Lily Myers - "Shrinking Women" (CUPSI 2013)

Anatomy of a Fuck Up

Between old Looney Tunes cartoons and my multiple readings of Of Mice and Men, I vaguely recall the character of Lennie, and his Looney Tunes likeness, saying "I done a bad thing"...
While this phrase sums up the beginning of this month well, I have been on a big and long ride the past several weeks. Puts the wildest shit a tragic novelist can devise to shame... But then those
World War I ambulance drivers like Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald always really pissed me off. I know that tragedy had a very real meaning to these men, but to me, it always seemed like overkill, to the point of being just silly and absurd... For me it was never like tragedy needed absolutely everyone to suffer horribly and/or die ironically... I always favored the tortures that Kafka and Dostoyevsky devised... For, in my own experience, real tragedy is about despair and fear. Death is an easy out, the greatest torture on earth is at our own hands, nestled within the depths of the human psyche. Living with what you have done as well as what you blame yourself for anyway... that is what destroys a person.

Nearly a month ago, I really fucked up...
I had spent the 3 months prior at my Grandma's side as her second husband of 8 years shriveled into a shadow of his former self in her living room on hospice... Bone cancer had taken my Grampa the same way 11 years ago, after 45 years of marriage...
Her second husband was the one who saved her from loneliness, gave her another chance at life with another extraordinary man... I owe all of the good in me to all 3 of them... my boyfriend and I visited them constantly, assisting with his care, helping with errands, smiling, reassuring, anything we could...then things start to blur...
After Pap died, my boyfriend and I somehow managed to slip away with all of his hospice medication. I'm money situation was getting desperate and I think that we were going to sell them... I forget... Unfortunately we also decided to take some ourselves with quite disastrous and amnetic consequences... I don't remember the rosary and I don't remember the funeral.... Apparently people without cancer torturing every nerve ending in their body are not intended to take pure morphine and heavy duty opiates... The doctor came back to collect the medication after the second day and my grandma found it gone. My aunt who is an RN came to pick it up my boyfriend's parent's home, where we were staying and we were kicked out. Everyone else banned us from their houses as well... We decided to cover up on my bumper stickers, license plates, etc and rob a Pharmacy... But we wound up chickening out after casing four different ones... Apparently there were 3 other robbery attempts that night on some of the same pharmacies and we would have been caught facing felony charges.
This is where grace comes in...
The next day after nearly three days in my car without sleep, my father reached out to us and offered us a way to redeem ourselves. We were married next day and my now husband began working a couple of days later. My disability back pay from 2012 arrived and I have spent this entire month renovating my new home, which is about the size of the average kitchen... And, as they say in all southern stereotypes, is "older than Methuselah"...
In light of the unpredictable nature of trailer plumbing, I set myself a "quit date" for purging (again)... it helps that the kitchen is the living room, the living room is the bedroom, and the bedroom is the bathroom....
kind of helps remove any semblance of privacy...
"Helps" is often a term people who are prone to binging, purging, and restricting, use when they are exchanging one behavior for another.... I know that ending up knee deep in vomit and ruining our plumbing is not an option. However, I am also aware of my blatant disregard for anyone else when it comes to my ED. People who are paid to stand and watch eating disorder patients use the restroom have managed to miss the occasional purge... I've done some disturbing and truly degrading things in desperation to not gain weight... And while this new situation of being unable to purge feels extremely liberating in a way... By making it something I simply cannot do... To my husband in the adjacent room, separated only by a saloon door... To all of our hard work over the past month... To my decrepit body and rotting teeth... It cannot happen. Period.
But taking away my ability to purge tends to transform every meal into an argument... My new home essentially becomes another one of my restriction prisons... or, if you like, a battleground, upon which I will fight with every breath in my body a daily war on calories, fat, carbs, weight, and anyone who is unfortunate enough to be in the way...
I'm scared.
I'm too old and, if I'm honest, too fucking smart to still believe that there is any reason to keep these unreasonable expectations, ridiculous beliefs, and maladaptive behaviors around... I know I am wrong, I know what is true, and I know that this never lasts...never makes anything better...
I know Anatomy, I know Nutrition, I know Psychology, and I know Me...
Yet I am once again feeling like a "fuck up" is a state of being rather than an occasional mishap...
Surely, this stupidity is not running my life... STILL...
Please, Doctor... there must be some mistake...
Love and Neurosis,
Little One

Getting Real Tired of Your Shit, Me...

Fuck me! I began this post on my cellphone and "Rainy Days and Mondays" by The Carpenters comes on XM Radio. How apropos...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjFoQxjgbrs‎

 Freaking Monday night depression hit me hard, strangely revolving around an intense desire to restrict back to September of last year... Karen Carpenter smacked me in the face with the hard truth of what that means...it essentially means death... but I tend not to concern myself with that neon pink elephant looming in the room... Not me... Nope...
For those unfamiliar with Karen Carpenter, she died of anorexia, more specifically, of a heart attack due to refeeding syndrome, in 1983, 2 years before I was born... they like to show documentaries about her in ed treatment facilities and on Lifetime...
Back then, for the vast majority of my disorder, and even now, this disease was and is extremely misunderstood and, sadly, often mistreated if not untreated... The consequences are devastating and ED's currently claim more lives than any other mental disorder, yet many suffer in silence and more still can find no way out....
Being anything but silent, I probably represent the latter... But the price of exposure of your disorder, although inevitable after so long, is to either accept or feign responsibility for your behavior...
It's that or let everyone believe that you're on drugs and go invisible for several months every year or two...
It's strange how ashamed and totally unashamed I am at this point... I despise the attention the truth gets me, but it's far easier to tell the truth more often than not... at least the truth keeps people from guessing you have AIDS or a big time addiction to heroin...
But, the result of being honest is vulnerability and transparency... everyone knows what goes on in that restroom and has a little insight into that twisted little brain of mine... People see the deliberate nature of your behavior around food and eventually gain the knowledge to make judgements and even decisions regarding your wellbeing...
This is where I get myself into trouble...
I have a tendency to blindly leap at recovery from time to time with no real desire for what that really means... total surrender of what has come to be my life...

My half assed efforts remind me of old roadrunner cartoons, lots of anvils and walls and splats and explosions, but for some reason I never get to die, just come up with another equally stupid idea that's going to leave a me standing, charred, in a cloud of smoke holding the fuse...

A lot of death has been hovering around my family and I lately. Most so far, grow old, some VERY old, before age or disease takes them... This blows my mind, as I had zero expectation of living to be 28, much less 91...

I've begged for death, even sought it out to the extent that I was even given last rites...

I don't seek it out so much anymore, but I still struggle with living in this particular version of my body... and that in itself confuses me to no end about what exactly it is that I want.... I cannot live this way, can't live that way, I apparently can't even die right... what the fuck!?

I'm actually willing to admit that a lot of this hostility towards my physical self is due to the fact that I'm especially triggered since last weekend. I went to a sort of reunion this past weekend and awkwardly tried to reconnect with some friends from my high school theater troupe, they hadn't seen me in 10 to 12 years... though I would never attend a school reunion, I'm known to make exceptions for smaller groups that I'm more intimate with, but the experience scared me shitless... I was grateful that no one really asked where I'd been or what I've done with my life... I kept it simple: degree in psych, worked in case management, pharmaceutical research, and a psychiatric hospital... even let some of my closer friends know about my "dancing"... 

But yesterday the pictures of the event showed up on Facebook.... thankfully only within the theater group which is closed... and I saw my body through the lenses of their cameras and pondered making an app that lets you cathartically rip digital pictures into pieces to make yourself feel better (technosavvy app designers, msg me)

Some hours and research later... it exists already...thunder stolen...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.km.photo.torn

Great! Just what I need to take self-loathing to the next level... because Fatbooth wasn't bad enough...

I would normally let this post trail off into oblivion while I downloaded and redownloaded both apps respectively and manipulated every picture in my phone into a human thumb to tear apart, but I just don't have the stomach for it tonight... Not only am I thoroughly disgusted by my self right now and have no desire to make it worse, but I feel so guilty that I'm actually having these thoughts as someone I love spends his last night on earth... I think its high time I pulled my head out of my ass and prepare it for the kicking that's coming over the next week when it isn't the center of my attention for once...

 Love and Neurosis,

Little One

Happiness and Other Drugs

It's been a minute hasn't it?
It's strange to come back after a long dry spell to find that your website has gone on without you...
I guess writing blogs is not so different from writing on a bathroom stall...leave your mark until your life's next paint job...
  I wonder how many abandoned blogs are floating around out there, their authors grasping for that one contribution they want to share with the world, only to lose their password, become mired in obligations, or stricken dumb by doubt and insecurity...

I have decided to make the writing my career for the time being, while I work to regain my footing after a long period of relapse with my eating disorder... found an agency to produce content for at $7.50  per 500 word article I can shit out and have been doing ok with that... Although I find it strange that when I want to get some "real writing" done to sort out my own thoughts and feelings, I sit here blankly staring at the blinking cursor for months before beginning to form words. Maybe it's the fact that the other one is incentivized. I make about 3 cents a month with my web traffic on this site only to communicate to my readers that I am stuck in the same rut that has claimed the past 18 years of my life... My articles about back pain and and elementary math education probably get more hits for my clients...whoever they are...

