I've moved!!

After seeing so many people export their blogs to Wordpress recently I decided I'd have a look. I thought it looked like they've got the right idea, so I am now at...

http://themilkfreeway.wordpress.com

A fitting URL for an amateur astronomer with a milk allergy :p and I am SO happy with the new theme, it's really pretty.

I hope you will follow me over :)

Six months on...

Tomorrow I will have been writing this blog for six months. I started it in February while I was still at university in York, a couple of days after emailing my mum to confess that I had relapsed badly and thought I needed to come home rather desperately. There was snow up and down the country and a lot going on at home, so my parents asked if I could wait ten days or so to be picked up. In the meantime, I thought I would spend my last week in the beautiful historic city of York making like a tourist, going to see all the museums, galleries and lovely buildings which I had missed due to having my nose stuck in various physics textbooks, trying to maintain my 90% average mark whilst eating bugger all. I did try - I went to one art gallery, as I recall, and I made a good attempt at walking round York Minster one final time too. I got so painfully cold and tired that I gave up after that, and just sat in my room feeling numb and bored out of my mind. I created the blog to keep a record of the worst of the illness and the beginnings of recovery, and as a sort of letter to a future self, to remind me that however hard things got once I was feeling better physically, I didn't ever want to go back to anorexia.

From some of my first posts:

I need to remember, next time I am uncomfortable in a newly healthy body, that you cannot have half an eating disorder, not long term. You might walk the tightrope between functioning and the whirlpool for so long, but anorexia steals your insight, tells you that if you are fine now, you can cope with losing just a couple more pounds. And then you find that you have lost the couple of pounds standing between barely functioning and disability. And although you've been there before, it's always a shock.

I am such a cliche, my eating disorder is all about control, and in an insight straight out of a textbook I have just realised that the anorexia has actually left me more out of control than I have ever been or felt before.

My first meal at the day programme this time last year was a pasta bake (gluten free corn pasta with chickpeas, if I remember correctly :p), and up until the moment that it was sitting in front of me waiting to be eaten I don't think the reality of my situation had hit me. I thought that it was just a case of starting to eat more and gaining weight, and I was scared of that but theoretically I was willing to give it a try, because I was stuck in a rut and knew it. But then I was sitting in a hospital kitchen with four other stressed out underweight girls, with this seemingly enormous meal in front of me, and it suddenly dawned on me that I actually had to EAT the damn thing. All of it. And I started crying into the damn pasta. It was so humiliating - I was 23 years old, no job, not studying, no partner, no friends, weighing less than my 12 year old sister and I was crying into a plate of fucking pasta. Not a good day for my self esteem.

I made the decision to start this blog pre-treatment because I know that once I am a bit better physically, I won't remember this period in my life very clearly. Malnourishment does that, it makes you foggy. It's all too easy to just remember the fake thrill of losing weight, the calmness and numbness induced by restriction, the way that everything boils down to simple numbers, none of the chaos or pain involved in real life - the aspects of anorexia which make it so hard to leave behind. In reality, this is absolute hell.

I find myself thinking that I would rather die than gain weight. That's absolutely ridiculous. At least I can hang on to the knowledge that these thoughts come from malnutrition and mental illness, not from reality. They are not logical. I have to hang on, because in a few months when I'm feeling better everything will look very different. I can't give up. It's just so hard, existing like this. I feel like I'm watching an amazing party from within a glass box. It's almost close enough to touch, but I can't reach past the barriers.

In a year or so, when I am healthier but probably still struggling, when the temptation to go back to this becomes almost too much to bear, I want to read these words and remember that this is hell. This life is not worth living.


February, before I started gaining weight.

And today, +25lbs :p not quite there, but give me a couple more months!

It's funny, reading my journal from eighteen months ago when I went into treatment after the relapse before this one, the tone is very different. I clearly felt hopeless, helpless, resentful of having to gain weight and disgusted with myself. But this year, even before I started gaining, things were different. I was depressed and confused, yes, but even then I was telling myself that that was the biological effects of starvation, the anorexia playing mind games, and that I wanted something different for myself. I was determined to avoid the pitfalls and traps I'd run straight into last time round. I meant to make those days back in February the last I would ever spend at such a physical and emotional low. I didn't go into recovery absolutely certain that I could cope and would definitely make it, how could I have - but I did arm myself with accounts of people who had recovered from all depths of the disorder. I decided that if they could do it, that meant that it was theoretically possible, and if it was theoretically possible, I could do it too. One of my worst and best qualities is total pig headedness :p if I set my mind to do something, I go all out and refuse to quit.

