I have a sort of "main" safe food currently - safe food meaning food I am comfortable with and keep down. I won't name it. But I have to leave the house to get it and I do, once a day; my dad drives me to a little nearby town, a popular college town called Chapel Hill, and I go there and I eat it. It's a cold food and because it's been really cold weather wise lately I've sometimes opted to go buy it and then get back in the heated car and go wherever my parents are going (to the recycling place where my dad sorts and disposes of our recycling, to Lowe's, wherever). Tonight I did that and we went to this store where I got some candy, also, and ate that in the car on the way home. I then took a bath and honestly, I purged it. When I went downstairs, my dad spoke to me in a really angry tone of voice and said "Sofia, we need to talk" - he and my mom are pretty freaked out, I guess they think I'm not keeping that safe food down anymore on a regular basis - which means they are under the impression that I'm keeping nothing or next to nothing down. He told me this and didn't believe me when I stated otherwise.
Then my mom said maybe I should go into treatment now. They told me that they're worried I'm getting worse and that I'll die if I wait the few weeks (while getting my driver's license) to go. I reacted really defensively - I said that it's true that I'm in bad shape but I AM keeping that food down goddamnit and blahblahblah...I tried to reassure them as best I could and concluded aloud that I would be going ahead with getting my license before going to treatment, because there's no guarantee that I could learn to drive and get my license while in treatment. I've had a lot of bad experiences with step down plans falling through, with treatment plans in general falling through (due to insurance, mostly) and this time I've really been working very hard to assure myself that it's much less likely to happen. I think that transitional living is a very important piece, I am giving up my apartment before I go, and I really don't want something to happen and end up without a place to live and unable to do the step down following treatment. I'm a little traumatized from how hard I fought to get and stay in recovery last time and how hard I fell.
We agreed that I wouldn't go to the bathroom for an hour or whatever after getting home from the place I get my safe food. And yeah, I feel like an idiot - look at me, an adult, with my dad telling me when I can and can't go to the bathroom. Honestly if I wanted to I could totally disregard his insistance of this but I am trying to respect the fact that my parents are very afraid and be as courteous as I can.
I have to admit, I'm tired. Sometimes I get really scared at how bad things are. Sometimes I worry that I won't live long enough to get myself there, that something disastrous will happen (a heart attack, esophageal rupture, whatever) - and those are fairly valid concerns because I've had issues in the recent past with both my heart and esophageal tears, as well as a number of other things. I'm seeing a doctor very frequently here but I don't particularly trust her judgement (she doesn't take my resting heart rate, doesn't order my blood work [which keeps tabs on important things like electrolytes and kidney function] in a timely manner)...I don't THINK I'll die or have something fatal happen, but who the hell knows? I'm sicker than some, not as sick as others, and eating disorders don't discriminate. Some people die without warning. Many people, really. And I'm making a sincere effort in some ways to decrease the amount I'm engaging in certain behaviors and increase my intake calorically, but clearly I'm not doing either enough to make much of a difference for my overall state of health and this is one of the main reasons why treatment has been deemed necessary - not because I'm special or more important or deserving of help than anyone else, but because my behaviors are affecting my health in a measurable, dangerous way at a rapid pace.
That said, of course a part of me would like to just get my name on the waiting list and go in sooner than later (meaning in a week or ten days as opposed to three or four weeks). But then there's that part of me that knows it would be ideal for me to go in with my driver's license - without that additional possible complication and source of anxiety. I think they are right, my parents, I think I need to push myself even harder to be proactive about my health in the interim and if I am unable to do so I may need to disregard the fact that I don't yet have my license and get on that list. I'm going to give myself a few days and re-evaluate, I think. The whole thing brought to light yet again just how profoundly this is affecting my family. I can't or opt not to think about it for longer than short periods at a time because it's painful and I don't know how productive it is or that I can do much about it (they're going to be scared because this is scary), but it brought it to mind.
Moving on...
