Instead of Feeling, Instead of Dealing?

I think that for most of my life, the eating disorder and exercise in the form of striving to be a dancer has taken the place of staying with my feelings and with my reality – good and bad. In fact, I think this is a huge function of many people’s eating disorders and also could be true for people with addictions like alcohol, drugs, people who self harm.

I think eating disorders are a smoke screen. I’ve said this before, I know. I look back, and when I was hurting the most in my life, instead I turned to food and weight and ballet.

When the abuse at home and the bullying at school was out of control, I spent every waking hour practising my ballet. I even spent most of the night awake doing quiet exercises in bed or on the floor next to it. My mind was lost in the ballet music I imagined to keep time of each foot exercise or relevé or plié or pirouette. If I was too upset or too anxious or too angry I just counted in time. Counted to a thousand and started again, over and over.

I can see now that I was upset, angry, anxious, lost, scared. I can see that now. Back then, I remember thinking “How strong I am. You have hurt me every way you can, and still I do not show anything. You will not make me cry, you have made me stronger.” I didn’t realise that in fact, I was losing myself bit by bit, becoming stuck inside an armour that I built up bit by bit, then made thicker and stronger. An armour that protected me – but also trapped me. I now have to take  it off – bit by bit so that I can  replace it with real ways to cope.

Now that I’m in my thirties, I’ve noticed for the last couple of years that even though a lot of my feelings have been coming back (and this is scary as I don’t know what a lot of it even is!) I do not feel things anywhere near as intensely as I used to in my teens. I am wondering if any of you have found this, too? Maybe it has something to do with the cocktail of hormones that our bodies are producing at that age as we become adults. Things that used to be the ‘end of the world’ for me, don’t bother me anywhere near as much now.

Maturity is a factor, sure, but it’s not so much about my mind, how I am thinking – it’s FEELING. It’s stuff that doesn’t need words, stuff that can’t even be described with words sometimes. Feelings that could physically hurt. Grief that could leave me keening. Happiness that made me heady and ecstatic over simple little things like a teacher telling me I was doing well. Betrayal felt like being stabbed through the heart – physically. I feel all these things still, just not anywhere near that intensely. They don’t make  me feel like my heart will explode as they used to.

I wonder if things would have been different if back years ago, I’d had the insight I have now to recognise what I was doing? I did not know anything about eating disorders, so when I didn’t eat because of how I felt, or ate to make myself feel better, I didn’t think I was doing anything dangerous. I just couldn’t bear to do anything else right now. I’d eat later and make up for it, or deal with whatever was wrong later. Problem was that later I was too busy or felt as bad or the food was off. Also my mother was extremely controlling with food, and when I did not eat a battle would erupt, but when I wanted to eat, that wasn’t easy either.

I often feared having it found out that I did not eat my breakfast in the mornings or my lunch at school – throwing food in the bin seemed to get me caught out every time. The teachers would notice, or my older sister would tattle tale on me. Same for giving it away or swapping with others. So breakfasts were squished down the kitchen sink and uneaten lunches were crammed in on the way home, or left in my bag as I panicked about what to do with them. Too many times I was forced to eat something that was discovered because I had tried to throw it out, or it was just a few days old – really bad, rancid food. “Waste not, want not” was my mother’s mantra, and these experiences really turned me off against eating in general. Food was pushed on me or taken from me. Food was punishment. Food was comfort. Food was reward.

Food was not fuel.

On the other side of the coin, I was always hungry. I went full time as a ballet dancer at fourteen, suddenly going from every other night classes and my own practising to every single day – four or five hours of classes, a few hours of my own work in the studios between, before and after classes, and most of each night doing exercises.  Hunger really stepped up with all the extra movement, so when I wasn’t not eating, I wanted to eat everything in sight.

A particular treat became saving up $1.20 from finding the odd coin on the ground, and then going and buying a packet of jelly beans that I slowly dissolved in my mouth on the two hour journey home. It was my little secret, knowing that my mother would be furious about my ‘transgression’ but it was a mood lifter, somehow I always found enough money when I was feeling particularly low and so jelly beans have become forever linked with self-soothing.

After things imploded, I’d run away from home, found somewhere to live, fallen into the next nightmare and was struggling to cope, the link between food and soothing myself became even stronger.

Every single time that someone hurt me, instead of thinking about it or processing it, or asking for help – my mind did a big switcheroo to numbers. I constantly counted and recited lists of calories, carbohydrates and protein grams per 100g of foods in my head. I constantly planned days of intake in my mind, and how much of each fruit and vegie I would be allowed to two decimal points. I walked and walked and counted as I walked.

Surprisingly my ballet started to falter. I couldn’t leave my problems at the door any more. I was distracted, and that combined with feeling completely self conscious and hating myself and my body, meant that I was never ‘really there’. Looking back I see that a lot of the time I was actually dissociated. When you are nutritionally in trouble and dissociated you aren’t going to dance well. I was also missing classes because I was too distressed about my skin – my face had broken out like a pizza – my weight – I saw a michelin woman wobbling as I tried to dance among a roomful of sticks – and the depression was so debilitating that many days I just could not get out of bed any more. It ended in tears – me being kicked out of the performance strand.

This was the last straw, and from there I fell headfirst  into the  anorexia, and not long after that, into hospital for the first time of many, a cycle I was not to break out of for nearly fifteen years.  Dancing had been the last reason to stay alive, and it was gone.

Throughout my childhood there were offers of help and support. Teachers always seemed to pick up that home was not a good place – constantly they asked me why I was always late, always crying, always filthy dirty? Why didn’t I have tissues or a hanky when I had a cold leading to snotty sniffing and teasing? Why was I sent to school when so unwell? Why didn’t I have this or that necessary item for school? And more direct questions – what was going on at home? What did my mother do all day? How did she treat me? Where did we live, and who lived with us?And Was everything okay at home, you can talk to me any time? All questions I had been coached to answer, and I couldn’t even begin to think of saying Yes, please, I need help, things are unbearable. That they constantly hurt me or neglected me or made me feel awful about myself. They were my family, and I couldn’t turn them in, it would be the ultimate betrayal. And it must have been my fault any way for being so ‘bad’. Or I’d really cop it if I said something and it got back to them. If I was taken away by the child services I would be beaten up in the foster home.. all sorts of things I was scared of. So I declined help and support, insisted that everything was fine til I was blue in the face. And denied to myself that I wasn’t coping at all. 

We can spend our lives ‘running’ from what we can’t deal with for a long time, but not forever. Life has a way of forcing you to stop and face your own shit head on. In my case it was by breaking me down completely, bringing me to my knees in every possible way. I was completely captive to something that was killing me just because I could not face up to my troubles, and it came down to the choice to live or die – I couldn’t avoid this  choice any more by living in the limbo of denial that I’d been in for years. My body simply couldn’t survive any more. Either I started fighting to save myself, or I WOULD die.

And it’s hard. I don’t think there is a right way or a wrong way to deal with the past. I think there’s only YOUR way. There’s so much to learn, so much to admit to yourself. There’s accepting what happened. Accepting that you are a mess. Accepting that you need help. Getting off your high horse and realising it won’t kill you to stop pretending you are fine, but it’s sure going to kill you to keep on doing it. Dignity can be so overrated.

