The Difficulty Of Getting Something Down...

... is partly due to my inability to find words apt enough to describe the way I feel. This is compounded and made considerably more difficult by the fact that the feelings surrounding the food issues which occupy my mind much of the time, are not only in constant conflict with one another, but also shift precariously from a mode of total freeze over, to a frenetic clamoring of overwhelming proportions and volume.

Add to this the tide of lethargy that ebbs away at the desire to even attempt to find a voice, and the contrasting sense of compulsion to never sit still (thus burning calories almost constantly) and you have the ingredients for a pretty hit and miss blog.

Due to a binge session which my body won't allow me to purge, no matter how far my fingers get down my throat, I am battling the urge to just tear my stomach open and pull the food out by some twisted, self performed C-section type thing...

Nice.

I am, as of next week, beginning a program of re-feeding at a new Eating Disorders Unit.

The terror I feel is pretty much indescribable, but the backlash against the inevitable weight gain has been drastic.

I never knew my weight could drop so fast once past a certain weight.

I now fall into the "critical" category with a BMI that puts me at very high risk.

With a body that is so weak and painful, I find it almost unbelievable that I STILL fear gaining weight... I don't know if I will ever understand how on earth my thinking has become SO WARPED, so disillusioned, that death seems to be the ever-so-slightly preferable option over watching the numbers on the scales increase.

At this point though, understanding hardly matters and in reality, the agony of my family is my greatest concern.

A part of me is looking for recovery, still trying to cling to hope, desperate for balance and normality.

I've bought SELF HELP books on eating disorders for goodness sakes.

I'm not a self help book person. In fact, generally, the trite, over simplified advice given in them, kills me... that or the fact that an equal number of books which profess to improve you, your life, relationships, memory, income, confidence, whatever, are written by people who learned to write alliterative lists of rehashed proverbs.

Moving on.

Reflecting today, I realised that this blog is less and less 'A Journey Through Therapy' and has (excuse the pun) been devoured by my eating disorder.

It seems that, for the time being, it will now centre around the struggles of 'recovery' (albeit, merely a notional reality for me).

With all this in mind, I apologise to anyone who has been misled with regards to the content herein.

I have considered starting another, more appropriately titled space, but realised one blog was hard enough to manage. The Woman still wants to see me weekly, if this is possible and so I will still be charting aspects of what goes on in The Little House In The Woods.

I guess in some ways, I will be examining the effects of both CBT and psychoanalytic therapy and just how effective and useful they are for me, and perhaps, for others in similar situations.

For Dear Life

A small platform stands high above the trees. My feet are squashed on the square and I wobble and bend into, and against, the varying winds in my effort not to fall.

I am frightened to even breathe.

I look up and see blurred lines in the distance but I am too scared to focus on anything other than staying balanced.

Those lines are the date of my treatment in the unit and they hang somewhere a space and a half away from me. I try to look up at them, to adjust my vision. If i try to brace myself I'm scared I'll tense up too much and topple.

For the time being, I can only look directly at the scales I stand on, hardly daring to breathe in the precarious safety of the diminishing numbers.

Somewhere in my mind, I am trying to come to terms with the fact that weight gain is going to be inevitable.

Two friends gave me this stone earlier in the week.

I've been holding onto it at night, hoping that somehow, it will sink beneath the surface of my skin.

The battle seems endless and hope is something that I know I need more than any other weapon in my armory right now.

Quiet

My silence does not reflect a lack of happening.

Rather it is me sitting very, very still in a vain effort to just hold on to the dream-tilting floor on which I appear to be crumpled.

No longer able to work out, I have experienced an incredibly rapid, not to mention painful, wasting of my muscles.

Despite the plummeting scales, pulse rate, metabolism, body temperature and capillary refill times, my 'rational'/natural sense of alarm is still usurped by this absurd illness' desperation to lay waste to my physical form.

The Eating Disorders Team insist on weekly meetings, blood tests and ECGs and have become increasingly forthright in demanding my attendance and compliance with their requests.

I stumbled out of Friday's meeting in the horror glare of full beam headlights, my autonomy waved in front of me like an over exposed photo.

I commence full time treatment in their new unit in the first week of March. Failure to comply will result in the section route.

One of the primary focuses of the treatment is re-feeding.

I suspect that you have to be half bloody mad yourself before you can begin to understand the absolute frozen terror which lies in thick sheets at the bottom of my stomach.

Where I've Been

The place I was staying was incredibly beautiful, and from a spiritual and emotional perspective, was exactly what I most needed.

Even my room was called 'Peace'.

It was a retreat in the true sense of the world and for five days, I didn't have to answer to, look out for or 'live up to' anyone.

During the days, I took myself off for long walks along miles of deserted coastline. The chill wind cut across my skin as I bent and straightened picking shells off the sand, making me feel more alive than I have for weeks. On two of the days, a harsh February sun lit the beaches and the reedy sand grasses so deeply that it took my breath away.

In my early teens I fell in love with Byron's poetry and although not necessarily understanding it all, I would experience something not unlike agony as I tried to hold the weight of his beauty-laden words.

I later discovered Shelley, Keats, Longfellow and the other romantics and went through a period where I appreciated little else in the way of literature.

As I walked along, I recalled Byron's lines from one of his epic works, 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage'

"There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal

From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal."

I learned these lines because they resonated at a level far deeper than I myself ever found words for. Here he expresses the universal sense of 'rapture' at the awesome beauty of the natural world, and somehow captures man's longing to, be a part of something outside the bounds of society, to transcend the material world of mankind and be a part of something divine.

I had moments where I felt this in the core of my soul.

I include some pictures I took, some more artistic than others.

Physically, I lost weight and my muscles ache endlessly as they. quite obviously, waste.

Spiritually, hands have cupped around dying embers and gentle breath has deepened their glow. I am unsure how long it will last, but I am taking time to focus on being creative as a way of trying to nurture this.

The Woman was careful with her relief when I saw her on Friday.

I realise I look bad.

I have a lot of catching up to do on other blogs. Please bear with me.