Still here ...

It's been over a month since I posted. I know, I know ...
I am still in California at A New Journey. After a few week stint in the day program I moved back to the night IOP, so my days feels rather empty. And that can be an issue. I try to fill them with meaningful things, but sometimes I still feel at a loss, chasing one meaningless activity after another just to fill the emptiness. Or worse, doing my eating disorder behaviors. Those take up a lot of time, and numb out the rest.
In group last Thursday, I did something I haven't really done in a while. I confronted my eating disorder, head-on, in person. It's a kind of psycho drama technique, in which first I took on the persona of my eating disorder voice and let it talk, and then someone else took on that persona, and as myself I confronted it. It was rather like confronting a beloved one who's really not good for me, like an addictive, abusive relationship with a seducer. I told it I was in love, crazy love I was coming to realise wasn't good for me. As much as the eating disorder gave me, even more it took away. I came to realise that numb isn't the same as feeling good. Sure, it's status quo for me, but it isn't living. I still love my addictive behavior but I want to explore other options now. That, anyway, was the gist of the conversation.
I'm coming to realise how hungry I am for life. I haven't truly lived in over six years. There have been glimpses, little tastes of life, but nothing continuous. I'm tired of that. I want to eat life up, I'm so hungry to live. I'm tired of empty and numb. It's comfortable and familiar, but it's no longer working too well.

Tired

I am nearing the end of my rope. Having an eating disorder and trying to be in treatment for it is completely exhausting, especially when I continue to act out in the disordered behavior every few days. I long for some kind of break, just a little rest from it all.
So the eating disorder comes in, seductive, telling me I can numb it all away with just a little using. And I give in, again and again, forgetting on purpose so easily how short-lived the benefits are and how awful I feel afterward, how the guilt and shame I feel only perpetuate the cycle. I forget, and I give in. Because I do want a break, and I push away the thought that what I am doing to escape is the very thing I am trying to escape from. The only way I know to rid myself of the insanity is to participate in it. I wake up every morning feeling like I absolutely must act out. I go to sleep every night thinking of how the next day I might, and then some nights I even dream about it. It's horrible, it's crazy, and this is my life. I want out.
Like I said, I'm nearing my end. I don't have much more strength to fight this. Which means I either give in ... or I lean on other people and more than that, I lean on God. Which I hate doing. But I am going to have to do something ... I am tired.

Memory

Over four months ago I entered treatment once again, having hit a very low bottom. I was desperate and going to treatment seemed like the only way out. My eating disorder had taken complete control, and I was spending my entire paycheck on bingeing and purging or alcohol if I ate at all. There was no money for rent or bills, no time or energy for friends, family or work. I spent my time in obsession, depression and anxiety. My body was tolerating the abuse, but barely. It was in survival mode, and eking out an mere existence was all I could do. It hardly seemed worth it to keep going. I wanted to escape -- and treatment seemed a little more hopeful than death. So I went. Now here in California, it's difficult to remember that time. The physical and temporal distance keep the memories at bay. I am finding that I need to remember that time now, however painful it was. I want to keep it at a distance, I don't want to recall that pain and despair, yet if I do not keep it ever present in my mind, I will forget what is waiting for me should I choose my eating disorder. I chose to restrict a meal today. In my insane thinking I simply want to be a little thinner. I've been struggling with a severe case of bad body image . It feels miserable. I am certain I look exactly like a pregnant manitee. I wanted a little relief, and I knew what was guaranteed to work. I don't eat, I get smaller, presto, chango... except it isn't that simple and it isn't that benign. For me the delusion that being thinner will make everything feel better is life-threatening. This is exactly when I need that memory of what I came from, and I'm having a difficult time crossing the distance between my present and my recent past. I catch myself thinking that it wouldn't hurt to "do a little" of my eating disorder, in whatever form it takes that day (it's sneakily chameleon-like). I forget so easily that this same idea is what has led me into despair, near to death, and of course many bouts in eating disorder treatement. There's an enormous gap between my present urges to act out and the consequences they will inevitably incur. I act as if it doesn't matter what I do now, but it matters immensely to my recovery. Every meal I hold my life in my hands. How could I not remember that? Yet still I forget, still I have this disconnect, and still I struggle to bridge the gap between my present, my past and my future. I don't understand why. I suppose the immediate relief seems so enticing I can fool myself into thinking the consequences are avoidable. My disorder seems friendly and comforting in the face of discomfort and pain, or frankly any emotion at all. I know, I know it's a liar, a life-snatcher, a cruel beast ... and so forth. I have a lot of inappropriate-to-write epithets with which to address it. The point is I cannot, absolutely cannot forget what I came from and how close I am, every day, to going back to that and worse. I cannot forget that the eating disorder lie, a beautiful fantasy though it be, is nothing more that a filthy life-sucking lie.

