Where I'm At

Well I guess I decided to jump in sooner than I thought :-P
Ah, really it's 1:30 AM and I am not ready for sleep, but also need something to occupy myself and could use the space to relay what's going on with me at the moment, to vent a little if you will, and after writing out that introduction-esque post I went to get some water and take my medication and questioned myself: how open am I going to be in this blog about what's going on with me NOW? Now, when I'm very unwell? How much do I want to reveal? Will people judge me? Will it come across as "bragging" about my level of illness, or will it be what I intend it to - an honest portrayal of where I'm currently at - my building ground? Should I even start writing this damn thing or should I put it off until I'm in recovery?
I haven't answered these questions for myself yet but I will say that I think there's something to witnessing transformation in a person. I think there ARE reasons to share some of the details of daily existence with an eating disorder, pre-recovery. And I am a person who is extremely fearful of judgement, but I also have very honest, solid intentions to turn things around. So I think that, for now at least, I'm going to go ahead and be fairly open about what's going on now.
Which is this: for the last several months I've been staying with my parents. I live in Northern California, and they live in North Carolina. I came out here because my health was declining, I had been hospitalized twice in a three week span, and I was so depressed and nonfunctional I thought I might lose my mind if I stayed in my little apartment all by myself. I was isolating heavily, starving, and binging and purging like crazy. And to be terribly honest I'm still doing all of these things, but being out here has been beneficial in the following ways:
1. My parents are aware of my current state of being medically compromised, and if something had gone wrong or does go wrong, they will be here to help.
2. Being around my parents, as dysfunctional a unit as we can often be, has been helpful in lessening my depression and despite how overwhelming I know it is for THEM at times to have me around, it has helped lessen my feelings of trying to figure all of this out by myself.
3. In the time I have been here I've been able to sit down with my parents and have some important conversations about what I currently need and how they can help, and they have been in many ways very understanding, loving, and willing. We have come up with a plan and I believe they are more aware of my situation and more invested in being involved in my recovery than they have been in the past.
4. At home I was having trouble doing things like getting to the pharmacy to fill my prescriptions, which are pretty important, as I don't have a car and have been physically compromised - here my dad drives me to my doctor's appointments and to the pharmacy and elsewhere.

Certainly it's a temporary solution and I don't intend to rely on my parents so heavily for much longer, but at the moment it's necessary and it's kept me alive and as sane as possible given the circumstances.
So. I've been staying with my parents. This time last year, I was in a similar place eating disorder wise; very sick and about to go into treatment. I did go into treatment, and it WAS different than other times had been. I was very willing, I was doing the work, and I was benefiting from the care I was receiving. Unfortunately I went in in bad shape and due to some major issues with my insurance company I was discharged abruptly - still quite malnourished and in the beginning stages of refeeding (which is problematic when you struggle with binging and purging to the degree that I do). It's a long, drawn out story, but I tried my very best and I didn't sink immediately but I did ultimately end up relapsing completely. The odds were heavily stacked against me and I have accepted what happened.
I'm overwhelmed even thinking about how to try to sum up the rest of it and I'm pretty tired of talking about it...well, because my insurance company's actions were pretty outrageous and I was directed to an attorney who decided to work with me, but believed that in order to win an appeal that I needed to be able to return to treatment and stay there while the appeal took place. She's really good. She's never lost, etcetera etcetera. The problem with that is how incredibly expensive treatment is and my family lacking the financial resources for this. My dad decided to take what he could from his retirement, but it alone wouldn't be enough to supplement the duration of an appeal, so after some thought and desperation I began fund raising. A LOT of people have been helping me and I've been very lucky in that it's been quite successful. With a few recent developments I feel confident enough to go into treatment in the coming weeks.
Before I can do so, though, because I think it's quite important I pre plan for the transition following treatment to be as smooth as possible (after all - treatment's a great starting point, but I'm going to need to maintain the progress I make afterward in the "real world") and because I and my treatment team have decided transitional living could be a very helpful piece of this, I have a couple of last things to take care of before I can put my name on the waiting list to go. These things are:
1. Giving my 30 days notice with my apartment (my dad, bless his heart, is going to take care of putting my things into storage), and
2. Getting my driver's license (which is required for the transition house at this particular facility).