Since my last post, I turned 28, and I found out my Social Security backpay for all of 2012 is FINALLY en route... I'm currently working on not spending this check in my head before it gets here in about 3 weeks... But after over 2 years spent broke, miserable, struggling, sick, and not working (unless you count writing and exotic dancing) it's very hard not to want to take that fat check with your name on it and say, "I fucking deserve to be happy for once!"

This would usually an improvement on my typical thought process, but  it's been my experience that me when I'm excited or comfortable is often more dangerous than me when I'm miserable... Elation and hopelessness, are two emotions that both tend to translate to crazy in my experience, but hopelessness has a certain "je ne sais quoi"that prompts your inner survivalist into action... Desperation has a strange way of making you keep going, probably because you have nothing to lose. Conversely, the limited experience I have with "contentment" suggests that it quickly gives way to apathy and stagnation... and those are two things I simply can't abide... That being said, I've designated this small fortune to "move" me... Literally and figuratively... I intend to use it to get the fiancee and I a place in Austin again, reconnect with a treatment team (maybe... or parts of one), get my meds straight, my pain sorted out, labs done, DEXA scan, orthopedic treatment, car insurance, etc. Hard to move when you physically and financially CAN'T... so I thought I'd see if I could turn the tables on my long held tradition of irresponsibility... I'm not terribly optimistic, but I'm only as hopeless as I have to be to stay motivated...

I tried to take another stab at remaining purge-free several weeks ago after (MORE) months of pretending that I was working at it (and fooling absolutely no one but myself...) only to find my ED here with me still with no sign of relenting. My behaviors are consistent at least. I don't proper "binge" any longer, however I still subjectively consider everything with calories to be a binge, so my "everything must go" mentality is pretty much still the norm. In a VERY surreal new development after months of totally avoiding every reflective surface and hiding in giant clothing, Texas just got too fucking hot for that shit, and I had to bust out the tanks and steal a few pairs of men's shorts from the fiancee... This has, however, made me into Neurotic Body-checker of the Century, and I now I cannot seem to stop looking down and in the mirror, the car door, the window, disgusted and yet oddly fascinated by my new-ish size... To clarify, it fascinates me in the same way a rash or a tumor fascinates me, it's certainly not a good thing, but it sure is weird and interesting...
Too bad shitty body image remains immune to ointments and radiation...

To further complicate matters, the lack of ability to afford to see a credible doctor in about 2 years has taken its toll on my body, causing it to feel like I distributed sticks to an army of 10,000 invisible bodybuilding gnomes so they can follow me around whacking the shit out of me everyday... My arthritic body makes the simplest activity (like fucking sitting) into a chore... I cannot communicate how profound this pain is, but it is unlike anything I've ever felt, probably because it doesn't heal or dissipate, it only gets worse with each passing day. I've never known myself to be much of a pussy about physical pain, I usually muddle through it to get shit done despite it, but this is different, this isn't going away and I know it... I've almost given up hope that even maintaining a healthy weight is worth it, at least when I had pitiful, atrophied, sorry excuses for muscles, they didn't cripple and torture me so.... Actually sustained a stupid, but reasonable relationship with other people's pain medications for a while... Reasonable, as in I actually took 2, waited 6 to 8 hrs before taking more, and maybe looked for some every 3 days or so... But it doesn't even remotely touch the pain and getting them is exhausting, more money and trouble than it's worth when you're actually hurting... So knocking that out with the check by seeing a specialist is going to be amazing...

But I won't get too happy about it just yet... Then I won't go...

Until next time... hopefully that's soon...
Love and Neurosis,
Little One

  The past few weeks, perhaps it's even been longer, are somewhat hazy...
I feared to approach the issues weighing on my mind the heaviest with my typical habit of dissecting them, knowing that I would just make a big mess and solve nothing...
Several monthss back,  I think I gave up... Yes, again...
I discovered for the billionth time in my 28 years on this planet that not one fuck is given about my recovery as long as the state of Texas refuses to insure me via medicaid, despite the fact that I am considered Disabled by the same entity. In addition, I was granted an insulting $16 a month to feed myself and told to try again in December 2013 when I become eligible for SSI/Medicare in addition to my current disability benefits... I'm happy to report that this is because Texas told the Affordable Care Act to fuck itself, so it takes longer to be eligible....
But get this madness, if I don't get a "malnutrition" diagnosis this year and every year I actually need these benefits from now on, I'll lose that too...
 So then I filed my taxes (late) and find out that as of January 2014 I would have been mandated to purchase private insurance ANYWAY... So I thought, perhaps it may benefit me to purchase a private insurance plan to get me from now to December... but wait... Disabled? Doesn't that mean expensive? Pre-existing conditions and whatnot? Your sick already? Well, then there's no way we can insure you, we would have to pay for medical expenses like we are supposed to...
 Thinking long and hard about abandoning the whole time-tested attempts at recovery...
Not only do i seem to give zero fucks... this disorder is my identity now, and i dont trust what'll be next...

We are not worthy!

Things have come to an inevitable head... I had several depressing as fuck phone calls over the past few days... weighing my options (or lack thereof):about the possibility of yet another trip to residential... or even PHP... or anything that I am not doing now...
I was surprisingly excited, or perhaps just desperate, to do the humiliating phone assessments that I've done a thousand times before... I half hoped that some one would say "I know just the thing!" And I'd be scooped up, hugged, supported, and welcomed into an environment that could save me from myself...

  Every conversation ended promptly after "What kind of insurance do you have?" Followed by "Unfortunately we won't be able to help you."
I realized how screwed I was... I knew I forgot something... being sick requires money...
   Furthermore, many leave you with the impression that you need to take a few weeks to go get sicker.... then call back... Sorry we need you to almost die again before you're worth saving...
Fucking absurd....
So they can tell you again that they can't help you... wish you the best of luck with your descent into madness...and their job is done...
  At one point in my life, this constant fuckover made me a staunch supporter of healthcare reform... public option... all that shit...
I identify as a libertarian, but the prospect of not living in terror that my perpetual state of illness goes perpetually untreated, I thought "What the hell?"
I think I should've changed my tone.... been more incredulous...
I feel like everyone around me is fed up and poised to withdraw support.... as a topic I've spent so long running into the ground.... I can't see my bullshit being tolerated much longer....
In fact, I'm damn near the point of banning the topic from my conversations and my life entirely... I'm tired of belaboring this useless argument... "It's not that bad." if I am not yet capable or willing to make the changes then I'm not going to waste everyone's time talking about it incessantly...
Except here I guess... I'm about to expand to some other topical blogs to get my mind off this shit, but rest assured, this disorder has gone absolutely nowhere... I'll keep posting...
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Love and Neurosis

When a Cigar is Just a Cigar...

So in case my elaborate post on nightmare babies made it unclear, I've been just a tad erratic lately...
So erratic that I forget most things that cross my mind almost instantly... until something I apparently said-but-don't-
recall-feeling hurts someone else...Then I realize how it came across and prepare my hair shirt and self- flagellation supplies for the guilt trip...
I'm noticing that I have this very unflattering tendency of mistaking my own feelings about my worth and character for the opinions of others... with consequences that are not so pleasant...
Try explaining to someone who's feelings you've hurt, that all of the dirty looks, frustration, and irritation in your words and actions is really you speaking with the disdain you feel for yourself... Not them...
They just happened to be in the vicinity of your entire life...
They may ask you to explain the Easter Bunny next...

Provided you are fortunate enough to insult someone who cares about you (or at least has a sense of humor about your bullshit...), maybe they'll laugh, but they are probably far from amused.
  The psychological community has sought to understand the loosely defined concept of "transference" (and it's close pal "projection") for decades... Originally, transference was a very specific therapeutic event in psychoanalysis. It occurred when a patient began responding to the analyst as they would a significant authority figure/parent)...
Then the patient, eventually realizes that he is undeniably incorrect in attributing his childhood trauma (and subsequent adult neurosis) to a fucking stranger he paid to listen.
In an ideal world, this would illuminate which of his sexual organs was really to blame for his troubles... Catharsis happens...
And he'll ride a winged unicorn into the sunset...

It was thought that allowing the patient to express undesirable or shameful emotions to the therapist would cause him to process them differently than he had at an earlier stage of development. Bring the subconscious (and perhaps some of the of the unconscious) into consciousness and it won't sneak up on you and make you act crazy...
Or it will anyway, but at least you'll know why..  Transference in therapy and projection as a defense mechanism, have since become common explanations for any instance of misplaced emotion. Once Sigmund Freud had expounded upon his theories, and they gained global momentum, it became apparent that assumptions such as these permeated social situations that do not always necessarily involve a cigar, a couch, or your mother. In fact, had Freud steered clear of referring to anuses and penis envy, his enumeration of the ways we defend ourselves was pretty accurate and still holds...