So here I am, I came to the crossroads and I chose the uphill path. Chose the path I should have taken every time I came to this crossroads before, every time I insisted “No, I know that’s not the way I need to go, THIS way is” despite having been down that path before and coming to the cliff edge that it led to, requiring me to go back. I wore that path bare with my constant cycling. And now, I stepped off it. 

I don’t know if I’ll be okay from here. But I do know I have a chance to be, now.

Can you see ways that you have used unhelpful ways to cope with feelings or escape from reality in the past? Do you still do this now?

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Kath’s Wisdom On Tackling ED Bit By Bit.

A couple of days ago, I reblogged Surviving Anorexia’s post about how our eating disorders (or whatever coping mechanisms are your way) are our armour, that they do serve a purpose for us, and that when it comes to taking that armour off, we need to do it one bit at a time. Because it’s too overwhelming leaving ourselves totally unprotected and floundering with no new ways of coping to fill in the gaps left by it!

Two of my readers had a really insightful conversation in the comments section – Gel  and Kath of My Funny Little Life discussed how one would go about peeling that armour off bit by bit – how do you tackle a little bit of your eating disorder at a time? I know I’ve always been an ‘all or nothing’ type person, and I know I’m not alone here – so just changing a little bit of something is actually quite a challenge

I was blown away reading this comment of Kath’s, and just as I replied to her saying I wished I could reblog her entire comment, I saw an email from her suggesting the same thing. Great minds hey? I don’t know about that – I totally think Kath is in a class of her own when it comes to that

I’ll let you read her wise words for herself.   

Okay, I’ll try to write a helpful response to this. 

From what you write, I read that you tried to tackle the ED mostly on the behavioral level: stopping the bingeing and purging by means of self-control and discipline. I’ve tried that many, many times, and always failed. I used to make “healthy eating plans” for myself (like, 1800 cals a day, nicely dispersed on several balanced meals), and the longest time I managed to stick with them was 5 weeks. Those were some of the most terrible weeks of my whole life, because I was at the edge of a panic attack 24 hours a day, and my allergy symptoms skyrocketed. (This was before I knew about my allergies, and I ate lots of “healthy” whole grain bread and dairy products.) When I couldn’t bear it anymore, I would always throw my well-meant plans out of the window and return to my chaotic eating patterns, immediately feeling emotional relief.

An ED is so much more than what you can see at the behavioral level! It also manifests itself at the level of thoughts and feelings. Looking for ED functions is a very good idea. For me, the main functions were these:

-emotion regulation: obsessing about food and being busy with ED rituals keeps emotions at bay
-stress regulation: if everyting got too much, I could just “give” myself into the ED, and didn’t have to pull myself together anymore (temporarily)
-tolerance of unpleasant body feelings: feeling “clean” after purging or by not-eating
-self-esteem: “I’m more valuable when I’m thin”
-general coping: “I’ll feel better when I lose some more weight”
-security needs: tragically true, but the more I got used to living with an ED, the more it gave me a feeling of security, because I knew what to expect

So you can already see some other things that are part of the ED armor: unpleasant emotions and feelings, dysfunctional coping strategies, self-esteem and body-image issues, insecurity in life, plus dysunctional thoughts, like the ones you described (I call them mind monsters): “I’ll never bear life when I don’t have the ED as an outlet” / “I’ll lose my mind and go up the walls” / “I won’t make it anyway, so I’ll just give up” / “I can have some more binges and purges before I stop ultimately” etc etc. These parts of the armor have to be put down as well, besides the behavioral changes.

What has helped me to tackle the ED at its multiple levels of manifestation were these things:

- mindfulness meditation: a meditation technique that works without a mantra, just by focusing on your breathing, and letting thoughts and feelings pass by without judging them (sounds easy but is not, haha) – this has helped me incredibly with emotion and stress regulation (I still don’t do longer sessions but countless short – a few seconds or minutes – practices during the day, to keep the bad stuff from building up, and I couldn’t bear doing longer sessions at first anyway)
– mindful eating: eating as an active mindfulness practice, i.e. doing nothing but eating your food and experiencing it with all your senses (how it looks, smells, tastes, etc) – *crucial* for me to develop a good relationship with food and eating again, although it was *very* hard in the beginning (I couldn’t do it longer than for the first one or two bites and then needed to turn on my laptop and read while eating, but it got better within a couple of weeks) – DON’T EAT WHILE DOING OTHER THINGS!
– learning to enjoy a moment and activities: mainly by means of mindfulness (see above)
– starting activities to improve crappy body feelings: everything that makes you feel more comfortable in your body is fine, but it should not be related to or aiming at weight reduction – for me: yoga, walks in the nature to catch sunlight and fresh air, bubble baths, sauna, massages, gym (I still have to work on the gym)
– improving self-esteem: learning or doing something that you find valuable and that is *not* ED related (for me: piano, now also guitar, and I’m starting to learn improvisation, songwriting, and composition – so everything that has to do with music, this also serves emotion and stress regulation purposes)
– social life: spending time with friends or family (people you like and who like you as you are and make you feel good when being in their company), also internet friends (great support for me to exchange thoughts with these lovely girls  )
- time management: setting aside me-time (schedule it if necessary!), planning breaks, organizing unstructured time (evenings) by filling it with (planned) activities or relaxing time
– joyful activities: necessary to make your life worth living and to have something to look forward to – you’ll have a lot of spare time when you don’t engage in your ED, so you need something to do in that time (I find it helpful to do something creative, other people like gardening or so)
– changing my diet: since my ED behaviors are triggered by feeling unwell in my body, it was crucial that I learned about my allergies and sugar addictions, and stay away from those foods to get better – this means no dairy, no soy, no grains (except a little brown rice on occasion), generally carbohydrate-reduced, very little sugar, balanced meals with lots of veggies, protein, healthy fats
– cooking: related to changing my diet, because I can’t rely on what I get so easily, and have to prepare most things myself, and this has helped me as well to develop a good relationship with food again, and to see it as something nourishing and a source of energy – it also helped me to do something good for myself by putting effort and devotion into creating a meal
– being a friend to yourself: being kind with yourself and forgiving relapses and imperfections, caring for yourself and saying nice and encouraging things to yourself – imagine you were a good friend of yourself, and then treat yourself accordingly

I guess there are more things, but those are the ones that come to my mind at first. If you work on those things, you gradually deprive the ED of its functions. The idea is to build up alternative behaviors that serve the same funcions, but not in a destructive way. Then, it gets easier to tackle the behaviors.

But of course, the behaviors are still there. The strategy is to reduce the relevance of those behaviors to the minimum, so in the end there’s nothing left, no function, just plain, conditioned (during many years of “practice”) behaviors. Finishing off the rest of them *still* is a challenge, but much less of a challenge when those behaviors are the only ones that help you to get through your day. The last step is absolute and honest ACCEPTANCE – acceptance that there will be fear, there will be insecurity, there will be unpleasant emotions and body feelings. If you embrace and anticipate that, you’re equipped for what is actually to come, and you won’t be surprised anymore. You should learn to (literally) sit through those feelings from mindfulness practice.

