Born This Way? Trigger – Self Harm talk.

First I’d like to say thank you – so much support and kindness has been poured out to me through this blog and your comments. Your words DO make a difference.

Today I thought I’d just do a quick, short post – or my version of short, which seems to be other people’s version of ‘normal length!’

Reading Gel’s recent update on her chicks, and how they are adapting to being able to go outside after being weaned inside – I had a sudden light-bulb moment.

Gel’s chicks have never had a chicken ‘mamma’. Instead, Gel is their mamma. And she’s done a good job. But Gel can never teach them chook things like a chicken mamma could. Like dust-bathing. Dust-bathing seems to be a behaviour that chickens are born just ‘knowing’. It’s natural to them. It keeps their plumage looking good, and free of mites (and looks like fun, too!)

Let’s have a bit of a demonstration here!

 

What does this have to do with my blog?

Well, nobody taught Gel’s chicks to dust-bathe. They just instinctively did it. They were born with the instinct to perform those behaviours.

The first time I ever self harmed, I didn’t know that people even did such thing. I’d never heard or read about it, I had never encountered the term ‘self harm’. The closest I had come to that, was knowing that people did commit suicide – and thinking of wrist slicing – but apart from actually actively trying to kill oneself, I never imagined that anyone would harm themselves on purpose.

I still don’t understand what led me to do it. If I remember correctly the trigger was piercing my finger on the sharp edge of a tin and seeing the blood. But I don’t think I will ever understand how from that, I had the idea of actually causing harm to myself.

It freaked me out! And I hid it. From that day on, long sleeves became part of my daily clothing. Nobody would have ever known, had I not at some stage blurted it out to a counselor at uni. I was freaked out by what I was doing and asked her if I was crazy. To my shock and surprise, she calmly asked me how many stitches I had needed! I hadn’t needed medical care – I only scratched at that point – but to realize other people did that nearly blew my mind.

I wonder, looking back, why that lady didn’t bother to seize on that admission as a way in and ask me what was actually wrong. She brushed it off as though people did all the time and we never spoke of it again. It went secret again for years until it got to the point where I had to get stitches and no longer could keep it hidden.

Likewise, nobody ‘taught’ me to starve or not drink enough. It’s a behaviour that came naturally too, aside from my mother’s own abuse of food as punishment, I remember feeling some sort of inability to eat despite being ravenous and liking the food at age 4, and hiding the food to get out of eating it. At 5, I had weekly IV’s due to being so severely dehydrated from my refusal to drink, even when it was a green rehydration solution that I actually quite liked.

I was a very ‘goody-two-shoes’ sort of kid, so I wasn’t doing it to be ‘bad’ or to get attention. I only wanted to please my mother. Refusing to eat or drink definitely accomplished the opposite of that. So it wasn’t something I was doing because I wanted to, either.

I do think that many of us are born genetically ‘wired’ to develop these behaviours. I believe I was born with the eating disorder, which in turn, was then triggered by events during my life. It’s also been found that starvation can itself trigger an eating disorder – and I can see that being possible since I had a history of difficulties from childhood.

Maybe eating disorders are leftovers from a day when we needed to adapt to survive times of famine? I think  Shan Guisinger‘s  theory is very interesting.

From Adapted to Flee Famine: Adding an Evolutionary Perspective on Anorexia Nervosa:

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is commonly attributed to psychological conflicts, attempts to be fashionably slender, neuroendocrine dysfunction, orsome combination ofthese factors. Considerable  research reveals these theoriesto be incomplete. Psychological and societalfactors accountforthe decision to diet but not for the phenomenology of the disorder; theories of biological  defects fail to explain neuroendocrine findings that suggest coordinated physiological mechanisms. This article presents evidence that AN’s
distinctive symptoms of restricting food, denial of starvation, and hyperactivity are likely to be evolved adaptive mechanisms that facilitated ancestral nomadic foragers leaving depleted environments; genetically susceptible individuals who lose too much weight may trigger these archaic adaptations. This hypothesis accounts for the occurrence of AN-like syndromes in both humans and animals and is consistent with changes observed in the physiology, cognitions, and behavior of patients with AN.

Also check out a letter she wrote to Harriet Brown – some good reading.

I’d love to know what you think!

Honesty Amidst Setbacks

I find it incredibly difficult to be completely honest about how I’m really going. Especially on such a public forum as this blog.

There are perhaps a couple of people I’m always totally honest with – and that is because they are part of my treatment team. Being honest with them is obvious to me. They can’t help  me unless they know what’s happening! Scarily enough there are many people with eating disorders who cannot be honest with their treatment team – in fact, it seems to be very common in the earlier stages of being so unwell, or when the person is lacking in insight. Insight makes a huge difference in this fight – being able to understand that you are unwell, and why, and that the people around you are trying to help you, not persecute you.

It’s quite obvious in the blog world, actually, to come across people who blog about their supposedly ‘healthy lives’, but don’t have the insight to acknowledge the elephant in the room, their eating disorder – and the fact that they are becoming more and more unwell and more people every day are speaking out in concern for them. I can never understand some of these people when they so blatantly ignore the concern and pretend they are fine, or worse, they are well - and it’s often hard to find respect for them. There are so many people, especially younger and more vulnerable people – who read these sites and take on board the messages these sick bloggers are putting out there. If there is one thing I would absolutely loathe myself for, it would be inadvertently causing or triggering someone else’s eating disorder.

But despite it being so easy for me to stand in judgement – we often forget that eating disorders are by nature, an illness in where the person suffering from it often lacks that insight or is in heavy denial. That they often act in ways that infuriate, irritate, frustrate, people around them. That deceit is a classic behavior  born of shame and fear and the need to hang on to their disorder. Being sick doesn’t make someone bad. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been thought of and told that I was a bad person, because I was too unwell to just eat and keep it down and behave. And I would have done anything at those times to ‘behave’ so that I could stop hurting, worrying or frustrating people – I tried with all my heart to do that. It wasn’t something I was capable of doing at that stage.

