EAT ME!

The food in my fridge sings to me. And I mean it really sings. I suspect this is another one of those situations only people with an eating disorder genuinely understand.

I’ve talked about The Voices before. Maybe you think I’m completely mad. Or schizophrenic. I’m neither of those things. I just have an eating disorder.

All day long I think about food – what am I going to eat, should I eat it, can I grab that and hide away with it, can I sneak a few of those and nobody will notice, how many calories are in that, can I skip a day of eating, can I fit any more in, if I eat fast enough can I throw it up, how many days can I go without food, will anyone notice if I have another one, what shall I eat when I go home, is there any cheesecake left, how long since I last ate, can I eat yet? Yada, yada, yada. Incessant. It never stops. Perhaps you think I’m joking? Over exaggerating? I’m not. That goes on in my head, all… the… time.

But the singing thing?

If I manage to distract myself long enough to do something else for a short period of time, as soon as I glance up, or walk past the kitchen on the way to the bathroom, or hear someone open the fridge, or I smell something cooking, or a million other scenarios, the gentle siren song of the food in my fridge starts up.

It’s a delicate melody, with a very soft pulse – no time signature, no regularity. Just gentle melodic fluctuations and close harmonies slithering their way into my soul. It starts quietly, inaudibly, but before I know it, I’m hypnotised by the call of the cheese, and the toast, the yoghurt and the chocolate. The calls get louder and more incessant, stronger and more powerful, until I can no longer resist. I’m drawn to the fridge, the door opens and the food is desperately chanting, Eat me! Eat me!

But today… Today I started to resist that song. Not a lot… Just a teency bit. I started to turn the volume down. I started to hear some of the discord in the harmonies. I started to resist. I could hear a different song. A song with a comforting, regular pulse. A song with unfamiliar, predictable melodies. Easy to remember, easy to understand. Simple harmonies accompanying the heartbeat pulse and the gentle melody. A song of hope. A song of courage. A song of freedom.

The song of recovery.

I can’t yet sing the song from memory – it’s not even the first melody that comes to mind to tell you the truth. I still have the siren song of the begging food running through my head like a colony of earworms. But I’ve heard a new melody, and I’m going to be seeking it out.

I am on the road to recovery. I will learn the new melodies. I will rise up, every time I fall to the incessant call of Eat me! Eat me! I can do this. I have to believe it.