Another thing you can do (a strategy my therapist has told me, and it works well with anxiety in general) is not to get carried away into an anxiety spiral by your thoughts and worries! The trick is to draw your attention on your *body* as soon as you feel the slightest sign of anxiety, away from your mind. It’s crucial to do that as early as possible, before the anxiety is getting too big, because then the chances are the greater that you can calm the anxiety down. Go through your whole body and try to locate where the anxiety is (in your stomach, your throat, your chest, etc), and how it feels there (tense, pulsing, etc). Then look for parts of your body where no anxiety is (if it’s just your ear lobes or the tip of your nose – anxiety is never in your whole body), and observe how it feels there. By doing so, the anxiety should already decrease. You can then actively try to carry the feeling from the non-anxiety regions of your body into the others, so you decrease the size of the anxiety regions starting at the periphery. The goal is *not* to reduce the anxiety to zero, but reduce it to a level that you can bear and that doesn’t trigger you into ED behaviors.

Just be aware that all of this is a process that takes time, and it won’t be linear. You’ll have relapses, and it won’t always be easy. The impulses to binge and purge will still be there, but you can learn not to act on them anymore, and then they’ll get less. And it won’t work every day, but the important thing is that it *does* work, and things get better overall. And it’s possible to get out of it completely.

Also, this is written from my personal perspective, and your way may look different. But probably you find something helpful in this response.

I think Kath’s insight is amazing and I’m so thankful that she’s shared it with us – top points from me. This has been one of THE all time most helpful things I’ve ever read about challenging the eating disorder behaviours – not by ripping them away and leaving yourself vulnerable, wide open to all you found it hard to cope with before, and without any positive strategies in place to take it’s place, but by working as much on what you are ADDING to your life as you are on what you are taking away! How many of us have the idea that our eating disorder is something we have to ‘stop doing’? I know this is how I’ve seen it for a long time. But it’s more important to build up your life, build up your supports, your activities, your coping strategies, your hobbies and passions, build up a foundation to keep you steady when this disease – something that HAS had a very real function for you in your life – is gone.

I hope you all found this as helpful as I have. Any thoughts?  

And thank you to Kath for her smiley pictures! I couldn’t help but add a little bit of her unique flair to this post

Reader Appreciation Award and Shalimar Photo Bomb

Diane from Hometogo232 has been a constant source of encouragement and support towards me since we found each other’s blogs. I couldn’t think of a more deserving person to have been awarded a reader appreciation award, so it’s really amazing that she’s chosen me as one of the people to pass it on to.

It means a lot to me, because my readers are part of why I blog. My blog started as a way for me to express myself and air the ‘secrets’ of many kinds that fill my life with so much shame. Eating disorders are such hidden diseases much of the time. Everyone knew I had one, I couldn’t hide that, but my life with it, the realities, are something I hid every single day, put on a face and just pushed on.  This means that a lot of people saw me ‘coping okay’ and decided that I WAS doing this because I wanted to be skinny, because I was vain, because I was a brat, because I was too lazy to get better… pull out any of the many misconceptions  tossed around about people with Eds and it’s been said and thought about me.

The reality was it was a nightmare, still is a nightmare, a life that is agony to live every single day, and for many of those years there were no bright spots to even hang on for, not for me. I don’t know HOW I hung on so long, looking back, I truly don’t. For my cat. Because I’m stubborn. So as to not let ‘them’ win. Many reasons – but I did not wish this on myself or set out to become sick in the first place. It was not a choice. But I now know it’s a choice to fight it and I have been, and now there ARE bright spots in my life that far outshine the everyday nightmare bits.

I blog to share what’s happened to me in my life, all the abuse, because I am no longer going to be shamed or scared silent by that either. I speak up now, because I realise that this shame does not belong with me (and does not belong with anyone out there who has been abused in any way.) It belongs with my abusers. If they are not comfortable with me laying the facts of  their actions towards me out there – well that’s their problem. I owe them nothing. I’m not their punching bag any more and never will be again. I have a voice now and never again will I be silenced. 

Now my readers. When I began, there were no readers. There was just me, and that was fine. But as I found other people’s blogs and found amazing friends in many of them, my readership grew. I now have a lot of hope to share – a few short years ago I had none whatsoever, I was on a fast trajectory to death. Hellish short life, then death. Things have turned around so fast and now I can see what  I just couldn’t see back then. Hope. Growth. Change. That things take time. And that we need to trust and believe in ourselves and in our progress, especially when we feel we are getting nowhere.

You don’t spend most of your life battling an eating disorder at a life threatening level without learning a lot about the nature of the beast – and meeting a heck of a lot of people who are going through the same thing. I have seen so many people falling through the cracks – missing out on support, on treatment, on understanding, even on tolerance and acceptance in society. Because there are so many fallacies flying around, and so little understanding in the community.

I’ve been told to eat a sandwich when I was admitted for early stage heart failure. Restrained to a bed because I was not to be trusted, and locked in a room with none of my belongings because the people treating me decided my eating disorder was a spoilt brat thing and that punishment would cure me. (It didn’t. It made me sicker as I started to forget there was a real world out there and the walls closed in on me.) I have been spat on, on a well-to-do shopping street for being too disgustingly thin and making myself into some sort of  ’creature’. Punched in the face for not giving a lady my bag of groceries one day because “There was no way I could possibly eat those and I was wasting food that poor people (meaning, she and her drug-addled friends who had blown all their money on heroin) badly needed more than I did.”

All this, and so much more that has happened through these long years of fighting, is not acceptable. Should never happen to anyone. And yet it does. I’m not the only one by far. I don’t want anyone else to go through that.

But even more, I want others to read my words and realise that they do have hope, that they can hang on, that it’s worthwhile. That it IS possible to turn a corner when you feel there is no way out. That it IS possible to recover no matter how hopeless a ‘case’ you feel you are. That they DO have the courage to fight for their lives, because they already have that courage and strength right there within them, they need to believe in themselves, believe it’s possible. And that life is so worth it. That THEY are worth fighting for. Because that’s the truth.

And so to be nominated for a Readers Appreciation Award fills me with happiness because it means that there must be something I’m doing that’s working. Thank you so much, Diane.

Here’s what I have to do!

The steps to take, preferably with joy

1. Include the award logo somewhere in your blog.
2. Answer these 10 questions, below, for fun if you want to.
3. Nominate 10 to 12 blogs you enjoy. Or you pick the number.
4. Pay the love forward: Provide your nominee’s link in your post and comment on their blog to let them know they’ve been included and invited to participate.
5. Pay the love back with gratitude and a link to the blogger(s) who nominated you.

The Questions: Note I have answered some of these questions previously so if I have, I will give you an alternate answer.

1. What is your favorite colour?

Every colour in the rainbow.

2. What is your favorite animal?

Cats – namely my cat Shalimar.

3. What is your favorite non-alcoholic drink?

I drink more tea than anything else – white tea, with lots of (I know, I know, bad stuff) Equal sweetener.  I crave fresh juice – both fruit and veggie – a lot. But I don’t really like to drink or find it easy – it’s a constant struggle, especially as I used to have a huge phobia of even water. I’m working on it

4. Do you prefer Facebook or Twitter?

Facebook, I have never really used Twitter. I love that I can keep in touch with my friends but also tend to find it  very superficial.

