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)

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

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

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

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

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

High tea was sublime -

Eyeing off the goodies…

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

That can totally be a New Year resolution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Image Sources: 1, 2 , 4, 5, 6)

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

Sleepover Parties

… are something that eating disorders exclude you from.

It certainly excluded me from weddings, parties, anything.

Never again!

Today I’m apologising to you, my readers, and to the brilliant bloggers whose posts I love to read, for being awfully behind in my commenting and responding – for a GOOD reason -

I’ve just been enjoying a sleepover with a very special friend – and it was awesome. Absolutely awesome.

It’s really lovely to be doing some things that are ‘normal’ – but for me, so, so special.

PS this is the face that greeted me on going to bed last night – her puppy!

Don’t tell Shalimar!! She was fine, though. One night alone (with plenty of food and water and toys) is still a far cry from the days she spent months at a time in pet motels. She was absolutely fine.

I think she’s dreaming of driving a car or dancing a jig..

Have you reclaimed anything that you lost to being unwell?

(Featured image source)

If You Could Have A Say…

For almost 15 years, I had no say about when I was admitted to hospital, or what happened if I needed to be admitted. I had no say in any decisions to do with my health.

Recently, I’ve been offered a little bit of that power – an opportunity that I think many of us who are fighting eating disorders and caught up in the health system would give anything to have.

As I am a ‘complex patient’, my case manager is now required to have plans drawn up for every aspect of my management. Usually my admissions have been planned – I’ve been becoming too unwell, or medically I’ve become unstable, my case manager and/or GP has contacted the ED specialist unit at the hospital, and because they know me, it’s pretty much been a case of “Okay, she’s coming in at x time, see you then.” All that’s remained has been for them to bring me in.

However there have been emergencies and crises, as there will be when someone is battling a long chronic illness that has so many volatile aspects to it.  And without a written plan in my files, they have been difficult and even traumatic. There was the time I was taken to hospital by a case worker who was standing in, for chest pains. The registrar didn’t check me out – instead, he gave me a few lectures about how people with eating disorders are manipulative, spoilt brats who just want attention – and told me to go home and eat a sandwich. I really did have heart problems – ended up in hospital with them a few days later – but that experience is just one of many similar, not just for myself, but for friends I’ve talked to.

It’s scary that many of us will not go to emergency under our own steam, because of the fear of being treated with no understanding, even being accused of attention seeking or malingering. Often staff in emergency aren’t aware of what to actually test for medically – beyond basics like electrolyte levels, and even that at times has been something that if I haven’t reminded them of, would have been overlooked. One of my friends who had to attend for her self harm was stitched up with no anesthetic, because obviously, she wanted the pain, right? (No, she didn’t, and it traumatised her.)

So having a chance to control some of what happens in this situation is truly an opportunity I don’t want to waste. It also might go to abate some of the fears I have of ever being in hospital again – that I will always be at the mercy of others, never have a say, just be reduced to a body, because I have a mental illness and therefore I don’t get a say.

As far as my health goes, my case manager is going to help me take out an Advanced Health Care Directive. It’s a good idea to have it done now, and have it signed off by a doctor to say that I was mentally able to make my own informed decisions at the time that it was made. When I’ve been in hospital, there has often been a point at which things have been too much – too traumatic or too painful – and I’ve wanted to be able to say “No more”. Indeed, I’ve begged them at times to let me die – because at that time, there was truly not much hope, I had tried everything and tried it many times. I was tired, I was broken, now medical help had just become more abuse – and I wanted them to just be kind to me now. But because I was mentally ill – I was told that I didn’t know what was best for me and was incapable of making those decisions.

Recently in the  news there have been two women who have been in this situation – and it went to court. One woman was granted the right to not be fed – (trigger warning, stupid cliché anorexia photo) despite wanting to live. The other was ordered to be fed against her will – despite there being no hope for her and suffering the medical and psychological effects of years of a long, hard battle. Today, I am glad that I was kept alive despite wanting then to just be allowed to die. Because I’m still here, and I have a chance. One of my past doctor always used to say to me “While there is life, there is hope.” And she’s right.

A now long gone friend of mine was resuscitated and her chest was smashed from the efforts, she lived in agony for a while before she died. That terrifies me, because I have severe osteoporosis so the chances are the same would happen to me. I do have heart complications, according to my case manager, so it could happen. I wanted to have a Do Not Resuscitate order at one stage, was knocked back because of the ‘mentally impaired’ thing. NOW, I can have it if I want it. But I’m scared of not being resuscitated, too. As much as I struggle to live, struggle to want to live when hurting and fighting 24/7, I’m scared of dying too. Who isn’t? The thought of having a heart attack and them NOT trying to save my life is too scary to think about.

