i don’t have a clever title

Loneliness is my biggest trigger. I’m going through a lot right now. I’ve recently loss the first best friend I’ve had since seventh grade. To be fair, we really didn’t have much in common except for our loneliness but either way, going from spending your weekends with someone to sitting alone sucks.

So yes, I am sitting alone at my computer on a Friday night listening to all my favorite sad songs. This blog comes after sitting in the bathroom crying because my life just always seems to fall apart. The loneliness is kind of on the backburner for this blog though. I want to talk about why it is my trigger.

For a few irrelevant reasons, this night has been all about me, myself, and I. The unholy trinity if you ask me. But the time alone with myself makes me think and if you haven’t caught on, when I think… it’s never good. I’ve spent a lot of my night looking at pictures of my favorite treatment center. I was looking at the google stock photos of it and picking out where I sat during process group, thinking about the seats people fought over in the common room, and even being disgusted that they advertise with pillows in the photos because we all know there’s no pillows!! People would throw up in the pillows (for those of you unfamiliar with the treatment world, throwing up in furniture like cushions is a real thing that I have seen with my own eyes)!! But why are those images so important? Because they represent the most broken moments of my life.

I romanticize my brokenness and not without reason. Those moments were the times I had nurses at my beck and call literally 24/7. They were times when I was surrounded by at least twenty other patients. They were when I knew my actions would have consequences. Right now, alone, things are not that way. No one is here. No one is around me. I very well might drink a whole bottle of wine and the only consequence is waking up the next morning feeling like shit. No one else is involved.. not that I really want anyone to be involved in that but the bottom line is that no one knows what happens when I’m alone. No one else sits in the pain. No one else stares at my body and longs for the day that size two jeans are huge again. No one looks at my pictures and runs to the toilet to throw up the low calorie cracker they just ate. It’s all me. It’s all my brain.

So I sit. I sit in the brokenness. I sit in the longing for a smaller body and a life I’m in control of. But I sit knowing that happiness does not exist if I dive into my eating disorder. I sit knowing that love and companionship cannot thrive when I’m solely focused on my body. I sit and I wait for tomorrow with the hope that it won’t be this hard. I wait for recovery to be second nature because I’ve come too far to go back now.

The images of treatment will always be sparkling in my mind. I’ll dream of walking into the bathroom, looking at my emaciated face and still thinking it’s too fat. But those sparkles come with the memories of trying to run away from treatment. From being so mad that I was willing to harm myself. Memories of sitting in the corner of rooms yelling at my parents to take me home.

So I sit and I wait for it to be easier. I know one day it will be.