Totally Freaked Out

So I was doing much better. Much much better in fact. Now suddenly, I am not. I am back to being mysteriously hungry all the time (heres a clue: if you don't eat enough, you are always hungry) somehow I am having a hard time admitting that my eating disorder has rallied and is back for round three. I thought she was gone, I thought I was doing ok without her. What I realize now is that I was pushing her out the door so hard that I was actually leaning on her back. Although I was chasing her away, all I was really doing was following her lead.

But I am taking what I have learned while I wasn't listening to her. I learned that the best way to deal with a problem is to deal with it, not ignore it and hope it will go away. So, step one, eat. I wonder if I didn't have all these other random scary emotional things popping up right now if I would be able to do this no problem. I'm scared.

If you are doing something you already know how to do, you are not really doing anything at all.

Holy fuck. I am scared.

But did I mention I love my team? They allow me to be scared, without them I wouldn't even let myself be scared, being scared means you admit there is something to be scared about.

Before the Party

I want to do good. At my old job i was doing some good, but mostly i was getting shit upon, which isn't good for anyone. In a week I will be going back to that place for a party for my comrade. I am terrified! I keep dreaming about it. I keep thinking about it.

Part of me feels strong enough to go back, to see the place that slowly sucked the life out of me. To see the people who hurried that process along, and also those who saw it happening, but couldn't do anything about it, and even those who saw it happening, and could have stopped it, but didn't. This part of me knows these people have lost their power over me. My one boss, who I pity more than anything else, lost her ability to hurt me when I stopped working for her. My other boss, who I don't quite trust anymore, and probably never will again regardless of whether I work for her or not, I am no longer dependent on for protection (which was rarely given, though often promised), so she too has lost her power to hurt me, by action or inaction.

But there is another part of me, which is scared and shaking in her boots. Its the little girl in me, the one who doesn't want to go to the doctor because the last time she went in there she got a shot and it hurt, even though they said it wouldn't.

The only way forward is through. I will face my fears. I will look into the faces of those who hurt me the worst. I will smile, I will say charming things, I will tell them the truth about how well I am doing, and if they ask me to come back, to help them out, even just for a little while I will say no, I learned my lesson there, I don't want to learn it again.

Perhaps what I am really afraid of though, is seeing the people who loved me there. The ones who were just as helpless as I was. The ones who saw me falling apart but could do nothing to help me, and nothing to stop it from happening. How do I tell them they just weren't enough? that as much as i loved them they were not worth it. or that they failed me. how to i accept that? that they both loved me and failed me?

Stay On Your Own Mat

In yoga they tell you to stay on your own mat. Practice your yoga, not your neighbors, or the yoga you did yesterday or three days ago or last year. This is a principle I try to keep in mind whenever I hear about one of my friends moving on to bigger and better things and the jealousy starts to creep in. I get cranky, I want to be moving on too! I want to be living my dream! I want to be buying houses and getting married and getting my dream job! WTF! When do I get to start living again!

Then I remember that if I were given any of those things right now I would be a bleeding mess, I would sabotage it and end up back where I am now anyway. It is better to build a proper foundation before trying to build too high up. Still, this laying foundation shit is not glamorous, nor does it give you much to talk about at parties.

I am so pissed at Edie for taking so much away from me, for setting me back so far, I almost feel like an athlete who tore some kind of very vital ligament and is now on the bench for a few years until it fully heals. I know that if I get back in the game too early it will just set me back even further, but it is so hard to see all my teammates out there living it up, becoming better athletes. Soon I think I will walk away from this team, change sports, or careers, see what else there is out there for me.

But that is terrifying! Leave the life I know? For what? I suppose I have already left, I just need to let go. If I don't belong here, where do I belong? Where do I look for friends? How do I meet people?

If I was ready for a real job, I'd have it. If I was ready to live alone, I would. If I was ready to fall in love again, I would. But this is what I am ready for, I am ready to learn how to set boundaries and stick to them, I'm ready to figure out what I need and want and how to get it and then how to hold on to it. I am ready to learn what I can give and what I need to keep. I am ready to figure out what I want to do, what makes me happy and how to avoid the things that destroy me. So, that is what I am doing, I am in a place where I can learn all of those things before its too late. And when it comes down to it, I wouldn't trade this for anything right now.

Containers

Tonight in Art Therapy we made containers, which was something I had been looking forward to, until it came down to doing it. I had thought, what a convenient thing, a place to put things, recovery things: emotions I don't know what to do with, hopes, fears, momentos, whatever.

But when it came down to decorating it I froze momentarily. There was the magic threshold of self expression, and what did I really want this container to be for anyway? for the good? the bad? the ugly? What I really need is a container for the confused, the lost, the unknown. But in order to have a container of these things I need to be able to hold them, to put them away, which is where the real problem lays. If I knew what these things were I would be able to put them in their proper containers in the first place.

There was something else bothering me too though; I am tired of putting things in containers, I just want things to be, I want to just be, I don't want to be contained. Also containers seem so stagnant and still and what I am trying to do is a process, it cannot be contained, which is part of why it is so hard, and hard to describe to people who are not going through it.