I have spent quite a lot of time in a 12 step program, going to meetings, working the steps. I will not name the particular program I was in but it was not for eating disorders, though I did try my hand at lumping my eating disorder in with my overall disease of addiction - in some ways I found the parallel and application very helpful, and in others I did not.
That's not what I'm writing to address, though. One of the things I learned about in my program was the concept of reservations about recovery, and how important it was to identify and address them - the phrase from the book we used was something to the effect of reservations "reserving a place in our program for relapse". "Our program" in that context meaning one's personal program of recovery, their work. A "reservation" in this context is something that holds you back emotionally or mentally from recovering - it can be a fear, a thought, it can be perfectly based in reality or not. This IS something that I think could be helpful for me to think about now, before treatment, to identify and begin to sort through my reservations. Now, doubt I think is something that can go hand in hand with reservations but is in my opinion separate somehow...for me, doubt feeds some of my reservations. Self doubt for me mainly manifests in feeling like I'm...incapable, which is a big thing for me not just in terms of recovering but in terms of living (and maybe that's more intwined than I'll get into right now anyway). So there's SELF doubt and then there's OTHERS doubt. Having had this disease for some time there've been a lot of people who love me who have watched me "fail" at recovery many times and so I face "others doubt", as well, which can be discouraging and feed into self doubt. "Others doubt", however, I have very little control over - I can do work to manage and work through self doubt.
Am I making sense here? I think I am. I was doing a little more thought about how I want to utilize this blog and what I want to do with it, and I thought that if I am willing and able to be very open in an appropriate way, and I do manage to get into recovery and then recover, sharing the steps I take in a detailed manner could possibly be helpful for other people as well as for me. Again, only time will tell if I actually keep up with this, but it's an idea.
On to reservations...
My Current Reservations regarding recovery, and thoughts/counters I can believe:
- Weight. (Of course.) I have shitty body image and I "feel fat" most of the time NOW, so how will I tolerate giving up the control around my weight? In my case, recovery means gaining weight to begin with, and then unconditionally tolerating whatever my body decides to do when I am eating in a manner that is conducive to my health and well being. I have this sense somehow that I'm not worthy if I'm at a higher weight, and also currently hold the belief that I
amlook revolting at higher weights. Also, I feel like I don't look my weight and how am I supposed to tolerate gaining __ number of pounds if it's all going to just make me look really big? I'm very nervous also because the last time I gained weight it was very oddly distributed - now this I have been told by professionals and by people who have recovered passes, and there are biologically based reasons for why this happens. Unfortunately, I never did give my body the time to redistribute. - I like food too much and will not be able to control what/how much I eat, and I'll end up overweight.
- [this is a reservation about even going into treatment] - I'll be the fattest one there, after all of this fuss with fund raising and stuff people are going to expect me to be "sicker" and think I'm dumb.
- There is no purpose or meaning to life. I will not be able to find anything concrete that I consistently feel is worth living for, especially without my ED as a vice.
- I have depression, and when I do not have my ED as a distraction/have it quelling my emotions I become incredibly depressed with such a force that it feels totally intolerable.
- Relationships - I
amfeel that I am socially inept and won't be able to make friends, and without my ED I will feel lonely all of the time. - I
'mfeel incapable of handling life's everyday adult responsibilities.
- Oh weight. Weight weight weight. It's true that I am concerned with my appearance to a degree, but this obsession with weight is in a lot of ways not actually about the weight. I am aware that it is going to be incredibly difficult to tolerate gaining weight and that for probably a very long time afterward I will feel extreme discomfort around it...I'm told body dissatisfaction is often the first thing to come with an eating disorder and the last thing to go, but I'm also told that if you really wait through it without messing with it, it passes eventually or at least gets better. I'll also probably find some relief by NOT weighing myself - which of course will also most likely provoke extreme anxiety but I do need to be willing to do whatever I can to ensure that my recovery happens, so that I can live and enjoy life. I am not a person who attaches the worth of others to their weight, so why the double standard? I would like to live in accordance with my values. Also, if letting go of my weight means that I can eventually recover and be a good example and help to others who suffer from these life sucking diseases, it will be worth more to me. That much I know. I will also have and seek a fair amount of support in the moments where I freak out. This obsession with a number and with my appearance keeps me completely unavailable to others emotionally and spiritually. It holds me back in so many ways. Weight will have to be something I take on a day to day, possibly moment to moment basis, but others have done it who were just as obsessed and riddled with fear as I am.