I want to be able to decide when to no longer push to save me. When I’m to be considered ‘end of life’. That is also such a hard decision. When is anorexia ‘end of life’? Who gets to make that decision? Nobody with an eating disorder should ever get to that stage but it does happen. When you are in organ failure, for example, it’s a bit silly to try and keep saving you, especially if it’s painful and traumatic.

I definitely want to specify that I not be restrained ever again. That isn’t worth it, and I’d truly rather die. I don’t know if that would be acceptable on an AHD, but I can try.

Generally, I get to have instructions to emergency staff about what is helpful for me, and what is not. For example – not to say “Go eat a sandwich” to me! My case manager is putting in details of what medical things to test for (in case they don’t know, but seriously, I hope it becomes compulsory for all front line nurses, doctors, and any other professional health staff to be taught about eating disorders, since they are often the first point of contact for sufferers and how they handle the situation can heavily influence the sufferer’s attitude towards accepting help in the future.)

Very importantly, I can have instructions to care for Shalimar. I’ve always been scared that she would be left alone to fend for herself if I was suddenly unwell and none of my treatment team were around to arrange for her to be cared for. She is to me, my ‘child’ – and she is reliant on me in as many ways as a child.

I’m struggling to come up with what things I would like to have on my plan. I was shocked to be given the chance to have input, and thankful that I have a chance to influence what the future might hold, before I got to a point where my opinion no longer counted – NOT that I ever intend to revisit that state of health again. The most important thing here, is that this is a safety net for me in many ways.

What would you choose to have on an emergency admission care plan? For both medical and psychiatric emergencies? What would you want the people who are helping you to do or not do? Are there any triggers that you would benefit from the staff knowing in advance and so avoiding?

Would you ever take out an Advanced Health Care Directive or do you have one? And what would you have on that directive? What is your biggest fear health-wise?

Thank you for your input! I am so interested to see what you all think.

(Image source – I love this picture, and I love this verse.)

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? 

A Little, Empty Life.

One of the hardest things about my life as the eating disorder has shaped it, is that it really is a very small, self-centred, empty life. It’s hard to admit that, and hurtful when others say it, but that’s the reality. You can’t have an eating disorder AND a life. You just can’t.

I’m sure most people with an eating disorder have tried to at some stage. Many probably  still have a ‘life’ of sorts, for now. When you are in the earlier stages, and are yet to experience the full devastation it can wreak on every part of your existence, it can be difficult to imagine that it could bring you to such a grinding halt. Also, some people who have had their eating disorders for a long time have a ‘semblance’ of a life – they have had to learn to live around it or with it – work to support themselves, for example – but it’s just a resemblance from the outside that shatters pretty quickly under gentle poking around. It’s not really life when you barely scrape through each day going through the motions and pretty much become a robot. Wake up, eating disorder stuff and work, go to sleep (or toss and turn if you are one of the many with insomnia). Same the next day. And the next. And pretending on a daily basis to be ‘fine’ in order to be professional at work is exhausting and isolating.

My career was going to be a professional dancer. I’d already come a long way in just a few years, and it was looking like it could be a reality. I had the talent, I had the perseverance and the drive to push myself beyond the pain and constantly keep working beyond ‘normal’ limits to keep achieving in order to use that talent. I’d also had a lot of really good luck that enabled me to have opportunities that most people never get.

Having an eating disorder meant I threw all that away. Years of hard work, of actual blood, sweat and tears – just thrown away. All for nothing. My physical health declined so quickly after I fell over the edge from sub-clinical disordered eating into a full blown disorder that I didn’t even know what was happening until after the fact – in hindsight it’s obvious. At the time, I didn’t even realise that I was sick, and I genuinely thought I had a huge weight problem. I was also in denial, in pain, traumatised and suffering from PTSD, dissociated all the time, and irrational. I genuinely believed that if I lost weight, my problems would be fixed. Even when the majority of those problems had nothing to do with my weight or my body.

Today that doesn’t make sense at all. I can see it’s irrational.  But back then, I couldn’t. Even when I’d lost too much weight, been kicked out of the performance strand in my dancing course at university, and was constantly passing out, and people were remarking on not only my weight loss but now that I’d gone too far and was looking sick,  I still firmly believed that all that would be solved when I ‘got my dancer’s body back again’ which to me at the time, meant losing weight.

Totally ZERO insight. Not a clue.

It all went downhill very fast after that point. A valuable lesson that I have learnt from this  is that it’s so important to have activities and goals that are meaningful and purposeful in your life – to have a reason for getting up in the morning, a reason for being alive at all. A reason to not give in completely and let the eating disorder suck the last bit of life out of you.  The more that was taken from me – not just ballet, but ability to think in order to do the academic classes at university, to have a conversation with people, the stamina and thinking in order to keep doing the volunteer work I’d always done, the steady hand and imagination to keep doing my drawings and paintings, the imagination to write my poetry, and the energy and self-esteem to keep up with friends – the more of it I lost, the more of myself I lost, too.

