Push A Little Harder...Get A Little Thinner

{January 6, 2009} Almost A Year Has Passed…

It’s been almost a year now, and although the environment which brings me down so much hasn’t changed, I have done something about it. Over the summer following the last entry, I had some of the best days in a long time. The relationship between me and my boyfriend really took off, and we are still together now. I’ve been with him for just over a year and four months now. I turned 17 in August, and where I have never been able to commit to someone, somehow I have found a stability and safety in him. He makes me smile and I feel warm when I’m with him.

My eating habits are still as bad as they were, probably more disordered actually, but I’m more accepting of it now, and it’s a coping mechanism which I can turn on and off. I don’t think about calories every second of every day, but I do fast sometimes for over a week without anything more than a drop of water. But I know when to stop. I smoke a little now, and a lot of weed. I think it has helped with the transitions between how I was then and how I was now.

I get more panic attacks than before, but I’m not as depressed. I have a week in about two months where I’ll go into a slump and feel shit and not get out of bed, but that’s a massive improvement on before. Sometimes I don’t even get that – I only get depressed at home. I realised that, and so I moved out.

I live with my family in the holidays but in term time I live with my boyfriend in his University halls. The Uni he goes to is really close to where my family live and it’s really easy to get to college from there because there are direct buses. The system works perfectly. My dad let me live with him when I said I needed to go, because he realised how hard it would be for me to go back to college with the situation at home as it was. My parents are splitting up officially now, and I have to say I’m relieved. I feel guilty that I’ve left my sister with the whole thing, but I think she can cope. I just know that I can’t.

My mum has always had a drinking problem but it’s just got so much worse that I can barely look at her. My dad however, who I never got along with and who always treated me like I was never good enough, seems to have been kicked in the backside my ”suicide attempt” and has been wonderful. He tells me he loves me and worries. The worrying isn’t great, but when you come from a family who never say “I love you”, it means a hell of a lot.

I put “suicide attempt” in marks because I don’t really consider it as such. I think it is far more insane than any ‘normal’ suicide attempt. I don’t think that I’m insane – don’t all mad people say that? anyway – but ‘normal’ suicides can be done by any desperate person. You only have to find yourself on the edge to have the courage to jump. A perfectly stable person could go through an experience which just leaves them shattered and teetering on the brink of darkness, and they might just decide in that fatal moment of desperation that the prospect of fighting through it is too bleak. Mine wasn’t like that. I was clear-headed and calm, I hadn’t taken anything or drank anything, I wasn’t unhappy, I wasn’t angry…I wasn’t really anything associated with suicidal.

I just decided that I felt nothing for my life. I had a little tiny bit of wonderful in it – my boyfriend – and a lot of shitty in it – my family and college and me. It countered each other out in the end and I just felt numb. There was nothing there at all, and all I wanted was to feel some sort of passion for my life. Whether that passion was to die, or to live, it didn’t matter – as long as I FELT and WANTED something. The depression had killed all of my dreams and my hopes and I had nothing to wish for. Nothing seemed worth getting out of bed for. So I decided to force myself to choose. To place myself on the edge of death, with a breathing space of time in which I could back out. I would wait an hour or two for the pills to kick in, and then choose. If I didn’t choose then, I would die, and if I decided that I didn’t want that to happen, then I would tell someone and get myself pumped.

It was even more masochistic than that though, because I wanted to feel pain either way. If I had wanted to die I would have had to go through such prolonged, agonising pain that would last days until I finally died. It would be slow and it would make me regret it. I would suffer – that was the point. If I was to put the people around me through my suicide, I would damn well suffer for it. Not because I wanted to be a martyr, but because that was the logic of the time. Of course I was too self-involved to realised that an agonising death would only hurt those that loved me more. But the logic of the time was that they would be hurt either way, and at least this way I paid for it and there wasn’t any mess. If I chose to live, then I would have to suffer having my stomach pumped or such like, and I would have to have all of my secrets revealed and go through psychiatrists and psychologists and have my family know everything. This was almost harder to deal with than the first punishment.

