January 15, 2013 by Fiona

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

June 27, 2012 by Fiona

Tears In The Night.

(Trigger warning, abuse/rape/self-harm)

I wake crying in the early hours of the morning. This is when my heart is breaking, when I can no longer ignore it. I lay there this morning and thought “These are the feelings that I used the eating disorder to numb. And I can see why, they are just unbearable. It feels as though I could die from this pain.”

In the dark, I travelled to other dark times. Ones that I’ve revisited far too many times.

When I was still living in the place I grew up with the family, I used to escape outside every night that I could. It would be after 10pm, when all the shouting and screaming and bashing and hair pulling had mostly died down, and the others were getting ready to sleep in their soft safe beds, having their nice warm baths.

I used to sit there in the back yard and stare up at the sky. More nights than not, our mutt Whiskas would come and just sit next to me, leaning on me, and we’d peer upwards in comradely silence. He got it.

The stars were brilliant out there. It was pitch black at night, not close at all to any city or even town that could dull the amazing galaxy up there. And I used to dream. Plan and dream – but mostly dream.

These escapes kept me sane.

“One day I’m going to be free from here. I’m going to be safe. I’m never going to be hurt so much again. I’m not going to go without anything. I’ll be happy. I’ll be successful. I’ll be free.”

Years into the future, Wanker forced me to drive with him out to a secluded national park on the outskirts of the city. This is the same night that he drove to the big bridge in our city, leaned past me and threw open my door. “Jump!” he taunted me. “If you want to kill yourself, just go ahead and jump already.” And I sat there, frozen. He’d torn my pants off after a fight to keep them on that evening, and seen my self harm efforts on the tops of my thighs.

(This was the very beginning of my years of self harming – and I had been terrified at the urge to do it, never having known that people actually did that sort of thing. I never read about people doing it in books or all over the internet like you can, today. My self harm went hidden for years, known only to myself and to Wanker, because I was so terrified of what they would do if they saw what I did to myself, surely they would call out the men in the white jackets..)

At the national park, it was darker than even back at home. Terrified and alone. Nothing but trees as far as the eye could see. And the stars, brilliant above, the first time I’d seen them so brightly since back home.

And as I gazed at them over Wanker’s shoulder, through a film of tears – the smell of the grass strong in the crisp cold air – I remembered those nights of dreaming. And something in me shattered.

“…so this, this is freedom.”

(Image Source)

June 11, 2012 by Fiona

Eating Disorders and Pet Feeding; and My Secret Dream World.

Happy Monday. It’s been a rainy holiday here, the perfect day to snuggle up inside – which is exactly what I’ve done. For the most part anyway – as usual, Shalimar cannot accept that it’s rainy and cold outside, and begs for me to take her out. So I did. And this is what happened:

She’s gained some weight again. She’s struggled with being overweight for the last few years, actually was obese about a year ago. I was terrified for her health, and put her on a Vet supervised obesity diet for as long as we could afford ($55 a bag!!!! Pet food can be more expensive than people food..) She was a LOT better. Even though I couldn’t keep her on the expensive food for more than a few months, it helped us to get into a routine and set amount for two meals a day – she no longer pesters me for food at all hours, and I no longer give in and spoil her with tidbits and extra feedings.

Well, at least, that was the case. Lately I’ve been slipping – she’s begun pawing for food at all hours again, partly because of cabin fever with all the rain lately, and I’ve been giving in to her. That stops again, right now. It’s scary how fast a few little bits here and there blow her up. I want her to be happy and healthy and she is neither if she gets too fat.

I have always been scared about how much to feed her. When I first adopted her, I vowed that she would never know what it was like to be hungry and not know where her next meal was coming from, or even if she would ever get a next meal again. I also was scared of messing up her relationship with food like mine is. I still struggle with that fear. Especially as I hold a lot of guilt about the number of times I’ve had to board her, and for me, food and love are hard to separate at times. (It was a lovely pet motel who cherished her, but it was horrible for her still – to be away from home in a cage, large or not, outings on the grass and cuddles or not. This is a huge motivation for me to stay well and out of hospital.)

Mostly I just want Shalimar to enjoy her life with food just being food. That’s my goal. I just want her to be as happy as she can be, and as healthy as she can be. When she’s happy, I’m happy – which is why she’s allowed to eat my beans!

