Raw Ramblings of my Former Eating Disordered Self
Day Two
Read the introduction about this recovery for bulimia journal entry
October 10, 2006
I’ve always thought other things were the major cause/problem – not the eating disorder itself. I just have dysfunctional coping methods and have had emotional issues for a long time now. I can’t focus on anything else. I can’t read. I can’t concentrate. I haven’t been to class (one day- I missed a test and 2 classes) because I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I don’t know what to do…
…
I haven’t eaten anything today. I’m afraid if I start eating I won’t be able to stop. I haven’t been able to concentrate on anything. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do I feel so out of control!
I’ve ALWAYS thought I was fat. For as long as I can remember. I’ve always been so self-conscious and worrying about what everyone else thought I’ve NEVER been able to control my eating…just when I was younger the weight never showed up on me. (Well I thought it did but I was actually quite skinny).
…
October 13
But I’ve got them all fooled. They don’t know the real me. They don’t know how I cry inside, wanting someone to love me for who I am, not this ugly exterior…
…
October 15
I’m like so fucked up. Seriously. I’m right back where I started. Fucking miserable. I hate my life. I hate everyone in it. I hate having to wake up and feel so sick. I hate having to look at myself in the mirror. It disgusts me.
Ew. Why can I not think of anything else?
I don’t really see the point in living. What is the purpose of it all? I just don’t think it’s worth it anymore. I don’t have anything or anyone. At all. No one knows how I feel nor would they care.
I think that whenever I try to pull myself out of this I’m just fooling myself (and everyone else for that matter). I try and convince myself that I’m okay but I’m really not. I can’t fake it anymore. That’s what I’ve done my whole life to be accepted and have friends. But I can’t do that anymore. So where does that leave me? How come I can’t be happy? I just don’t get it.
I wish my parents would have tried harder to talk to me and have a relationship with them. I wish I would have let them. I wish it was easier for me. I don’t want life to be hard. But it is! And it’s depressing. I’m always looking for an escape from my life and my thoughts.
Empty Life
Splattered on the Sidewalk
Lookie here
What have I found
an empty merry go round
Spinning round in the Darkness
I can’t get off!
Turn off the Ride!
“I can’t slow it down!”
says the operator.
Help! I’m screaming as the
music gets louder
Faster and faster, round and round
I even try to jump
but I’m too afraid.
I can’t get off!
I want to die.
These horses make me sick to my stomach.
I’m dizzy
I fall to the ground. The ride slows
down
Black.
…
Falseness.
Fake Life.
How do you do it?
I guess I was programmed wrong.
The defective product here.
Return me quick I might explode!
Hahahahaha. I can hear them laughing
Whore! Slut! LOSER
You deserve nothing.
You are worth nothing.
No one would care if you DIE
Slowly…peaceful.
What a happy way to go.
Grandma I miss you.
Look after me.
If I died could I become a butterfly
and glide across the breeze with you?
I love you.
Why can’t I love myself?
…
So many thoughts in this closed-off head.
They bounce around and magnify
The less people I talk to.
I isolate and they get louder.
Screaming, piercing, deafening
paralyzing.
They want me to have no friends.
They want me to be miserable, fat, and lonely.
They want my life
They want me to be trapped so I can’t escape
They hate me but they are my best friend.
They won’t leave me alone
I can never escape
I can only ignore them
For a small time
But they don’t like to be ignored so they come back
twice as strong, twice as loud,
and twice as powerful.
Taking me over.
Incapacitating me.
Living is a struggle
Overwhelming pain
Memories haunting me, tormenting me
Feeding my disease
Release the demons
Its too painful
I swallow it down
and throw it up
Getting high spells relief
getting drunk to forget
help me escape this prison
they love to destroy me
punish me
devour my soul.
…
I am sick, mentally and physically. What’s it gonna take to get “better”? What is normal anyhow? Can I even get better? Do I even want to right now? How long can I keep up this charade?
I just want it to be easy.
This is easy for me.
If it isn’t easy, it’s gonna be terrifyingly hard and I just want it all to be over with.
…
October 16, 2006
I want to get better. I do. I can’t just sit back and let this thing take me over. Which is what happened yesterday. I binged out hardcore on my ride home to Blacksburg. I stopped somewhere to purge. Then I couldn’t think about shit anymore so I went over Louis’s and got high. Real high. Then I came home and binged again! I’m done! I can’t live my life like this anymore. I’m tired of feeling trapped and lonely and alone!
…
October 17, 2006
I literally don’t know what to do. I can’t stand life or living it right now. I feel like I’m having a nervous breakdown. Everything is overwhelming me at once… I just don’t know how to handle it..myself. I use my eating disorder and drugs to cope. That just makes it worse. I can’t sleep at night. I can’t pull myself out of bed in the morning. I don’t feel like there’s any point to life or doing the things I’m doing. I’m not living for anything. I hate it. I hate myself. I need help. I need to get out. I need help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. I feel like I’m going crazy. I can’t control myself. I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what I’m feeling. I don’t know how to feel what I feel let alone express how I feel. I’m terrified of people, of relationships, of talking to them. I’m afraid of what they might think of me. I’m tired of faking it. I’m tired of pretending to be happy and alive. Nothing makes me happy. I can’t read. I can’t concentrate. I can’t get shit and negative thoughts out of my head. I want to talk to someone about it.