I did go through the councelling, even though it was me and my parents that sorted it out – the hospital took one look at me and assumed that it was attention seeking and left it at that – they didn’t listen to my story at all. I went through all that hassle – they never found out that much about the E.D. stuff; they found a form I’d been sent to fill out, but didn’t read the whole thing and only got as far as ‘personal image’. They thought I was the same as every other teenage girl thinking she was fat. I was somewhat disappointed that they didn’t care enough to bother to read the whole thing. They might have learnt something. All this, and because I have a fear of things going wrong with my eyes. When I’d waited an hour and a half, my eyes went blind with white spots and I couldn’t see. It was this that made me ask for help. Not because I wanted to live. It was the reactions I got from my boyfriend and my family that made me want to live. Mainly from my boyfriend. Because he’s the one that really loves me and accepts me. He saved me really.

I haven’t cut in months, and the last time I did was only the one session and before that there were months where I didn’t either. That seems to have passed. I won’t say it’s gone because I don’t know what might happen to provoke it, but for now, I feel okay. Not great, but okay. As long as I’m away from that environment, I can survive it.

{April 12, 2008} Broken.

You know the type of crying where it reaches your stomach and you can’t stop or breathe? I’ve been like this for about half an hour now. I wanted a family bike ride and I got it. I just wanted everyone to be happy. Together. It obviously isn’t meant to be because it couldn’t have gone more wrong.

My sister ruined it by getting angry and childish and running off. Well, cycling off, but it’s the same thing. Only, it got worse because it started to rain, and instead of staying in the car and waiting for it to pass like my parents (and I had the plans not changed), she decided to go all attention seeking and cycle off. So I followed her because she had refused to wear her helmet because it was making her ‘hot and faint’ – again, it’s early april in england and its raining. Only, not only did it rain, it hailed.

So we’re out there on the track in the pouring rain and spitting hail, her only wearing a little top and tracksuit bottoms. She thinks she’s so cool. She did all of it just to piss us off. I know she did, a stranger would have known the signs. Typical teen. Fun, yeah? Hardly.

We got back, and sat in the car. It stopped raining. She started jumping about all hyper, rubbing our annoyance and upset in our faces as she sang made up tunes. I sat in the car as they put the biked back on the rack. We couldn’t keep going now, we were soaked – her especially. Had she not acted like a self rightous idiot we could have carried on. But no.

I sat there, and I started to cry. No one knew – far too preoccupied. It became obvious though, even though I had my hood pulled over my head, because I didn’t stop the entire 30 minutes drive home. Not counting the time before we left. And after, when I had to sit alone in the garden because I couldn’t wait for them to open the door before another burst came.

When she got into the car, everyone was so annoyed with her. Dad was furious. We were soaked through and I was clearly livid. It was only when she said, “how come when I do a “stupid thing” I get shouted at, but when she does, she gets pity?”. I told her to f**k off, (I really was livid, it had brought back all my anger that I find so hard to deal with as it is), and she replied, “why don’t you just go take some pills?”

And then everything turned. Anger disappeared to be replaced by this heartwrenching pain inside me that I have tried so hard to deny. I have tried so hard to be happy, to be better, and I don’t know if I can do it anymore. I have tried and tried, and all I wanted was to make everything better after what happened.

My throat is caught and I can’t breathe.

All I ended up thinking, and I would cry when seeing where I was still, was, “if only I had waited a couple more hours, I wouldn’t be here right now. The pain would have gone and they would be burying me in the ground, instead of trying so hard to love me. If only…if only…if only I hadn’t asked for help.”

All I can see is endless weekends lasting forever and never ending. Weekends where I see people that ‘love’ me, and try to be happy. Weeks and weeks and weekends and weekends of trying and trying to be brave and keep smiling. But it isn’t fake smiles now, because that isn’t the point. It has to be real, I have to be better. I don’t think I can though. I don’t think I’ll ever be better.

I’m a wreck. She’s right. I’m pitiful.

{April 10, 2008} “Past Councelling”

They don’t know why I did it. I don’t really think I know why I did it. But none of that changes the fact that…well, I did it. I took the 80 paracetamol pills and I sat down, ready to wait for a week for death to come. Everyone is baffled as to why I did it, because it was a normal day, and there was nothing to provoke it, nothing at all.

There were no arguements, nothing happened that would upset me; it was a very average, normal day. The rage inside me had been building but it was at a plateau at that point. I didn’t feel anything particular that would make me make such a decision. Yet, I did make the decision.

To me, it was just a game. Once I opened the first pill wrapper, I wouldn’t be allowed to stop. Once that first one had been opened, I had to take them all. It wasn’t questionable. I didn’t even think that I had a choice about that. Once the first one had been breached, the rest would follow, that was how it would be and there was nothing I could do to stop it, even though I was the one initiating it all, even though I was the one in control.