The feelings each of us have (that we really wish we didn't) are easier to understand and ignore if we don't have to assume direct responsibility for having them...
This causes most of us to repress them, rationalize them, and project them all over creation rather than be stuck with the discomfort... Recently, my own desperation to ignore the state of total relapse I've been in for months, has been making me furious with myself for being so weak... Unfortunately, since the restricting and purging was failing to ease the discomfort, I had to get rid of it some other way. I don't know why, but making it everyone else's fault was how I excused it this time...
That's not to say I was always accurate in my attribution of blame before, but most of the time it's pretty consistently self-directed... I'm neither usually so bold or self-pitying as to feel like it's the cold, cruel world's fault that I'm fucked up, nor is it typical for me to assume that the problem lies with those around me for not caring...
But, alas, this has been going on all fucking week...
  I know that I am the one responsible for the relapse, I know that I am the one who pissed away the professional help and shrugged off the loving support that I've been offered... Now it feels like I'm back in it too deep and I almost don't want to be stopped...
The long and tedious climb up the scale is fully in reverse and my brakes are fucking out...
I find it strange how quickly things have escalated... it took months of slow and tedious work to gain the weight and trust of those around me... It only took weeks to undo about half of the weight gain and all of the trust. I keep telling myself that if I just stop right now, stay put, BE CAREFUL, that I could walk in both worlds. Recovered, but not quite so OBVIOUSLY recovered... I like to think I could teeter on the verge of "normal" indefinitely... without stepping over the edge and careening towards certain death below... I like to think that every time I've supposedly done so in the past is grossly exaggerated... was it really a cliff? or did I just fall a few feet?
I suppose that if I were to analyze how many blatant defense mechanisms just shot out of me in the last paragraph or two, I could deduce that I am definitely in denial... Unfortunately,  merely dissecting all of the tricks my mind plays just leaves me with a big mess splayed all over the autopsy table... I'd like to clean it up and put everything back where it belongs, but I have no idea where anything goes...

"I think the Bad Man is Gone, Mr.B"

So not quite the whiney little bitch I was yesterday...
No resolutions to the laundry list of grievances, but that's ok, what's the point of grieving if you aren't eventually going to move on in spite of yourself...
So I woke up this morning feeling like proper shit and decided to immerse myself in a nightmare of someone else's creation...rescue and harvest some children on Xbox for a bit... That is, I played Bioshock...

In the game, which I am actually playing through for the first time, I'm being presented with this moral dilemma each time I die 60 times and finally kill the giant Big Daddy Robot who protects the Little Sisters...

If I Rescue, I get less ADAM, which is some powerful shit I use to purchase genetic modifications and upgrades, but she becomes a "real girl"...

If I Harvest her, I get more ADAM, but she shrivels up and turns into a giant slug that looks like something out of the movie Slither... Effectively killing her... But making you more of a badass...

While I have not played very far at all in this awesome yet creepy fucking game... And I'm playing it way later in life than most of my fellow gamers...

Each time I go to make this decision of what to do with these eerie little girls, a decision I've now made a whole 5 times after getting my ass stomped by giant robots making orca noises, I have no implications of how it will affect the eventual outcome of the story, only that it will... 

 I usually love this aspect of gaming, used to be really into those Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books as a child... I've always described myself, ironically, as "insatiably curious." I love to manipulate variables and see what happens... While this often gets me into trouble, as it inevitably leads to testing limits and breaking rules, it's rare that my intent is malicious or even all that devious... I just want to explore... Anybody who's ever watched Star Trek or and Indiana Jones movie knows that exploration has both unexpected and painful consequences as well as a plethora of rewards...

 Thus far in the game, I've "harvested" 2 Little Sisters, and "rescued" 3. I have no idea what these disturbing little girls are yet, or even, really what the ADAM I'm sucking from their tiny skulls is... all I know is, that I feel like I'm making a fucked up choice no matter what decision I make...

Perhaps you are wondering why I bring this up...

Well, I have this tendency to be really shit sleeper... I have been my entire life... Recently, in my desperation to knock myself out at night, I've turn to an arsenal of over the counter and herbal remedies to try to coax my overactive brain into slumber... I adapt to medications rapidly, so in the past month I've had to tweak the quantities of the dyphenhydramine (Benadryl), Valerian Root, Melatonin, doxylamine succinate (Unisom), Kava Kava, and the occasional Ambien (when I can get it) to absurd proportions for them to work...

 But in the past week, I've noticed something strange... I'm not only dreaming... but I am remembering dreams, which I have only done intermittently most of my life... More than that, I am dreaming really bizarrely and vividly... and waking up with damn near perfect recall of the shit, to the point where it can both level and disturb me for days...

A creepy trend in these twisted dreams I've been having is babies and children... 

And I'm beginning to realize where Stephen King gets his material...

So three nights in a row last week, I was inventing my own creepy dream children... most disturbingly, in one dream, I was entrusted to protect and nurture myself as a baby... I don't know if you've ever breast-fed a tiny version of yourself, with your exact face, hair, expressions, and personality, in the front pew of a church you don't belong in, but it's unsettling... 

To say the least...

So, naturally, when you wind up having to rescue her and a school full of other elementary school children from 2 teenage ginger boys that transform into green demons that leave rectangular sores when they touch you that ooze radioactive neon slime, you really start to wonder what the fuck your subconscious is getting at... Not to mention when Baby You is ripped from your arms and carried away by the ginger-boy demons and an evil bald leprechaun with black spikes all over his head and carried into the underworld...

And everyone you know and love is there standing on my elementary school playground, fucking looking on and nodding as she's sucked into hell... like its the end of Magnolia and it's fucking raining frogs, "It's just something that happens."

But this is not all...

Only one night prior, in another dream, I had exited an apartment occupied by people I know and total strangers' children dressed in costumes from Yo Gabba Gabba...

 And everywhere I wandered inside of this apartment, people would appear out of nowhere and then proceed to bitch about how rude I was for not seeing them... I ran from the apartment when they began mocking me for being blind... Now outside of this decrepit apartment, I saw bloody water gushing onto the steps and sidewalk from a nearby hydrant... as I sidestepped to avoid the "water", I caught a glimpse of an infant seated with its back to me on an adjacent stairwell leading to another apartment... I suspect I got this image from The Devil's Advocate...

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/mv-djoU8/devils_advocate_film_wheres_your_mommy/

When I approached to check on the baby, two enormous dobermans raced down the stairs to defend him... Baring their razor sharp teeth in my face...

 So, my point in all of this is... It's got to be here somewhere...

 I don't think dreams are much more than manifestations of what your subconscious is attempting to "process"... Nor do I feel deep remorse for the decisions I make in Bioshock...

 What I am all mixed up about is the feelings they leave me with...

When I "Rescued" my first Little Sister in the video game, I felt like I had removed something dark buried deep inside her. She hopped to her feet, her eyes no longer yellow and glowing and said "Gee' thanks.!" But when I tested out the "harvest" option, to my horror, the child melted away and a squirming slug remained in my hands... 

 I think, on some level, I liken this brain drain exorcism shit to my entire life right now...

Caught between two courses of action, I am trying to decide what parts of me are most conducive to living vs. which ones render me useless and dead inside...

Excuse me now while I go scare the crap out of myself to get my answer...

Love and Neurosis

Little One

The Girl Who Cried "Recovery"