5. What is your favorite pattern?

I love the patterns that the clouds make in the sky!

6. Do you prefer giving or getting presents?

Giving, by far. But I squirm in embarrassment and wish that I could hide. My favourite way to give gifts would be for them to just appear out of nowhere and surprise the recipient!

7. What is your favorite number?

My lucky number is 13. Amazing things have happened to me related to 13 – the date, the address, etc. My least favourite is 4, partly because I believe it means death for the Chinese, but mostly because the OCD-ritualistic crap that happened with food and eating (and still does to a far lesser degree) usually involves a lot of fours.

8. What is your favorite day of the week?

Friday, because I have an entire weekend right ahead of me!!! Sleep in tomorrow!

9. What is your favorite flower?

I had a huge daisy bush that I grew as a child, but it’s too hard as an adult to choose just one. I love honeysuckle for their smell and some memories, and I love nasturtium for the same reason (and am currently growing them in my garden.)

10. What’s your passion?

My passion is life, my cat, people, God and His amazing world. I used to be passionate about dancing, still am a dancer on the inside, hope to be one on the outside again in the future (for my own love of it, not as a career like it was, once).

The Nominees  Some (or all) of these writers may choose to not participate in this award process but I still want this chance to help you to find these blogs and perhaps be inspired by what they contain, if you haven’t found them already. Since I have been through the process recently I will choose 5 to nominate.

I enjoy so much reading these inspirational  blogs and in turn I receive many encouraging words from them.

Emma at http://doesmybumlookbiginthis.org

Buckwheat at http://buckwheatsrisk.wordpress.com

Cathy at http://extralongtail.wordpress.com/

Kath at http://kathsfunnylittlelife.wordpress.com/

Roxy at http://adverseuniverse.wordpress.com/

Sooz at http://mundanebrain.wordpress.com/

There are so many people I would love to include! Thank you to everyone for encouraging me and for reaching out to me, a complete stranger.

Now for a light-hearted ending to this post – Shalimar always manages to inject hilarity into my life. My money is controlled by a Government appointed Trustee (still hanging round from the sicker days, hopefully I’ll get off this soon) and today I was taking photos of my backpack to show them that I really do need to buy a new one, will they let me have my money? (Getting your money can be like trying to get blood from a stone!)

Shalimar totally photobombed my photo. Sneaky, cheeky little darling

be careful how you take off the armor

Reblogged from surviving anorexia:

I am currently reading Joanne Poppink book, Healing your Hungry Heart. A former sufferer, now psychotherapist treating eating disorders, particularly in older women, her book is a delight. Sensitive, insightful and full of a lot of inside information into how eating disorder change and effect people, and recovery insights that other books miss.

Remember how our recovery team likened the journey of recovery to a boat and lifejacket?

Read more… 676 more words

It has nearly killed me, but it's also saved my life, I would not be here without it. It IS an armour for me - protecting me from the big bad world that has hurt me and is full of people who have hurt me. Peeling it off takes time as I discover more and more that it's also filled with good people and that I'm stronger now, safer, more able to protect myself, and that my fear of life is unfounded.

Grateful

Today started out the way many days have begun lately – with groans and complaints. I feel so old in the mornings, it’s when the aches and pains are the worst, I’m tired from not having slept, and it’s another day. Another day that I have to get through. Lately I have been wishing with all my heart that things could just stop for a while. Long enough for me to have a quick rest at least. God, where did you put the ‘pause button’? I cannot find it!

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But life doesn’t wait for anyone!

Struggling so badly with depression, chronic fatigue, and a dastardly virus lately means that a lot of my spare time has been spent in bed. What a waste of time! It’s very tempting to sleep away as much of the day as I can – because that means I don’t have to face it, don’t have to be there, and I don’t have to be inside my head. It’s called Avoidance. But it’s not making anything better.

True fact – when you are in pain, lying in bed and being inactive makes it worse. When you are depressed, lying in bed and being inactive makes that worse too! It’s getting up and moving, outdoors, that helps with both mood and pain, hard as it can be to push yourself out there in the beginning!

So today, I got up, and I went out into the garden with Shalimar.

We both felt a heck of a lot better!

It’s getting cold here. Winter is on it’s way! I love winter because it means that Shalimar cuddles up to me all the more. When you are under the doonas, with a warm purring cat nestled into your body, you just don’t want to move! Life feels so good and so full of love

Sometimes we let the hard stuff get us down and we forget to see just how blessed we are and our lives are. And I’m thankful every time I’m reminded of this.

Sometimes things get to be a bit much, but who doesn’t get overwhelmed and tired? That’s life, right? And now I know that if I get outside and surround myself with the beautiful world and my beloved kitty, and talk and spend time with the people I love, too – I’ll feel a heck of a lot better.

You can’t put some things in an antidepressant!

Hope you have all had a good weekend and thank you for reading my blog. 

What  makes you feel grateful today? 

How do you make yourself feel better when you are not feeling all that good? 

How You See Yourself Is What Matters.

Today one of my friends on Facebook posted this photo on my wall. I LOVE IT.

(source – facebook)

This is so relevant to me, because I have always been hyper-aware of what others might think of me. ‘Might’ think of me, because I certainly cannot read minds – thank goodness for that!

I don’t know if  people who don’t have an eating disorder or even everyone else apart from myself, think this way –  whether they worry about how others think about them to a smaller degree, the same degree, a larger degree, whether it’s something that goes hand in  hand with eating disorders – all I know is that it’s always been important to me. Too important.

I guess it wouldn’t matter so much if I thought people were probably thinking nice things about me, but see, that’s the thing – it’s the opposite. I’m terrified that people think I’m ugly, lazy, disgusting, wrong, weird, crazy, fill-in-the-blank-with-words-that-hurt. And FAT. I am scared they are thinking I’m FAT. Especially now, because many people in my area have known me for a long time and know about my eating disorder, and here I am with an extra 20 kilos. Of course they are going to think “she must be eating heaps, she must be joking to think she’s got an eating disorder”. Just the sort of thinking I shoot down in flames in others because it’s just not true.

But here’s the thing – it’s none of my business what other people think of me. None whatsoever. Nada. Their thoughts belong to them. I have no right to their headspace (unless they share it with me). I have a right to think what I like, and so do they. It’s also far better to not know what they think because the reality is, we aren’t perfect, other people aren’t perfect, and we ARE going to have other people thinking  not-so-nice things about us or downright horrid things about us at times. And it’s okay! Because if we don’t know about it, it doesn’t hurt us.

What is far more important than what other people think of us or whether it’s our business or not – is what WE think of us. It’s ironic that some of us do worry so much about what others think of us because we are often far harsher than we could imagine they might be!  Our tendency to put ourselves down and beat ourselves up can make us our own worst critic. It can also hinder us – believing in ourselves is so important. Self belief is what makes us keep on going when otherwise we would have given up. Helps us keep fighting an illness because we believe we are strong enough to beat it. Helps us apply for jobs because we believe there is a chance of getting it. Helps us paint, draw, write, sing, dance, run – because we have enough belief that we can do those things to chance doing them.

