Clearing out
I just found a diary entry from last year, just before I got the sickest I’ve ever been, and when I was trying to decide whether to defer university for a year to go back into treatment. Which I did end up doing. And reading back makes me so glad I did. I gave myself the year, and things are still hard sometimes, but it’s good to look back and see how far I’ve come from then:
“So it looks like if I’m going to do this properly, all the way, no going back, I’m going to have to defer a year... Another year. A whole year. I have a choice, I don’t have to do it. But what would going to uni after only 3 - 4 months of treatment mean? I would gain a bit of weight, but I wouldn’t reach target. My lowest weight would still be in sight but I wouldn’t be there anymore and I already know how painful and soul destroying that feeling is. I would be starting university as a failed anorexic, I wouldn’t be as obviously sick but I wouldn’t be normal either.
That’s how I started college... No friends, no social life, no other interests. No space in my head for anything except the illness and the tiniest bit of me that’s clinging on to pretending to be normal. Living alone, working alone, walking for hours. Me, my illness and my school work. And nothing else.
As much as I can pretend that this is independence, it’s not. I’m miserable. Any time I briefly remember that actually anorexia is not really my friend, I am mind numbingly lonely. Any time I remember that thinness is not an achievement, I realise that I have no purpose, no drive for anything worthwhile. Any time I remember that sickness is not strength, I feel frail and weak. So I don’t allow myself to remember those things. But I need to, because they are true... Change is terrifying but I am so, so tired of this relentless battle with myself. I’m exhausted. I’m done. I can’t do it anymore.”