This time, rather than being ashamed of the weight gain like last year, I am proud of having come so far. Recovery from anorexia is hard. According to statistics, around 20% of anorexics will die from the disorder, 50% suffer chronically and 30% recover fully. Not everyone gets the right combination of luck, motivation and stubbornness necessary to pull themselves out of it. It gets harder the longer you have been ill too - and this May marked the beginning of the 12th year that I have had an eating disorder. I have made all this progress in the community too, with no intensive treatment - although that wasn't through choice, it just wasn't available. It's still only been six months and sceptics (including the nurse I used to see at the local EDU, now nothing but a not-very-fond memory, mwahaha) would say that it's too early to say whether I will manage to keep this up and shake off the disorder completely. But I think that's up to me, really, and as long as I have a say in the matter, I'm not going back there. This feels like a permanent change.

I feel like I should apologise for blowing my own trumpet :p but I've spent the last 15 years talking myself down and beating myself up, so maybe I should try saying nice stuff about myself more often!

In honour of my blog being six months old, I'm going to jump on the Q+A bandwagon that everyone else seems to have such fun with - any questions you'd like to ask (whether personal, ED related, about the ridiculous list of allergies, I'll answer them all!), comments, anything you would like to see me do more or less of? You're welcome to leave them at the end of this post (anonymous commenting is fine), or you can email me at katie_cullinane@hotmail.com. I'm on facebook with the same name as my email address. I don't know if I'll get enough questions for a whole post, but if I do, I will put it up in a couple of weeks :)

And here's to another six months!

Three good things about today:
1. I met my friend Allie for coffee earlier. Well, I say coffee, but caffeine makes me sick so it was chamomile tea :p but that wasn't important, the meeting Allie bit was!
2. It's rained on and off all day, but every time I started my car the weather mysteriously cleared up. Thank you, whoever arranged that!
3. Tomorrow afternoon I am going to a local support group for people with anxiety disorders for the first time. I've wanted to go for ages but had transportation issues. I do love my car.

Sam

I realised with a rush of guilt this morning that I forgot the anniversary of a good friend's death. He would have been gone for ten years on the 26th June. I don't live in the same town anymore and speak to very few of the other people who knew him so I'm not going to beat myself up for not remembering until now, but now I have, here's to Sam.

In parts of my county the school system is three tiered: primary from 4-9, middle from 9-13 and upper from 13-16, or 18 if you take A levels there. For about 3000 local kids living in my area, upper means the Purbeck School. I was nearly 14 when I moved up there in September 1998, because I am a September baby and I've always been one of the oldest in my year. At the time I lived 10 miles away from the school in a seaside town called Swanage, so I had to get the dreaded school bus.

Like the experience of school buses and their occupants everywhere, it was a nightmare. To start off with the kids living near me were in the catchment area for the #13 bus, otherwise known as the biscuit tin. This is because it rattled. It also belched up exhaust fumes into the back seats, leaked whenever the weather so much as drizzled, and was filled with 16 year old boys who found it hilarious to throw stuff at us, including but not limited to sandwich crusts and spit balls, shot at the younger kids through a broken ball point pen. I usually managed to avoid such delights because - shock horror - there were bigger nerds than me on the bus, who presented more obvious targets. But I still hated the buses. I always felt travel sick on buses, and being phobic of being sick that was no fun at all. I have also always had a pretty violent reaction to food being thrown around or stomped on, it disgusts me so much I actually feel sick about that too. So for an hour a day, I just had to grit my teeth and think of England, or something like that.

