same old tired lonely place
I miss treatment, y’all. Everyone keeps threatening it and claiming it will take away all my progress, throw away all I’ve worked for, but nobody has stopped to think that maybe I want that.
Treatment is safe. People are quite literally paid to meet my needs, they have to listen to my sob stories, more than anything, I am removed from all of the external forces that feel like they’re working against me in the “real world.” I’m doing alright but I’m also just not loving things right now.
I constantly feel scared. I am terrified of catastrophe and I am always looking for threats. Often times it manifests as debilitating health anxiety and after finding three bruises on my body, with no clue where they came from, I have fully panicked that I could have cancer. My anxiety gets so bad that I feel nauseated and get scared to move from my bed. Those are daily occurrences for me.
Being the president of an organization that oversees more than 3,000 women is no easy task. I am learning that I don’t have to answer every text I get at 11 p.m. and that it is okay to delegate tasks. All the while, I’m trying to be appropriately authoritative while maintaining a calming, open, and warm environment. I know that I am a sweet, genuine, huge hearted girl, but often times I’m so scared of rejection or failure that I come across as a raging bitch- and I know it. Naturally, to combat that, I overuse all the happy emojis and exclamation points in every!!! text!!!! I!!!! send!!!!!!!
I’m really riding out my loneliness right now. I stopped talking to my not-so-healthy ex three weeks ago and some days are great, I don’t even think about him. Other days I spend hours trying to figure out what went wrong and why. Though, I do ᵐᶦˢˢ ʰᶦᵐ and I would describe myself as lonely, I have no real emotional hang up on anyone right now. Instead of being relationship lonely like the stereotypical sad girl who cries over men while eating ice cream, I’m just kind of numb-lonely. I don’t feel super connected to anything or anyone.
The problem with my perfect storm of stress, disconnection, and OCD is that it makes plenty of room for my eating disorder. I think, well I know, that a lot of times I romanticize the hell out of my anorexia. Some of that comes from the disorder itself needing to survive and some of it comes from wishing that there really was a quick fix. I so often think that “once I’m sick enough” all the other problems will go away; my mind will be so fixated on food/avoiding food that the anxiety and loneliness and OCD will go away. It never works like that.
My anorexia is making me pretty miserable now, too. Every freaking thought I have is about food, avoiding food, being mad that I ate food, wishing I hadn’t stepped on the scale, wishing I had stepped on the scale, wishing I hadn’t eaten whatever I ate six years ago as if that is the problem. My mind doesn’t shut up. It’s always something. So quite frankly, a little grippy sock vacation feels like it would do the trick. I could make sure my body is healthy, I would be forced to make my brain shut the hell up, I would be surrounded by people.
It’s a sad thing to desire but my dietician recently reminded me that no one can do it for me, “you have to choose it for yourself, you have to choose yourself.”
I wish I knew how to choose myself.