VANQUISHING THE VOICES

I’m trying to picture a life free from disordered eating. What would it look like? How would I feel? What would be different? The voice of doubt always wants to knock me down, but I’m working hard to vanquish that voice, and bring forth positive messages to empower recovery.
In this picture, my external life would be largely unchanged – I will (hopefully!) be married to the same man, have the same children, friends, family and colleagues, work at the same job, live in the same house and have a beautiful, brown Burmese cat. But a lot should be different as well. I know some things will improve and some will not, but my goal is for the scales to be heavily balanced in favour of ups rather than downs.
I am not in a perfect place, barely even a good place – but I am in a better place. Part of my recovery process is looking forward, looking for the pluses – the current and future gains. Here’s a little list of real-world recovery bonuses:
1. Energy
If you’ve never lived it, you have NO idea how exhausting an eating disorder is. Seriously – it takes up an astonishing amount of mental space. I could have done two PhD’s with all the time spent cogitating upon how to plan a binge or avoid eating. Physically it’s extremely demanding – vomiting, restricting and bingeing are exhausting, blood sugar fluctuations, malnutrition and headaches are exhausting. It’s all exhausting.
While I am still exhausted, I have made progress: I’m on a multivitamin until my dietary intake is consistently adequate, I haven’t restricted for months, I’m purging 3-4 times a week instead of 6-8 times a day, I’m binging 3-4 times a week instead of 2-3 times a day. This is not perfect – but it’s a heck of a lot better than it was!
2. Health
There is nothing healthy about an eating disorder. Being “less fat” might seem like a health goal, but it’s not. A health goal is good health – not changing a number on a scale. When I restrict, my health deteriorates quickly – energy levels crash, blood sugars go wild, immune system is compromised. When I binge and purge I have a sore throat, sore stomach and reflux. Purging and restricting can both strain the heart – my resting heart rate hasn’t been right for months. I have issues with hair loss and brittle nails. Not to mention metabolism – my poor old body never knows if it’s getting nutrients, and if it does, will it keep them!
Good health is something I can look forward to – it is a little early in the process to have made much progress here yet.
3. Relationships
Poor emotional skills can go hand-in-hand with an ED, which can have a huge impact on relationships. My self-esteem is pretty non-existent, which makes it difficult to relate authentically with other people. Fear of conflict, anger and almost all emotions, brings a level of dishonesty to relationships. I focus on other people’s issues because I don’t want to deal with the impact my behaviours might have. I know people worry – I don’t want them to. The best way to stop that worry, is to recover. I don’t want to talk about my eating disorder issues – I feel vulnerable and ashamed. I feel judged – even when I’m not. I’m judging myself.
Again, healthy relationships with healthy boundaries is something I hope to gain in recovery. I’m not there yet. I am incredibly honest with my struggles – but not at a deep level. I’ve yet to find the courage to talk about this stuff out loud with many people. I am grateful for the tool of writing and blogging, which keeps my loved ones near and far in the loop.
4. Finances
It pains me to admit this, but having an eating disorder costs a fortune. Eating food that is, for the most part, flushed down the toilet. Crazy stupid diets and eventually a lap band surgery – all very pricey. Increased visits to doctors and therapists. Investing time, energy and resources into trying to recover. All of this money would be FAR better spent on shoes. Or a trip to Thailand.
As far as right now, I’m quite possibly at the most expensive part of my disorder, as I’m heavily financially invested in recovery right now – doing an online course, purchasing books, seeing my psychologist etc. But one day in the future, in lieu of books about bulimia, I will have an absolutely fabulous shoe collection.
5. Purpose
We all need purpose in life. All of us. I used to have purpose, as a mum and a musician. I’ve completely dropped my music – been there, done that – and while I’ll always be a mum, the hands-on, daily aspects of mothering are long behind me. Part of the rapid deterioration of my mental health in recent years related to losing my identity. I developed an identity as a person with an eating disorder – which is not great.
My recovery is related to finding purpose in life. Purpose – hope – belief. They are intricately related. I am very happy in my current job – I have no pressing desire to change the world with my career. I recently realised how much I love writing, and I’m working hard on picturing a future that involves a lot of writing . No guidelines or rules, just keep writing. I also look forward to being a Nanna – I adore babies! – but I wouldn’t wish early parenthood on my children, so this is a joy for future years. I look forward to being fully recovered and setting a fabulous example to all my lovely future grandbabies.
Each morning the voice of doubt tries to suck me back into disordered eating, and each morning I try and vanquish that voice with reminders of the things I have to gain. They might seem like simple basic things, but in a world of disordered eating, these simple things would change my life.

END OF AN ERA

See that picture? That’s my toes. Pointing at a blank spot. A blank spot where my scales have sat since we renovated the bathroom about 12 years ago. (Before that they sat somewhere else…)

For as long as I can remember, I have weighed myself first thing every morning – day in day out. Like clockwork. A special, comforting routine. I’d climb out of bed, empty bladder, strip naked, stare at fateful numbers. I talked about this once before…

And for as long as I can remember I have known this is a terrible thing to do. When the numbers go up I panic and make stupid decisions about my eating. When the numbers go down I fear they’ll go back up then I make stupid decisions about my eating. There is no win. There is no time when I look at the numbers and think, Awesome! There are definitely times when I look back and wish I’d appreciated numbers, but I never appreciate them at the time.

They are always a stepping stone to a magical place that doesn’t exist – skinny=happy land…

When I started my recovery course about five weeks ago, I made a commitment to drop from daily to weekly weighing. I couldn’t cope with the thought of getting rid of them at the time. I had only in recent months contemplated the thought of not weighing myself daily. Many tiny baby steps! So I dropped to weighing every 7-10 days.

This morning I weighed in. Fateful number was okay. Not up or down. Still not happy with it – I’m quite a bit heavier than I need to be. But I didn’t feel particularly bad about it. I then jumped online and caught up on all the recovery group chat overnight and noticed a lot of discussion about scales. There was some very tough love tossed around – in a beautiful, gentle, empathetic manner – but it was still no bullshit, tough love. And while I hadn’t been the original poster of the scales question, I knew everything being talked about related to me completely…

• I can’t be dragged over the finish line
• I can’t be forced to use the tools
• Nobody else can do the work for me
• I already know what I need to do
• I know I need to get rid of the fucking scales
• I’ll never feel good about getting rid of them
• Why do I want to weigh myself?
• What do I hope to gain?
• What happens when this eight weeks is over?
• Will this course be something else I tried and failed?