The one thing that made the bus journeys bearable was Sam. He was a tall, blond, blue eyed 16 year old, one of the older boys (the sixth formers caught a different bus), but not like the others. He was sweet and kind and always made an effort to talk to the younger kids, and especially the ones marked out as targets by the fuckwits in his year. He talked to the kid who had been born with hydrocephalus (water on the brain), which had left him with an unnaturally high forehead and needing bottle bottomed glasses, one of the older boys' main targets. He talked to the kid who was far too clever for his own good and had been bullied since he was about 5, who had developed a bit of an aggression problem to cope. He talked to the kid who would come out later that year as gay. He talked to the kid with severe dyslexia and another learning disability, who everyone else avoided. And he talked to me. At the time I was in a bit of a state, mental health wise. I had been bullied all through middle school and held out no hope for upper school to be any better. I was extremely depressed - I had first started to entertain the idea of suicide when I was 11 - suffering from panic attacks and PTSD, and had such low self esteem that I refused to go into a shop all that year because I was convinced that the person behind the till would be laughing at me. I never looked anyone in the eye, I never spoke to anyone I didn't know above a whisper. I had already started to self harm, first by standing in front of the mirror in the toilets at school and slapping myself in the face, telling myself how ugly and worthless I was, and then moving on to needles, my compass, and the little blades from pencil sharpeners. I had spent the summer holidays starving myself, living on orange juice, boiled eggs and fun size Milky Ways, for some reason. My mum had already taken me to the doctor after I passed out, and I had dealt with that by starting to binge to regain enough of the weight I'd lost to fool the doctor, so my secret would be safe. And then I couldn't stop bingeing, and that became the cycle for the next decade - starve, lose 10lbs, binge and gain it back, starve - and so on. I was not my own biggest fan.

I was shocked when Sam went out of his way to be nice to me. You never got the feeling, either, that he was doing it out of pity or that you should be grateful for the attention - he seemed genuinely interested in everyone he talked to. Although the kids in the back of the bus were undoubtedly being arses to impress eachother and the girls in their year, Sam was the hero of the younger boys and the main crush of the girls. He was definitely mine. I actually looked forward to getting on the bus once I got to know him. He had such a talent for cheering people up, he could make anyone smile and we were quite often in fits of giggles, sandwiches flying round our heads or not.

In England, at 16 years old you take your GCSE exams. Sam was in his GCSE year, which is why when he started having headaches, the doctor told him that it was probably stress. He finished the school year in June, telling us about the holiday to Canada that his parents had promised him as a reward for getting through his exams. When he got off the bus for the last time I wanted so badly to go and give him a hug and say thank you for being such a good friend, but I was still too shy. I distinctly remember thinking 'that's ok, I'll see him in September'. But on the plane to Canada a week later he started complaining of terrible pain in his head and being sick, and before the plane touched down at the airport on the other side of the Atlantic he had lost consciousness. He was rushed to hospital where he remained in a coma for three days before his parents were advised that he had suffered from brain death and there was nothing anyone could do.

I found out that he had died on the 26th June 1999, at a rehearsal for a ballet I was in. Our ballet teacher was a right old bat, and that's the most polite way of describing her. She had no patience for fuck ups, hormones, emotional distress, boy problems or anything that might get in the way of her classes or performances. So she was quite annoyed to find that every teenager in her production was in floods of tears all evening. I remember going into the dressing room at one point, feeling really numb and dizzy, and she came in and told everyone in there to stop being attention seeking, if we weren't in his actual class at school we didn't know him well enough to let it affect the rehearsal so we should get on with it. I believe I did get on with it, but only because for that evening everyone was in the same state and so supporting eachother, regardless of who they normally hung around with at school.

School the next day was horrible. Everyone on our bus was devastated, girls had to be sent home in hysterics, even I, usually unable to show any emotion in front of other people, had a panic attack in my German class when I found the image of a dead Sam lying in a coffin stuck in my head. The cool older kids were just as upset as the youngest bullying victims, as were the teachers, the dinner ladies, everyone. Me and some of the others in my year went to ask our year head if we could take the afternoon of the funeral off. Again, we got 'but you weren't in his year, you can't have known him that well, it might be disrespectful to his family' yadayada. For a change I stuck up for myself and everyone else there and said that we were going.

