NEARLY

Today I had a desperate, desperate urge to restrict. It was really important to me. I nearly did. I ate breakfast. Then I ate nothing all day. At the end of the day I had a moment of sanity and ate a late dinner. Meat and vegetables. Nutritious foods.

I nearly starved myself today. I didn’t. I wanted to. It doesn’t feel like a victory – it feels like failure.

I do know restricting ultimately leads to bingeing. But there’s so much fear in me – and eating disordered behaviours feel safe and familiar and comforting. It’s exhausting trying to overcome fear day in and day out. It’s not like being calm all the time and then fearfully trying to traverse a rope bridge. It’s like the rope bridge is the calm place and the whole of the rest of life is the fearful zone. Incessant.

In the past when I restricted it would go for days. Occasionally weeks. Today it was just a matter of hours. Just over 12 hours. Less than the amount of time kids do the 40 hour famine. Going hungry for 12 hours is no big deal. People do it all the time. Only difference here is that it was eating disordered thoughts that got me there. I felt like a failure for wanting to starve. I felt like a failure for giving in.

I nearly starved myself today. I didn’t.

I was reminded today it is important to not dwell on the struggle, but rather dwell on the outcome. The struggle is real. Don’t doubt me. It’s real. The outcome is imaginary. But I am doggedly determined to keep imagining it until the outcome becomes real. Until I am free from disordered eating. I have written before about the imagined world and how that would look and feel.

I nearly starved myself today. I didn’t.

In my future freedom, I don’t starve. Ever. I don’t feel guilty for starving. I don’t feel guilty for eating. I just eat because I need to and I want to and there is no angst of fear involved. It’s just food – and I eat it.

I nearly starved myself today. I didn’t.

I am making progress. I am blossoming. I am transforming into a butterfly. I am finding freedom.

I nearly starved myself today. I didn’t.

A HAPPY MEMORY [OR A FEW]

As I feel myself sliding, down, down, down again, I want to make a really concerted effort to focus on ups – not downs.

I went for a walk after gym this evening, and for the first 20 minutes, I found myself falling into heavy, dark, unproductive thoughts. Then I remembered I’m supposed to be retraining my brain to think of a positive future. So I tried remembering happy times in my life – peaceful, simple times, with family and friends.

A month or two back I went on a couple of camping trips with a good friend.

It was quiet and peaceful, and there was beautiful companionship and the revitalising energy of being out in the bush, inhaling tantalisingly fresh air, seeing beautiful native flora and fauna, and listening to the huge surf crashing with almighty power against black cliffs. We ate great food, drank baileys, went walking late at night, and lay down on the jetty to look at the stars. We talked and walked a lot and it was really lovely. I felt peaceful. I felt alive. I was happy.

At the crack of dawn every morning, my devoted husband brings me a cup of tea and breakfast in bed, then kisses me goodbye before he goes to work.

I get to start the day feeling relaxed, cared for and loved. I get to lounge in bed for an hour or so before work, doing recovery work, catching up on emails and Facebook, reading, watching the morning news, all while enjoying my breakfast. Once my feet hit the floor, I’m running for the day, but that one hour in the morning is therapeutic and recuperative. It’s my time and it’s peaceful. I treasure it every day.

Every year since 1988, I have gone away for a girls’ weekend with my three closest friends.

That’s 29 years with a group of wonderful women who are more akin to sisters than friends. We’ve had so many fantastic trips away together – usually filled with shopping, eating and drinking. There was one memorable night a decade or more back. We were staying in Adelaide at the fire station hotel and went out for a meal then dropped into a local pub for a drink. I don’t remember the meal. I don’t really remember the pub. I’m sure it wasn’t fancy though. We were a group of four middle aged women having a girls’ night out. We decided to play pool – even though none of us had the first idea what to do. Four lovely young gentlemen decided to come and offer us some advice and ended up spending an hour playing pool with us. There was nothing sleazy about the evening. It was just hilarious. I can’t remember why – but I do remember I laughed so much I literally wet my pants. Thankfully not so dramatically it was a major problem, but it was a night of hysterical laughter and it was cathartically fantastic.

