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.