My baby told me you gotta get better if you ever wanna win

My therapist keeps asking me why this feels safe. It’s the word I seem to use often to describe why I do what I do do. It feels “safe”.

Why do you need to be small? It feels safe.

What feels safe about being small for you? I don’t know.

But I do know. Only I’m too scared to say it. If I say it will be real, and maybe it isn’t actually real in the end. Maybe it’s just a made up reason because I want to be skinny like the rest of the world.

A funny thing happens when you try to be too skinny for too long. There are days when your body takes over. Days here and there when I stuff 2000 calories worth of food into my face and it feels absolutely terrifying because it is literally not me doing it. I can’t even properly convey the experience because it’s almost as if I’m not in it. Like I’m yelling at a movie screen “don’t do it! Go back!” but my hands just reach for food, any food, and I literally cannot stop them. My anxiety soars because I know I can’t stop. Any illusion of control that I’ve built by only eating xyz, by doing some arbitrarily unreasonable amount of steps, by staying beneath a ridiculous threshold of lbs and oz…it’s all shattered right then and there while I’m licking peanut butter off a spoon and berating myself…knowing that I am probably going back for more. It disgusts me.

I hate myself more now than I ever did. My body hates me too. Though I may technically be underweight and though the minimal weight gains that I have made may be mostly due to water retention, those losses of control speckled here and there between days of rigid balance, careful restriction, calculated control…those days are the stuff my nightmares are made of. They prove that I am disgusting, overindulgent, and way too much. At least that’s what my head tells me.

My therapist would say that’s my disorder talking. She would point out the thought distortion of all or nothing thinking and suggest the possibility of a grey area wherein I might actually become a real person who lives somewhere in between the wild here’s and there’s of my mind. Absurd. Has she even met me?!

At any rate I have successfully scared off, pissed off or downright tired out any people who actually were willing to support me at one point. Except my husband. He is rock solid, only he says nothing because this scares the shit out of him and his coping mechanism happens to be avoidance. Everyone else has run from me like the plague. I have always found it truly fascinating how caught up people get in their experience of your problem. This is not to say that I don’t recognize that my struggles affect other people. Certainly they do. What I have found though, is that people move away from what makes them uncomfortable and anorexia certainly makes them that.

I apologize that my struggle is so hard for you. I apologize for the discomfort it causes you. I am sorry that I am currently dark and if you want me to be real here it is: I have come to loathe myself in a way I didn’t know was possible. But people don’t want to hear that shit. Not really. They are full of “I’m always here” and “you can talk to me any time” and I think they really believe it and mean it but at the end of the day nobody really wants to hear about what goes on in my head because it makes them way too uncomfortable. Except my therapist of course. She eats that shit up for breakfast.

In a body of years, now a pile of bones..

I am gutted. Inside out with ribs open and vulnerable, fingers digging between them. I have a best friend, or maybe I had one. Maybe that ship has sailed. I am struggling. I am a piece of shit. My very presence causes discomfort to those around me. You might say I’m melodramatic, but it’s literally true and confirmed. I also feel confused. Confused about friendship and what that even means.

Admittedly, I can be a shitty friend. I am both busy and elusive. I can be withholding of my feelings and distant when it comes to myself. But I also make myself available and present whenever it might count. If I have a friend in need, I will do my best to meet that need and be whatever they need me to be for them while they move through it. I have been that many times to my best friend. I was there when her children were born, have walked her through the ending of a marriage, the journey of single parenthood, an abusive boyfriend, a catastrophic and career changing firing that was entirely her fault, and countless other ups and downs. I prided myself on showing up without reservation or judgement and simply being there as her friend. I once spent the night with her in her bed on Christmas eve after a devastating fight with her husband in which he left with no promise of coming back. If nothing else, I felt like I had the capacity to do that.

Well, if I am a shitty friend, then my best friend is the absolute worst. She can also be elusive and withholding, and I have accepted that about her because I fucking get it. Me too man, me too. This past year (almost 2?) has represented possibly the biggest struggle of my adult life, and believe me, I know it isn’t pretty. I thought though, that my friend might extend me the same courtesy and grace that I’ve always given her. I guess I was wrong. She has been mostly absent. Instead of the non-judgmental unconditional love I really feel like I need right now, I have faced pressure to change, comments that my progress seems minimal and contrived, and was outright told that seeing me feels “too sad” for her. The real fucking kicker is that I don’t even think it’s about me, because this particular friend also has a tendency to project things onto me that actually aren’t even my shit to own. Lord knows, I have plenty of shit to own as mine, but I can smell a good projection from a mile away. She told me recently, in the same conversation in which my very existence pains her, that she thinks I’m just fucking around and hiding behind therapy as an excuse not to change, and that she “doesn’t even know me anymore”, I am no fun, etc etc you get the fucking picture. Not exactly the support I was hoping for from her direction. It’s not even that I can’t take some tough love, though I don’t personally agree that it’s an effective strategy for motivating change in most cases, but the thing is: She doesn’t know what I’ve been doing or what changes I’ve made because she’s literally never asked. She doesn’t know this struggle, and from what I can tell, the main issue for her is how this whole thing is affecting her. Because I am no fun because I don’t want to go for dinner. Because she has weird fears about people dying and my health is not great. Because she feels uncomfortable with my weight. And doesn’t it always come down to my weight? Never mind that I am confronting a ton of uncomfortable historic shit in therapy, or that I did not restrict over Christmas and sat with the discomfort of a plethora of food and food related visits or that I gained a few lbs in the last couple of months which literally makes me want to act out in damage control and lose at least 5 to make up for it.

