I have finally finished my new blog and it’s been taken off of the private setting. So please follow me over! Under The Stars will be deleted in a couple of weeks, once I’m sure as many people who read my blog as possible have found out where I’ve gone, so please update your blogrolls/google readers/subscriptions/whatever else you guys use to be nice to me and leave me such lovely comments

Click here for my new blog…

I have exciting news! Exciting for me, anyway. I wrote a guest post for Michele Rosenthal’s wonderful PTSD blog about eighteen months ago, and a couple of days ago I received an email from her saying that she wanted to include it in a book she was compiling from the blog. So yay, I get to see my name in print!

I also found my mini USB to USB cable and so have finally managed to get the photos from my new camera (read: my sister’s old camera) onto my laptop. I’m not going to put all of them up here – for a start there are 161 of them (!), but I am also saving some for a new page when I change blogs. I found my GCSE art work in amongst the stuff my mum brought up from home when she came to visit, so I thought I would take pictures of them and put them on the new blog. Some of them aren’t bad at all considering I was only 16 when I painted them. I wish I’d kept painting and drawing rather than leaving a ten year gap before I got back into it. Nothing I can do about that now anyway, other than continuing to draw in the present

SO. Photos.

From my old camera phone – it’s very rare that I ever taken photos of my food (I would make the world’s worst food blogger, I would get bored very quickly!) but I wanted to include this as my favourite meal of the moment. I have been giggling at the craze for “socca” going around blogs recently, because I’ve been making wraps with chickpea flour for years! I didn’t even know it had a proper name. I tend to make mine from 3 parts chickpea flour to one part plain gluten free flour, because that makes them feel softer, more pliable and less like trying to digest a brick. And currently they always seem to get filled with olive tofu and fried chestnut mushrooms. It’s a crappy blurry photo so I’ll make it small – don’t be tempted to enlarge

And for good measure, a lovely sunset I took out of the window of the classroom I was working in at college on Monday evening:

And now on to the new camera…drool…

The first few photos are from when my mum and sister came to visit me. We went to Tynemouth, one of the coastal suburbs of Newcastle. It’s a beautiful little town with a ruined castle and priory…and a café which sells gluten and dairy free cakes. Always good

The colours and lines are so much sharper with the DSLR! Yay

The tombstones were made from a sandstone typical of Newcastle buildings, and so they had worn away around the letters over the hundreds of years they had been standing. The patterns were so fascinating!

The ceiling of a tiny chapel

The two lighthouses of North and South Shields, guiding ships into the mouth of the Tyne

Aww! I went on a walk with Jonathan last week and we saw these little lambs. I swear I only have maternal instincts for animals…

And just because I had my camera I made Jonathan go back to the shoe tree with me to see how it came out! I love this tree so much, I think it’s hilarious

As pretty much anyone who has read my blog for the last year or so will know, the eight months since I moved up to Newcastle have been really challenging for me – as would be expected given that every other of my attempts at independent living in the last seven years have ended in either a depressive or anorexic crisis. This time around I struggled to avoid an ED relapse during the weeks when I kept catching virus after virus and couldn’t eat properly, felt horribly homesick when my sisters couldn’t visit me as planned in October, became depressed when my housemate drama was going on and I felt so lonely, had a massive PTSD attack from November until January when I moved into a new house by myself, and briefly lapsed back into self harming behaviours for a week in December. I didn’t expect the move up north to be easy, because a lot of people moving away from home for the first time struggle with homesickness and loneliness for the first few months – but I may have underestimated just how much this would be exaggerated in someone who is already vulnerable to mental health problems.

For the last few weeks I’ve felt like I’ve finally come out of the other side of all that. I didn’t want to put that into words before now because I was scared it wouldn’t last, but I’ve been in a consistently not-depressed mood since the beginning of February. It’s such a relief, I can’t even begin to tell you. I feel really optimistic and excited about my voluntary work with NIWE and the prospect of starting my foundation degree in counselling in September. I enjoyed seeing my mum and sister last weekend – mum said it was lovely to see me looking so healthy (and if mum says I look healthy it MUST be true ) and Claire sent me a text when she got home to say that I seemed happy and that made her happy. I’ve also been far more anxious to get out and DO things, like when I spontaneously bought tickets for Jonathan and I to see Iron and Wine last week (brilliant concert by the way! I think I already said that but it needed saying again!)

