an invisible disaster.

I can feel it everywhere. All over me, weighing me down and pinning me to the ground.

I'm drowning in it, the enormity of the mass of fat that is holding me to this earth is so intense that I can't breathe. I'm enormous, I'm disgusting, I'm huge and I sicken myself.

I want to eat purely so I can purge it all and feel some form of control. I want to not eat so I can remind myself that I have the power to shrink myself back down to thin.

Every thought is food, every thought is fat. Food is the enemy. Enemies can be conquered. Do I simply starve myself, or do I restrict so much that I can feel the relief in every ounce of fat on me that I did it, I succeeded in preventing this poison from entering my body. Do I talk to someone? Do I just do this? Do I even publish this post?

Do I let it take me down again? Do I open the very loose gates that are being opened bit by bit every single second, and let anorexia flood back into my life? Is it worth it? Is it the only way to survive? Is it the only way to feel again? Is it the only way to feel accomplished again? I don't feel worthy. I feel like a failure of human being, I feel like an enormous mass of obesity.

I can't look in the mirror, I can't catch my reflection, I'm hiding from myself and from my mind's perception of me.

The medication that caused so much weight gain has officially stopped, I'm free of it. The control is now down to me. The reigns are in my hands. I can shrink myself back down to nothing again, I have that power, I want that power. Nothing else matters. I just want to be thin. When I was thin I could visibly see love even though I couldn't feel it. Maybe that's the answer. Maybe that's it. I'm huge and unloveable. I'm starting to think the smaller I am, the more invisible I can be, the more unnoticeable I am, the less shameful I will be. The less all of my wrong doings will seem to matter because I am just this small mass of nothingness.

The bigger I am the more enormous my disastrous nature is, it's more obvious. The drama that orbits me is more profound because there is more of me to orbit. If I can disappear into nothingness then surely everything that comes with it will disappear into nothingness too?

I just want to vanish. I want to break myself down to thin and bones. I want to lose all of this fat, I want to shed it and shed everything I've done wrong with it. I want a rebirth. I want to cleanse myself of this enormous layer that has enveloped me and start over, with my very shell exposed and ready to start again.

you lock me out and knock me down

I feel out of synch. Like my world is rotating on a different axis to usual. Everything is off balance and I feel I'm grasping for something solid to hold onto but I just get air. Empty. I feel empty. There is nothing left inside of me and I've got nothing else to give. Everything is moving too fast, it's all moving around me and I cannot hold onto any of it.

I'm trying to find some semblance of order to my thoughts. Rapid cycling moods are something I thought I'd gotten used to, and then they come along and sweep me off my feet, I can't catch my breath, I can't still myself enough to catch my breath.

Did you ever do that thing when you were a kid, where you put your arms out and just spun around in circles until you got dizzy and just fell to the floor? Then you'd giggle and get back up, and everything around you was swirling all over the place, but it gave you a high, so you'd put your arms back out and spin again, faster and faster. Bang. You'd hit the floor again. There was a dizzy adrenaline rush that made you feel so warm inside that anything felt possible. I could lie there for what felt like forever, dizzy, breathless, but I felt like I'd been flying, and my landing heightened every single one of my senses.

Now imagine that again, you're an adult, the setting has changed; instead of holding your arms out by your sides, they are rigid and stuck, you are moving, walking through a menial every day task. But then out of nowhere, you start spinning, that dizzy adrenaline rushing through your blood stream, everything is swirling around you and no matter how hard you try, you cannot find a point of stillness amongst all of the dizzy chaos. Everything is just moving and moving and you're going faster and faster, but there's no landing, there's no stopping. That is what rapid cycling moods feel like.

I cannot find a still point amongst the chaos. I can't slow down. I can't control anything, my moods are moving so quickly that I can't concentrate, I can't focus on anything, it's near enough impossible. It's like I'm on a carousel, but I can't get off. I want to, but I can't. That same adrenaline rush is sweeping through my system and I'm flying high, so high. I want everything to stop, I want to get off, I want to find a still point to focus on a slow it all down, to bring me down, but before I can even think about how much I want to find that still point, my mind is already bringing up a hundred other things.

