Nobody said it was easy

"No one ever said it would be so hard..."

- Coldplay

So... time for an update?

It's been a confusing couple of weeks, finding out that my old friend from the EDU had a heat attack, and then my flatmate being admitted to hospital for her anorexia... It's been fucking hard and exhausting. I tried really hard to keep myself safe, I spent a lot of time at home on and off and as soon as I knew what date she was going in I gave the flat a miss for the week. Before I left I gave her a hug and told her it'll be okay, and then I sent her a messege letting her know she could talk to me whenever she wanted... She didn't respond and in a way I do feel a bit hurt but at the same time, and I know this sounds awful, it's not my problem. And how many offers of help have I thrown back in people's faces? I don't really have the right to be upset about it.

My (bp'ing) behaviours have slipped a bit in the last couple of weeks. Slowly, slowly as always, and then I realise how much it helps to purge all the bad shit out of you life, not food, but anxiety and anger and hurt, I've had a lot of that recently, and for a split second I saw a way out of all the emotional crap... I caught myself pretty quickly, I knew I couldn't let it get the better of me, that there would no such thing as 'just one more time'...

It's really shaken me up, though, I feel so unsettled. Recovery had been going SO WELL. I was coping with being overweight and learning not to punish myself more because of it and gently trying to lose weight by eating right and not binging or restricting. It's been a tough couple of months but I thought I was coping with it okay, I thought I was doing okay... I've never been this genuine about recovery, I've never given it this much effort, I've never tried so hard to block out what the rest of the world was doing with the food and their body and just concentrate on myself. Feeling bad for having a bad couple of weeks and beating myself up about it isn't really that productive so yes, acknowledge the fact that I've been using behaviours, try and work out why and move on.

I am moving on because damn it I have never wanted life without an eating disorder more than I have these last couple of years.

Talking of life without bad habits, it's 81 days since I last self-harmed (I am quite the poster girl with my DBT therapist) and my mood is alright, I think I'm over the worst of the depression. I've even been trusted with monthly pescriptions for the first time in years! I had my outpatient appointment last week, my consultant was off sick but I saw someone else instead of them cancelling (which considering I only see her every other month is a good thing) and the stand-in was really nice and had actually bothered to read my file. I told her about how my anxiety is just as bad as before, that I'm doing the 'keep going out anyway' advise without much success and that a lot of the time I'm inside by myself I still feel on edge and how I've been feelig physically awful because of all the headaches and chest pains. She put me on Seroxat (paroxetine) 10mg to see if it helps No impressions either way as yet, apart from the terrifying internet articles I've read about it being addictive and causing suicide, (there was even a 'The Secrets of Seroxat' Panaroma) but I've banned myself from Google now.

So, I'm now taking;

Seroquel XR - 300mg
Seroquel - 100mg
Lamictal - 200mg
Mirtazapine - 45mg
Seroxat - 10mg
Zopiclone - 7.5mg (upto 3 x a week)

I feel reletively human and functionable some of the time and the rest like WTF!!! and become convinced that it's some kind of mind-controlling experiment to get rid of 'the real me'. The times that I feel human are worth it though, right? I mean, I REALLY want to get on with my life, do productive things, grow and change, and I can't do that if I'm all... Erm? Unstable is maybe the politest word.

I re-enrolled for university today, to go back in October and complete my second year of Creative Writing and English. I'm pretty sure it's what I want to do, it's what I wanted for a long time but after I had to drop out before Christmas I've been scared of making the commitment to go back. I feel like I've already failed, in a way, and that going back would be too hard. I want to give it a shot, though, I think I'll regret it if I don't.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do about accomodation, I still really want to get my own flat or something instead of student housing because I've left it too late to get a decent place because the applications have to be in by the end of the first term. I don't know how to go about looking though, I get really scared when I think about properly living on my own. I'm nearly 24 and in so many ways I feel about 84, but there are times when I feel like a child....

