Declaration at Dusk.

Still the battle rages,

And though the field dark red,

Rather now the agony,

Than live already dead.

So 'til the foe is silent,

Ignoring pleas of aching limb,

Through soul's dark night of madness

My heavy sword shall swing.

***

I'm fighting so hard that the mental exhaustion of the constant clash of thoughts, matches, even outweighs, the physical exhaustion of the eating disorder. 

At times, the swords swing so fast that I can't recognise whether it is me, or the Anorexia, who has won the round. 

Two things I know for sure: It hurts like hell 

and 

it doesn't stop for a minute in any waking hour. 

Bombshell

At around midday yesterday, unit staff announced the decision to reintroduce two much dreaded 'high energy' supplements into my meal plan.

The room around me blurred and whitened as my mind whirled into the shadow flecked vortex of spinning panic and dissociation.

Today I sit in relative calm.

The pain and the panic whirl around me but not within.

I discharged myself from the unit.

I'm not entirely sure how I will manage

but

failure is even less of an option that it was last week or the week before.

So:

The work of rebuilding continues.

A lot tougher and a little lonelier, but it continues nonetheless.

At the moment I am shuffling through rubble, feeling little more than dazed as I survey the extent of the wreckage and try to keep breathing through the swirling fusion of chalky dust and stone.

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.