After leaving home as a teen, I’d become fiercely independent. I’d lived to that point with every aspect of my life completely controlled – right down to what I could think,  what I wore, read, and did with my spare time. My determination to survive in the ‘big bad world’ was such that I strived to budget and manage money, pay bills and look after my commitments without failing. To get myself around the city despite it being unfamiliar, to find my own housing and fend for myself. I did fail to keep myself safe – since I fell out of the family frying pan into the fire of Wanker the rapist and stalker – but for the first few years I did quite well in everything else, especially considering that I had to learn a lot of basic life skills from scratch. In a home where you are brainwashed and tightly controlled, you don’t learn these skills, even when you are actually performing them – because you aren’t ‘practising’ them so much as you are ‘obeying’, like a robot, every command. Thus I had been preparing and cooking family meals, cleaning, washing up, laundering, working in the yard etc for much of my childhood, but found I didn’t even know where to begin on any of these tasks when I’d needed to do them on the outside.

So to lose my independence to the eating disorder was a huge blow for me. And I lost it ALL. I had no say about my life. My finances were taken over by a state trustee and a state-appointed guardian made decisions about my body. As I grew physically less able, Home and Community Care moved in to help me to get out of bed, shower and dress, go to appointments, look after the housework, encourage me to come on a drive to the park or just get out, and most importantly, help me look after my cat, Shalimar. By this point, I’d had her a few years, and I still can’t imagine living without her, now. We have been almost inseperable since the first hour we spent together. Almost, because with me constantly in and out of hospital, Shalimar was in and out of the pet motel. Thankfully a really lovely man who ran the facility I finally settled on for her, cared for her personally and sensitively – giving her cuddles and walkies and treats. But it wasn’t a life for her, and it was the thing I most regretted about being sick.

At my sickest, I even had to be bathed, toileted, and fed. The indignity of it, especially when some of the nurses or aides who are doing it are much younger than you, really stings. I felt so helpless.

At that point, to look back at the strong, determined, courageous, talented and highly achieving young woman I had once been – was heartbreaking and very bizarre. No way in the world had I ever imagined such a future for myself. I’d aimed for the sky, and beyond, back then! I had believed that if I truly hoped and dreamed for something, I would achieve it – no doubts – because hoping and dreaming to me was synonymous with going out of my way, pulling out all the stops, not stopping at all until I’d gotten there. In fact, I’d made a point of always setting goals that were higher than I (and most other people who knew me, too) imagined I could ever achieve, because my will and my drive was such that I usually ended up surpassing the more ‘realistic’ goals I’d had that way, achieving more than had I just aimed for the them in the first place.

And here I was now – helpless. Pathetic, weak, miserable and helpless.

Eating disorders will strip even the brightest people of their every hope and dream. It will leave no aspect of your life untouched. You will constantly drop to a new low, feel like nothing could possibly get worse than ‘this’ – and then fall again even further. Nobody escapes this. Even for those who somehow hang on to some semblance of sanity and function for a longer time than usual – it will crumble around you in the end. Because it’s impossible to maintain something that is the very antithesis of LIFE and LIVE.

Many people with eating disorders have to start from scratch when they start to turn things around. The little basics of life have to be learnt all over again, but it goes far deeper. Many of us find ourselves in the body of a complete stranger. If we ever knew ‘who’ we were in the first place, we don’t even begin to know that now. We have lost being a person to become basically a host body to a parasite. Interests, hopes, dreams – they all have to be found all over again. And in the jaded, weary aftermath, it’s difficult to find the cares for that stuff, it seems so trivial compared to the battle we have been wading through.

But it’s important. Essential. You can’t just rip the eating disorder from the person and expect them to be okay. They have nothing. You have ripped away their ‘suit of armour’ and their skin, too, leaving them a quivering helpless mess of jelly and innards that will collapse uselessly in a pile. The way you need to do  this is to replace each old supporting and protecting structure for a new one, before taking the old one away. A new activity here, a new interest there, gradually ease the person from leaning totally on the old to shifting more and more weight onto the new – and hopefully when you can finally take eating disorder from that part of their life completely they will stay standing and keep going.

It’s a long slow process. It can’t be rushed.

In many ways, I’m the same person as I once was. Yet, in many ways, I’m completely different, and I do feel like I’m living with a stranger in the same body every single day – not to forget that my body feels like someone else’s too.  My rebuilding process has involved me being broken down to the very most basic, shattered slivers of myself as I once was. Hopefully this time around, the foundation built will be sturdy and I will be stronger for it. Ballet, volunteer work, reading, gardening, interacting with friends much more, art, and spending precious time with my beloved Shalimar all make up parts of the scaffolding of my new person. And with the therapist in trauma therapy, we are chipping away at the frozen, tormented bits to hopefully reveal and set free the little abused kid so that she can finally grow up and leave the past behind her.