Once upon a time...fuck it...
Sometimes, I regretfully admit, I take for granted how lucky I have been to have access to treatment for my eating disorder in the past...
 When I reflect on all of the tools I've been provided over the years, the care I've been given, the friends I have made, I get all warm and tingly inside and rainbows nearly shoot from my ass I'm so grateful...
 But there is a deep-rooted, seething, mess of agression and pain bubbling beneath the surface of that gratitude that leaves me cold, cynical, embittered and utterly enraged with myself...
 The latter is, unfortunately, often the more prevalent sentiment... Especially over the past year...
I know I've probably betrayed this fact in previous posts: The "poor-pitiful-me" sob story where I whine about losing my insurance, and my job and my entire fucking life over the last year... How I relapsed instantaneously, gave up completely, resigned myself to a life of quiet desperation and suck, then magically resolved after almost dying, having some scary fucking seizures and heart problems and osteoarthritis, etc. and reuniting with the love of my life, to at least try to muddle through the complicated business of changing my entire fucking life...
Or maybe you heard the one where "I'm never purging again" rolled off my bloody, seizure bitten tongue back in November before I'd even fully regained consciousness, and that was the start of actually trying to recover...or something like that...
 What really happened is that everyone in my life wanted to have me involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital with a court order, specifically one where I would be completely immobilized, tube fed, and forced to lie there thinking about why I had to be in such a position... My boyfriend, friends, and family had gone about the business of researching this option extensively without my knowledge, and proceeded to terrify me with the notion that I had just better do something... Before they inevitably got to their wits' ends, threw up their hands, and  followed through with their diabolical plan... I was incessantly looking over my shoulder in absolute terror for the proverbial padded wagon and white coats "Coming to take me away... (ha ha!)"
They had concluded that I was becoming a legitimate danger to myself, or rather, had always been a danger to myself, and that I had been so for far too long to continue much further... To me, this all seemed wildly melodramatic...excessive... Surely I had not actually gone crazy enough to warrant such extreme interventions...?
This was the kicker... They placed this drastic plan on standby, subtly revealed details that scared the shit out of me, then said that I would have no knowledge of when it would happen, if it would happen, etc. so I couldn't hop on a passing freight train and elope... So every time I got into a car, since I was not yet allowed to drive given the seizing, for the last few months of 2012, I would instantly commence panic mode, terrified of the destination...
 Oddly enough, my idiotic behavior actually underwent very few significant changes, overall at least.  More like it underwent a brief superficial makeover...
 At first, In October, I was pretty serious about "getting better..."(or was it just not getting hospitalized?) My boyfriend supervised my every move for two or three months, my therapist got in on the Involuntary Commitment plan, and I was forced to have all meals with the bf, take medications that skyrocketed my weight, and make weekly weight gains (while assuring my therapist that I didn't care that I was doing so), in order to be permitted to remain an outpatient...
 The sad truth of all of this is that I was never really "outpatient material" to begin with... in fact, the only reason I had ever become one in the first place was because I received my termination notice from work on the same day I attempted to re-enter 10 hour/day treatment...
Fast Forward to January 2013...
 3 months and 40 lbs later, I was at the low end of my "range", and off the wagon in a major way, I had convinced them I was no longer about to die, got off of supervision, and was back to purging every fucking time I looked at food... My saving grace in these dark times was simple: Alcohol... Kept just enough fermented sugar and carb juice down to keep my weight from dropping too noticeably or quickly, while secretly vowing to carefully and covertly wick away what I'd gained and then some...
 The sheer absurdity of this ridiculous scheme is not lost on me...
I don't have any idea why I thought I could get away with quietly tiptoe-ing back to the verge of death, or why I continue to entertain that notion in the back of my mind today...  Perhaps I'm taking the results of that Barry Manilow shirt study from the last post a tad too seriously... But a HUGE part of me actually desires to go completely unnoticed as I make a total ass out of myself...
I digress...
 In the interest of continuity, as January, February, and now March passed, I began to get more and more freedom from those around me. I'm sure you can imagine the finesse with which I handled that freedom if you have not already read about it...
 Did you imagine lots and lots of bullshit and almost no action?
Well give yourself a gold star, because that is exactly what I've been up to since the moment I got off their radar...
With the boyfriend, I'd reveal a fuck up after doing it countless times a day for a few weeks, then I'd eventually break down and cry and confess what a naughty girl I'd been... But what I failed to acknowledge in these breakthrough moments of accountability, was that I had not once asked for help in the moment I was actually doing the up-fucking...
Likewise, the therapist who I've been avoiding appointments with for over a month now, has become a luxury that I can no longer afford to keep... He too, has become a total waste of my time, energy, and very limited budget, all because I tell him about 3% of what I actually do... Because, in his words, he will "send me to the hospital so fast it will make my head spin", if I "play" with him...
 And like the fucking child I am known to be, all I have done is play...
 You see, in my mind, eating once every day or two and only purging like 3 or 4 times a day is me kicking some serious ass... at least in comparison to how I was operating 5 months ago... and most of my life, for that matter... but if I currently had any the financial means to access to a professional opinion, I don't think I would exactly be getting patted on the back...
 Which brings us to tonight...
I have been chain-smoking and thinking and writing all day. This evening, I stumbled upon some news that should have made me happy, a friend who is also struggling is reluctantly returning to a treatment program we attended together... And what started out as relief that she was going to be taken care of and admiration of her strength, slowly morphed into a whole slew of emotions that but sent me spiraling into a pit of despair... And wow, did that ever make me feel like a piece of shit...
 I tried to ignore it... Mostly, because I felt like a sorry excuse for a human being for allowing my thoughts turn in such a selfish direction... But the din soon became an uproar and within moments I was sobbing uncontrollably in my boyfriends arms before I even had a chance to figure out why I was so fucking upset in the first place...
 Eventually, I began to have coherent thoughts, and told him every little awful thought in my head... Most notably, how I have had so many opportunities, so many chances, so many treatments to fix this stupid eating disorder and I pissed away every single one of them... relapsed immediately each time and now that I am utterly destitute and uninsured, I have no help when I would actually put it to good use...
To really blow the kazoo at this pity party, I continued to kick myself...
  I cannot blame anyone but myself for the situation I'm currently in. I was the one who stubbornly resisted every step of the way, I was the one who used up all my chances, and now I am laying in the bed I made for myself. Treatment is not an option for me now, it may never be again. This puts this whole business of trying to "getting better" entirely in the hands of the worst possible person: ME...
And I fucking suck at it...
And its unfair to ask him to stop me... or help me...
And he can't anyway...
And I've exhausted my family and all of their resources years ago...
And so on, and so on... You get the idea... Girl Who Cried "Recovery" when it wasn't really there, one time too many, eventually she gets ignored and it eats her...
 So, then he hits me with this, "So you feel like your doing this alone, but who exactly have you asked to help you?"
Fuck me sideways!
After rattling off a seemingly endless list of places I had worn out my welcome and people who had (justifiably) given up on me, he rephrases it...
"Well, what is it that you need?"
I snickered through the swollen slits of my eyes, "If I knew that I wouldn't need help!"
Then, it really hit me, the real answer:
"I have no concept of what I need. What I need is someone to fucking follow me around telling me what I need...or I'll forget that I have needs..."

Love and fucking Neurosis

Ain't Nothing but a Barry Manilow T-Shirt...

Historically, and somewhat notoriously, I avoid the topic of "Body Image", especially in the context of treatment programs I've participated in.. I really avoid it when I am physically present and the topic comes up... or, in treatment, when that dreaded "Body Image"/"Body Awareness"/"Yoga"/"Mindfulness"/"Psychodrama"(DON'T ASK) Group comes around each week...
If I am in anyone's direct line of sight when these topics are discussed, or if I am visible to anyone when asked to "connect with" or "be aware of"the fact that I even have a fucking body, I almost invariably: (a) have a full blown panic attack, (b)storm out and refuse to participate, or (c) pout in the corner scowling in silence... This even happens in individual therapy sessions, medical appointments, and everyday occurrences, probably because the second I think about my disgusting and overwhelming "PRESENCE" I immediately want to obliterate it into nothing... Seriously, put me in a Yoga class, ask me to role play, or "notice my (fucking) breathing" and watch the fun..
I begin having a veritable tsunami of disturbing and horrible thoughts and ideas, and will be in another room sobbing, breathless, popping a Klonopin, or vomiting within the first 3 minutes... Then I'll be playing out scenarios in my mind for the remainder of the day involving grotesque self-evisceration... Where I imagine carving all of the fat and muscle off of my body with an oversized potato peeler, then replacing my skin neatly over the remaining skeleton...
Trust me, the serial killer-esque nature of this image is not lost on me...
Also believe me when I say that you would cry too if this was your response to something as innocuous as a Doward-Facing Dog pose...
In addition to my desperation not to acknowledge the existence of my own body, I am even more determined for the rest of the world to forget that it exists as well... The fantasy I have when I have to talk about a body part, or how I look, or how I see myself, in front of anyone, typically involves transforming into a disembodied head... I become consumed with the fear that the second that I mention anything regarding my appearance, everyone will suddenly hyperfocus on my flaws, notice how gross I really am... The scales will fall from the eyes of those present and there I'll be in my true form: Jabba the Hut's stunt double...
Part of me knows all of this is highly irrational, but that does absolutely fuck all to change the horror movie that plays in my mind... And although logically, I know that "The Spotlight Effect" is deeply at work in me and almost certainly everyone I encounter, I still long for a cloak of invisibility to wrap around my body, leaving just a floating head to face the world...
Behavioral researchers Gilovich, Medvec, and Savitsky did an experiment almost bordering on inhumane to examine this "Spotlight Effect" in 2000. They describe the phenomenon as an overestimation of the extent to which others actually give a shit about what you are doing or how you appear... especially when you fuck up or are otherwise doing something you perceive to be socially unacceptable... Put simply, when you make a mistake or possess a flaw, you are suddenly the center of the universe. The spotlight is fixed on you and the horrifying spectacle that is your botched life is on display for the world to see. To challenge this erroneous perception we all supposedly possess, Gilovich and Co., evil geniuses that they were, required college students to wear a fucking Barry Manilow t-shirt... because it doesn't get any more humiliating than that, right? Then they each were led into a room full of other students for a bit, then back out eventually, and allowed to remove the loathsome garment... Once they had slightly recovered from the social trauma, the researchers asked the Barry Manilow Fan Club how many people they thought noticed their fashion faux pas. When compared to how many people in the room actually gave a flying fuck, the t-shirt group significantly overestimated how many people noticed...
While I should find reassurance in the fact that it is highly unlikely that others are judging me by my own ridiculous standards, somehow, it doesn't diminish the wattage of the spotlight...
I recall a group I had weekly in one of my countless treatment programs in which the therapist had these little blank body diagrams:

  And every week we would have to "accept" a new body part, write the date on the diagram, and say some positive shit about that part... Keeping in mind that this is an eating disorder clinic, I was not alone when I reluctantly selected one eye one week, the other the next, working my way around each ear, each eyebrow, each hand and foot, my hair, top lip, bottom lip, until eventually months had gone by and I was running low on acceptable parts... 

