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.