October 13th

My eating disorder turned my life around; it changed me in every way. I feel like free. There's a certain freedom in knowing you could die after taking diet pill after diet pill until you're in the emergency room, dehydrated, with IVs hooked up to you and nurses running around as you sit there smiling - nibbling on a bag of pretzels that you'll throw up as soon as poison control let's you leave. You smile because you're getting exactly what you want. You get everyone around your hospital bedside crying over you. You're special. There's freedom in knowing you could die from organ failure and heart failure. It becomes exciting. Your life becomes unpredictable - which is a contradiction because you are a perfectionist; everything needs to be in order, on time. You think in all-or-nothing terms. You are either starving, organized and structured or you fall off binging, purging, snorting cocaine, running from guy to guy leaving their bed before they wake. You can't sustain perfection so you lose control. That to us is freedom - for a short time - until anxiety makes us go back. We are anxious people. That could be why we have an eating disorder; anxiety could drive us to starve our bodies. Anxiety could makes us ill.

We never fully recover. The anxiety never leaves. We take a bit of a burger on a bun, scoop up some mashed potatoes soaked in butter - take a bite. Chew. Swallow. That for us is success. We finish it all. We do not purge or exercise compulsively or take 30 laxatives and 10 diet pills. We however are not recovered. People look at us, they smile, we walk away - we cry. It's so hard to bring that burger to the mouth. It's harder to chew. It's even harder to shallow. For some it might be even harder to not purge. But we consumed the food and it stays down. We feel out of control, anxious, imperfect. We have lost. We cry ourselves to sleep holding on to the waist; a size 0, hoping our hips don't grow, hoping the ass doesn't expand and the stomach doesn't blow up like a balloon. Impossible is what rationality tells us; however the disorder, our mental illness that we do not recover fully from tells us we are worthless, we lose, we are imperfect. We believe it so we isolate ourselves. This is not recovery. There is no recovery. 

October 11th

How can something so innocent become an addiction. How can being ashamed of yourself turn into fucking hating yourself so much. When you hate yourself so much, when you're so lonely the human mind can not comprehend this. You do not understand how you can have everything and yet something is missing. At 18 you can't analyze this; it's too hard. You begin to innocently cut calories to lose weight, because maybe something superficial can give you what you need. That, however, is only in the short term. Cutting calories turns into starving the body. The starving turns into puking, drugs, cigarettes, sex, cheating, lying. It's a way to cope with being gay, being imperfect, hating your flaws. You do not understand. Being lonely is an awful feeling. If you don't understand - how can anyone else? You begin to get close to someone because you are lonely. It's unbearable. You need to fill the void. Maybe that's what will help you recover. Maybe a piece of you doesn't want to recover though; however if you don't, you die. Maybe that's what we want somedays, most days it's not. You getting close to someone doesn't make you feel any less lonely; it in fact makes you more lonely because not being understood by someone that should understand is worse than not being understood and being alone. So we fuck, we leave, we don't call back. We feel nobody understands. We get into relationships for support, reassurance, affection, attention, love; however we cheat because we don't get the reassurance we are looking for. Our views on relationships are fucked up, we are mentally sick. Without this reassurance we are looking for and cannot find, we become lonelier. We cheat, we fuck, we cry, we purge, we leave. We blame then punish ourselves. We want to feel pain because we deserve it.

We smoke a cigarette, go to sleep, wake up, run, eat two eggs, drink a glass of milk, puke, pop 12 diet pills. You forget what normal is. You begin to go insane. People take sanity for granted. Sometimes the crazy person isn't the old woman walking down the street with a shopping cart filled with cans in a plastic garbage bag; it's a boy walking, wearing fur boots on the sidewalk smoking a cigarette waiting until the street is empty so he can go behind a tree a throw up his lunch.

Keeping this a secret makes us lonelier. We hate keeping secrets.. we want to tell, but telling would get us in the hospital. It would be admitting there's a problem - and in the beginning when it's innocent there is no problem - it's good. People look at us and smile because we've lost weight (weight we didn't need to lose - but society is so fucked up that when someone who's already underweight loses more weight, we congratulate them.) After awhile we become sick; 68 pounds and 5 foot 11. People look a way. We become skeletons. We are lonelier than before. Telling isn't an option - at least not right away. 

