circles and cycles and seasons.

After living out of suitcase for the last however many months, I am finally posting this from my own bed, in my own apartment, in the beautiful North London location that I am now calling home.

Home. It's a funny word. I haven't felt like I've belonged anywhere for so long. Months and months. My house that I lived in before I went into hospital, that's been my home for the last twenty years of my life felt alien to me. I couldn't settle, I couldn't breathe. The city I used to live in felt impossible to live with. Fragments of the ill version of me are scattered everywhere, I was stumbling over ghosts and heartache and loneliness. So I made the decision to stay in London where my treatment was and set myself up from pretty much rock bottom.

Eleven months and one day ago, I tried to take my own life. Eleven months and one day later and I thank every fibre of the universe that I wasn't successful.

It's been a year of learning, of making mistakes, of piecing parts of myself back together, of loss, but also of tremendous gain.

I have gained a small amount of wisdom, a huge amount of weight. I became a healthy weight with the help of the hospital, and then I made the brave/stupid (it depends which day you ask me) decision to 'sacrifice' my idea of the 'perfect' weight and to disappear into skin and bone, to go onto a large number of different medications that would cause weight gain, but stabilise the mood swings, the dark moods, the suicidal thoughts. Today is a day where I think it was brave.

Last night, I didn't. I punished myself for it. I stumbled, and I gave in to the self harm thoughts for the first time in so many months, and it felt so good. But then it felt everything it should have felt; unnatural, wrong, and something I absolutely should not be doing. I could see that there was a way through it all, without having to hurt myself. I felt that tiny ounce of self esteem that has been growing inside of me, come through and start to help me fight for what is important, me.

I've become more and more at ease as the last few months have gone on. I have been introduced to the most incredible people who have become my family, and who make each day that little bit easier. It's a cliche, but I have got the most amazing people in my life right now. People whom I adore, and who make me feel like I am worth something, who make me feel loved and accepted. People who are seeing me at my highest weight and who still love me and go out of their way to make sure I'm okay and happy.

I've never felt part of a family (with one very special exception) or that I was someone who actually mattered amongst a group of friends, and now, I feel like I've found my place amongst some truly wonderful, big hearted, beautiful people, and I'm lucky enough to call them my friends.

There is still so much to learn and to gain, I don't feel so alone in life anymore, and that makes this whole recovery thing a lot more manageable. Small steps eventually get you somewhere, and I'm getting there, slowly. As for what I lost, nothing is lost forever, even the pieces that I treasured the most are slowly making their way back into my orbit.

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"

something beautiful, a new chance.

Today, I stumbled. Metaphorically, of course, not literally. It was a waiting game really, when I was going to have my first slip, and today just happened to be the day. 

But it's okay. I can pick myself back up, dust myself off, and carry on with my journey. I can try to not let it set me back, or let these compulsions and thoughts take over my brain and drag me backwards into the past. There is no point regretting my actions today, I am sad, yes, disappointed, yes. But cycles of behaviour don't just stop, we have to keep fighting them and instilling new, positive behaviours into our life. 

I had an interesting discussion about regret in terms of self harm scars a few days ago. I like to think of scars as battle scars. Proof that you fought the fight, and won. That you overcame. A scar, by definition, means that some form of healing has taken place. Wounds have slowly healed over, gained new strength, gained a new layer of skin to them. The human skin isn't an easy armour to carry anyway. Rarely, do we ever "fit" into our own skin, we don't feel comfortable in it, we aren't happy with it. It's is never, ever thick enough. It cuts, it bleeds, it burns, it dies, it scars, but it also heals. 

Sometimes a little adjustment is all that is needed to feel acceptance in yourself. Adjust your view, adjust a thought, adjust an outlook; maybe then, your skin, your armour might feel a little more comfortable. 

Having thin skin isn't a flaw. It's human. We aren't all capable of being able to let a comment, words, thoughts, anything not get to us. The saying "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" is complete and utter bullshit. Words can do more damage than a wrecking ball. It's okay to be sensitive, it's okay to not be comfortable with who you are, or what you look like. It is rare to come across people who were born with the "perfect" layer of skin to be able to brush off negativity. 

If you have scars, you have scars. It's an unfortunate consequence. I used to get incredibly self conscious of my scars and cover them up with make up. I remember seeing the horror on someone's face at work when I rolled up my sleeve and they saw my arm had been hacked away at. I know for some people, it's just "another part" of them and I am in awe of their confidence. I would like to think that we are capable of eventually accepting our scars. Metaphorical scars too. We don't have to like them or love them, or think about what lead us to inflict pain upon ourselves. But accepting they are a part of us, is accepting that we have fought the fight against our mind, and we are healing. We may not be healed, we may only be a day into recovery, or a week, or a month. But what we are is better than we were before. 

was a prisoner inside, now i'm breathing the air

I'm sat eating a bar of chocolate, and I keep wondering what would "she" say? How would "she" feel? How would "she" react? 

When I talk about she, I'm referring to anorexia. My eating disorder became so embedded in my brain, it became me, I became it, together we were one. Now our connection is tumulus, not quite severed, but it is not quite the symbiotic relationship we once had.

