I'm Still Here...

... Still in the hospital.
... Still battling.
...Still wanting recovery
and...
Still finding communication very, very difficult.

However...
I am currently weighing in at 38.8kgs and my BMI is now above 15.
Although I am finding weight restoration almost unbearable, I am finding that eating the food itself is less frightening.
I even enjoy it.

I want to begin writing about the recovery process and I want to use my experiences to benefit others in some way and yet, I still have so, so far to go.

Tomorrow I get to go home for one night after twelve long weeks... Or is that thirteen?

I think it will feel like heaven, and yet, I am scared I'm gonna mess it up.

If you're still reading here, 

you are more faithful than I am deserving, and show more loyalty than this blog warrants!

Corm Before The Storm

Beautiful Cornwall.

The unexpected warmth of the late October sun; the flat, brilliantly clear light; the depth of blue... This is a place I'd really love to live someday.
My friends have been great. True friends. No terrible questions. Just simple observations and a couple of honest conversations, which in all fairness, is a lot more than I have had with most people in recent months.

I hadn't meant to eat or drink tonight, yet having succumbed to the call of alcohol, I've given in to both. I feel absolute despair right now.
I'm sure I must weigh so much.
I will never go away again without my scales.

Tomorrow I drive home and in some ways, I dread all that is waiting for me.
I wish I never needed anything but oxygen again.

On The Rack

Tortured by his enemies, a film I once watched showed a man tied between two posts which were then gradually pulled apart, thus ripping his whole body in half.

Nice start huh?

Thought I'd jump in headfirst before I got cold and ran out on the balls of my feet.

Medieval England practised "Stretching" as a form of torture on a hideous frame known as 'the rack'. It was often used to punish or to extract information from a victim.

I'm not great at history, but even the narcoleptic kid wakes up for the part of the lesson where the teacher tells about torture methods.

It's that morbid fascination thing.

Not to sound too melodramatic, but the image of someone being pulled apart has floated around my head over the past couple of days.

I feel as though parts of me are engaged in a game of "tug of war", and while that conjures up images of happily exhausted, muddy heaps of people who have engaged in the battle of the rope, for me, it feels as though my two teams, who are unfortunately, both inside me, are actually going to rip me in half.

It's a tug of war with a hell of a lot at stake and another part of me watches with some degree of horror as the stubborn struggle between me and me reaches a ridiculous intensity.

On one end of the rope, Desperation pulls me towards the gym to work my body into a frenzied, sweating, mechanical state where I no longer feel anything except a physical exhaustion and a terrible desperation to deplete my body in a any which way.

On the other end, Depression pushes me down, won't let me move, pulls my energy away from me so I have to step further back to retrieve it.

And as they pull, I am torn.

Desperation to lose weight is screaming in my ears.

"You must be in control".

"You only have this".

"If you allow yourself an inch, you'll be sure to take miles and miles and it'll be unstoppable".

Depression whispers,

"Don't bother".

"What's the point?"

"Nothing matters".

Yet another part, cries at the pain of being torn so violently. It feels as though I am on a rack.

I end up in the gym but the inside is weary and tired from the fight.

It would seem that I am able to cope when depression is not begging me to stop and when I am winning what I know is an unhealthy battle against my weight. Which is absurd!

This is not how it's meant to go, surely?

I suppose that when you are on a rack, if the force is only pulling you in one direction, it ceases to be torture.

The lesser of the two evils (in terms of short term outcomes) is the force which drives me to starve and exercise.

It's when that force is opposed by the dreadful weight of depression that it becomes so painful.

Circling at One Thousand Feet

It's ironic that as I sit down once again, to tackle the subject of eating disorders, and in particular, anorexia, I have an image of me circling my subject like a very hungry animal circles a potential feed; warily and full of tentative, watchful suspicion that what is being circled might suddenly retaliate with a defensive blow from a place which went unnoticed.

This topic. I'm afraid it has the potential to do that.

I have written a fair bit about my sister. In fact, there are a few posts here about her and although it is not easy to write about, it's more because of my sense of hopelessness around making others understand than any deep pain at the memories of the experiences.
In fact, if anything, I have very few memories and the ones I do have are almost totally devoid of any feeling.
Giant pools of nothingness swill and wash around my insides much of the time. I feel that underneath everything... under all the angst and the pain and the upset, there is nothing.
Just an empty, black void.

Hopping out of that void for a minute, it's fair to say I have been circling my own feed for a while now.
I've burnt a lot of calories with my circling.

I don't expect understanding.
In fact, if anything, I expect to be met with the same level of horror and disgust that I feel about myself.

Having such an intimate knowledge of what it is to have to stand by and watch a loved one scream and twist in an unreachable cage, shredding themselves against the razor bars, you'd think that:

1. I would have more common sense and


2. I would never be as selfish as to inflict it on those who are already so broken.

But no.
It seems that I lack the ability to apply the logic I am such close friends with and that I am clearly so completely wrapped up in myself, that I care very little that others will suffer.

