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)

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)

Crazy Christmas Cat Lady Survival Pack

I wish there was a pack you could buy that had everything in it to deal with Christmas with an Eating Disorder. In fact, I think it’s brilliant idea that someone is going to make a fortune out of some day.

I think mine would definitely need things like a ready-to-assemble sound-proof screaming booth, canned answers to the questions that I get asked every single year several times over, Super duper clothing that no matter what I ate or drank felt comfortable and hid all sins (both imagined and real, and I think the maker of the invisibility cloak from Harry Potter would need to be involved.. in fact, scratch that, just give me the darn cloak already…) and so many other things I can’t even think of yet.

It’s very easy in the midst of stress and frustration and the whirlwind that the end of the year can be, to lose sight of the little but important things. For me, Christmas is special because of the people I’m so blessed to have in my life.

This Christmas I’m actually going to be wanted, included, and spending it with people who love me, do their best to understand and support me, and never would willingly hurt me as my family has done. This will be my first Christmas with my true, chosen family as part of the family  - as opposed to being a guest. In a way, this actually makes me a bit more scared of the actual food and social aspects of the day, because I although I have always tried my best to take part and not give others any reason to worry, more than ever this time, I don’t want to ruin the day for anyone, or give them cause to worry about me. That means participating to my fullest ability – whether the ED says I can or can not. I know that my friends will not be disappointed in me if I can’t, because they truly love me and want the best for me. But they would be sad, and I want to only give them cause to be happy.

I have always tried so hard – and most times, failed (In my eyes) because in hindsight, I might have been joining in, and pretending to eat, but I can see that I didn’t fool anyone. But this year I have more power, more insight, more love and support, and in many ways, I’m a different person to the previous years. Same person but better. (New and Improved Fiona?? LOL)

I do still wish there was a kit full of little lifesaving devices to help me through every eventuality though!

I have so much to write in the lead up to Christmas, that I don’t know where to start. So I thought I would start with this question to my readers -

What would you have in your Christmas Survival Kit?

Let Go, Walk Away.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been able to distance myself from the people who have hurt me more and more. This hasn’t been easy, surprisingly.

You would think that if someone hurt you, it would be the easiest thing in the world to get as far as you can away from them and stay there. After all, we have an instinct that keeps us alive – to flee from bad people (or to stay and fight them, but even the most fighting spirit knows when they are beaten). It seems that this is overridden, however, by another survival instinct – bonding.

My psychologist explained to me that human beings are actually the only species that is completely helpless from birth for a significant period. This surprised me – I mean, kittens are born blind, for example, and baby birds seem fairly helpless. But no, she assured me, they become able to fend for themselves very fast indeed, and if they are pushed out of the nest or abandoned, they can survive.

Humans, when abandoned or attacked as babies, cannot.

So one of our earliest and most important survival instincts is bonding with our parents, especially our mothers. We want her to love us and bond to us. We want her to care about us – because our life is completely at her mercy. If our mother doesn’t love us or bond to us, she might not want to look after us and we will die.

This hit home hard for me. For my entire life, my mother, my older sister, my brother – they have all hurt me continuously. With my older sister, I very early on accepted that she was ‘not a good person’ and ‘dangerous’ and to keep awares – but even my deep down belief that people – especially family – are inherently good and are on my side led me to constantly letting my guard down with her and being wounded by her again.

My brother and I were very close when we were little, but as he grew older he became more and more violent. I kept on forgiving him. I never forgot that childhood bond, and I suppose that because I knew he had been subject to sexual abuse at the hands of our older sister too, he was dealing with his own stuff in the only way he knew how, which obviously was outward, whereas mine was inward. So I didn’t really blame him, and it was hard to hold it against him much past the actual acts of violence. He’s also shown redeeming qualities – he tried hard to be there for me at several points over the years I was struggling with the ED, and he also rescued a pile of things from our childhood home and mailed them to me in a few batches. The memories were overwhelming and it was a truly precious gesture and one I’m forever thankful for.  (My mother would not allow me to even see my own photos, certificates, yearbooks etc when we were growing up, and I left behind pretty much everything I ‘owned’ when I left.) 

My mother. How to even begin to talk about my mother. A very complicated woman and a very unwell one. Or insane. Or just evil? It’s hard to think of your own mother as evil. I can easily see without a doubt that my older sister is extremely evil – but with my mother, well, she’s very good at appearing ‘nice’. The harm she causes is more underhand, sly. But yes, I can look at it and see that in most cases, she truly meant to cause that harm, whether she will admit that to herself or not (or to anyone else, ever.  Because my family in their eyes, are absolute f*cking saints.)

My mother has absolutely devastated me with her actions towards me many times. And yet, I gave her a pass, every time. I kept on going back. I couldn’t believe that my own mother could possibly mean harm to me. After all, mothers are supposed to love and protect their children, aren’t they?

Sadly it doesn’t always work that way.

It took me years to understand this, to accept it, and to be able to stop wishing that it was different. Even after I realised and accepted that my mother had no love for me and at many times actually meant me harm, I found it so difficult to stop thinking that maybe I could change it. Had I not been loveable enough? Was there something about myself I could do differently? How could I be different enough to please her? Maybe both of us could change. We might not have had the best relationship so far, but many people work hard on their relationships as adults, and become if not friends or close, at least friendly, right?

I tried all that. For years. I tried everything I could think of. And nothing got better. It was a truly toxic relationship. I couldn’t do right by her, but not just that, she didn’t CARE. She didn’t care what happened to me, she didn’t care if I died. She didn’t care enough to want to know who her daughter actually was as a person, she just wanted another possession that she could manipulate and control and create drama with to satisfy her own warped wishes.

I also felt like a traitor. These people, they are my family. The people with whom I share blood. Despite the harm they have done and the harm they wish on me, they kept me alive during my growing up years. My mother educated me, clothed me, fed me, took me to ballet – that’s something many kids never get. And I’m forever grateful for that. (To a degree – my mother was also very often negligent and cruel to me, witholding even basic necessities.)

So how can I just reject them? Turn my back on them and walk away – forever. Not just for a while, not just creating distance – completely cutting ties. Forever.

As much as I loved my mother (despite not actually liking her as a person – there is a difference and I knew that very young) I had to accept that having her in my life, having any of them in my life, was only destroying me.

I realise now it’s the only way I can ever find peace and perhaps healing from this. With them in my life, I was constantly being hurt and upset and never had a chance to put things behind me. It was constantly there, being raked over again like raking open a wound that’s trying to heal.

I started cutting ties over a year ago. Slowly. Because I knew I would never be able to just rip myself away. And because it’s hard. Even now, I feel regrets and tinges of sadness and panic, all the time. What if they have noticed I’ve vanished from their lives, and are hurt, think I never loved them? What if they decide I’m an ungrateful brat (well they pretty much already always have said that – so nothing much would be different.) 

