitable way. It’s getting in the way during therapy because I spend all my time talking too fast and not feeling anything. I am not very hungry (but eating anyway). I am currently studying about seven hours a day, trying to fit everything in before I go to Durham so I don’t fall behind during my week off – and this is making me feel a bit overworked and unstable too. My ex had bipolar I and when he was ill, he had half typical, euphoric mania and half that skin crawling combination of mania and anxiety. I’ve always had a lesser version of the latter kind, except when I was on effexor and swung almost hourly between extreme states of euphoria, dysphoria and depression. It was fun while it lasted, I used to insist that the staff accompany me and my friends down the beach during windows of classic mania and then go hide back in my bedroom when my mood dropped again. Or pace the halls, listening to Muse on my iPod and feeling like screaming. Or do self destructive things to myself that shouldn’t have been possible in hospital. Um, I don’t need to be thinking about this. But that’s why this scares me. Now, I am so much more in control of myself than I ever have been at any time in the past. But I remember exactly how it feels to be so depressed that I can’t bear the thought of living anymore, however much pain it would cause my family if I died, and I remember being aware that I was manic and irritating and ridiculous but being unable to control myself when my friends visited, and I remember being at a very low weight and unable to choose to change things even though the anorexia was taking away York and my last chance at university. I have attempted to give up my life several times in the past so my lack of concern about my health was not shocking to me – but I remembered how much York had meant to me, I remembered how excited I was, I remembered how I saw the letter from UCAS in our letterbox at the end of the drive, couldn’t wait to open it so sat on the gravel right there and tore it open, and cried when I saw I had been accepted. Whatever my history with suicidal thoughts, I knew I wouldn’t have given up York for the world, when I couldn’t stop the anorexia from stealing it from me I knew I had to be ill rather than choosing this. Really, I’m quite grateful for having gotten too ill to continue there, I don’t think I would have accepted that anorexia was an illness and found the motivation to fight back otherwise.
I remember being completely out of control and it scares me more than anything. I have a higher than average baseline of anxiety – probably much higher than most people, since I have had panic attacks and OCD since I was about four years old and since everything became magnified by a thousand times when I was raped - but I can’t really get into an ‘average’ person’s head to check out that theory. Anyway, given that I have lived with this all my life, and that I am no longer using self destructive methods of coping, I am very good at sitting with it and/or distracting myself now. I am also learning not to panic when my mood drops, to let it happen and to let it pass. This is good. This is progress. But I worry if it is going to be enough.
I’ve spent the last ten days working on my OU course almost constantly, and I have begun thinking about pretty much everything in physics terms. I found myself trying to calculate the components of force and torque acting on me when one of my dogs was pulling me along at an angle the other day. Bad dogs = good revision. I started waffling on about chaos theory in relation to recovery on my blog last week, and this week I discussed equilibrium with my therapist. Objects can be in three types of equilibrium – stable, neutral and unstable. Imagine a…I don’t know, a marble. If you put it at the bottom of a pit, you can move it a little way up the sides of the pit and when you let it go it will roll back down to the bottom. This is stable equilibrium, in which a force acts to return an object to it’s original position. If you put the marble on a flat surface and roll it a little way, it will stop where it is and not accelerate towards or away from its original position. This is neutral equilibrium. And unstable equilibrium equates to putting the marble on top of a hill, where you can balance it if you get the centre of mass in the right position, but if you move it a little way it will roll down the hill, moving further from its starting position. I feel like I am in the psychological equivalent of unstable equilibrium. I am relatively stable, relatively in control, relatively calm – as long as nothing pushes me. I can cope with my usual levels of anxiety, I can cope with the remaining eating disordered thoughts, I can cope with the things in my life which frustrate or irritate me, because I am used to these things. But sometimes I have a week like this week, in which I have been ill with a virus, unable to sleep properly, studying too hard and worrying about various things, and everything gets a little bit too much. So far this year I’ve managed to pull myself back each time before I fall off the cliff, but I’ve come closer than I am comfortable with to losing it, especially back in October.
I’m tired of everything being a fight. I’m tired of being scared of my own brain. I’m tired of having to work so hard just to keep myself still in a place that most people would take for granted. I’m tired of fire fighting and kicking the asses of metaphorical vampires. I’m tired of feeling alone. I’m tired of knowing there is still so far to go before I can do the things that other people my age do. I’m just…tired of it all.