One of the main reasons I find it so difficult to be honest with people about how I’m really going, is deep shame. Long before I had the foggiest notion that I actually had an eating disorder, I saw people with anorexia on current affairs shows on TV and just was heartbroken for them, and frightened for them that they were so fragile and that they would die – and I couldn’t understand at all why they were doing that to themselves. It shocked me to think they had actually chosen to do that to themselves and then to continue to do so in the face of imminent death and the pleas of their loved ones. I just could not get my head around it.  I thought they were also incredibly vain, to be killing themselves to just be skinny – I didn’t even see the appeal of being skinny. All my life, I had found skinny quite ugly. Instead, I strived to be strong, and to be able to dance. I was extremely proud of being able to dance at the level that I had gotten to, and at what my body could do. Even as a young child, It had been obvious to me that the worst dancers in my class were the skinny girls, who just couldn’t get anything right and always looked gangly and out of place. Conversely, the biggest girl was also the best dancer and always front and centre. She was bouncy and full of energy and personality.

And I have to admit – I thought they were brats. Sick, scared, lost, hurting brats, but brats nonetheless. I thought they were selfish. I thought they were manipulating everyone who cared for them in order to get attention and mollycoddling. I truly did.

So when I finally had to admit just after my first hospital admission for anorexia (spent protesting that I had needed to lose the weight and that I wasn’t at all like the ‘real anorexics’) that I had anorexia too, it brought incredible shame and disbelief down on me. I couldn’t believe I had an eating disorder. I who had been overcome with fury when other class mates had whispered “That’s what Fiona has” during a biology class discussion about anorexia, who had disgustedly retorted “that’s what spoilt vain brats do, and I would never do something that stupid” had indeed, done exactly that. Talk about irony!

Now I know better. I know that’s not true at all. I’ve never wanted the attention having an eating disorder has brought me. And I didn’t have anyone to mollycoddle me – my family has never cared. My dad, when he tracked me down a few years into my hospital admissions, tried his best, even offered initially for me to move in with them in the Far North – but I was too scared to, at that stage he was a complete stranger to me. And I didn’t want to impose on him and his family. I didn’t want to bring my problems into their world, they didn’t deserve that. He persevered with me – and I stayed with him a week or two here and there over the eight years I knew him – it was such a blessing and a privilege to be given a second chance at having a real family. I loved my stays with them – I was made welcome, treated with kindness and respect, and my little sister was always all over me which warmed my heart – I loved her dearly. (Still do.)

Unfortunately, despite wanting more than anything else to be able to just ‘stop’ being unwell when I was with them, I couldn’t. I tried so hard! I usually lasted at best a few days. In those years, I wasn’t even really able to eat ‘normal’ food, so great was my fear, so I usually had my own food and created meals to eat with them, mostly dinner meals. I tried to make these meals look large and as close to ‘normal’ as I could – hoping that my family would just think I had other preferences and was feeding myself satisfactorily and not worry or be sad that I couldn’t enjoy some of their delicious meals. I wanted them to believe I was happy. I didn’t want them to worry at all. I failed.

A huge pile of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, and a million carrots (nibbled mostly during the evenings when I just badly wanted to EAT everything in sight) does not look like a good nutritious meal to anyone. Neither does a pile of brown, terribly overcooked cabbage. I only fooled myself. It was plainly apparent to anyone that I was sick, and even when I wasn’t staying with them, my dad worried. He would phone me (in the days I was still trying to communicate via phone) and ask me how I was doing, and I’d tell him I was going okay, hanging in there. Unfortunately he could tell just by my voice that I wasn’t well at all, he later told me, and instead reached out to someone he thought was a friend of mine – who had given him her details at a time he’d visited me in hospital and she had been there. She wasn’t a friend – I thought she was too for a while, she turned out to be an enemy – she fed my dad the nastiest of lies – told him my eating disorder was to hurt him, to ‘get back at him’ for not being around when I was younger. That it was for attention. That I was dying, when I was very sick but definitely not on my death bed (she also tried to force me to make a will once visiting me – and got promptly kicked out, who does that?!) She also contacted my sister, who was in her very early teens at the time, perhaps even a tween still at that stage – this forty-something year old (really)parent’s basement-dwelling woman, friended a kid. And fed her lies about me too. Told her that if I loved her, really loved her, I wouldn’t be doing this to myself, and that my dad died of cancer – melanoma – because of the stress I had caused him.

I have deeply regretted that I wasn’t honest with my dad about how I was really going, no matter how unwell I was. If I was honest, he wouldn’t have felt the need to ask someone else how I really was, and he might never have been fed such a pack of lies that probably coloured his views of his own daughter, nor would my little sister have been fed the lies that led to her gradually hating me more and more until the last straw was me actually doing something deplorable – shoplifting binge food and getting caught on the morning of dad’s funeral – for which she cannot forgive me. She hates my guts now. What’s more, I just reinforced the lies by what I did. Shoplifting is the thing I hate perhaps most about me. I haven’t done it for a while now – but I haven’t let my guard down and I never will. There have been so many times in my life that I have stopped, for years sometimes – and then fallen down that hole again. The urge to grab food is always, always so strong, even more so when I’m upset, stressed, unwell and definitely, hungry. And the bingeing and purging is the most horrible thing ever, I wish with all my heart I’d never started down that road, a road I feel unable to break free from now. I would never have struggled as much as I have, and I would never have shoplifted food – something so, so wrong to me.

I fear judgement so much. All my life, I have been harshly judged, by my own family, and by society. My own family (apart from dad) never made any attempts to understand me. When I got out of there  they didn’t know me. They had had nearly 17 years living with me from my birth to get to know me – and they didn’t have a clue. This was because they simply did not care.