And then, there’s my little sister. She’s not the same as they are. I don’t think she realises just what they are truly like. I don’t think she believes how much they have hurt me, especially I don’t think she would ever believe my brother has hurt me. And I think she hates me for even suggesting it.

She hates me for a number of things. For always being unwell. For not being able to cope with my dad dying and his funeral without bingeing and purging at night in secret, which led to me desperately stealing binge food. And so, for getting caught shoplifting on the day of his funeral (something I thought I’d kept to myself and that they didn’t know. Something I have never forgiven myself for, and never will.)  For ‘using my eating disorder as a reason to sit around and be lazy and not work’ and ditto with the abuse and the rapes. For making everything ‘about me’ despite me trying so hard to make it about anyone BUT me and hide my own problems for them. For just being a complete failure as a sister I guess. For ‘not loving her enough’ to get better (and if only she knew how hard I tried, and how much I hated myself for not being able to do it for her since I couldn’t do it for me.)

I wonder if she remembers how close we used to be. I don’t think she does, and I don’t think she cares. She’s completely cut me off and ignores me completely. I have tried so hard, in every way I can think of to try, and it’s been rejected. I have been rejected, and in many ways, hurtfully and rudely. I know she has her own issues – indeed her own mother talked to me about how hurtfully she’d treated her, too – but it stings and it’s heartbreaking and there isn’t anything more I can do about it. It’s her choice.

My little sister is my biggest fear in cutting off my other family. I’m scared that one day she might come around and give me another chance, but there will be no way of her finding me. And the more distance I put between us all,the harder it is for me to find her, even on facebook, now. I’m scared that she will think that I didn’t love her enough, didn’t care about her, when I disappeared. That I didn’t want to be involved in her life when in fact the opposite was true. It hurts, it really deeply hurts.

It’s been a while now. I haven’t spoken to any family members since last year. I didn’t tell them when I moved away and I went silent on the electoral rolls and discontinued my main phone. I’m about to adopt a legal alias in preparation for changing my name, change my mobile phone number, and I might close my facebook and create a new one to just distance myself from the web trails that account has made. I’m planning to move interstate in the end, hopefully sooner rather than later. My point is, I’m moving closer to this all the time, and my chances of ever getting to know and maybe even be friends with my little sister again are diminishing.

And yet, if I hold on, just in case, I’ll truly never be free. No hope of peace. No hope of healing.

If you love someone, set them free. If they return on their own, they are yours, if they don’t, they never were (~ Richard Bach)

<– I hate that quote. But all I can do now is accept it, and live despite it. Focus on the positives, that I have people who truly love me, truly accept me, and would never dream of treating me the way my own family have. I have my beloved Shalimar, who is my ‘everything’. I have hope again, as I rebuild my life little step by little step. There is so much out there for me to do, so many places to go, people to be with, I think the person I most need to set free in my life is myself. 

(Image source 1, 2)

Have you loved and lost? 

Escaping Prisons Both Real And Imagined (trigger – abuse, rape)

I think a lot of my eating disorder has involved me trying to hold on to what is familiar to me, trying to feel ‘safe’.

Despite all that it’s put me through – utter hell in which I lost everything, including nearly my LIFE – I daily find myself daydreaming about losing weight. More than daily – all through the day. And I dream of it at night.

It feels a bit like an old friend and lover. Familiar, and seductive. You know them so well. There aren’t any unknowns (although there are – you can never know anyone’s deepest secrets as you can never know anything’s deepest most hidden facets in this life).

Sometimes, despite this ‘friend and lover’ having being an abusive one, it feels safer than what I face now. It’s a prison that I actually daydream about returning to, of creeping back into the cage and shutting the scary world out.

Every step forward into LIFE is a step I have not travelled before, and a step that I travel without my peers, for they have all gone on ahead of me when I should have come this way. The fear of each step is so great, I have to fight to not just turn around and run away again. 

I fear so many things. I fear failure most of all. That, and ‘not coping’. I’m not good at new things now, and find myself overwhelmed by the colourful, exciting, ever-happening quality of real life. The eating disorder kept me very closeted. It was a dark, isolated life, then. And despite it being my cage, I came to find it familiar and comforting.

There have been studies done showing that when you keep a creature in captivity for long enough, you can open the doors and let it free – and it likely will not flee. I feel that way, myself.

As a child in my abusive and neglectful home, I accepted that this was what was. I did not like it  or agree with it, in fact, it was extremely traumatic, especially as I grew older and my brother’s violence and my sister’s twisted cruelty grew worse. And my mother’s ability (or desire) to either protect me, or to supply me with the basics of life at all – seemed to dwindle ever more.

I couldn’t change it. I hurt terribly from it. But I accepted it.

Accepting it, actually caused me less pain than not accepting it. I am sure that had I not been able to accept what was, I would not have survived – it would have utterly broken me. More than I was broken, anyway. I mean, fatally broken.

Picture a wild bird in a cage, just caught, terrified at their predicament and thrashing to free themselves. In the majority of cases, that bird simply will not be able to get free from the cage. If she doesn’t accept her fate, she will batter herself to death, or at least be weak, bruised and battered – and still trapped.

You need to conserve your energy and strength in order to fight what you can fight when you are that trapped (in any way). You need to realise which battles are worth going all out for, and which, even if won, would only be empty victories.

But looking back, I see just how trapped I had become by my own mind – and it wasn’t just because I’d accepted I was trapped for now.

It took me so long to run away from there, not because anyone was stopping me, but because I believed I could not run away. 

Our home had so many LAWS. These laws were punishable if broken, and the punishment felt like it would be as bad as death (or as I felt, worse, because of the emotional and physical distress punishments could involve).  One of these many laws was ‘thou shalt not step outside this house and yard’s perimeters without due cause and permission.’

Our yard was fenced by a brown, wooden farmstyle fence – planks of wood placed horizontally between each fencepost, with two gates that were always heavily chained and padlocked. Intimidating, especially with loud barking dogs and ‘dangerous dog’ signs, but very easy to climb over. It wasn’t even that high – higher than me growing up, perhaps shoulder height when I left. I climbed over it every morning on the way to school, and every evening on the way back home. But had I wanted to climb over it when I didn’t have permission? I couldn’t have. 

That easily-climbed fence was as effective as an electrified, barbed-wire-topped prison fence for me.

And it took being pushed for me to grasp the courage to break the ‘law’ and leave – realising that I couldn’t stay here and stay alive any longer.

And so, I fled for the ‘greener grass’ out yonder.

This is where I look back and say “I fled the frying pan and jumped into the fire”. Because I did exactly that. I met Wanker.

I wonder, had I come from a family that wasn’t abusive, would I have fought Wanker harder? Would I have refused to accept things as they came to be? Talking to my headshrinking doctor about it, his theory is that Wanker was familiar to me. He treated me the only way I’d ever known – cruelly, and without any respect at all. And, right after my flight from my home, that was familiar to me and therefore in some way, a comfort.