So while I had the strength to do so, I sent my husband a message asking him to hide them away when he got home from work. I could have taken them outside and ceremoniously smashed them to bits, but that seemed very wasteful for rather expensive scales, and also a bit unfair on the rest of the family who do use them from time to time – usually to weigh luggage.

I felt a lot of angst about it all day and weighed myself again at lunchtime – just for old time’s sake. And then when I got home after my appointment this afternoon, the scales were gone. A big empty space where they used to sit. No more weighing…

People have said they are proud of me for doing this.

I don’t feel pride. I just feel angst. How will I know if I’m getting fatter? How will I know if I’m not? What will my new morning routine look like? How will I know what to wear each day? How will I know how much to eat each day?

But I also know, this was a really, really good decision, and it is a decision I will become more comfortable with over time. Change is MEANT to be uncomfortable. I hear that again and again! So this is hugely uncomfortable, and I’ve roped my husband into it and now made a public declaration, so I can’t just unhide them from myself or go buy a new set tomorrow. The longer I go not weighing, the more normal it should become. I guess the answer to the questions above (probably utterly absurd questions in other people’s minds) will become clear over time.

Throwing away the scales is the end of a monumental era for me. But more than that, I think it indicates really powerfully I have found the path I am supposed to embark upon, and I have started moving forward. I have traversed many roads in the past, and none of them led to anywhere near this kind of improvement – for me they were the wrong road. Or perhaps they were just the little back roads that eventually brought me to the highway. But everything I’m doing now, feels like I am heading in the right direction.

I am making progress. I can’t do it all at once, but I can take each little success as it comes. Has my day been flawless? Not even a little bit. Is my eating disorder in remission? Hardly! Is the removal of my scales a huge step in the right direction? Absolutely 🙂

INVOKING THE INNER CHILD

When I was a child I was repressed. Not in an awful way – we weren’t beaten or abused or mistreated in any capacity. But when emotions can’t be expressed, they are repressed. [It wasn’t done intentionally of course – it is just an unfortunate hangover from previous generations.]

A week or so back I had one of those highly emotional moments in my life journey – a moment of deep self-awareness, and a moment of letting go. Letting go of a deeply held belief or feeling is not a conscious choice. It may be something you have always known you must do, but the time has to be right. Then one day, just like holding tight onto a big red balloon, you discover you can open your hand and let that string go, watch that balloon float off into the distance. So I did. [I think I did?! The tricky thing about invisible strings is you can’t always be sure they are gone…]

Many deeply held beliefs about myself come from my mother, and those beliefs had to go – they were intolerably painful and destructive. They may have been intended as a means of protecting me from all sorts of perceived stresses in life, but the intention was misguided and the harm was incalculable. The time was right, so one day, I pictured a powerfully vivid image of my mother in her 40s – a time when I was in my teens and was most damaged by her words – and I thanked her for her efforts but asked her to stop. Her words would impact me no more. I needed to let her go, to let her voice and her fears and her concerns vacate my head. And so she left. I saw her turn around and walk away – wearing her white button up shirt and knee length blue skirt (good grief it was so 1980!) She was slim and beautiful and in the prime of her life. She was healthy and vital and full of hope and love.

And she is gone.

In her place, is a little red-headed girl, full of hope and vitality. A little girl who wanted nothing more than to be loved. Who just wanted to do the right thing. To be good. To be wanted. To be enough. That little girl was full of empathy and kindness. She was also able to read every little thought that crossed your brow, and they were all taken to heart. For more years than I care to count, that little girl was pushed further and further away. Never allowed to be a child. Never allowed to make a mistake. Never allowed to be the full version of herself.