Sam's family asked that no one wear black to the funeral so I wore a green dress which used to belong to my mum. She took it in for me that morning. The small church two streets away from my house was literally packed, and I and some of the others from the bus sat on the floor near the back. Sam's head of year at school spoke of how everyone had loved him, how he wanted to be a policeman and he would have been so good at it, because he was amazing with people. He was so friendly, so kind, he approached everyone as an equal, showed no prejudices or regard for the complicated social hierarchies of teenage students. He was just an incredibly nice person - but not in a boring, dull, too-nice way, he was just...lovely. Everyone loved him. Everyone cried, it seemed - except me. I couldn't. I wanted to but I just felt numb. Every time I thought 'Sam is dead' a little rush of adrenaline exploded in my stomach - but although internally I felt like the world had fallen down around my ears, none of it showed on the outside. The girl who lived two doors away from me said that I can't have really cared about him, but most of the others were unusually understanding. I handed out tissues and held up other hysterical females instead. It was early July and as hot as England ever gets, so afterwards most of the kids from my year went into town to get some ice cream and sit on the beach. I was invited, and I walked most of the way there with them, but then I saw a headline about Sam on the local newspaper on a board outside a shop, and I left the rest of them to go for a dissociated wander on my own. I don't think I gave much of an explanation because later on one of the girls who had spent the previous three years bullying me actually phoned my house to make sure I was OK.

About a month later, I was on the school's German exchange programme, living with a host family in Hemsbach for a week. I don't think I was very with it at the time because I wasn't bothering with any of my usual tricks for hiding how little I was eating - even my host family got worried towards the end of the week and called one of the teachers who were with us. I remember the heat, the thunderstorms, talking to another guy called Duncan who had also known Sam, having a fight with one of the girls in my year about my not eating, getting drunk on Sambuca by the lake. I ended up with heatstroke on a day trip to Frankfurt and, sitting on the floor of the train station on our way back to Hemsbach, telling my German teacher that there were three of her before passing out and being virtually carried into the air conditioned first class area of the train. There, I finally cried and mumbled incomprehensively about Sam for the whole journey back.

Later that summer, at a choir rehearsal for a show we were taking to Eurodisney, I met another tall, blond, blue eyed guy who, despite looking like God's gift to women, treated everyone he met in the same way. I fell instantly in love with him and in a stunning display of disregard for my usual atrociously low self esteem, went out of my way to get to know him and succeeded in becoming friends with him. I finally asked him out five years later. He was my first and only serious boyfriend, Andy, the ex who has bipolar disorder. It took me years to realise why I'd latched on to him so quickly and intensely, why I hadn't let how much I hated myself at the time stop me from trying to get to know him. He wasn't Sam, but I loved him anyway.

I just wish I'd told the real Sam how much he meant to me when I still had a chance. Out of all the people in the world, why did it have to be him who died so heartbreakingly young? It's not fair. But then, death rarely is.

So, Sam, I can't speak for the rest of the people on the biscuit tin, but I imagine that I can't have been the only one whose life you enriched so much. You were a wonderful person, and even if the date of your death passes me by most years now, I could never forget you. If there is a heaven, you would be a shoo-in. I'm eight years older now than you will ever be, but I still think that you meant so much to so many people that you crammed more meaning and life into 16 years than many people do with 80. I would be honoured and know that my life was not a waste if I managed to touch just one person as deeply as you did me. I miss you, and I wish so much that I'd gotten to see who you would have grown up to be.

Grateful

I emailed my blog post from last night to my therapist this morning. Eating disorder, consider yourself told on. She replied really quickly to tell me that it was read and understood, and that it would be fine to email her anything else like that that I wanted to talk about in future sessions. Thank you all for your comments too, they were very much appreciated. I am really grateful to all of you who do read and leave replies by the way, I know I get a bit of a case of the deep and meaningfuls sometimes :p My blog IS positive 95% of the time but not in an upbeat and excitable way, if that makes sense. It doesn't often have pretty pictures or declarations of how amazing I feel. I don't feel amazing most of the time, but I do keep trying to untangle any problems I come up against, I keep eating and gaining weight however bad I feel, and I keep believing that full recovery is not only desirable but completely possible. And I am always honest. My blog is not going to win popularity contests this way, but that's never been my aim. It's meant to be a record of and a tool in my recovery, and it's meeting those purposes beautifully, so I will just keep going as I am if that's OK, soul searching and all :)

I am tired, shivery, overly emotional and anxious (my sister has a dodgy stomach so I am having fun with emetophobia this evening) so no epic from me today. I just wanted to say thank you for helping me feel less alone.