She was my first real love. My first real friend. My first real driving force. I want to say letting go of the anorexic, eating disorder ridden me has been a lot easier than I anticipated, but in actual fact I've spent over a year getting to this place. Bit by bit, our bond got chipped away, it wasn't noticeable. At the time I thought nothing was happening, but seeds were being planted in my brain. Parts of my brain began to break free from her grip over me. 

She stole me away without me realising. She took me prisoner and she wouldn't let me go. She told me over and over again that I was nothing, that I was worthless, than the only value I would hold was to be thin. And I believed her. I hung on her every word. She made me feel special, she made me feel wanted. As long as I was striving to be thin, I thought I had control, when in actual fact, it was her that was in control. She caged me, she chained me in, I was confined to one goal and one goal only.

Every second of everyday her voice was in my head;  "Don't eat, purge what you do eat. Fat is nothing. You are nothing. You wonder why nobody likes you? It's because you're so fat and ugly. At least if you're thin and ugly, you'll at least be thin. That girl is thin, why can't you be that thin? Why are you such a failure? You're nothing. You're lazy. You're disgusting. You make me sick."

She made me doubt people's love for me. "How could anybody ever love you?"she taught me that compliments were people's way of laughing at me. "They're really insulting you, whatever they're saying, they really mean the opposite" she taught me to smile and politely thank them and then go home and cry and listen whilst she told me how grotesque and what a failure I was. 

But she was there for me when nobody else was. Nobody ever stayed around, but she did. She was there when I needed someone, she was there to spur me on, to make me want to achieve my goal of being thin. I was reliant on her, as long as she was there, I was safe. I was in my comfort zone. My comfort zone was starve, purge, hate. An endless cycle of soul destroying, torturous thoughts, where I felt nothing but shame and disgust.

She brainwashed me. For years, she manipulated and controlled every aspect of my being. She convinced me that thin would equal happiness. She used my body dysmorphia against me, she used my other mental illnesses against me, she twisted them to what she wanted and what she needed them to be; failures. Failures on my account, they were there because I simply wasn't good enough or thin enough. For years, I was burdened with the notion that I had brought about my own mental illness, and that was yet another failure to add to my increasingly long list. 

She had me under lock and key; I can't look at any other female without instantly racking up which parts of their bodies were smaller than the parts of my body. No matter what their shape or size, and due to my body dysmorphia, I can't understand that a UK size 20 has bigger thighs than me, or a bigger stomach. I can't see it. It's a blind spot for me. There is an inherent lack of comprehension that remains within me in regards to body size. All I see is people smaller than me.  

She was happily living alongside me, inside me, and I was happy for her to stay, we would have probably been set for life. But then I found love in small places, friends, extended family, and then they set to war. One voice told me I was worthless. Others told me I was worthy. One praised me for being thin. The others cried over my weight. One told me I was ugly. The others old me I was beautiful. 

Slowly, I found myself listening more to positive. The people who saw something in me that I clearly couldn't. I trusted them so implicitly, I knew they would not lie to me, I knew what they were saying had to be truth. Maybe not "truth truth" but a truth how they saw it. And that floored me. Never had I ever been made to feel anything more than what my mind had told me I was. Their love started to drive the other "her"'s love away. I wanted to trust what I could see, what I could really feel. 

It's a very strange adjustment to make, but the impact it has had on the rest of me has been remarkable. I still have some deep rooted issues with other mental illnesses that I suffer with, but finally, in terms of eating, I feel like I can breathe a little bit again. 

I find myself somewhat hypocritical writing this, because only today I had thoughts back of being too fat and restricting what I ate. I am in no way recovered. My eating disorders are still a huge factor in my life, they are just manageable now. Despite those thoughts going round my mind, I still "allowed" myself to eat a chocolate bar, I still "allowed" myself to indulge. Two months ago, I couldn't do that. Allowance of indulgence required a sacrifice; eat a meal, throw it up, don't eat anything the next day. Eat something with too many calories in, throw it up, exercise, don't even think about eating anything else for at least a day. But now, I allow myself these luxuries, they aren't luxuries, they're non disordered ways of thinking. 

Sure I do slip, but I'm only human. I'm just working on making sure those slips don't turn into falls.

One day at a time. One day at a time. 

the darkness in which I swim.

when you try your best but you don't succeed.

What happens if we never get where we want? If we strive for something we think is possible, when the reality is that it's unobtainable? Do we give up? Do we keep trying even though we're never going to get where we want? Do we stop striving for the unobtainable and settle for mediocrity? 

I'm really struggling with this. I kept on trying. I gave up, I decided you weren't worth it because nothing in your eyes would ever be "right" so I just stopped trying and tried to do what I wanted and not let your opinions bother me. But still, even today, a comment so simple, knocks me off my feet and makes me think that despite the fact I'm never going to be good enough for you, maybe I'll never be good enough for myself. 

Maybe I wont. That's a terrifying thought. So what do you do with that? Do you ignore it and keep going and continue to never get to where we want? Do you hold onto it and not even try? Do you just give up? 

You're meant to love certain people unconditionally. You're meant to support them not make their lives 10x harder. Especially when you say you love them. Are you seeing the me I see? Does that make what I see a reality and everybody else's views skewered? 

I just don't know. I just do not know. 

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.