You are not the exception to the rule.

Even if you still have a life, if you have an eating disorder, you will not escape this loss of life. I promise you – you simply will not, can not. And that is why I tell this story. My message to you is, get out now. I read of people asking if they are ready to attempt to get better, are they ‘sick enough’? Do they want to let go of losing weight, or the illusion of control, or of whatever pretty carrot the eating disorder has promised? Maybe there is a special occasion they want to be thin for first, or studies to be finished, or someone to meet. Some goal to have achieved, or some point to have reached where they will ‘know’ they now are ready to change.

My question is – what makes you think you will even have those choices? Or that when you get to whatever the goalpost is, you will be able to change, then?

I listen to someone telling me that they want to time their recovery for after a vacation period, when the harsh reality is that if they don’t start fighting now, they won’t even have that vacation period, and they certainly won’t have a choice about when to be plunged into treatment or hospital. I listen to someone telling me that they have to finish the year’s studies first, and wonder if they realise that if they don’t start fighting NOW, not only will they not finish the year’s studies, they may lose the chance to complete the entire course. I hear someone saying they can’t take time from their job to fight for their lives, and wonder if they realise that it’s take the time, or become so unwell they have no choice about losing it, and maybe not even be ever able to work again. And I listen to  someone wanting to be thinner for some occasion and wish she realised that it’s too high a price to pay for that – this disease leaves you crippled and weak, even bedridden, and in the end, DEAD, and believe me that’s not a good look for anyone.

We don’t have tomorrow. None of us has tomorrow. Or next week. Definitely not next year. We only have today. We can only do what we can do right now. And every moment that we don’t fight for our lives against ED, is potentially a moment in the future where we no longer have a life at all.

Even if you take just one small step today – challenge yourself in just one little way, change just one little thing – to fight your eating disorder – it’s a chance you now have. It’s a little bit of yourself and your life and your future that you are claiming, now when you are still able to claim it.

Keep fighting. 

(Image source)

Don’t Give Up Hope.

 

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

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

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

Today I am so glad for that. So grateful.

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

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

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

There is always hope. 

 

Turning Points?

People often ask me, after years of being so sick, and so stuck – to the point where I wasn’t expected to survive and my treatment team only really kept me alive to legally cover themselves, admitting me only on death’s door – how did things change for me? Why did I suddenly go from hopeless to so full of hope?

In many ways it seems a very sudden development, but it’s not. I think all of us face turning points in our lives, points where we simply cannot continue on as we have been. Wiktionary defines turning point as  ”A decisive point at which a significant change or historical event occurs, or at which a decision must be made.”  Both are true for myself, in my journey.

When I look back at this seemingly ‘sudden’ turnaround, it’s not that sudden at all. I can see that I was growing and changing in ways that were not then visible – even to myself – that came together in the end to enable change to be made outwardly. During the times that much of this growth was occurring, I was depressed and felt hopeless, I felt that I had tried, and tried, and tried, and nothing had worked, that I had nothing left to give and would be better off dead. That I had been fighting endlessly and had gotten nowhere. I had no idea I was already on the road to improving. I wonder if I had known, I would have had more hope? I’ll never know. The important thing was that little things were changing.

I was learning how to cope better with the things that I didn’t cope with before – with flashbacks, nightmares, emotions. I was learning to be more accepting of myself – I was learning more ABOUT myself – and I was learning that it’s okay to fall down. I fell down big time, and many times, over those years and most of the time I needed a LOT of help to get back up again. My pride took a huge battering. I lost every shred of dignity, was completely humbled, and now that I look back at that, I see that although it was not a nice thing to go through at all, it helped me. When you have humbled yourself and being able to say, “Yes, I suck right now, I’m a failure, and I need your help” and reach out and accept the help offered – you truly cannot fall any lower. The only way from there can be up. And sometimes it’s important for us to reach this point so we can get over ourselves and be forced to see ourselves in all our brokenness – in order to get past the denial that can prevent us from ever otherwise accepting the help we need.

I am Christian. I will not pretend that I am not. I usually don’t talk much about it, because I feel very ‘new’ to it, and am scared of putting my foot in it big time by saying something that turns out to be the wrong thing. A lot of my Bible reading occurred during my sickest period and so a lot of the facts went through my cottage cheese brain and promptly vanished, so I also find myself stumbling when it comes to quoting, referring to the Scripture, to remembering important points…  I also have been worried that sometimes people who do NOT believe are offended, and I don’t want to alienate anyone. I am a live and let live person. My beliefs are mine, and I have them because of things that have occurred in my life and how and what I feel. Other people come by their beliefs in a similar way. Also none of us has a right to say “My beliefs are right, and yours are not” because none of us can ever know that for sure, and it’s arrogant to assume our beliefs are right or better than someone else’s.