There is nothing like attempted suicide to realise your own mortality, and your own power.

I sat on my bedroom floor, and I had a plan. It was easy and it had already formulated itself before I had even thought it out properly. I would take them in tens, and I would unwrap them first, and then swallow them together. Once the first pill was unwrapped it was easy to unwrap the others, and place them beside each other, one by one. Before I knew it, there were ten pills in front of me, waiting to be swallowed. It was just a game, so swallowing them down was easy. There were no tears.

I had cried before I had started the game, in my clear moment, but they had quickly subsided.

I went through the eighty pills easily. It didn’t hurt. I didn’t feel scared or worried or upset. I was fine. This was how it was meant to be. This was how you played the game.

I waited for half an hour, thinking about what I had done. Then I waited for another half hour, accepting my choice. You see, the game was this: if I died; I died. If I lived; I lived. It wasn’t about the end result, because I didn’t care enough about my life to care about that. It was about my strength, and the fight in me.

If I got to a point where I decided I wanted to live, I would have to fight for it. I would have to fight hard, and I would have to give all my secrets and my previous life up to live again. I would have to sacrifice and be honest and I would have to go through pain and humiliation to live. It would be my punishment, but it was in the rules. If I decided that I wanted to die, then I would die a painful, slow death, and that in itself would be punishment before I was finally let go. Let out of my misery.

I would have to fight to live. Or suffer to die.

Both seemed fitting.

Only it didn’t work out that way. I have a thing about my eyes; I don’t like them being messed with. So when after an hour, my eyes started burning and blurring and the light in the room (which was dull) burning into my eyes, I freaked. I realised what I had done; how the game had turned on me.

I sat on the stairs, staring at the banisters – it was midnight on a Friday night and my parents and sister had gone to bed but my sister was wandering about for water. The light between the banisters was burning into my eyes and my head felt like it was about to explode. I sat there, rocking myself, thinking how stupid I was. Then my sister came past, and seeing my in such a state she asked what was wrong, and all I could say was, “I’ve done something really stupid”.

I showed her the empty packets, and she was horrified when she realised that I had taken them all. She got my mum, my mum got my dad because she couldn’t drive – drinking – and they ran me to the hospital. I felt sick. I threw up in the waiting room a little bit because the drive had been bendy and fast and had turned my stomach. No pills came up.

I was numb. Delirious. I hadn’t slept for weeks, and I couldn’t think straight. I kept seeing things. I was confused. I was laughing at nothing, talking to my worried parents about colours and shoes. They would stare at me teary eyed, and hold my hand tightly as they made me drink charcoal in a hospital bed in A&E. Hours of drinking and throwing up went by. Blood tests, pulse rate, throwing up, more charcoal, and then there was the drip.

The two hour drip, and then the four hour. Neither was enough, I’d taken too much. So they put me on a 16 hour drip and wheeled me into a ward. I couldn’t think straight, let alone see straight. This wasn’t anything to do witht he drugs, it was sleep derivation mixing with the situation and my conveniently deranged mind.

On Sunday, the last day I was there in the hospital, my mum told me how she and my sister had gone through my room. They’d found the broken glass, the razors and the blades. They’d found hidden alcohol and laxatives. Sitting there, my organs and muscles aching because they were trying to work without assistance, I just breathed. I didn’t feel it.

I still don’t feel it. To me, it’s all surreal. Yes, they know. They also know about the food stuff, because as well as the laxatives they found my eating disorder questionaire and read the answers. Yes, they know all that. But I can’t let myself feel it. If I do, I might do it again. But this time, I wouldn’t do it as a game, to test myself. Because I don’t think I would need a test anymore.

Since then, all I can think about, is how I need my secrets back. How they make me who I am, and how I miss them. How I miss the double life, as much as it caused me pain. I had just found acceptance within myself for who I was, and then this happened and it went away and I have to work to get that back.

In a way, the challenge makes it even more fun. I cut myself yesterday, but on the leg. No one knows, and they won’t look, because they think I cut on my arm. To them, I’ll be getting better, but to me, I’ll be getting my old life back, slowly, slowly, but still. If they are looking at me, then maybe that’s good. As long as they are looking in the wrong place.

