Binge/Purge.

I had a lovely Christmas!  It doesn't usually happen in our house - I've lost count of the number of times we've spent it in A&E with Grandad, or cleaning Grandad's mattress.  It makes me sad that Grandad wasn't here to share Christmas with us this year, but - and does this sound really awful? - that the day was peaceful and fairly unstressful was quite nice for a change.

What isn't so lovely (and, yes, people, here she goes again!) is the constant anxiety around food and eating.  I just can't do it.  I sat looking at my plate during Christmas dinner feeling absolutely overwhelmed by the food I was meant to be eating.  One of the biggest problems I have when it comes to actually trying to make myself eat something is that I'm just not sure what size portion I should allow myself.  I've forgotten what's normal: I can't trust myself not to binge, but I also don't know how much I need to eat to make myself feel full.  I'm terrified of overfeeding myself, but I also can't remember what constitutes normal eating either.  

I really feel like I need someone to teach me how to eat normally.  It's just not something I can do any more.

I feel like I'm losing control on the binge/purge cycle as well.  Before, it was something I was able to be very strict about: I did it at work, and that was that.  I've never binged properly, but only because I'm terrified of eating anything, so my binges tend to consist of two bananas, or a couple of chocolates, rather than the massive eating-everything-in-the-kitchen binges that the media tend to write about.  Now, I find myself needing to purge more and more: after a mince pie on the way home from work; after eating my tea at home; when I've eaten some chocolate with my Granny.  I wanted so badly to purge after having a small tub of ice cream at the theatre this evening, but I think my Mum is too clever for me to get away with it...

I still haven't told them that I've been to the doctors' and been referred for counselling - it's something I'm going to have to do, because I don't want to lie to them the whole way through, but I just can't find the right time to bring it up.  Maybe when Christmas is over?

One last thing: thankyou to everyone who reads my blog - I passed 900 pageviews yesterday!  I know it sounds clichéd, but it does mean so much to me.  

When I Get Better.

Sometimes, I think it would be better if I don't get better.  If you see what I mean?  I don't want to be fat.  I think that constantly.  Constantly. 

But then that's simultaneously the problem and the answer.  I will not get better until I get 'fat' and then learn that I am not fat.

If you see what I mean?!

When I get better, however, there are things that I won't miss.

I won't miss watering down orange juice.  Or milk.

And I won't miss dreading Christmas because Christmas means, almost certainly, eating at every point of every day.

I won't miss having to say no whenever anyone offers me any food.

And I can't wait to have proper hot chocolate again.

What I want most is for the feeling of all encompassing guilt to disappear.  Because eating is what people do.  It's not something that I don't deserve.

The best thing is to get better.

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.

I love Christmas.  I love giving people presents, and sometimes getting presents myself.  I love the sparkle and the twinkle and the lights and the pretty, glittery things.

But I don't love the food.  I don't love sitting and trying to plan what I'm going to be able to skip or purge or how I'm going to be able to avoid being in places where people are eating.

And I definitely don't love staying up as late as I possibly can so that I don't wake up until lunchtime because it means I don't have to eat breakfast.

This also means that the morning is wasted because I'm either asleep or my blood sugar is too low to do anything other than sit and watch TV.

At the moment, I feel like I'm in perjury because I'm still waiting for my referral to come through, and I feel like I'm slipping further backwards whilst I'm waiting.

So, for Christmas, I would very much like to be normal, please?!

Bacon Sandwich.

I've not had a bad couple of days since my doctors' appointment.

As is always the case with a middle-of-the-night blog post, I'm feeling most anxious about having to go to the supermarket with my Mum tomorrow because I'm expected to eat a whole bacon sandwich to myself.  The plan was - because this is the way my life works at the minute - to restrict like crazy today so that the calories would come off today's 'allowance', but then I ended up being at home for more of today than expected, and I had to eat more food than I'd calculated would be the case.