Home

I arrived in Santa Monica, California two days ago. Since then I've felt pretty lost. I didn't realise how safe Wickenburg felt until I left it, though I ought to have known given how many times I've been discharged from treatment. Here, with only programming in the evenings, and a lot less structure, it feels scary and unfamiliar. I'm not having an easy transition so far, and I can only hope that it improves quickly. I've been pondering the concept of "home" lately. I think I'm homesick, but I'm not sure what home is anymore. I have nothing job or housing-wise to return to in Colorado. I know I feel terribly out of place here in California. It's not exactly my comfort zone -- I'm not stylish, I'm not a skinny beach babe, I have little interest in the fashion or film industries -- these are the things you expect out of a California girl, no? So I feel out of place for that reason. I feel out of place because I'm new at this treatment program, and I know very few people and am close with even fewer. The idea that everyone else is in a clique I can't break into has haunted me most of my life, and here I am, dealing with it again. When I think back, however, I wonder if that's all there is behind this feeling of displacement, restlessness and lostness. Is it just the location, or is it me? I don't remember truly feeling like I belonged somewhere for a long time -- not since before I was kicked out of my family home. I've had other "homes" but even in those places I felt odd. My last place I stayed for nearly six months and refused to fully unpack my boxes. It wasn't home and I knew, subconsciously at least, I didn't belong. It was much the same with the two places I lived before that, and when I stayed in the upper classroom in my church for several months that was obviously not home. I didn't even have a key. I guess the point is that I'm carrying something with me, some intangible baggage I can't unpack, or won't. I don't have that sense of security anywhere. I don't feel at home inside my own body and mind. I feel lost inside my own self, and constantly want to run away from myself. In the past I did that with my eating disorder. In a very real way the disease became my home, the one place I could run to and feel a little safety. It provided security, familiarity, a sense of rightness to my life -- never forgetting the numbing effect it had. It makes sense that I'm so lonely now, without it available for me to use. Now I wonder, were I okay with who I am, if I had some sense of direction and purpose for my life, would I be able to carry a sense of home with me? Would the restlessness that makes me wander the streets aimlessly just to kill time be replaced with some kind of agenda for the day, some kind of purposefulness? I would hope that. I suspect that until I can firgure out who I might possibly be and accept it, with both the positive and negative, I may feel lost no matter where I am.