I keep thinking that I should have waited longer, waited for the eye thing to normalise. I know it will now. It went when I was at the hospital. Ironically. I wish I had waited longer. I didn’t fight hard enough. I chickened out. I was a coward. A stupid, scared little girl who didn’t know what she was doing. It won’t be paracetamol next time, but next time, I won’t wait an hour and then freak out. I’ll wait until I know that I could die, and then I’ll decide if dying is worth it. Then I’ll decide if I’m going to fight hard or give in to the pain.

The doctors said I was “past councelling”. They’re deciding my treatment now. This should be fun. Just another game, right?

{March 31, 2008} Add Some Spice…

Oh my god.

There is this drug called spice, which is a blend of herbs and, you guessed it, spices. It’s one of many ‘alternative’ drugs. It is similar to weed, except lighter, fluffier and without the underlying paranoia and heaviness. It isn’t as deep as weed, it’s more playful and you feel interested in everything you see, rather than feel like everything is okay in the world and that you understand everything like weed. It’s also weirder in that although your head is completely spaced out, you appear normal exteriorly, and your body is normal and your responses normal – but it’s like your body is actually on autopilot and controlling all your reactions.

I took the biggest two drags I have ever taken before, but I only took four drags altogether of it. That was at two this afternoon. That was…ten hours ago. I’m still high.

The greatest thing, the very greatest thing, is that once you are over 18, it is completely legal.

{March 28, 2008} Sleep Is For The Weak

My boyfriend and I broke my bed the other day whilst having quite *cough cough* forceful sex, and I haven’t been able to sleep on it for a few days. He’s coming over this weekend to help me make a new frame from an identical bed we have. Luckily, my bed was one half of a twin pair.

Other than that though, I don’t want to sleep. At night I can relax, and usually don’t sleep then anyway. It just doesn’t settle well with me. I don’t like sleeping alone, and I don’t like sleeping in silence or the dark really. Daytime is safer, more secure, and nighttime is a time for parties and fun.

I miss self harm. It’s the first time that I’ve missed cutting. A large part of me wants to start cutting my legs, and lying about it. If I did it in a certain place, on the inside of my thigh, not even my boyfriend might see it. The only reason I stopped was because it seemed right. It was what everyone wanted.

The scars are on my arm and they’ll be there forever. I have to cover them with make up next week because I’m in a play and can’t wear a bandage. Part of me feels like such a freak, but really, I’ve accepted myself for who I am. I’ve told a few friends now, and they still like me. They worry, of course they do, but they know that I would never go too far.

Although, that I’m not so sure….

My childhood best-friend told me the other day that a friend of his was rushed into hospital after taking a paracetamol overdose. She was trying to kill herself. I don’t know if I’ve told you this already, but even if I have, you can see it’s been playing on my mind. His reaction…he was so worried and concerned for her. She was just a friend he had made this year, he can’t have known her longer than six months. I’ve known him since I was a baby, we’re like brother and sister.

It would hurt him so much, him and my family, and everyone else.

But there I go again, stopping myself just because of other people’s feelings. It isn’t how it’s meant to be. I want to do what I want and not worry about their feelings. As long as what I’m doing is for me and not to purposely hurt them, then at least there is just cause for me to behave however.

I know I won’t kill myself. It’s just…the amount I think about it, it’s phenominal.

I took five laxatives today, and I purged food before too. Technically yesterday, but seeing as I’m not sleeping it makes little difference. Tomorrow (when the sun comes up), I’m going to do everything that I need to do. I’m going to tidy up the house, go down to the beach, ask for a job at the cafe and at the restaurant down there, and go for a run.

I’m going to have half an apple for breakfast, and half when I get back from the beach. I’m going to fake a big lunch. Because my diet is so bad, what with it not being regular, my weight goes up and down like a yoyo. I’ve put on half a stone just this week, and it’s getting towards the end of the month and I need to be lower for my personal weigh-in.

I’ve let myself accept that this month might not count, because it’s been a tough few weeks emotionally. I’ve been the happiest I’ve ever been, and yet, I’ve also been the angriest. I’ve never felt rage such as this. The need to destroy.

Tomorrow is a new day, and although I won’t have lost much by the end of the week, I have until Tuesday. That’s…four full days between now and then. Today (Friday – seeing as it hasn’t started properly yet), Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Tomorrow is the only day I have to sneak around my mum.

