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

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?

Treacle. Through Which I Am Walking.

I want to cancel my doctors' appointment.

It took me all my courage to make the appointment and that seemed like the biggest hurdle overcome - admitting that I need to do something - but, apparently, that was an easy part.  

Now I'm worried that I've made a mistake and there's nothing wrong with me and I'll be wasting the doctors' time.  What if there isn't anything wrong with me?  What if I'm making up all the symptoms, and it's something I'm choosing to do?  What if I could stop it tomorrow if I wanted to?  Do I even want to?  

The questions are going round in my head constantly.  I don't know what to do.

I've made a step, but I haven't got a clue whether it's in the right direction.

And now it's Friday evening, and I'm panicking because I've got to go out for a meal with my seminar group on Monday.  And I don't know what I'm going to eat, because there isn't anything remotely within my 'calorie-range' on the menu.

And, although I am continuing to deny that there is a problem, I have just hidden three-quarters of a bag of crisps and most of the chips I was supposed to be eating for my tea.  I am writing this down, mainly, for myself.  Because things like that are forgotten, or glossed over in my head all too easily and, next time I'm a phone call away from cancelling all the help I've worked so hard to muster up the courage to get, I want the truth to come and hit me in the face.

Because Geoffrey (who is my eating disorder as well as my OCD - very talented man!) is still telling me that there isn't a problem.