Today I went to a local high school to speak to the sixth formers – all eighty or so of them – with Annemarie, one of the ladies who runs NIWE. I was terrified beforehand as usual, and felt awkward while I was talking, but I got really good feedback again and it’s such a boost to my confidence to know that I CAN do stuff like that without chickening out and buggering off in an uncannily accurate impression of Brave Brave Sir Robin. It makes me feel like I actually have a future ahead of me. I have spent the last two years HOPING that I have a future worth living for ahead of me, but this is the first time that I have really started to believe it. I can actually see myself qualifying as a counsellor, continuing to speak in schools, staying involved with charities and doing everything I can to improve understanding and treatment of eating disorders. I can see myself loving my time at college and university, making new friends and hopefully developing my very fledgling social life. Keeping myself healthy and stable, increasing my stamina when it comes to functioning and socialising, becoming more confident and sure of myself. And of course I want to include my Jonathan in all of this too

I don’t feel like I’m just struggling to keep my head above the water today. I’m still pretty anxious, as usual – you know me, being happy scares the crap out of me because I keep thinking that something will come along and spoil it if I relax and let my guard down. But I can’t even remember the last time I felt so…good.

It’s weird, but I could get used to it

* ETA: Thank you so much for your responses to my last post – if anyone has any more ideas please feel free to add them! The draft of my new post-weight restoration section is already 3150 words long, I think I’m going to have to split it into two pages…

In other less annoying news, I am in the middle of writing a new page for my DIY recovery section, on recovery after weight restoration. As I have a host of lovely people here to advise me I thought I would ask you what I should include in it!

So far my plan is to write about:
* My feelings on reaching my target weight last year
* The way my view of recovery changed afterwards – for example, I felt virtually invincible after I first reached my target weight, and when I realised that I still had to sort out the rest of my life I fell into a bit of a depressive pit for a few weeks. I was so disheartened when I was forced to accept that gaining weight was only the tip of the iceberg!
* Moving to intuitive eating and dispelling common misconceptions
* Coping with lapses if they happen

People who are already weight restored:  can you think of any other common facets of recovery post-weight restoration that I’ve forgotten? I’m sure there must be a few.
People who are currently in the process of recovery: what are your questions about recovery after weight restoration is complete?

I scrolled down, and as I suspected, one person had written a ridiculous and ignorant comment about how anorexics were vain and shallow and celebrity magazines were to blame. Ugh. But this was the comment with one of the worst ratings…and below it were dozens of people shouting this guy down, insisting that anorexia was a serious mental illness with complex causes, and that the earliest recorded cases dated from hundreds of years ago, well before Heat and OK existed.

Hallelujah, my work here is done! It was like 50 Katies had replied. I left a comment anyway, but there wasn’t really any need for it.

Of course, for every article full of sympathetic commenters there are ten more which are full of shit. But it gave me some hope that maybe some of the more scientific and up to date information about eating disorders is slowly filtering down into the public consciousness.

This doesn’t for a second detract from the awful circumstances under which this poor woman died. Her illness tormented her so much that she couldn’t imagine a future worth living for regardless of the fact that she was in treatment and had a supportive family. Sometimes all the love and help in the world isn’t enough to keep a person alive, and it makes me so sad to imagine her in so much pain, because her story could have so easily been my own, or that of any of my friends with eating disorders. She joins the list of people in my head who I remember whenever I get stage fright before one of my talks. It’s stories like this which drive me and make me determined to do everything I can to spread knowledge and understanding of eating disorders, however scary I find some of those methods.

* I’ve just realised that I can’t remember how I found it! I don’t go on the DM website (I wouldn’t want my head to explode), so where on earth did I see it? Hm. One of the great mysteries of life.

I had lots of fun with my mum and sister this weekend! It was brilliant, I miss them now. I have my sister’s old DSLR camera but am a little confused about how to transfer photos from the memory card to my computer, so the photos will have to wait until I work it out

I felt all homesick yesterday so I decided to spend the day with my Jonathan, but after a long walk he was exhausted and grumpy, so I went home. Just as well, because his exhaustion turned out to be the beginnings of a stomach bug, so he spent most of last night throwing up! I feel okay at the moment but I’m terrified of the prospect of catching it. Poor boy does seem to throw up at the drop of a hat but that doesn’t mean that this isn’t a genuine bug…erk. Send me happy immune system thoughts please! My emetophobia is in full swing – I had to get most of my dinner in through liquid calories. Grrrrr.