I ended up thinking about what I need to do to recover, and I realized that I need to let some things die, I need to let them go. Years ago I missed the Samhain celebration here because I was too afraid of what I really needed to let go of. Thats when things started to go wrong.

So I went back to that place of letting the leaves fall and moulder and protect the growth that was yet to come. I came back to where the leaves turn to rich loamy soil. It occurred to me that that process was just one part of the wheel of the year that turns so effortlessly. So I put a bit of winter ontop of the autumn (time to mourn that loss, and understand it) and had to follow that with the spring of course (turning that loss into something beautiful and new). But I left the summer for the inside of the container. That is what I want to contain: flowers and growth and beauty.
Looking at my container all you see is process (some of it not so pretty). That is what the world sees right now, a girl still too sick to drive herself around, a girl hiding at her parents house. But inside, there is all kinds of growth, it is beautiful and rich and colorful. If you are lucky I might let you peek inside.

Tunes

I have been having a tough time with nurturing lately. I have been resentful that I am always the one to have to nurture myself. I get angry at my mother for not being there for me when I was growing up and I get mad at my best friend for being too busy to see me (seeing him gives me a break from holding myself up and together). In getting angry like this I realized that if I were stronger in myself I wouldn't feel the need to be nurtured and held. I also realized that the more I truly take care of myself the easier it gets.

So tonight after doing a days work on myself and trying desperately to hold onto the progress I have made in recovery thus far, I looked through my iTunes to find something nurturing to listen to while I read, I wanted something that would hold me, wrap itself around me and keep me warm and safe. And of course I turned to tunes. Depriving myself of tunes because I am afraid of loving them too much is one of the worst things I can do for myself, it is almost worse than avoiding food.

So I flipped through my tune collection and came across a band called Lunasa, lovely lovely, warm and safe and comforting. Complex without being complicated. Exactly what I need.

Someday I'll be Dancing Circles Around Her

As part of my full life reboot I have moved into my childhood home with my childhood dad and all my childhood issues, behaviors and habits. It has been a tough transition for me. I am mostly able to think of it less as 'moving back in with my parents' and more as 'doing what I need to do to take care of myself' but still, its tough, a big change. As part of this big change I am still trying to figure out how best to fit my apartments worth of stuff into my one bedroom.

I never lived in a dorm room (I skipped that part of the college edperience) but I imagine my room looks a bit like a dorm room might. It is packed from floor to ceiling with all my worldy possessions. The closet is packed (mostly with yarn) to the spilling point. The only furniture is my bed, my desk, chair (a relic from my childhood), the bookcase (also packed to the spilling point), my dresser and a few milk crates which serve as my bedside table as well as storage for more books, art supplies and knitted things which are waiting patiently for winter to come around again.

One of the nice things about moving is realizing what is actually important to you , what you clearly value, for example, I didn't realize just how many books I own until I had to pack them and then find room for them all. I apparently also have a liking for black boots (I own 4 pairs). I'm not even going to go into the yarn and knitting supplies (although I should mention that at least a quarter of my books are knitting related), of course there are the art supplies of all types, and my cd collection is much larger than I had thought it was.

You are also given the opportunity to cull your belongings, you come across things you realize you have no use for, no desire to own. I let my fabric collection go to goodwill (when did I really think I would find the time and patience to learn to sew?), I took a bag of books to the used book store (I took store credit of course, who needs cash when it will all be coming back to them anyway?)

But there are some things I cannot let go of quite yet, some of these things have just gone into storage (cook books, momentos), but some of them I keep close to me. Things like my dance shoes.

You would think that a pair of shoes wouldn't be such a big deal, but dancing is one of the things that Edie (where are my manners? World, meet Edie, my eating disorder. Edie, this is the World, none of them like you, get used to it) has taken away from me. I used to dance, before i got sick, and I had just started to get back into it, and realize it was something I actually enjoyed when Edie showed up. For a while I thought I could have both Edie and my dancing, but I was terribly mistaken. So as Edie took on a bigger role in my life my dancing took on a much smaller role until one day, I looked over at my dance shoes and realized they were covered in dust and I didn't have enough strength to brush them off.

I refuse to put these shoes in storage. In fact they are not even shoved to the back of the closet, they are sitting where I can see them every day. I don't want to forget about them again, and even though I cannot use them to batter out the once familiar rhythms like I used to, I can still use them as weapons against Edie. And someday when she has faded like an old girlfriend into the backdrop of my life I will pull those shoes out and step up to be the woman I knowI can be.

The Lake (and what you find in its depths)

So this is what you do, you dive into these horrific emotions that you have avoided (with reason) for years, then you surface again, take a breath, go on with your day, live your life with the afterimage of these memories clouding your vision. You try to find the balance that will let you find everything, but not drown. You avoid anxiety by making the trips frequent enough that you eventually lose your fear of those depths, if not of what is actually down there to find.

You dive and surface until you have pulled every last mud covered gem from the bottom of this lake. Later you will take your sack of mud and sift through it, pull out the gems, and one by one; you will polish them to a shine and then cut them into jewels and eventually you will find the strength and desire to wear them with pride, more beautiful than scars, but no less useful, or hard won.