I know that this won’t last. I will be gung ho and full of energy again in a few hours, days or weeks, spoiling for another fight with the problems that have been plaguing me for over 20 years now. And most of the time I feel as if the odds are tipped in my favour, that if I keep taking step after step, I can’t fail to get where I want to be eventually. But I have nothing concrete to base this on and a long history of the monsters getting the better of me – so really, my entire recovery efforts have been based on a leap of faith. This is strange, because I have never been one for faith. I thought the rape had knocked my ability to trust without evidence right out of me. It has been, and still is, exciting for me to dig myself out of the ground I had buried myself in, to shake off the dirt, to remember what I used to know about myself and discover the new things which had grown while I wasn’t watching. But sometimes the world seems too big and I seem to small and I don’t know what to do with myself.
It’s a huge step forward to be able to recognise this stage before it turns into burn out. Now I just need to fight the urge to close my eyes to it and work out what to do about it.
I read this post by Laura Collins with interest this morning. The research she discusses is a study on the presence of autistic traits in recovered versus currently unwell anorexics. It’s a subject that I am fascinated by, because although I am not autistic, I have a lot of difficulties often associated with the condition. I have, as I said in my reply to Laura’s post, a tic disorder, OCD (now generally thought of as a neurological rather than psychological disorder), food allergies, sensory problems and aversions not related to my eating disorder. In fact, I spent most of therapy today talking about this subject. I am not under the illusion that these problems will lessen if I talk about them enough because they are not caused by emotional issues, they are physical and neurological, but I DO need to learn how to calm and control them better.
The tic disorder is an irritating thing. I have not been diagnosed with Tourette’s because I rarely develop phonic (vocal) tics, 99% of mine are motor tics. These are…they are difficult to describe. It feels like a repetitive muscular itch that can only be ’scratched’ by contracting the muscle. They are not things that I want to do, and they are not like OCD rituals because in OCD, rituals are usually preceded by obsessive worrying about bad things happening if you don’t carry out the compulsive behaviours. A tic disorder has nothing to do with trauma or family difficulties, it is a neurological quirk, kind of like your brain misfiring. They do tend to get worse with stress, and in my case they also became very severe when I was put on antidepressants. When I was coming off effexor I felt like my tics were trying to take over my body, I couldn’t control them at all and I even developed a stutter that stopped me talking on one of the worst days. Yet another way in which medication and I don’t agree with eachother! Most of the time my tics don’t bother me too much, they irritate me but I mostly ignore them. But sometimes they can be quite distressing – I had facial tics for a while at school which was embarrassing as hell, and tics involving my eyes can become very painful. They tend to fluctuate in frequency and intensity and they also change every few months, so in January the main one might be quickly tensing and relaxing my calf muscles and by September it might have changed to blinking too much. Usually there’s one that happens most often and a whole host of other little interchangeable ones. Most people don’t notice unless they are with me when I’m anxious or excited, then they might ask me if I’ve got something in my eye/my leg hurts/my stomach is OK/etc.
My OCD is different to this. Mostly, I tidy things obsessively. I rearrange things that don’t look ‘right’, I can’t stand to be in the kitchen when it’s messy and I am always loading and unloading the dishwasher (my nemesis!). I’m not phobic of germs but I do end up washing my hands repeatedly beyond the point of necessity if I get something like milk on me. Milk makes me so sick that I have actually become phobic of it! I have also had problems with counting things in the past – when I was very ill in 2007 I counted EVERYTHING. It drove me nuts, I couldn’t walk anywhere without counting my steps. When I was a kid I counted the number of groups of three letters in words for a period of six months or so, which was highly irritating.