So far I have spent the last 24 hours ranting and doing college work. The ranting was due to an article in the Guardian about anorexia, in which one commenter suggested sending patients to boot camps (yes, because all that strenuous activity would be SO good for them), and a research study in Carrie’s weekly round up of ED articles which totally misinterpreted non-fat phobic anorexia. The way in which non-fat phobic anorexics are different to “typical” anorexics is that in the non-fat phobic subtype, anorexic behaviours are not driven by the belief that the person is or will become overweight – their fear of weight gain is driven by other concerns, such as the inability to cope with anxiety or trauma. It DOES NOT MEAN that non-fat phobic anorexics are not scared of gaining weight, which is what this study suggested. What the study described was a group of sub-clinical ED patients who were not as scared of gaining as typical ED patients. I was deathly afraid of eating more and gaining weight when I was ill – I would have rather died than gained weight at several points in my illness – I just didn’t interpret that fear as a fear of becoming overweight. For me it was a fear of losing control of my emotions.

The college work was less stressful. I have now finished ALL the assignments for my current counselling course. I just need to make sure I have covered all the criteria we have to hit in our portfolios and I am done. I can’t wait to get started on the foundation degree! Of course, I have to actually get through the interview first…I have two now, both in the last week of June. My voluntary work with Barnardos also finishes this week, so I think it is time to start looking for a part time job again. I will be taking myself off to the Jobcentre next week…hopefully I will be slightly more employable now I have recent references!

I have an entire room full of junk to sort out tomorrow. When my mum came to visit she brought all the stuff I left at home when I moved last July, so now I have to find homes for all of those books and clothes. I think the local charity shops are going to find themselves significantly better stocked in the next few days!

Finally, the new blog is ALMOST finished. I have edited all my posts, cleaned and spell checked them, password protected the ones with photos of myself, and taken out the dead links. I just have to mess with the theme/appearance and write my new post-weight restoration recovery section. Whoop

This is a really bitty and incoherent post. Blame the glass of red wine. I can’t believe one glass could have such a big effect!

This last week has been pretty good. I finished the external assessment for my counselling course, so I just have one essay to write and my portfolio to get together now before the course ends in less than a month. On Tuesday I had a meeting with one of the ladies who runs the charity I volunteer for. She roped me into giving another talk at the end of March, to go with the other one I’m doing next Thursday in a local school (to EIGHTY sixth formers. Eek!), and they also want me to be involved in the development of a support group for carers and possibly another one for people who have recovered from EDs, to compliment their existing service user support groups. I’m really excited about the way things are going with the charity, and of course I want to be as involved as possible!

On Wednesday evening Jonathan and I went to see Iron and Wine, who were (was? It’s one man, but he had several musicians with him!) amazing. Jonathan and other purists were a little put off by the fact that he changed all the arrangements for the songs, but to me, who had only heard a few of the originals, it sounded great! He’s been on my list of musicians to download the entire back catalogue of for a while. I only noticed that he was playing in Newcastle three days before, and the tickets were pretty cheap so I went for it, and then nearly exploded with excitement while I was trying to get Jonathan on the phone for the next two hours It’s not exactly like I’m rolling in money but I don’t really drink much or go out very often, and as previously discussed I only go clothes shopping every six months or so – so I think I can probably justify two tickets to Iron and Wine. Just about

Other than that, I’ve been busy finishing the necklaces for the winners of my 2 year bloggiversary giveaway, listening to the BBC radio one longest show for Comic Relief, and working on my new blog! It’s coming along pretty well, I’ve finished editing all five hundred and twenty odd posts and I’m just going back through them to check, then I’m going to work on the appearance and change the pages a bit. I need a new about me I think, and I was thinking of adding to my DIY recovery pages – I think a new section on recovery post-weight restoration and intuitive eating might be good! It will be ready by the end of April, I think. Probably sooner, if my obsessive tendencies keep on making me edit “just one more post…just one more…one more…” etc! If anyone has any other suggestions for the new blog, email me at katie_cullinane@hotmail.com or leave me a comment here

We grew apart in middle school, when Kate fell in with the popular kids who bullied me. I know when she got a little older she began to feel guilty about that, and apologised to me several times when my mental health problems became common knowledge at school. I don’t feel any anger towards her – it’s so easy for people, especially children and teenagers, to get sucked into that sort of mob mentality. She just got swept up in it all and she was too young to understand how I must be feeling. I dealt with any residual sadness around being bullied a long time ago, it doesn’t have an impact on my day to day life any more.

