Hello my friends!
I’m continuing to do well in my recovery and wanted to post a link to my poetry blog. I haven’t shared it yet. I rarely write about my eating disorder, but poetry is an outlet for me.
If you’d like to read it, follow the link below.
http://www.nomehadejado.weebly.com
Best to you all.
Things are changing.
For one thing, I’m eating more regularly than I have in over a decade. I’m not yet over one meal a day, but I’m eating one full meal, and I feel okay. My goal is to get to three. I have not purged in over a week.
For another, I’m probably changing majors. I feel called to go from a Theatre major and a Spanish minor to a Spanish major with a concentration in teaching English as a second language. I’ve felt called to do this for years but am just now looking at pursuing it.
I may keep the Theatre minor, I don’t know. I’m also starting to look into Africana studies (also something I’ve been interested in for years) and gender and women’s studies. I can’t make up my mind and I’m trying to pray about each one and get some guidance from Someone who knows more than me.
That is an issue in itself- the changing majors. I’ve built my life around Theatre, but I feel god tugging on my heart strings and I know I have to listen. Theatre will always be my hobby and my passion, but I am feeling so called to serve that I just can’t ignore it anyone. Teaching ESL was my major in 2011, so it’s less of a change and more of a shift back. Interestingly enough, I’m not afraid because I know Who goes before me. I’m choosing to truly believe that if God is calling me in one direction, then He will provide.
I think this is know as letting go, as recovery. I’m seeing it more as authenticity with myself and with my God. There are so many more important things in this broken world than the private hell I created for myself. I’m no longer seeing the value in being the sickest or the thinnest, and I’m ready to become the person I’m meant to be.
I’ll be leaving this blog up and may still update it, as I don’t have an unrealistic expectation of my recovery. but I’m just not seeing the value in documenting step after exhausting step deeper into myself. I am not doing anyone any amount of good by staying with my addictions. I want to be in the world. I want to hold the hurting and the helpless and to show people hope. Specifically, I want to teach ESL abroad. I want to visit Sevilla, which has inspired my next tattoo (NO8DO. It symbolizes “No me ha dejado,” or “It has not left me.” The phrase reminds me of hope. Hope has not left me).
Like my eating disorder, this blog served (and may continue to serve) a purpose for me. It was expression and connection and understanding. I’m finding ways to get those things in my daily life now, through school and church. I no longer need to write about my struggles anonymously because I’m no longer ashamed.
I may open another blog about my journey through recovery and through my dramatic changes at school. If I do, I’ll post a link on this page.
The friendships I’ve made online have been beautiful and wonderful. You all have touched my heart and have kept me afloat during the hardest of times. If you want to add me on Facebook so we can keep in touch, copy and paste the following link: http://www.twitter.com/losing_shae
That’s my twitter handle. My Facebook is linked in my header. I would love to hear how each of you, especially my regular readers, are doing.
The skeptic in me says to not hold your breath and see if I can last in recovery for more than a month or so. The hope in me says that I’ve had quite enough of being miserable and sick, and that I’m ready to go back to the land of the living. I’m already walking there. Sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, but I’m on my way.
You can, too. You can be okay. Although at times it feels like the deepest pit of hell, the depth of an eating disorder is actually nothing more than a line in the sand. When you’re ready, step out and come join me in the light. I’ll be waiting for you. It’s so much better out here.
Not surprisingly, I injured myself again recently. I am extremely clumsy, and it’s not unusual for my legs to be covered in bruises or small cuts. They are not usually self-inflicted. On Monday, I twisted an ankle badly to the point that they think it is fractured. I’m not surprised; I have osteopenia (early stage of osteoporosis) and break or fracture bones often. My ankle hurts so badly that it’s distracting. I have a follow up appointment tomorrow.
The pain in my ankle is so severe that I was sent home today from the theatre by my tech director. Instead of going back to my dorm, I binged and purged. It speaks to the compulsion factor of my eating disorder — I wasn’t hungry and had eaten one full meal earlier that day. Granted, I know my body needed food physically, but I wasn’t hungry. I binged out of habit and compulsion. I hate myself for it. The pain in my ankle was so severe that I couldn’t purge past a certain point because I literally couldn’t stand with that much pressure on my foot for more than a few minutes at a time. That was a low point for me. The osteopenia was onset by my eating disorder, and now it is taking away from my symptoms. I find it ironic.
