People with eating disorders often talk about the eating disorder voice that natters away, telling us what to do. Or not. Undermining recovery. Making us doubt ourselves. But I wonder what that means to someone without an eating disorder voice? Or even what it means to other eating disordered people – I doubt we’re all the same.
Always reaching out for freedom.
Always chained.
Trapped.
My hands are tied and as lost as my soul is.
It seems like I’m always someone else – or pieces of other people put together. Somehow it’s always easier to be someone else.
I have wanted death I have cried for it I have sought the final oblivion of death for as long as I am able to remember. Yet, I am here, I am alive and I can not help but wonder why? Why did the rope not strangle me, or the pills stop my heart? Why when the trigger was pulled, the gun did not spark? Why, when my blood was flowing, did my pulse still beat? Why when the voices yelled death and murder was I not defeated?
When everything hurts. When everything is just to much. I hold my head and I hide. If I can not see the demons, maybe they can not see me?
Face off. The truth of the masks and the pain it hides.
It may not seem like it, but I’ve been working hard on my blog- just not writing posts. I’m prepping the blog […]
I have consulted the technology fairies and the pixie dust has been waived, the credit card swiped, and I’m back in the land of the cyber living. Phew!
I’m also in the land of man flu so nothing of any significance will be gracing my page for a day or two, but I just wanted to say don’t give up on me. There are good things to come this year. Really good things. I can feel it in my waters!
For me – I feel good about 2019. I choose to believe the worst of my grief and issues are behind me and my journey forward is now much closer to everyone else – ie I’m sure I won’t get everything right but I’ll try not to make a royal fuck up every time a little snag comes my way. I’m calling resolutions ‘goals’ this year.
Until today, I’d never heard the phrase abuse by omission. But now I’ve heard it, I feel like I’ve come home.
If you’d told me three years ago that my poor, long suffering psychologist would still be listening to my woes at the end of 2018, I would have said, No way! (Possibly in much stronger language.) But here we are, 42 months later, and I still grace her couch on a regular basis. And not just for the lols.
Decades of maladaptive coping mechanisms crashed down around my ears, and the words severe depression and chronic anxiety were bandied about – in relation to me. I was in the depths of self-induced starvation, self-harming, highly suicidal, too depressed to function, and suffering the physical misery of high anxiety – pounding heart, shaking hands, internal catastrophising, panic attacks. I’d become one of “those people”.
It’s 35 days since I touched down on terra firma. Jet lag’s done and dusted, the big adventure receding into once upon a time status, and I’m settled back into normality – taking for granted the luxuries of my pillow, my car, and our pristine drinking water. Yet for most of those 35 days, my mental health has been really shit.
There are moments – hours, days – when I feel overwhelmed with anxiety. Not nervousness. Not stress. Not worry. Not even depression. Just anxiety, with all its accompanying physical misery. Five years ago I didn’t have anxiety at all – so I believed. I certainly didn’t seem to experience the effects of anxiety. In fact I didn’t really experience emotions at all. Which is why, I realise, that girl is never coming back.
It’s the unfun bit of travel – going home. And after three months, it’s the bit to look forward to – going home.