Looking to the future, I hope one day to spend time welcoming all my beautiful boys home, with their partners and kids.

To keep spending time together as a family and watching yet another generation grow and thrive. I can’t wait to hug and snuggle with my grandbabies and to read stories to them and teach them to play the piano. I want to go for walks with them and bake cakes with them and just generally spoil them rotten. I want to feel their little arms around my neck and be smothered in little toddler kisses and hand them back to their parents when the tantrums begin. To feel that unconditional love and to have my heart just swell with pride and joy.

And lastly, looking into my future, I hope to lead a life of peace and quiet at home, growing old with my husband as we quietly travel together, read together, and revel in the joy of our extended family.

Intermingled with episodes of glee as I spend time with friends on nights out and trips away, or feelings of productivity and purpose as I contribute in the workplace.

My dreams of the future don’t involve obsessions with weight or what to eat.

My dreams of the future don’t revolve around food – they revolve around people. I am blessed with amazing people in my life and I want that to be my future focus – not the food. One day… One day I’ll have a happy memory and the food won’t be in at all. I will have forgotten about the food…

MIGHTY IRONY

Oh, the irony… I’m in the midst of a 30-day challenge to write a post every day representing positivity and/or freedom from disordered eating. I know – I’ve been wavering a little bit. But I’m trying to be mostly positive! I was sitting here wondering what to write tonight – it has to start with the letter M. And then what do you know?! An email popped into my inbox from The Mighty, and it’s their new challenge for June – My Mighty Month #boringselfcare challenge…

I wrote a post a little while back about boring self-care things I need to do. Boring self-care is much more likely to slip by and not be done. Exciting self-care seems to have a bit of an incentive for doing it… There’s not much exciting about making sure I take constipation medication every day. But it’s pretty jolly important.

I don’t know if I would go to the effort of printing out a chart and tracking self-care activities every day. But I do know this is an area that needs a lot of work for me. My two main recovery goals at the moment are to indulge in self-care activities every day, and focus on freedom “whys” – look to the future and keep picturing what it might look like.

I went to a book club this evening. I’ve never been to book club before – I had no idea what to expect. Or who to expect. I kind of enjoyed it though. As it was the first week of a new group, we all just took along a few of our favourite books and told everyone why we loved them. I had to leave early, but everyone will choose a book that we’ll read this month (hopefully they’ll let me know what it is!) and then next month we’ll chat about it.

Pretty simple really.

Anyway – I’m saying all this because I think reading will become both a really important self-care activity (I pretty much stopped reading several years ago) and an important part of my freedom “why”. I adore getting lost in a book. It’s so therapeutic. And having time and energy and desire to read heaps feels a really good goal for future me.

So for this week, my daily self-care goals are, do my physio exercises, take my constipation medication, start reading again. Just three goals. I don’t want to make things too complicated.

I need to keep doing these things until they’re so normal and part of my daily routine that it doesn’t feel like “work” – I don’t have to remember. And then when that happens, I’ll work on adding three more things into my life. Perhaps all these little steps will turn around and lead me to recovery.

I had one other recovery epiphany today – I sent the following into my recovery group:

I realised today, I’m going to be dragged kicking and screaming over this recovery “finish line”… And it will be me – dragging myself.

A fair whack of me is mightily determined to do all the work, make all the changes, and relish in all that freedom. And a small, but resilient, determined and really strong little bit of me, is hell-bent on dragging me back to the start line.