Where this is leading is that my faith did play a big part in my being here today –  although I hate it when I’m reading a book where someone recovers, whether it’s from an eating disorder or something else, and they just say “God cured me”. I hate it. Because it doesn’t just happen like that. I do believe in miracles, yes, but miracles usually have a lot of work involved in making them happen – they are miracles because they should not have happened, should have been impossible, were against the odds. But they didn’t just happen. People have said that my own turning things around is a miracle, because I should be dead, there wasn’t hope for me and my body was on it’s last legs – but I know it’s not, I know how much hard work and time and tears and perseverance  has gone into getting this far.

I have always been a very spiritual person. I did go through a very dark period where I lost all faith in there being any thing called God out there, and I lost all hope. I defined hope as being something that you can only have if you know for sure that what you hope for (life, feeling better, etc) CAN happen – and I did not. I couldn’t fathom that anything could get better for me, and therefore I had no hope. As for God, I felt totally alone. If He existed, I surmised, He had long turned His face from me in disgust.

But I did strongly feel, within myself, something bigger and more powerful out there. Some kind of energy, or spirit. Something great. Something benevolent, caring.. I could feel that. When my Dad was dying for example, I went up there to his city full of anger and despair, raging at the world – “how could you take my Dad? How could you give him cancer? How could you make him suffer so much, he’s a good man?” But when I got there and was by his side and he was dying, I felt deep down that this was as it was meant to be. I will never be able to describe what I felt in words really – but I could almost feel something like ‘gears’ grinding – could almost feel that all life goes in cycles, and that my Dad’s was grinding to an end – and then, after he died, I could feel him continue on a new cycle, where, I do not know. But I felt all that. It didn’t make it less painful, but it did feel like this was meant to happen and part of life, my Dad’s time was here to go. I’ve always been very connected to nature and I can’t not feel that there is something far greater under all we can see on the surface and that essentially it is filled with LIFE.

Back to God – one day, I just happened to come out of a session with a case manager and walk into the church across the road, into a mid week service that I’d passed by for years and never felt tempted to join. I still do not know why I walked in that day. But what I do know, is that it was one of the turning points in my life that I can definitely identify, even though nothing earth shattering happened that day. What was important was the people I met there.

I was greeted and welcomed by a lovely lady and a just as lovely girl closer to my age who became dear friends. They made me feel worthy of being there, and it did feel like I’d joined their ‘family’. I came to look forward to my wednesdays spent with the kindest people I know, that church group, and started spending more and more time with them – they did become my own family for a while. They accepted me, no questions asked. Totally unconditionally. There was no sense of  ”When you have gotten better, gained weight, fixed up your problems, then we will accept you.” It was NOW. Despite all, despite the fact that I was an emaciated, bingeing, anxious, shy MESS – they loved me despite that. They loved me for ME. No matter where I was in my journey, they would meet me there and walk by my side during anything and everything it took to get through it all.

This was probably the most important thing of all for me, certainly at this stage of my life, but probably in my whole life. Who of us does not need to know they are okay? I struggled for a long time to understand how they could so easily like me, even love me as they came to. I could love them, because they were such lovely people. I came to be able to trust in God, that He existed, because I could see every quality that describes God in these people – shining from their eyes, their actions, their words, their hearts. They lived their faiths – and passed it on to me in a very real way I could no longer ignore or doubt.

Being unconditionally loved and accepted meant that I began to realise that there must be something in me, horrible little Fiona – that was loveable and acceptable. It was a huge enlightening for me. I have grown up always feeling completely inferior to the rest of the whole world – and had that pretty much beaten into me as a child – that I was not good enough, that I was even quite disgusting. So for the first time, I decided that it was time to give this girl a chance, to stop just hating for the sake of hating, and get to know her – get to know myself – really and truly. And I also came to realise how little I knew myself. I was a stranger to myself. No wonder I had been trying to kill myself for all these years – being trapped in a stranger’s hated body, what else would someone do?

And so things began to change. My hatred of myself and my self destruction started to lessen. I still found myself overwhelmed with self loathing, but I was kinder – I started seeing a Christian counsellor and learnt how to refute the lies that flew at me thick and fast with simple truths, and to believe those simple truths more and more. I learnt to arm myself with the truth -

“ Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. (11) Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. (12) For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. (13) Wherefore take unto you the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. (14) Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness; (15) And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace; (16) Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. (17) And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God: (18) Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints;”Ephesians 6: 10-18 NIV

And I learnt that God loved me – every hair of my head, He knew and loved me – despite my sins – and He had never turned from me – indeed He had found a way to reach me despite ME turning from Him. How arrogant was I, to hate someone who HE loved?

