The End Of ObviouslyCompletelyNormal.

Hello all!

I had my first appointment at the Eating Disorder Clinic today.

Thus, I feel that it's time to move on from this corner of the internet - reading back over my blog, a lot of the posts are very negative, and I think that I want to continue blogging, but to be more positive in my posts and my outlook.

Therefore, I've gone over to the dark-side and started a blog on wordpress.  I hope that you'll pop over and read what I've written - you never know; you might be my first follower!

The link is here...don't forget to say hello!

Finally, thankyou to everyone who has read and commented for being so supportive - I feel that I've met people who are genuinely caring, and it's touching that someone who is on the other side of the world would be so open and honest and bother about how I'm feeling.

For that I'm truly grateful.

Another Post No-one Really Wants to Read.

Evening!

I know I've not updated for ages - sorry again!  I seem to be swinging between being too busy and 'OK' to post, and being too miserable to think about even attempting it.  I'll try harder next time...

I finally got an appointment with the Eating Disorders Team (and it's even on the NHS - how unexpected is that?!).  I imagine that I'll be being assessed at the first appointment, and then we'll see how it goes from there.  Half of me is hoping that I'll be given a strict eating plan because I just want to get better as quickly as possible.  Geoff, on the other hand, wants nothing to do with any of it and will not be listening to anything anyone says.

Geoff, as it happens, has been an absolute nightmare since I got the appointment through.  He doesn't want me to eat anything at all, and wants me to get rid of anything I have eaten.  It's a massive struggle to convince him that eating is normal, or that I'm ever hungry enough to be allowed to do it.  He's in my head constantly, so most of what I think about is food-orientated.  It's difficult to find the brain-space for anything else at the moment.

My friends are, as ever, wonderful and amazing.  We went to the cinema last week and it was the first time I've really not concentrated on what Geoff is saying for ages and ages.  They're also really good at knowing exactly the right thing to say at all times.  It's so lovely to know that there are people who really do care about me, and who seem to understand how I'm feeling so absolutely.

So, yes, this is my life-update for this week.  I'll try and post again before my appointment!

I'm Just Tired.

Sorry I haven't updated in a while.  No excuses, really...I'm obviously just getting lazy!

I'm still waiting for my referral to come through for counselling.  It's been nearly six weeks now, and I'm getting fed up of waiting.  I'm also worrying about the effect that being ill is having on my body; it can't be healthy to continue doing what I'm doing every day.

It is - yet again - the middle of the night, and I'm tired of having to make decisions for myself.  In a perfect world, I would go for a walk with my family tomorrow morning, and I would have hot chocolate and cake when I get there.  But this is not the perfect world, and so I am trying to decide whether it's best to have something for breakfast, and then go for the walk and not have anything to eat when we get there, or whether it would be better to not have anything for breakfast and allow myself something when we get there. Geoff doesn't want me to eat at all, but I'm trying so hard to fight him.

I think, in the end, I won't go, simply because I know that I'll either be too hungry to walk the two miles there, or I'll upset my family when we get there.  There is no easy answer.

I'm physically tired as well.  Tired of the fight all the time, and of thinking every move through so very carefully.  I want to say yes when someone offers me cake, or crisps, or ice cream.  And I want to be able to join in with things properly.  I would love, more than anything, to be able to have a proper afternoon tea party for my birthday, but I'm just not going to be better in time.

I think that what I am most tired of is straining all my relationships.  My sister and I hardly have a relationship at all anymore, although we were once best friends.  I don't know what to say to her, and she tries to avoid me as much as possible.  I think that she truly believes that I am doing this to myself.  I am not doing this to myself.  My two best friends are wonderful, amazing, lovely people but I hate doing this to them.  I don't want them to have to sit and encourage me to eat every lunchtime, or to have to listen to me being anxious and upset and frightened when I've eaten something, or when I'm desperate to purge.  It's just not fair.

There was a girl with anorexia on Casualty earlier.  She said, 'If there was a pill, I'd take two.'.

I agree.

When I Get Better...

...I'm going to have the biggest Cookie Dough ice cream party ever.

That is all.

Difficult weekend, but I feel better for it, if you see what I mean.  It's snowing outside, so I'm going to watch from my bedroom window for a bit.

Goodnight BlogReaders!

Another Day.

So, my weigh in wasn't brilliant, but it was OK.  I'm allowed to continue at University and at work for the present, which is a good thing at least.

It turns out that I hadn't heard anything from the Eating Disorders' Clinic because they'd not received my referral.  Which, I think, is NHS speak for having lost it, or just not bothering to process things.  I hope their counsellors are better than their admin. staff! Although my GP contacted them on the same day I went for my weigh-in and it should all be sorted now.