And so now I'm stressing about a bacon sandwich.  A bacon sandwich.  A bacon sandwich. Doesn't it sound ridiculous?  KateBrain says that, indeed, it does.  Bacon sandwiches are one of KateBrain's favourite things and KateBrain would give anything for a bacon sandwich right now.

Geoff doesn't agree.  He thinks that bacon sandwiches should be on the 'Always Banned' list and he thinks that KateBrain is greedy and doesn't deserve a bacon sandwich.  Ever.

Stupid bacon sandwich.

What A Day (Grandad).

My family always remind me of the time I said this to my Grandad shortly before my third birthday.  It's one of the memories that I will always enjoy.

Today wasn't as bad as it could have been.  The most important thing is that my sister's operation went well, and she was recovered enough to be discharged this evening (although remarkably later than could have been the case due to a medication problem. The NHS wins again!).  She has, however, spent a good proportion of the evening vomiting into an empty ice cream tub.  It's a good job I'm not emetophobic!

Today was also the day of my doctors' appointment.  It went well.  I think.  My amazing, amazing friend, to whom I owe so, so much (suitably large Christmas present heading her way very soon!), came with me, and was 'there for me' every step of the way, which was an immense comfort.  I've done so many things by myself because there has been no-one else, that it's very odd to have a non-family member who actually seems to care about me.

I managed to tell the doctor about everything and allowed myself to be weighed, although that has really frightened me because I've lost ten pounds in the last fortnight.  She asked me whether I was depressed/suicidal/mood-swingy (I'm not) and then said that she'd refer me for counselling.

Lovely as she was (and she was lovely), she kept telling me that I should 'keep eating'.  As if that's going to happen.  I'm not eating anyway, and so someone telling me that eating healthily isn't going to make me put any weight on isn't going to change that.  She also asked me whether I'd 'tried to get better', which did make me feel a tiny bit like she thought I was a teenager going through a phase.  I'm not.  And also that I'd given up without trying and gone straight for a 'quick fix' (which counselling never is...).  If I could make myself better, I wouldn't have been sitting, petrified, in a doctors' surgery at ten past four on a Tuesday afternoon, would I?

But, yes, today has been considerably better than I had imagined.

Apart from that I've still got a heck of a lot of Christmas shopping to do...

Sometimes, Good Things Happen.

I think that I've written about it before, but my life must sound terribly doomy and gloomy on this blog.

It's really not: when I'm not obsessing about food or my health or my sister's health (or, let's face it, any one of a number of things!), I'm actually quite a happy person.

I'm happy when my boyfriend comes home from University for the holidays and we drink tea in front of a fire in a tearoom only we know about.

I'm happy when my sister and I are at home together.

I'm happy when I'm with my best friend.

I'm happy (mostly!) when I'm at work and at University.

I'm happy when I'm writing.

I'm happy when I walk home from the bus stop and play my music as loud as I like (and sing fairly loudly too!).

And, yes, I'm happy when I get my first two followers (!!!) and when I hit 800 pageviews.  Because then I think that I'm making a little bit of a difference somewhere in the world.

When are you happy?

Day 0.

This week is going to be big.

Huge.

Massive.

Two of the things which I fear the most are scheduled for the same day.  I wish it were Wednesday and I knew the outcome of both.

On Tuesday, my sister will have her tonsils removed.  One of the things Geoff really hates is when sister is ill. And so sister having an operation is likely to send him absolutely wild.  He's not started yet, but I can feel him biding his time.  However, since she's been ill since May - so for seven months - this should be (touch wood) the final hurdle before she starts getting better.  I do wonder whether her illness has played a major part in my health having declined so rapidly of late.

On Tuesday, I will also go and see the doctor about my eating disorder.  This terrifies me.  I know that I need help but I just don't want to admit to anyone else that I've got a problem.  I don't want it to have implications on my degree, or on my family and friends, or on any part of my life.  I don't want to be weighed by anyone else, particularly, and I don't think that I can tell anyone else what I do at work, or what I did in the car park.  I guess that I've got to be brave.  This year, my sister has been braver than I will ever be.  If I can emulate just a little bit of that...