 Everything from my neck, down to the stumps of my wrists and ankles could take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut... Which in retrospect is probably how I imagined those parts appeared, soft, puffy, greasy sugar-coated evil with a giant hole in the middle...

 So the therapist running the group, known by the patients as the gentlest hard-ass in the facility, had a tendency to aggressively challenge our disorders while deeply empathizing with the patient, the person, left in the ED's wake... As one girl would later put it, she would "make you cry, then start crying with you, making you cry even harder..."

 So we are going around the table, each accepting a part, or pretending to, and I am frantically searching my mind for something, anything, that I could honestly learn to live with... I was oddly determined, for some reason, to be sincere when I accepted parts... it was a huge deal to me... 

 I have always been rubbed the wrong way by the therapeutic concept of "Fake it til you make it." For me, manufacturing sentiments that I didn't possess for show was something I did constantly with everyone outside of treatment, and the outcome of this pretense was almost always to self-destruct... So I tried my damnedest when in therapy not to conceal my true emotions, with the hope that it would liberate me from my destructive ways... 

"Your turn..."

Deer in the headlights... Still staring at the diagram, at the mowhawk and representations of my tattoos I had drawn in previous weeks... Suffocating, suppressing tears, eyeballing the door, ready to run...

"I can't. There are no more parts."

"Is there one you think you can work on accepting?"

"No."

"Would you like some help from the group?"

"NO!"

Tears are now pouring down my face, heat and blood are rushing to my cheeks and chest...

"NO! STOP LOOKING AT ME!" I sobbed to the entire room. Spotlight much?

I got up to leave the room. 

 I had run out of the facility to my car once before, stolen my keys from the front office, took off driving in the middle of a panic attack, vomited into a cup, chain-smoked 3 cigarettes, and almost crashed before returning to apologize and finish out the 10 hr a day intensive treatment program, the staff had not been amused... I had also run out on other occasions to purge in bushes, neighboring doctors offices, trash cans... I was not running out again...

 The therapist rose to stop me, said my name sternly. But when I looked up to see her face, instead of the anger and frustration I had expected from her tone, this therapist, a year or two younger than me, but eons ahead in emotional maturity looked...sad? She had tears in her eyes, that she quickly blinked away with her back to the other patients as she faced me. My back was pressed against the door, my hand on the knob, her face shifted in and out of focus... blurred by tears... Surely she had given up, surely this was the last fucking straw, surely she had tired of my constant resistance... Nope, her face remained the same, a combination of helplessness, sadness, pity... "Hey, those are my feelings," I thought to myself... I mumbled to her that I wasn't running again, just please excuse me for the rest of the group...

I took a Klonopin, and plopped onto a beanbag in the common area, curled into the fetal position, and attempted to breathe... As I drifted into a post-panic nap, I found myself fascinated at the therapist's response to my tantrum... Was my self-image really that distorted? Was it that pitiful to see? Was it sad?

 Its been almost a year and a half since this incident, but I think about it constantly still, replaying it in my mind...Even as I sit here now, in my oversized clothing, afraid to glance down or at be near reflective surfaces for more than a few minutes a day for months, I remain utterly baffled...

I have no idea what is real. I have no idea how I appear to others. I have no idea what my imaginary spotlight is actually exposing... Who even notices what I obsess over constantly... What do they really think when I slink off to purge or excuse myself from eating... Do they even care? 

I remain oblivious...

I want to take off this damn Barry Milow t-shirt already... but I'm absolutely terrified of whats underneath it...

Love and Neurosis

Commitment to Failure

I've taken a short break from blogging this past week... mostly because my perspective was so fucking inconsistent that if I were to attempt to write about about any topic, I would have changed my opinion on the matter before I could finish a sentence...
You would swear that I was Robin Williams I changed character so often... Doing serial impersonations of wildly varying personalities with no discernible attachment to any of them... I think my head has finally cooled to a simmer, giving me a chance to plot my next move...
Which is oddly enough going to be to stop dead in my tracks...
I cancelled therapy for the 3rd week in a row, hid from the world and all of its ugly judgements and obligations, relaxed, slept late, read, sang in my car, schemed, had a couple of orgasms, played xbox, blew some shit up, even did my taxes... The mundaneness of my week was so comfortable I had absolutely no desire to do anything productive OR destructive... Which has caused me to emerge from my cocoon surprisingly pleased with the consequences of doing nothing... there were none...
Now were this to become the norm, I could see it becoming problematic... but my external inaction was the only way I could handle a surplus of internal activity... my thoughts were racing and my emotions were all over the place... so I stopped and waited for the shit-storm to pass...
The thing that wavered the most this week was my confidence that I would ever be recovered, or happy, or anything at all... I was beginning to get extremely tired of running in place on this hamster wheel that never goes anywhere... trying so hard to not purge and not restrict and not be a pussy...
Got me really fucking confused about what to actually DO...
It would be incredibly exciting if I could say I had deduced from my countless failures the precise course of action required to recover from an eating disorder... come to think of it, I guess repeated failure is the burden and source of all expertise...
But the trick to failing successfully is to learn from your unsuccessful attempts... This week, when my motivation was sapped and recovery seemed hopeless and the familiar sense of impending doom descended upon me... I kind of shrugged and said, "Bring it!" And I cannot help but feel that this attitude towards fuckups is going to be a key element in getting out of my 18 year rut... Lacking the ability to commit to anything else, I can always commit to milking my failures for every bit of insight they have to offer...  Its not exactly a box of kittens, but it keeps me here...
Until next time...
Love and Neurosis,
Little One

Uncivil Disobedience

Ever feel like the instructions for recovery resemble those on a shampoo bottle...?
Half the time you scoff that there are any instructions at all, because it seems like a chimpanzee can do it.. because the way to go about it seems so obvious: Eat, don't throw up...
You, are like someone with insanely long hair, or really soft water... the exception to the rule... the way to go about changing your life is superficially simple, but some how the terminal uniqueness of your situation makes "Lather, Rinse, Repeat" impossible given the complexity of your specific confounding factors... I have a "special" problem... Your commands are meaningless puny human!

Ok, weird analogy, but I cannot say it hasn't felt real the past few weeks...

or has it been months again already?

 I am floundering around aimlessly, have returned to purging at full force, as in every time I so much as look at a bathroom... (or a trash can... or a garbage disposal...or a fucking shrub...)  I've resolved for days in row now that I was shutting this behavior down! Only to find it cropping up on me halfway through my first cup of coffee... did i add skim milk...? unacceptable... do over tomorrow...
Since I became suddenly uninsured and unemployed without warning over a year ago, I've been forced financially to take my "treatment" into my own hands... and there is truly no one more dangerous than I to entrust with such a lofty task...
I am unstructured, petrified, delusional, anxious mess... Just what I looked for in all my previous helping professionals!

It seems that these days I'm playing my own "treatment team..." You would think that I'd be really quite good at this after working in psychiatric care for so long and having so many "teams" throughout the years... but nope, I am beginning to believe I am fundamentally incapable of self-care...
So here are the many hats I'm currently wearing (that don't quite fit my head...)

