Having a breakdown is pretty tiring…

So last night everything became too much. I sat on the kitchen floor, crying, shaking, breathing fast and feeling dizzy and trapped until the early hours. I don’t remember the last time I felt that alone. I wanted not to be here, for everything to go away. I woke up this morning with a headache and was so emotionally messed up that I couldn’t go to college.

Pretty crap to be honest.

After a day of being alone most of the time I am ready to face tomorrow. It WILL be a better day, I need to just keep going until my life is less stressful and I can sort my head out more. Right now I just don’t have the time or energy, but I have to keep getting through each day somehow.

Time for bed I think..

I’ve made a decision.

I have finally realised that neither anorexia or bulimia make me feel good. The only way to truy have control of my body is to stop flipping between eating disorders. One always leads to the other and I am perpetually on edge about it all. I’m not saying I can wake up tomorrow morning and be calm, happy and recovered, but right now, I am making these promises to myself:

1. not to eat below or above my calorie range
2. not completely starve myself on a really stressful day
3. to not take laxatives
4. to eat as calmly as possible

Muddle.

My emotions are all over the place at the moment. It is a stressful time anyway, because the next academic year is currently completely unknown, which s terrifying! I have had a few bulimic episode over the last weeks, and ending up exercising for hours, taking loads of tablets to get it out of me and/or failing to throw up very much and so self harming.

I’m no supposed to be harming though, so I have done my best to follow through the plan I made with my therapist to avoid that part….

One moment, I feel worthless, fat, like nothing will ever make me feel good, wishing I didn’t exist; then are moments when it is kinda ok and I don’t feel like such a weirdo who is outside normal teenage life. It is so confusing!

I just need some consistency right now because so many things are out of my control, therefore it seems even worse than usual if food doesn’t go EXACTLY how I want it to one day. I just can’t keep on like this, but it isn’t a choice. I am too stressed, too emotional and too surrounded by people that don’t know me well enough for me to try to get better.

humph.

Money really does make the world go round…

There is one very scary thought playing on my mind right now: not knowing whether or not I will have the funding to continue studying next year.

Getting a place at a good performing arts school is massively competitive, and after managing it last year, I’m terrified that money will stop me carrying on. I work hard, I have passion & I have got good marks so far….how is it fair that the government gives university students with poor grades a loan for a degree, but no loan for the institution I am at?

I hate that this situation is so out of my control. It is just so so so unfair and unsettling. I really hope that a solution appears, because this is what I am supposed to be doing.  I don’t want to do anything else with my life, and I shouldn’t have to now that I’ve come this far…

On a happier note, I have held myself together (sort of) despite all this crap going around in my head today.

Speaking my mind.

My binges and purging (usually through laxatives and exercise as I’m rarely able to be sick) are always a result of my restrictive anorexia. Before having a restrictive eating disorder I never ate out of control, ate quickly or had the urge to eat loads. Until today, I never told anybody LITERALLY what happens. I found myself saying that “I ate loads in one go, had to rid of it and then sat in a panicked state, unable to physically move when I was unable to do so. No money for laxatves, unable to be sick and not feeling like I could ever do enough exercise…”

I have never been so open about what goes on in the short binge phases I experience, and I feel so relieved. I have admitted that I DO have a problem in that respect, and while it isn’t its own entity- more a biological and psychological response to deprivation- I do need to address it in order to reach the ultimate “middle” of eating well and being mentally ok.

I am not yet in a place to contemplate not losing more weight, and so I am going to accept that, but create a calorie range, so there is a bottom to my restriction. That way I will still lose weight, but be “allowed” a certain amount… this will be new to me, as throughout my problem with food, lowering the calories has been a constant focus. What I have learned is that 100-300 calories less a day barely speeds up the weight loss at all anyway!