Today though, I want to invoke her right to exist. I want to encourage her to come forth and do the best she can. Sometimes it won’t be enough. Sometimes she’ll get it horribly wrong. That’s okay – that’s how the human spirit works. We try, we fall, we fail, we rise, we do it all again. The inner child is always within us. Always. I believe this with every ounce of my being. No matter how buried or lost or deeply damaged, she is there. And nobody knows better how I should best set out upon the recovery road, than the little girl who was dragged off it in the first place.

There is innocence, joy and hope in young children. We lose that as we get older. Some lose it sooner than others for many different reasons. And the more damaged our inner child, the less hope we have. I want to recover. I really do. I’m tired of being tired. I’m sick of being sad. I’m ready to recover. I want to take that little girl by the hand and say, Let’s go. We can do it. We know what we need to do now. 

Hope. That is what the little girl lost brings. Hope. The cornerstone of recovery. The lamp that lights the way to freedom. Come on little girl – it’s time to set forth.
 

LOOKING FORWARD

Today was a non-linear recovery day. You know – the old cha cha cha – a few steps forward, a few steps back. Recovery is a non-linear process. But that’s okay – I keep telling myself…

I made some really excellent decisions today and made some really excellent progress. Then I made some really crap decisions and slipped back again. Cha cha cha.

But what I have done is focus on two little things – writing and looking to the future. I didn’t do a lot of writing today – I actually did paid work during my paid work hours today. But after work when the normal temptations descended upon me, I quickly sent out a message – while endeavouring to avoid running into a light pole at the same time – and once again, I didn’t need to eat. I actually stopped thinking about food. Briefly! But every brief success is a big improvement on last week.

Then I got caught in a highly emotional and slightly distressing situation and got stuck back into the chocolates and biscuits. C’est la vie… This eating disorder is going to go down kicking and screaming. But it’s going to go down.
Which brings me to the second point – while writing is awesome as a go-to tool in the moment, long term, I need to look forward and get a picture of where I’m heading and why I want to go there.

I don’t have major dreams for the future – I only ever had two major dreams in life, become a mother and making a living as a flautist. I’ve been a mother – three times over for my biological children, and more times than I count for my niece, nephews and students over the years. Mothering has been my purpose in life for as long as I can remember – love, love, loved it. But it too has passed.

My career as a flautist is over.

I’m okay with that – I’m sad and relieved. I’m really melancholy. I loved it but I don’t want to go back. It wasn’t everything I wanted it to be but was so much more than it could have been. There were a lot of really awesome times. I never felt so alive and whole as I did when performing in a show, but it’s history now. I need a new future. I need to look forward and think of something else.

In the past few weeks I have been told from numerous sources I should write. Well – I am writing! Not for money or profit or purpose. Just for fun and just for me. I absolutely love writing though, and find it is a safe place for me to express and explore. Somewhere I can get lost and be creative and feel engaged. Not sure what I would DO with writing in the future… But it is my focus for now. Keep writing here and see what happens.

I have had lots of blog posts published on The Mighty, and BayArt, and there are other sites are publishing one or two of my stories here and there. Not exactly big time – but for now I’ve been very introspective with my writing. Perhaps I’ll venture out and do something more interesting one day.

I have signed up for a seven-day writing challenge which I’m looking forward to. No idea what’s involved. Not entirely sure why I want to do it, but when it comes to writing, the world is my oyster. I don’t feel a need to make a career out of it – which is a blessed relief, as making a career as a writer is even more problematic than making a career as a musician! And I am perfectly happy with the lovely job I do now anyway. But stringing a few words together and emphatically sharing my opinion with people, sounds like a nice fun way to spend some of my future.

So – looking forward, into the land of my future self, I hope to find myself writing regularly about not just mental health issues (I’m getting bored writing about the same old crap all the time…) but about everything interesting in my world. I’m sure there will be other lovely things in my future – like travelling, finishing our house, and meeting my grand-babies – but a purely selfish and cathartic pursuit, will be writing.

My first genuine future goal. I’m looking forward to it.

EASTER EGG EPIPHANIES

Today I ate Easter eggs. I didn’t enjoy them. And it isn’t Easter.

There are bags and bags of leftover solid little eggs at work, and apparently we can help ourselves. I’m not sure my colleagues realise what that actually means to somebody with an eating disorder. The only thing stopping me eating the thousand or so delightful chocolate orbs perched upon the piano, is the mortifying thought of explaining how I ate a thousand chocolates. By myself! I’ve certainly been giving it a red hot try though… The eggs are disappearing at a reasonably rapid pace.