Those are the highs. When you're flying so high, at some point, you have to land. The carousel eventually has to stop and you eventually have to get off. The lows are bleak, black, an infinite abyss. Emptiness overwhelms me. I feel the absence of everything I've lost in each and every one of my pores. Sadness seeps out of me, from every little crevice, every little part of me. It evaporates out of my skin, it pours out of me every time I exhale.

I try. I try so hard to battle it, I try so hard to fight it and not let it paralyse me. I try so hard. But I'm not tough, I'm not a warrior. So sometimes I fail. Sometimes I give into it. I let it consume me, inch by inch, muscle by muscle, thought by thought.

I cry. I cry until my head hurts and my eyes ache. Sometimes I just want those tears to drown me, to take me under and hold me underneath them until I'm lost completely in their power. I pick at my skin, at my lips, at any part of me that I can grasp onto. I pick at them to break myself apart. To strip pieces of me off, bit by bit. To break myself to my very core, so that I can start again. Self loathing doesn't come with a care manual, it doesn't tell you to stop, it doesn't tell you that you don't deserve to be broken apart; that you are already whole enough to live through a day, a minute, an hour without pain. I lose all sight of hope, I'm trapped in my own little purgatory of bleakness, I'm wading through misery and I can't see an end in sight. I'm drowning in it. I let it into my lungs, I breathe it into my system. It's filling me up from the inside out and nothing can stop it. I can see the sand of an hourglass moving slowly, as I try and scream and fight my way out of this glass case of despair that has trapped me inside myself.

People try and break me out, they tell me nice things, they give me pretty words of hope and promise and encouragement. But they don't reach their intended target, they never do. I absorb them as much as the despair allows me to, I try to inhale them deeply enough to reach my core, to reach the nucleus of the self loathing, to break it apart and shatter it into so many pieces that it will never be able to form itself again. But they can never reach deep enough.

Criticism, on the other hand, reaches right inside of the central nervous system of the misery and self loathing, and gives it life, it gives it energy and fuels it to carry on; to keep feasting on my spirit.

"At 24, I would have hoped you would have grown out of staying in bed all day"

Simple words of disgust, veiled with self righteousness, thrown my way, directing themselves at the very heart and soul of the depression, fuelling it with enough energy to consume me further and further.

You are a failure. You couldn't fight me today and she judged you for that. She thinks you are a failure because in that moment you weren't stronger than me. You were a failure, you are a failure. You're fat and you're pathetic and you're never going to be free of me.

Depression has been feasting on me, I can feel it taking me back under it's sweeping tide, swallowing me whole.

I hope I'm strong enough to fight it.

my mind is somewhere hazy

There are some days, like today, where I actually wish that I was ill again. It was so exhausting and lonely and killed my spirit. But fighting it?  This is equally as exhausting and lonely.

It's so hard to fight against every single thought you have. I put up such a bright and bubbly front all the time, but underneath it all, I'm not this "recovered" person. I have to fight against almost every single thought that comes into my head, my automatic thought processes tell me to self destruct, that I'm not worthy of simply existing, and I have to fight that every second of every day, and it drains me.

Today my brain actually aches because of everything that has gone on. It's hard to fight the thoughts when your brain is completely drained of any kind of energy or motivation.

In a bizarre series of events, the song "Days" by Kirsty McColl just came on in the restaurant that I am in, a song that I associate with the loss of the greatest light in my life, my heart and soul. It's been seven long years without him, and my grief got tangled up amongst eating disorders and depression and self loathing.

Grief poured out of me disguised as blood.  It was grief trying to get out. It's still trying to get out. It buried itself so deep within me that it became a part of me. There are shrapnels of him inside of me.

How do you allow yourself to move on? To grieve seven years worth of mourning. The more the issues that were tangled together with the grief get dealt with, the more the grief has to come out of hiding.

I can feel his hand in mine as he slipped away, it's so real, all the time.

I think it's a sign, I really do. I think it's a sign to deal with it and to fight. Maybe once I've began to tackle this, the feelings of wishing I was ill again will go away. Maybe.