Everything in my life was something I was judged for. My mother spent my life berating me for all the good things she did do for me – telling me endlessly that if only she didn’t ‘have’ to take me to ballet, the car wouldn’t be wearing out, she’d have more money for other things, she would have more time to spend with my brother and sister. She would have been able to finish her studies and be working now. She would have been a successful artist. She would have fixed our filthy, unfinished house up.  It didn’t matter that she took me to ballet perhaps 3 times a week, which took about 2 – 3 hours at a time tops. That is not the lions’ share of the week. She had all day that we were at school to be an artist, to do her schoolwork, to clean up or fix things and so on – and she instead would sit around watching soapies on TV or working on the growing pile of receipts she kept to create another bill to send our dad of money she wanted to demand from him. She spent all day with my older sister who was home all day too, they were like best girlfriends rather than  mother and daughter. She had time to take my brother to soccer and martial arts and basketball. They weren’t starving for attention or time with her.

The last couple of years I lived there she didn’t even have to take me to ballet or pay a cent for me aside from absolute basics – food and clothing. My ballet was paid for by scholarships and sponsorships I’d won, and I got myself there using public transport. My days were long – a school day for me was up at 5am, chores, breakfast, cold bath, try to iron dry damp clothes I had to wear. Catch bus at 5.55am. Transfer to train, for nearly an hour. Transfer to another bus to school. We started dancing at 8am with Limber, followed by usually ballet class, then jazz or tap or repertoire or pointe or contemporary or something else afterwards. I danced during the class breaks, and danced afterwards til everyone had showered so that I was in there mostly alone to avoid the bullying that was happening all those years. Showered and caught our bus to school to begin academic work at about 2pm, going through til 4.30pm. Then reversing the transport home, at 6.30pm where there were more chores, homework, and endless family battles to navigate. I would practice most nights and end up either lying in bed all night exercising or falling asleep at about 3am at my desk, to repeat the next day. This was six days a week, there was no time for me to get a job and between the ages of 14 to 16, I was still extremely immature and probably wouldn’t have been able to find anyone to employ me anyway. (I did try – volunteering during my holidays and canvassing local businesses for work with my resume.) My mother, who was paid a single parent pension, an allowance for me for my disabilities, and maintenance from dad – refused to supply most basics for me aside from food – and very cheap food at that, usually buying food for the family and cheaper food just for me. She even refused to buy me a school uniform, and the school supplied me with one out of their spares cupboard, kept for accidents, four sizes too big and stained. One of my school teachers helped me tape the fronts of my shoes together and paint over the tape so they stayed on my feet. I also tried to keep my shoes together by nailing nails into the sole from the inside – and ended up walking painfully on them all day as they worked themselves upwards. (And I was grateful – it was a uniform, just like everyone else had.)

My point is, my mother was not only needlessly cruel, she seemed to blame everything on me. I was just a kid, and one who had been tightly controlled too, so that I was very emotionally immature, and she was my mother. My PARENT, who was meant to feed me, clothe me, look after me. Instead, she taught me that I was some horrible, unworthy and inherently wrong creature not worthy of what other people took for granted, and the bullying I suffered due partly to  my constant scruffiness (especially during ballet school where most of the others were from affluent backgrounds) and partly due to my ineptness socially, just reinforced this. I grew up deeply ashamed of myself as a person in every way.

My own family never cared enough to really find out who Fiona was, and they made it clear I wasn’t even worthy of being understood or accepted,  and so they certainly didn’t even try to learn about or understand eating disorders. They believed every stereotype there was – to them, my eating disorder was a sign of me being the spoilt naughty selfish girl they’d always told me I was. In later years they accused me of using a ‘made up illness’ to basically be a lazy bludger, never working, never achieving anything but sponging off the taxpayer, and this stung deeply. They of all people, knew how hard a worker I was, and how I surpassed all expectations, winning a local Australia day award among other acknowledgements for my striving and perseverance. They used their words and their cruelty to basically ally themselves with the eating disorder and strip me of the last vestiges of self – invalidating my past, and stripping me of even being able to hang on to knowing I was a hard worker and an achieve who was capable of better things than this, or that it wasn’t laziness that had stopped me in my tracks. That my whole life hadn’t all been a complete failure.

It makes sense to me that if your own family judges you so harshly, what can you expect from people who don’t know you? I went straight from leaving home into the arms of the man who raped and stalked me for years. It was a very familiar situation for me – and it felt like all I deserved. I’ve met quite a number of people who were more than happy to feed my insecurities like the so-called ‘friend’ who lied to my dad and little sister, and a certain number of ignorant people who don’t seem to realize that not everyone is born with the privileges they take for granted, that some of us have to really fight to even survive let alone enjoy the milestones that they are assured of achieving. In my own heart, I feel like the biggest failure ever, I reflect on my life and see missed opportunities, on so much hard work thrown away, and so much support and belief from people I failed in some way – let down, failed to meet their expectations, or cut off. I feel as though at 35, I haven’t even achieved as much as most teenagers have, and that there is no way I will ever be able to catch up to them, let alone those of my own age group.

I’m just so deeply ashamed.

I’m reminded constantly by those who have taken the time to get to know me, and who genuinely care, that I have come a long way, that I can’t afford to compare myself with anyone else, because nobody else has had to fight the same things I have in my life – same as there are so many people out there who have faced circumstances I have no idea of and for me to judge them on their face value at any point of time that I come in contact with them would be so wrong, and totally belittling how much they HAVE achieved – just in a life completely different and therefore with different milestones and measures of progress to mine. And yet, I am so scared of others judging me harshly and finding me a failure, a loser, that I judge myself the most harshly of all.

And here is where honesty comes into the equation – I’m already ashamed of the fact that I have an eating disorder. My shame when I am struggling more than usual or I relapse is many times greater than that. Throw in the harsh judgement towards people with eating disorders that I often come across online, particularly if they blog about it, and the shame of having fallen from my position of being able to say “Here I am, I am proof that a chronic severe eating disorder doesn’t have to kill you or mean you can’t turn things around.” and most importantly of all – “There is hope” – and it’s extremely hard to face up to people and be honest with you all about the fact that I’m not doing all that well any more.