But this week? This week you are dirty and wet and tired and cold and you stink; but you are doing what needs to be done. So while you rest on the banks, let yourself smile, just a little, at the warmth of the sun on your face.

Waves

I am supposed to be working on anger and all that right now (why do i say 'supposed to be', its like I'm afraid to even admit that I am doing it) and in doing so I have been looking at the anger I grew up with, as in how my mom and dad expressed their anger and the ways they viewed it and dealt with other people being mad. Neither of them did a particularly good job of it. They were on either end of the spectrum, but neither one was balanced, helpful or productive.

Arguing with my best friend has helped me realize that its not an awful thing to have differing opinions about things, and that I can bring shit up without it being the end of the world, or our friendship. And that is all because he actually listens to me, and thinks about what I said, and why I might feel like I do, then either says sorry, and explains his side, or comes back with why I am wrong, but he doesn't default to one or the other. I like that. It helps, a lot, not just in our friendship (although it has done wonders for my ability to be more present in it) but also for my well being, not only feeling like I am allowed to be mad, but also trusting someone else with that anger.

In the chapter on feelings in 'Eating in the Light of the Moon' by Anita Johnston she talks about how feelings are waves, you can either allow them to roll through you and ride them, or you can block them, but if you block them, all that emotional energy just gets stuck, and often confused and messy. That image of the waves helped, because waves roll, they wont stop unless you stop them, which means, if you just let yourself feel what you need to feel and let it go, it will pass. and just like a wave of water, if you slam a wall down on it, it breaks, but gets all confused and loses the grace that waves usually have, then you have all this chaotically swirling water to deal with, and that is where you could drown. If you take it a step further, water that sits for too long gets stagnant and bad things grow in it. So really its a lot better to just let the waves come, and ride them out, and see where they take you. I'm going to try that I guess, its scary though, and its going to take practice to get better at it, but we can all do anything we want to do, right?

I know that the best way to get better and become a whole person again is to deal with all this shit that I wasn't dealing with before.

Yoga and Body Image

I started a new group today at the Emily Program called Yoga and Body Image. I love it.

First, a word about the Emily Program and how fantastic it is: I started at the Emily program in May and from the first moment I stepped foot in the St. Paul office I felt taken care of, and cared about. It was the first time I had ever felt like that in a health care facility. For the first time I felt like I wasn't just somebodies job. I felt like they really wanted me to get better.

One of the many many things I love about the Emily program is that they offer 'traditional' as well as 'non-traditional' treatment. This yoga class is a prime example of that. It is such a gentle way to get people with Eating Disorders to get a little more comfortable in our bodies. It offers a safe place to move and start to rebuild the connection between body and mind that so many of us have worked so hard, and so destructively to sever. It gives us a safe place to really feel all the feelings that come up during yoga, which is one of the reasons I stopped going to yoga years ago, I would want to cry in the middle of class and I was so embarrassed. But here, we can cry, or not, and after wards we all check in about what came up during our practice. It was so comforting to hear that I am not the only one who is so confused and conflicted about what my body can do and what it looks like and what it all feels like.

When I signed up for the group I wondered how useful it would really be for me right now as my body image issues are not high on my list of ED (Eating Disorder) issues right now. What I struggle with now has less to do with image and more to do with function. I don't generally mind the way my ass looks, but I do hate the fact that I cannot go hiking anymore because I don't have the strength. I'm not overly concerned with the way my tits have shrunk (its annoying, but what can I really do about it right now?) but I do rue the fact that I cannot dance anymore. The way my hipbones come in and out of prominence is merely interesting to me, for the most part, but not being able to drive because my legs get too weak is a problem I would like to take care of.

So when I heard this same sort of attitude reflected back from my group mates it was a relief. To know that many of us are frustrated and annoyed that our bodies wont do what they used to, whether that is because of getting older, or because we have gained too much weight, or because we are malnourished and starving; that is why we are here. We are all here because we are not happy with our bodies in one way or another, not only what we see in the mirror.

Through is the Best Part

When I decided to blog about my experience in recovery from my eating disorder I immediately had very little to say. It was as though I thought I had to start with a bang, some kind of big breakthrough, and in the last week I've had none.

Then it hit me: recovery isn't always, or even usually, made up of the big breakthroughs, it is mostly made up of these kinds of days, where there is no big breakthrough, there is no sizable steps forward, just this slow plodding. These days there is still forward movement, which is what counts. These are what I call the musical montage days, the days that, in a movie, get covered in the musical montage that show 'time passed' and then you end up at the next breakthrough moment, or next stage of the characters lives. But these are the important days, these are the days that really count. They are sort of like the pennies in your change jar that eventually add up to the two hundred dollars you needed to buy that sweaters worth of cashmere.

It reminds me a bit about a quote from an Alix Olsen poem she says: "all these girls, struggling to get through, don't you know through, its the best part". Its the difference between stopping and stopped. Someday I will be fully recovered, but that is not what this blog is about, its about recovering. And today is just as much a day of recovery as any big breakthrough day.