it’s almost like losing myself
well hi. starting a post after a long time feels a lot like introducing yourself to a stranger who’s looking in the other direction…awkward to start! I’m not writing this for a purpose though, so that part should be easy. just at a moment where things swirling around in my head need to find their way onto virtual ‘paper’ somehow.
it’s officially summer now. uni’s over, lease on the house is through (I was so sad to see the last of that house…silly, but I could have cried! it was home in so many ways), exam results are out. I averaged a high 2:1. it’s testament to how much I’ve changed since I was 18 that I was actually really happy with that, not disappointed. I’d like to grab a few more marks in my degree as a whole but this year doesn’t count so that’s cool 
new modules for next year – all what I wanted, and I reckon the highlight is one that wasn’t even actually my first choice, Literature and Terrorism. but having looked at the reading list and read one background text…amazing.
I’ve been staying at a friend’s place for the last two weeks or so…so really have just been shopping, going out for coffee, watching TV and so on. more adventurous exploits (Dublin, staying at my parent’s place in Dorset, Manchester to name a few) will begin next week
both the upside and the downside of this summer so far has been the ‘new start’ aspect of it all. I’m moving into new accommodation in October with a bunch of people I won’t know, cause me and my tutor agreed that it’s awkward for me to stay where I was seeing as I’m out of sync with people I made friends with in the first year since I repeated it, and some of my friends have graduated now. obviously this is somewhat unnerving!
anyway more than that, my whole life is a bit of a leap into the unknown right now. when I last posted I felt like I was leaving my life with anorexia behind, and I could finally say it didn’t have a hold on me at all. but hey, more fun for me! what I didn’t realise was that that left me…behaviourally/mentally healthy, yes…but still ‘out of sync’ with where I would have been if I’d never had an eating disorder. I didn’t have an intense struggle when I reached a healthy bmi, which seemed odd. but the past month every problem that’s not to do with my ED seems to want to come and hit me round the head…just for a nice twist in the tale. to be a little overdramatic, it feels like I recovered and now there’s a huge hole inside me. a black hole of…well…nothing. I was underweight and disordered since early in my adolescence and now I feel thrown into something I don’t understand. the infuriating part is that I seem to have blacked out with permanent marker the part of my head that wants to blame this on my weight or food intake. there are no easy solutions now. (or rather, solutions I find myself practised at implementing!) mostly, as I said to my friend the other day, I feel like an addict who’s over withdrawal but adrift in the ‘real world’. I have no clue how to live while ‘healthy’…but rather than that uncertainty making me miss using behaviours or being really underweight, it just makes me feel this empty space left over all the more keenly. I rant and rave about how unfair it all is cause I had to rip my world apart at the seams to get over this illness, but I don’t want it back. I don’t know what I want. this part requires patience. and to me, that’s a four letter word.
in any case, I am ok. well, I think I will be ok, but I underestimated the ‘grieving’ process so to speak. it felt like metaphorically tearing all the ED’d bullshit out of my mind would be a cathartic end point to it all…and the fact that it just seemed to leave a gaping wound doesn’t go over too well at times.
just to get Fate’s middle finger well and truly stuck up in my face, I’ve been utterly miserable due to stomach problems lately. well, I was until last week, but I got a prescription for a dopamine antagonist which is helping a lot. plus a gastro referral in a couple of months. I’d lost some weight before that though, and although I reckon I’m eating more with the medication, my appetite’s still a bit rubbish. I’m not sure if some of that is aversion to the possibility of pain though? could be. tis incredibly frustrating. often I have nagging thoughts that I should be eating more but early fullness and nausea are such a pain to deal with. and I know the answer may be ‘put up with it’…but to be honest it makes me want to scream WELL JUST FUCKING TRY IT YOURSELF :@:@ (lol sorry not directed at anyone reading more just the whole thing makes me pissed with myself) esp given that I’m already not eating vegetables, haven’t been for ages, and the past few weeks I’ve had no fruit and very little wholegrain too, cause I know I need more dense foods and less fibre. I also have juice or sugary drinks a lot and very few low calorie foods. feels like I am making some sacrifices and not just rolling over and giving in no? but even with that I seem to get full/sick or in pain before I’ve gotten to the amount I need to eat, which is still probably like over 2500 sedentary. if anyone knows of a way to reduce metabolism please let me know! (I’m only half kidding…I want to cry at the thought of spending the next two months sitting propped up without moving for fear I’ll puke, but also the thought of losing loads of weight…erm bad.) anyways sorry for venting my medical dilemmas here. it is a lot better since I’m taking the medication, and if I keep losing weight even with it, I’ll just have to go back to the GP and beg for ideas.
in the meantime…some of this wouldn’t go amiss…
oh also, on a fun note…I’ve been learning to walk in 4.5 inch heels! I’m such a trainers/flip flops girl so this is rather impressive for me and I love it! makes me ridiculously far too tall though, my dad wasn’t happy when I towered over him at dinner the other day! but hey, why not! if I break an ankle I’ll go back on that but I’ve been lucky so far…
Sarah said,
July 20, 2010 at 6:55 am
Congrats on your amazing exam results – to do all that recovery work AND get good results academically is a fantastic achievement. Ooh and Literature and Terrorism sounds fascinating.
