On Feelings and Being Numb:
"I'm feeling [my emotions] through a film, as in, I know I'm pissed, but I don't have the energy to devote to being REALLY actively pissed. It's a very general, but very sincere, sort of 'grrr...' moment."
This is what I crave, the emotional "film." The only problem is, very shortly after the film settles over your emotions, it settles over everything else -- your consciousness, your cognitive process, your waking thoughts. It sucks. It's not a very fair trade.
AP AJ History Lesson:
"What they say about addictions, and eating disorders, is that they saved you. At one point or another, it saved your life. I know it saved my life. I can think of at least one occasion where it directly saved my life. When it first got severe enough to hospitalize me, I had been planning to kill myself. See, I'd been starvation-dieting off and on since about fourth grace, but nothing severe, and at the beginning of seventh grade, when I was twelve, I hated my middle school, I was being frequently sexually abused, I told no one, I was trapped and alone. The abuse and objectification and hatred for myself and everyone around me that resulted drove me into depression and I started a suicide journal. I had picked a suicide date. ...I felt like I was utterly worthless and that there was no way I could ever be happy again. Then, around February or March, my eating disorder came to the rescue. I thought, what if I really commit to this?... I've always wanted to lose all this weight (there was, by the way, on my body no such thing as 'all this weight'). Maybe I'll be happier, maybe I'll feel more worthwhile, maybe I'll be able to tolerate myself if I lose weight. And I was happier. I did feel more worthwhile. I was able to tolerate myself. ...I decided that things were going so well that I didn't have to kill myself after all. All I had to do was keep losing weight and everything would be okay again. That was the first instance in which I can recall my eating disorder saving my life. I'd be dead without it. Literally. Unfortunately, I'll be dead with it, too. So it's time to get rid of it, but I can't on my own. I know all of this. In some part of my brain, I know it. But I'm being held prisoner, it feels like, by my eating disorder. I know I've got to get out but I'm trapped. And I need help."
Oh, one-year-younger AJ, with your long hair and impeccable insight, what denial has since crept into you. Because here I am, one-year-older AJ, with my short hair and "I can quit anytime I want to, I just like to not party" attitude, and... yeah.
On the Relapse Before The Relapse Before This Relapse (I was "in recovery" summer '08):
"Where, when, and how did relapse start for me? I remember I ordered diet supplements in late September of last year [2008]. I started smoking [again]. I began to feel the negative effects smoking and restricting were having on my body, so I would pull out of it for a few days, maybe even a week, for every week or so that I slipped up. In January [2009] I started having severe panic attacks, so I worked on my eating and, most days I would say, ate normally. There were some slip-ups here and there. ...In February I started using cocaine and it really helped me to not feel hungry. My cycle of intuitive eating was once again broken. Around April the panic had really cleared up, and I could devote even more time to restricting, so I did. When my parents came to pick me up from [college] in May, I didn't want to let on that I'd been doing badly lately. I ate a lot in front of them, for about a week. I felt very guilty about it. ...Over the summer I would have an empty house for most of the day and for the most part, on weekdays, or whenever I could, I ate between X and X calories a day [numbers omitted]. Once I fainted at work. Towards the end of the summer, I went to visit my sister and her husband in Boston. Again I tried to put on a good show. ...When my parents and I left to move me in for [sophomore year]... I had a definite plan to lose a lot of weight as soon as they were gone."
"What happened? Why did I relapse? What clicked, or stopped clicking? I can remember so clearly what foolishness flipped the switch to get me into recovery. What made it dim over time? Was it just a case of not changing the lightbulb? I was in college. I started to feel like a failure. A bad actress. Not worth anything. Low self-esteem kicked in, I suppose. I felt unnoticed and unloved. I failed and there was nothing to fall back on. I failed and had no excuse for failing. What did I fail? [Not school] I failed at relationships. I failed at my relationship with my ex-boyfriend. ...I failed at being perfect. I expected perfection and when it didn't happen after recovery I had failed. I treated a symptom, not a disease. I stopped the eating disorder behaviours (and even then, old habits died hard, perhaps didn't ever quite die at all). I did nothing to address the perfectionism."