I don’t consider myself to be fully in relapse – but I’m borderline. I’ve slowed down, perhaps stopped the weight loss, but I can’t seem to get it to go back up again – and what’s more, am sitting just above what used to be my discharge weight from hospital back when times were bad. And as always, ED brain has taken over – I struggle to keep hydrated, struggle to eat, struggle with bingeing and purging. Physically I have lost a lot of strength and the chronic pain I worked so hard to rid myself of is plaguing me again. And I’m so angry at myself – I know how hard I worked to get where I was – and now, I’m no better than I was on leaving hospital during those bad  years again. I am so disappointed in myself, and so scared not only for myself, but more so, for Shalimar. What if I get so sick again, what will become of her? I don’t want to send her back to the pet motel all the time – she’s getting old now. She deserves so much better than this. And I don’t want to miss out on sharing a single moment of her life with her. I missed too much of her life when I was in hospital. I’ve let her down, most of all. She depended on me and I am not living up to those responsibilities.

And I’ve let you down, the people who read my blog. It was supposed to be a journey of hope, reclaiming a LIFE, of proving that just because everyone has expected you to die, doesn’t mean you have to.

Here is where I am going to take on board my own message. I am going to believe in hope, and I am going to remind myself that it is always within our power to change our behaviors and our thoughts, if we desire to enough. The more I walk on my chosen trail in a forest, the more worn and visible that trail becomes, and the less visible the trail I’m no longer walking on becomes as nature reclaims it and grows over where it used to be. Same with my mind – the more I practice new ways to think and new behaviors, the more natural they become to me, and the less natural the old ones will be, too. It’s called creating new neural pathways. It’s also called not giving up, being stubborn, and fighting to live – all things true of me.

I have so much to live for – even more now. I have less than two months to go until I am officially a uni student again. And I’m finally realizing that my hopes and dreams and goals these days  might be vastly different, but they are still things I’m able to be passionate about, and my life still can be for good, rather than have been pointless.

I’m not going to live up to the expectations of the people who taught me I would never be anything more than a loser.

I’m going to fulfil my own expectations – and those of the people who truly care and want the best for me. I’m going to fight and make this life truly count.

Thank you for reading, I hope to be able to bring a more positive post next time.

 

(Image sources: 1, 2)

Deep In A Hole

I’ve fallen into a hole since I got home from my holiday. A hole I can’t seem to climb out of – although I’ve never stopped fighting to escape it.

I suppose that what goes up, must come down. The holiday was such a high for me. I didn’t want to come back to my life. I couldn’t keep the eating disorder out of the holiday completely, but it was still a break, such a refreshing break. A glimpse of what could be a much better life to live.

I have come to believe that even though I still am adamanant that people do and can recover from eating disorders, depression, and other mental illnesses, I am not one of them. Depression is something I have fought in all my living memories – and was first diagnosed with at age 9, after I supposedly wrote a suicide note. It’s as much an organic part of me as my brown hair and my hazel/green eyes are. And like my eyes used to be blue, and my hair used to be white-blonde – I have hoped that as I grew older and wiser, the nature of the depression would change.

In many ways, it has. Twenty years ago, every emotion I felt threatened to burst me, inside out like a sausage splitting on the barbecue. I could not contain that pain, or that ecstacy when things were going right for me. Betrayal felt like literally being speared through the gut with a knife. These days, that has mellowed to some extent. The highs and lows are still excruciating – but they usually do not feel like they are physically killing me. Usually.

Because there are still times I could claw my own skin to shreds with the agony of it – and lately it’s been a lot like that. I’ve resisted, lying still under the heavy covers on my bed, pretending I’m buried under cool dark earth, contained, unable to hurt myself. Unable to be found or hurt by others either. But shards of anxiety and piercing distress still worm their way through the earth to nibble at me, relentlessly. I open my mouth to scream and eat dirt.

It hurts. Depression hurts. It feels like more than a human being can bear.

My eating disorder is intricately linked to the depression – it does make it harder to fight, when you cannot even bear to be. It’s easy to stop caring whether you live or not, or wish you would just die now and get it over with. It’s easy to forget there are so many reasons to live, so many people who are everything to you, that you have a beautiful cat who adores you nearly as much as you adore her, that your life is much better now, so much better than it was twenty years ago, and it’s getting a little bit better all the time, slowly but surely. It’s easy to forget that depression always ends. It will always get better. I know that, because I have been through it so many times before – and it always did get better. My question is – how do I make it stay better?

There is no easy way out for me. I’ve lost friends to suicide in the past, and it hurt so much to lose them – still hurts so much, more than it hurt to lose people through other means in many cases. I swore I would never put anyone through that myself – and never again attempted to kill myself. In the past couple of weeks, two people who were dear friends of dear friends of mine – have killed themselves. And witnessing the grief my dear friends are experiencing – is a reminder of my vow. I cannot cause this pain to another person. No matter how much pain I am in, myself.

Life has been all about pain for me. In many ways, I’ve courted it. As a dancer, more pain meant I was working harder and therefore becoming a better dancer. As a daughter and sister living through domestic abuse, as a student being bullied, and as the victim of the man who raped me, I bore it expressionlessly because I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of knowing they had hurt me. And it reminded me that I was still alive, despite them. As someone with an eating disorder, I cannot remember a time without pain, physical or emotional – it is my every moment’s reality. I think I would not know what to do with myself were I not in pain of some kind.

But no matter how great my tolerance is to it, that does not mean it is not eating me away inside and damaging my ability to live.

These days, much of the pain I feel is from the past abuses. I wish it would go away, shut up already. Get out of my life! I’m free now. I’ve been free of them for ages. My life is my own to live now. To live as I believe, without hiding or changing myself so as not to draw more violence. To discover who I am, and be true to that person for once. I have rejected the past and the people who were part of it, and moved on. Except the pain didn’t cooperate and my days are haunted, I relive the violence and the taunting constantly. And I fall into holes of despair.

