Lost? Time To Find New Pathways!

First of all I want to thank everyone for your support and compassion when it comes to my last post. I was, as the title suggests, extremely discouraged and depressed. I still am battling depression hugely, but there have been little glimmers of hope for me since I wrote that.

That post, as some wise owls also remarked in the comments section, was an example of pretty screwed up, negative, unhelpful thinking.

By saying things like “I will NEVER…” I totally deny myself any chances of that thing happening, before I’ve even really tried. I close the door just like that. And I do deny faith, deny God. (I’m sorry if you don’t believe in God – each to their own. I do) Deny any plans that He has for my life, or any faith in Him that with Him I can get through anything.

Diane mentioned that to come back and use my newly minted CBT skills on those statements I made would be very helpful and I agree. Those are thoughts that have been going round and round in my mind, upsetting me, causing me anxiety and making me feel hopeless. If I am not challenging them, they will never change. Challenging them is the first step.

I may no longer have the dreams I had when I was younger – but who of us ever knows what is round the corner? Even the best laid plans fall, and often. If only we had a crystal ball, we could plan our way to success and happiness step by step, including navigation around every hurdle we would face on the way! But life is not like that.

Life doesn’t only give us hurdles. It opens doors. All the time, in unexpected places. Opportunities don’t always announce themselves. We have to keep a look out for them. And we have to believe in them. If we don’t, we won’t look, and we will sail right past them.

There is no factual evidence at all that I will never amount to anything in my life. NONE. I am ONLY 35 years old. That is not even half of a person’s life expectancy. And I might not have things like certificates or diplomas or degrees, I might not have a job or career or a family or house or car, but I have lived experience – and that is something you just cannot buy or learn.

I don’t have a crystal ball or ESP. I have no idea what the future holds for me. I don’t even know what tomorrow really holds for me as opposed to what I’ve planned. 35 is not too old to begin anything. I might struggle to have kids, and who knows, maybe I never will meet a partner, but I have wonderful friends who love me in the ways I need to be loved, and there are many kids out there who some day I might be able to adopt or foster. They won’t be ‘my’ kids, but I would hope that I could be part of thier lives even if briefly.

There are definitely things I can do – I’ve been researching with the help of a close friend, Tertiary Preparation Programs, which are short uni courses that help you get back into being a student. I might soon be doing one of these, online and part time. It would be awesome to call myself a student again after so long – and this might be a pathway into something like a psychology degree or case management or social work, which might be another 8 years if I did it part time (and then still not be actually qualified) but I’ve just thrown more than 15 years of my actual life away to the ED, more than that, so what’s another 8 years when it’s going to be positive stuff? And this is very sudden – yesterday my therapist just suggested it as I was bemoaning exactly what I wrote here in my last post. I do need to feel like I’m actually working towards something again. The cognitive difficulties? I’ll tackle that as it comes. Even if I have to do only one unit at a time, I’ll do this. I’m still not actually finishing most books I borrow from the library, in fact I don’t start most of them – but I’m getting through more of the book before I give up. That’s progress I guess.

I’ve been told of a program that is run by survivors of child abuse, for survivors, that’s situated out in a remote area, a series of 5 day retreats. It sounds really great, and what’s more, they do not turn anyone down based on financial difficulty – they help you come up with a way to do it. Feedback sounds really good – some people say the 5 days was worth more to them than a 6 month hospital stay. What’s more, since the volunteers who run the course are all past program participants who have come through their own troubles and trained to then come back and help, that again is another pathway to my future that I might choose. I’d be really happy with something like that. To help other people like me as a volunteer at a place like that.

Basically what’s most important to me is that my life is meaningful, in that I left something behind that was better for my having been here (as opposed to leaving a deficit because I took much and contributed nothing or very little.) For me, meaningful means helping others, however I achieve that (whether directly or indirectly.)

I’ve looked into some other options for therapy (8 sessions left for the rest of 2013) including funding that’s set aside for people with Eating Disorders to attend therapy (not very likely but worth a shot) and a community counselling organisation which would provide free or sliding scale sessions. They do seem to specialise in ED,  I do worry that they sound very ‘feminist’ based which isn’t my thing at all, but again, I have nothing to lose by checking them out and I have an intake appointment next Tuesday to meet them and see what they are like. (And I am, as usual for me, petrified!)