Surrender

When I think of total surrender my mind floods with panic. The idea of utterly letting go of my illusions of control frightens me beyond belief, makes me want to grab a shred, any shred, of control back as fast as I can. I hold it tightly, as if in a toddler's clenched fist, and throw a tantrum if anyone tries to wrest it from me. I'm very immature in that way.
The eating disorder has been and is still so hard for me to fully surrender. When I let a little bit of it go, let go of it's most overt behaviors, I grasp onto isolation and fleeing the scene both figuratively and literally. Always there is something I feel I have to hang on to. It's a push-pull, constantly --let it go, snatch it back, over and over again. This frustrates me because with my perfectionism I feel I have to surrender completely, all at once, perfectly. I can't make mistakes. I have been told surrender looks more like stepping back, taking my hands off the situation and asking someone to help me -- yet still in my perfect world I would step back once and that would be done. The truth is I have to do this over and over again, each day my disorder beckoning and each day having to say no. My head agrees with this, but my heart falters, my mind races, and inside I can't imagine myself truly letting go.
Yet I know, when I come to my end, I have no other choice, I have no other recourse. I have tried so hard, so hard to manage the eating disorder on my own, tried to balance life with addiction. I have tried to hang on to bits and pieces of it, and always the bits and pieces end up dragging me back into the black hole of my disease. It never works and yet continuously it asks me, why not try again? Maybe this time it will work. The maybe never happens, my life becomes more unmanageable and my fears get bigger and once I begin I can't stop. I can't stop! This is no prescription for life, this is my disease and as they say in AA, it is cunning, baffling and powerful. In the end, whenever and wherever I find it, my only way out is to surrender to a higher power, whether that be God or simply the treatment team he has placed in my life for now.
Maybe it's not so much an unclamping my toddler's hands from around the eating disorder, but of allowing someone, something, to gently and patiently pry my fingers away from the pacifier. Maybe it's allowing someone, something else to comfort me in the absence of my usual tools, trusting that this strange new tool I am given may work given a chance. Rarely if at all have I given recovery a chance to work. I run headlong back to my old ways, hoping they won't be so hurtful this time, hoping for the relief I remember and fantasize about, hoping for a miracle. The miraculous relief of the eating disorder doesn't come the way it used to. The price I pay for it has become greater and greater and will eventually cost me my life. My life, do you understand, do I understand? I used to think all I had was my eating disorder and if I left go of it nothing would be left of me. In reality my life is all I have and if I cannot, if I will not begin to surrender my will and my life over to the care of a God other than my disordered idol, I will lose my life. Truly a sobering thought, surrender or die. Like in a war -- I am in a war, and I guess now is a good a time as ever to pick sides.

Pact

Honestly? Honesty and transparency? When that was first asked of me I thought I was, figuratively, being asked to strip naked in public. Heck, I might as well be gutted and hung out to drain, because there would be nothing left of me without my secret thoughts and my secret behaviors. Eating disorders live and thrive in the dark. They feed on half-truths, lies, deception and secrets. There is a secret pact between myself and my addiction, a promise for each to never betray the other. I've tried so hard to keep it in the past, hiding the eating disorder under the flimsiest of excuses and the most complex lies, until even I am mentally dizzy. Who did I tell what? When and where did I do what and who might have seen or heard me? It's mentally and physically exhausting, playing the game of protection and deception.
The sad fact is, though I've tried to keep the pact and never betray my disorder, it has already betrayed me. What promise did it give me that it's kept? A better body? Love and acceptance? Peace? Simplicity? A solution to all my problems? Whatever the promises it may have kept, to whatever degree, they come at far too high a price. The eating disorder never revealed the most secret part of the pact to me. I had to discover those lines, written in invisible ink, that took my health, my happiness, my functionality, my ability to give and recieve love, and so much more, until the final clause -- my life. I thought when I was in my eating disorder I was free. Truly, I have never been less so.
So how to break the pact? How to free myself from those hidden clauses? I believe it begins with a counter-betrayal of the eating disorder, turning it in and calling out it's lies and deception again and again. In short, the freedom lies in honesty. Honesty and transparency with myself, and with my support and treatment team. I need to reveal each thought and behavior the addiction cries out for me to conceal. Give me just this one, it pleads with me, let me keep just this one secret between us, it won't hurt anything, it's so little. Just give in a little, lie a little ... until the small things grow and I'm back in the web of deception, back in slavery to the secret pact. I know where it leads.
This doesn't mean I always am honest and transparent. I struggle with keeping the secrets. I struggle to remember that the eating disorder has already betrayed me, that it not only wants me to lie for it, but it also continuously lies to me. It can do nothing but lie. How could I forget that? How could I forget the secret clause that gives me over, body and soul, to something unspeakably evil? Yet still I forget, I fall, I lie, I give in and cover up. But now the difference is, I uncover the eating disorder too. I try to be honest. Truly my conscience tortures me, and the lies eat away at me until I come clean. So I am learning ... honesty and openness, and a slow death to the addition's secret agreement.