I’m working with the best therapist I’ve ever met. I have hope we are going to get through this. I just don’t know if I can hang on until we get through this. And I don’t know if it’s possible to ‘get through this’ and have it go away for good.

Do you believe that the pain from the past, can be over and left behind permanently? How did you manage to do this, if  you have?

If you or someone you know is suicidal, please get help now. 

Lifeline Australia

Suicide Help UK

Suicide and Crisis Hotlines USA

(image source)

Ugly Beauty Whinge

My eating disorder is an ugly beast of an illness. It’s made me old, dried out my skin and hair, ruined my teeth. Sucked my bones of nutrients, damaged my organs, and stolen the light from my eyes, the smile from my lips.

When I’m acutely ill, there is absolutely no point in painting my face, or dressing with style. Instead I dress to camoflague a body that shocks and disgusts and incites passerby to stare and spit. I don’t believe that clothes  ’look better on the hanger’ than on a fleshed body – as many claim they do – but the hanger sure beats my body. My body makes clothing ugly.

I don’t want to stand out in any way. I seek to hide. To slip by unnoticed. The hell I live is beyond the imagination of most who haven’t been there, and I don’t want them to glimpse my shame and despair, lest I infect them in some way – pull them in and drown them with me.

It is not a glamourous life.

I have quite a number of friends with eating disorders, severe eating disorders, just like mine, who have modelled, or do still model. Or aspire to model. I see their facebook pages every day – I see the continuous stream of photographs. Smiling, laughing, posed to perfection.

Here the wind whips my hair. Here I shake my hair as I laugh joyously. There I sink my teeth into a huge dribbling wedge of melon. I sip delicately from a glass of wine, or twirl on pointe shoes. I am glamourous in evening gown, or I’m an adorable pixie in a summery dress that shows off every single rib. Even in the dark emo shots, I am a glorious ethereal creature. Everyone wants to be me. 

Yes, even me. I have lived with my eating disorder for most of my life.  I know first hand the utter hell they live, even without having read their cries of utter distress on a daily basis – and yet, I want their lives so badly. I want to look like that. To be so beautiful. So glamourous, so perfect. To have people want to photograph me, to make inspirational posters from my own likeness. I want to look amazing in every single thing I wear no matter whether it is a hessian sack or there not be much more than bones to hang it on. I want to go to parties.. and I hate parties, I freaking hate them.

We are fighting the same illness – and yet we are so completely different. I know the majority of this I see is a sham – it’s a mask. A carefully maintained and perfected facade that hides the fact that these girls have shattered bodies, shattered dreams, shattered lives and shattered psyches. There are many ways of hiding – hiding in full view can be as successful as being completely out of sight.

I don’t understand these girls. And I doubt they understand me. But they make this monster look desireable. They make me want it – someone who has been there. What must those who have not yet experienced the reality of this think? I’m not talking about taking care of one’s appearance. I’m talking about flaunting something deadly, fully in the knowledge of what message is sent to others.

It is sweet deadly poison.

 

Chris Thornton ‘The brain, the mind and eating disorders’ at Mind & Its Potential 2012

What is an eating disorder?
What’s the effect on the brain?
How can neuroscience help in treating eating disorders?
New therapies for eating disorders: cognitive self-compassion and mindfulness

Chris Thornton, Clinical Director and Principal Clinical Psychologist, The Redleaf Practice

Ground breaking research, a real eye opener for many.

(I can’t figure out how to only post the second video in this playlist – sorry)

 

Discouraged

The post-festive period is often a time of steep come-down for many people.

For me, lately, it’s been peaks and valleys.

If my life has been a journey, it’s been a rough one.

But that’s made me all the more determined to continue on, to make it through to the end – wherever the end may be.

For all the times I’ve struggled to climb a steep, rocky slope, I’ve slipped down an equally treacherous abyss.

For all the times I’ve realised just how worth living life is, how wonderful and amazing this world is and how much I love those people I am blessed to know, I have been equally as hopelessly lost in a black well of depression. Unable to see but a star in the sky – but I hang on to that star, because it reminds me that there is a way out. And it reminds me to dream. Because dream I do, and dreaming is how I convinced myself I had a reason to live when I was in my rock bottom places.

 

My dreams used to be high as the sky – there were no limits. I was going to be a dancer, a writer, a veterinarian, a biochemist, an artist.. there truly were no barriers. If I wished to achieve something deeply enough, I worked my guts out at it and I got there. My childhood and adolescent years were heady with the heights of my own successes. I rarely knew failure. I was labelled ‘gifted and talented’.

The hell of home paled when I threw myself into that world.

But there comes a time when the good can no longer block out the effects of the bad, and the nightmare overcame the pleasantness. I no longer was able to become lost in the dreams I worked towards, no longer was able to concentrate, I was only partly there any more. I was dissociated.

Part of me ran away. Flew away. (Still wants to, all the time, today.)

Here I am now. I have incredible difficulty living in the present.

It’s scary to be me. I’m 35. I have nothing to show for it. No hopes. No dreams. They all were lost. Ravaged by what happened. By illness and trauma.

I have never had a job. Never will have a career. My brain is incapable of study. Cannot remember even the basics of stuff I need to know when I need it. Cannot read and enjoy books. Cannot concentrate to paint. Cannot hold a conversaton sometimes.

I will never have a partner or husband, never have children of my own. Never have grandchildren or nephews or nieces. Never play Santa or the Easter Bunny, bake birthday cakes, pick out pretty dresses or play in the garden with my kids. Never take them to school and coach them through their homework. Never be frazzled by tantrums and tears.

I cannot enjoy ballet, cannot enjoy volunteer work, because I spend days flooded with anxiety about just leaving home, getting there, being there, and coming home again. I’m wracked with fear about just doing every day things. I still do them. But enjoy them?