I wasn’t hungry tonight at 0100 hours when I decided to go down to the basement of my building and microwave some frozen broccoli. I wanted to eat because I am bored and because I am stressed, which is terrible to me. Having well exceeded my self-imposed calorie limit today, I shouldn’t eat for another two days to compensate. Anyway, I walked down two flights of stairs to the basement, which is no small thing given the state of my right leg, and put my broccoli in the microwave. While waiting, I opened the freezer out of curiosity and found ice cream, which quickly turned into a very small binge. I was shocked. I had come down stairs to eat broccoli and suddenly had half a pint of someone else’s ice cream in my hands. The words “complete loss of control” and “fat ass” went screaming through my head as I tore off to the bathroom. It was bizarre. I haven’t done anything like that in years, really. I felt like I was thirteen again but I can’t explain why.
It’s just that I’m still here. Nearly eleven years after purging initially and I am still stealing food from the communal freezer and throwing it up. Eleven years later, and my knuckles are still swollen. I am stuck in the same fucking cycle and I can’t break it no matter how hard I try. I’m so frustrated with myself that I want to scream. I smell like vomit and it’s 0136 hours.
The problem with eating disorders is that they are both a mental illness (or a variety of mental illnesses) and a process addiction. If we can stop the addictive behavior, the root cause is still underneath and you will eventually relapse, in some form or another. If you’ve done the years of therapy and you have a good grasp on the mental illness, you can’t break the addictive cycling. I need someone to make everything stop for a little while just so I can breathe. I need someone to tell me what to do next.
I think I’m always going to be like this. I am trying harder than I ever have, and I’m still here. I don’t think I’ll ever come out.
I haven’t had time to write in such a long time. I have been stage managing a production through my college with a guest director from New York City. It was a wonderful experience that lead to me being offered an internship in New York City starting mid-June this summer. I’ll be Production Managing a small scale film. I’m thrilled; not a lot of 19 year olds get this kind of offer, especially because my food and boarding will be provided by the company. I’m nervous and excited and overwhelmed. I don’t know much experience in film, but the director has enough faith in me to figure out what I need to be doing. I also have to get my act together by way of food before I leave. I’ll be living with the director and his girlfriend, both of whom I know and feel comfortable living with, but I can’t have such heavy eating disorder symptoms. We’ll be in a small apartment in Manhattan. I won’t be able to hide. I need to be stable enough to work, and stability requires food.
I came to that conclusion and reached out to my dietitian. She sent me a meal plan, and I’ve been trying to follow it for at least one meal a day. The complicated thing is that I really, desperately want to be recovered, but I literally can’t stop my symptoms. I have no control over my symptoms. It is terrifying and frustrating. I want to stop but I can’t.
So- that’s where I am now and where I’ve been for quite some time. I’ve gained weight and now am in a healthier range, which is very difficult for me emotionally. I hate the skin I’m in, but I know that I cannot lose any more weight before going off to New York City. I’m trying as hard as I can, but it’s never enough.
It’s never enough.
Who found my blog by searching “I gained 5 pounds and want to kill myself,” my heart breaks for you. Although I deeply believe that you are beautiful, exactly as you are, I won’t fill this post with that same-old-same-old. It loses meaning after a while. If you don’t believe that you are beautiful, it can be exhausting to hear people try to stop your spiral with three well intended words. So, though you are beautiful, that is all I’ll say about that.
You are in a place where gaining five pounds makes you lose the will to live, and I am so sorry that you are experiencing this, too. There is no easy answer. There is nothing I can tell you except that you are not alone. You are not the only one who feels this awful feeling. Please take refuge in the thought that there are so many people who understand you and who want to help you. If you were here right now, I would sit with you and hold your hands until you realized how valuable you are. You are metaphysical. You are a miracle. You are valuable.
Child, don’t lose hope that some day this can get so much better. I don’t pretend to know when or how, but I promise that it won’t be this awful forever. Until you see the universe in yourself, you need to find things that you are passionate about and hold on to them. Hold on to others until you are strong and stable and can hold onto yourself.
A few weeks ago, I was (and truthfully still am) battling those same destructive thoughts. My dietitian heard my cry about how much I hate myself, then said to me, “You can keep pursuing these golden hoops you’ve set for yourself, but at what cost?” That’s the thought I leave you with tonight. You can lose those five pounds, but at what cost? What are you willing to lose?
Pick yourself back up. String together your broken pieces on a clothes line and find where they fit. The cost is too high; you are worth so much more than this.