Memory

If I haven't written much lately -- and I haven't -- it's because my life here has taken on something of a repetitive nature. I'm not bored, but even my struggles have a tinge of familiarity to them. Depression, I know you. Bad body image, check. Food struggles, little slips, I remember how it goes. I know this path because in some way I have been here before.
I had a routine before I came into treatment -- a routine of serial, self-inflicted abuse. Wake up, barely in time for daddy to pick me up for work, skipping breakfast entirely. Work itself was routine, taking call after call until the names and details blended together, and I felt numb and useless. After work I'd be drawn irresistably to the grocery store or a restaurant to pick up binge food. Binge followed binge, and then came the inevitable chore of finding a secluded bathroom where I'd purge until my stomach was empty and I was exhausted. I'd go home or to various appointments, then spend the evening secluded in my room while my roommates, who were dating each other, did their own activities, whether that be screaming at each other or flirting while making dinner. I'd go out for dinner and binge and purge more, or buy wine and drink until I fell asleep, only to dream restless dreams that woke me at two in the morning. I would binge and purge in the middle of the night, then sleep to wake up unrefreshed, dreading the cycle's beginning again.
The panicky thoughts of whether to not eat or binge and purge never stopped. Work thoughts, friend thoughts, family thoughts -- all were concurrent with a constant stream of abusive mental dialogue about food, my body, my depression. You suck, you piece of trash, you are a food-whore, disgusting and worthless, a complete failure, your life is meaningless, you should just give up -- over and over, interrupting what little life I had and destroying me from inside.
I dread going back to that, though in truth I still have not left it behind. The mind-chatter from the eating disorder is constant and steady, though some days not as loud. I am no longer so helplessly driven by it, but I fear that the semblance of order my life has taken is merely a byproduct of treatment. My mind is still very disordered, though my body is beginning to heal. I am slipping even here, fiddling with my meal plan, and it seems small but it isn't. Nothing is small when it's driven by an eating disorder mind set.
I am visiting home next weekend, and I am afraid. My new patterns are so shaky and formless. Can they stand up to the memories I will face as I go back to the place I left so sick? Facing home will be a true test of my recovery. So many places and people have a painful and shamelful significance for me. This is the bathroom where I purged so often, this is my therapist's office, this is the path I used to walk in the middle of the night to buy binge food, this is the grocery store I shoplifted food from, that's the restaurant I binged at and this is the one I was too terrified to try ... so many memories. Will the new pattern hold? How strong are the new thoughts, and how strong are the eating disordered ones? Am I brave enough, strong enough, willing enough to try something new? Or will I fall back on the comfort and familiar numbness of my disease?

Falling

I woke up yesterday morning, and I was still in Arizona. I hate that some days, because it reminds me that I'm still sick, though I'm trying to get well. I woke up and remembered the thing I was trying to forget. I binged and purged in the early, early hours of the morning. I wanted to forget it, pretend it didn't happen and I didn't fall into my disease once again.
It had been about four weeks since I last did it. I was reaching my threshold of the longest time I've been without it, and the urges were getting stronger, stronger and louder. I don't understand why I gave in. I feel like a failure. I know it's not failing but it feels that way. it's hard for me to pick myself up after a fall like that. Extreme thinking tells me to just throw my recovery in the trash and do it again, and again, to wallow in my shame and misery and then numb it off with binging and purging. It tells me I'm a worthless failure, that my recovery is a lie.
I know this thinking is the real lie, but it's enticing nonetheless. It would be so easy to give up and listen again. I can't. I won't. I've come too far and I know too much of the truth to be happily, numbly blind again. I can pick myself up from this fall and begin again.