A close friend has recommended a psychiatrist who specialises in Trauma and will bulk bill (sadly bulk billing is getting scarce these days), and psychiatrists are able to bulk bill I think 50 sessions a year as opposed to the 10 that psychologists can. I had given up on psychiatrists – my experiences being that they throw medication and labels at you but don’t do anything to actually HELP you, whereas psychologists are all about changing your thinking and behaviours and working with your emotions. They give you real tools to take away and use for the rest of your life. But I will give this fellow a chance if he will give me one. I googled him and he has a huge reputation in this country so I just hope he’s not too busy for someone like me.

To help me face up to the anxiety that is ruining ballet and volunteer work with, I’ve been working with my care team to come up with ways they can support me to get there – after which once I get stuck into it I’m fine. it’s getting there in the first place where I fall down most, and it’s spending 2 or 3 days before hand constantly in panic attacks about it that exhausts me. I panic over the simplest things like “will I get up on time” and “I need to leave by x o’clock, remember that” and to have someone support me in the getting ready and getting there will help a lot of that anxiety calm down. I’m also changing my volunteering day, because Mondays is perhaps the worst day of the week for me. My weekends tend to be my busiest days of all and by Monday I am physically and emotionally a wreck, which doesn’t help in getting myself there in one piece or feeling very productive and helpful once there. And to help with the anxiety about what people will think of my appearance at Ballet, I’ve visited Bloch and come away with some really nice dance clothes that cover my scars, are loose but not baggy, and breathable. (I hate that I fret over this, but to me, the people at Ballet represent a group of people that once judged me very harshly, and to go back to them covered in self harm scars and underweight is something I feel very ashamed and self conscious about.)

I bought dancewear very like these!!

This leotard in Rouge

A similar wrap top, but very light and floaty material (for our hot summer) in baby pink

Black skirted jazz pants very similar to these, with a tie front, but no pattern.

And one for the wish list:

Another reason I NEED to have children some day. So i can dress them up in adorable clothes and shoes.

I don’t help myself when I catastrophise about possible disastrous outcomes (that 99.999% of the time never happen) or engage in all-or-nothing thinking (“I’m not a success, so I’m a failure.”) I don’t help myself when I let what I feel override what I know to be true (for example, feeling fat overriding knowing I’m actually underweight, or feeling that people will judge me and find me to be a loser over actually knowing that those particular people like me, are nice to me, and accept me.)

I don’t help myself when I close myself off to any possibilities not just right now, but in the future, by declaring my life ‘over’.

I don’t help myself by forgetting that I don’t have to fight my problems by myself, or even face them alone. By forgetting that God has a plan for every single one of us, and that He has a plan for MY life too – even if I don’t know what it is yet. He is fighting for me every step of the way, and everything that I go through is part of His plan for my life. I don’t help myself by losing faith not just in God, but in my own self. (Thank you, Missy, for the reminder.)

Giving up on myself is the same as declaring myself worthless. And if God finds me worth fighting for, and even worth creating in the first place, who am I to have the arrogance to say “God, you are wrong, I’m awful!”

I’ve been enlightened in SO many ways since I wrote my previous post that I DO have more options than I can even know of right at this moment, that more options will be coming along in the future. That it’s never too late to change or to start afresh, to begin with something new. And that the fastest way to really fail, is to declare yourself a failure before you have even tried. It’s not failure when you give something your best shot. It’s only failure when you never even try at all.

I could go on, but this is already a heck of a long post. I am also needing to work on my screwed up sleeping patterns and have taken proactive steps to try and get more and better quality sleep –  but I didn’t mean to include boring other people to sleep as well!

Thank you to everyone for your support and your belief in me – and for reminding myself to believe in myself.

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Impossible Dreams – Back To Ballet.

Sometimes even the most impossible-seeming dreams can come true.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact time frame of many events in the last two decades of my life, partly because so much time was sucked into being sick and in hospital for months on end, where the days all merge into one another and the world outside no longer seems real. When you come out, you are shellshocked and have no idea what’s happened since you last were there. Whole buildings have appeared where there was a hole in the ground before. New prime ministers have been elected. Disasters have happened. Celebrities have died. People where you live have changed.