Three good things about today:
1. I am 99% sure that my periods will be back pretty damn soon. I have been feeling really chaotic and stressed out today. When I got home I asked mum when it was that I last mentioned feeling a bit PMS-y, and she confirmed that it was about four weeks ago, so there's a good chance that it really is hormonal. I like it when I have a reason for feeling crappy, it's always such a relief.
2. I met up with my friend Ella today which was really nice, and we have made a pact to meet up every week and go somewhere we've never been before in the local area. Sounds like a plan :)
3. I don't have to get up early on Saturdays to go to Tesco with my parents if I want to buy allergy friendly food now, I can drive there on my own whenever I run out of gluten free chocolate muffins!

Betrayal

Anorexia has a new trick. Apparently I am only doing well in recovery because I never had a 'proper' eating disorder in the first place. I just wasn't that ill. This is a variation on the theme that the eating disorder has been pushing all week: by gaining weight, I am betraying myself. When the eating disorder was first developing it was in response to being bullied at school from the age of 11-13. I was very depressed but wouldn't talk to anyone about it because I thought it was all my fault. I got a lot of reinforcing messages from my teachers, who told me that the other kids were 'just being girls', that I was oversensitive and melodramatic. The head teacher told my mum that 'there is no bullying in my school'. So it wasn't so weird that I decided that starving myself was the way to cope - not only did it make me numb and distract me from all the shit in my head, but it also promised to give me a real, physical, visible problem. Once I had a real problem that everyone could see, then I would be 'allowed' to ask for help. I had to deserve it first, though. To a certain extent that did happen. Not when I was a teenager, because I had EDNOS as a teenager and stayed within the same 10-15lbs, not ever getting to a healthy BMI but not quite into anorexic territory either. But when I was 22, suicidal and had been stuck on waiting lists for therapy for three years, after I lost a lot of weight for the first time suddenly people were rushing to help. I was referred to the local EDU really quickly and had a therapist who I really liked within weeks.

I'm not saying that my eating disorder was a ploy for attention. There was an aspect of that when I was a teenager, but by the time I was very underweight ten years later I wanted everyone to leave me alone because I didn't want to give the eating disorder up. Having regular contact with a therapist after being stuck on waiting lists for years was not something I wanted to give up either though, so I complied with the conditions I had to meet if I wanted to continue seeing her, went to the day hospital and gained some of the weight back. I hated every pound, none of it was for me. To start off with it was to avoid being chucked out of therapy and then later on I carried on gaining so I would be well enough to escape to York in the autumn.

This time things are obviously different, I am definitely doing it for myself. There will be no running away 300 miles up the country, and I pay my therapist so I get to say when I am ready to stop seeing her. But still, there is a voice in my head screaming at me that I am in emotionally dangerous territory now. In the last couple of weeks my BMI has crept over the magic 17.5 mark so I am no longer diagnostically anorexic. My period usually comes back at around a BMI of 18, so there will be another criterion gone in the next few weeks. This is great, this is what I've been working for. It's also scary as hell.

I don't know if anyone will understand what I mean when I say that by gaining weight, I feel like I am joining the chorus of voices who have invalidated my experiences over the years. I am taking my real, visible problem away from myself. I am taking away my right to be feel depressed and unwell, my excuse for not being able to cope, my obvious illness. I am left with crippling anxiety and recurring depression, none of which anyone can see and say oh yes, THAT'S why Katie can't do X/Y/Z, she is telling the truth about being ill. And on top of that, the emotions I have been anaesthetising with the anorexia for all this time are flooding back, and I am left to face them without the ways in which I have coped with them for more than a decade. It's no wonder I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed at the moment.