I’ve talked about my odd diet on my blog quite a bit, and I am fascinated by the alleged links between neurological and psychiatric disorders and food allergies/intolerances. My depression and anxiety have calmed down a lot since I cut out milk and wheat two years ago, and things have further improved since I started taking a multivitamin and extra supplements for nutrients I kept developing deficiencies in. I am not suggesting that everyone do this obviously, it can be very dangerous for someone in recovery from an eating disorder to make drastic dietary changes, but in my case the allergies/intolerances had been diagnosed by blood tests and it was necessary as my digestive system had virtually packed up. I have had a milk allergy since I was a baby (not all allergies cause anaphylaxis; I am allergic to milk but intolerant to all the other things on my list), and spent the first ten months of my life screaming because of the pain from the digestive problems it caused. I carried on eating it anyway as I got older and I often felt very nauseous and tired, but no one never made the connection. For seven years between the age of 9 and 16 I felt sick pretty much constantly and got to be a medical mystery. A large proportion of the neurotransmitters in your brain are manufactured in the gut, so it’s no wonder that people with digestive disorders often develop psychiatric and neurological disorders. Vitamin and mineral deficiencies are also associated with depression and anxiety, and poor nutrient absorption due to damage in the digestive system can contribute to this. My immune system and emotional stability have never been as good as they are at the moment, and I am sure that changing my diet and treating the deficiencies helped with this improvement.
My sensory problems are not so easily controlled. Basically, I am really oversensitive – in the physical sense, not the emotional. Everyone has a tolerance level for things like noise, temperature, tiredness…caffeine and mine is lower than most. When I was with my ex I would have to leave his gigs sometimes because they were so loud they actually made me cry – when everyone else in the room was fine. I get palpitations after drinking a can of coke (although IBS dictates that fizzy drinks are entirely out these days). I start feeling sick and faint before most people in hot weather. I can’t cope with crowds, I panic due to the sensory overload. I got hypothermia in the Millennium Dome a few years ago! It wasn’t exactly warm in there but I was wearing three layers and nobody else there was shivering so much they almost threw up. My ex used to say that he thought I should be rolled in bubble wrap so there was an extra barrier between me and the world. It pisses me off SO MUCH that most people seem to think that this oversensitivity is a sign of character weakness or of being fussy, but it is REALLY not. For example: I was in Barcelona on holiday, and it was really hot so I was wearing a new dress. It was a very pretty dress, but unfortunately it was made from some material which…I can’t really explain it, but it made my skin crawl. I went out in it and within half an hour I was in so much discomfort it actually gave me a panic attack and I had to go back to the hotel and change. This isn’t the same thing as not liking the feel of something, it’s more like it throws my nervous system into chaos. The same thing happens when my mum turns the radio on in the kitchen while I’m watching TV in the living room. I have to turn the television off because it overloads my brain to have two conflicting types of noise going on like that. When I’ve asked her if I could shut the door to the kitchen she has come into the living room to see what I’m talking about and told me that it’s easy to hear the TV over the radio, that she doesn’t like being shut in the kitchen and I am being ridiculous. I’m not meaning to be selfish or difficult; I just can’t ignore unwanted stimuli like most people can. In that situation, if I leave the TV on, I can’t shut the music out and I am fully conscious of it, it makes me more and more anxious and feeling like I’m listening to someone dragging their nails down a chalkboard. It’s so hard to describe but it causes such intense discomfort it’s impossible to sit with.
This sort of thing really affects my functioning. I can’t multitask. If I’m talking on the phone I can’t do anything else at the same time or I end up unable to listen to the other person. If I’m studying I can’t listen to music or nothing I read goes in. If I’m writing a post on my blog it takes me three times as long if the TV is on in the background. My favourite activities are those which involve my senses and concentration as much as possible without overwhelming them. Driving, going to the cinema and solving puzzles like sudoku are the things that calm me the most. When I was learning mindfulness skills I quickly discovered that if I was asked to concentrate on one sense – such as looking at a picture or listening for sounds in the building – I couldn’t do it. I was willing, I did try, but my attention would fly off every two seconds and things didn’t improve even after a year of practise. In contrast, if more than one sense was involved in the task – if I was given something like a stone, which I could hold and feel and study the colours and textures and weight – then I could focus on that almost indefinitely without becoming distracted at all. I am, however, my own worst enemy. I get almost as anxious at being understimulated as I do at being overstimulated, and I find it almost impossible to concentrate on one thing at a time if it’s not engaging enough cognitively. I often end up trying to do five things at once so I don’t get anxious and finding myself unable to concentrate on any of them. I had problems at school because sitting still for an hour just listening to the teacher was so understimulating sensory-wise that I would start feeling horribly trapped, panicky, itchy and generally psychologically uncomfortable. When I had a summer job at the age of 18 the experience of 4/8/12 hours of standing around doing nothing would make me feel like throwing myself through the shop window – not through boredom, through panic from not having anything stimulating enough to do to keep me calm. I would end up standing behind the sweet counter hitting myself with the toffee hammer to keep myself from having a panic attack. And this is the problem I face now, really.