The other problem was my cognition. A starving mind doesn’t grasp time well. Nor memories. There are a lot of holes there. The holes scare me.

But roughly, it’s been fifteen years since I last danced. Fifteen years!! A decade and a half. Almost half my lifetime.

Ballet was the last ‘dream’ that Anorexia robbed me of before pushing me completely off the cliff.

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As I’d lost hopes and dreams one by one, I’d lost my grip on life and reality more and more. One of the main reasons I have survived my life is because I had goals. I had dreams. I was going to have a good future, and I was doing everything I could to make sure that future happened for me. My dream was to be a dancer – and I worked my butt off to make it happen. My passion for dancing was so deep that I stayed at that school, where I was bullied mercilessly, for two years rather than leave and go back to a school where I felt wanted, liked, accepted. Because it was worth that hell, to be a dancer.

I’d lost everything by the time ballet was taken from me. My beloved cat Hotchy who had been my one and only remaining friend in the world.  The hope of having a loving family. The only home I’d ever known. Innocence. My body. My safety.  So much more. All gone but ballet. And then, I was told I was too sick to dance. I was kicked out of the performance strand of my course, having to make up the last of my BA in units I could take from anywhere else university wide (having only electives left to complete, and the staff deciding it was extreme circumstances). I tried. I studied Subjects in Literature, Information Technology, Business, Creative Arts. But my mojo was gone.

I was in free fall. There was nothing left to hold on for.

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Over the years that followed, the hope that I would ever dance again fell ever further from reach. My limbs atrophied, I lost pretty much all my muscle mass. I developed osteopenia, then osteoporosis, then stress fractures in both femurs and both tibias in my legs. I felt the agony of peripheral neuropathy. I was in so much constant pain, that my body was to me, crippled, and would never function well again.

I was wrong.

It’s taken over a year of hard painful work with the help of physiotherapy services, but today I graduated from physio. Tomorrow, I am going to my first ballet class – more accurately it’s a ‘ballet barre and pilates’ class because I’m still very rusty, I still can’t do anything! But it’s a start and I’m so excited.

I’m so so so terrified too!

Tomorrow, I will be facing up to my past. All these years, the bullying that I went through at the ballet school and what was happening at home at that time, has overpowered every waking moment of my life. I’m not just going back to dancing again, I’m going back to a dancing school run by one of the ballerinas who was a principal in the company when I was in the school. I’m pretty certain there will be more people there that I know from back then. So it’s going to be pretty confronting!

I think that sometimes, opportunities arise to make peace with our pasts – and this is one for me. I’m hoping that I can realise that I am okay, and that I always was okay – that the way I was treated back then wasn’t because I was a horrible monster, but because adolescent girls can be nasty little bitches,  and sometimes bad things do happen to good people. They will no longer be the bitches in my memory, they will have grown up now. I’m hoping my mind can accept that all that happened then is over – gone – never again. Accept it and let go.

My physio today told me that ballerina who runs the school is coming in tomorrow morning just to meet me and make sure everything is okay, and that she was extremely lovely and welcoming on the phone. She’s also going to throw in a few free classes, and giving me a pair of ballet shoes to wear because mine are about 15 years old! How lovely are people? I continue to be surprised by the generosity and goodness of people towards me. So thankful, so blessed.

I went digging to find my old ballet shoes, this is some of the few things I’ve managed to save from those years. I never had any photos, but circled in faint reddish/pink is a little headshot of myself. Apologies for how dusty it all is, it lives in a suitcase under my bed (rather, Shalimar’s cavern)

 It’s really lucky that she is bringing me some shoes too. My ballet flats actually are still alive after all these years! But they are quite stiff, and mouldy.

But still wearable.

Shalimar is puzzled by my excitement! She’s on her leash because the door is open, I was letting her play near me as I dug out my shoes.

As you can see,  I have muscle on my calves again. (I have a lot of trouble looking at this photo and not seeing that my legs, to me, are HUGE now But they are legs that can walk and DANCE.) I also have scars, on my arms too.  I’ll be wearing opaque tights and trackpants over those, as well as a long sleeved top (thankfully it’s COLD) so I don’t have to worry about those. But I’m dreading the reaction if anyone there sees my scars.