- Ah...this one's hard. I've always loved food and hated food for its effects on my weight when I didn't have purging as a "tool" to manage it. This reservation/fear is somewhat based in reality because the last time I went through refeeding I DID gain weight incredibly quickly and gained a good amount above what my dietician suspected my set point might be...recently I wrote back and forth with a woman who is awesome and in recovery, and she said the same happened with her - and she didn't even struggle much with binging, her symptoms were primarily anorexic. But she said that this is really common in the refeeding stage, especially if you aren't in a structured environment, because when the body comes out of starving it not only wants to hold on to everything and make good use of it (and it's confused by it) but the MIND also needs to be reassured that it isn't temporary, that it isn't all just going to stop one day, this new experience of being nourished. She said that she gained (from an emaciated weight) to an almost overweight by medical definition weight at first and that no one said a damn thing because the truth was they were all just glad she was alive, because her weight does not define her...and because after all she had done abusing her body, it was her turn to be patient with it. She went on to say that her body dropped back down to its set point. It's notable that SOME of the reason at least probably that I have such a love affair with food is born from being malnourished, and that once the sense of urgency is gone and I am more properly nourished I may not feel this way about it anymore. Now, I believe that there are a lot of emotional reasons I use food also, and I'll have to learn to cope with my emotions differently and thankfully I am lucky enough to be going into treatment where the professionals who are trained in treating people with this issue will help me learn to differentiate between physical and emotional hunger and help me to practice applying that. There have been times in my life when I was not malnourished and did not feel so urgently in love with food. I can have that again.
- EVERYONE thinks they're going to be the "fattest one" in treatment. It's common, and it's usually bullshit. However even if it were true it wouldn't mean I was any less sick or needed help any less and I value my life enough to risk that being true and go into treatment anyway.
- As far as meaning and purpose in life, I've never been in recovery long enough to really give myself a chance to remain functional long enough to explore it, to reconnect with or create new passions. I THINK about it a lot, but I suspect that this particular thing might require action and fumbling around a bit in the dark, experimentation. I will have faith in the things that those who have recovered before me tell me - that there is indeed meaning. When I have thought about this extensively in the past I have always acknowledged that I don't believe in any ultimate meaning or truth - in any god to devote my life for - and what I had concluded was that each person's reasons for living are different, as each person cares about different things to different degrees. It's personal. The thing I always thought I valued most, so far in life, are the people I love and unbarred human connection. I have also had other strong passions in the past that I never explored very fully, but some of them included: singing, writing, playing musical instruments...and so on.
- I do have depression. Malnourishment probably exacerbates this. I will seek support and help in learning to manage depression daily, and come up with a way of living and coping skills that help. Staying in the eating disorder may make me completely numb to it, but it also actually keeps my life a hell of a lot more depressing than it might be if I tried living without it. I know that some things have helped with my depression in the past, including medications as well as exploring my passions and ways of expressing myself.
- Simple: my eating disorder keeps me at a distance and unavailable. It may feel like a protective shield, and it may fill the space when I'm alone, but it is not the solution. I may be lonely and awkward for some time but I will have support. I am very loved as has been demonstrated in a variety of ways both recently and in the past, and if I am honest and open, other human beings will relate.
- Well hell, of course I don't feel like an adult. I haven't LIVED like one. I've had this disorder since childhood...and I'll have to do a lot of maturing and growing up, but it doesn't have to be impossible.
Salut for now.
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