I am a psychiatrist. Ta da! (Not really... don't want legal bullshit for impersonating a physician...) As I've mentioned in previous posts, I have a long and complicated relationship with psychiatry...
As if the criteria for mental illnesses wasn't vague enough, the descriptions of the "mechanism of action" for most psych meds is "unknown"... (i.e.no one knows how or why it works, just that it kinda sometimes does...)
I've plowed through various psychiatrists and tried over 35 meds in the past 10 years... then, after my last seizure, stopped taking klonapin because I was having to jump through hoops and suffer crippling withdrawal symptoms to get it... my latest provider prescribed a low dose combo of Prozac, Lamictal, Remeron, and Zyprexa back in November when I was still very underweight... I had been prescribed each med individually before in conjunction with others, but never all 4 together...
Remeron and Zyprexa are both two of the biggest uncontrollable weight-gainer meds in psychiatry... the sad part is that the weight gain is so substantial and so abnormal that no matter how fantastic the emotional effects, people without EDs are inclined to discontinue using both because of the side effects, citing increases depression and anxiety over gaining 30+ lbs in 1-3 mos... Granted I would have been made to gain more if I had to go inpatient again... granted, this gain simply put me in "range" initially, all granted,  but still, unamused...
So feeling that I couldn't handle that after a few weeks, I decided to stop everything except some herbs... and unfortunately I severed ties with everyone from whom I obtain the "smoking type"...
So I turn to the insanely overpriced supplement isle... I get Valerian Root, Kava Kava, Skullcap, passionflower, Inosotol, GABA, L-Theanine, L-Tryptophan, 5HTP, Phenibut, Chamomile, B complex...
My boyfriend and I even bought a sonic jewelry cleaner to make mega-doses of liposomal Vitamin C to increase its bioavailability... For the non-nerds, we tried binding high potency Vitamin C crystals with soy lecithin with sound waves to make it absorb better... it tasted like sour milk...
In fact, I've come to refer to most natural supplements as "Foot Pills" because I'm fairly certain that the herbs they are made with grow only in adolescent boys' locker rooms...
So... yeah... I took Benadryl and melatonin to sleep... which worked like a fucking charm... well... if by "charm", you mean "insomnia-cursed-talisman"...
My fanaticism for Buffy the Vampire Slayer is now on the table...
I decided this week that I could no longer abide living in fear and stagnation... (How many times have I decided that? )
So I checked with my former psychiatrist in Austin and arranged a phone consult for tomorrow because I decided to go back to my old medications that she prescribed, keeping the Lamictal from the low-cost clinic on board... Back to Buspar, Zoloft, and Klonopin... Nice safe soothing security blanket prescription... know how it works, that it works, and I can work with it...
Self-medication isn't so bad if you've been legitimately medicated in the same manner by a physician? Right...?
Now lets play Freud... Lie back on my couch...
Then, while I do have a counselor, I've been becoming increasingly frustrated with him for a while... He's no doubt talented, knowledgeable, real, not big on the bullshit... It didn't hurt that he had spent a long time working for a renown ED clinic for years and considered himself an expert on the subject... Up until recently, I did too...
But now he's pumping me for details concerning early childhood sexual trauma that I don't believe happened, at least not if you don't consider 12 "early"... sure, I wasn't emotionally mature, sure I got manipulated here and there, but in the end, I "consented"... and the only (non-sexual) traumas I can recall, the ones I see leaking out into all areas of my life and behavior, he views as "not accepting responsibility"... And I will not fabricate memories to stroke his ego...
so be as frustrated as you like, Dr. Badass, I'm slowly losing faith that you are helping...
So I've begun to undertake a quest for a new therapist as well... I feel bad after the effort this one has put in, and how far I've come under his care... but I feel we are going in circles, and he won't let me escape the loop until we resolve what he wants resolved... So pretty soon, this hamster is getting off the damn wheel...
Then there's the dietician/nutritionist role... one that I, no doubt, have absolutely no business undertaking... for obvious reasons...
Everyone with an eating disorder KNOWS enough about nutrition to do this job, unfortunately everyone with an eating disorder is also completely incapable of APPLYING this knowledge to their lives without supervision and accountability...
A HUGE thing I still struggle with is the concept of needing "permission" to eat... In the past, I obtained this permission from dietician's meal plans, structured meal times, eating with others/under supervision, careful measuring and counting, purging, vowing to exercise, etc.... But undertaking the task of eating outpatient and having no concept of hunger cues, I look to others' appetites to gauge my own... My current boyfriend and those in his immediate family who I am staying with are wonderfully intuitive eaters... Great examples for me to some extent, no plate-cleaning pressure, take time to enjoy food and conversation, and don't get all ass-hurt if you pass on something...
BUT, they are all extremely patient and laid back, and I am SO not... So I often won't eat until they do, keeping a running bite-for-bite tally all day in my head, still trying to ensure that I consume the least... And I don't have that very necessary permission I require until someone else eats... which can put the first meal of the day as late as 9pm, and thats a taboo time anyway, in my mind... So purging almost always follows...
This is why I need a dietician, to identify my limits and prevent undertaking challenges I'm not prepared for, and to help me draw my boundaries when surrounded by people who know how to fucking eat like human beings... There's this overwhelming temptation in these situations to behave as if I'm just like them, cool with (petrifying) foods, appropriately paced, undisturbed by anxiety, enjoying the shit out of the meal, and completely intent on allowing it to digest...
I'm terrified and ashamed to admit that I'm hungry until someone else does... furthermore, I can't bring myself to eat unless my boyfriend joins me... largely so I can compare our portions and pace...
So I'm clearly playing this part horribly... and using the lack of accountability to a twisted end...
So when I get approved for my medicaid this must happen...
Um... did I mention I have no doctor? I have no doctor...
I play that too... Was gonna be one for a while... Didn't trust my discipline or stress tolerance to go there...
In short, none of my current hats fit... While I've spent years caring for others in a mental heath capacity and in other areas of healthcare, self-care is quite another beast altogether...
Its funny that I would prefer to delegate my current lack of ability to master this "self-care" business to others, but I clearly cannot be trusted...
Every day I doubt my ability to overcome this just a little more and a little more, makes me wonder if doing all of this my way is wise... Am I trusting my intuition, or my disorder?
Love and Neurosis,
Little One

Me At War on YouTube.com

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj-izBbgsoU

Bundle of malcontent...

Its actually March 10th... Welcome to a week after the last day of National ED Awareness week. I had high hopes and big plans for that week. Namely, actually posting shit!
Imagined myself advocating all over the place... acting all recovered... I even made a video... well received, but a total sham...
The week did not go as well as I had initially planned... Apparently, being aware, while crucial, is quite jarring in practice. I spent the week actually crippled by awareness... Whether it was: (a) because focusing on the eating disorder sucked me into active participation in it, or (b)the loneliness in finding out how little other people understand setting me about the unpleasant business of trying to fill in the holes... (c) or the comparisons i drew between other friends in recovery... or (d) realizing how much i often suck at getting better...I do not know....
One thing I do know is that I am exhausted...
Since I embarked upon this "recovery" shit several months ago, I have given up an enormous amount of the control, security, and identity I erroneously thought was mine to begin with... I'm fighting my ass off just to fucking function and, at this point, it's way too fucking complicated to explain...
I've been off meds for a few months now... over the past week, something has been creeping up on me that makes me want to sprawl out on the floor in tears and rage... I keep fighting off those "I want to die" thoughts... I think, perhaps, that I thought them one time too many when I didn't mean it... now I have this "cried wolf" scenario with no buffer... I remember what meds were all about now... but I'm fucking terrified at life both with and without them...
How does one go about communicating that she is out of her mind when she refuses to swallow what has the potential to remedy that?
I hate the anxiety and frustration that fester inside of me... I like them placed, chemically and unnaturally, as far away as possible... however...
I've mentioned in the past that I (thought that I) had good reasons to stop taking them... manipulation of my neurotransmitters, misdiagnosis, money, initial "fattening" ...
But now, after 3 months off meds, I'm beginning to understand heir intended goal... I'm more conscious of medications than I want to be... one professional (my current prescriber), influenced me greatly, when he not only challenged my previous mood/anxiety diagnoses, and proposed that he panic attacks and extremes in mood were actually consequences of the ED... not ADD, GAD, Bipolar, or PTSD predisposing me to an ED... well, he is even on board about the PTSD...
I recall triumphantly (and half jokingly) crying out when he changed my Bipolar/GAD diagnoses to PTSD about 10 weeks ago, "Whohoo! At least its not organic!"
Translation: I didn't COME broken, someone BROKE me!"
But there's the panic, and death wishes, and incapacitating misery that sneak up on occasion and paralyze/humiliate/scare me...
My throat closes, i cant breathe, reason eludes me, I usually cry, and every train of thought ends at "RUN!" or "DIE!"... You know the Anchorman meme, "That escalated quickly!"?
On more than one occasion, most recently last night, I found myself transferring my post-meal frustration onto my boyfriend... This seems to happen whenever I get inordinately and inexplicably angry at what I ate, how much I ate, or the fact that I ate at all... in the past, its been, "NO I'LL GET THE GARBAGE! DISHES, etc..." as I almost violently shrug him off... I recognize that almost everything I hear before a meal sounds like, "You really shouldn't." And everything during and after screams "Look what you did, Lard Ass!" And whoever seems to be around when emotions get unbearable, is likely to be accused of saying some variation of these phrases...
My boyfriend is in the process of recovering from a serious addiction to opiates using Suboxone, which binds to your opiate receptors as a partial agonist, and has a ceiling effect to prevent the high while essentially delaying the withdrawals... meanwhile, the idea is to curb both cravings and the reward response, giving you perspective and insight you may lack if actively using...
After one of my, now famous, mealtime explosions last  night, we began to discuss the concept of "easy does it" vs. "Total immersion" in the recovery process... we compared experiences in our respective inpatient treatments and our massive "fails" when we relapsed....
I wondered why, in substance abuse and other addictions, there were all these "training wheels" Suboxone, Methadone, benzos to ease withdrawal symptoms... and yet, ED clinics rather violently throw you into 6 meals a day, prevent your typical responses, and generally avoid the gradual adjustment approach altogether... I understand that the nature of the beasts are entirely different... their bodies are trained to function with their drug of choice and atrocious and violent withdrawal symptoms ensue... but the truth is that they were technically designed to operate without 50 PKs a day... weening them off is the cure...people aren't designed to function without nourishment and reintroduction of food is what saves our lives...
I've been responsible as a psychiatric caseworker and technician for monitoring patients in the throws of withdrawal and understand that the "easy does it" approach is absolutely necessary to learning to live without drugs or alcohol... its truly brutal and no one should be drastically ripped from something their bodies are so used to!