That makes me recoil in disgust, to read that – that I found comfort in that rapist bastard’s treatment of me. I was hurting, I fought him tooth and nail at first, and the  first day he raped me (in a rape that just went on, and on, and on for an entire afternoon, at least 4 hours) I kept saying “NO!” loudly the entire time as well as fighting – and I may as well have been battering a tree trunk for all that moved him.

I never, ever wanted anything to do with Wanker. Never. Not even before he hurt me. I simply didn’t believe I had any chance of avoiding his abuse of me. 

So I’d taken my prison from home with me – wherever I went from there, I still wasn’t free. I still was trapped by abuse and resigned to being abused because that was all I had known and all I felt worthy of.

Later on again, in hospital, the treatment of me there just confirmed to me that this was all I deserved. I was nothing better than a wild beast – and that’s how they treated me. And I stopped hoping for better, because I didn’t feel I deserved better.

So the big question for me here is – how do I take freedom with both hands? Not only sum up the courage to step out of my prison, but to stay out of it?

I think the answer is, one step at a time. And with courage – despite the fear of it all. By reminding myself that there isn’t such thing as failure unless you are talking about the failure to even try. And that I have nothing to lose by pressing ahead – and everything to lose by taking the easy way out.

Because that’s what it is, really. It takes great strength and courage for a child to stay alive in the face of such trauma – but it takes none to stay in your cage after the doors are thrown wide and the monsters are gone – monsters in your reality that is.

The monsters in your mind, they are a different matter entirely. And for many of us, they haunt us for life. 

This is not from weakness – child abuse actually impacts on our brain.

Healing will be different for everyone. For me, it’s a very slow process, perhaps it will be a ‘forever’ process. I might never be healed, but always healing – if that makes sense.

For me, little things are more important at the moment. Like being accepted by my peers. Adding activities that to most are small and of no consequence into my life. And repeating, and repeating.

Every time I leave my home to go to art, to go to ballet, to do volunteer work, to have coffee with a friend, go to the supermarket, or even to put the rubbish in the bins – I face my fears. And every single time I face my fears this way, I’m making myself stronger and another step closer to some day being able to embrace this big scary world as simply ‘the world I live in’ – because I’ll be able to live in it, enjoy it, and feel safe.

I think this is part of why when it comes to fighting an eating disorder or an addiction or a mental illness that keeps you isolated and trapped – such ‘little’ milestones are just as important to work on achieving as are the more obvious ones, such as weight gain, abstinence, or managing your anxiety.  They are all the stepping stones, and you can’t just hope to yank out what you are trying to overcome and not freak out when there is nothing there to replace what it’s been in your life. We also have to practice at life, just like we need to practice our ballet or our piano playing or other skills daily to improve them. It comes by doing. This is a huge challenge to me, I who tend to keep retreating into avoidance!

One last important thing?

Forgiving yourself. You did the best with the situation, knowledge and resources you had at the time – you did your best. It’s not your fault.

Thank you to Motifake for the demotivational poster images.

Featured image source. 

The Things They Do To Get To You

Recent blog world events have been quite nasty – and left some of us reeling with shock. I know I find it hard to get my head around somebody going out of their way to hurt a kind, sweet lady who has done nothing but been kind to everyone she meets.

But then, I remember my own older sister. The most evil, vile, and terrifying person I have ever met, and probably ever will meet.

There is a blogger in the ED blogging community I am part of, who reminds me of my older sister all the time. The nastiness, the manipulation, the utter lack of compassion or empathy or kindness (despite declaring herself a model of each) and her complete absence of conscience.

My older sister is a sociopath, through and through. From the outside, she’s quite strikingly handsome, very tall, curvy, and many men seem to think she is God’s gift to men – she attracts them like bees to honey.  (I hesitate to call her beautiful, because to me, she is ‘good looking’ but there is only darkness in her heart – nothing truly beautiful there.) She is very aware of her seductive power and does not hesitate to use it – never has.

Behind the mask, she is cruel, cold, callous. She does not blink an eyelid at killing animals – our pets growing up, or whatever animals she ‘sacrifices’ now  to make little ‘presents’ like the one she left on my doorstep during the night before 23rd December 2006. She doesn’t have friends – only acquaintances.  People are tolerated if they are useful, then discarded.

With the nastiness happening in the blog world at the moment, many find it difficult to believe that someone could do this kind of thing. Remembering what my sister did to me in my teens, and the shock and betrayal I experienced about that – I can say, YES, absolutely people who are sociopathic in nature definitely do this sort of thing with absolutely no hesitation or regrets.

This is my story.

I was attending the dance school, being bullied, being abused at home – so very depressed, and completely worn out from the 12- hour days 6 days a week, four of which were travel – then home to the violence and crap and hard work there. My depression began to be noticeable again – as was my inability to eat enough to keep my weight up, and my difficulty in focussing on my studies.

I don’t know what was happening – a lot of the lead up to realising what my sister was doing to me is conjecture – pieced together from what I know now. But my mother started leaving newspaper articles for me to find with passages about drug use and the dangers highlighted. This made me furious – and I would tell her definitely that I had never used drugs of any kind, and had no desire ever to do so. I didn’t know why she would suddenly be thinking that – I did start to feel that it was probably due to my depression meaning I wasn’t the same person I used to be, and her nervousness about letting me, so controlled by her, out of the house for so much of the time.

My sister then started bringing things home to Mum. Not any old things, things that belonged to Mum already. She had her first Job in the Valley as a MahJong reader (similar to Tarot) a few years before this, and now was studying at a college there to become a Naturopath. (She was always into black magic and stuff like that, and my opinion on the Naturopathy is that it’s a socially acceptable way for her to indulge her fascination in potions and stuff… today she is a rather well known Naturopath.)

According to my sister, she had been looking around in all the pawn shops in the Valley and she had seen my mother’s things on display there. (I don’t even know, to this day, what these ‘things’ were – the best I could get out of them were that they were ‘old books, trophies, and valuable items.’ Oh, and throw in some of my sister’s cheap and tacky costume jewellery too.

So my sister’s tale had her ‘buying back’ these ‘things’, and bringing them home to return them to Mum.

Can you spot the problem here? I was 15, 16 years old when this happened. And the only form of ID I had ever held in my grubby little hand was my library card/school card. Later – long after I had left that hellhole – I learnt that to pawn goods, you must supply 100 points of ID – that is the LAW – AND you must be over 18 years of age – also the LAW. The goods that you pawn are NOT displayed out in the store, either, but kept in a back room, and if you want to redeem them, you must present a ticket.

Not only that, but I asked what happened to the goods that are sold. The shops all replied that they do not put them out in the store at all – instead they are taken back to a more central part of the chain and auctioned or redistributed.