October 7th

Fasting- a word we use because we don't believe we are starving. We are doing the body good. We "fast" for days. Shaking hands, thin wobbling knees, eyes sunken in. "No, I don't have HIV...I have anorexia."

Soon you can't fast anymore. You begin to shake. Your feet start moving uncontrollably. You have an anxiety attack. You think you're dying. Your head begins to spin, you're dizzy. "One cracker," is what you tell yourself- "that's the limit." You find yourself on the couch with your hand wrapped around your waist, measuring - to digging in the pantry on your knees through everything. Pouring brown sugar, honey, more sugar, pancake batter, butter, syrup all into a bowl. You eat it. You have three peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, half gallon of icecream, bag of Family Sized chips, cookies, candy that isn't yours, and soda. You down a whole liter of soda- then find cans of energy drinks and gulp them.

"What the fuck have I done," I say looking at myself in the mirror thinking 15 pounds will magically appear on my ass in seconds. "You have no self control. You're fat and gross. You are a fat, disgusting ugly faggot." You begin to cry- you can't take looking at yourself in the mirror.

You run to the bathroom, throw yourself onto your knees in front of the toilet. You worship the toilet, like you worship the spot behind your house where you go when people are home. You put your fingers down your throat. This is familiar, this is easy because your gag reflex is sensitive. You begin to throw up. There's the peanut butter and jelly. There goes the vanilla icecream and chocolate candy bars. After awhile when there's nothing but water, blood, and bile you stop. It's over- it's gone. The puking is over but you're not completely done. You pop in twenty diet pills in your mouth and after an hour you're on the toilet shitting. You have diarrhea and that's ok.

Now you need a few days of starving and living off of appetite suppressants, cigarettes, sugarfree gum, and reduced calorie peanut butter, and 9 mile runs everyday to compensate for what you've done.

Then comes the dreaded weigh-in at the doctors. You step on, close your eyes. I can't be. I can't fucking be. 126- I've lost weight. How? I step off, step on, step off, step on. Cry.

This is anorexia nervosa. This is my story. This is hard to write because I want to go back. But I can't.

October 7th

This blog post is kind of scattered, like me. My thoughts are all over the place. This blog might not make sense.

In my opinion an eating disordered person has a lot of issues with growing up. This might be why we regress. It might, for some people, be the reason for starving; to go back. Then we become children again. We get attention and begin to rely on someone else.
When you grow up attention isn't always going to be on you, unless you do something crazy- which eating disordered people do for publicity. When we do something outrageous and it all goes wrong and we get the publicity we wanted, we crawl in a hole and hibernate. "Pity me. I hate myself. I fucked up. It's my fault. I fail." It's a way to hate yourself. We hate ourselves so much that we find reasons to hate ourselves even more. The pimple, saggy ass, big chin, thick hair, terrible jaw structure. We leave, delete numbers, deactivate Facebook all because we are ashamed of ourselves; ashamed of the publicity we originally wanted. So we try to get forgotten. After awhile, when the publicity dies down, we begin to associate with society again. We begin to act like perfectionists until we get sick of it, because we can't be perfect forever. Acting insane all because we want attention; all because we want to regress. It's all a contradiction. We are not perfect. Then we do something crazy and when everything seems crazy, everything gets crazy. We binge. We purge. We get high. Starving isn't dramatic enough. It doesn't give us publicity.

Eating disorders are about insecurities. We are so fucking ridiculously insecure that we rely on other people for reassurance. Am I good? Was I ok? Do I look ok? Doctors and eating disorder specialists don't encourage this. This type of reassurance that will feed the disordered thinking. Insecurities make us not think we're good enough to succeed, to be committed. We meet guys, we fuck, we leave because we aren't good enough to stay. We might get rejected. We don't think we can compete with the rest of the world. We want to stay but if we do we might get hurt.

We're selfish. It's all about us. We love drama because life is boring. We are often pessimists. We're insecure. We are perfectionist, attention-seeker, competitive, self loathing, anxiety driven, obsessive, and angry. We don't take out our anger out in the world, that's not fair, so we take it out on ourselves and when we've done so much damage to ourselves we take it out on our love interests. We fight, we cheat, we leave. That makes us hate ourselves more because we hate how we treat them; it's so hard to respect someone you're supposed to love, when you don't even respect yourself.

We don't think we're good enough, so we associate being good enough with being thin. We get thinner and thinner until we're nothing because we want so badly to be good enough. To be perfect; to understand ourselves.