But I also recall all of the times I had violent reactions to the reintroduction of food... vomiting in my mouth, chest pains, inability to shit for weeks, hallucinations, paranoia, anxiety so severe I've screamed, kicked, fought, ran away from treatment, found a way to purge at all costs, etc. I've seen others rip feeding tubes from their noses leaving a bloody mess... different beast, same host of horrors...
I just wondered as we talked if there was an equivalent approach in the ED realm, besides antidepressants and benzos (which honestly do fuck all to curb ones desire to purge and/or starve...) to ease one into the notion of eating food without compensatory behavior... I instantly devised several hundred ways that I could makes the most distressing parts of my own recovery less anxiety provoking... Avoid meals with others, choose safer foods, remove the pressures of social engagement and the temptation to compare, go my own pace, use supplements again, start exercising more, quit drinking, avoid reflective surfaces, etc.
Then he mentioned that the Suboxone was less like training wheels and more like delaying the inevitable.... and I realized just how very eating disordered every one of my lax recovery ideas sounded...
Feeling wise for noticing this, I told him that I forget that my Eating Disorder resembles OCD every bit as much as it fits the addiction model... and that as a result, anything I do that changes how I feel on more than one occasion will become a ritual by the third time I do it...
Then looking at my list of anxiety reducing ideas, I realized that, in the context of an active ED, every single item had become a way of life almost immediately EVERY TIME I've used it in the past... eating alone becomes years of isolation and pushing others away, supplements and smoothies and safe foods become all you will allow to pass your lips, exercise becomes required, and avoiding mirrors enables you to never have to admit that you are wrong...
It all made so much sense why each is treated differently... An eating disorder, like its OCD counterpart cannot be trusted with a comforting behavior without that behavior escalating to indispensable ritual rapidly...
Shit... thought I was onto something... that maybe I was failing because I was pushing myself too hard before I had developed the coping skills to handle it...
But now I'm left wondering where the balance lies between being patient with yourself and being a little pussy who refuses to commit to change...
More soon...
Love and neurosis,
Little One

Ball of Confusion...

So I feel as though I've been stuck in this cycle for months now, I lie, I feel bad, I expose my lie, I cry, I vow to change, I lie again... On one occasion, back in January, when I was in the process of exposing the fact that I was still purging, I told my boyfriend, who has undertaken the arduous task of my outpatient "supervision" that until I could be consistently honest, the most important truth to remain aware of was this: I cannot be trusted when it comes to my eating disorder.
It's strange how malleable "truth" becomes in the hands of an addict... It is not only incredibly easy to manipulate facts to fit your schema, but eventually, the lies surrounding the topic of your destructive behavior become so natural and effortless, that you even begin to believe them...
This is where things get convoluted and messy...
I recall an exchange from earlier this month in which I was confronted by my boyfriend immediately after a meal as we smoked a cigarette outside. Anyone who has ever treated me or been in an inpatient setting with me would probably tell you that this is a time when I am fundamentally incapable of telling the truth or being out of anyone's direct Line-of-Sight safely...
Him: "Did you throw up?" Yes.
Me: "No." Direct eye contact. Instant resolve...
Him: "Are you sure?"   Nope...
Me:  (Indignant, even!) "I should think I would know!"
He had taken a minute, on our way outside, to use the restroom. When we began our endeavor to avoid hospitalization (again), several months ago, I gave him a detailed list of "tricks" I had used in the past and signs that I was "using"... He seemed to be mentally rummaging through this list in his head. He did not believe me...
Him: "So...You went outside before me just now... If you were to purge out here, where would you do it?"
 Excited that I didn't have to lie, per se, about this, I quickly enumerated 6 or 7 locations/methods I would avail myself of if I were to purge outside... Looking back on it, it seems like I was almost proud. Very impressed with my own bullshit...
Him: "And you didn't do any of those things just now?"
Me: "Nope. You can even check those places."
Truth: I had covertly purged 3 times before we even left the kitchen... WAY OFF... Semantics save so much guilt... until you inevitably realize that careful word selection and deliberate sentence construction change only what you mean and not what you did...

The hardest part of "recovery" for me, thus far, has been remaining actively engaged in it, and being honest with myself about where I stand... Addiction literature often refers to "The Stages of Change" model, which lists five (sometimes six if you include relapse) degrees of varying insight into one's behavior, and how that insight eventually combines with and translates into actively pursuing change. One treatment program I participated in even had weekly group devoted to the subject.

The stages of change are:

1) Precontemplation (Not yet acknowledging that there is a problem behavior that needs to be changed)

• 2) Contemplation (Acknowledging that there is a problem but not yet ready or sure of  wanting to make a change)
• 3) Preparation/Determination (Getting ready to change)
• 4) Action/Willpower (Changing behavior)
• 5) Maintenance (Maintaining the behavior change) and
• 6) Relapse (Returning to older behaviors and abandoning the new changes)
• http://www.addictioninfo.org/articles/11/1/Stages-of-Change-Model/Page1.html

• No matter how many times I am presented with the model, no matter how simple it makes changing appear, my fundamental error seems to lie in skipping crucial steps. This is how I "change": Pre-contemplation, Contemplation, Preparation, Relapse... 
•   The art of conveniently avoiding Action or Maintenance, is a simple matter of prolonging the "Preparation" and making all the planning to "do" look like actual "doing"... So convincingly so, that I myself become adamant that "I'm TRYING!" when, in fact, I'm simply exaggerating the preliminary gestures one makes when poising herself to "try." 
• In the brief moments of clarity I do get, I shock even myself with the truth. A truly terrifying state of things. I see that I have not changed at all. I look back, and further back, and further back still, and cannot recall a day in which I did not restrict or purge. And yet my external facade and superficial state of mind still boasts, "RECOVERY!" or "Go, me!", or "Look at me, rockin' my new weight gain!" Let's be real: "bigger" does not necessarily equal "better"... In fact, at this point, it only means "not about to die of malnutrition..." It does not mean "comfortable", it does not mean "wiser"... Fuck, it doesn't even mean "working on it." It simply means that the extent of the disorder is now concealed from view... And it's easy to confuse "invisible" with "gone." 
• It's as if I spent months fashioning these impressive, beautiful, and elaborate wings. Then ran around town telling everyone how marvelous they were, showing them off, and inviting everyone to come watch the miracle of flight! And after a while, when finally poised atop a tall building with a veritable sea of spectators below me, I crouch, prepare to leap, and suddenly the design flaw that will cause me to break my neck becomes apparent, and I back away from the edge... "Sorry, not today..."
• So, to embark on this business of getting better, where do I begin? Goals, action steps, to-do lists, race through my mind... More confounding than clarifying, more question than answer... My most burning desires to act are subverted by the question mark I seem to inevitably place behind every "decision" that I make. Write? Medicate? Don't purge? Read? Create? Disclose? Ask for help? Tell the truth? Grow a pair? Tomorrow... Next time... Later... Soon...
• It's all so very polite... Nauseatingly so... Like I'm just SUGGESTING that something should be done...
• I think forget sometimes what I'm dealing with... My eating disorder knows NO boundaries, has no shame, no respect, no sense of etiquette... This is not something I should be treating with such propriety and caution, it is an immanent danger, a threat that should be eradicated.... It is a tyrant that I allow to dictate my mood, my behavior, my thoughts...
• As with most revolutions, I'm beginning to think that success here, is a formula... Something like Extent of Injustice, times the Strength of the Principle one believes they are Fighting For...
• More on what EI x SPFF =?, actually means, soon...
• Love and Neurosis,
• Little One
•    

Wake me up when December ends...

As I flip through the scattered entries in my journal from the past several months, looking to find my lost resolve... I stumbled upon a lively discussion (that I had with myself...) detailing the evolution of my perceptions regarding medication, diagnoses, etc. In mid December, I decided to try to face the world without meds for the first time in nearly 10 years. I will be the first to say that I do not encourage anyone to do the same, nor do I feel that medications are without benefit or merit. I simply allowed my curious nature to experiment with the novel concept that crazy begets more crazy... and in examining my own diagnostic history and my most recent descents into madness, I saw firsthand how one psychological disorder can confound diagnosis and, in turn, the entire resultant treatment process...
December 28-31, 2012
"Recently, I've found myself becoming increasingly frustrated at my own decision several weeks ago to discontinue all of my psych meds. Looking at all of my perceived failures over the past few weeks, I realized that I have, in fact, become extremely bitter that what I had once found to be a source of relief from my brain's incessant badgering, is no longer a viable option for securing peace of mind permanently... 