I could ostensibly ask my manager to move them to another location so I wasn’t tempted. They’d be happy to do so, but I’m not entirely convinced that is a great idea. 

I don’t think it’s in my vested interest.

Firstly, it would mean divulging the full of extent of my unhealthy relationship with food (they know I’ve had mental health issues and an eating disorder, but they don’t know the full extent of it). While I have definitely become very open in the past six months, I don’t necessarily open every sentence with, Hi I’m Simone and btw I’m bulimic. Most people are very kind about it, and they want the best for me, but in order to actually understand the depths of it, you have to have lived it. And that is not something I wish upon anybody. So no – I don’t want to ask my boss to move the eggs.

More importantly however, the hundreds of foil-wrapped treats that remain, are just this week’s problem. If I ask someone to hide them, it doesn’t solve next week’s problem. I don’t actually know what next week’s problem will be… But I do know this is neither the first nor the last time I will be confronted with irresistible tidbits for me to hungrily gorge myself upon.

The whole point of recovery is for me to find healthy and manageable ways of dealing with what for most people, is perfectly normal. Everyone else in the office is enjoying the Easter eggs – one or two here and there. I am the only person that waits until nobody is looking, grabs a handful to hide on my desk then quickly scoffs them all before anybody returns.

I downed all my eggs, threw half of them up because they taste pretty hideous after a while and they got stuck with my lap band – after that, I chose to reach out to my recovery group. Clearly I could – and should – have reached out before eating the eggs. But we can’t win all the battles on the first day! I sent all those lovely ladies some meaningless drivel but once I’d finished writing, the compulsion and urge to keep consuming eggs was gone. Poof! Just like that 🙂 Which proves one really amazing point to me – the most useful recovery tool at my disposal is writing.

I have been gathering tools for ages and trying bits of this and bits of that.

But today I realised when I reach out and write, it helps. It is cathartic. My ability to express myself with the spoken word is somewhat limited. I’m not entirely tongue-tied most of the time – I can string some intelligible sentences together – but the written word is where I find what is buried so deep inside me, I can’t even give it a name.

So today, those little bags of divine deliciousness, imparted some divine wisdom – I need to write. I don’t need to ring people, or do exercises, visualisations or affirmations (… actually I retract that… I’m sure I DO need to do those things, but not as my very first go-to tool in a crisis). My first port of call is to write it down. Explore what’s going on in my head. Something like I wrote today…

I’m at work and everyone left so I am here alone. Went straight to the bags of chocolates (disappearing at a rapid rate – not entirely due to me thank goodness!) I dragged 20 little Easter eggs out, made a cup of tea, ate them until I felt sick and threw half of them up. Stellar start to the day…

My head is telling me, bad bad bad stupid woman go eat the rest now (still a few hundred there) so the problem goes away, la la la… And what I want to say instead is, make a cup of tea and relax and do some actual work and you’re not hungry right now so what’s going on and what tool could I be using instead of gorging on sugar until I feel sick.

So here I am. I haven’t made tea yet but the kettle is boiling. I don’t relax. I’m obviously not working right now but I will in a moment (I’m usually an excellent employee!) I have no idea what’s going on. I’m using the tool of writing it all out. I can’t spend too much time on tools. I do actually have work to do…

I am – as per usual – exhausted. So, so fricking tired… And I have a horribly sore throat so possibly coming down with something. I think my weakness this morning is largely attributed to that. Maybe? And or the emotional hangover from Mother’s Day (my mother and sister are dead and when I look at grandma I think she’s dying and we scattered Vanessa’s ashes yesterday and Dad looked god awful. So a bit of emotional baggage going on… )

Okay. Kettle is boiled. Work awaits. Writing it out is SOOO cathartic. I won’t need/desire/eat any more chocolates.

So there we go – epiphanies found buried beneath a pile of Cadbury’s eggs. You just never know what you might find – especially when you’re not looking!

ps… if anyone I work with stumbles upon this little blog, I’m sorry I ate so many Easter eggs. I will endeavour not to eat any more. I will conquer this beast – I promise! It’s just a very big beast. I’m kicking hard though 😀  And I did do my work. It was just a few dodgy moments!