I always had a problem with therapists and self help books which told me that I needed to love and take care of myself, because I didn't see anorexia as a punishment. I saw it as a comfort: the way I took care of and protected myself. And conversely, in recovery, I feel like I am letting myself down. I feel like I'm punishing myself now, betraying myself. Leaving myself open and vulnerable to attack from external and internal forces. I've lost my armour.

At least this time I can put this into words. Last time I just panicked and relapsed. Now, I can see what's going on, and I know that feeling something doesn't make it fact. I'm not helpless, there are other ways to cope. At the moment there's not a lot to cope with anyway, other than the usual anxiety, and I'm used to dealing with that. The real problem is more fear of potential, future threats.

I have a very anorexic approach to life. I am rigid, inflexible and obsessive in thoughts and behaviour, and I avoid anything I perceive as a risk. Or at least, I have done for the last few years. Not any more though. I am not going backwards the second I come up against some uncomfortable emotions. They can't hurt me, they are just in my head. Just little electrical and chemical impulses. If I don't push them away and fight them they do pass eventually. It's being scared of them and forcing them into a little box in my head which turns them into monsters.

I am scared although there is nothing physical to be scared of. I just have to keep repeating, I am safe. I am OK. I can do this.


Three good things about today:
1. Being able to drive means that on therapy days I don't have to leave the house at 8.30am when mum takes the kids to school and spend the whole day in town - I can lie in!! Not that I did :p but I could have done!
2. Therapy was much more focussed than last week, I didn't just feel like I was blathering on about anything and everything.
3. Google. Every time I'm not sure how to spell something I google it :p it makes my life a lot easier!

*twitch*

I don't know what set it off this time, but I am having a hell of a time with the tic disorder at the moment. Did I ever mention that I have a tic disorder? It's a little like Tourette syndrome, but I only have motor tics (you have to have motor and phonic tics for a TS diagnosis) most of the time. It gets worse when I'm stressed, not eating properly, tired, ill, have been eating something I'm intolerant too or if I can see someone else ticcing. I always have at least one tic on the go though. When I was a teenager I had a lot of facial tics, which was...fun :p and blinking too much is still my most frequent tic, but there's also been frowning, curling either lip, dragging my foot, clenching various muscles, retching (not my favourite, with the emetophobia), kind of...clicking with my throat while I breath in before I can speak, touching things that I don't want to touch, counting letters in groups of three (sometimes it's hard to tell where the tic disorder ends and the OCD begins, although TS, OCD, and things like autism and ADHD have biological/chemical similarities apparently so that's not so surprising), inhaling sharply like a sort of inwards gasp...come to think of it, this disorder is a pain in the ass :p

It's not been too bad for the last few months as my tics have been confined to my calves. When I walk I must put terrible pressure on the joints in my legs because I am constantly tensing my calf muscles far too much. But in the last couple of weeks they have gotten loose again - lots of blinking, not being able to speak until I've 'clicked' enough, stuff like that. It's probably only a combination of my pass plus (driving on the motorway was exciting but stressful, ditto getting my car and driving solo) and the talks to the psychology classes, but it's doing my head in. My eyes hurt.

I saw a neurologist about all this a couple of years ago and he said there was medication I could take, but as long as it wasn't really interfering with my life I would be better off just trying to live with it. I was fine with that, it doesn't often interfere. It does make me look like a crazy lady sometimes, but I'm pretty adept at hiding it! It also gives me muscle strain sometimes - eyes and legs particularly - but it doesn't usually stay this intense for long. When I was on effexor my tics went completely nuts (yet another reason why antidepressants and I do not mix), I developed a stutter and it got so bad I couldn't speak for a day or so during the withdrawal - but that's the worst it's ever been and it calmed down again once I had been off the meds for a while. I hope that once the weather cools down a bit and I get more used to driving I can go back to keeping the monster locked up in my right calf again!