If we don’t believe ourselves worthy and good – then it’s hard to live as a worthy, good person. I am certain that if I had not loathed myself, utterly despised myself, I would never have shoplifted, ever, for example. I would never have gotten as sick as I did, because I would have loved myself enough to take better care of myself. And believed that I deserved better and that I COULD get better. I would not have been quite as debilitated by the physical complications of my eating disorder because I came to believe that it would hurt too much to do things, that I would be too weak or too tired, so I actually did far less than I could do which led to my body deteriorating so that I really did get to that point physically. I could go on and on, but in short, lack of self-belief helped me to shatter my life and body as much as it was. Helped ME to. Me. MY lack of belief is responsible for much of how broken down I am.

I did not choose any of the abuse that has happened to me, and I did not choose to have an eating disorder or depression. But I DID choose my attitude to all that, and my attitude was to blame myself and hate myself for it all, so in a way, I actually chose to HELP what happened to me destroy me.

Now that I know this, I’m working on changing my thinking. I need to learn Self Compassion – someone posted this amazing link on Recovering Anorexic’s comments last night and I checked it out – it’s one of those things that I read and just go “yeah!” I really find it makes sense. And it’s interesting:

Having compassion for oneself is really no different than having compassion for others. Think about what the experience of compassion feels like. First, to have compassion for others you must notice that they are suffering. If you ignore that homeless person on the street, you can’t feel compassion for how difficult his or her experience is. Second, compassion involves feeling moved by others’ suffering so that your heart responds to their pain (the word compassion literally means to “suffer with”). When this occurs, you feel warmth, caring, and the desire to help the suffering person in some way. Having compassion also means that you offer understanding and kindness to others when they fail or make mistakes, rather than judging them harshly. Finally, when you feel compassion for another (rather than mere pity), it means that you realize that suffering, failure, and imperfection is part of the shared human experience. “There but for fortune go I.”

Self-compassion involves acting the same way towards yourself when you are having a difficult time, fail, or notice something you don’t like about yourself. Instead of just ignoring your pain with a “stiff upper lip” mentality, you stop to tell yourself “this is really difficult right now,” how can I comfort and care for myself in this moment? Instead of mercilessly judging and criticizing yourself for various inadequacies or shortcomings, self-compassion means you are kind and understanding when confronted with personal failings – after all, who ever said you were supposed to be perfect? You may try to change in ways that allow you to be more healthy and happy, but this is done because you care about yourself, not because you are worthless or unacceptable as you are. Perhaps most importantly, having compassion for yourself means that you honor and accept your humanness. Things will not always go the way you want them to. You will encounter frustrations, losses will occur, you will make mistakes, bump up against your limitations, fall short of your ideals. This is the human condition, a reality shared by all of us. The more you open your heart to this reality instead of constantly fighting against it, the more you will be able to feel compassion for yourself and all your fellow humans in the experience of life.

What I find interesting about this, is that it’s often being self-compassionate that helps people recover from an eating disorder (among many other things) because you need to care enough about yourself and stop beating yourself up enough to be able to care FOR yourself – to be tender and nurturing to your own self and body. So self-compassion is totally an important skill for us.

I also find that so many of us with eating disorders ARE compassionate people by nature. We care about others, often too much. So that means that when we learn to apply that to ourselves, we should have a LOT of self compassion there for us to help ourselves with. I hope it works out that way, anyway. I know that since I’ve started being less hateful and more accepting of myself, I’ve been able to turn things about eating disorder wise.

I’ve totally gone off on a tangent, but I’m sure that how we see ourselves affects how much we are able to be compassionate towards ourselves, and I’m going to try and be more accepting of myself from now on.  My mantra is going to be “I accept myself” and I’ll go from there.

(image source)

Do you worry about what other people think of you? A lot? A little? Do you think what you think of yourself is better or worse than what you think others do?

Can you see a way that believing in yourself has helped you positively in your life?

Are you a compassionate person, and are you compassionate towards yourself? 

Giving Up And Starting Over.

In the every day fight to reclaim my life and my health, one of the hardest things is to give up. That’s right – I said give up.  We all know how important it is to not give up fighting to live and break free of the eating disorder. To not let depression overpower us, to not let the persistent thoughts that tell us we are worthless, stupid, bad, fat, whatever, stick without refuting and correcting them with the truth. But I don’t mean giving up all that.

One of the (very many!) reasons I stayed so sick for so long, which is still a reason – is that I find it so very difficult to let go. To give up the eating disorder’s habits, the rituals, the comforts. To give up even the aspects of it that torment me – feeling and seeing myself as fat and worthless, torturing myself physically and mentally, and so on. Hardest of all, I think, is to give up on ever having the body I thought I wanted.

I have come to realise that it doesn’t matter what kind of eating disorder you have – anorexia, bulimia, EDNOS, binge eating disorder,exercise obsession, orthorexia – if you want to be free of your disorder, you have to give up on the body that it promises you.

You can’t hang on to the eating disorder AND get better. So you can’t hang on to the lies that it feeds you either, and get better. While you are hanging on to some body ideal, you won’t recover.

It makes sense and goes without saying that someone who is underweight with their disorder needs to give up on weight loss (ever again – I mean never ever ever again) because it too often triggers the disease all over again – and because while you are trying to lose weight, you are denying yourself of the nutrition your body needs – (I am not going to dig too deeply into this aspect as I do not have much more than a layperson’s understanding of it), those who are overweight (and normal weight) also need to give up on the ideal body. Even if you are normal or overweight, having an eating disorder means  chances are VERY high that you are actually malnourished – and you need to allow your body to renourish itself just as much as someone suffering from anorexia needs to. (Yes, it’s possible to be overweight and malnourished.)

When you are constantly trying to lose weight or ‘improve’ your body, you are in some way restricting what you give it, but more importantly, your focus is on YOU controlling your body. You are still trying to force it into some ideal without listening to it. And that’s an important part of getting better – listening to your body. Feeding it, looking after it, giving it everything it needs – without trying to cut down or cut back in any way. No matter what your weight is, your body has been through a really tough time with your disorder and it needs to recuperate. It needs to be able to trust you in order to start being able to function again as a healthy body should. And it can’t repair itself in all the ways it needs (many unseen and unfelt) when complete balanced nutrition might not be forthcoming or exercise constantly wears it out.  (For a really good, insightful post about the relationship between your body’s trust in you and bingeing see Mundanebrain’s post.)

Apart from still being engaged in a war physically, hanging on means  you are also not focussed totally on getting better. You still have at least part of your mind held hostage to the disease. And you are still basing your happiness on something you do not have right now. Something that may not even be achievable, or sustainable for the long term. Something that might make you very sick or even kill you.

While you are focussed on that “I’ll be happy and everything will be a lot better when…” dream, you are not dealing with what is making you unhappy or sick, finding out what made you need to obliterate those problems and almost yourself, too – with the eating disorder and the food and weight and clothes sizes and numbers and exercise and all that chaos. You are not even living in the right now, but off with the fairies in the future.

Heads up, people – it’s not your body that is the problem!! As long as you are trying to fix your body, your real problems are going to go unchanged.