Most of these stores also do not buy cheap costume jewellery or even loan on it, nor do they buy or sell books or most trophies.

My sister however, WAS over 18. She knew exactly where out of all the shops in an area that has many of them to find my mother’s ‘things’ – and they would not have been on display for her to look for. She also would have possessed tickets to reclaim those ‘things’ to bring them home – if those ‘things’ had ever even been out of the house in the first place.

Nevertheless, my Mum ate my sister’s story right up. Which wasn’t surprising – my sister had always been ‘God’ in my Mum’s eyes. My sister even had more power over the family as a disciplinarian than our own Mum did.

I was utterly hurt, betrayed and horrified, and I angrily protested my innocence. My sister’s story had been that I must have been stealing these items – she told Mum that it was ME! – and that because my school had me going close to the Valley (but at that stage, I hadn’t been there and was totally unfamiliar with the place) it could only have been me. Furthermore, she informed my Mum that I must have needed the money for drugs. My own mood changes and depression, and the fact that adolescents and drug use were big media stories at the time because of Anna Wood’s death from Ecstasy – were a perfect setting for her lies.

(Bear in mind that I was a sick-making goody-goody two shoes! Always obedient, I wouldn’t dare to even think of trying drugs. On being offered a cigarette at school, I shrugged, and turned it down. My friends (before I went to the ballet school) sometimes smoked – it had no influence on me. I didn’t drink either. Even when I was helping out at an evening do for the state ballet company (several students were invited to act as servers that night) the other students got plastered nicking wine and throwing it back in the dressing rooms. I didn’t have a drop. I was mildly interested, but terrified of my mother smelling it on my breath, or even smelling the smoke from other’s cigarettes on me – that was enough to make her go OFF. My mother was highly controlling – even climbing (because the gates were always padlocked and heavily chained) over the fence of our yard at home, to retrieve something that was outside it, like the paper, without permission – was absolutely on pain of death VERBOTEN and merited harsh punishment. And that punishment, let’s say, nothing was worth it. Nothing. ) 

So the story about me doing drugs, and stealing things to fund those drugs – was not only so unlikely that if this hadn’t been a serious thing, it would have been funny – but highly offensive to me that my mother even believed it and refused to see the reality.

Not only that – she thought that I was addicted to Ecstasy. (again, because of Anna Wood’s death being in the news) Back then,  from what I’d read in those articles she left for me, I had learnt that ecstasy wasn’t (at that time known as) a drug people got addicted to in that ‘regular’ way, so much that it was a party drug. Besides, I never went to parties. Who would have invited me? And Mum would never have let me go if I was.

(In fact, she DID let me go to a party near the end of our second year at the dance school. I think she allowed me, because she knew that I did not want to go. I begged her NOT to go. The other girl had invited the rest of the class (our school was made up of 2 classes of less than 20 people in each, mostly girls) to her birthday party – except for me, the hated, ‘dirty’ girl who wore yucky clothes, broken shoes etc. Her mother insisted that she not leave anyone out and forced her to invite me. My own mother found the invite (I didn’t even consider going) and rang to make sure it would be appropriately chaperoned (In my mother’s view – NO alcohol or smoking and never out of the sight of adults, in the other mother’s view, champagne at dinner, blind eye to friends smoking, dancing, and teenage fun LOL), and her call earned me even more disgust from the other girls. Knowing (probably hearing from the other mother) that I actually wasn’t wanted at the party, she forced me to go. Without anything decent to wear. Without money to buy a present and no way of getting any. And it was a sleepover. Not only that, but I found my shoes soaking with cat pee that day and nothing else to wear… it was a nightmare.) 

Fast forward to a year after I walked out of that hell of a ‘not-home’. The hostel I’d found to live in was shut over the Christmas period, and I had searched and searched for accomodation elsewhere that I could afford, finding none. I faced being on the streets again – unless I asked if I could stay with my family at home over the Christmas holidays. They hadn’t been that bad, surely? A year had taken the harshness from the memories and left me doubting myself. I was in shock that a lot of what happened at that place even happened – the violence, the incest and abuse, the other  stuff. It was all so completely CRAZY. Surely it wasn’t really that awful? Or they had changed?

BIG mistake. The moment I entered that place, with all my belongings (again, enough to take home myself on public transport) my mother declared that I was now her employee – we had agreed that I would pay board (comparable to the amount I’d been charged at the hostel – which was actually very expensive and included all meals, cleaners, linen etc), and I bought most of my own food. But in order to ‘earn my keep’ I would also have to do ALL the housework AND make the house presentable to someone who might be able to come in and fix up the water problems (my mother was still letting the water run endlessly for my father to be slugged with penalty rates, but the situation for hot water was still the same as when I’d lived there before – none, we boiled water for baths and washing up, and we brought water in from outside because the taps were either stuck on, or stuck off.)

Making this house presentable was actually an impossible task. My mother is a hoarder extroadinaire – and the house was never finished. It’s an illegal dwelling, because my mother bullied my father into straying far from the approved plans because she wanted more than they were allowed to build. They’d split long before it was finished. Inside, the walls were sheets of gyprock, or were exposed beams. Plants often grew inside the walls due to lack of sealing. Our ceilings were exposed beams, wires and pipes too. Vermin were abundant – millions of cockroaches, rats, who often were to be found dead and maggoty in an unused drawer or in the walls, even snakes, and in summer, so many flies. I still gag remembering the fly papers hanging from the ceiling, covered in so many flies that you couldn’t find room for more.

The floors were rough concrete – not smooth, rough. This meant that when you tried to sweep or mop, the dirt would be trapped and mops were simply ripped to bits. The fact that it was always a muddy swamp outside meant that cleaning it was pretty futile anyway, it just got tracked straight in, and various hoses and pipes snaked in and out of doors and windows for our plumbing. When you mopped it (as you HAD to do) you ended up with a mud slick indoors, too. And then factor in 20-30 ducks and geese, at least 2 dogs, up to 4 cats, assorted birds, guinea pigs, etc, and the rest of the family being utterly slobbish and almost going out of their way to make things dirtier.  It was a totally impossible task.

I actually stood my ground against Mum’s demands, insisting that I be able to go to the gym nearby every day, and look for work – and we had a huge fight about it – but it was a step forward for me to stand my ground against them. In the end, I still paid, AND worked, and took a few hours in the morning to go to the gym and do my stuff – but the rest of the time I was her ‘employee’.

That holiday was hell. I literally crossed off the days until the hostel reopened. My brother was STILL violent, and now my bed was in his part of our shared bedspace – as a bunk bed as it was originally, and because it was sagging, it meant I slept with this huge monstrous man-child’s bed about a centimetre from my face and always threatening to to collapse on me. He would throw things under at me, and even cut through his mattress to push a pipe through to pour water (hopefully only water..) on me. He was still sexually inappropriate and was constantly flashing me. His temper tantrums were as scary as they used to be resulting in my finally fleeing this house in the first place.