I just can't wait to get better and eat Mini Eggs! Although I think that it's probably somewhat ambitious to imagine that I'll ever feel totally OK about eating chocolate again.  I've got so used to bargaining with myself and adjusting my intake so that I can eat when absolutely unavoidable, and binge/purging that I actually can't remember what it's like to eat normally: even when I think I'm doing so, I'm often calculating the calories and how fat I think the food is going to make me.

This week is turning out to be quite stressful: my best friend is poorly and has to go to hospital for tests, and so I'm - naturally - worried about her; we've had an essay deadline at University, and it's the first week back after Christmas, which always makes it a little bit stressful.  Added to this that I've been trying to lose the weight I think I must have gained over Christmas, even if the scales say otherwise, and you've not got the best mix!

Hope everyone else is fighting off the post-Christmas blues?

Mixed Reviews.

The big news of today is that I reached 1000 pageviews!  This is amazing because I think it must mean that people are actually reading my blog - other than my four followers - and it's not just spam traffic from adverts...I'd also like to say a quick hello to my new follower!

However, tomorrow I've got to go back to the doctors' to be weighed.  If I've lost weight, and my BMI has dropped then it means that my whole life with change.  Other than the stuff I write about on here, I'm so happy.  I love University, and I love my friends and my job.  I really don't want to have to give it all up just because a tiny part of me is so dysfunctional.  I'm hoping against hope that I've eaten enough, and kept enough of it inside me, over Christmas to have at least maintained what I weighed before then.

It's funny, because Geoff wants me to have lost more weight.  I'm not sure how he dares!

I read my blog back last night - as you do - and I just wanted to say one thing.  When I was writing about telling my friends about Geoff, I wrote that I didn't really want help from my friends.  I wasn't entirely right.  I couldn't have done much of last term, the holidays, or the beginning of this without them and their help.

Thankyou, by the way, to everyone who reads, comments on and follows my blog!

Is This a Problem for the Rest of the World? {{Or}} Hurray for the NHS.

I went to the doctors' four weeks ago on Tuesday.

It was one of the biggest, bravest things I've ever done in my life.  I thought that it would be the beginning of getting better.

But no, apparently not.  Because my referral hasn't come through.  The doctor said that, if I hadn't heard anything in four weeks, then I'd have to go back.  Presumably to remind them that I still exist and I'm still not eating anything.

All I want to do is get better because I'm so hungry and I've got to the point where I'd just like to be normal, yes please thankyou very much.

I know I shouldn't be moaning, because I'm really lucky to have access to free healthcare, and to be able to go and get counselling without having to worry about the financial aspects.  I know that.  But it would be really nice if it actually worked, and I wasn't waiting for months and months whilst I'm losing even more weight, and destroying my health even more.

Last time I had CBT, I had two sessions and then the counselling service had an overhaul and they 'temporarily discharged' me for over a year.  By the time the letter came, I'd got past the point where I desperately needed help - because these things tend to run in cycles - and, although I still had a problem, I chose not to accept the help.

It seems that getting better is just about impossible.

Normal. And How I Am Not.

Well, so much for YOLO!

I am sitting in bed, absolutely desperate to start doing extra exercise because I had a bowl of cereal before coming to bed.  Bear in mind that the bowl of cereal was a replacement for the beans on toast, apple and yoghurt I'd purged earlier in the evening.  Bear in mind that the bowl of cereal was not a full bowl of cereal.

Why can't I just be normal?

No-one else sits in bed worrying about a bowl of cereal they ate two hours ago.

Do they?

#YOLO

I don't know how widespread the trend is, but a current fashion is the Twitter 'hashtag' 'YOLO', which stands for 'You Only Live Once'.

So, for example, someone might post 'About to abseil off the Eiffel Tower. #YOLO'.

If you already knew that, and are sitting, cringing, at my terrible explanation, I apologise.

And, so, in the spirit of New Year reflectiveness, and a sudden need to analyse everything about my life now that it's 2013 (Happy New Year, by the way...), I have been thinking about whether I should be more embracing on the YOLO attitude.

The thing is, I'm only here one.  I have one life, and then I die.  Which is incredibly morbid, but also about the only certainty that there is.  And what do I spend my life doing?  I worry and I overthink and I don't eat anything.

And I've spent at least five years of my life being fairly miserable because of it.

What does it matter that I'm thin, or that I don't say certain words, or that everything I do revolves around the number three?  Really?  Because when I die, no-one's going to think about how I was a size 6, or how there were words that I couldn't say, or that everything I did was perfectly 'three'.

And so, in 2013 (which, by the way, is apparently a 'good' year, because it has a three in it...and the first year with a three in in that I can remember, because I was born in 1992), I am going to be more YOLO.  I know that I'm not just going to get better because all of a sudden I've discovered that I'm going to die, and no-one really cares about whether I eat less than 400 calories a day, but I'm going to try my absolute hardest to begin to get better.

#YOLO