The other thing I wanted to write about today, was my ‘Secret Dream World’. In other words, where I go, when I’m in a very deep, almost comatose state of sleep. What has this got to do with eating disorders? Well for me, a lot.

It sounds crazy. It probably IS crazy.

All of my life, I have dreamt about a place, the same place. It’s recognisable to me because it only changes as one would expect with time (trees growing, etc). It’s a huge, complex place, like another entire WORLD. There are still new places that I haven’t explored or discovered yet. And it’s a beautiful place. Utterly beautiful. All the things that make this world of ours beautiful are there but perhaps even MORE amazing if that’s possible. There are buildings there, but they don’t spoil it like our man made crap is spoiling our world. They seem to coexist with the natural landscape as though they belong there (or have been extremely well planned and designed.)

I used to call it the Ether – for want of a better name. Not because I knew of the connotations of the word ‘ether‘ at that time, but because as a dancer, I used to strive to be ‘ethereal’ like the willis in Giselle‘ – and came to love the word itself. Some words are just beautiful to me.

I am a dancer, I grew up living the dance. Eating, sleeping, walking, playing, reading, I danced my way through life. So it was only natural that I tried to dance in my dreams. I found this a frustrating practice, because I could never quite touch the ground there – it was like gravity didn’t have the same force as it does here in our world. Have you ever tried to dance when you are hovering a few centimetres off the ground? (No, I suspect not!) It’s hard. Your movements become more sluggish and not tidy at all. I just wanted to dance!!

And it was this battle to dance that led me to learn to fly. I found that I could ‘step’ into pockets of the air, and that a leap through the air (a grand jeté) became flight. I soon progressed from leaping to flying, full on flying. Oh the exhilaration! Although all this was in dreaming, it was all SO REAL. I would fly and fly and fly and fly, and sing at the top of my lungs, and wake up back in the real world exhausted, breathless, still trying to sing, on top of the world. Deeply disappointed to be awake and wanting only to go back again and fly away forever.

Another interesting thing I discovered is that often I would fly too high, and I’d crash into some invisible shield, sort of like a safety net, that bounced me back again. I found myself believing that if I broke that safety net, I would never wake up again in real life. That was scary as much as it was tempting. Especially as when I used to have these dreams all the time, my life was pretty horrible. I was a broken spirited, sick stick, trapped in a body that was dying and painful. I couldn’t see a way out, and so to escape it in these amazing dreams was heavenly.

These dreams are now one of the biggest pulls for me to sink back into the disorder. I only really seemed to ‘go’ there when I was very unwell – which makes me believe that they weren’t so much dreams as hallucinations. My mind needs to be in a very starved state for it to create all of that amazingness. And it’s still tempting, because living in the real world is still scary and painful. I’m terrified of life, terrified of being a failure, terrified of so much more. It’s the only place I’m free from the PTSD stuff, the depression, the pain and the never ending battle with my body.

And this battle, this epic, life-long battle, has left me so very weary. I often feel like I’m a thousand years old rather than 34. I need a rest – but the kind of rest I need isn’t possible in real life.

Does anyone else have this sort of experience? This sort of rich dream life that becomes more tempting than real life, an escape from fear and unhappiness?

I’m doing my best to make my real life as tempting as possible. Rejecting the oh-so-easy choice of just copping out and letting the eating disorder completely take over me again, so it would be over and I’d be ‘gone’. Nothing worth fighting for is ever easy, and that’s so true of my fight for life, for a real, genuine, LIFE.

My battle is for that feeling of genuine peace and freedom, and for a safety that I’ve never felt here. I hope that some day I can bring some of that beauty that exists only in my dreams into this world – perhaps by becoming more confident with my art again and painting it. Perhaps by finding a way to create little havens for other people here, havens where they can feel some sort of peacefulness and freedom to be themselves – another dream I have long held is to work with people in some sort of professional therapeutic capacity, to heal from what’s hurt them already, and just as importantly, to equip them with tools to not become that hurt and broken in the first place. To do this in a refuge-like setting that I’ve created for them. It’s not a concrete dream so much as something that is still evolving.

To be able to begin working on making this dream happen, I have to first get better, myself. Which means staying in the here and now.

If anyone is convinced I’m a nutcase because of this post, I have one request – please can my straightjacket be rainbow coloured?