I have developed an eating problem.

I don't want to call it Anorexia because that is what my sister has suffered from for over half of her years on earth, and any similarities between us disappeared long ago.
It also just feels fundamentally wrong to be "anorexic".
I'm just not LIKE that.
It's not me.
I'm not the type.

And... at any given moment, I feel in grave danger of all my control slipping away from me. In other words, I don't know if I can keep up the starvation, the denial, the ferocity of the exercise regime BUT if I even think about going easier on myself, I will be unable to stop the gorging and the uncontollable binging that will follow.

I recognise that wht I have just written lacks balance.

It is a problem I can't find an answer to.

I need extreme lack.

My Sister - Anorexia.

I've been looking at some stuff to try to help me make sense of what is going on... I suppose in some ways I want to give a part of me a voice without having to go through the agony of trying to find the words.
I feel like I have spent a lifetime doing that in some respects. Music... I have spent my whole life looking for a song that will somehow sing me... There's no such thing of course.
"Write your own then", I hear you say. But, it's not like I haven't tried. It's just that words slip into obscurity when I try to gather them.

Anyway.


Anorexia.
There's not a lot I don't know about it.
I've sat and watched it devour my sister for over seventeen years.
I've watched it's grotesque form gnaw at her from the inside out and then superimpose itself onto her once beautiful body.
I've watched her scream into her bones as they become more and more hollow. Her shoulders, a branch from which the rest of her hangs.
I've seen her eyes sink deeper, the cage of bones around her cheeks protruding sharply, her chin just a point. I've watched her face become a skull, her skin stretched like canvas.
I've showered in the bath blocked by chunks of her broken hair.
I've cleaned my teeth in the washbasin blocked by the food she used to have to eat.
I've existed next to her tortured screaming and ranting. Her desperate sobbing. Her silent streaming tears.
I've watched her punching and kicking my parents as she has been dragged screaming into ambulances and cars to take her to hospital.
I've turned from her retching as she pulls out NG tubes and rips out cannula's.

I've watched her turn into someone I no longer know.
I have loved her as I thought I could never love anyone and I have hated her and longed to beat and bruise every inch of her fragile body.
And all this...
All this doesn't even begin to describe anything.

What I am left with however, is absolutely nothing.

I don't feel a thing for her.
Not a thing.
3 stone or 7, I don't feel anything... except maybe, a sort of brokenness somewhere too deep to mend.

So.
Given all this.
I should know better.
But apparently, I don't.

I started this post because I found an article I wanted to write about.
I wanted to explain something about myself that I feel is almost incomprehensible.
My sister is relevant but it is my own recent struggle I was going to write about.

Perhaps another time though.

I'll leave it at, 'there isn't much I don't know about anorexia'.
Just for now.

Can't keep something this good to myself...

When in doubt...



... This stuff is like nectar!
Soothing with a good kick, it might just be my newest drug of choice!

Really strange how you can hate a taste for 30 years and then, overnight, develop a crazed passion for it.
I've heard a theory that eating a food you dislike 15 times leads to a person acquiring a taste for it...
Perhaps I reached the magic 15 with the ginger?
Either way, I am going to make up for lost time!

The Truth Hurts

I have been lying to myself and everyone else for some time now.

I know I have a problem and I know it is getting worse.

Today I weighed 6 stone 12. 85.68 pounds. It's not a terribly low weight given that I'm only about 5,3" but others have been making comments lately. I feel like a fox must feel when backed against a mud wall, faced with the moist, snarled mouth of a hound.

I just want to get smaller and smaller.

It would seem that I have an eating disorder. However hard that it to admit.
And it IS hard.
I can't say it aloud to anyone.

The problem is that for the past 17 years, my family and I have watched my middle sister, a severe anorexic, systematically attempt to starve herself to death.
It has been extreme even by most anorexic standards.

It's not about food. My thing.
It's about control and aging and being small and being loved and being unhappy.

I've just had a huge family ordeal. My youngest sister is in tears, telling me she can't do this again. I am selfish, she says.
There is truth in that.
How can I do this to them? How can I let this happen?
But...
How can I stop it?

I am terrified that if I was to let go of this, I would collapse. Smash into shards like dropped cut glass.
I would have nothing to live for.

I want and need to be left alone.

I want to be smaller.
I need my pain to be outside instead of inside.

This is a "reactive" post. Not one where I have had time to rationalise my feelings and create a distance.
According to Wordsworth it's not good to write this raw. He said that "the best poetry comes from emotion recollected in tranquility". I always thought that applied to writing in general.

There aren't words to describe the desperation I feel right now.

Metaphorically speaking it feels as though I have had lemon juice poured onto a fresh wound tonight.
The more they say, the more I am pressed against the wall an the more I will shrink.

I'm too old to have developed an eating disorder. I cannot understand what is going on.

I'm lost.