Finally, the holidays came to an end, and I packed up my bags ready to catch the bus, train and bus back to the hostel. I was set to go, when I was stopped by Mum and my older sister. They refused to let me go without going through all my belongings searching for stuff that I might have stolen. This was the first I had heard of it the entire time I had been there – but apparently I had been stealing LOTS of money from Mum, from my older sister too, jewellery (she still wore tacky costume stuff which I turned my nose up at anyway) and various ‘things’ which again, I never actually knew of. And it was my sister, who again had done this. I was told that they had gone into my brother’s room because my sister wanted to point out the curtains to Mum (as if they didn’t know that they were hanging in ribbons, shredded by my brother in his rages, plainly visible from the door and from outside and very old news). Apparently when they had been in there, my sister had seen stuff in the bunk bed I slept in – pushed down the side of it. I think she must have X-ray vision, but also, ESP. In reality, she’d put whatever ‘things’ she had taken down there and then taken my mother in to find them in front of her, thereby concreting ‘evidence’ that I had stolen them.

I begged Mum to believe that I had not done it – but she was completely in my sister’s thrall.  The betrayal was so acute that it truly did hurt like someone stabbing me – I completely understand where the saying ‘stabbed in the back’ comes from. I even began to search my own mind, my own memories, for any gaps. Wondered if I had some split personality where a part of me I wasn’t aware of was doing all these horrible things. There were absolutely no gaps in my memories – indeed my time there had been packed full of hard endless work in the house.  But it’s a horrible feeling to be doubting your own self.

As I’d missed the bus, my mother actually drove me to the hostel (actually, because of my mother’s stinginess with things like that for me). On the way, she told me that she had a will, and that I should be very careful how I behaved if I wanted to benefit from that will.

I said “I don’t want anything of yours. I don’t care about your will.  All I want from you, is for you to actually love me. And you don’t, you don’t love me enough to see when you are being taken for a fool by [sister] to make you believe I’ve done those things.”

Now, that house stands abandoned, and I am completely cut off from those people. For more than a decade, I tried and tried and tried to forge good relations with all of them, despite everything that had happened. It was rebuffed at every turn, with only more upset and hurt caused towards myself. My mother became more and more toxic towards me (towards everyone - these days she’s pretty much a loner, living amongst her junk, living out her fantasies in her marshmallow world, having alienated everyone who ever cared for her.) My brother seemed to have turned a corner, but too soon his true colours showed. My older sister never stopped trying to hurt me at every opportunity.

And so the decision to ‘vanish’ from their lives was made, action taken, and here I am. I think about it all the time – have pangs about having ‘abandoned’ my family – but the truth is that they abandoned me a long time ago – abandoned me as a sister and daughter and only kept me around as a punching bag and scapegoat.

Irony does exist. I do know my sister does still communicate with my mother. I have a feeling she’s waiting to relieve her of all her worldly belongings as soon as she gets a chance – the way I watched my mother relieve older relatives, and older neighbours, of theirs. The vulture becoming the prey picked over by a new vulture. Life has it’s natural cycles that do tend to play out like this.

This is why I fully believe that people CAN be utterly cruel and remorseless towards others, to even act in ways that can potentially incriminate themselves because they know that they have the power to turn it around to make themselves look as white as snow, and they know that they are more powerful than anyone around them and if people suspect them, they will never say it out of pure fear.

And it’s why I have been watching this whole blogging community drama over the past few months with interest – to have ‘met’ another person so much like my evil older sister has been quite an eye-opener for me. On one hand, I’m watching with the knowledge from my experiences, on the other hand, I’m learning more about creatures like these through observation now. God forbid I ever run into yet another person this horrid – but if I do, I will have a full weaponry of knowledge with which to protect myself.

It’s Not Just About Me Any More.

Hello World! I feel like I’ve been away forever – and yet I haven’t been. I had my computer taken to be checked out – it’s now in great running order again – but the two nights I had to go computer free felt like I’d lost a limb. What did we used to DO before we had computers? I texted back and forth with friends, read a book, did sudoku puzzles (I’m addicted!) played with Shalimar, watched TV – and yet it was all so quiet still. TOO quiet.

I don’t mean quiet in volume, but in feeling that I was communicating with people – feeling I wasn’t alone. It brought home just how isolated I used to be before I got my computer and then the internet. All those years I hid away at home at night – there is no way I could do that, now. I’ve met so many friends from online, and my friendships with people I already knew in real life have become deeper too.

Eating disorder wise, without the computer I had a lot of trouble keeping up my intake – I seemed to struggle more with the depression and therefore the inability to eat. (I did eat – I just felt it harder). On the other hand, having the computer helps me feel more able to eat, distracts me from purging after meals, and is something that keeps me busy and distracted, a coping tool, when I strongly feel like bingeing. It’s not infallible and on it’s own it would be useless as a tool – I have to work on these in other ways too – but it’s been amazing just how much a computer helps me in so many ways.

Okay, bored you enough – on to the real stuff I wanted to post today. And it also has a lot to do with friends, being social/less isolated than before, and how that’s affected me in ED terms.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I’m still not used to being liked. I’m used to being loathed. To people looking at me, and treating me, like something you might find on your shoe. And even if that wasn’t the truth, that’s how I perceived things. So sometimes I think about the fact that I have friends these days, and really good ones at that – that people care about me – WANT to care about me – and my head spins.

The other night I actually for the first time felt some kind of compassion for my own self as a young child. As an adolescent, and as a teenager and young woman too. I found myself actually crying – I rarely cry, having taught myself to keep as much of my emotions hidden as possible – thinking, this girl was just a kid, she wasn’t a bad kid at all, and she just had so much love to give – nothing but love. And somehow she ended up being completely dumped on with hatred. No wonder she ended up such a shattered mess.

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Sometimes when you have too much time on your hands to THINK, these things happen!  I try to not look back on the past too deeply because it’s always shocking how much time has passed so quickly – so  much of that is lost time because it was spent dying.

I know that sounds dramatic, but it’s the truth. From my teens to recent years, I was in the act of dying. We are all dying – some faster than others – but I was helping myself along so to speak. And every other facet of my life was based on the fact that I wouldn’t be around for very long. Dreams fell apart. Goals weren’t important any more. The future had nothing for me. I was just waiting.

A huge part of what kept this ‘dying’ going was the fact that I felt no responsibility to live. There wasn’t anyone to live for. The few there had been had gone. I was an island, really. So everything I did, I did to myself only (in my view – I now know that even while having ‘nobody’, what we do does affect others, like a thrown stone spreads ripples in a pond.) (Image Source)

When I did come across someone I cared about, they either died or moved on – people in my life were at best, transient.

When I was pretty young, I remember saying to myself:

“The only person who is going to be with me from the beginning of my life to the very end of my life is myself. Therefore, the only person I ever will be able to rely on is myself. Everyone else WILL let me down.”