Hold on, hold on to yourself.
S
I don’t have many memories from high school. Years blur into one and I attribute much of this to the severity of my eating disorder and PTSD, both of which were going untreated for much of the time. Reading my old journals from those years often bring with them a sense of amazement (and sometimes loss), as I have no recollection of many of those things happening. It is almost as if I didn’t live those years at all. I do have, however, very vivid and specific memories of certain things, like the time, when I was a sophomore and I reached a new low weight. That evening was a dress rehearsal for my dance company. I remember staring at myself in a full length mirror wearing only my leotard and tights and feeling that bizarre and almost inexplicable mixture of disgust and pleasure. If you don’t have an eating disorder, that mixture of emotions will make no sense to you. Do not seek it out. I hope you never have to experience it.
One memory from my senior year in high school has been haunting me particularly over the last few weeks. I had been accepted into the college I am currently attending, and was at a scholarship competition. My father and I drove to the closest city to the school and booked a hotel room. My memory gets fuzzy here, as I know I was alone in that hotel room, but I have no idea where my father was at the time. What I do remember is sitting on the bathroom tiles and overdosing on laxatives and stolen medications from my friends. I took handfuls, not because I wanted to die, but because I knew from experience that my body could handle what I was taking. I must have passed out; I woke up some time later, in the early morning the following day, with my head hung over the bathtub. I binged and purged that morning, then went off to the scholarship competition. I won one of five scholarships that were being offered, still strung out from whatever I took the night before. I remember listening to the song “Not An Addict” on repeat as I got ready for the competition.
I drive by that hotel on my way to therapy and try not think about how three years have passed and nothing has changed.
These are the things they don’t tell you about. There is desperation in this place. There is a yearning to go back or forward or just to move anywhere because I am just so sick of living to die, and still unable to change the trajectory that I have set for myself.
Things are blurring still. I can feel them slipping away from me. Sometimes I feel like my brain is crumbling and like I’m retreating to that inner place again- that place of overdosing and mania and attempt after fruitless attempt to take my own life. It is no coincidence that I am bingeing and purging like a maniac again; these things have always gone in tandem. I don’t want to go back to that place. I feel like a voice is screaming inside of me, You have to wake up, S, over and over. But I’m not waking up. I’m not even speaking- not out loud, not even in writing. This blog and my journal have been uncharacteristically quiet lately. There has been too much noise in my head to make any sense of anything. And still, I think there is a part of me that is afraid to give these things words. I don’t want this to be real.
I feel like I’m losing my mind.
Tomorrow, March 22, 2013, is one year since the car accident. Currently, it’s 12 minutes until tomorrow.
I think that I’m just overwhelming myself preemptively. Tomorrow is just another day- another 24 hours that are going to come and go, just like every other 24 hours that I’ve survived up until now. I keep telling myself I’ve survived worse: I made it through 2007, for God’s sake, I made it through the disaster of living in Utah, and, especially, I made it through the accident. I can make it through this day.
I’m not going to my classes tomorrow. I’m taking a mental health day. I’ll do my laundry, finish my paper work, and rest. I can’t deal with Statistics on a normal day, and frankly I don’t see the point in putting myself through my tedious classes on a day such as tomorrow. (7 minutes.)
I’m taking a deep breath, remembering my coping skills, and leaving myself sticky notes to remind me to stay present. I have my therapist’s cell phone number, and although I really don’t want to call her, it’s comforting to know that I can reach her if everything goes to shit.
What I have been so far unable to articulate is that the sudden influx of trauma memories isn’t just about the accident. The accident triggers memories from my childhood that I’ve repressed until now. The accident is hard enough to understand and process by itself. I cannot handle dealing with everything at once. And for that reason, I’m not dealing with anything at all.
I’m remembering things now. Things from the accident, things from 2007, things from when I was a young, young girl. Things that I didn’t understand, things that I didn’t even know would haunt me still. I recognize that I was helpless and that I developed an eating disorder at a very young age to help me understand these things. I’m only now understanding how much I use my eating disorder to cope with these things.
It’s all interconnected and so fragile, like a spider’s web. Sometimes I feel like I’m caught like a fly, just waiting to be consumed.
2 minutes until tomorrow and I think I’m going to be sick.
1 minute until March 22, 2013. March 22, 2012 was 364 days, 23 hours, and 59 minutes ago.
The clock just changed.
It’s been one year.