On That Elusive Chimera, Recovery:
"...[T]here's no guarantee that life suddenly sorts itself out after recovery. It's not like I'll come back into the real world and suddenly all my problems are solved. All my relationships are perfect. I'm the world's most amazing actress. I'll never have to deal with grief or sorrow or stress ever again. Life is still life, with or without an eating disorder. Life is more lifelike without an eating disorder -- the bad as well as the good. ...[T]he highs feel higher. The lows must feel lower, too, or at least more real. But you can probably bounce back from them quickly. You probably find it easier to face them.
I'm so sick. I know this, intellectually. Here I am, journaling about what I think life might feel like. Every day is eating disorder day, and I love it, it gives me a purpose, drives me toward a goal. It gives me an identity to serve and a direction in which to point myself. What the hell is recovery like? What the hell is life after recovery? Will it exist for me? Will I die from this?"
Too many questions, young grasshopper. Simmer down.
"Psychologically (and quite possibly physically as well), I'm in a much worse place now than I was when I first went to CFC. [And things just got worser and worser.] I feel so emotionally dead. I can't see out of my eating disorder, can't see any goals or anything outside of my anorexic life. That scares me because sometimes it makes me wonder if I will ever recover. Oh, all the days when I would say I didn't want recovery or I didn't want to get better, those are so long gone and so far behind me and so wasted. I could have been free by now. My life would have been so different."
Yeah, only things still didn't work out after CFC round 2, did they?
Righteous Anger:
"Fuck you, eating disorder. Fuck you for making me panic every time I eat more than X calories. Fuck you for making me REALLY panic every time I eat enough to maintain my weight. ...No, I just need to lose more, that's all I put any real effort into doing in life, lose more weight, lose more weight. FUCK YOU for killing me. For sucking the joy out of everything. Fuck you fuck you fuck you. Go away. Fuck you for fucking with my body. I can't take this. YOU RUIN EVERYTHING. You shatter my life with your stupid lies, how do I fall for them every single time? How did I even start to believe you, your foulness and your filth, why can't I see through you when everyone else in this world can? You sicken me in every way, there's nothing I can do to truly please you, I can't do this, I can't recover, I'm trapped. I'm so trapped and I'm so scared. I want you gone but I don't. Why are you here? Why can't you let me have a life?"
"Fuck you, ED. I'm stronger than you. I was here first. I am not an eating disorder. I never was and I never will be. I am a strong, beautiful woman. I'm sexy, too. And smart. Talented. Fuck you fuck you fuck you."
"I don't want to play games anymore. I don't want to dick around and manipulate shit. ...I just want to get better. There's never an opportune time to do it, but it needs to happen. No more games; just recovery."
"I'm taking action. I don't give a fuck about excuses. School will always be here. Acting will always be here. Friends will always be here. Now I need to make sure that I'm here to realise all these things and have them in my life. No excuses. ...This is it. There is never a convenient time to get your life back. There's only now."
CLEARLY you did not want recovery BAD ENOUGH. Shit, I talked such a good game, didn't I? I don't even know if I believed it at the time; I just wanted to convince myself that I did because I was so scared of what it would mean if I didn't.
There are also entries about how easy it was to get away with restricting at my short-lived IOP. The IOP wasn't even like a band-aid. It was like someone offering me a band-aid while I'm bleeding profusely from my skull. And me saying "no thanks."
Positive Affirmations:
"I am fierce and I am a fighter.
I am not an eating disorder.
I am not my body.
If there's anyone more stubborn than my eating disorder, it's me.
I have everything it takes to beat my eating disorder.
I am proud of myself.
I will win.
I will and can do whatever it takes until I am healthy inside and out.
My mind and my will are strong.
Recovery is worth it and I am worth recovery.
I deserve nothing less than health and happiness.
I am incredible and amazing."
On CFC:
"And of course now I'm going through all the inevitable second-guessing... am I sick enough, couldn't I just pull out of this on my own if I wanted, am I being selfish going into inpatient treatment, etc. And now on top of all of this, there's the lingering ambivalence in the back of my head. I want to get rid of this, I really do, but I just don't know if it's possible. I feel like I'll get back out and only be able to think about losing weight [congratulations, that's exactly what happened. You're psychic]. I need to be at CFC for a while. They say 18 weeks (four and a half months) is the recommended length of stay for anorexia, but a lot of people (weight has no bearing on this whatsoever) stay longer, and I think I'm going to be one of those people. I won't mind. However long they want to keep me, I'll stay."
