Mistletoe and whine

Christmas is supposed to be merry and bright, but it can also be hard........really hard when you have an eating disorder, and also when your family is split. But this year has been exceptionally lovely - relaxed and chilled and spent with the entire family - just not at the same time! Despite facing hospital treatment soon into the New Year, I have eaten and managed better for the past week or so than since I can remember. No bingeing, no vomiting, and I have allowed myself to eat some treats, to drink and to be merry without feeling too guilty. The guilt will come next week when I get on the scales and face the damage, but I'm trying to ignore that for now.

I think the key this year has been spending time with my amazing family, not being alone and making sure not to isolate myself. As much as I want to hide away from the world at the moment, I can see that it just makes me more unhappy in the long run. My family are also all an incredibly good lesson in how to be 'normal', how to enjoy life and of how I could be in the future.

One of my biggest fears is that, one day, enough will be enough for them, and they will give up on me. Quite honestly, I am surprised that day hasn't already come. There is, however, a downside to having a supportive family, as strange as that may sound! It means that no matter how tired I am of fighting, I have to bloody carry on......and the eating-disordered side of myself really hates that ;) Slowly I have realised that my illness doesn't just affect me, but everyone around me. Even if I do want to self -destruct, in doing that I would be hurting a great many people, and I refuse to do that any more. Some people say their family will be the death of them. Right now, as corny as it sounds, mine are my salvation.

I've learned that all a person has in life is family and friends. If you lose those, you have nothing, so friends are to be treasured more than anything else in the world.

~ South Park



So much to gain....

Doctors always seem reluctant to discuss a target weight with me, presumably because they think I will freak out at the thought of being healthy, at how much weight I will have to gain. If numbers are mentioned, they say I can consider just getting to a 'safer' body mass index of around 15 for now (anything below 17.5 is classed as anorexic and 'healthy' is around 20-25). That has never actually been acceptable to me - if I am to recover and gain weight, I need to do it properly, and remaining at a low BMI feels like a bit of a cop-out to be honest. It is allowing myself to remain anorexic and unhealthy, albeit healthier than right now.

Yet just to get my body back into the range where my BMI is no longer 'anorexic', I need to gain a good two stone. And to be back at a 'healthy' BMI of 20, it turns out I'll have to pack on three stone. Those numbers truly stagger me and I can't quite make sense of them. How can I actually be so underweight but feel so fat? If I can't look at myself in the mirror now, if the sight of my body at my current weight makes me want to cry, how can I possible tolerate it any bigger?

Strangely enough, the abstract idea of having to gain all that weight in the future doesn't scare me as much as you might expect. But if I were asked to gain a couple of pounds in the next week, my reaction would be one of horror and I would downright refuse. Stepping on the scales and seeing a gain feels to me like a failure, and I want to howl with rage and despair and actually hurt myself for being so fat and disgusting. I claim I want to get better, but I suppose I am still hoping there is a way of doing that without gaining weight!

Right now even drinking a glass of water makes me feel full, which equates to dirty, fat and revolting. I have to shower first thing in the morning before I put anything inside my body and I have perfected the art of doing that and getting dressed without seeing myself naked. My Grandmother thinks I wear baggy clothes to hide how much weight I have lost - really it is because I can't stand to look at myself, and any clothes which fit closely convince me I have gained weight and am fat. If I don't have to see myself properly, I can pretend the fat is not there. Last time I was this weight I had stopped drinking alcohol because of its calorific content, so people around me see the fact that I will now do that as a positive sign and an improvement. The truth is, I only drink because it numbs the voices in my head, because it dulls the pain of how wretched and wrong I feel in this skin.

So I am torn, because I certainly don't want to remain miserable and ill, but if I don't even want to maintain my current weight, let alone gain any, do I really stand any chance of getting better?

'I don't care if it hurts, I want to have control.

I want a perfect body, I want a perfect soul.' 

~  Radiohead, Creep

Wasted

I have no words at the moment, so I am going to borrow some from Marya Hornbacher in Wasted, because this sums up how I feel right now.......

'When, after fifteen years of bingeing, barfing, starving, needles and tubes and terror and rage, and medical crises and personal failure and loss after loss - when, after all this, you are in your early twenties and staring down a vastly abbreviated life expectancy and the eating disorder still takes up half your body, half your brain, with its invisible eroding force, when you have spent the majority of your life sick, when you do not yet know what it means to be "well" or "normal", when you doubt that those words even have meaning anymore, there are still no answers. You will die young, and you have no way to make sense of that fact.

You have this: You are thin.

Whoop-de-f**king-dee.'