Relationship

Last night I went to an AA meeting with a few girls from the program. The topic was relationship, and made for a very insightful meeting. After dinner, we saw a late movie, just a chick flick really. Behind all the sex and cussing and cute comic dialogue the message I gleaned was this: If you're afraid of being hurt, try not to fall in love. Because love and relationships in general require feeling, and that includes pain.
After the movie, before which I drank far too much coffee, I was at home trying unsuccessfully to sleep. I had one of those 3 am epiphanies or something, at least my mind managed to connect the movie to AA and all I have begun to learn the past six or so years I've had or tried not to have an eating disorder. I realised that a relationship of any kind, with anyone, is a reflection of my relationship with myself. This could be why I'm not very good at them. For so long I've avoided, run from, hated myself. I really couldn't, and still sometimes can't, stand being me. Sometimes I'll avoid being friends with a certain person because they remind me so much of those parts of myself I dislike. This actually happened recently at the Capri. Sometimes someone reminds me of my own pain and I start acting codependent, wanting to save them. Other relationships are shallow, surfacy, what-are-you-doing-lately sorts, and I never get to know the actual person. We only talk about what we have in common or the simple easy topics because at least for my part, I'm afraid to reveal myself any more deeply. I have had very few deep relationships, in which each party feels and shares their inner world with the other. I have very rarely been truly known or truly known anyone. So perhaps it's no wonder that the movie left me, as is typical, feeling depressed and love-hungry and pessimistic. Whenever is love going to show up in my life like that?
Until I begin to have that deep knowing relationship with myself, I don't think any real love is possible. Until I allow myself to accept my flaws, how could I recognise and still accept the flaws in another person? Until I face my own hurts, what possible empathy or help can I offer to a fellow hurting human?
This was a depressing realisation at first, given that I don't really love or accept myself, and don't even know myself terribly well. I hardly know how to begin. The possibility of love, romantic or otherwise, felt very far off. But I think now that there must be hope, because of God. He doesn't have my flaws-- he can do what I can't. He can accept my broken, messed up, rebel heart and love it anyway. He knows me deeply and doesn't draw himself away or become codependent. He just loves, because he is love. He loves with all the range of feelings from anger to joy to pain, and doesn't stop loving for any one of them. So gradually, as I am loved and known, I can practice relationship with a perfect yet perfectly emotional being. As this happens, maybe I can begin to have that relationship with myself. And perhaps, if I let it, the deep relationships with other humans will be possible.

Shopping

I went clothes shopping yesterday. For a normal person this can be stressful and depending on how the clothes look, even depressing. For me, with a newly acquired healthy body, it was devastating. Imagine not knowing exactly how much your body has grown in six weeks, and being confronted with a full length mirror in a dressing room, stripped down to your underwear with every new bulge hanging out for the mirror to mock. Then imagine not knowing what size clothes to pick, being used to the old body, and trying on item after item that was simply too tight in front of that same mirror. I haven't felt the same since.
I confess I have spent a lot of time critiquing myself in the mirror since I went shopping. Even when I'm not in front of the mirror I am hyper-aware of the flesh that wasn't there before, the way it clings to me in the most awkward of places, places I am horribly self-conscious about. To be honest, I miss my old, sick body. I'm not used to this one, and right now there are a lot of things I hate about it. I miss lying in bed, starving from having restricted all day or binged and purged, and feeling the flatness of my belly, the way the hipbones jut out, the fist size gap between my thighs. I felt uncomfortable then, but the thinness of my body comforted me. But even then, I wasn't enough. I could always be thinner, starve better, do better at work, relationships, money handling, you name it. I was always inadequate. I used to say I'd always be unhappy, so I might as well be skinny and unhappy than fat and unhappy.
It's hard to stay in recovery with such thoughts. I try to turn them around, now, but they always come back. The last thing I wanted to do after the shopping day was eat my lunch. I wanted badly to slip into my eating disorder. It promised to take the pain away, and make me skinny again. I know it's a complete lie, but tantalizing nonetheless. I forget all the horrible consequences the eating disorder brings, and I romanticize it and mourn its loss. But I know in my heart that going back is not what I want. It's only that it's going to take a while to get used to being healthy. Til then, maybe I don't need too many new clothes.

Change

I'm not very good at change. It's something that brings up almost a visceral reaction in me, something I want to resist with all my energy. I used to think that I was flexible and I was fine going with the flow, but since starting treatment six years ago I have learned that is not the case. Small changes I can make without pain, like alterations to my schedule. External changes, changes in the environment or other people, I can handle. But changes in me? Ouch. Something inside of me screams when changing something about me, the way I think and operate and believe, becomes necessary.
Being in treatment demands change, an abrupt change of the daily addict's routine to a treatment routine, a change from so-called autonomy to following a treatment teams rules and recommendations. Recovering truly from an eating disorder requires even more. I am challenged here to change my very thoughts and beliefs, or at least entertain the idea that they may not be accurate. I am challenged to make long term changes to my schedule, my eating habits, my relationships and my living situation, any one of which may be unhealthy to leave as is and lead me into a relapse.
Case in point, and ever present in my mind, is following a meal plan. I am a self-identified meal plan rebel. I hate that meal plan passionately, and I want to eat when I want and what I want -- indicative of my rebellious lifestyle in general. Which is a problem, given that in my disorder I wanted either nothing at all or a whole grocery bagful and then some. The meal plan keeps me safe and regulated, but I feel so inhibited and controlled by its sensible regularity. I want excitement and thrills out of my eating experience (and I wonder if that's because I didn't allow myself any thrills from any other experience -- talk about ascetic!). But those thrills were unhealthy, and I am beginning reluctantly to accept that I am doomed to follow a meal plan for a while if I want to live a life of recovery. I am simply not capable of feeding myself following my own instincts right now. So every time I go to eat, I eat what is prescribed, and my little rebel whispers in my ear how unhappy it is all the while.
That's just an example, but the point is, it's hard to change, even if it's for the better. I am comfortable in my self-destructive patterns of eating. I am still more comfortable in my negative thinking. I've had it most of my life. But in order to have the rest of my life, I have to change, and as much as I protest and try to buck the saddle of change, God keeps gently laying it back on. A bad metaphor, but it works. Change is painful and uncomfortable, but a necessary part of a recovered life.