Giving up on ever having that body is so hard for me. I still have a lot of weight to gain despite having gained so much already. I still am not coping with this weight gain at all. And I would love, dearly love to lose it, just dump it. I am highly aware all the time how easily I can do that if I choose, like the more than a hundred times I did that over the more sick years (going by the number of admissions for weight restoration!) But I know that if I do that, dump this weight – that’s it. I’m sick again, I lose all the ground I worked so hard for, and yes, it’s going to kill me.

I DID, in my teens, believe when things were rock bottom, that if I fixed my body and got my lean, strong dancer’s body back, all my problems would go away. I’d be the best dancer. I’d be happy. Wanker would go away and leave me alone. My family would have some sort of epiphany and personality transplant and actually become caring and loving and decent. Even when I’d lost my dance career I still believed that when I got my dancer’s body back i.e LOST weight, I’d get it back again. Can we say screwed up, insane? Definitely not  rational. At the time I didn’t even know I had an eating disorder, everything was just a mess that was crumbling around me. But now I know better. I know that weight loss will NOT fix anything – it will make it worse. And yet it’s still really, really hard to let go.

What I miss most about it was that feeling, that comforting feeling of being convinced I was doing the right thing, I was working on the solution, that everything was going to be okay. Now I know that the only way I can guarantee that everything will be okay is to identify what the actual problems are, accept them, and ask for help to fix them.

I will never get that feeling back, not just because I know  how untrue it is, but also because I will never again starve myself and exercise obsessively the way I did back then. However losing weight is still my predominant thought much of my time. I can’t do something properly, need to lose weight. I catch sight of myself in a window – fatty boomba, lose some weight! I just can’t stand my body or being in it. And despite that I have no choice, I have to tolerate it, and hope that with time the thoughts become less. I hate being so aware of it and so caught up in it because it really is a very shallow way of thinking and being, and there is so much that’s far more important. It’s also not pleasant to have everything you do overshadowed by that constant criticism. But I have to toughen up and learn to stay with the pain and fear. Tolerate feelings that aren’t nice to feel – because feelings will never kill me. Feeling fat won’t hurt me, but acting on those feelings might.

Letting go  means getting humble and admitting that you aren’t okay, you aren’t in control, in fact you and your life are a mess, and things can’t go on this way. There is nothing to be ashamed of in accepting this. In fact it takes courage to do this – because we have so much pride as human beings and are so scared of failure. It’s not a failure at all. It’s being realistic and owning your own truths.

I now know and accept that it’s my life that’s screwed up, and myself, and that I will never fix it by concentrating on my body. Even if my body is ‘perfect’ I will still be sick and miserable. And if I want to work on my problems and have any chance of having a happy, healthy, fulfilling life – I have to let go of trying to change my body and let it look after me. And in order to let it look after me – I have to look after it. I don’t know what my future holds, but I know that I will be able to deal with it now, because I’m no longer in denial. I’m no longer sticking my fingers in my ears and singing “I need to lose weight and then everything will be better” – instead I’m taking a deep breath and facing my real problems head on.

Still got a long way to go – but what’s most important is that I’m definitely headed in the right direction.

 

Psychopath Magnet (Warning, potential triggers to people who have been abused)

Have you ever felt like you attract a certain type of person?

I have, and I do. It seems that ever since I escaped my childhood home and ran smack bang into my next abuser, I have been a magnet for the worst scum of the earth. Somehow they seem to sense that I’m a vulnerable, hurting soul, and they home in on me. Do they have some sort of radar? Is there something about me that gives it away? My walk? My talk? My body language?

Googling this question landed me in a forum for Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD) sufferers themselves. From the initial warning -

“Given the unique propensities of those who are faced with the issues of ASPD, topics at times may be uncomfortable for non ASPD readers. Discussions related to violent urges are permitted here, within the context of deeper understanding of the commonalties shared by members. Indulging these urges is not what regular users here are attempting to do.

Conversations here can be triggering for those who have suffered abuse or violent encounters. Respectful questioning is welcome from non ASPD members.”

Okayyyyyyyy…

I do not know anything, really, about the personality disorders that are ASPD and Narcissistic PD (NPD). What I do know, is that in the support groups, and in the books that I’ve joined and read in order to understand what my own abusers were driven by, ‘Socipaths’, ‘Psychopaths’, and ‘Malignant Narcissists’ were labelled as ‘abusers’ and even ‘evil’ and were said to have these personality disorders.

I do not know if I agree with this. Every single abuser in my life (and potential abuser, those I have gotten away from) has fit the descriptions in these groups and books to a T. Reading them has given me so many “Aha” moments and helped me to come to a shaky level of  peace about ‘why’ it happened – probably the closest to answering that I will ever have. But people suffering from true personality disorders are not evil, are they? They are sick. I doubt they are all abusers either. So how do we tell the difference? I do not know, and I’m loathe to label everyone under one label. So I just want to say for this post – I’m talking about people who abuse, and enjoy abusing, others. So someone could argue that their friend with one of these personality disorders is sick and that it’s not nice to lump them in with the evil people – but if they actually enjoy hurting people I am sure as hell going to call them evil!!

Back to my question – why do they zoom in on me? The first answer in the forum said “sexual attraction”. I didn’t really think that is the whole answer – we are human beings, and when one person is strongly drawn to another person sexually, it does NOT necessarily make them a psychopath! The next answer I read however, chilled me to the bone:

“This subject is interesting to me because I am attracted strangely towards certain things. I mean I maybe attracted to someone or grow curious about someone purely because they stand out in a peculiar way. I mean if I meet someone who is completely naive it baffles me so it attracts me. I do experiments on them to see how they would react. I rationalize it in my mind that I am helping them as much as I am learning about the human race. Or suppose I meet a completely moral and upright person, like a virgin. I find this fascinating. Especially, if they are like a senior in high school or older. It attracts me to them. It makes me want to preserve them as if they are a species going extinct…”(source)(emphasis mine)

Can you imagine talking about another human being, one who you were initiating a relationship with, this way? The commenter goes on to state that he “want[s] to completely devour my prey in every aspect of their life…. LOL I think the biggest thing is categorizing people, some are in the “attractive” file and some are in different files for different things.”(source)

“Devour my prey”. Charming, right? Remember this is a potential girlfriend or boyfriend we are talking about here. Not ‘prey’. Other members of the forum go on to agree on sexual attraction being key. But they talk about human beings like they are objects of curiosity.

I will call my first abuser out of home, Wanker. A very fitting name indeed. Wanker was a very sexual man. He was about 35 to my just-seventeen. He saw me first on campus at the university I was beginning my dance/performance degree in, and I guess, decided that he ‘wanted’ me. I wanted nothing to do with him! One day I was walking back to the place where I was staying at this stage, a flat, and he drove up alongside me, leaned out of the window of his car and said, “Get in”. I did not get in. I kept walking.

So Wanker got out of his car, bodily picked me up, forced me in his car, and drove away. From that day, I was effectively ‘his’.

He had caught his prey, claimed it as his, taken it away to ‘play’ with.

So why did he choose me? I was a very young seventeen despite all that I had already been through, and I certainly was not a sexual person. If anything, I was A-sexual. I didn’t feel turned on, I didn’t think about it, I didn’t want anything to do with it actually – it repulsed me. Maybe he saw that as a challenge. I was also a dancer – small. I had gained a lot of weight, but looking back, I still wasn’t a sexually attractive woman – more like a young girl who had just started filling out.