My brain is mush, my heart shattered, my self broken, my body wracked with pain. What is there to live for?

I have no future.

The best I can hope for is to survive. I will never heal completely from the traumas, because there are no options to help me with it here in Australia beyond what I’ve accessed already, and try as I have to help myself, I’ve gotten nowhere.

As a child, I was prisoner of my family.

As an adult, I’m prisoner of my mind. Of my past.

Is it any wonder that all I want is to fly far, far away?

(But I won’t give up. I never have. I never will.)

Image sources 1, 2, 3, 4

Community Safety Announcement – ED Watchdogs.

This post comes with a MASSIVE trigger warning. 

In the last few years, I’ve seen so much that’s truly shocked me. And I’ve become aware that the eating disorders community attracts predators of it’s own.

There are some utter scumbags on the internet. And, being the internet, it can be hard, sometimes impossible, to police them.

Ideally, the internet never should be policed. But there are lines that should never be crossed – some of which in this case are paedophilia, rape,  preying on those who are vulnerable.

ED Watchdogs is a recently set up facebook community that is hoping to spread the message of keeping ourselves safe, and of keeping an eye out for each other. The facilitators have spent several years working silently behind the scenes compiling thousands of screenshots, messages and emails, endeavoring to try and remove the worst of these predators one at a time. Reporting them to facebook has been only a temporary measure – they always return. Reporting them to authorities usually results in nothing – not enough evidence. With very real abuse and assault going on – these facebook meetings do cross into real life in many instances – they put in hundreds of hours of work in order to get the evidence to present to police and have them actually investigate.

However this is just too much for a couple of people, themselves members of this community, to undertake alone – and they hope for the community to become their eyes and ears.

ED Watchdogs has an Ask.fm page for anonymous tip offs.

Screenshots and other files can be emailed to ed.watchdogs@gmail.com and if you prefer to stay anonymous, you can use a service like Anonymouse to do so.

I’ll leave you with an example of just what sort of person is among us. (Trigger warning.) 

I would like to take this opportunity to warn you all about the user ‘Myke Nihilist Davidian’.My alarm bells went off about this man a few months ago when I saw hints in his profile information that he may be the type of character to prey on young girls with eating disorders.

~WARNING: The following information may be triggering to those with abuse or rape in their past.~

I confronted Myke about his page and flat out requested to know what his intentions were. This image was the last reply I got.

This is an example of the kind of character we, the ED Watchdogs want to warn people to be wary about.
Please take care.

 

Images courtesy ED Watchdogs.

Happy New Year! High Tea, Friends, Happiness, And More To Come.

Hello! I just wanted to quickly pop in and share with you my special, challenging day – and most of all to wish you all a wonderful, happy New Year.

I can’t believe that 2012 is coming to a close already. It goes so fast!

Today, I did something that a few years ago I never would have dreamed of doing. Another something – after Christmas and my Sleepover parties!

I met up with two special friends for a Fashionista High Tea at a pretty amazing place, the Palazzo Versace hotel on the Gold Coast. We had high tea in this amazing room – the Le Jardin restaurant -

High tea was sublime -

Eyeing off the goodies…

Of course, I take terrible photos. Focus on the FOOD, and the surroundings! The pool was amazing. We are all going to have to come back at some stage and get ourselves a pagoda!

That can totally be a New Year resolution.

I’m not really big on actual formal resolutions any more. I used to aim for the sky, far higher than I could possibly hope to achieve. It meant for me, that I fought harder and usually achieved more than had I aimed for what was ‘reasonable’. That was one of the secrets behind my high achievements of my younger years.

The biggest secret was that I was obsessive and relentless and pushed myself, body and mind, beyond the limit – and this contributed to my eventual break down. I guess there are ‘reasonable’ limits on most things for a good reason.

I often think just how much more I could have achieved in my life, had I stuck to limits that were reasonable for me. I might be in a career now, I might be married, or at least have a partner and kids, I might be a totally different person in a totally different position to now.

But we can’t waste more time with regrets. We only have right now – our future is made up of a series of ‘right nows’ – and it’s by making right now the best we can make it that we ensure our future will also be the best it can be.

And that’s what I’m going to focus on in 2013. Trying to make every moment count. Trying to continue the good things I’ve managed to achieve this year, and add more, but not overwhelm myself to the point of relapse.

In 2012, I achieved 2.5 years hospital free, and with a fairly stable weight at around 15 kilos heavier than what I used to fall to, and 5 kilos heavier than what my discharge weight used to be. I started volunteer work, graduated from physiotherapy after 18 months, started ballet classes, moved suburbs, completely cut off my biological family, and grown in many other small ways. I’ve taken up some more hobbies like gardening and sudoku, been painting and in an art show,  and I’ve been stretching myself so much more socially – getting out there meeting friends and DOING things with them instead of letting the social anxiety part of things cut me off.

I’ve eaten out so much, eaten so many new things. Like Christmas dinner, birthday meals, just meals at restaurants and picnics, high tea today. A couple of years ago, there was no way I would even put a speck of that stuff in my mouth, or keep it in my body,  and that’s before we even get into the ‘in public’ stuff.

I’ve  even gone swimming in a public pool and at the beach, and I’ve slept over with friends twice.

And I’ve started proper therapy and am working hard, making good  progress.

It’s been a great year. And there is so much more to come.

In 2013, I just want to keep expanding on these things. I want to increase my work hours so I can get a real job, and keep on volunteering because it’s good for my spirit. I want to do more ballet, and tackle the crippling anxiety that I have to fight to get to do it every single time. I want to do more things with more friends more often. I want to enjoy my own time more, doing more things I like or find meaningful or constructive rather than sleeping my life away or being sucked up by all ED thoughts and activities. And I want to progress even more with the therapy, and hopefully be able to achieve some peace – to that end, I already have an intake appointment lined up with an independent ED-based counselling/therapy service provider early in January and hope that when my 10 psychologist appointments are up, this fills the gap. (I also found the courage to ‘fire’ my private psychiatrist.)