I need some time off. I think I need to leave school. I can’t sit around pretending to be fine when I’m getting worse. I feel like I’m dying inside. It’s consuming me and my life. I need help. I don’t trust myself. I never have. It’s cause I do things impulsively without thinking and later regret them. Or I make promises to myself and don’t keep them. Or I lie to myself about how I am feeling.
I’m gonna tell Mom that I want to withdraw from school this semester. I can’t concentrate. I can’t read, I have no energy… I can’t go to class and when I do I can’t pay attention. I’m depressed. I feel like I’m going crazy. I can’t talk to anyone. I have a huge social phobia.
The only way I’ve been getting schoolwork done is by using drugs so I won’t think about anything else. I’m extremely unhappy and I can’t go on faking it anymore. I can’t keep killing myself on the inside. I’m dying inside. You don’t have to understand any of it, I just want support in my recovery. I’ve been sick for years but I’ve either ignored it or I try to fix it…but every time I fool myself into thinking I’m “cured” and happy..then it comes back 10 times as strong as the last time. This time it came back and now it has control of my life. I don’t know what to do. It makes me not want to live another day.
I can’t keep waiting for the future to get better, because I never do. That time is now. I need help. I can’t do this myself. I can’t do this alone.
I try to convince myself that I’m not “that” bad. How much more proof do you need Lauren??????
I’ve tried geographical cures, love cures, health cures…and none of it works. It is only a temporary fix.
You can’t just get high and forget about it.
If you’re out there looking for places to go – you need help.
…
October 18, 2006.
Today (yesterday) was so emotionally draining. I literally had a nervous breakdown. I was freaking out – crying, hyperventilating. I called a recovery place and he asked me if I was doing drugs. I said yes – he said ‘you can’t just go get high and forget about it’ which is totally true. He also said if you’re calling rehab places you probably need to do. I’m scared though I really am. So I called Mom. I told her how depressed and unhappy I am, that I have an Eating Disorder and that I need to get help. She basically played it off and didn’t really take me seriously. She said, ‘been there, done that’ about the eating disorder and ‘Aunt D went through this same thing – wanna talk to her?’ No! I don’t wanna talk to her. Or you for that matter!
She had me really upset. She sucks.
Okay so then I called my therapist Jackie and she was like “I’ll change my schedule so you can come in” cause I was Freaking Out. I was out of control I was bawling I just wanted to die I just wanted help I was so desperate and lonely and sick… So we talked for over an hour and I cried the whole time. I told her how I’m so unhappy and I feel like I’m just faking it all the time. I said I can’t go on living like this cause I have nothing to live for. I told her I can’t read, can’t concentrate, I haven’t been able to think straight. I’m all warped and dysfunctional – I told her I was thinking about dropping out of my classes. I think I really need to. I need time to get over everything in my life. I can’t let this eating disorder take control of everything in my life anymore.
She told me about academic relief which sounded like a pretty sweet deal. I think I am going to do it. This is not the right atmosphere for me to recover in. Its gonna take a lot of hard work.
So then I called M after all this and he’s like, ‘Looks like you’ve hit your rock bottom.’ Yeah, so I think I have. I have never felt like that in my whole life. I went out and got a bunch of food – I binged all night. It was disgusting.
I went to rent movies and M calls. He tells me that he needs to back off for a while, that he can’t help me. By helping me with my problem, he is jeopardizing his recovery. Which is true. He has to be selfish right now and work on himself because if he clouds his head with something other than his recovery right now he might relapse. I was really upset. It means I don’t have that “go-to” person in my life right now.
…
October 18, 2006
I keep trying to tell myself I’m alright. I know I am not. I’m beginning to see that my world as I know it is fucked up. I want to learn how to cope with it differently. It’s hard now realizing all this stuff and the reason it makes it worse is because I have a hard time with coping. I want to learn how to be a normally functioning member of society. I want this more than anything else.
I watched ‘What the Bleep Do We Know’ last night and it talked about being addicted. It was kind of crazy the way they were explaining the world. One of the things I took from it is that we have so much potential all around us to pick a new action and we can change. It takes a while for the neurons to change their paths but it is possible. It will probably take a long time and a lot of work, but I think I’m willing to make that change.
These entries were just before getting treatment for bulimia. Getting treatment for bulimia and my depression was definitely what I needed at the time. It still amazes me to look back at what happened. It seems not real, as if I was living a dream, starting to wake up. Thank God I got treatment for bulimia, depression and anxiety at that point, but what I didn’t know was that it was about to get a lot worse before it got better…
Peace, Love + Freedom,