It’s kind of exhausting to tell you the truth…😴

Apparently this is some kind of breakthrough – I’m very close to flipping over to the recovery side of the fence. I don’t feel like that… But I’m not in a position to state whether or not that is true. For now – I will have to accept that someone else thinks it is so. In the meantime, I’ll keep working on dragging my weary carcass for as long and as far as I can. Because I ain’t going back to the start line…

OPENING A NEW DOOR

I’ve been doing a writing challenge this week and discovered I love it!! Really, really love it 🙂 Part of my recovery is looking to the future and finding purpose. Seeing what freedom looks like means seeing a future-focused on interesting things – not mental health issues and what I am (or am not) eating. And the more writing I do, the more I picture writing as integral to my recovery, and part of my freedom and future.

Tomorrow is the last day of the challenge and we will have the opportunity to apply for a scholarship to an eight-week intensive writing course. I desperately want to do this course! It is prohibitively expensive, so I need that scholarship. An optional extra in today’s challenge was to do preparatory work for the application and I have just finished it. I found it eye-opening. I am starting to feel exploring this writing will lead me through a new door. I closed the music door, and have yet to find another one. I have a good feeling about this door.

Here are a few snippets of things I worked out while pondering why I want to write…

DREAM WRITING [a timed, non-stop writing session]

Writing is my way of communicating with the world.

I might stand vulnerable and silent, frozen to the spot in person, with not a single intelligent word flowing through my head, but when pen hits paper or fingers hit the keyboard, my innards come out. I feel the words. They flow from me.

I have so much emotion that sat dormant and silent for half a century. So many words. So many thoughts. I create vivid tragic events and convince myself they’re going to happen. I create vivid fantastic events and convince myself they’re going to happen. In the real world – the here and now – there are tales and stories, ideas and emotions, I need to put into words, and my most eloquent place is the written word.

I want to make people laugh and cry and live. I want people to understand. It has taken me a long time to realise so few people understand how it feels to walk in another’s shoes – they need it spelled out in small words. I want to write those small words and help them to feel someone else’s journey. Someone else’s choices. Their pain. Love. Loss. I want people to understand each other. I want to feel understood.

I have been through mental health hell in recent years and it taught me so much. This writing challenge has come at the tail end of my recovery course and there are so many parallels. Find the why for my freedom/writing. We must all accept and acknowledge emotions to be whole. These are the same things I am hearing from two different places. Two different worlds. But the same message. Is that not telling me something? I feel writing my story will lead me to recovery. And recovery will lead me to writing. They are becoming intertwined.

REASONS I WANT TO WRITE

• To let my insides out
• To help me understand me
• To help others understand me
• To help others understand others
• I love it
• I feel useful, purposeful, alive
• I can express myself with the written word in a way I can’t with the spoken word
• I dream of writing “author” on my tax return form under “employment”
• I feel good when I write
• It has become the most valuable tool in my recovery

WHAT DOES WRITING…

look like? Peace. Stillness. Like a swan gliding over a still lake first thing in the morning, with its little webbed feet paddling below the surface as if life depended on it.

sound like? Silence. Like watching a television show with the sound turned off. Every nuance and every emotion showing on the faces. The story vividly depicted without need for the spoken word.

smell like? Cinnamon. Freshly ground cinnamon. Do you have a Thermomix? If you do, you should grind cinnamon. It smells divine. It smells like home.

taste like? Salted caramel. A smooth, delicate blend of salty and sweet and creamy. It’s delicious. It melts in the mouth and the taste lingers for a tantalisingly delicious amount of time.

feel like? Home. When I write, I’ve come home. I’m in my comfortable pyjamas on a cold winter night, there’s snow outside and I’m snug,  warm and cosy inside. The words flow and I’m alive in that moment. I articulate things I could not articulate before. My consciousness dims and my unfiltered subconscious flows. It tells the story of who I am, who I’ve been, who I want to be. It shows the story of who I’ve seen, where I’ve been, and how they made me feel. Writing is home.

WHERE IS IT LOCATED IN THE BODY?