I guess I was just hoping she would show up and try to be what I need from a friend like I always do for her, instead of making it all about her in the end. What I need is unconditional love without pressure. What I need is gentle reassurance that I am moving in the right direction. What I need is someone who is happy to go for a coffee and walk instead of pizza, and will not place all focus on my underweight body. I guess I just really don’t want to be reduced to anorexia and nothing else, because there are so many other sides of who I am.

I should be very aware by now that we rarely get what we want, and often don’t even get what we need. I wonder why I am so afraid of vulnerability. I also, it seems, have no friends. Capital L loser.

Face down in the moment waiting to let go

Somebody save me from myself…

I heard you crying loud. All the way across town.

I am reduced to nothing. I am size zero pants and therapy. I am crying all over the therapist’s educational paperwork. I am crying all over a plate of nachos made by my husband, of which I ate 5. Chicken no less, undoubtedly because chicken seems safer than beef. I am drowning in these tears.

I am long walks and hours of pacing. I am 19,419 steps today. I am obsessed with food and am now a baker because sugar free, butter free, oil free muffins controlled by me seem sort of safe and I can eat one (125 cals) every day for lunch, which is also breakfast as it turns out. I am celibate because my husband is scared to have sex with me, because he says seeing me naked worries him. I am crying again because I can’t talk to him, and he can’t talk to me, and when we try there are tears and frustration and he tries to ignore this thing that is taking me out and I can’t ignore it but I can’t talk about it either. I am back in my childhood where there is this ugly truth that everybody dances around but nobody talks about. I am alone.

I like my new therapist, I truly do. She keeps saying that she won’t push me to to weight restore…yet. That yet has big implications. I am not ready. She assured me she wouldn’t argue intricacies with me at this point, but that weight restoration is a necessity of actually recovering from this, implying that at some point the push will happen. I do not feel remotely prepared to gain any weight. Right now I don’t even want to maintain my weight but my body is fighting me hard and I feel like I am on the brink of losing control of this at all times. Fantasies of stuffing my face full of all the food, and I know that weight restoration is a joke. A cruel one at that. Who am I kidding. I am a fat person hiding in an underweight body. If I open that door I just know that I won’t be able to close it and I will be back up where I started. Far too big for my liking, and far too terrifying to fully process.

I am so alone in this. I guess the joke’s on me. I created the perfect system to keep it all out and now I can’t let any of it in. I used to talk to jon about it, but I think we are both sick of me at this point, so I am trying to spare him the details of what feels like a total breakdown. The sick part of it all is that I still feel I could lose just another pound or two. If the scale is not actively shedding numbers and downward trending, I physically cannot see that I am thin.

I am checking my fitbit 52 times a day. I am not even a person anymore.

I’ve got no roots, but my home was never on the ground

I want to write so badly but I feel like I have no words. I can’t breath tonight. My heart is aching with some unknown weight. I am 100% lost. I feel like I could smoke 1000 cigarettes and and it wouldn’t be enough to touch this feeling of discomfort with myself.

I’ve starved all the anxiety away and all that’s left is sad. Anxiety has been my nemesis and not eating is the cure. It worked. It worked so well that I feel almost nothing but this lingering sadness. The physical pain seems almost worth it.

Luckily you never smile

Oh forgotten words where have you gone. I am reduced to nothing. Calories and ribs and a spine that hurts when I sit, lean, move.

It’s out of my hands again

I hate thanksgiving. I said it. It’s a stupid holiday that basically celebrates assimilation and white privilege. I do hate that, but that’s not why I hate it today. Today I hate it because it has been on my mind for the 2 weeks leading up, knowing that I need to show up and be a normal person when I am incapable of doing so.

