Turning point?

I get mood swings… Big ones. I know that depression and ed’s do this to lots of people, so in my therapy session yesterday I was trying to be sarcastic and brush off the hard things that happened this week, and then it all came to a head. I find it hard to touch things that have been touched by others, and yesterday I completely froze when asked to pick the pen up off the table. My thoughts were so much that I couldn’t even hear them. I couldn’t move or talk. 

All of a sudden I was just so angry that I couldn’t pick up a fucking pen! It’s ridiculous! I then became more angry at myself for not being thin enough and for failing for years now at achieving that. I felt like if I couldn’t do anything right then why the hell am I alive. 

“What are you thinking right now?”

Me: I just want to die. 

“What would you do?”

Me: I have loads of meds. I want to take them all and end it. 

“Do you feel like you could reach out to someone later if this feeling continued?”

Me: I don’t think I want to. Not being here would end all the problems. I can’t continue having to do all these things when I don’t even have any control afterwards. 

“You are suffering and I think you need to talk more. We can’t talk now but I’m going to ask a colleague and then I think you need to go to the hospital. What do you think about that?”

Me: I don’t think anything. I’m sorry. 

I spent a long time in hospital yesterday and spoke to several people. The despair in that moment was too much to handle alone. Today I’m left with the shock of how my mood deteriorated so fast, and also how easily a suicidal thought became a solid idea in my mind. 

One of my biggest difficulties with recovery is my belief that I’m not sick enough to merit change, but I think yesterday was a turning point. I’m going to spend my whole life going through these crisis points if I can’t get better. I must be ill. 

So many things that I can’t think of a title..

1. Loving food

What a lot of people find hard to understand, is just how obsessed you can be with food, in spite of being totally determined to control it. While I count calories, weigh food, and generally spend almost my whole day calculating the exact amount of exercise I need to do to earn the food I have planned for the day, I LOVE food. I love to cook, I love to read recipes or calories books, I love to bake cake, I love to watch anything food related. 

In my head, I plan meals and dinners that I would never eat, and I love seeing other people eat the unhealthy foods that I wouldn’t indulge in myself (apart from when deprivation turns into a frantic “binge”, or what feels like one even if it isn’t in calorie terms.)

I guess that I have always loved food; always been one to find something I liked a lot, and then go through phases of constantly eating whatever my favourites were at the time. My eating disorder has definitely heightened my feelings about food, but I have, on some level, always had quite specific likes and dislikes. 

Now I think about it, perhaps it is my love of food that has helped trigger my disorder. If you’re going to punish yourself, they you deprive yourself of something you love, right?

2. Mental illness and getting on with life all at once

I feel extremely negative, down, angry and/or tearful on a regular basis. Sometimes it is just for a snippet of the day, and other times my utter hopelessness dominates lengthy periods of time. I have stayed in the house for days because of these feelings, yet I always seem to manage to shove it all to the back of my mind and carry on with life. My depression, anxiety, and eating issues have not taken away everything from my life, but they are so mentally overwhelming, that I am unable to devote a minute to anything without all of that crap being there too. I am perpetually waiting for one of the “outburst” days/hours to come- and they do, frequently.

At the moment, I keep finding myself google searching medication for depression and anxiety, so I must know I have problems but I simultaneously find myself thinking that I’m just a weak idiot and/or that there are so many people who are properly depressed or anxious and I don’t know what I’m talking about.

I know somebody who is currently in a mental health unit in hospital. Of course, this saddens me because this person is lovely, but I’m also having a weird feeling of jealousy. What the hell? I don’t know whether that is because I feel desperate for help, desperate for somebody to just get me out of the not knowing whether I’m “ill” or not, or just because if I were to be inpatient then nobody would disbelieve I have problems (not that anybody has told me they think I’m a liar.)

So. very, confused…

3. Mood swings

I am beginning to wonder whether it is normal to feel intensely irritated/irritable, cross and sad 5 minutes before feeling almost hyper with bubbliness. Weird times.

Random thoughts (same as usual really!)