I’m not making any ‘absolutes’ though – because we never know what is going to happen, and I think that as long as I’m going in the right direction, that is what matters.

I hope all of you have a wonderful, safe, happy new year, and that it brings better times – better health, peace, stability, healing. I hope that the good things are only a sign of things yet to come. And despite wishing you all so much more, in the same breath, I wish you all enough.

Okay, enough of my long winded ‘quick’ post! Go celebrate, go sleep, go see out 2013 in a way that makes YOU happy, and start the new year in a way you mean to continue.

And thank you all for being so supportive and lovely to me throughout this year of blogging.

(Image Sources: 1, 2 , 4, 5, 6)

(Ps, Shalimar has informed me of her desire to spend the new year eating, sleeping, catching lizards, and repeating it all over again )

My Experience Of Body Image

I do a lot of pretending.

I pretend a lot that I’m going better than I really am.

I pretend that I’m happier than I am, or at least, not as unhappy as I really am.

I pretend that I have a lot more hope than I do in reality.

And I pretend that I don’t really want to be ‘thin’.

I don’t know what to say to explain that one!

No, I really do NOT want to be emaciated, or even ‘too thin’. I feel like such a failure, and that everyone can SEE it when it’s that obvious. It’s not a nice look at all, in fact, it can be quite disgusting. Have you ever seen someone who is emaciated’s bottom? There is this big… concave HOLE there. And the anus that is usually hidden by flesh is.. stretched out in the middle of that hole. Too much info right?

Grossed out yet? Imagine LIVING WITH THAT. Still want to be thin?

And yet, I would give anything to go back to being almost 15 kilograms less than I am now. I don’t care how gross it might be. I don’t care about people looking down on me or treating me horribly because of it. I don’t even care that it might kill me. I am too much, and I will always be too much. At least in my mind, I am too much. I know in reality I am not, far from it. But to me, always too much. Always. And even at my lowest weight, I never even started to not be too much.

My body image is SO distorted. Even when I was at my lowest weight, on a good day I would see a normal, maybe rather fleshy person. On a bad day, I’d practically be able to roll myself around. And yet, under all that, my wise mind was constantly saying “But I’m too thin. I know I’m too thin. The ‘numbers’ say I’m too thin. And yet what is this incredible fleshy hulk I’m hauling round with me every day?”

Every now and then I’d catch a glance of what I called “Michael Jackson” in the mirror – a glimpse of how I truly was – and scare myself terribly. But that lasted for a glimpse and a few moments post-glimpse – before “too-much” loomed over me again, threatening to squish the ‘me’ right out of myself.

Okay, I know my nose is bigger and it’s REAL, but yeah. Scary stuff.

One of the common myths is that people with anorexia and/or bulimia enjoy their disease, enjoy the ‘thinness’ that many of them achieve. I think the reality would be closer to we don’t even get to experience it let alone ‘enjoy’ it.

How do I really see myself?

Imagine your body is SO heavy and huge that you find it hard to move. You find yourself very weighed down. Sluggish. One of the reasons my dancing started to fail in uni was because, yes I’d gained some weight initially, but after that, even though it was plunging DOWN, I felt heavy and unable to MOVE properly due to having so much flesh stopping me. It was a complete utter delusion.

You can’t walk with your legs together because your thigh rolls prevent that.

You can’t put your arms down properly to your sides because the rolls of fat under them and on your torso are too huge.

And it all feels SO REAL. So completely utterly REAL.

It’s not just about the body image way of being ‘fat’ either. It’s about being that aforementioned ‘too much’.

I experience the world as though I’m towering over everyone around me. I am more tall than I am short, but I’m not THAT tall, and I still feel this way when the person next to me is actually a lot taller than I. The same with width – I feel monstrous next to everyone else, even if the person beside me outweighs me by 100 kilos.

Even without the comparing of size, I just feel too much ME.  I’ve spent my life trying to squeeze myself out. Trying to disappear. To be invisible. Apologising for taking up too much space, for being so wrong, for being so grossly overimposingly massively HERE.

The way I experience my own size against that of the world has also see-sawed along with my actual weight, except that it’s strayed ever further than reality each time. The first time I ever lost weight, I felt tiny, I could feel myself and see myself shrinking. The world became huge, but only in relation to my own size.. Then I was refed, and although I grew, oh boy did I grow bigger, the world seemed to stay the same size. Each time I went down after that, the world got bigger while I stayed the same size. And each time I was refed, I grew bigger and the world stayed the same size. Can you understand that? We were becoming more and more skewed the more I lost and gained, I growing ever bigger, the world ever smaller.

Whoever invented those carnival mirrors, I wonder if they knew what this was like to live with?

This is just how I see my own face! My brain stretches it out so that it appears smeared.

So my problem is, I guess, that it’s so hard to live in a body that you feel so wrong in, one that you constantly wish you could literally unzip and step out of.

And while I struggle so much with my body image, I guess I have had to get to a place of maturity – listening to my wise mind and rationality over my discomfort and my desire to strive for something I find more pleasant to both see and be. 

Not everyone has reached that place.

Eating disorders are NOT about food, shape, weight – that is surface stuff. That is the language of our culture. That is the language we fall to first, when we are not happy, worried, anxious, have problems, and have no other way to express them but “I hate myself, I am so ugly, I am so big, if I lost weight, my problems would be better.” But food and weight and body image issues are often triggers for eating disorders to begin – and for the malnutrition that they cause to trigger the cognitive deficit and irrationality that leads to it becoming a mindset and something that overpowers us easily.

It’s very dangerous to be constantly giving us images to which we are expected to conform when they are physically not even possible for most. So many of us are struggling to even accept ourselves, let alone find ourselves acceptable in context of the rest of the world… and we are bombarded by reminders that apparently we never WILL ‘size up’.

What do you think of this?