Sadly, this is how my experience of people had shaped my beliefs. But it also protected me to some extent, not relying on others, and therefore, not having so much invested in others when they inevitably failed me. Fast forward to being a young woman, and I was failing myself – but in my eyes that was okay. I didn’t care about myself enough to not fail myself, and as long as nobody else was relying on me – that was fine. My beloved Shalimar DOES rely on me, and there have been times I’ve held on for her – because I couldn’t bear to leave her alone in a world where she knows nobody and would probably end up in a shelter. But in reality, she’s not going to live more than a couple more years – she’s nearly ten years old. And it terrifies me so much to think of her dying that I would rather die first or at the same time.

I still feel so much fear of people who are important to me dying that I’d rather die first. That’s something I’m going to have to address. And I guess it’s a human thing – to fear people you love dying – so I’m far from alone there.

In the last few years, with me crawling more and more out of my own shell, the computer and internet and phone meaning my friends can talk to me all the time and I am able to reach out and make new connections constantly – well I’m not alone any more. And that’s a wonderful feeling that I feel so, so grateful for every single day. But up til the other day I didn’t really think much about how this changes my own responsibilities when it comes to my own life and health.

A friend of mine, who is about 20 years older than me and a fair way ahead of me in her own recovery from Anorexia, has become one of my special sisters. She hasn’t any siblings, her mum is an alcoholic and doesn’t really give her any affection, her family is pretty much gone. Her boyfriend is much older than her, in his 70′s. She’s very precious to me, as she tells me I am to her. And I know that she worries about me sometimes, knowing I’m not completely out of the woods in terms of the ED.

But the other day, she said to me:

“I have nobody to survive me. My mother will die first, my boyfriend will die first. I’ve never had a family to outlive me before you came along. And I want you to outlive me. I worry that you are going to die too, die early, and leave me alone.”

I have a couple of friends to whom I’m this close – we are family – but the age gap in this friendship is the widest, and this friend the only one without a family of her own too. And it hit me hard. I realized I was heartbroken that she felt that way – both that she would be alone because everyone who she loved had died, and that she was scared of me dying before her too. And I was also overwhelmed that someone loved me that much to consider me her family, someone that she hoped would continue her own ‘family’ after she had gone.

I realised that I have made so many connections now. They weave their way out from me like many cobwebs – some never meet, some tangle, some run side by side. All are precious and important to me. And to many of them, I mean something to them, too. 

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I no longer can just die and leave nothing behind. I have a responsibility to not hurt those who do care about me. It no longer means nothing to the world if I die – now it means something. And as wonderful as it is to be valued by others, it terrifies me. One of my hugest fears of life itself is that I’ll fail life. That I’ve already failed life. I know it’s probably pretty close to impossible to fail at life, but fears don’t often know rationality, do they?

But the bottom line is, this world has finally stolen my heart, for keeps. I’m not going anywhere soon.

How are you aware of your problems affecting others around you, whether they are close to you or not? Has this awareness helped you change anything? 

 

When I Knew My Mother Did Not Love Me – Letting Go and Moving On.

There have been times throughout these years  when I’ve come to know something without a doubt. Whether it’s a reality of my situation or about myself that I’ve until that moment denied, or it’s a reality of someone else in my world that affects me, or it’s a reality of LIFE – it’s been a defining moment that I’ve never forgotten.

Unfortunately the path to insight and enlightenment never runs smoothly – I found most of these occasions oh-so-painful. Because why do we hide the truth from ourselves in the first place? Mostly because it hurts too much? For me, that’s definitely so.

After I left home, I still held on to some fantasy that my mother did, deep down, love me as a mother. That the imaginary mother I’d spent my life hoping would emerge would come out and show her ‘real self’. It’s hard for someone who never existed except in my dreams, to show their ‘real self’.

 

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I hung on to anorexia for many years in the hope that “my mother will love me, and then I’ll be okay, and I’ll be able to get better.” I don’t know what it was that I actually expected from her. Maybe it was just for her to acknowledge the pain that she’d caused me for so many years. Maybe it was for her to just care. I saw other patient’s parents and loved ones come into the hospital all the time, always hugging them, supporting them.  Going into ward rounds with them (ward rounds being the most emotional and terrifying part of our week!). Wanting to be a part of whatever it took to help their loved ones. In comparison, I was very alone. My case workers went into ward rounds if they had the time, and I really appreciated that. They came to visit me. Friends sometimes came too, as long as they weren’t the friends I’d made on that very ward – because there is a ‘no past patient’ visitors policy for good reason. But there wasn’t anyone to hold me and tell me it was all going to be okay and remind me that there was more to life than this. Not that, in hindsight, having that happen would have ‘set me free’ like I imagined it would.

There are LOTS of people who don’t have anybody, and lots of people who might have families but struggle with them immensely so I know I’m far from alone. But it’s very hard to avoid feeling abandoned and uncared for when you are locked up in hospital against your will,  trapped and frightened.

The bottom line is that even had I had the most supportive family from the start, even had my mother come in and apologised for the hurt and abuse, hugged me tight, promised me she wouldn’t hurt me ever again, told me she cared, whatever – even had that happened, it wouldn’t have helped me eating disorder wise. That is something that I’ve slowly had to accept comes down to me alone.

 

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It’s been very, very hard to let go of this imaginary loving, supporting mother. Very hard. I had to admit to myself that she’d never really loved me and that she didn’t love me now, at all. That she would never love me. She wasn’t capable or willing to love me. That all she knew was how to cause harm and she wasn’t going to start changing in her 60′s (as she was then, she’s now in her 70′s) from the person she had been all her life long. She doesn’t even want to change. She’s happy being a malignant narcissist. And yet, I always held tight to the hope that somehow she would change, and the erroneous belief that this would be the key needed to unlock my illness and allow me to heal.

My moment of truth came about five or more years ago. (It’s hard to keep track of when things happened, the fifteen years of continual  hospitalizations are a long blur to me. I even have had quite a number of people come up to me and say hello, start reminiscing  about “this time when we..” and I cannot  remember ever having set eyes on them in my life!)

I had been transferred from the ED unit with heart problems to the emergency department for safety’s sake, later to be transferred to cardiac care. It was there that I was told that they were not expecting at this stage that I would live through this night. The constant purging had dropped my potassium so low that my heart was struggling, and several days of IV’s hadn’t brought it up at all either. My other organs were also starting to fail and in tandem with being emaciated and weak, I was in huge trouble.

At that stage, I still had my mother as my next of kin. (I now no longer have any family next of kin – two special friends have that honour, and they not only would be prepared to be there if needed, they volunteered for this.) My mother was called by the emergency department staff and asked to please come in right away, as her daughter was in a critical condition and not expected to survive the night.