5 THINGS I WILL DO IF I FEEL LIKE I AM GOING TO BINGE:

-Think about how I will feel if I do
-Do my favourite breathing exercise
-Listen to music
-Remind myself that I don’t need to “stock up” food, because I have induced the deprivation and I know I am going to get x calories tomorrow anyway. Know that my body is programmed to survive, but the instinct to eat large amounts in unnecessary in society where food is readily available
-Call someone and talk about anything! This is good because it proves food doesn’t have to control my llife

I feel like I have just had a massive revelation! Never using clear language has stopped me from fully admitting to anybody the truth of this side of my illness. So I will say it again and see it in black and white:

My anorexic brain wishes me to be perfect. When biology eventually cuts in, my instinct makes me eat and eat. The eating disorder makes me guilty, get rid of the food, and perpetuate the cycle. When the phase ends, I am back to restricting all the time and so pretend I have never binged. Like most people. I HAVE BINGED. I am not proud of it, and have hidden it by wrapping the statement in cotton wool when speaking to others. Now this is a fact, I can break that cycle. Then I only have the one (starvation)  cycle left to break.

Green tea..

Recently discovered I like green tea! I have sat here and researched detoxing and decided to do a green tea only detox tomorrow. Obviously the feeling of lightness appeals from an ed point of view, but I also just need to stop everything; stop thinking, stop doing too many things, stop feeling like I can’t get everything done. I need I day of ticking things off the to do list in a CALM and EFFORTLESS way. I’m going to sleep some of the day too and just chill out and breathe a bit… 

Nobody ever gets the full story.

I feel so alone- partly because I actually am right now! But seriously, nobody ever hears me say the WHOLE truth. My housemates know I have an eating disorder, but they don’t understand what that entails. and sitting in my room crying because  was unable to make myself sick isn’t exactly something I want to explain. 

I just hate that my whole life is a limited bubble of activities, dictated by how I’m feeling about food and my body at a particular moment in time. I am exhausted, stressed and still have to make myself exercise. I don’t care about myself right now and I would be a burden to someone if I were to call someone to talk. Why do I do this to myself?

Why do I cause myself so many horrible feelings?

Triggering disorder rambling.

As the title explains, please don’t read this if you might be triggered by it….

I am just so in pain right now: my stomach hurts, my head hurts, my whole body hurts with worry, anger, upset. I know that I have fasted before, and so I can do it again.

Nobody else would support that but I don’t give a damn what anybody else thinks about anything right now. If I fast, I categorically WILL feel better (even though I shouldn’t, I know that I will…)

Tonight I need to organise my stuff for a busy day tomorrow, start a brand new food journal (in accordance with my revised eating rules), and write some positive post its and stick them round my room! Oh… and drink some green tea to try and soothe my physical pain. I actally want to die at the thought of everything falling apart again tomorrow, so it better not. 

Being left alone

I often long for my 5 housemates go to out, so that I don’t have to see anyone and worry they think I’m fat. “If they go out, you can cook alone, eat alone, everything will be perfect” is what the voice tells me…

This past weeks has blown that theory out the water. As I’m so rarely alone, my habitual state is to be planning and calculating when I can take food from the cupboard/ cook/ eat and not be seen, so being alone somehow just makes me binge (or what feels like bingeing as it has reached around double my normal amount) Even if my binge amount would be considered normal to others i FEEL out of control during these episodes.. 😦

In a way it makes sense: I subconsciously don’t know when I will be able to eat without the rushing and on edge feeling of there being 5 others in the house, so there’s probably some biological trigger for my body to store food while it can. What doesn’t help is that I am stressed anyway, so my reaction to eating is to immediately try to throw up & when that fails exercise obsessively and take laxatives. I am so frustrated that living with 5 others makes my relationship with food more difficult AND that when they are gone food stuff is almost worst. 

When we are all in the house I want them to be gone, but now they have gone and this has happened, I am afraid of being alone in the house. So what if a short period of eating more can’t scientifically change how fat you look? Cos it feels shit anyway. I feel like a child… confused and scared, but nobody can protect me from myself. I am the one who has these thoughts and reacts to them, but I feel powerless to stop them. I wish somebody else could stop everything for me.