I have a big rant to go on to start with, so going to get that out the way first…

Today I saw a friend who I haven’t seen for quite a while. She asked me how things were going ed/ depression/ anxiety wise, and I said that they were up and down but “fine”. Obviously they aren’t, as I feel totally unstable, but it wasn’t the time to say! Her response was “well you’re obviously doing some things right, like, you haven’t ended up in hospital”

My ed reaction to this was OH MY GOD SHE DOESN’T THINK I’VE LOST WEIGHT, SHE MUST THINK I’M FAT. This thought has been playing on my mind since the moment she said it. I suppose she may not have been referring to weight at all- I hope now! But I just hear the ed telling me that I’m tricking myself into being ok if I believe that.

On quite a different note, my evening ended with a family member commenting how thin I have gotten since I was home at Christmas. As usual, I couldn’t formulate a response and just kinda shrugged. Part of me is delighted at their statement, while part of me wants to curl up in a hole of confusion as I get less and less able to know what the hell I actually look like anymore!

My next worry is the coming weekend. I’m going with my parents to another town to see some relatives. We are going out to lunch. I don’t have to eat, but after the “are you eating? you’ve gotten thin” fiasco this evening, maybe people will leave me be if I do eat? But then there’s the possiblity I might have a panic attack if I try which I frankly don’t have the energy for at the moment. Ah what to do?!

I’ve been thinking a lot today about how food impacts my family generally. Since a young age, eating out and eating bad foods has always been a treat, a birthday thing, a celebration of an achievement. And I guess I do classify food as a treat, yet it has become something that I can never do enough to earn. Both my parents have quite focused relationships with their bodies and food: one has been phasey and researched into health and dieting extensively, while the other has only recently managed to successfully lose excess weight. My whole life I have watched the latter do a hundred and one different diets and always put the weight (and more) back on when it eventually fell apart.

I would never blame anybody else for my problems, but I suppose it isn’t surprising that I have developed pride in being able to lose weight & attached a sense of achievement and necessity in doing so. Couple that with a perfeccionist personality and lack of confidence and BAM…

As it is 11.30 pm I think it is time for bed. Zzzzzz

You know you have a messed up mind when a bit of you wants to be in hospital.

I know more than one person who has been hospitalised because of their eating disorder. For one of those people the inpatient time was only 2 weeks long. I don’t know what happened to initiate them going into hospital, but I just keep thinking that a fortnight is really not long at all, so maybe I would feel better if that happened to me…

I feel like an absolute idiot for even having the tiniest wish to go into hospital, but I can’t deny that it is there, and so I am writing to get it out. 

I have thought about this for a long time, and on days when I feel very low, having the validation of my disorder by being in hospital seems so appealing. Realistically speaking, I don’t want my life to be put on hold,.yet sometimes that is what I want more than anything else in the world. Sometimes everything just feels too much and I sit in a heap on the floor unable to do anything.

The “dream” would be to be fully eating disordered and function normally- obviously not an option- so when my issues are really getting in the way of my life, I feel like if I could finally hit the bottom of my ed then I could come back out of it and get on with being normal… The thing is, there is no bottom. There is always I way I feel I could be sicker, thinner, more depressed etc. There will always be somebody worse than me.

I guess part of my current worry, is that I am in a relatively new environment, full of people that mostly do not understand anything about any kind of mental,illness at all, and so it feels necessary and like it would be an “achievement” to prove to them that I really do have an eating disorder. 

Right now I am also waiting for one very, very important letter, which will probably determine what I’m doing for the next few years. I know that I will get this just before the end of the month. With that in mind, my focus is on hoping that it will say what I want to, so that I can relax knowing that my future is sorted out for a while. 

Once I read that letter (and if it is the outcome I hope for) then I will feel like I don’t need to keep holding things together, as I have been for the last months. If that pressure is relieved then I can relax a little.

The day I get that letter is also the day that I go home for Easter- busy time hey!? I have quite a long holiday and all I can think about is getting noticeably thinner for the new term.

Reading this all back just makes me feel silly. I know how bad it is to think like this, but right now there is so much pressure in my life that I can’t stop it. I WANT it there. I WANT to be eating disordered. I can’t let go of it now because it is the only thing I am holding on to.

If I get good news in that letter AND I lose lots over Easter, then I will tell my therapist I need the more intensive treatment option. Sorry to anyone who is reading all this non-nonsensical babbling, but hey, I wrote this to be a place to figure things out, and I have: I am as messed up as ever, I wish I weren’t, but right now I feel that I need and want to be. however much I want to get on with being normal.