wanting

My EDNOS is 19 years old. It started with Anorexia when I was fifteen. Then I progressed to Bulimia, otherwise known to some as a failed anorexic. You do the maths. I’m too ashamed to get my calculator out.

My weight fluctuates between slightly overweight, slightly underweight and somewhere in between. Which proves that my methods of losing weight aren’t that efficient, but this is not about logic. This is not about doing the right things like eating less or exercising more. This is not about being sensible or healthy or a shining example of mental health. This is not Jamie Oliver and his organic pig testicles.

This is not about looking good on the beach or wanting to be a supermodel. This is not about wanting the cute guy in the coffee shop to beg for your telephone number. This is not about sliding a pair of skinny jeans over your hipbones and laughing all the way to the check out till.

This is not about wanting attention until complete strangers force feed you Black Forest Gateau and siphon double cream into your skinny latte. It is not about deliberately pissing off the nurses by hiding your peas under your fork and stashing butter in the bed pans. It is not about starving for all the children in Africa. It is not about reading the magazines and pining for the Body Mass Index of Paris Hilton’s pet Chihuahua. This is not a conspiracy created by the Patriarchal system to oppress women.

This is about having the self-esteem of a gnat’s arse. This is the polite way of committing suicide. This is about having no life because it’s impossible to order a bowl of dry cereal in a restaurant and ask them to hold the raisins. This is about weighing pasta, cereal, raisins and anything that passes your lips, including toothpaste. This is about secrets and lies and shame. This is about not wanting to admit that you need to eat. That you deserve to live.

This is about being scared. This is about being terrified. Of everything.

This is about control. This is about sex. This is about putting relationships on hold until your thighs don’t meet in the middle and by then you have no libido anyway. This is about hiding under layers of clothing that are mostly black. This is about “Please don’t look at me and cover all the mirrors with black crepe.” This is about avoiding the camera, even at your sister’s wedding. This is about intense self hatred.

This is about needing so much that you can’t stand it. This is about having emotions that bubble up and spill out all over the carpet and stink up the whole house. This is about having too many choices and too much pressure and isn’t it easier just to keep it simple and obsess about the amount of calories in a small cantaloupe? Instead of making big scary choices that might crush you to a pulp?

This is about wanting to be safe. This is about wanting to curl up in a nutshell like Thumbelina and ignore the big bad world that’s too noisy and dangerous and can’t be trusted. This is about not trusting anyone and relying on food (or lack of) to give you an all enveloping comfort blanket when the medication bloats you up like a corpse in a river.

This is about really crappy coping methods. This is about making a choice that will quite possibly kill you. This is about failed relationships, waiting lists, devastated families, waiting lists, becoming vegetarian, becoming vegan, becoming lactose intolerant, developing a wheat allergy and more waiting lists. This is about infertility, rotten teeth, and hollow bones. This is about cardiac arrest in a shopping centre. This is about being sick. This is about not being sick enough. This is about finally being sick enough for a bed in a unit until you drop down dead and you get a mention in the local paper for being such a model student.

This is not about food

(found on this tumblr: http://-shine-a-light-.tumblr.com/

I was doing my normal stalking on Tumblr just a few minutes ago and i stumbled upon something i really...well, let's just say it took me by surprise. At first, i saw that stupid first part and thought, 'oh for god sake. not another one', half expecting to click the link and see yet another one of those pro-ed related posts where there are a load of 'thin commandments' or something along those lines.
However, upon clicking, what i found was quite different. It sort of surprised me like a bullet in the head. I read it. I re-read it and then i read it again, not quite believing what i just read.
I know that it might all be cliche and that we will have all heard snippets of things like this before and thought 'yeah yeah, course i feel like that. don't we all. big wow.' but i honestly do feel like i have been wowed; like someone has just come along and rammed something in to my stomach and pushed the wind right out of me, blasted up from my oesophagus and sent it spewing out of my throat. I feel like i need to gasp for breath.
I mean, come on...we all know i have been in this game long enough to know that its not all about food and its not all about weight. We all know that 'its not about food, its about feelings' but sometimes, for one small piece of writing to 'get you' like this...it sort of brings things back in to perspective.