Yeah, not much point to that little moan. It's just annoying me. Sometimes I get disheartened by how much is *wrong* with me. Psychologically there's the anorexia, depression, OCD, PTSD, agoraphobia, emetophobia, panic attacks, generally worrying and thinking too much. Physically I have osteopenia, ten thousand food intolerances, IBS, the tic disorder (counted as physical as I see it as biologically based, not set off by trauma) and I'm absolutely covered in scars from when I used to self harm, on both my arms, both my legs and my stomach. I wish I could trade my body in for a new one. Some of the damage is my own fault. The osteopenia, digestive disorders and scars are direct consequences of the eating disorders and self harm. But then, the anxiety disorders and depression were what caused the anorexia and self harm, and those weren't my 'fault' - they certainly weren't within my control when I first started getting panic attacks at four years old, or OCD at six, palpitations at nine, depression at 11. Before a certain age you are just not equipped with the tools to cope with stuff like that. Enough adults struggle terribly with these disorders - kids don't stand a chance, particularly if no one realises what's going on. So many people on my mum's side of the family have mild to moderate anxiety or affective disorders that I really don't think she realised that it was out of the ordinary for her child to be having panic attacks at such a young age. No one's fault. Genes, eh? If only I could take mine to Oxfam and buy some new ones at Topshop :p

I don't really mind being me. There are benefits too. I am academically clever, quick to learn, creative. I am good at science, maths, music, art. If I am really interested in something I usually find that it comes quite easily to me. These traits help with the mental health problems. My default response to a problem is to beat it down with information and logic, and if you hit it hard enough even anorexia falls to that eventually. It wasn't that I didn't know how to recover before, I just didn't want to. Once I did, I set about trying to rewire my head and change my automatic responses to situations. The thought 'I have to lose weight' does not have me saying 'yes of course, how quickly would you like me to screw myself up this time?' anymore, the new reaction is 'that's a symptom and it can go fuck itself'! I am grateful for my analytical mind, even if it means that I do have a tendency to see my problems as intellectual challenges rather than things to feel my way through, which can cause difficulties.

I used to believe that I was irrevocably broken. I don't feel like that anymore, but I do wish that things were easier sometimes. If my head could have just limited itself to ONE mental health problem, rather than being greedy and trying several on for size. But there's no use complaining. No use having a 'why me' attitude. Why not me? Since I've had to fight for my life, I think I appreciate it much more. I am grateful to still be here, eccentricities and all.

Three good things about today:
1. I found acceptable sunglasses for driving in Boots for £5. Score! Most of the others were over £20.
2. Driving to the nearest big town on my own for the first time earlier :)
3. MY HAND IS NORMAL AGAIN!!! Thank goodness for that.

Have car, will travel...but where?!

Goodness, I can't believe it's July already, that's just crazy! I've been home from York for four and a half months now. If you want to see what a difference a proper calorie intake and a decent amount of weight restoration makes to a person's cognitive processes, read some of my first entries on this blog from February. They are all very short and sound like they were written by someone feeling terribly confused, desperate and hopeless. Which they were.

My car insurance certificate came in the post today so I went down town to get it taxed (£104.50 for six months - I know what I'm asking for as a Christmas present!) and then drove dad round the area for a few hours because he had some stuff to do and he paid for £100 of my car, so it's only fair. I'm not picking him up drunk from the pub though :p daughterly duties only stretch so far! It was fun, but I think my arm got sunburnt! I think it must be the hottest day of the year so far, it's 28C here at 6.15pm.

So, now I have my car, what am I going to do with myself? Hmm. Well, the local astronomy society has a talk on tomorrow evening, and a vegan and vegetarian group meets up for dinner on the first Friday of the month, so there are some ideas. I'm not sure I will go to either though. I almost wrote I'm not sure I can go to either but that's rubbish because clearly I COULD, the only thing stopping me is being a bit of a wuss. I will look into the astronomy meeting but the veggie dinner might have to wait until next month. Only capable of so much bravery in one go!

I just got back from my first solo drive. It was kind of scary, being in control of a ton of metal capable of death and destruction. I am the queen of dissociation though, so mostly I just sang loudly to drown my thoughts out and concentrated on the road. It was an adventure at first - I went to have a look in a new supermarket which opened in town today, and decided to come home via the town I was born in ten miles away! But after half an hour I started feeling a bit sad. I want somewhere to GO, and someone to go with. I have the freedom now, I just don't know what to do with it. I'm not sure where to start. More than that, I'm kind of scared of it. I've had an excuse not to get out there and do stuff so far, because I have been ill and because I had no transport - but now I'm a lot better and my car is all taxed, insured, legal and ready to go. What if in six months time I'm still spending all my evenings at home because I'm just not capable of making friends? What if I'm just...I don't know, unlikeable? I do know that I'm horribly out of practise with socialising. For the last two years I've really only had contact with my family and mental health professionals, although I do have a couple of really good friends who also have mental health difficulties who I feel comfortable around.