Today has been a bad day, those days that you know will happen but dread it and fear will set back your entire recovery process. I thought it was important to just have some kind of record that I am here in a bad day, but I am okay.

I am okay.

I am okay and I am enough.

What I am doing is good, I'm conquering a lot of things, but I'm also recognising the falls and the mistakes. I've made many, but we can only keep moving forward can't we? I need to keep telling myself, forward is the only way, well, as the song by Yazz says; "the only way is up"

people are better in the abstract

There is a certain amount of recklessness that comes with despair.

I show myself to people, I give them little glimpses, I show them little fragments of myself that I assume to be true pieces of me, who I am inside.

It takes so much out of me to be able to do that; to show myself to someone and allow myself to be judged, or worst, abandoned.

On paper, it seems like it should be easier to hold people at arms length, to choose not to show them the little pieces of who you are, because then you can't get attached and then they won't leave you.

If only life was that simple.

We gravitate towards different people, we merge, we collide... We can try to stop ourselves from letting people in, we can build our walls thick and high, we can turn ourselves into an insurmountable mass. But all we gain is loneliness and self destruction.

You turn inwards and when all your walls cave in on you, it's you that is left in the centre of it. You're the burnt out grenade canister, the wreckage is around you. So why not have other people there to help you sift through it all.

I've learned the hard way that people are just temporary. Some people come into our lives for a very short amount of time, and then they're gone again. It's as simple as that. We can't grasp onto people for dear life, people will come and people will go.

It's a really hard lesson to learn, I've lost my most favourite of all human beings, they've gone and I'm still grieving for those each and everyday. It dictates every connection I make, every piece of myself I show to others.

Recovery is teaching me to show myself to more people and be more open, I'm trying to harness all of what I've learned and am still learning but sometimes I get it wrong. I'm going to slip up and I'm going to make mistakes, I'm allowed to do that and I absolutely hate that I feel like I have to justify myself.

I don't even know what this post is, I just needed to write something and this is it, I hate it and will probably delete it, but for now, whilst I sob in a coffee shop, take this post.

This was the end of this entry, until:

Tonight, a combination of things happened and so many things just fell into place.

I have had an awful day, I've cried, I've screamed, I've cried some more... But then I didn't. Things felt better, things felt more manageable, things felt within reach.

I learnt some stuff about myself. I met up with a friend and at one point she had an anxiety attack, and I felt like Rogue from X-Men (she can gain the super powers of anybody she touches, for non nerd folk) and I just seemed to absorb all of her anxiety. It filled every single part of me, and it consumed me in a way I can only describe as a tidal wave, because after it had flooded every single part of me, as quickly as it appeared, it was gone.

I had a similar experience an hour later, where I met someone who is such a beautiful and happy spirit, and her happiness just consumed me.

What I said earlier about people colliding... We stumble upon people and sometime's their impact is profoundly important to us, maybe it's a sliding doors situation, if we hadn't had that one tiny interaction with them, everything might be different. It's so weird to think about.

the winds of change are blowing wild and free.

A sweeping sense of solitude has washed over me. There are moments of pure unadulterated clarity, where I see myself as a "survivor" someone who is overcoming demons that have haunted me for too long, someone making their way towards the light. But then there are moments, like today, where I just pull the panic cord and go into a complete state of "but why?" every single one of my senses are heightened and my mind turns into an emergency check point, combing through every little detail of anything that passes through it, scrutinising it down to it's very last inch, checking it over and over to make sure I didn't miss anything.

You get stuck in this infinite state of questioning. Not just questioning where you are and how you got there, but why you feel the way you feel and why certain people arouse such a variety of emotions within you. There is never an answer. There is always another "but why?" to any form of answer you can derive.

I will not apologise for the fact that peoples actions and behaviours have caused a subconscious series of emotions and behaviours that are triggered when I am in their presence. It's not something to criticise or tell me to "snap out of" it isn't that simple and I'm working through it. But they didn't come from nowhere, sometimes the harder people try to help in their own way, the worse they make a situation. 