Fingers crossed.

Just Another Boring Blog Post.

It's Friday, 7th December.

That is about the only certain thing in my life right now.  I want to cancel my doctors' appointment.  I don't want to talk to anybody professional about anything at the moment, because I'm finding it difficult to think, let alone explain things to someone I don't know who sees me as a name on a list of tasks to complete.

I love my friends.  I really do.  They are amazing people, and I really don't think that I deserve them, because I'm just a huge burden.  I owe them all so much.  I hope that they realise that I'm grateful, because I really, really am.  I don't know how to tell them quite what it means, and I'm constantly amazed that they still want to spend time with me because I don't think I'd want to be my friend.

I don't really know why I'm writing this, other than I'm sitting in bed in the middle of the night with nothing better to do; no motivation and a lump the size of Australia in my throat for no particular reason.

Nearly everyone else I know has a better reason than me to feel sad and lonely, but I'm the only person who seems to be falling apart at the seams.

I'm sorry.

Ill? Me?

Tonight I made myself vomit in a car park.  In the dark.

Absolute.  Lowpoint.

And my head still says there's nothing wrong with me.

That is all.

Santa Leave Your Sleigh Behind and Other Songs.

You know when you find a portion of your childhood you thought was lost and it brings back all sorts of memories which were really deeply buried?

Well, it being the beginning of Advent, I've dug my Christmas iTunes playlist out, and remembered the lyrics to some songs we used to have on tape (remember those!?) when I was really little.  A quick Google has proven that they a) did once exist and b) still exist on iTunes.  And, so, I'm now spending my Sunday night being all wistful about my childhood.

And, the more I listen, the more I keep thinking about, well, things.  

Was Geoff always inside me?  Even before I started school?  Did the little Kate, complete with scruffy hair and denim dungarees, who used to dance round the living room to Santa Leave Your Sleigh Behind always have the OCD and the eating disorder inside her?  Was it really always lurking, just waiting to come out? 

I guess the answer is that nobody really knows the answer.  It's one of those things which is anecdotal only and also takes into account whether you really believe that the Strep. virus causes the onset of Obsessive/Compulsive type disorders.  

As far as I'm concerned, I was a very anxious child.  As a baby, my Mum always tells me, I was the first child ever to be returned early to its mother from the creche because the staff couldn't settle it.  I was the only child who had to leave playgroup at three because they couldn't last the hour and a half without their mother, and I was the last child in my class to cry all morning, every morning and have to be taken home for lunch every day when I started school.  I think the not-very-technical-term is 'clingy'!

What does puzzle me, though, is that I was the last person you'd ever imagine would become slave to an eating disorder.  I had absolutely no perception of body image at all until I was sixteen-ish and then only because people told me that I had really nice legs (I'm blushing behind my laptop!).  What I wore didn't - and, to a certain extent, still doesn't - bother me.  I never thought that I was fat, but I never thought that I was thin either.  I came to the whole eating disorder game fairly late: where most girls start developing symptoms whilst in their teens, I was nineteen by the time I started developing mine, and also at home by myself for most of every day, since I was on my 'gap year' before starting University, so there wasn't any peer pressure to succumb to.  Yes, I was working, but with a group of entirely middle-aged women who were nothing but entirely supportive.

In my head, I can see the three year old me.  I am dancing around - in slow motion - to Christmas music, wearing a tartan skirt, knitted cardigan and little white tights.  There is my whole life ahead of me: endless possibilities.  

And all I want to do is apologise to that three year old Kate.  I am so sorry, I want to tell her, that we've ended up here.  So sorry that I've wrecked your body by starving it.  So sorry that I've spent years and years and years worrying about things.  I'm so sorry that you were so full of excitement and wonder and awe and now that same brain-space is filled with worry and anxiety and sadness.

But I don't know: maybe that was what was meant for my life?  Maybe nobody could have changed anything?  

Or maybe I'm trying to pass the blame?