I’m very tight and not at all limber any more. I’m also very weak  and don’t have much stamina. But they are all things that with work I will change. I’m looking forward to the challenge.

I can’t wait til tomorrow! I’m not going to be held down by my eating disorder any more. It’s time to spread my wings and fly. It really does feel like I’m being given my wings back

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Pinch me someone, am I dreaming?

What have you LOST to your Eating Disorder (or other illness/addiction)?

Have you ever had dreams you thought impossible, become reality?

Fly Away.

When I was more unwell, I used to dream a lot.  Maybe being unconscious a lot had something to do with it!

What WAS a puzzle, and still is, is where I went when i was dreaming. It was a whole world in it’s own right.

I used to call it Ether. Derived from ‘Ethereal‘  -

e·the·re·al

adjective

1.light, airy, or tenuous: an ethereal world created through thepoetic imagination.

2.extremely delicate or refined: ethereal beauty.

3.heavenly or celestial: gone to his ethereal home.

4.of or pertaining to the upper regions of space.

5.Chemistry . pertaining to, containing, or resembling ethyl ether.

Today, at my home. Peaceful.

Ether was a beautiful place. It was so real. It was so spooky – it was abandoned, in ruins. And yet, I felt safe there. I wanted to go back to sleep whenever I woke up because I wanted to stay there. I felt safe and hidden in my ruined city (ruined world?)

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Sometimes I wonder if there is a place on earth that is real, that I have somehow dreamed of without ever having been to in my life. I’ve experienced Deja Vu many times – realising I’ve been here, in this exact place, exact situation – and yet I’ve never been.

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It was a place where I was forever a child. I had no responsibilities, and I had all the time in the world.

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Mostly I think it was just the comfort of being somewhere where I could escape this world and my troubles.. and FLY.

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I really miss those dreams, and I want to go back all the time.

Maybe it’s where I will go when i do die, some day. Maybe it’s the next place. (I am Christian, but who knows what really is out there – sometimes I wonder).  When I was flying in Ether, if I flew too high, I would hit some invisible force field almost like a rubber-band shield that stretched over the sky, not allowing me past that point. It bounced me back down again – I used to feel strongly in my dreams that if I ever broke that barrier, I would not return to the real world, I would not wake up – so in reality, I would die.

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I don’t want to die – so please do NOT worry about me talking about it – I don’t want to die at ALL, not til I’m old and wrinkly and grumpy and have done everything, including such adventures as taking a rocket trip into outer space and dropping into a black hole to see where I end up, and making a nuisance of myself in the Bermuda Triangle area to see if I end up anywhere interesting. There is way too much I haven’t done yet in THIS world.

What I long for is the feeling that dreaming of Ether and flying gave me. Wellbeing, full of air – on top of the world! Exhiliarated (I would actually wake up totally drained from these dreams as though I had really been flying). Free – able to leave everything that worried or hurt or haunted me behind.

And flying is pretty damn cool.  I really wish I could do it in real life.

Have you ever had a special dream, special dream place that you ‘visited’, or dreamed you could fly? 

What’s the most amazing, bizarre thing you have to do before you die?

First Hydrotherapy Session, Ballet Memories.

Today i had my first hydrotherapy session! I’ve waited so long for this. It took MONTHS to get to the top of the physiotherapy wait list at the hospital and then months more to climb the hydrotherapy list.

As a result of years of anorexia as well as the bulimia (I’m primarily anorexic) my bones are like honeycomb and I have stress fractures in both femurs (the longest strongest bone in the body.. so that’s scary.) I’ve spent a lot of time bedridden, gotten too weak to sit or stand. My muscles wasted away.

Now begins the rebuilding process that i’ve started with walking. I have a long way to go – and it’s not going to be easy – but I’m so excited!

As I’ve mentioned but not really gone into, I used to be a dancer. Specifically I was a ballet dancer. I branched out into different dance types but I loved the ballet best.