I know there's no pressure for me to get out there, no deadline I'm working towards. But there is...internal pressure, I guess. I really want to make new friends and have something to do with my evenings other than surf the internet, but at the same time I'm terrified of the idea too. It's like a mental tug of war. I'm shy, self conscious and always anxious around people I don't know - but I'm also lonely as hell. I feel so out of place, everywhere. I haven't finished an academic year since my A levels, 5 years ago, I've just kept trying stuff, getting ill and dropping out again. I don't have any experience of working, I don't have a degree, I don't have any friends locally, I have been single nearly two years...pretty much all the socialising and making new friends I've done in the last five years has been online, through various eating disorder communities. But now I don't even feel like I fit in there either. I left all the actual websites in March, including one which I'd been a member of for four years, where I'd met some really lovely people and received an awful lot of support. I enjoy blogging, but I still have that feeling of being on the outside looking in. I think I'm holding back a bit from getting really involved with blogging, because I know how easily I get obsessed with stuff and I can see myself being one of those people with a hundred people on my blogroll, making myself reply to all of them every day. I've been like that with online communities before and I don't want it to happen again, I want a life outside of the internet and outside of my house. Desperately.

If it's not obvious, I'm feeling very lost. I absolutely mean it when I say that although I have a way left to go with physical and behavioural aspects of recovery, I really feel that I've let go of anorexia emotionally - the idea that losing weight and being underweight are the answers to all my problems. This is wonderful, obviously, but it leaves some rather large gaps in my life. When I was anorexic I had things in common with a big group of people. I had something to cling to as an identity. I had a warped sense of self esteem from losing weight. And now - although I never want that lot back - I'm not really sure what's going to take its place, how I am going to connect with people outside of the context of eating disorders, and what I am meant to base my concept of myself on anymore.

Eh, enough answerless questions for now. I am going to set some goals for July :)
1. No consumption of eating disorder porn. I did a pretty good job of avoiding celebrity magazines in May (I never buy the things, I just seem to be drawn to headlines like 'X loses 20lbs in a week!!!' like a moth to a bloody flame) but in the last couple of weeks I've slipped a bit. So, no magazine articles, websites or TV programmes about diets or weight loss. No excuses.
2. Get to the point by the end of June where I don't weigh any of the stuff that goes into my snacks. I think stopping weighing meals would be a bit dangerous at the moment because I have a tendency to think I'm eating more than I am, but snacks are easier because there's no real need to weigh bananas, avocadoes, rice cakes, nut butters etc, I can judge portion size.
3. Stick to weighing myself once a week. I was doing it twice up until recently because I wanted to check that I wasn't screwing up and not eating enough, but I think I can trust myself enough now - since the end of March there has only been one time when I lost weight, and that was only a quarter of a pound. I ate more over the weekend and made up for it easily. Now when I want to weigh myself on a day other than Monday the thoughts running through my head are more along the lines of 'just to check I'm not gaining too much this week', which is dumb. So Mondays only.
4. Make use of my car - go to at least two new things this month, like the local anxiety disorder support group and the astronomy society meeting.

Not likely to set the world on fire with this lot, but they are all the things I need to work on most :)

Update on the hand: I have two and a half knuckles back to normal now and it hurts/itches a lot less, so hopefully it will be back to normal tomorrow! I hope so, I am really behind with other blogs now - typing one handed is a slow process!

Three good things about today:
1. CAR!!! I drove about 50 miles today, 20 of them completely solo. Wow.
2. The new supermarket in town, whilst small, does stock something that the one we go to for the big weekly shop doesn't - a box of allergy friendly chocolates! I bought some to...um...celebrate the opening of the shop :p yeah. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!
3. MSN is working well enough for me to actually have a conversation with Fiona at the moment - for the last week when mine works hers has been playing up and vice versa, d'oh!