It's been really hard for me to just...function, really, so it's been interesting trying to get these things in order. Finally on Friday, after taking the test for the second time, I passed - so I have my learning permit now, and this coming week I'll be starting driving lessons. I have to admit I'm sort of nervous to be *driving* but I'm going to do my best to be as safe about it as possible - i.e. making sure my blood sugar is level by eating something beforehand, and so on. I am hoping that after 2-3 weeks of a lot of lessons coupled with my dad's teaching me, I'll get a good enough handle on driving to take the test and pass. And I'll be giving my 30 days notice in probably about a week or so depending on how quickly I get a handle on driving (I do need to go home before I go into treatment to get some things and it's kind of a big deal for me to be moving away - I have a lot of people that I love very much in the Bay Area, where I live, and I want to say goodbye if possible, though I'm sure I'll visit them as much as I can).

Whew. I feel like I needed to get that background out there before I could move on to anything else. So there's a picture of where I'm currently at as far as what's going on in general - but to bring you here with me into this moment: I just spent about 25 minutes running around the house, out of my mind with cold, looking for the heated blanket. I found it a couple of weeks ago but didn't have the extension that you plug into the wall to actually make it heat up, and after I asked my mom about it she found it and gave it to me. Of course on the coldest night of the year so far (27 degrees outside - yeah, in North Carolina), once I have the cord, I can't find the goddamn thing. I get so cold sometimes now that it hurts, so cold my brain stops working, so cold I want to cry. When I finally located the blanket, it was on my sleeping father. He wasn't using it as a heated blanket though, just as regular one, and by this point I was completely bundled up in sweats and wearing several layers and still panicking because I felt so goddamn cold...so I got a nice quilt, and woke him up to trade.
Did I feel bad waking my dad up? Absolutely. Did I feel like I had much of a choice? No. I can't explain for the life of me this kind of cold. It's one of the unfortunate effects of being anorexic. And it was either spend all night in a bathtub filled with scorching hot water, or the heated blanket.
Oy vey, now it's 2:15 and I meant to take my sleeping medication by 2:00. Fuck. I've been trying really hard to regulate my sleep pattern - another unfortunate, less glaringly obvious area that can be serious affected by an eating disorder. One of my good friends, who also has an eating disorder, makes youtube videos about it. She was talking a little bit in one of her recent videos about all of the seemingly "little" areas of a person's life that are affected that no one ever really thinks about (or that it's easy for the sufferer to overlook because they aren't imminent or life threatening), and I thought she was spot on. There are SO many things that get shoved to the side because you get so used to them, and some of them really aren't "little things" - from a 'normal person''s perspective, when I take the time to step back and take a look at it, some of them are probably downright abnormal to an almost freaky degree. My friend cleverly refers to these things as "not having been in the bulimia brochure". I like that. This? This insanity inducing cold? Definitely wasn't in the brochure.
And here I find myself now procrastinating taking my sleeping medication (oh hell, I'll take it right now and make sure to only write for another few minutes - done) waiting for this blanket to heat up some more...typing out this blog entry, always doing something (usually on the computer) because...ah, it's hard to put words to...because I fear the space of just being. The emptiness, the silence - that terrifies me. It's one of the reasons I binge and purge, I think.
And after I stop writing this I'll try to read. That's a love of mine, reading - though it's another thing that having an eating disorder has made more difficult for me, because concentrating is hard. But I've been making an effort recently to read because I need some healthier escape, because it allows me to get out of my own head, and because I love stories. I kicked off my starting-to-read-again mission with "The Haunting", a short novel by Shirley Jackson, (That's another thing I used to love - not just stories, but scary stories. This also applies to horror movies.) and now I've moved on to "Crooked Little Heart" by one of my favorite authors, Anne Lamott (it's the first I've read of her fiction - she writes a lot of nonfiction as well and I've read a few of those).
ANYway, I'll read until I can barely keep my eyes open because I just can't sit with me. I think that's something that might be helpful to start trying to practice? Or maybe not? Ah, who cares. Whenever I think about this crap I realize I'm just incompetant in so many ways at the moment - it's a scary awareness, that you're just a little too far gone to really trust yourself or take yourself very seriously - and I try to focus on the tangible facts: get the driver's license. Do that first.

Well, I'm afraid if I keep writing and my sleeping pill kicks in that I might start to not make much sense, so I'm going to go now. What a long entry, oy.