Fears

"Fear not."
What a hard command that is for me. I am full of fear, especially now. I may be leaving treatment or stepping down to a lower level of care. I don't know for sure -- I'll find out more tomorrow -- but the uncertainty is driving me crazy. I'm so frightened. I don't feel ready at all. I've slipped several times, the last only a few days ago, and my recovery is fragile. I know what to do to get back on my feet, I know what I need to do to stay in recovery, but what I don't have is the experience of doing it.
I've relapsed so many times now that I don't care to count. I don't want to go back to the miserable eating disorder hell I came from, yet the disorder still has a steely grasp on my mind and heart, and part of me still longs for it. Things were miserable, but so simple with it. I didn't have to face all the spectrum of feelings. I didn't have to face myself, I didn't have to face life, temporarily. So the eating disorder calls me, every day. Binge, purge, restrict, it's ok, it's just one time, no one will catch you. Beat yourself up, call yourself a fat stupid ugly bitch, it's what you are. You don't deserve anything good, you failed piece of crap. Day in and day out, the voice in my head tells me it's gonna get me eventually, that I'm a failure and will never succeed. Not at recovery, not at life. It frightens me how strong the voice is still, and how much I still buy into it.
The other voices, faint in my head but present nonetheless, tell me I'm buying into lies. I am a valuable, precious child of God, redeemed and dearly loved, and with God I can make it in life and recovery. I believe these sometimes. I am afraid to believe them all the time, afraid of what that might mean if I did. Afraid of success, I think, as weird as that sounds. I'm used to and comfortable with failure. No one expects anything of a failure.
So here I am, caught in between the fear of my eating disorder and the fear of living life. Caught between fear of surrender and fear of the prison I already know in the eating disorder. I guess I have a choice to make. For now, I choose to live, and little by little surrender my fears to the only One who can truly handle them. It's hard, and in a few seconds I'll probably try to take them back, because I know them and they're weirdly comfortable. But for now, I just want to rest and let Him handle it. Fear is very tiring.

New Year

I don't believe in New Year's resolutions. I only set myself up for failure and disappointment, expecting myself to keep them perfectly when nothing, in reality, is done perfectly. I believe in dreams, goals and hopes... but I hardly know what to hope for or dream of any longer.
The past six years in my eating disorder have been so other than what I thought my life would be. I find myself a little jaded about making any new plans. What if they all come crashing down, just like so many tries before? I get paralysed so often by fear of failure. It's scary for me to put my fragile little wishes for the future out there, knowing that I myself am the one who destroyed them before, knowing that it could happen again. So I hesitate. Dare I dream of a place of my own, school, a real career, travel, even love and friendship and happiness? I want to dream, and I want to be well, but how much is too much to ask? When asked in group what I wanted to be doing this time next year, I froze. I really was afraid to picture it, because what if it weren't that way and I disappointed myself again?
Don't get me wrong. I haven't given up hope by any means. I'm only saying that with a life like I've had these past years, and my recovery so fragile, my hopes and dreams must for now be very small. They have to be achievable, picturable. I hope that I won't purge tonight. I hope that I'll progress in treatment. I hope I can open my Bible a few times this week. Little steps, see, are all I can manage. As they say in AA, one day at a time. Maybe one hour or minute or meal. And maybe that's ok for now. The dreams will come.