My mother lives an easy 5 minute drive from the hospital. She also, at that time, was driving everywhere all the time, long distances, short distances, daytime, night time, everywhere. There  wasn’t any need for her to even go through the city area as she was on the same side of the city from the hospital.

But this evening (it was about 6pm I remember) her response was something along the lines of “I can’t come in. I couldn’t possibly drive there at night”.

The nurse who called her didn’t give up with that – and she was actually furious when she told me of this response. Not just that, but the nurse who had come down with me from the ED unit and who sat by my side for the next 12 hours, indicated to bring the phone to her and started telling my mother off. It didn’t work.

It was at this moment, that I realised without a doubt, that my mother did not love me, never had, never would. I could no longer deny that.

She didn’t even care if she never saw me alive again.

I made it through that night – it was one of many expectations of me not living that I defied. But the part of me that had hoped my mother could love me, that died.

It still has been years between that revelation, and me being able to totally cut her loose. I remained in touch, kept taking her calls and holding on through the inevitable screaming fits. (We never saw eye to eye, and our conversations would always degenerate into her offending me, or me offending her.) I don’t know why I bothered, but some part of me couldn’t stop trying.

 

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Despite all the abuse – physical and emotional, the neglect, the craziness with food, turning a blind eye to and enabling the abuse from others – I kept forgiving her. I used to be endlessly forgiving. Maybe too forgiving. I gave every excuse in the book for her actions. At some stage, I had to wake up and realise I was flogging a dead horse here.

This all has had a huge effect on me in eating disorder terms. I had to face up to the fact that it really didn’t matter whether my mother loved me or hated me, I still had this disorder, I still had to deal with my problems, I still had to choose ultimately whether I wanted to live or die. I also came to the conclusion over time, that even had my mother been different, the most loving, caring woman on earth – I would still have this eating disorder and still be unable to heal from it just for having her support.

This has been one of the scariest revelations over the years for me – that there is nothing outside of myself, that can change this. Take away every single reason, influence, everything – and I would still have this. This includes being scared of weight gain, wanting to lose weight, being scared of eating, feeling unloved and unsupported, hating myself, being scared to either live or die, dealing with my past, getting anything from the eating disorder at all – I would still have my eating disorder.

It truly has a life of its own, and I truly believe I was born with it lying dormant in me, just biding it’s time for the right conditions and triggers to be present. Take them all away and it’s still part of me that I’m going to have in me forever. I wish I could rip it out, but I can’t – I can only do my best to manage it, like a diabetic must manage their diabetes for life.

Don’t get me wrong - I do believe complete recovery from an eating disorder is possible. I’ve personally witnessed a number of friends achieve this. I just don’t think that it’s possible for everyone, and most likely not myself. There are things I just can’t undo – how can I unlearn how to purge at will, for example, which has been the biggest stumbling block to maintaining my weight for years – because even eating my meal plan, I have that outlet in which I can undo all that good work in just one split second’s weakness. And how can I oust the ED voice from my head, when it’s been there all my life? I can live with it, grow stronger than it, refute it, but I can’t see it not ever being there. Even more, I have a feeling that the C-PTSD and the haunting remnants of my past will never give me much peace either, and all that is very much tied up together.

Even lately, when I’m still maintaining my weight, I’ve started ballet, still working on getting a job (and still hopeful), am doing art classes, more social, more active than in all the more than a decade previously – I haven’t been coping. Every day is a battle – the social anxiety in particular is a huge problem. It often takes me several attempts to get to classes or appointments because I’ll start out, chicken out and come back home, only to turn around again and head out again. I just don’t understand the level of absolute FEAR that keeps popping up for simple everyday things.

The C-PTSD problems, especially the constant dissociating and the abundance of triggers for this everywhere I go, also haunt me big time. It frustrates me because I want to move on, I’ve left my past behind. I do get pangs about just ‘cutting off’ my entire family like I did – but I’m able to see that it was my only choice and that they only will ever keep hurting me if I keep giving them the chance too. So usually when I think of them, I shake my  head and say “Pfffft”. And yet they still follow me everywhere like shadows that only I can see.

Life itself is overwhelming and most days, I’m just not coping with it at all. It is extremely tempting to go crawling back to the disorder because I know it will kill me if I relapse – and that would at least mean it was finally all over with. Because I am SO TIRED.

There still is that ever-present urge to keep living though. To keep fighting, and so I do. That belief that everything that happens is for a reason, and the knowledge that even though I still have so far to go, I’ve come further than I thought possible, and that I already have had people say they have been given hope or inspired by something I’ve written or done or said. That really is an important one for me – my priorities have changed so much over the years – from everything being about me being successful and the best I can be, to wanting to do the best that I can do with what I have. If I can just live a functional life, be happy and content, give Shalimar as happy a life as she could have, and most of all, leave this world in some way a better place for my having been here – that’s all I want now.

The only chance I have of achieving this comes with continuing to fight – but also in letting go. Letting go of past dreams, letting go of past hurts, letting go of people who I used to not be able to imagine living life without. It means grieving all that I’ve lost or will never have. And it means growing up.

I’ve come to realise that there is a part of having an eating disorder that is very childish. Someone once mentioned in a blog – (I cannot remember who, or I’d link you – if it was you, please let me know!) that to have an eating disorder is a bit like throwing a childish tantrum. I’m not happy with the world and with my life and with myself? Time to throw myself down on the floor and kick and scream and hold my breath till I turn blue. Or refuse to eat, throw it up, throw the dishes at those trying to make me eat, throw it in their faces. It’s still a tantrum, whether it’s someone or something else I’m rejecting or my very self.

But not only do I need to grow up and take responsibility for being alive, but I also needed to do a lot of growing up in order to leave my mum behind. True, she never mothered me – but in my imagination, she did. That, at least, was something I clung on to, and I had to give that up like finally parting with a security blanket or favourite teddy bear.

Most of all, I had to learn to start parenting myself. I don’t have much of a clue how to do this, but I’ve started with being kinder to myself, practising self acceptance, and being firm with myself, too. I’ve read a lot of information online to educate myself as to why my mother is the way she is and why, particularly sites like Daughters Of Narcissistic Mothers, which have made me realise how far I am from being alone.  I guess it’s a start – the main thing is that I’m not even relying on the fantasy of having a mother to soothe myself any more.  Neither am I letting my absent ‘mother’ torment me as she did for all that time. I don’t have a mother. I never really did.

 

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I know that whether a family is supportive or unsupportive varies widely among all of us. Eating disorders are not caused by parents/family. They might contribute in some, sure. But they don’t cause it. And for all of us, in the end it comes down to us alone against the eating disorder – only we can fight our own battle.  But support and being loved do make a difference, as does feeling alone, feeling unloved, unsupported, and being constantly in battle with our family.

How has your family relationship affected you in terms of your eating disorder? Have you ever had to cut someone close to you off completely? How did you get through this? 

A huge thank you to everyone for yet again reading through such a long winded post, and for all your comments – your contributions are always so thought-provoking to read!