Slowly my behaviours started to lessen in their rigidity and I began to have the courage to change in tiny ways. I began eating tiny bits with my friends at the meal we all shared at Church (before this I had just sat with them). I graduated to taking frozen dinners to my counselling sessions, heating them in the microwave there, and eating them before my sessions. I started to trust people more, and learnt about having stronger boundaries – a really useful tool to discourage all those horrible jerks who seem to prey on the vulnerable. (My counsellor called my new attitude my ‘F*ck Off Body Language haha). I spent less time hiding in my home, and more time going to coffee and church and outings.  I started making more friends outside of the church too. One thing always led to another in a very natural way.  I blossomed.

None of this was enough to save me – I had several more hospital admissions and was the sickest I had been – several admissions involved receiving TPN to save my life. But the seed had been planted, and under the surface, things were growing. In hospital, I was more open to talking with the staff, and had some amazing discussions with nurses that I’d previously not gotten on with, even feared, when they discovered I was Christian. For the first time I wanted to live. I was also prepared to reach out and accept the help. I didn’t close my mind off to it and scream and fight them, I tried my best to accept it and do what I needed to do – to cooperate – and that was hard, because the ED in me still fought like the demon I likened it to. I did not feel in control of myself when I turned into a ‘girl from exorcist’ like creature, hissing and screaming and throwing things, worse a lot of the time as it was cornered. Because I was actively fighting it more than I ever had. I was no longer content to just lie there and let it win.

Out of hospital, I was more honest with my treatment team, and I talked more with them. I engaged more in therapy. Learnt more about how to change my mindset, learnt mindfulness techniques, and started to be able to have my own brand of acceptance – accepting that I hurt, that I hated my body, that horrible things had been done to me, and so much more. Accepting all this – and then moving on. Not letting it hold me frozen like it did before. Feeling the hurt and shame and grief and fear – but not letting it kill me any more.

The hardest thing to accept was that my family hated me. The basic thing most of us human beings crave is to be loved and accepted and you would think that your own family who have known you from birth would be the most likely people to love you – but admitting to myself that they were not capable of loving me, and had never even really bothered to get to know me in all the years I lived with them – was an important step for me. I had to stop trying to foster a relationship with them, in particular my mother, and so stop putting myself constantly in harm’s way to get hurt again and again by them. I did more than this – I walked away. Cut them off totally – No Contact, as it’s called in many circles of survivors of narcissistic and sociopathic abusers.

I finally reached a point where I had enough belief that there was a lot worth living for to ask my treatment team to help me gain weight. I’m sure this was a complete shock to them – as before this, I had spent years fighting their attempts to force weight on me and losing it almost as soon as discharged, meaning they had to go through the forcing process all over again. (I racked up more than 150 hospital admissions in nearly 15 years, mostly for weight gain or  medical admissions due to being so sick from the anorexia and bulimia). Not only did I this time ask for the weight gain, I asked to go further. They had for years had a discharge weight for me set at BMI 13.9-14, and I was asking them to go a whole 5 kg above that to BMI 15. Still nowhere near enough, but for me that was a huge fear that I was willingly facing. At first they did not believe me – and refused. But I convinced them, and it happened. It was NOT easy. I had to ‘eat’ the weight on and for years I’d put it on through nasogastric and/or TPN – so it was awful. My body was in very poor health and it seemed like everything that could go wrong, went wrong. I felt constantly humiliated there in the hospital, and had to face up to that and keep on despite knowing that being ‘voluntary’ this time around I could leave any time I wanted to. I pushed on. It took two admissions, but I did it, and I’ve maintained that weight gain ever since. The first time in years that I didn’t immediately drop a huge amount in the first week of being home.

I still have a long way to go. I have much  more weight I need to put on. I still struggle with both restricting and bingeing and purging. I still have a tendency to over exercise despite the pain my body gives me. I’m slowly changing and making small gains in these behaviours over time. I’ve also had more positive changes in my life in recent times than in years and years altogether. I’ve moved to a lovely new place. I have a garden, and actively garden it. My cat Shalimar is happier, because I’m not as sick and I play with her more. I go out with friends more, now, to restaurants, for coffee, to the beach, the pool, other outings. I have done an art workshop and am about to start another one that goes a few months ending in an exhibition. I’ve completed a course of hydrotherapy and am halfway through the back pain group course. I’ve been doing well at physiotherapy and have much better posture, less pain, more strength, and am soon to start ballet again after never believing it could be possible again.  I’ve faced my fear of transport, public places, and now I go out all the time on my own. I’ve put strategies in place that have helped me stay shoplifting free for this entire period in 2012 so far.  And I’ve been working with an agency and am close to having my first paid job, as a library assistant. How cool is that!

I also have faith that there is much more to come, and that despite struggling constantly with bouts of depression, fatigue and pain, and the CPTSD, I’m learning to live despite that – and realising that life can be quite liveable for me, despite everything. It’s worth it, and I’m finally, slowly, coming to believe that I’m worth it, too.