I can’t breath tonight. I can’t breath even though I came in below in calories despite being subjected to a full family thanksgiving dinner. I can’t breath because I came in low in calories. I don’t know what is success and what is failure in this. I know my weight is too low, but I also know that the scale doesn’t want to budge this week regardless of how little I am eating, and that feels like panic. I know I can’t lose more weight. But losing more weight feels like the only safe option to assure myself I am not gaining. if the number isn’t going down it means I have reached the bottom. If I’ve reached the bottom then where do I go from here? Up? I can’t.

I have been preparing for the weekend all week. And by preparing I mean eating pathetically in attempt to make up for whatever accidental calorie consumption I might come up against this food filled weekend. It feels unsafe. It feels like a fucking horrible joke’s on me situation. Only now I feel physically ill. Blacked out in the bathroom after washing my hair. Woke up in the middle of the night to intense stomach pains. Instead of taking this as indication that I need to stop the madness, I just feel like I am weak. My body should be stronger than this. It’s not that bad.

I feel alone this weekend, and I am struggling. I made a pathetic attempt to tell my husband I felt anxious about the food and the family, and the food and the family together. He didn’t get it. I don’t think he wants to. He does not want this to be me. I don’t want this to be me.

I.am.so.fucking.sorry. And I still have one more family dinner before this week is over. I am choking on my anxiety. Maybe it will kill me so I don’t have to attend.

A greater threat to herself than the cigarette she consumes

Physical reasons to eat more food:

• My body hurts
• Fainting is dumb
• My husband cringes when he touches me (does he?)
• Headaches
• Stomach aches
• Shaky hands
• Dizziness
• Weakness
• Fatigue
• I should not be able to wear my 10 year old’s clothes
• My ass is missing

There are probably more..

These precious things, let them bleed, let them wash away

Can’t sleep. Busy hating myself. Maybe I’ll write more later. Maybe I’ll eat more later.

When we were young we were small, but we did not know it

There are some days more than others when I I feel incapable of being human. Where any task great or small feels like it is asking too much of me. Today is a day where I needed someone to put me to bed and feed me soup. Only there wasn’t anyone, and I probably would have declined the soup anyway.

I am venturing out this weekend. A girl’s night for a very dear friend’s birthday. Aside from her, the rest of the friends are ones I haven’t seen in a very long time now. I already feel a creeping anxiety about my body. My body. My fucking body. It’s always there for everyone to see isn’t it? My body is shrunken. My body is weak. My body is not well and it wears it like an old pair of boots. I know they will know. These are friends who have seen this body at its worst and have urged it forward when I couldn’t. These are friends. So I don’t know why I am so scared. I am scared because they will know without me telling them, and that takes away any sense of autonomy I have. That anxiety has been creeping as the date draws near and I have been trying to just breath through it because these are people I love, and I want to see them, and I want to enjoy them.

And then my friend calls and the conversation is crushing. She tells me she doesn’t want my eating disorder to be a topic of conversation at her birthday. I am unsure for a moment if she somehow thinks I’m going to bring it up?! This is literally the thing I don’t bring up. This is literally the last topic of conversation I would ever bring to her birthday. It is barely even a conversation I am willing to have with her on most days. We have spoken about it exactly twice prior to this conversation, vaguely, with much reluctance on my part. She knows this. And then she says, “because of my weight” she thinks other people will try to bring it up, and she just doesn’t want it to be a thing. “A thing”. I’m not sure what to do with this information. I’m pretty sure I can’t get un-skinny by Saturday.

Instant shame. I am a piece of shit. I am a walking problem that makes people uncomfortable and poses a conversation risk. My chest feels heavy with panic and shame for who I am, and I feel so fucking sorry for being this way. I want to be invisible. I want this to be invisible, but it’s not.

Body dysmorphia says I should not know that I am skinny. I do know. Body dysmorphia says I should look in the mirror and see a whale staring back at me. I don’t. I see my ribcage and my jutting hips and my sternum poking through. I see it and I think “well that’s not fucking good”. But then I see my thighs, the flesh of my stomach, the meat on my arms, and I think “A few more pounds might just take care of that part”. Some days I see all the skinny and I scare myself and I think “Shit, I’m so fucked.” and other days I see all the fat and I think to myself “I can’t believe I thought I might be too skinny yesterday”. This is my body dysmorphia. It is simultaneous utter denial and shocking awareness of self. Looking at myself in clothes or pictures distorts it even more. Maybe I was too skinny getting out of the bath with my clothes off, but I am definitely too big in the mirror wearing those jeans. In the end none of what I see even matters anymore because the compulsion to limit my food is just that. It is compulsion.

This is the part where I would like to be anybody other than who I am. And even after this whole fucked up night with it’s fucked up conversation and the subsequent self-loathing I still go to bed thinking we’re all being overly dramatic. I’m not that thin after all. Fuck, I had someone tell me I look great just the other day. Obviously we’re all overreacting here. I am fine.