Qualms, Questions, and Quotes

The qualms --

Today is a low day.

I don't know what it is. I don't really have a reason for it; you can never guarantee what days will be shit and what days will be worse. Sometimes, like today, you can't even predict it.

I woke up tired. I nap so often now, and sleep through the night. My naps don't even occur at their expected times. The past few days I've been napping at around seven, eight o'clock and going to bed for good a few hours later. Today I took a nap less than two hours after I woke up. I was itching for another one about an hour ago, but when I laid down my body wouldn't let me sleep.

These naps are punctuated, every fifteen minutes or so, by cyclonic jerks that make my legs kick and my eyes snap open. Fortunately, my efforts to sleep mostly through the night aren't thwarted by these same muscle twitches. Instead I wake up, once or twice a night (usually twice) with the intense urge to go to the bathroom. This isn't anything new; it happens every time I restrict and I like it because I look at it as my body getting rid of the weight it lost that day.

So, yeah. I was even more lethargic than usual today; I couldn't focus on anything not related to the anorexia. Not even the fun little pet projects I have to keep myself entertained when I've too much (read: any) idle time. I read, I write (a number of different things), I compose and arrange music, I do crossword puzzles, I play tetris; hell, I even collage. Today I couldn't do any of these things because my mind was just not cognitively there. It couldn't sustain a task that didn't have to do with thinking about food or weight.

This kind of shit always frustrates me because it makes me feel stupid at best; like I'm losing it at worst. Going brain dead at the ripe old age of 21. And I had such a good little brain to start out with too. Now it's all shrunken and wheezing and unmyelinated and sleepy.

What really makes this unbearable is the increasing feeling of abject helplessness. "Oh God I need help," this tiny voice in me says. "Oh God I can't do it. Somebody... somebody needs to save me. Somebody needs to drag me kicking and screaming into a hospital -- and yes I will be kicking and screaming because I have no conscious motivation to recover -- and save me."

"Oh God shut up," says a less tiny voice. "It's less than a month until your dad comes to move you out, which means less than three weeks until you have to start fucking eating again --"

"I'm so afraid to eat," says the tinier voice. There is no part of me, psychologically, that wants to eat. A tube would be preferable -- and don't tell myself I said that.

Of course, my eating disorder thinks this is all quite lovely. I've successfully trained myself to be nothing but repulsed and terrified by the thought of being fed. There is no temptation to "indulge," even a little bit, when I'm with my parents. I have firmly resolved to eat as little as possible with less of an effort to conceal it all than I've made in the past. Not because I want to get caught; because I don't think I will get caught. So I can stop trying to put on a good show for my parents -- and, as a result, eating much more than I would care to -- and just restrict while not actively, imminently dying. In the past year, nobody in my family has said a damn thing about any concerns or doubts they have about my recovery. Even as I've lost 25 pounds in a matter of a few months, and paraded around in tank tops and skirts. Even when, before I lost those 25 pounds, I was right at the borderline between "underweight but not technically anorexic" and "anorexic." Even when countless other non-relations (and non-specialists) have been perfectly vocal about their concerns with my weight.

So I think my parents might be almost as blind as I am. Which is real good, speaking from my eating disorder's point of view.

*

And now, courtesy of my inability to write in paragraph and/or complete sentence format by hand, I would like to share some random musings I've jotted down in my little "evil plans and stuff" notebook these past few days... as well as some "inspirational" quotes. Some of which I found online and some of which I made up myself. First, the questions that REALLY hold me back big time:

What if I recover only to find that all of my friends have moved on and I am alone?
What if I recover and find that I am no good at making new friends?
What if the eating disorder is the only thing about me that makes me interesting?
What if the eating disorder is the only thing about me that makes people care?
What if the eating disorder is the only thing about me that makes people notice?
What if I recover and yet am unable to function in this world?

"What if I'm nothing without this? What if it's hopeless?" I wrote below this list. "I need someone to talk to. I need someone to tell me that none of this is true."

And then I started crying because I feel so fucking alone and desperate and needy and shit. But it feels good, it does feel good, just to get all of this out on paper or on a computer monitor. It's not much, but it's something.

*

Now, the quotes --

It's not recovery. It's DIScovery.
^ Cheesy as all hell and, yet, strangely comforting.

Just because my eating disorder defines my life right now DOES NOT MEAN that it defines ME.
^ So what does define me? And how do I prove it? I need to write some kind of lame "I am" paragraph eventually. As I try to do group therapy with just myself.