I have faced let down after let down, I haven't even had any kind of expectation with regards to certain people, because I get lulled into a false sense of security that maybe, just maybe, this time they may have changed. But then, there they go again and let me down all over again. Except I told myself I wouldn't get let down, because I was anticipating it, it was to be expected. But it still hurts each and every time, no matter how much you anticipate it. 

I am a strong believer that people can change. I can see change within myself daily, I like to give people a chance, because I would like to think that people would give me one too. I know how hard I can be sometimes, how difficult and exhausting I can be, I'd like to think that if I let someone down when I was in one of my "episodes" that they would be understanding and would be willing to give me a second chance. "Treat others the way you wish to be treated", isn't that how the saying goes? I think for me, there is some element of that in how I go about my daily life. But I also think that we all have an obligation, as human beings, to show care and love to the people around us. Those deserving of it. It doesn't take a lot of energy to be kind to someone. Showing kindness to somebody you care about, or love, should be a reflex, it shouldn't be something that seems like too much hard work. 

It's taking me a long time, and a lot of therapy, to at least recognise that loving somebody and pleasing somebody isn't the same thing. They do not go hand in hand. Trying to constantly please somebody and adhere to what they want, isn't love. You can love somebody and not constantly alter yourself or what makes you happy to try to please them. You cannot please everybody, I have to train myself to stop trying to please certain people or worry about other people's judgements. You just have to please and look after yourself. As long as you aren't hurting yourself or others, it's okay. If other people don't like it? Tough. It's still taking me a really long time to distinguish it, but I think I'm getting there. It's not being selfish, it's not loving those people any less, it's knowing more about who you are and what makes you happy and not letting others dictate your happiness and control what you do.

We're all unique. We don't all occupy the same brain, the same heart, the same religion, or have the same principals or beliefs. Some people look down on what they don't understand, but all we can do is help them understand, we can show them what we feel, what we think, we can talk about it, put it out there. People have a right to disagree with you, but they do not have the right to make you feel inferior for whatever you do (as long as no harm is being caused to anybody) 

I don't know where life will take me, where my mind will take me, which days will be bad days, which days will be good days, which side effects my next lot of meds will bring me, which path of treatment I am headed onto next. But what I do know is that I can get through it. I can fight against the current and win. Even when I feel like I can't, I know that I was in a much darker place twelve months ago and I made it through those. 

Sometimes the people that help us the most aren't the people you expect. Sometimes it's hard for other people around you to understand that despite the fact they're your parent/family/spouse/lover/sibling whatever, they aren't necessarily the person that can fix you. I'm sure it must be a hard thing to deal with, especially when all they want to do is help. 

But at the end of the day, the only person who can really fix you, is you. Some are lucky enough to find somebody along the way, in whatever form of love, that mends our broken parts. That helps fix you, that provides strength as you become the glue as you piece yourself back together. If you have somebody in your life who is as instrumental in your recovery, please, treat them well, let them know that they too are loved and that you are so grateful for them. 

Sometimes people come along once you've started doing the repair job. I've seen it happen first hand. Nobody is ever alone in recovery, in putting themselves back together. There is always support out there, even if it's through a computer, there are still people who want to help you and love you, and help glue you back together. Even if it's just through listening. 

Here are some useful numbers and links: 

(US) National Suicide Prevention Lifeline - 1–800–273-TALK (8255)

• (UK)  Samaritans - 08457 90 90 90 
• (ROI) Samaritans -  1850 60 90 90 

International Association for Suicide Prevention

To Write Love On Her Arms

Love is Louder

Half of Us

Beat (for eating disorders)

the darkness in which I swim.

catch me, i'm falling.

I hate myself. 

What is so wrong with me that I have to always do or say the wrong thing. Why can I never do anything right in my life? Why do I have to be so sensitive about every single thing? Why do I manage to annoy everybody all the time? Why am I such a burden? Why am I even here? 