My writing is deep in my gut. It is the same place I feel the rhythm in music. Place your hand across your belly, your palm centred over your belly button. My writing is buried deep beneath your pinky. That’s where it sits. Anxiety is felt high in my chest, pressing into my throat. Depression is felt deep in my heart, buried behind my rib cage. But writing – writing is my emotional well, and it is found in my belly.

DOWNS & UPS

Some days I’m up. Some days I’m down. I had a down day today.

I have a lot of pain at the moment – I may even have to start admitting my pain is chronic. I’m hesitant to accept that label though – it feels like giving up. But when I’m in pain all the time, I feel tired all the time. And when I’m tired all the time, I have declines with mental health stuff. And of course if you know the first thing about me, you’ll know most of my mental health stuff revolves around eating issues. Man – I wish I could stop associating the words “mental health” and “eating issues” with myself… I feel like my tombstone will be engraved with the words, 

Here lies Simone. She had lots of mental health issues – mostly eating disorder stuff. That’s all there was to her really…

I hope that’s not true. I hope I am many, many other things – not just a big sad ball of eating disorder shit. Because that’s really very, very boring. I’m sick to death of it.

Anyway – just to labour the point a little longer… I did very badly today. It was a down day. I’d taken a few pain killers yesterday to deal with my neck so woke up groggy this morning. Felt exhausted and in pain, tried to white knuckle my way through the day but ended up eating a fair whack of food and throwing a fair whack of it up.

On the up side of things, I know tomorrow is a new day, and with all the recovery work I’ve been doing of late, I can start afresh and today’s fails do not mean my recovery is a failure or impossible. I don’t need to negate all the positives I’ve had so far. It is just one day.

So that’s my downer…

My upper – so to speak – is that I’m doing more writing.

I’m loving (loving, loving, loving!) this seven day writing challenge, and I’m feeling inspired to write heaps more. I just wish there were more hours in the day… I have several books in my head I’d like to get out and when some of the dust settles (I can only do so many challenges and courses and recovery activities at once) I would really like to get stuck into the writing side of things.

I could write a whole series of hilarious novels based on the adventures of the geriatrically insane – the people I meet every time I visit grandma in the dementia ward at the nursing home…

Yesterday I was more than a little chuffed to win one of the daily prizes in the writing challenge. A lot more than a little chuffed 😀 There is a pack of writing prompt cards winging it’s way to me in the post as we speak! I rarely win stuff, so this is very exciting!

There is a photo taken of me when I was highly, highly suicidal. I was sitting at the beach making concrete plans. So you could say I was a little down when I took that photo. I looked so happy and cheerful. My headspace is much safer now.

However, I also look at that photo with enormous regret, because I was way thinner. Like 10kg thinner. And while I do want recovery, I also want to be 10kg thinner. I liked it. I felt better thinner. I do recall that at the time, I wasn’t “thin enough”. I would cheerfully have lost another 10kg… But I felt like I was at an acceptable weight then. I was quietly chuffed that I’d managed to get to that weight for the first time ever. And I secretly (well given that I’m stating this in a public blog, it’s not much of a secret), want to be that weight again.

I am getting closer and closer to believing that recovering from food obsession – bingeing, restricting, purging – will lead me to a stable weight. And that if I can cease to obsess about weight, that will give me the strongest chance of arriving at the weight I actually want to be at – or at least a weight that my body is meant to be at. But I’m not yet a hundred per cent at the point of believing that. Every time I throw up, I still feel successful… I’ve freed myself from the burden of food.

I must sound completely insane to anyone without an eating disorder – which is the vast majority of the population…

I have meandered and wandered and digressed in my writing tonight…

I have had a down day today. A few in a row in fact. Tomorrow will be an up day. I will make it so.

ESCAPING GRIEF

There is no escaping grief.

Each and every one of us experiences loss and it is always painful – just ask a toddler throwing the king of all tantrums at the supermarket while you steadfastly refuse to buy the matchbox car he desperately must have.