My life at the moment is literally a constant pattern of one disordered habit followed by another. I eat in a structured way, beat myself up afterwards, make plans to change it, take a bucket load of laxatives, feel bad, eat in a structured way...


It is like once this spin cycle is over, i just rinse and repeat it...I don't get anywhere, i don't move forward but it feels like that is my goal. It feels like by my doing this and by me repeating these behaviours, one day it will change. That's what i keep telling myself; what i keep telling my disorder. And i sometimes even find myself saying that i will be able to change things when i want to.
I want to fucking change things now but i aint doing shit about it.


I guess i don't want to.
I want to want it. I don't know...it sounds like its all much of a muchness but i guess you really do have to want change enough. And i guess i don't. Eurgh. God thats depressing...
Sorry.

"One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. 'Which road do I take?' she asked. 'Where do you want to go?' was his response. 'I don't know', Alice answered. 'Then', said the cat, 'it doesn't matter.'"

Today, i swear i have seen my bathroom door more than i have seen anything else.

All i have done is run back and forth. I shat myself twice, cried once and went so dizzy on the way to the toilet that i fell in to the door. I had to sit down in the shower because i went dizzy as fuck and i have a funny feeling something might be slightly wrong. Not because of all of the above but because of something else.

I don't want to go in to it too much because i am thinking i am probably over-exaggerating things in my head and so i am going to see if it calms down before i say anything. Too many people read this for me to just whack out something and expect people not to worry about me and about the effects that this life is having on me right now.

Bloodyhell, i was thinking back earlier. I was only thinking back as far as the beginning of the year. I wasn't 'well' in the way that i WAS taking laxatives and i was bingeing on a daily basis and puking but, in my head, i would say i was healthier than i am now.

I remember New Year really well because i travelled down to spend a week with a really close friend. It was the first time we had met and so obviously it was all really exciting. Things were far from normal in that i was still very aware of myself and of hiding my body from everyone but, as bad as it felt then, it is nothing compared to now.

Now, i am in the house maybe 6 days a week. I am taking laxatives every single day, restricting what i eat and feeling the intense shame when and if i do have something. I am so consumed by this thing that i can't hold up a conversation. I can't leave the house some days. I can't look in the mirror. I can't wear anything that shows my figure. I can't wear old clothes because they scare me. I don't know what i am scared of anymore. I don't know what triggered this to come back so strongly

I don't know what it is going to take for me to stop this. For it to stop. Is it going to take me having some sort of heart attack? Losing part of my intestine? Pooing blood? Blood pressure problems? Fainting? Death? How fucking far am i actually going to let this go? Seriously?

I wish i knew the answer. Or maybe i do and it is the answer that i am so scared of.

Often, my sister wonders what is worse; Anorexia or Bulimia. I want to have an answer to the question but, in reality, they both feel like the worst when you're so in them that you don't see a way out but then when you are in the other side, you can't imagine feeling any worse. Does that make sense? Probably not.

Basically, right now, i am going to ignore the FEELINGS of my eating disorder because i know that they are going to be very dominant anyways, like always. And they are going to feel worse now because...well, just stick with me on this. I am finding it hard to articulate what i am trying to say. What i know to be true is that things, behaviour-wise, are worse than they have ever been. Ever.

I was thinking about things today and i was thinking about how stuck i feel and how obviously sad i am to be in this situation but i am holding on to it for dear life. I am still working to be thinner, because being thinner is going to make me happier, isn't it? No. No it is not. I just wish i could snap out of this mindset and in to some sort of healthier place. I wish i could say to myself that being thinner is not going to make me any happier. Well, i can say that to myself if i want to. Saying it is the easiest part. It's the believing part that i am struggling with.

How do i make myself believe something that is so foreign to everything that goes through my mind right now?

Even writing this i feel stupid because i am thinking 'what a load of shit. a fat girl can't say these things' but this is my blog and i can say whatever the fuck i want so i am riding this out. I need to get something down on ...not paper, but you know what i mean. I need to see the pixelated remains of my mushed up brain; to see it in front of my very eyes.