When I was anorexic I didn’t have these problems to this degree. The anorexia dampened everything down, made it far more manageable and less overwhelming. It was like being constantly on valium. Being starved and malnourished does something physical to my brain which actually HELPS me to function. Of course it also ruins my health, destroys my desire to socialise, makes me obsess about food to the cost of everything else, gradually lowers my mood until I don’t care if I live or die as long as I weigh less tomorrow, and steals my personality, turning me into a scary skinny zombie. So I think this is probably not a good long term strategy But there’s no escaping the fact that this is why I was able to study endlessly when I was very underweight, and why I am having problems with my physics work now I am weight restored. It also doesn’t bode very well for my attempts at getting a job. I would actually go crazy in an office job, and I mean that literally, not in a spoilt-little-princess-doesn’t-want-to-work way. The lack of stimulation would fry my brain. I would end up constantly fighting the urge to hide in the toilets and hyperventilate or self harm like I did at school. I am not giving in to the eating disorder because that is a sticking plaster, not a cure, and not only that but it’s a sticking plaster that releases poison into your body and slowly kills you, to extend the metaphor to breaking point! But I am also not sure how I go about dealing with this healthily so I can be a functioning member of society. Yeah, sorry for writing this post before I have thought of a solution ;) if it helps, I know what ISN’T the answer…
I have a feeling that this is a very convoluted post that nobody is going to get to the end of. It’s hard trying to put this sort of thing into words. But apparently these problems are common in people with eating disorders, so maybe some of you will be less confused and uninterested than I fear. Quick poll – does anyone else out there relate to any of this? Have you found anything that helps? That is, anything not involving food or lack there of!
Three good things about today:
1. Julie somehow made sense of my virus induced hypomania, which is kind of astonishing because I thought I was talking crap!
2. I MADE VEGAN MACARONI CHEESE FOR DINNER!!! This deserves to be in capitals, because it was YUM. I hadn’t ever seen a cheese sauce substitute that didn’t involve yeast, which I am also intolerant to, before Aisha posted this link a month or so ago. I made it for myself and my sister (obviously I had corn pasta instead of wheat!) and she really liked it too Aisha, you are my hero! It was IBS in a bowl – garlic, cayenne, lemon juice and mustard were involved – so I will probably suffer tomorrow, but it was sooooooo worth it.
3. I only have two more questions to do for the physics assignment which is due in next Thursday, yay
I realised a few days ago that when I go to Durham to stay with Fi next Friday I will NOT want to be studying, so I needed to do three weeks worth of work in two. That would be 150 pages of 2nd year university level physics to read, understand and memorise. I’ve done about 70 so far but I also have to take at least one day off to finish my latest assignment, which is due in next Thursday, so now I only have seven days to get through it all. Ouuuch. Of course, my body decided that this would be a GREAT moment to catch a virus, so I have no idea how much of what I’m studying is going in, because I’m sneezing every five minutes and I think my temperature is high enough to start melting my brain. After eating dinner earlier I was sweating like I’d been on the exercise bike for half an hour (lol TMI ), I have been coming over all lightheaded every time I go upstairs to get something and at one point I got palpitations just from walking to the bathroom! I keep getting all giggly too, having a high temperature feels a bit like being drunk (and I’ve been teetotal for two years, so I’ll take anything I can get!).
Here’s the odd part: this is, as much as I hate to use this word, triggering as hell. Having spent half of my life feeling physically ill – even at healthy weights I was usually alternating between restricting and bingeing, neither of which are great for a person’s health – it feels more natural than being healthy. Feeling faint, seeing stars when I stand up, the tiredness, the heavy limbs, the aching. Most of all, the sense of being in an altered state of consciousness. When I was anorexic nothing scared me, nothing hurt me, nothing touched me. When I used to cut myself, that was another way of going after that trance-like feeling. Being in a similar state, even due to a virus rather than my own actions, results in a physical longing, like a body memory of the false comfort and emotional numbness the eating disorder used to give me.