Grief is easily recognised when we lose someone. We expect the bereaved to be upset, struggle to function, and need support. Sometimes we put a timeline on grief and think they should “get over it” in six months, or a year, or whatever arbitrary amount of time seems reasonable. But grief occurs in many situations, and the way individuals respond is highly personal and completely unique. And there is no timeline.

We experience loss in the breakdown of a relationship, financial devastation, health issues, career failures, shattered dreams, or a loved one’s death. The seven stages of grief are well known and well documented, and it is not for me to discuss them here.

I remember once finding the rings of grief and thinking how perfectly it demonstrated the way to approach a grieving person – just figure out which ring you’re in…

We all know that person who makes every situation about themselves – you tell them about your mental health struggles and they tell you all about the time they were so sad they ate a whole bucket of ice cream. [I should carry business cards with this handy picture on it to distribute in emergencies – so everyone knows which circle they’re in…]

There’s no escaping grief, we just have to accept it.

If someone you know is going through a worse (in your opinion) situation, it does not invalidate your own loss. All pain is dealt with – the choice we have is whether or not it is dealt with productively.

When grieving, perhaps you’ll go through all seven stages – perhaps you won’t. Perhaps you’ll follow a timeline that suits others – perhaps you won’t. It’s okay – you’re doing the best you can. Don’t pretend it’s all better if it’s not. If you’re in the centre of the circle – because you’ve lost a child, been diagnosed with cancer, your house burned to the ground, or your career is shattered – it’s important to know who is in your inner circle. They are your lifeline and you must trust them. If you can’t trust them, put them in another circle.

Perspective can be lost in grief. Sometimes it’s easy to think nothing will ever be okay. That we will never again notice the sand beneath our toes, the taste of salty hot chips, or the excitement of planning for a holiday. That is when we need our inner circle – people to lean on, cry with, and share our darkest thoughts. Everyone in your inner circle has someone in the next ring to debrief with. That is how it works.

Comfort in, pain out.

Mental illness is the same. It is illness after all. One of the obstacles we can face is we sit in the centre of our circle and push everyone to the outside – leaving the nearest rings barren. Leaving ourselves alone, dark and vulnerable.
There is a lot of grief in mental illness – in fact, the seven stages are as valid here as anywhere else…

1. Shock or disbelief it could happen
2. Denial there is a problem at all
3. Anger at feeling so weak
4. Bargaining and hoping you talk yourself out of it
5. Guilt for the stress and worry caused to those around you
6. Depression – goes without saying
7. Acceptance and hope when treatments and/or recovery start appearing

At the start of last year, I was firmly entrenched in the first stage – disbelief I could have a nervous breakdown. I felt weak and deeply flawed for not coping. Throughout the past 18 months I have worked my way through almost all the stages and finally – finally – I am moving from stage 6 to 7.

I am still on anti-depressant medication, and will no doubt be on it for the rest of the year. But in general, the symptoms are well managed and I don’t feel particularly depressed most of the time. I am getting really close to accepting I will find freedom and recovery and I have moments of hope. Those moments are happening on an almost daily basis.

So grief? There is so much of it – for some people a lot more than others and that’s just not fair. But it happens anyway, and it is so hard to fathom that life can ever go on. I have seen and watched people survive and thrive after the most extraordinary and distressing of circumstances.

We humans are unbelievably resilient.

The next time you find yourself in the centremost circle of the rings of grief, hold on tight to your inner circle. Let grief flow from you and around you for as long as you need. You do not need to stand alone or recover on anyone else’s timeline. The next time you find yourself in one of the other rings, work out which one it is, and be careful how you debrief your own woes – comfort in, stress out. Simple formula.

There is no escaping being thrust into the horrid pit of grief – it can happen in a heartbeat or slowly creep up on you over time. Work out your circle. Leaning on people for support is a means of self-care. And self-care is the cornerstone of recovery from anything. It’s okay to grieve. You’re okay. Be kind and take care.