That's probably the question. Do you have to see something to believe it? Or do you have to believe in something before you can see it?

Are you scared enough yet?

Shall i let you in on a little secret? I don't admit to this often because admitting my fear is, to me, what crying is to men. I am fucking terrified of telling people i am scared and admitting that i have fucked up. I'll be the first to admit that i have fucked up. Heck. I have had to do it a fair few times, i have it off to a fine art. But when i have to admit that i am scared; that  i don't actually have any sort of control over anything anymore, it scares the shit out of me. Just typing this is scaring me.

Allow me to elaborate.

I am not sure where to start or where this blog is headed. Maybe i will just write whatever choses to leave my fingertips and then see what happens? Yes. Plan, stan, Batman.

This is the link that has brought me to write this blog tonight. Well, it is 5am in the morning but shush. Right, so i clicked this after a girl posted the link on Facebook and i was interested. I began reading it and quickly realised that this was not your everyday, run of the mill, teeny tiny bones and eating disorder cliched shit that i have read so many times before. This was a deeply moving, three page long story of a woman's grief and despair when her daughter died of Bulimia. Fucking BULIMIA! Eurgh. At the beginning of the article, i was worried. I am often sickeningly triggered by this sort of crap (that THIN documentary triggered the absolute shit out of me and fucked me up proper. Horrid documentary!) and i was just, i don't know, apprehensive, i think.

However, i began reading and i was drawn in to this world of turmoil. I was shown just how much this woman loved her daughter and i was sort of seeing something slightly differently. You probably would have missed this moment if you had blinked but it was there. I was sat reading it in complete silence. It was like reading somebody close to you's diary. It was like taking a peak into the mind of a parent, a parent that has watched or is watching their child fade before their eyes. I don't mean fade in the physical sense of the word, as such. I mean fade from the inside out, like when you suck all of the life out of someone and you can see in their eyes that they aren't actually in there anymore. Not bright enough to be seen anyway. There is something in there but it is being powered by some whole other being, like some alien that has managed to possess your child's body. The body you created and fed, bathed, loved, hugged. This body that you know every mole on, you know exactly the moment they were born and you know that you wont forget the time they first rode their bike, the time they fell over and you applied your lips to their virgin skin. You kissed their tiny knee and everything was better.

I can't even imagine the feeling of helplessness that parents must experience when they watch this alien move in and erase their 'Before' son or daughter and replace them with this unknown, unbelievable, unpredictable disease.

Because you do get replaced. I will be the first to stand up and scream at you that 'I AM NOT MY EATING DISORDER' but, in most ways, you do become it because it becomes you. You wake and your first waking thought is disordered. You will plan your day around your morning weight or how you feel. You will plan everything, down to the final calorie. You will record everything in a mental or physical log. You will know exactly what you weighed yesterday but you probably wont know what day yesterday was. You'll forget everything you were because you are so consumed by everything you believe that you are. Life seems to hurt, like knives stabbing into you repeatedly. You can't actually imagine a life out of this rut and even if, on the rare occasions, you manage to realise you can get out, it is too hard to see how.

Basically, reading this article and gazing upon the quotes from the mother, the father and the brother of this girl, i just...Well, i felt the lump in my throat and then i felt the first tear drop from my eyelid and they just wouldn't stop coming. I just...they were fear. My tears were fear. I didn't like it because it was a foreign sort of fear. Not the sort that you tend to experience regularly. Like, it was in my chest and in my legs and just...it was everywhere. It IS everywhere and i could cry for weeks.

This poor girl was born in the same year as me. We were the same age. Had the same problems and it just...well, the same could happen, potentially. I know 'it'll never happen to me' but it could. That is what i need to fucking realise. IT COULD HAPPEN TO ME. And it COULD happen to you. It could happen to any of us. I don't want this to happen. I don't want this to keep happening to so many people around the world. And i don't want to be thinking the things i am thinking,

I am sat on my bed as i type this. I have my blanket wrapped around me for protection and i have my laxatives, ready to be taken.