On the morning that I moved to York last year I woke up with a sore throat. My voice had disappeared by the time my parents and I had driven up there, and for the first week, while all the other students were partying and making friends, I spent my evenings falling into bed at 7pm, exhausted from having to keep up with the introductions and orientations during the day when I was so ill. I had a temperature of 104 for two of those nights. I usually won’t touch any type of medication unless I’m in too much (physical) pain to function, but for a fortnight I had to take ibruprofen to keep my temperature down during the day, otherwise I would end up shivering and feeling like I was about to pass out. I was almost at a healthy weight at that point, and funnily enough I never get that sick when I’m more underweight than that. My immune system tends to give up and roll over so every virus I catch hangs around for about a month but only affects me mildly (it’s your immune system fighting the virus off that makes you feel ill, not the virus itself). That virus I caught just before York was the last until this one I’m fighting off currently. But that’s besides the point, which was that the virus that I had when I went to York was the catalyst for the relapse I was already heading for. I had already slipped to the degree that I wasn’t eating enough to gain anymore and I had begun losing very slowly, but I lost my appetite entirely while I was ill and several hundred calories fell out of my intake, not to be seen again for several months. I wonder now, if I had been well when I left for York, if I hadn’t spent my first week in a fever that reminded of the addictive nature of sickness, if instead I had been present enough to make friends and get involved…maybe I would have managed to tie myself to my fresh start tightly enough to avoid slipping as far as I did.
That thought doesn’t really upset me anymore, because now I think last winter changed something fundamental in me, forced me to confront reality and to switch sides – from apathetically killing myself to fighting to live. I wouldn’t give that up for anything. And although feeling like this is strange and disturbing, in recovery there is no way to avoid every single triggering situation. In fact, it’s not a good idea to go out of your way to avoid them for the rest of your life, or you never learn the skills needed to deal with the ones you can’t escape. So being ill is good practise for me. It puts me into a state with startling similaries to the experience of an eating disorder, and I just have to deal with it in the same way that I deal with every other eating disordered thought or feeling that wanders on through. My brain might be a bit confused by the sensations involved but my behaviour hasn’t changed – I am still eating the same amount, appetite or no appetite – and my motivation hasn’t changed. I don’t want to be ill again. And I don’t say that in the sense that I don’t want to relapse but I don’t know if I can stop myself – no, I mean that I don’t want to and it’s not going to happen. I am strong enough now that common inescapable triggers will not shake my recovery down to its foundations.
When my parents went on holiday in 2008 I relapsed because the house was too empty and quiet and I couldn’t stand being alone with my thoughts. When my parents went on holiday last month I was fine. When I was 18 and an older girl I looked up to hugely relapsed I did too, because I lost hope that I could do it if she couldn’t. This time I have kept going regardless of where my friends are in recovery. When I tried to talk about the rape last year in therapy I started cutting my intake back that day to cope with the anxiety and disgust. When I starting talking about it with Julie a couple of months ago I felt proud and defiant to be facing the PTSD, and I was happy to carry on fighting the eating disorder alongside that. In 2007 I stopped eating when I was very depressed and hopeless that things would ever change. This year I became convinced that the depression was coming back in September, and although I was terrified and exhausted I carried on eating just the same, because I finally realised that starving myself is not the solution. And last year in York my relapse snowballed after I had the flu for a fortnight. I’m pretty sick at the moment but I’m not using it as an excuse to let my standards or my motivation slip.
Most things in nature, micro and macroscopic, follow the path of least resistance. Humans are no different. For me, staying anorexic was a lot easier than even contemplating the idea of recovery, so recovery would not have happened naturally for me. It is going to take time and effort. It has gotten so much easier to keep myself motivated and to ignore eating disordered thoughts since March, I can’t believe how quickly things have improved myself. But becoming complacent would be dangerous, because the most unexpected things can make a person suddenly vulnerable. I can’t completely control everything that will happen to me in my life. Things are going to depress me, disappoint me, make me anxious. I am going to catch illnesses, lose my appetite, get stressed out, worry about people I care about, have to spend time alone in my head. But what I CAN control is how I react to those things. I can control my behaviour and I can refuse to allow myself to slip back into habitual thought patterns. I can keep reminding myself that anorexia is not really comforting or safe, it’s not a cure for depression or anxiety, it’s not a solution to anything – it’s an opportunistic mental illness that WILL try to jump on me every time I am vulnerable. But as long as I am vigilent, honest with myself and continue to work to keep myself motivated, I won’t let it slip under the door. I am in control of my life now, and my plans require being alive, fully conscious and able to feel and react to my experiences. There’s no room for anorexia in my head or my future now.