I think that my previous abuse in my home set me up somehow to attract him. I don’t know for sure, because I cannot read minds, and I’m not going to ever seek Wanker out to ask him – but I’m pretty sure that after leaving home I had an air of ‘beaten and dejected’ about me. I was exhausted. I’d been through a lifetime of abuse already, a life time of being on edge – that walking-on-eggshells feeling of when is the next blow going to come, when is this person going to crack up again. You never relax. Even sleeping is dangerous – I used to feel I had to keep my back to a wall, in case I was stabbed or hit from behind. Would someone use my doona to smother me? Or would the funnel web spiders drop from their infested curtain above me? There were dangers all around, all hours of the day. And I was exhausted and almost broken – almost but not quite – when I got out of there. I was strong and determined enough to make sure I found myself a roof over my head and fought to get some money to keep me fed and clothed, but it was all an overwhelming time for me. And in walked Wanker, saw me vulnerable, and he swooped.

I don’t know how these people know when someone is vulnerable. I could have put it down to ‘luck’ on Wanker’s part. But later on, when free of him, I was targeted, and keep being targeted, by the same sort of person. And not just men, either. Women too. The women have come in the form of ‘so called friends’ who turn around and stab me in the back and keep on stabbing. Ingratiate themselves into my life then try to tear it to shreds.

What is it? Personally, I think it’s my body language first up. I somehow have to put up stronger boundaries – a real “F*ck off” message as one counsellor described it. My body language is too open and too accepting. I tend to be a kind heart who cares too much, and these predators grab that with both hands, exploit it. The hard part is learning how to ‘send that message’ with my body language all the time. I’m getting there, but obviously I still am not doing it ‘right’ because I have just this past weekend attracted yet another ‘hanger on’, would be stalkerish guy, who is now popping up in ‘convenient’ places that I happen to be and has given me a love letter. Yes you read that right. He gave me a love letter.

Sheesh.

“Dear stranger, I love you!” Get lost! No way.

I have noticed a lot of regularities in what these people do and say.

They LIE. They cannot tell the truth to save their lives. Their backstories will be elaborate and full of twists and turns. If they have obviously seen hard times, like obviously had drug/alcohol addiction, homelessness, joblessness, or are broke, the explanation will always be that it wasn’t their fault. It was always someone else’s fault. They are always the innocent party. It reminds me of that saying “everyone in jail is innocent”. And yes, a couple of my personal predators have turned out to be frequent jail flyers. And yes, they were innocent. Surprise, surprise.

When it comes to talking about ‘you and me’, they always say “It’s your choice. I will not force you into anything. I’m a kind hearted person. I’m gentle.” and other statements along those lines – to me anyway – because I have always said firmly from the beginning that I do not want a relationship. Not with them. Not with anyone at this stage. Their come back is always “It’s your choice, I will not force you” which is ironically exactly what they are intending to try and do.

Another lie they always trot out is how it was ‘meant to be’. “I saw you across a crowded room and just could not look away”. “Our eyes met and we clicked” (even though I didn’t feel it – these people speak for us both). “It was meant to be. We were two lonely souls looking for our soul mate.” *gag* Okay, I know this happens in real life, true dovey love happens – but with these people it’s so patently fake – at least in hindsight – that you just feel sickened.

They are also highly manipulative. When you turn them down, they will make YOU feel like YOU are the one who is out of line. “What, you wouldn’t spare half an hour to have coffee with me?” “Am I that much of a loser?” “Oh, you make me want to cry..” – all said with a wounded, puppy dog expression. Later on, if you let them get in – they will turn everything round on you, and the puppy dog will turn into a vicious dangerous dog. Everything will be your fault. You talk too much. You breathe too much. Violence will accompany the slightest thing. If you are with a real winner, this will translate into homicide. Especially after you begin to unravel their webs of lies. Even when the truth is staring them in the face, they will lie, and they will protect their lies. Every single time.

M Scott Peck called them them true human evil, calls them “People Of The Lie” – which is also the title of his popular book. He was before his time, before the terms of sociopath and narcissist were bandied around in abuse groups with sighs and “You too?” I do reccomend that you check his book out, along with Martha Stout’s The Psychopath Next Door, and Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test.

Interestingly, these people aren’t all ‘bad’ to the uninitiated. In all books, there are examples of seemingly ‘nice’ people. Pillars of society. Peck illustrates this with a scenario where his patient, a teenage boy, was given the gun that his older brother, his parent’s favourite child, used to commit suicide. The parents were both ‘evil’. Their message, unspoken, was that they wished that the boy had killed himself instead of his brother and that it would be so convenient if he took this gift and used it. Stout gave us a case study involving a woman who posed as a psychologist, saw patients in a big hospital, came across to her co-workers as a lovely, kind woman who loved her dog and cared perhaps too much about her patients – and yet was  manipulating and sabotaging both patients and colleages. The dog was no better than a prop to her, discarded the moment it got in the way.

My own older sister is a good example of this. She is the scariest person I have ever met. A true viper in the body of a woman. Men flock to her like bees to honey because she is so very attractive. She works now as a naturopath (which I always saw as a ‘PC’ alternative to her first love, black magic) and is a Justice of the Peace – an upstanding pillar of society.  But she spits pure venom, has killed animals, and I believe she is capable of cold blooded murder. My mother, although she put on her ‘lovely friendly lady’ mask out in public, wasn’t so good at fooling people, even my school friends used to whisper that there was something really weird and ‘off’ about my mother, and ‘poor Fiona’. If only they knew.

I feel like I was ‘marked’ in some way from the beginning. I started out as a play toy for my family predators, and was passed along to predators ‘out there’. Somehow they can tell, and I have turned into a pied piper of sorts for them, whereever I go, they will find me.

I intend to change that.

Okay this is getting to be a long and pointless post – more a rant of mine. I’ll finish it with a site that lists the characteristics of a sociopath for you to read. You might just recognise someone in your own life. Most probably you will – there are many people in our lives like this – more than we can possibly imagine. Truly wolves in sheeps clothing. Beware!

Do you seem to continually attract dangerous people? 

Be Yourself

Growing up in a nest of vipers… whoopsidoo, I meant, family of Narcissists and Sociopaths is an interesting experience – when you get past the fear and loathing bit of it. I got to observe them close up for the first seventeen years of my life.

It was interesting that even though I was the odd one out in our little family, I did not buy into their thinking or their philosophies. It was like I held my own inborn morals and values, secretly and carefully, hidden in my heart. I held onto my truth – believed in that truth, even when I could not believe in myself. I do believe that this helped me survive. It gave me some sort of rock-solid core to stand firm in the face of all that happened to me and around me.

(image source)

(Side note – in later, more recent years, it’s been all the more heartbreaking for this reason when I found myself going so against my own dearly held beliefs, shoplifting food for binges. It will always break my heart, and it shattered me in a way that noone had been able to all these years – my own betrayal of myself. I felt like I had become what they were trying to make me.)