When I was three years old, the Kindergarten teachers discovered that I was deaf, because I didn’t respond to them when I couldn’t see their faces. A side effect of being deaf was lousy balance – I could barely stand upright – and this lead to physiotherapy, and gymnastics – which I hated. So we tried ballet…

I think I was born dancing. I don’t think I ever really walked as a child. I didn’t act out things like being a mummy to my baby doll, I made it a dance. I leapt instead of ran. Dance was part of me from as early as I know. I took to Ballet like a duck to water.

Many years later, I was accepted into a full time dance school attached to our state ballet company. I was fourteen. I was actually five years below the minimum level they accepted at audition – because I’d dropped out for a few years after a bad experience with a teacher who thought deaf people shouldn’t dance. (I proved her wrong, but it hurt me still.)

I was so scared! On the first day I realised just how deep I’d gotten myself in here – the other girls could do things I’d never even heard of. I was terrible compared to them!! I didn’t even know why they’d accepted me!

I could have let that discourage me, but I wasn’t like that. I was determined. I set out to ‘catch up’ and seeing those girls (and the girls in the higher classes and in the company itself) were my inspiration. I strove to do what they could. I just strove – I practised every waking moment, and pretty much all night in bed I did exercises to be stronger and more limber. All my breaks were spent practising.

It didn’t help that the couple of years I was at that school, I was the “yucky girl”. They were horrible toffee-nosed bullies. I was deaf, shy, came from the wrong side of the tracks, I wasn’t affluent or rich like they were. All my fees were paid by scholarships and sponsorships – even my dance shoes, travel, practice clothes. Mum refused to fund it. In fact, she drew back even more with just clothing me, supplying me with basics, like underwear and socks, shoes, uniform, books, etc. I was literally in rags, my school uniform (for the scholastic part in the afternoon) was the spare from the emergency cupboard, normally reserved for waterfight casualties and about four sizes too big.

So yeah, I was the ‘yucky girl’ and they were so horrible to me. A class of twenty five girls, maybe one boy, becomes pretty much one tight knit cliche. So when you are the odd one out, you are very much the ODD one out.

If you can’t join em, beat em. And I did. I went from the worst dancer they’d ever had to one of the best. And I’m dang proud of it too.

I went on to our state university dance course to prepare for a career as a performer. Unfortunately that’s where I also fell down the rabbit hole and became far too sick to dance anymore – dance was torn from my life.

It left a massive hole – and I think it nearly killed me.

Suddenly my major coping strategy and the one thing that had kept me surviving all this – was gone. Was lost. No longer was I going to ‘get out of this abusive situation because I’m going to be a dancer and free one day’. No longer was all the hurt danced out, no longer did I pour my fear and rage and brokenness into dancing.

I turned to anorexia.

As with dancing, I gave it my all.

And it took all I gave it and more.

Bulimia didn’t follow for a number of years – but I gave that my all too. And like a parasite, the more it took, the more it wanted. Anorexia and Bulimia devoured me from the inside out. They obliterated the person who I once was, the dancer to be, they turned me into a monster, a creature to be pitied, who lived in hospital wards strapped down and locked up because she couldn’t be trusted to even mingle with the ‘normal’ psych patients. Because she was dying and they had given up on her.

Somehow after all these years, I turned it around. I’m alive, I’m actually alive.

And now to repair the damage.

It breaks my heart that my once strong, limber body is such a mess, a wreck, so weak, so pathetically weak.

But as I’ve started walking, I’ve felt muscles I’d forgotten working. I’ve felt my body starting to move, almost dance rather than walk. I’ve felt close to taking off and flying, I’ve felt SO GOOD.

There is still frustration over the weakness, the weak core, the inability to do anything strenuous that would splinter my bones, and just HOW FAR I have to go.

That’s where hydrotherapy comes in. And it’s awesome. Warm water, gentle exercise… that exhausts you because you don’t realise how hard you are working when you are in that water!

Feeling so much stronger and fitter, being able to move my body in preparation for LIVING in this body – feels so good. It’s not worth it to let anorexia and bulimia rob me of this ever again.

Can you remember a time when what your body could do was more important to you than what it looked like?  Can you remember ever feeling fit and strong, and do you miss that? 

Have you rediscovered this, and how?