Except I didn't.
"I'm really mad at myself right now. I just have so much guilt over having to withdraw from school... this is ridiculous. I'm so angry with myself. Leaving college, ruining relationships, all of that. I feel like a failure. I keep telling myself I'm incredibly brave and courageous and smart for doing what I'm doing, but if I were so brave and courageous and smart, I would have kicked this back in 2007 (hell, maybe even 2003... though it did help me through high school) and not be stopping my life right now. I feel like a bad student. I hate this. I don't want to do it. Nothing will change. I can't do it. I should have been able to stay until the end of the semester. FUCK. I. Fail. At. Life. I can't get better. It's not possible. I don't want to go. I don't need to go. I'm making a big deal out of nothing and it's stupid and selfish of me to take away a spot from someone who actually needs and deserves to be in treatment."
"In eight days I check into CFC and those eight days could not come sooner. I'm so relieved to be going and getting my life back. ...I can barely function. I know I need to do this to get well and I'm grateful for the opportunity. I can't wait to live again."
Such idealism.
I pretty much knew I was going to relapse by the time I got out of CFC. Not sure if I mentioned that, but there it is. It wasn't that I wanted to; I just knew it was going to happen. Have I been over this already? If so, sorry for the repeat.
I did okay for the first couple of weeks. And by "okay" I mean, "I didn't follow my meal plan that my dietician wrote out for me because she wasn't even about to think about letting me try to eat intuitively, smart decision on her part, but I wasn't trying to lose weight super fast or anything, I don't think." Who knows at this point what was going through my head? I was like an alcoholic who walks into a bar right after they check out of rehab and says, "I don't really want to drink, but I'll just sit here and see what happens."
The universe must have realized I wasn't relapsing fast enough, however, because I soon became extraordinarily symptomatic with a hiatal hernia, which is sort of like one step below an ulcer. I'd been having stomach pain/pressure and heartburn, getting very full after eating tiny amounts (this began maybe my last month at CFC and was partly eating disordered but NOT ENTIRELY), and it just got worse and worse until maybe 6 weeks after I discharged and I had an endoscopy that revealed, much to my relief and my parents' dismay, that I was not "just imagining things," I really did have a stomach problem, and it would probably be best if I followed a slightly more restrictive diet.
The gastroenterologist understood that I had a history with anorexia, so he was very wary of telling me what foods would exacerbate the stomach pain and instead tried to insist that I take Prevacid, but after that proved ineffective, he told me that richer foods might worsen my symptoms.
Again. I didn't really want to cut out richer foods (I was actually just starting to enjoy grilled cheese again), but the nausea and heartburn was getting pretty bad. I didn't know what else to do. Grease was out. Cream was out. Calories soon began to dwindle. I lost a somewhat noticeable (though not alarming) amount of weight within a month, and, well, it felt good, damnit.
Eventually, the Prevacid started to do its job and my symptoms diminished. But I was nervous to start adding the rich foods back in and inevitably gain back the weight. Weight loss was hard-wired within me, at this point, after 11 years or so of practice and perfection of methodology. Weight gain was not.
And by this time I had just moved out for the summer and was living on my own. No parents to make sure I was at least making an effort to get food down. No roommates to judge my neurotic eating habits. Just me, and my apartment, and my raw food detox. Wait, what? A raw food detox? When did that happen? How did I miss that? Oh, that's right. My eating disorder had told me it would help with the stomach pain. That it was "healthy" anyway. That it was trendy and that countless raw foodists had proclaimed they had lost weight going raw but still eating the same amount of calories. It's not eating disordered if you're not cutting calories. Besides, it'll be good to get in more fruits and veggies. You can make smoothies!
I never made a smoothie. I ate carrot sticks and blueberries and paper-thin slices of cucumber doused in mustard and other such shit. Sodium became almost as bad as calories; almost worse than carbohydrates.
And there I was. Sicker than I'd been since I was 13, struggling to walk up (or down) a staircase.
If people think I'm manipulative, wait until they meet my anorexia.
I'm
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