Today, our lives couldn’t be more different. Today I rather self consciously posted on Facebook that I felt a bit pathetic for being so proud of myself after phoning my landlord about some repairs that need doing, because I am so nervous about using the phone with people I don’t know. I can talk to my Jonathan and my mum without feeling anxious, but that’s about it. My yard gate has dropped on it’s hinges and I’ve not been able to shut it since I moved in, and I thought I could live with the problem until things (read: my rubbish bin!) started getting stolen from my yard. So basically I’ve put off that phone call for four months, even though it was broken when I moved in and there was no reason at all to think that my landlord would be weird about me asking them to fix it! And that was only one phone call out of three, I have yet to ring the council (about a new bin) and my dentist.

Kate updated her status today too, to inform the world that she is pregnant. She qualified as a doctor a couple of years ago, and got married last autumn.

It’s not that I particularly wanted to be married at this point in my life, and I’m fairly sure that I never want children. I’m not jealous of her as such, it’s just a striking and uncomfortable contrast. Kate seems on a superficial level to have everything that our society deems a mark of success: great qualifications, a very respectable profession, lots of friends, a husband and now a potential baby. I’ve only just managed to master the art of living independently without going crazy in the last six months, and I’ve been trying to get a degree and repeatedly being foiled by mental health problems ever since I was 19.

The last couple of years have been a huge struggle – well, the last decade has, but it’s only been in the last two years that I have stopped using all those self destructive coping mechanisms and started trying to sort my life out – but I am beginning to enjoy the little life I’m building for myself. My voluntary work with NIWE makes me feel as if I am genuinely contributing to society for the first time in my life and I get a huge buzz from doing my talks, however terrifying they are. I love Jonathan and spending time with him always makes me happy. My counselling classes are great and I’m very much looking forward to beginning the degree in September. But it does all seem fairly small and insignificant in comparison to what Kate and many of my other friends have achieved.

In all honesty, I am torn between feeling proud of myself for how much progress I’ve made recently, and feeling like my life so far has been a gigantic waste of time. I understand logically that my illnesses have not been my fault, but even so, it’s hard to force those societally determined goalposts of success out of my head and to find some pride in my dramatically different definition of success.

A simplified explanation (off the top of my head – my textbooks are still in Dorset - so forgive me if I forget anything important ) is as follows. As a matter of course, most stars convert hydrogen into helium through nuclear fusion. When the store of hydrogen is depleted to the extent that fusion cannot generate enough pressure to hold off gravitational collapse, the collapse of the star begins and the centre becomes hotter and more dense. When the temperature and density are sufficient the star begins to convert helium into carbon and oxygen. If the star is massive enough, when the helium is depleted to a certain degree it collapses further, eventually converting carbon and oxygen into neon, sodium, magnesium, sulfur and silicon. This process continues until the structure of larger dying stars may consist of hydroden and helium forming an outer shell, with “heavier” elements in layers progressing to an iron core. Elements heavier than iron may be formed in the extremely high temperatures of a supernova – the explosions of very massive stars. This is the main reason why precious metals are precious – they are the heavy elements that are scarce in the Universe, since only during the death of the largest stars are the conditions conducive to their formation reached. In this way, all of the elements necessary for life – all of the elements forming the atoms which make up your body right now – were created by the stars.

Physics is nothing like the dry and boring subject I was taught at school. Although it predicts a sad end to the Universe (don’t google “heat death” unless you really enjoy existential crises), it also fills me with wonder. I can’t possibly feel as if my problems have any meaning when I’m looking up at the stars, knowing that the light currently hitting my eyes may have left the star of origin hundreds, thousands or millions of years ago. Practical astronomy is pretty much the only thing that can completely shut up my mind and make me feel at peace. It’s as close as I ever come to a feeling of spirituality.

Of course, when I was ill my knowledge of the processes of the Universe didn’t make much of an impact. On the night that I clearly saw the Andromeda galaxy through the university’s eight-inch reflector I didn’t jump up and down, declare my problems solved and rush home to eat a sandwich. But now I am capable of thinking clearly about the subject it does help keep all the crap in my head in perspective. Worrying about whether my jeans are a little tight today seems a little ridiculous when I know that the basic building blocks of both myself and said jeans were forged in the heart of a star.