Have you had any turning points in your life? How did they help or hinder you? 

 

(image credit)

Honesty, Uncensored.

When I first started blogging, it was really for me, so I could have a place to vent how I really feel. What is really going on in my thoughts, especially if they were negative thoughts. I spend my days putting on that happy face and assuring people I’m ‘fine’. There ARE people in my life I can be honest with – but sometimes I feel even they must get sick of me when I’m whining constantly and never happy with my lot.

Not that I am never happy – I have so many moments of what I think is happiness – because I’m not sure what happiness IS. My moments are those in which I’m just overwhelmed with gratitude, overcome with the.. amazingness that this world and life can be. When I’m just there, in the moment, with the sun shining and the breeze blowing with trees and green all round, and my cat is happily sunning herself by my side… times like that, I think I know happiness.

Sadly the depression has been a big time downer lately. Sometimes, no matter how good things are, you are so bogged down with the depression that it is like being stuck under a thick blanket. Or on the other side of some invisible force field that cuts you off from joining in. You can see it but you can’t be part of it. You can make a smile or a fake laugh to emulate what others are doing in reaction to whatever situation you are in, but inside you are withered and dead, nothing. Just tired, oh so tired.

I don’t know if the fatigue I’m feeling is a result of the depression, the long term malnutrition and still being under-nourished, or both. It’s the most debilitating thing. Most days I feel like a very, very old woman, I creak, I groan, I moan, I struggle to get out of bed and up from chairs, I walk slowly, hunched over.

At the moment, I just want to sleep. I slept most of Sunday and Monday away. Sleeping for me, is also a form of avoidance. When I’m out to it, I don’t have to face the fact that my life is scary and hard to live. I’ve worked hard to put things into my life, I still feel so behind in terms of doing things. And yet I have felt positive for the first time that I can actually catch up to some degree – I’m on my way to working, finally. I’m on my way to dancing again. I’m about to start another art workshop. I’m getting out and doing more things for enjoyment with friends. Trying so hard.

But there is so much fear. What if I am never free from the eating disorder or the depression? What if I’m this tired and this depressed for the rest of my life? I know that it’s not that ‘bad’ a thing to live with, but when the fatigue and the depression have hold of me, life just isn’t worth living – it’s a torment. It’s a toss up whether the eating disorder or the fatigue/depression are worse. Put them together, and I just don’t have a chance.

And the eating disorder – I often doubt I can beat it. I KNOW it’s possible, and I KNOW I have come a long way – but I also know how easy it is to undo all that hard work and progress in the blink of an eye. Every minute of every day, ED is in my head, picking at me. Yelling and screaming at me. Cajouling and pressuring me. I spend the day in thrall to it – not a happy thrall, but a fearful, overwhelmed thrall. It makes me expand as I walk, every person who happens to walk past me is so tiny and I’m this huge montrosity of a creature, towering over them, my oversized limbs taking up all the space so they have to shrink to pass me. It is a horrible feeling. I am surprised when I get home to find NO chafing rash and that my clothes come off easily, because as I walk, I feel my thighs rubbing together, I feel my arms rubbing my torso, and I feel wobbles as all my bits just… globble along, like globs of fat in shoes. I’m exploding out of my clothes like Violet in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory after she eats the forbidden gum and blows up like a  massive blueberry. But it’s all in my mind.

Also in my mind is the constant chant “You need to lose weight. You are SO huge now. TOO huge. ” I find myself looking down at my jeans, the jeans that used to fall off me without a belt, that used to be baggy around my legs but now are tight, skin tight – and it says “You need to lose 20 kilograms!! You are SO much bigger than you used to be. That 20 kilos needs to come off right now!” and I am defeated – because there is NO way I can do that – and NO way that I should do that, if I want to live.

And therein lies the question. DO I want to live?

Most of the time, I say, of course I want to live. Life hasn’t been amazing, yet, it’s been hard and harsh. But I haven’t experienced life without the ED, without the depression, without the struggle. Safe, with nobody hurting me. Financially okay from having a job. Feeling fulfilled from being able to actually contribute. I’ve never experienced that – so I can’t just give up on life as not worth living yet, can I, because I don’t know that it can’t be, in the future. I realise that it does take time to get from here to there.

What scares me is that I will never be able to enjoy life no matter how many of those things are in place for me. I’m scared that the depression will be a lifelong thing that overshadows it all and makes me a miserable person despite everything. I’m scared that I’ll screw up somehow and even though I’m working hard, these things will fall through. Nobody will want to give me a job. I’ll be awful at ballet. I’ll never paint well again. Etc. And that will happen if I give into the ED and lose weight – I will lose the lot. This is why I’m struggling so hard to NOT give in. Because on the one hand – I can’t cope with this weight, can’t cope with living in this fatsuit. On the other, it’s literally life and death. My body can’t cope medically with another relapse, and I can’t cope with seeing my tenaciously established budding dreams smashed down again. It’s not worth it.