I want this to stop

and i want to be shocked out of this

but i don't know if i will

or if i can be

I just want this to be over.

And i know i sound like a fuckin' drama queen but, quite frankly, i needed to vent.

I constantly moan and i don't ever tell you about the things in my life that actually keep me going. Sometimes, when you are in the grips of mental illness, you lose sight of the bigger picture and are purely concentrating on the here and now, the there and then. The larger picture scares you, it scares me. I am terrified of where i could end up and i am terrified of where i am now. I like to think about the things i have that are so important to me, but it is difficult when i am so low. I read things, and they touch my heart, pull on my strings and make me teary.

I know that being stuck in the here and now can be quite a problem, but we all need to think about the future at some point. Ignoring something, is never going to make it go away. And so, ignoring the future is just a stupid idea.
I look forward but then i have to cut off the vision, the imagination and the dreams. I don't dismiss them completely but looking forward really scares me. I am scared that this will never ever end. I am scared that Bulimia and Depression is all i am ever destined to be and that this is going to be the thing i am best at. I don't want to be known for my disorders, as such. I would love to look forward and to be able to imagine a time when i am in recovery, when i can be accepting of my body. I just...i am scared. I don't want this to be all that there is and all that i am.

I love life. I hate life.

I wish i could plan blogs. My life is just so interesting and hilarious that i can't ever just pick one thing to blog about. It is just too difficult. The first thing i do want to do is to tell you a few cool things from the past twenty-four hours.
1 - I woke up this morning, still drunk, on the sofa and having wee'd myself. Mint.
2 - I shaved my vagina for the first time in eleven weeks. (My 'real' one, not my coat).
3 - I did the cotton-eyed-Joe dance in the middle of Sheffield Fargate, to an audience, and a live band.
4 - I got drunk three times and suffered two hangovers.
5 - I wee'd a bit too hard on the toilet and sprayed it all over the floor.

Mint.

My new favourite word is 'mint' and 'boom' and erm...

Anywho, back to the topic, Lil-Dawg. Errr.

Eating disorders? hmmm. Oh yeah. I remember. So, today, i have been thinking about the ways in which i can lose weight (shocker, eh?) before my appointment at the eating disorder (ED) clinic. Hahahaha. The irony and pure fucking idiocy of this disorder is ridiculous. I concluded that after today, i am never eating again, again. And i have scheduled in a laxative binge tomorrow, which means that calories today do not matter. Now, either i lose at least 20lbs before the 12th of April, or i cancel my appointment and decide that cake is way more important that 'recovery'.


Geri Halliwell was on that Piers Morgan thing tonight and i feel sad. I didn't watch it, Dog no! I did, however, get fucking mad. I feel like shit right now and celebrities playing the 'I was closer to death than you' game is just rubbing vinegar in my wound. I am so sick of that game. Plus, if Robbie Williams saved me, id have ended up killing myself anywho. Like, seriously, your Bulimia was cured by a druggie? Are you trying to get a story in Pick Me Up?

I have mood swings like a bitch right now. Today has been a good example of this. I have been giddy as a bitch all day and then i came crashing. Oh my Dog. I googled 'mood swings' and it mentioned something about ADHD. I really hope i have ADHD because then they prescribe you speed and speed makes you lose weight. Dog, i would bum being speedy. I wont lie to you (LK ;)), i have been tempted to go on speed many times, to aid weight loss. Erm.

On a side note, i bum the 'Would you rather...' game, and Florence & The Machine.

I have a question. Why, at school, did my teacher always say that you should never ever use a comma and then say 'and' afterwards. Is that an actual rule? I think it is stupid if it is. I mean, i know how to spell and i know that i use small i's a lot but there is reason for this. I can smell (haha, spell) because i am good. I put little 'i's' instead of big ones because when i was in the heaven (also known as Anorexia *spittts*), i didn't want to be big and so 'i' made more sense than 'I'. hahahahahahahahahaahahahahahahah. I haven't typed that before. I only ever explained it to Condom but she gets me. Thank fuck.

The end.