And here I will end my ranting and leave you. Do you feel you ‘size up’ or are you too much? Is your body image distorted, or normal, or can you even tell when you only see what YOU see? How do you know if what you see is the reality?

If you have an eating disorder – how much do you feel it’s about food, weight, body image? Do you find that if you take those issues away, you still are stuck with your disorder and the problems that are underneath?

Do you find yourself yearning for something that is forbidden and dangerous? How do you deal with that?

And – if I don’t get to post again before midnight tomorrow - HAPPY NEW YEAR!! May 2013 be the happiest and most positive year all of you have lived to date – with better things on the horizon. xx

(Image Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 taken from Facebook.)

Tis The Season To Quake With Terror – Food and Christmas.

I’ve been doing a fair amount of quaking lately! The closer we come to Christmas, the more pressure I feel under and the more challenges I face.

A few Christmases ago, I could not even change my behaviours in order to not hurt the people I loved most. It broke my heart to know they worried about me, and I beat myself up endlessly for not being able to ‘fake it just for a day/week/appearance’ in some way to just set them at ease. It wouldn’t have been the end of the world – I knew that. One meal, like a Christmas dinner, would not have completely negated the years of starvation when it came to my body. It wouldn’t have suddenly made me fat or no longer emaciated. It wouldn’t have meant all hell broke loose and I lost control. (Although the reality was, I had NO control – I was controlled by the disorder, to a degree where I could not even disobey it if it meant saving my life or that of another.)

Christmas back then, if I was spending it with my Dad and his family, meant making myself a larger version of the same boring green iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber and celery salad I had every single meal, just adding in a few bits of watermelon for the dessert, and chomping on raw carrots when they snacked on nuts and nibblies. I guzzled diet coke as they downed juice and wine, and laughed and smiled insincerely to show how much I was enjoying myself and how full of the Christmas spirit I was. Wasn’t it all wonderful!!! (NO).

I didn’t fool anyone except myself (and hardly fooled myself either, I was miserable and I knew it.) Worse, I’d often end up bingeing later  on leftovers. Then wracked with guilt because that was their food, not mine, despite the many times they implored me to have some too.

The last couple of years have been different. My dad and his family are gone, he has passed away, they want nothing to do with me. So Christmas with them is no longer an option. I have cut myself off from the rest of my family  and so Christmas with them – an ordeal – is not ever going to be a threat. Mostly I spent the alone Christmases either hiding in bed, or volunteering. But the last couple, I’ve spent with my ‘chosen family’ – friends who are dear to me. Who make the day special just by their presence. And who treat me with the same respect that I treat them, something my mother’s side of the family never accomplished.

And I took part in the actual eating, too. The hugest challenge of all!

Two years ago, with a friend and her family I ate roast chicken, salad, roast veggies, and had pavlova and cream for dessert. Last year, a friend and I had a picnic ourselves in a park – a BBQ with sausages, veggies, salads, fruits and berries. Both of these were just amazing days for me, memories I will cherish for a long time.

This year, I’m actually doing a full on Christmas, with a friend, her partner,  and her extended family. I’m to join them for Christmas eve – we will tour the lights, and then go to a Christmas eve mass. On Christmas day, I have no idea of how it will actually unfold – but so far there are going to be at least 15 people, one of my friends who has been busy cooking is a chef, and these people go ‘all out’. It’s going to be Christmas with Bells on!

I am so excited. AND SO SCARED. So far in the last few days I’ve eaten SO MUCH scary food – like cheesy melty grilled sandwiches, deep fried battered fish, and real handmade fudge.  And it’s not even Christmas yet. Much as it’s a triumph being able to overthrow the ED when I’m with people who are dear to me, I’m more scared that I CAN eat these foods than when I didn’t used to have any power at all. I’m scared that if I can do this now, the old rules that used to keep my monstrous, gluttonous greed in check no longer will, and that I’m only ever a step away from losing control completely and eating myself into obesity. I still feel like one bite of something that is forbidden completely ‘blows’ years of abstinence. It still feels like the imminent end of the world to have food that is ‘forbidden’ inside me, and staying inside me. It feels that bad for ANY food actually.

The difference is I am feeling these fears, and eating the food anyway. In a way I’m doing my own exposure therapy and I’m proving to myself that the world doesn’t end and I don’t blow up or eat myself to obesity when I do allow myself to eat the ‘wrong’ food either. Hopefully with practice, this will come to feel okay. Maybe even normal? I live in hope (but still not much belief… yet..)

I think one of the most important lessons that living with an eating disorder has taught me over this more than 20 years of having it to a clinical degree, has nothing to do with food or weight, and everything to do with people. It’s brought home time and again how precious the people we love are, and how fleeting our time with them actually IS. Because when we avoid food, we end up avoiding them or distracting them and ourselves – we miss out on them and they miss out on us – even in the same room or at the same table, we are missing – gone AWOL.

Just a week ago, a close friend’s uncle died. He was in perfect health, and his car simply veered off the road on the way to work and smashed. He had suffered an aneurysm - no warning. Not a second to do anything about it – just healthy, then dead. It was a huge shock to his family, and a lesson to my friend to cherish every moment with her family and her loved ones, because we never know when this moment might be our last with them.

We just can’t afford to let the ED get in the way of that, either. We just can’t. There is no guarantee, and there never will be, of next Christmas. Until it happens, there isn’t even a guarantee of this one. We only ever have right now – and when we put it off for reasons like food, weight, etc – we lose it. Forever.

So this is the time we need to be making plans of how we’ll get through this season, while still being able to enjoy spending time with those we love. If that means bringing a safe food, then so be it – it’s preferable to not miss out on their companionship. If that means NOT going to a get together you would attend out of obligation but the people there are toxic to you – then that’s also a very positive step. Just as life is too short to spend avoiding our loved ones, it’s also too precious to waste in the company of those who only hurt us. 

What is the hardest part of Christmas for you? And how have you prepared, or feel would help you to cope? 

(Image Sources: 1, 2)