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okayyyyyyyy…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sheesh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I intend to change that.

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

Do you seem to continually attract dangerous people? 

More about Shalimar – and her newspaper debut!

A few weeks ago, Shalimar and I went to a pet fair called PawPrints.

My Home and Community Care comes from an awesome organisation with the most lovely people – no matter who I get from there as a case manager or helper, they are kind, caring people who I always come to see as friends. They don’t only provide assistance for people with mental illnesses, but to the disabled, the elderly, and they also have a service to help people who are homeless.

They sponsored PawPrints along with the council – and ‘marginalised’ people were invited to take their pets along for a free vet check, vaccinations, worming, samples of food, and home made blankets/coats/leashes.

It was so darn awesome!

The Courier Mail asked me if I would be in a article with Shalimar and it was in the paper today -

I’m so proud of Shalimar

I think it’s time I wrote more about my beloved cat!

This story starts years before Shalimar was even a twitch in a tomcat’s tail. We had many pets growing up – and cats were part of the menagerie – four of them. Hotchy was mine – she had been one of a litter of kittens an ex-stray cat had had, only two had survived, Hotchy, and her brother (my older sister’s cat). The honour of her being ‘mine’ meant that my mother had a good reason now to enslave me more than she had already been – but that’s another story.

Hotchy was my best friend. Home was hell, but suddenly I wasn’t alone. Hotchy was the first living being who showed me unconditional love, and I loved her back with all my heart. She would always be waiting for me when I got home from school – she’d jump up on the front of the car as I walked through the garage and put one paw on each of my shoulders, smooooching my face

Hotchy lived for six years – she died in December 1993, five days before Christmas when she was bitten by a baby taipan. I was heartbroken and cried myself to sleep every day for a year.

Those years were the worst ever, the year before and the year after she died. The bullying was intense, home was intense, I was depressed as hell, my eating and weight had attracted the attention of the teachers and I was often questioned about my intake. Mum had begun dragging me around to doctors trying to get me diagnosed with anorexia which infuriated me, I did NOT have anorexia (so I thought. Seems I was the last to know it. I remember being so angry when a couple of girls in front of me in Biology during a discussion where anorexia was brought up, looked back at me and whispered “Fiona’s got that.”)

I was finally diagnosed with major clinical depression and all prozac’d up. Not long after that, I left home for good – things got too dangerous and I had to get out fast. Looking back, I don’t think I would have been able to leave if Hotchy had not been gone all that long – it took that year for me to even be okay with not being able to be around where she was buried, and to not feel like leaving was a betrayal. If she had still been alive, I would have stayed. So I guess… she wasn’t meant to be alive longer.. but I missed her so much.

With Hotchy, October 1992 (I turned fifteen two days later)

Sorry for the quality of the photo – it’s very old. I don’t have a scanner so some of the photos for this post have been photographed from the originals.

I know this is VERY unusual, but I bonded strongly from the beginning with all animals. It just is natural for me. And I wasn’t getting any love from my family.

I always hoped that I would have another cat in the future. I used to wander though the David Jones in the city when waiting for my train after school, trying on the perfumes, and Shalimar by Guerlain had become my favourite. Nobody in my life that I can remember wore it, but it evoked feelings of safety, comfort, and nostalgia in me. Funny how perfume can do that! Somehow I decided that if I had another cat in the future, I’d call her Shalimar. I never forgot that.

Roll on to 2002. I had been in hospital many times by then, I was battling the eating disorder big time. One of my friends, B, had died the previous year from it. Her mother, E,  had been about to send her to a new clinic that had opened up in a southern state –  but B had not made it in time.  After B died, she bought a house here in my city for the clinic to have a branch based here, too. I went along to the opening party, but I never dreamed that I would go there. It was simply another private clinic that was inaccessibile to me since I didn’t have the money to pay for it. (People mortgaged their homes to go to this clinic, it cost tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, and wasn’t covered under private insurance which I didn’t have either)

One day I got a phone call from E. She said “You have an appointment at the clinic on –day, and I’m going with you”. I was blown away! It was a dream come true, I really believed I would get better, and I did very well for a while, but sadly they didn’t have what I needed, and I wasn’t ready either. Not every method works for everyone – we are different – and this method didn’t work for me. Also, if you are not ready to face up to things, be honest, do the work – you will get nowhere.

While I was at the clinic, E took me to the RSPCA to buy me a kitten as a gift. So exciting! We went on the 13th of February 2003.

I walked up and down the rows of mature cats, but the kittens cage drew me in. There were so many of them! All squalling and squealing and playing! So cute. But there was one little grey one, the runt, and the moment my eyes fell on her I exclaimed “There she is! Shalimar!”  E did everything she could to convince me to choose a healthier looking, less scruffy specimen, but I was taken. Shalimar was bought, boxed, bundled into the car and off we went!

On the way home we stopped for supplies, and I stayed in the car with her. I couldn’t bear to keep her in the box. When E came back a few minutes later, she was curled up in the crook of my elbow, asleep and purring. We bonded instantly.

That night, I hardly slept as this sweet little kitten clambered all over me, snuffled in armpits and neck, tangled in my hair, bounced on my tummy… she hardly left me alone, apart from jumping off the bed to go explore our little flat for while before always coming back to her new ‘mummy’.

From the start she was so naughty, so mischievous! She toppled head first into ugg boots, clambered up to the laundry tub and stole wet socks that were soaking, hoarding them under my bed in a pile. One day I turned around to see her with her face white as snow. She’d gotten up on the kitchen counter and toppled a box of milk powder off it, then been busy licking it up for all she was worth. That night I felt so sorry for her – poor thing had the runs! But she never overcame her addiction to milk powder. It  is like kitty crack.

Shalimar has been my best friend and constant companion for nine and a half years now. During that time, I have been extremely sick – but I could not leave her alone in this world. It broke my heart whenever I was in hospital, because she had to go to the pet motel (they were amazing, they treated her like a queen) and it motivated me to get well enough to go home.

She is why I hung on when I had no other reason to do so. I used to fall into a sort of coma like sleep before Shalimar came into my life, where I would wake up days later and not even know that it wasn’t the same day. Shalimar prevented those from ever happening again, because she just will not give up if I don’t wake up. I’ll wake with a face like mincemeat from her jabbing at me, but she will get me awake.

Since moving house at the beginning of this year, I finally have been able to give her the life she deserves, as well as the fact that she hasn’t had to go to the pet motel for two years now. And I hope that she will be with me for much longer. Nine is a grand dame in cat years, but my  removals man told me his cat was 17 and still going, so she has that to beat!

These days, Shalimar likes sleeping, eating, walking all over me, using my tummy as a jumping castle, eating my bean plants, and generally getting into everything. She truly is happy, and she makes me happy too.

Do you have a pet, and how has your pet affected your life?