The first week of December has gone by, already. At the beginning of the week there was just one house with its lights up – now there are a dozen, some houses have gone ballistic with lights on every window and gaudy glowing reindeers, and the lights and trees are up in the town centre. The supermarket has long been packed with the usual assortment of Christmas food in gold and red packaging. I don’t feel much excitement about Christmas though, never have, and now more than ever. We’ll get to why in a moment. Just a moment. This entry is hard to write. Carrying on the theme lately, my thoughts remain messy.
On Wednesday I went to see the psychologist. Or rather, my university’s eating disorder help service. There, I said it.
I overslept and although I had meant to go in at 10 to the drop in clinic, I ended up there at 11. I lingered outside the door, not sure whether just to go in or not, not sure if I even wanted to. What was I doing? I wanted to flee from the situation I had put myself in, to turn tail and run, to just forget about it all and try my best to go back to denial. But as I stood there I felt a strange calm overtake me. I was nervous, I was reluctant, I was embarrassed, but I wasn’t panicked. 15 minutes after I arrived, I knocked on the door and walked in. There was one woman there. I started off awkwardly, not sure where to begin, but as the session went on I felt it all spilling out of me. It was not like the doctors, where I was so terrified and panicked that I could hardly speak. I was still weirdly calm, almost detached from the situation. I talked about the dark places inside me as if they were small, meaningless things. As if they did not scare me, or make me feel ashamed. The woman listened, and asked all the right leading questions, which was what probably made it so easy, because responding is so much easier than free talk, and as she in turn responded to me, to help me out, to clarify, I thought to myself “She gets it”. I felt relieved. She summed it all up so well, and it made so much sense, and it was such a relief to speak to someone who got it.
Then, as the session began to wrap up she started to advise me, and I grew quiet, subdued, as it begun to sink in the weight of what I was doing. There was going to be no magic wand to wipe this out, there was going to have to be changes, I was going to have to work to make this better. I was going to have to drag myself out of this, and it would not be the first time to go through this fight. I knew that, but feeling like this, I cannot help but long for something foolish – some kind of saviour. How am I going to save myself, this time? I felt my throat grow tight but thankfully I was still detached enough from the situation to not cry. She told me, looking at me sadly, that it worried her how isolated I was – and I did not know what to say. Its been at least 4 years, possibly longer, that this has all been going on. When I left CBT the first time I was supposed to be better, and I was so happy. I thought it was over. But it wasn’t. Wounds not quite healed festered and now here I am, with all these bad habits and nasty thoughts, all tangled up with my being. I’ve been using food as a comfort for at least 4 years. Which I say loosely, as it is no longer a comfort to me. As the psychologist said, much more eloquently, you just keep up with the habit, looking for what it once gave you, searching for that relief you found (Once, when I was depressed, I would starve myself and binge on chocolate and the like, because it was one of the few things that would make me happy – no matter how fleeting, no matter how I kept needing more to get that same rush). Its become a part of me, of my lifestyle – a very secret, private part of my lifestyle. I have mentioned it on this blog in passing, light hearted, how I bought some chocolate to eat, how I eat too much but I am working it, how I binge but I am working on it. Always working on it. Recently, I had to face that I was in denial and I was not working on it, I was letting it consume me. Meanwhile, my anxieties and my fears are worsening, and I draw away from everything that could possibly hurt me – mainly, people. Isolating myself, barricading myself inside me. I am once again, slowly, surely, messing up my life, in my own little ways. At least my university work isn’t suffering, but with my grades falling last year, I worry I should be using the word “yet.”
I really don’t know how to fix this. And even though I long to, I am so comfortably set in my ways that no matter how much I know its wrong, and its not healthy, I still cannot help but fear change, because that involves leaving that comfort behind – becoming uncomfortable. Facing the unknown.
Anyway, I’ll be starting counselling for this in the new year. In the mean time, I have a diet plan to help me and a food and mood diary to stop lying to (two days in, and I cannot bring myself to admit – today I binged – and why.)
I had a project meeting at 12:20 the same day. I wandered down from the health centre to the bus stop, dazed, lost in thought, still in that weird, faraway place that I had been since that morning. I stood at the bus stop for a long moment before I realised I should check the bus schedule, and it was then I saw the time – 12:20. Oh shit, I thought. It was like oversleeping – it takes a moment for you to realise that yes, you are awake, and no, you are not reading the clock wrong. I felt immediately guilty and slightly panicked. This was a meeting with our supervisor aka a big important meeting. And I had missed it, just like that. I felt awful but what could I do? I hope my group members are not annoyed with me – I tend to be late to most meetings, and now I even missed one of the most important ones. I really cannot believe how long I was at the doctors though – it had not felt like such a long talk with the psychologist. I was, despite myself, amazed that I had managed to stay so calm for it all.
I’ve been in a daze since, struggling to get things done, again. I start off all my days with good intentions – with plans and goals, but somehow I always feel myself getting distracted, and I am struggling to make progress – revision is going so slowly and I am getting increasingly frustrated, which in turn does not help my eating disorder, which in turn does not help my revision, and so forth. Really, my modules are hard, there are so many of them and there is so much to remember, and it just makes me feel stressed. That and everything else. As of now I am juggling: six exams, one language course, one external mooc (online course), one group project, one eating disorder (and a possible anxiety problem). I feel like I’m being crushed under the weight of it all.
I’m not depressed, again. At least there is that. The psychologist asked me that and I had to think about it for a moment and finally I said “no, I’m not sad.” Because I am not. I’m just overwhelmed, afraid, and lost.
(I wondered about how much detail to write about my eating disorder – in the end I decided not to go into too much detail, but not to shy away from it either. I am still not sure if this is the right way to write about it. I still feel vaguely uncomfortable admitting to it. It feels strange, to have something like this.)