Something I saw a LOT was the donning of masks. Now, I do not mean the sort of masks you physically can wear – but still, I often find myself thinking of Roald Dahl’s book The Witches, and if you are familiar with this awesome book, you will understand why. In short, the witches of the title are children hating women with extremely ugly faces, hairless rashy poxy scalps, clawed talons instead of fingernails, squared off feet instead of toes, huuuuuge nostrils and very keen sense of smell – children smell like dogs droppings to them. Their life’s work is about eradicating children. In public, they look like really lovely ladies (all the better for sucking in hapless kids) because they wear wigs, realistic face masks, gloves, pointy shoes.. and cotton wool up their noses to stop them fainting at the smell of those awful unwashed children! Check out a clip from the movie here.

Every time we left our home, my family would don their masks. Not physically (although we put on our ‘good’ clothes and did our hair and all that) but you could almost ‘see’ them put on their masks. They became smiling, polite, charming, lovely people. They became virtuous, upstanding members of society. You would not begin to imagine the secrets their innocent facades hid.

(image source)

I always found myself wanting to yell at people who didn’t know better “That’s not who they really are at all! It’s all an act! They are liars!” Their deception was actually so polished that had I done so, they would have scoffed and said something like “She really has problems you know, she’s not stable, don’t worry, she’s seeing a child psychiatrist..” and people would totally have bought that and thought even more of them, poor lovely people dealing with a crazy stuffed up kid… people who knew me better suspected more because they knew my heart, they knew that the way I was – scared, shy, withdrawn, crying often, dirty and scruffy, bruised – was not ‘right’. But they fooled everyone else.

I learnt young that life can be far more.. bizarre than fiction. You couldn’t make my life up. It was like being stuck in a bad soap opera at times. A bad horror movie at other times.

My point is, many of us wear masks in our every day life. We often feel extremely vulnerable, especially when our self esteem and confidence is already lacking. It’s not just bad people who wear these masks – it’s good people too. Most people have at some stage in their lives. How many times, for example, have you ‘put on a happy face’ to face the world when you have been truly miserable, or smiled while choking back anger? There you go.

In some cases, wearing a mask can be the way to be diplomatic and appropriate in certain situations – many of us have a ‘work’ persona where we are professional, courteous, pleasant, and we don’t allow ‘ourselves’ to really intrude into the work environment. And that’s much of the time very appropriate – we are there to do a job, most of the time our employers and customers don’t want to deal with the human side of us that has problems and emotions and feelings and can be up one day and down the next.

But what about other times? What about with our friends? When we go out generally, to the shops or the movies or to the park or anywhere really?

Do you find yourself often pretending to be happier than you are? Friendlier? Laughing along when you don’t feel like laughing or think it’s amusing? Do you pretend to be funnier than you are, more outgoing? Tough when you really are a softie at heart? I’m sure you all could add things we sometimes pretend to be. Because I’m sure we all have at some stage done this. But what about all the time, with people you are close to?

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My thinking is that  people who truly love you and care for you, love you for YOU –  through good and bad, thick and thin. They love you despite any failings you might have and are prepared to stick around if you aren’t perfect. To accept you.  Because who is perfect? I’m not. I’m sure you aren’t. I’ve never met a person who was. It’s humanly impossible. In fact it’s being imperfect that makes us truly loveable – because it makes us unique. It makes us ourselves.

If you don’t feel like you can be yourself around someone, I think it’s time to have a good look at them, and yourself. Why do you feel you have to pretend? Are you scared they will reject you, and why? And then ask yourself Is this a real fear? Or is this fear unfounded? Are my ‘failings’ that heinous? Chances are likely they aren’t – they are on a par with everyone else’s ‘failings’, certainly no reason to be rejected. And then ask yourself, would this person, or these people really be likely to reject me if I was my true self with them? It can be quite illuminating to ask yourself these questions.

If someone is likely to reject you for being your true self – are they are true friend? Are they someone who is really healthy or helpful to have in your life? Or are they soul destroying, spirit-draining? Or not very accepting people? And is it worth having them in your life?

Is it worth taking a risk and finding out, by dropping the mask and being you?

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I truly think that struggling to accept ourselves is something that is part of and perpetuates eating disorders and many other problems that include poor self esteem and self hatred/loathing.  And I’ve found that as I’ve started to be more accepting of myself, I’ve been able to be myself more. I’ve always been pretty straightforward, but I’m a people pleaser through and through, and have always tried to be the person I think people want, and to act the way I think they expect me to act. Not any more. These days, I’m pretty much me, all the time. I realised that if being myself wasn’t okay with someone, they weren’t going to like me anyway and I was better off knowing that, and that not everyone in our lives is going to like us and that’s okay. I’m never going to be perfect or please everybody, or agree with everybody,  and that’s okay too. And it’s far less exhausting to live this way too! It’s refreshing, both for me, and I think for many people who just want to be with ‘real’ people themselves.

I don’t mean ditch your manners and let it all hang out. I’ll still observe social niceties. For example, if I don’t find someone’s joke funny, I’ll not be joining in with the tittering away at it. I’ll say so, or move on, or something more appropriate to the situation and how I feel.

And I’ve found that most of my friends still accepted me. In fact, the ones who walked away, weren’t truly friends, and I’m better off without them. Is it really worth compromising your own sense of self and your values in order to try and gain or keep someone’s respect? Life is too short.

And you deserve better than that.

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I dare you – pick one person in your life you wear a mask for, and be yourself with them today. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Be yourself – because you are perfectly YOU, and there isn’t a single person on this planet who is better at being you

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Don’t Give Up Hope.

 

The most important message I wanted to convey in last night’s post about turning points was that often when we feel stuck and hopeless, we actually aren’t as hopeless as we feel.

For YEARS I felt that I was getting nowhere. That I had fought so hard, and had nothing to show for it. That I went round and round and round in the same frustrating, stupid cycle. And for that, I decided I was a loser. That I’d never be able to do anything worthwhile. That I’d live my life fighting ED and then die from it.

I was so lucky that the people in my life didn’t give up on me, even when I gave up on myself. I was so tired, so discouraged. I would argue with them – I have tried everything that I can, fought my hardest, and it’s always had the same result. I’ve always ended up back here. They say that doing the same thing again and again despite always getting the same result is insanity. I begged them to just let me die. I said that they would put a dog down before allowing it to suffer this much. And yet they didn’t give up.

Today I am so glad for that. So grateful.

Because despite my belief that I was getting nowhere, I actually was making progress. Perhaps those who didn’t give up on me had more faith in me than I did, but I don’t think they saw this either. Invisible to myself, to others, there was a lot happening – I was learning, growing, storing away so much for use later on. Perhaps each twist and turn gave me another puzzle piece to keep for later, when I might have gathered enough to actually begin to put them together. What I do know was that finally I reached a point where enough had changed under the surface for my life to begin changing, and my mind to begin changing in very visible ways – and then in leaps and bounds! And it was truly an amazing thing to experience.

When you plant a seed in the ground, it doesn’t immediately spring up into leaf and flower above the ground. Instead it’s feeling around down there in the darkness, shooting out roots, finding the best sources of nutrients and water, spreading out, making sure it’s anchored firmly – before it emerges from the surface and begins to unfurl towards the sky and the sunshine!

When you least have hope, when you feel most stuck – think of that little seed. That’s YOU. 

There is always hope.