What makes me feel like I am the exception to recovery? Why do I think it's harder for me to recover than it was for everyone else who has?
^ Again, I feel like I should make some kind of list for this.

The anxious mind has a certain comfortable familiarity with the act of worrying. Anxiety feels familiar, comforting even. The mind doesn't always know what to do or think in every situation, but it does know how to worry about it -- that it can accomplish without breaking a sweat.
^ Also applicable to why we're so often overwhelmed by the urge to engage in our ED when things get tough, confusing, or painful.

If things go wrong, don't go with them.

If you're going through hell, keep going.
^ Thanks, Sir Winston.

EATING DISORDERS DO NOT GIVE YOU A VOICE. THEY STEAL IT.
^ I put this in all caps because, particularly lately, I've been using my eating disorder as a way to make myself heard. It actually takes a lot more time to get the message across this way than it does just to say, "hey, something's fucked up here."

The mirror is not you. It is you looking at yourself.

These feelings won't kill you. The eating disorder will.

I have a right to eat.

LAZY = L.etting A.norexia Z.ap Y.ou
^ One of those Gary Busey/A.A.-inspired aphorisms. I so frequently beat myself up for being "lazy" and a slacker who doesn't have the responsibility to get anything done, and then I remember it's because I can't really move or think very effectively.

He conquers who endures.

Go as far as you can't.
^ Voice professor said this once. I dig it.

When you wrestle a gorilla, you can't quit when you're tired. You quit when the gorilla is tired.
^ Problem is, my gorilla seems to be composed entirely of brute force, methamphetamine, and adamantium.

The time will pass anyway; we might as well put that passing time to the best possible use.
^ I could remind myself of this when I whine about it "not being the right time" to work on recovery/not dying.

You have within you right now everything you need to deal with whatever the world can throw at you. You also have everything you need to fuck it up.
^ I threw that last bit in. To me, it makes it feel more empowering. Oddly.

When people trip, they trip over pebbles. Nobody trips over mountains. They climb them.
^ I think I modified this from a Japanese proverb because it seems like all proverbs about mountains are Japanese. And ones about butterflies are Chinese. Flower proverbs are shared, 50/50. Anyway, basically it means that the things that make relapse seem tempting are actually very small matters, and the important thing is to overcome the huge-ass matter. And not my huge ass.

Don't abandon what you really want for what you want right now.
^ Credit goes to a rehab buddy for this one.

Stand up and walk out of your history.
^ To keep me from feeling trapped in my cycle of relapse just because that's what's always happened before.

Neither is this the life that I want.
^ Came from my "talking to God" thing where I was like "well, if I turn my will over to You how do I know that You'll lead me to the life I've planned for myself?" and He was all, "um, is THIS the life you've planned for yourself? And is it going to get you anywhere NEAR the life you've planned for yourself? Don't make Me come down there."

We acquire the strength of what we have overcome.

To be powerful is to use my strength in the service of my vision.

I will carpe the fuck out of this diem.

Just because you have a reason to doesn't mean you should.
^ Sort of one of those DUH moments for me that I've strangely never put in the context of my eating disorder. Just because I have a motive to restrict, just because it's understandable that I would, doesn't mean that it's the right thing to do.

The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in that grey twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.
^ I imagine a Gandalf- or Dumbledore-like figure saying this every time I read it. I think it's the "grey twilight" bit that cements it.

Our deepest wishes are whispers of our authentic selves. We must learn to respect them. We must learn to listen.
^ This resonates with me more than just hearing "listen to your heart" repeated ad nauseum. Like, the heart is an organ. What does that even mean?

The impossible can always be broken down into possibilities.
^ The best aphorisms, or the ones that are the most helpful to me, are the ones that I still agree with even after I think about them for a while. Case in point, above.

If it is necessary, then it is possible.
^ Again, this makes sense, if only from a scientific standpoint.

More powerful than the will to win is the courage to start.
^ So even if I'm not entirely motivated to recover...

If your ship doesn't come in, swim out to it.
^ A good argument for when I start whining about wanting for there to be a "lightbulb moment" that jump-starts my recovery. I've had potential lightbulb moments. Guess what. The filament popped. Which, now that I think about it, gives me this guy:

You can have a lightbulb moment, but it's still your responsibility to change the lightbulb.
^ Uninterrupted motivation gets challenged. It's up to you to find new reasons to keep moving forward. ...And make sure that you keep the light switch on.