Differences

It’s hitting me that things can’t carry on the way that they have been. I can’t keep continuing to let myself become weaker and more pliable in the hands of the eating disorder. Where did my inspiration go? Where did my hope go? Was it so precarious that the slightest bit of a breeze could extinguish it once and for all? Has it really gone and am I just this? It feels like it but then in my heart of hearts, I don’t want to accept it. I don’t think anybody really does, not when they still want to be here, in life. You know I think about the first time I became really unwell with the disorder and my whole world was so different to what it is now. Back then I didn’t want to be alive, I had made it so that I had nothing to live for and the only thing that mattered was starving myself into some sort of weird oblivion. I wasn’t careful with my body, I didn’t care what state I pushed it into because all it felt like I was doing or hoping was for it to fail. If I was doing things to make that happen faster than that felt acceptable. Of course it wasn’t…

And that my friends is where the difference lies.

I know now that it wasn’t acceptable. This whole thing is different because I am not some suicidal kid trying to find oblivion anymore. I am not curious to see how far I can push my body without toppling over the edge. I have no desire to even be within a 100 metres of that edge. Everything at the moment is a balancing act of what I can tolerate in regards to intake and making sure that I have the energy to keep my organs functioning and me not passing out. It’s not always simple. It should be. I can be rushing round late one afternoon and my entire world is spinning, there are black dots in my field of vision and it’s taking everything I have to stay stood up. My blood pressure is too low or my sugars are crashing and I know that all I have to do is to drink something at the very least but food would probably be better and I just can’t. I have this full blown battle going on between my logical side and the eating disorder side that drains me and I bet you can guess which side wins 98% of the time? As I said though I don’t want my body to fail on me. I need it. I need it to work well so I can do the things that I want to do which admittedly at the moment only includes studying but still. My brain needs to work for that and it’s not doing so in the way that it should at the moment. There is too much fog drifting around in there.

Of course I have reduced the Anorexia down to the physical element. It is so much simpler to talk about the effect that this disorder is currently having on my body even though admittedly that is probably not the most important thing in the grand scheme of things. The other aspect though feels raw and painful, as though if I poke at it too much things may come toppling down. There is little room for anything else lately in my mind. I try to concentrate on something else, anything else and within minutes my attention is being dragged back to it. The rules dominate me, as do my lists, as does the depression and the anxiety. I feel hollowed out most of the time and there is this exterior that I have which isn’t real but has to be real enough so nobody sees that underneath it all there isn’t very much.

So what do I do?

I have no energy to fight. I can’t carry on the way that I am. I’m tired all the time. Sometimes the sadness is so overwhelming that I can’t breathe properly and I know, I do know that none of this is going to change unless I do something about it. You know how I justify all of this though, with the words “but I’m still eating”. It’s not a justification. I know that. Stopping eating entirely has never been a real option, that weakens your body at such a rate that within weeks I’d find myself on some medical ward after collapsing or something. That by far would be the worst possible outcome for me. I’m not sure I can go back to being a shell, lying in a hospital bed and finding that my life has come to a dizzying halt. I always thought that when you have options you don’t like, you find a new option but in this I don’t think there is one. Sometimes I get this thought in my head that maybe it would have been better if I’d have just never made it through the time before. Maybe then it would be more certainly over but thankfully those thoughts are fleeting and I don’t really believe them. For as hard as this is, I am relieved that I am still here. I have no desire to check out of life anymore and I’m pretty sure that it’s never going to get to that point again, but then I didn’t think I’d be here again either. I realise that I need to find an answer sooner or later though because eventually, not now and certainly not for a while but it will get to a point where I will be forced to do something and I know that that is going to feel worse. I wish it was gone. I wish I was whole already. I wish I’d never even known this battle to begin with. I should have stopped so many times before. I could have you know…back before it blew up. I could have just stopped being stubborn and opened my mouth and it would never have gotten out of control. Yet that kind of wishful thinking is not helpful anymore.

So I am here. Knackered, terrified, sad or empty. There has to be more to life than this. There just has to be.

I hope your day has been kind to you.