Most of all, I’m just so tired. So very, very tired. Weary, exhausted, utterly spent. Life has never not been a struggle, never not been painful, hard, frightening… and I’ve given all I have. I have never given up, no matter how difficult things were. Never. But I’m only human, and I don’t have an endless fountain of strength here. I feel like I ran out a long time ago and have been dragging myself through life on an empty tank. Something needs to change fast, because I can’t keep endlessly fighting for that much longer.

So that is honestly how I feel – without censoring. Writing all this doesn’t mean that I’m going to go through with giving up or giving in to the eating disorder – quite the opposite. It means I’m not holding in how I really feel and instead writing happy, airy-fairy lies about how amazing and oh-so-awesome my life is now compared to ‘back then’. Because it is a lot better in many ways, but in many other ways, it’s a lot harder. I can’t escape from my feelings or fears the way I used to, and I didn’t have to worry about being a failure or my future before, because I didn’t have a future and I was already a failure.

It just helps to get this out, a bit like letting out a breath you have been holding for far too long. I needed some fresh air.

Thank you for reading.

Awesome lolcats courtesy of I can haz cheezeburger

Happy Easter – It’s Better To Light A Candle Than Curse The Darkness.

Happy Easter my blogging friends! I hope you are having a special Easter week, spending time with loved ones, spending precious you-time doing you-things.. just feeling peaceful and happy as possible.

Public holidays are excruciating for me usually. They are minefields of triggers, memories.. I cannot go through the lead up to and the actual holidays of Easter or Christmas without feelings of nostalgia cloaked with regret, fear, sadness.. and MISSING OUT. Do any of you feel that MISSING OUT feeling? Like I’m left out, stuck outside, peering in windows? I do.

But this Easter I’m not missing out! To start it off, the Easter Bunny came to me when I was out – I came home to find this outside my door! One of my case managers had thought of me, such a lovely thing to do.

My garden was starting to falter - the earth was too dry and lacking in nutrients. Now it's going to BLOOM. The flowers are Sweet Peas!

This Easter has been the best in memory so far, just from yesterday and today. I jumped on a train and bus for a couple of hours yesterday with my friend M, and we went to the beach!!

I even actually went swimming in the surf! It was exhilarating - and exhausting.

We had a lunch of sushi at a nearby sushi train-style store. I can never stop watching those trains go round and round. I’m glad I’ve never been to one by myself – there is so much temptation to just eat and eat and eat – graze all day. I match my friend bite for bite – we select a plate and halve what is on it, and stop before we are full. I love sushi because the flavours really pop in your mouth, and it encourages me to eat very slowly and savour each mouthful – the way we should eat. I love how pretty sushi is, especially fish roe. It always makes me think of tiny little coloured beads that you make friendship bracelets from and I love the little bursts of flavour in your mouth.

Fish roe is so very pretty.

We stacked up the plates! And yes, I was thinking of Nicole, though I’m aware that she would have had brown rice. I think it’s quite rare to find brown rice sushi here.. I’ve never seen it myself. I would love it. I love brown rice, it’s nutty, there is something to chew – and yes, white rice is scarier for me.

Today, it was such a lovely day. I wanted badly to go swimming again – and I asked M to meet me at the pool – something I couldn’t do a few short weeks ago. We spent a lovely couple of hours there – and I’m totally exhausted now, but happy. Very happy.

I'm also ready to nosh down in a very traditional way.. one question - ears first or tail?

Easter for me, is not just about Christ rising from the dead, after dying for our sins on the cross. It means HOPE. It means RENEWAL. And that’s deeply personal and encouraging for me. I have been going through my own times of re-finding hope and being renewed over just the last few years, and every single day I’m thankful. Every single day.

I appreciate my life so very much. Today for example, I was very aware of the water’s contact with my arms and legs as I swam, of the coldness of it, and it’s resistance. Of floating and sinking. I felt the warmth of the sun on my back as we lay on towels. I felt the grass underfoot, bouncy and springy.  The breeze and the freshness of it. The chlorine tang to it from the water.  And I loved walking home from the station last night – it was dark and I could see the stars. The moon is nearly full. I passed suburban family homes. I could hear crickets chirping.

I feel at home. Where I’m meant to be right now. I feel at peace in the present. if only the past will leave me alone – but right now is lovely, and that makes it easier to bear.

Focussing on what is positive and wonderful – has been my lifesaver. One of my lifesavers, anyway.

I hope you have a wonderful easter – all of you – whatever your beliefs may be, and that you can see some renewal and hope in your own lives too. 

Ears or tail first?