Anyway, I kind of want to get some shit off my chest, J* (my counsellor at LRC) is always asking if my writing is any better than my talking so...

The anxiety and trauma related stuff is fucking awful at the minute... It was getting better for a bit but now I just can't tune my brian out from it. For years I've torn myself up over it, I blame myself and at the same time I feel completely fucking violated and abused. It keeps going round in circles in my head. Is not saying no as good as saying yes? Is staying in the same room of someone that's trying to kiss you an invitation for sex? Is being drunk and stoned as good as permission? Is having a blank space where a memory should be just guilt? I'm not fucking over it. I get flashes of that night all the time, of the bits I do remember, him being kind to me and stroking my face, maybe it really was just a romantic one night stand that I asked for.... But then I just feel disgusted and repulsed and betrayed and I am so despretely trying to fill in the blanks and know what happened.

The thing is, as soon as one memory or thought gets triggered, everything else starts to crawl from my stomach into my throat and I end up feeling so confused and angry and scared. Memories that years of starving and puking and binging and cutting and burning and overdosing and insane amounts of alchohol quieten down. It doesn't work anymore, though, ever since it's been 'public' and I told my psychiatist and with now going to counselling... I don't really talk there though, well I do, I talk a shit load about everything else under the sun, but when it gets to talking about the real reason I'm there I just end up with THE FEAR and have to bolt from the room. I don't even feel like I belong there.

When I was 17, a group of us (including my ex-boyfriend) went out drinking, we always went out for drinking picnics in the summer holidays, he offered to take a couple of us back to a friend's place. The whole day he'd been all over me, but he was always drunk and I was used to it, but I guess I always went back to my own house afterwards and this time I didn't...

One of the times I was trying to get away from him my sleeves must have rolled back and he saw my SI scars and started shouting at me, screaming WHY over and over again, he was so angry, he hit me. He was very drunk, he was an alchoholic and I felt guilty for it, I felt like the reason for it. Or atleast, he always made me know how much me dumping him had fucked him up. I still don't understand why my scars pissed him off so much... He rolled back my sleeves and paraded me around the front room, in front of complete strangers, dragging me by the arm and telling everyone to look, telling everyone to tell me how stupid I was, telling everyone to feel the scars. I can't really describe how it feels when a stranger touches your scars, it's the final scene of 'Thirteen' only a million times worse because it's not someone you love doing it. I remember it more vividly than anything else that happened that night. Even now, seven years later, I still feel sick when I touch my scars.

I didn't want to be around people anymore after that, so I took myself off into one of the bedrooms. He follows me, I'm drunk and sleepy, I remember saying to him 'I don't want sex with you', but he didn't listen, he tried to get an erection but couldn't because he'd drunk so much so he used his tongue and hands on me. I started to black out, half or my memories are white noise and static and the rest are distorted snapshots of reality, pictures in the wrong order, too bright, too loud, like when you're in a nightmare and you can't wake up or move, you lose touch of what's real and what's not... I could have pushed him off, but I didn't, it wouldn't have made any difference, I was weak, most of my nutrition came from booze back then. I could have shouted out for the others, but I didn't. I could have locked the door before I went to bed but it just didn't occur to me...

I went to sleep, woke-up and left without saying goodbye. It didn't hit me until I was walking home, I thought I was going to die from the pain, trying to block out what happened in my head when my body just wouldn't co-operate.

A couple of days later he left a messege on my voicemail saying that he was sorry, that he couldn't live with what he'd done and that because of it, because of me, he was going to kill himself. I tried to get in contact with him but everywhere I looked, everyone I spoke to, wouldn't tell me anything. He'd told them some crap about me humping and dumping him and they hated me. It took him a whole YEAR to get in touch with me and tell me he was alive. For a whole year I was blaming myself for someone else's 'suicide'. I still have the e-mail he sent me, all it said was that he'd 'moved on with his life', he never mentioned that night and he never said sorry again. I kept that voicemail for years as proof that everything was my fault.....