Why have I let something out of my control make me so upset and angry? I cannot process these emotions quickly, it takes me a long time and whilst I'm feeling that I then have all of these "sub emotions" that come into play; irrationality, self loathing, paranoia, anxiety, and so many more. It doesn't take a simple "deep breaths" for me to stop feeling these things and understand why I felt them, it can take me hours.  This is what I call "the danger zone" it's when I react to those emotions without caution, or without thinking about the repercussions  I cut, I purge, I go to some very dark places and it takes me a very long time to get out of that danger zone.

I've been in that danger zone now for seven and a half hours. There has been no light yet. I've felt incredibly alone and isolated, through nobody's fault, and I've quite literally had to sit on my hands for a large portion of the night to prevent myself from hurting myself. 

I've had panic attack after panic attack. I' I'm like a wrecking ball. I've gained all this momentum and I can't stop. Where does it end? When will it end? 

Bad days can change everything. They can set you back. I'm trying, I'm really trying. I want to keep moving forward, I need to keep moving forward. Help. 

there's a grief that can't be spoken.

I've been staring at an empty page for a while now trying to think of a  profound, or beautiful way to put what I want to say but I think the only way I can do this justice is to just say exactly what I feel. Raw emotions, no edits, no glossing feelings over to make me look slightly less unhinged. What I'm writing is straight from the empty space where piece of my heart - that was taken away from me six years ago - used to be.

At the age of seventeen, I'd lost quite a number of people to death. But none of them could prepare me for the biggest loss of my life. There isn't a manual to tell you how to grieve, or how to cope with the loss of a loved one. I wish there was, it would make life so much easier. But that's life isn't it? Experiencing life and experiencing death. 

Nothing could have prepared me, it wasn't an expected death, not that I think that makes it any easier. No amount of time or words would have relieved or numbed the pain even in the slightest fraction. 

We spent an excruciatingly long night camped out in a tiny relatives room on 3 small sofas praying for a miracle, for the medicine to work, for anything.

But no amount of praying or wishing or hoping could have changed the outcome, the next morning, the words "there's nothing more we can do" were spoken, and the world that I knew was altered forever.

They removed the monitors and machinery keeping him alive and I held his hand and whispered in his ear. I can still feel his hand, how it felt that morning. It was different to every other time I had held his hand, this time it was lifeless, it still dwarfed my tiny hands and I knew this was the last time I was ever going to see him alive and feel the complete security and warmth that I felt every time that I grabbed his hand.

It didn't take very long, I suppose it never does. You remove the machine keeping the body alive, because the  body can't keep itself alive, and it's a waiting game of how long it can sustain itself before finally giving in. It was twenty minutes or so. I say it wasn't enough, but what amount of time would have been enough? 

I felt it instantly, a gaping hole was punched through my chest, my legs were no longer able to hold me and I fell to the floor. I'm still there now. 

I can visualise it all as though it was yesterday. And it does feel like yesterday, sometimes I hate the way my brain holds onto every painful detail, it makes the flashbacks and nightmares a lot more hard to recover from.

The pain in my chest that he left has become a normal sensation now. I don't think it will ever disappear. It aches, it burns, it hurts. This is my life now, a world in which he doesn't exist. 

It was an indescribable loss and I'm not going to sit here and try and find a collection of words that can't  even remotely articulate the emotions correctly.

One thing I can say, is that there have been times when I have felt his presence around me. As ridiculous as that may sound, there are times when I've sense him behind me, or in the room with me. His scent floods my senses and I'm immediately comforted. There was even a period of time when I felt something sit on the end of my bed each night and move a framed photograph of him and I next to my bed from another side of the room. Make of that what you will. But I take that as a sign that he still walks beside me. He may not be physically present, but for as long as I am living, he remains at my side, in my heart, and in my soul. 

I wish I could attest that "time heals everything" maybe it does. Time, that little paradox; running out by the second but on an indefinite infinite span. I have yet to be healed by time. But I have hope that I will. 

So, as we approach the night that six years ago changed my life forever. I am trying my hardest to remember the wonderful, beautiful, loving, inspirational person that he was. Not the huge gap that he left behind. I am who I am because he loved me, he taught me, he shaped me, he made me soar, and he was there when I fell.