Medication made things (if only slightly) simpler, made the din quieter, and every so often, I would go so far as to say that they calmed me down... A Herculean feat for a tiny pill prescribed to a walking bundle of nerves... After a scary few months (September, October, November of 2012), where I suddenly found myself seizing, cracking open my head, biting my tongue, and collapsing for no apparent reason... Well, no NO reason, but it couldn't be pinned down whether it was 18 years of self-inflicted violence from my eating disorder, or the sharp involuntary decrease in Benzo usage. You see, I moved from a large city in July of 2012, back to my small home town after 2+ years of being consistently prescribed Clonazapam for anxiety. Though I never abused the medication, doctors in my hometown either refused to prescribe it, or refused to even see me in the first place. After calling 30+ doctors and psychiatrists who either didn't accept anxiety patients, or didn't accept uninsured patients, after 3 massive seizures... I was done... The fear of having a seizure because I could not obtain my medication was worse than all of the previous fears that caused all of the panic attacks I ever had...COMBINED! When I finally met my current therapist, he changed my medication, but after a couple of weeks on that regimen, encouraged by a wild suggestion from the same therapist...(that misdiagnosis was a distinct possibility all of these years) I decided to test his theory for myself...

In my long and complicated relationship with psychiatry, I have been diagnosed with and treated for Bipolar Disorder, GAD, ADD, PTSD, OCD...you name it, some one has likely put the diagnosis on a bill... As an aspiring behavioral scientist and former mental health professional, I myself thought it odd to possess so many "disorders" co-morbidly... knowing damn well it was a statistical improbability, if not impossibility, to have one, much less MULTIPLE conditions simultaneously. Even given the broad, sweeping generalities and loosely defined terms of the DSM (Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), no one could come out with all of them... As skeptical as I am of the liberal manner in which psychiatric diagnoses are tossed around by both professionals and our culture, I couldn't really argue with my assorted labels. If the shoe fits... take your medication...

My moods shot up and down without warning or catalyst, sending me to the highest heights of elation and impulsiveness, crashing in the darkest depths of despair... When I wasn't oscillating between the two, I was hovering somewhere in the middle, feeling both extremes simultaneously. Where most would find some sort of baseline, my "in between" usually meant "both". My anxiety was incapacitating, and I suffered from incessant panic attacks. With mere hours elapsing between each horrifying sensation that the world was ending, my heart was exploding, my lungs were collapsing, and that I would somehow be caught in a limbo between life and death forever...

The last part was not so far off... Towards the end of November (2012), the whispers behind my back grew to a deafening roar... My family, my friends, my boyfriend, were getting scared (again...) that my 18 year old love affair with my eating disorder was going to bring about my demise (again...?) I had "voluntarily" been through (and failed) more treatment programs, etc. than I could enumerate, but this time Involuntary Psychiatric Commitment was looming in the horizon. Having worked on an acute psychiatric unit for over two years (before losing my job in February 2012 for taking too many consecutive medical leaves), I knew the criteria for Invol. all too well: Danger to self or others. As vehemently as I outwardly denied that I was in any real danger at all, I think I had known that the "end was (fucking) nigh" for quite sometime. I pretended to care so others wouldn't give up on me... But I had given up when my last treatment wrapped...

Unemployed, uninsured, osteoarthritic, batshit insane, seizing without warning, and purging to the tune of 60 times a day... As an employee on the unit, treating anyone else, yeah, legitimate death wish, hazard to herself... But me? I was so mixed up, I don't think I could distinguish any longer between wanting to die and not wanting to live in slavery anymore...  

Then, I grabbed the gun... One night, after a multitude of other confounding craziness, I lost my shit over some minor indiscretion between my 2 house guests. Feeling utterly hopeless and alone, I walked calmly to my mothers room, and retrieved her pistol from its home beneath her mattress... I checked the magazine, only to find it empty... I began desperately hunting for the bullets to load it, which she clearly stored elsewhere. I think somewhere in the determination to find the bullets and the time that elapsed as I did so, I began to frighten myself. 20 minutes later, exasperated by my failure, fear finally gave way to action. I still regret this action to this day, as I feel it was exceedingly selfish to hoist my suicide attempt upon anyone in this way, especially someone I love, but I did...
 Totally exhausted and afraid of my own intentions, I slipped the empty magazine into my boyfriend's back pocket, and instructed him not to examine it... as if any human being with a healthy curiosity or brain (he happens to have both...) could simply keep an object in their pocket without investigation...

        "Here, save me from myself!" This was what I intended my act to convey, but in the wake of his reaction, I quickly noticed the "Fuck you!" lurking in the subtext... The events of the evening had salted some rather painful wounds... As my desire to die had grown, so too had my desire to be stopped... No doubt, I should have gone about it differently, not cruelly placing the burden of my death in some one's pocket... In hindsight, the meager thoughts forming in that moment were completely at the mercy of my emotions... I hesitate to call them thoughts at all! Plagued by the panic that I was beyond hope or change, and disturbed by the fact that I could possess the collective insights of numerous treatment programs and enough professionals to populate a conference, and still remain sick? Death seemed an inevitability... And, since losing my job and insurance in February, I had been begging for death to just fucking come already for quite some time.
 Like a wounded animal, I had begun looking for a porch to crawl under. I had begun to prepare for the end, all the while, slapping expression after deceitful expression across my face. This is my "recovery face"! My liar's mask was, I'm sure, transparent as hell... But it did quiet the shouts of protest all around me... or at least insulated me from them. I let myself believe that because I was blind, deaf, and deluded, from their concern, from their love, from their suffering, that no such sentiments existed for me any longer.
As my, now boyfriend, said once at that point, "I think that, until you get better, you've worn out your welcome just about everywhere." Over the next few weeks following the "gun incident", it became painfully obvious that I had, in fact, become an (ironically tiny) elephant in the room... No matter how hard I tried to use the knowledge of the shadow I was casting over ever each place I went to ease the discomfort, no matter how cooperative, pleasant, or level-headed, the facade I generated was, the grim truth of how I was REALLY doing was inescapable.... unless of course you were me... I secretly maintained that I could escape anything and had everything I needed to do just that. How fucking naive...
As November wore on, the Ron Burgundy internet meme, "Wow! That escalated quickly!" comes to mind... It seems like forever ago, but in reality, only a few short weeks have elapsed. At the end of my rope, and tired of being treated like a criminal because I needed my benzodiapines for anxiety, I scheduled an appointment with the local low-cost clinic in hopes that I could get my medication refilled and would no longer have to live in perpetual fear of running out. In late September of 2012, I ran out while on a trip to Boston (poetically, to attend an eating disorder conference). I soon found myself seizing in Harvard Square and returned home with 5 stitches and a 4 day supply of clonazapam for my troubles. A week later, when that ran out, I seized again on the floor of a friend's house, and since I was, again discharged from the ER with a measly 3 day supply of medication. I called my former psychiatrist from the "big city". After a brief phone consultation, I obtained what would be my last full prescription to clonapin, and despite its anxiolitic nature, I anxiously awaited my appointment.
As my prescription dwindled and my appointment neared, so escalated my paralyzing fear of having another seizure...I ran out of clonapin on the morning of my appointment at the low-cost clinic. Although I was already shaking violently from withdrawals and intermittently bursting into tears at the slightest provocation. The nurse practitioner at the low-cost clinic sent me into a first-rate panic attack almost immediately, when he not only refused to fill my prescription on the spot AND, as I saw on my referral slip to the behavioral health branch of their family of clinics read : "Anxiety disorder vs. Medication seeking," I literally flipped my shit! Had a panic attack on the spot, trembling, crying, and rattling off profanity, as the nursing staff made the arrangements for my behavioral health appointment. I left with a sense of impending doom (and seizures), and perhaps a slight hope... (or expectation) that this LPC, who was solely responsible for behavioral health medication recommendations to the clueless Dr.'s and NP's writing the psych scripts for all of the low-cost clinics in the area...
So, for his confidentiality, we'll be calling my therapist Dr. Badass... Yeah, that seems most appropriate. So having been labeled a drug seeker despite 4 previous psychiatrists determining that my anxiety was substantial enough to warrant my benzo/antipsychotic/medication fun time regimen for over 2 years...I walked into Dr. Badass's office in a pretty pissy mood to say the least... Oddly, from the moment I walked into the door of his office, I had to say surprisingly little before he "had my number"... Barely volunteering any details in our initial meeting, he explained my problem to me better than I think I could have myself... And after my numerous hospitalizations and therapists, I considered myself to be quite the seasoned veteran of the breakdown...well, breakdown...
He told the asshole nurse practitioner that labeled me a drug seeker what to prescribe... I eventually took this cocktail...for a couple of weeks... OF COURSE, that night, the pharmacy had to take 36 hours to fill my prescription... OF COURSE, I had to have one more grand mal seizure in my boyfriend's garage the night of that first appointment while i waiting for myscripts ...(11/27/12) That night, I regained consciousness, wiped the blood and foam from my mouth, and, amnetic and delirious, mumbled "I'm never purging again..."
This would turn out to be a lie, but in all sincerity, it was probably the most USEFUL delusion that I have ever had..."