On Saturday and Sunday I have day-long rehearsals, and on Monday and Tuesday the performances. This month I am not letting anything other than fruit and veg pass my lips. No sauces, condiments, fatty, salty or sugary foods will grace my plate. Hardly ‘grace’, more like ‘contaminate’.

{March 25, 2008} Tasting Normality…Will I Eat Or Will I Purge?

This week and last week I have been eating normally. I’ve been talking normally. I’ve been acting normally. I haven’t self harmed. The more I eat, the more I feel normal. But it’s horrible. A double edged sword and it confuses like nothing I could imagine. I’m eating normally, and I know that it’s a healthy and good thing. That everyone I know thinks that it is a good thing. So why do I find myself crying for no reason, thinking of the food I’ve eaten, and wondering why I’m bothering?

I fell into this, I don’t even remember making the decision. I made a conscious, spontaneous decision not to self harm, and I think that I’ll stick with that. Scars are ugly and scabs and dried blood is inconvenient. I’ve stopped cutting but every now and then I find myself hitting or scratching myself. Punching things. There is so much anger there. It’s almost as if stopping the self-destruction has brought forth the need to destroy…but something other than myself.

I’m sick of being ugly. Being ashamed of my skin. Scars and scabs, blood and bruises.

Although I know eating normally makes other people feel better, I just feel fatter and fatter and uglier. I can stop cutting, stop self harming, but I’m going to get thin. If I need an obsession, this is better than weed, alcohol and self harm.

P.S If you are in England and have been watching Skins on E4, how amazing is it?! I love Effie.

{March 21, 2008} Bonding Time..?

It’s Easter weekend soon, and Mum has time off. She would probably be at work if she could, but everyone has a few days holiday. This is meant to be time to spend together because we are alone. My dad and sister are gone abroad and it’s just us. Today she made a delicious salad, and I have been so good food wise. All week I have been so good. Eating like a normal person, purging and exercising minimally.

I have tried so hard to be normal, and for what?

She makes this salad, talks about losing weight, being together, painting the house, eating chocolate together, chatting…I even say that I’ll have a few drinks with her. When I’m drinking water with lemon in it she seems disappointed that I chose not to drink with her. I’m with her aren’t I?

She walks out the room half way through the film, half way through her salad. Comes back later, much later, drunker than before. She eats more salad, drops off to sleep. She sleeps through the rest of the film, and through the next one. She’s sleeping now. Whenever she is awake she’s slurring, her head drooping, her hands fumbling, dropping things.

I don’t know what I feel anymore. I don’t know whether I can afford to keep hoping that she’ll stop drinking. I don’t know whether I can take waiting any more. Every time she says she’ll stop drinking, there’s a “one last time” and I don’t think I can believe her anymore. There are too many “one last time”s. Hope isn’t really enough anymore, and I think that for a long time it’s only been a memory of how it felt to hope.

I want to help her, but she falls back, pushing away my outstretched hands. I end up just watching her stumble around, my heart breaking. I know that many people have worse parents; abusive parents. Mine don’t particularly neglect me, it isn’t even that. I think in many ways neglect would be better. No, instead I’m looking after her. Shouldering her tears. She rubs my shoulder as she cries, but I’m fine. She’s only doing it to feel like she’s the parent. To feel like she is in control, looking after me. It’s not true though, is it? None of it is true.

{March 20, 2008} Poem

You sing so blue,
The only thing that’s true,
Baby hide your face,
Nothing there but your disgrace.

Don’t you cry,
Those beautiful tired eyes,
Baby hold your breath,
Life’s a test and then there’s…

Death.

{March 16, 2008} The Glow…

Aparantly I had the ‘just had sex glow’ this morning. I feel so good. The happiest I have been in so long…sex is a miracle cure for depression!

Tomorrow I start my Rainbow Diet, and I am going to be so good. There is no reason to eat. I’m happy. Life is good. Happiness and thinness go hand in hand, and being happy to start with…perfect!

I get to be thin, and fullfilled!

I’m happy.

{March 16, 2008} Sex…

I lost my virginity in the early hours of this morning. It was perfect. First time…managed to go through six positions without him ‘leaving’ me. Pretty impressive, huh? The desk was one of my favourites…just for the novelty! After having a really bad day Friday, and bad morning Saturday, it was so good to have him here with me.

Have a feeling I’m going to become addicted…but at least this is exercise! And very pleasurable!