So sorry to hear that you’ve got stomach issues right now, that’s really unfortunate, especially after all your hard work to get to where you are with recovery. Also, I can empathise with it being hard to figure out how to live life as a healthy person, it brings up some mixed feelings, and whilst everyone thinks it’s a case of celebrating getting the ED out of your life, I think there is some sense of mourning a loss of something that has been a part of your life for such a long time.
Filling that gaping hole is by no means easy – I think I’ve tried to cram it full of art, when I probably need other things in there to balance it out. You’re intelligent, witty and quirky, a lovely person who I’m sure in time will find a sense of meaning and fulfilment in a new healthy life. I just really hope you have some luck with the gastro referral – I’ve got everything crossed for you!
I also meant to send you a huge thanks for telling your friend about my art – it’s really hard starting out on this new ‘career’ path, and your support means an awful lot.
Hugs
Sarah x
louisa said,
July 20, 2010 at 10:46 pm
wow, well done. It’s astonishing to me (who is still trying to get her degree six years after matriculation!) that you’ve managed all this and stayed in uni let alone done so well academically.
I think that gaping hole is not spoken of enough. Maybe it was there pre-ED and you didn’t necessarily know it (or maybe you did?). In some ways my ED was a hole-filler (doesn’t that sound so wrong? I’m leaving it there for amusement’s sake) and in other ways it was to make a space for myself internally. It shrunk my world to manageable proportions and also made the inside of me bigger, spacier, and the outside less relevant. You have to find your place in the world probably for the first time ever. Part of you will still be at an early-adolescent age. That’s not saying you’re immature or anything, but that part of you would have been left behind then, sacrificed for the ED. She’s still there and it’ll take a while for you to find yourself, orient yourself to all the pieces of yourself again, or maybe for the first time.
A huge part of your life has gone. Your whole way of seeing and understanding the world around you/relating to you and vice versa has been deconstructed. You’ve pulled apart that way of existing so that it no longer makes sense, but that doesn’t make the way you live now have sense or meaning necessarily. I hear that it feels right to not go back to the ED, etc., but that doesn’t mean it feels right to be where you are. You’re in limbo, still walking away from something and still walking towards and touching this something new, but you’re still a bit inbetween…even if you’re not going back.
This probably makes little sense but I wanted to say that what does make sense is this post you’ve written and I’m glad you came back and put fingers to keys.
Keep talking to people as it sounds like you’re doing a bit already.
Louisa
Katie said,
July 22, 2010 at 3:46 pm
I wondered when you wrote that last post if you would come back and post something like this. When I became officially ‘healthy’ I remember feeling completely on top of the world and like I’d left it all behind me – and then I came back down to earth pretty swiftly a few weeks later. It is hard learning where you fit in and what you want when you’ve lost years to mental health problems and all your previous coping mechanisms are now defunct. I think talking to people helps – whether a professional person, or friends, and I still feel that blogging is a good outlet for me. But really it’s just something you have to go through to get through, if you know what I mean. Anyone recovering from a long illness, whether physical or psychiatric, would have a hard time readjusting. It takes time to find other places you fit in and other ways of seeing yourself. I am pretty sure I’m only half way through this myself – I noticed that my quiet background hum of ED thoughts intensified on my first night in Newcastle. I have no intention of acting on them, but being alone means one thing to me – self destructing. It is going to take a while to convince my brain that it can mean other things too, and in the meantime I just have to keep ignoring those thoughts and paying attention to the rest of my life. I still think full recovery is possible, but I think it takes a lot longer than weight restoration does!
I’m sorry you’re having stomach problems again
I really hope it all gets sorted out as soon as possible. I am with you in wanting to punch people who tell you to just learn to live with it! I’m a lot closer than I was if you want to chat or come and hang out with me 
xxx
Fiona said,
July 22, 2010 at 9:10 pm
well, it’s the fact that it’s ‘behind’ me that is the problem if ya know what I mean…
who would have thought absence of ED thoughts would make such a big hole. currently I am filling it with alcohol so apologies for incoherence lolz.
I feel like that Marya Hornbacher quote about the cereal and the silence. what a cliche. I am too drunk too google it.
for me I don’t think full recovery is going to happen if that means being without this hole. like nothing ever happened. cause it did happen and it will always be there. maybe normal people have it too but they don’t notice it cause they never tried filling it with food and hunger, huh? oh well that’s a shit definition anyway, I am happy with the hole. it’s a condition of life. if I didn’t get pissed off with it I wouldn’t be alive. or something. time for more wine…
xxx
Katie said,
July 22, 2010 at 10:12 pm
Lol! I am giggling a bit at the inebriation but not at the sentiment
I think lots of people have holes, but not everyone, and not everyone with one will have it forever. Some people really are happy, you know? God knows how they got away with that astounding piece of good fortune, but hey! I don’t equate full recovery with denial that anything was ever wrong. It’s like with trauma – you can never be untraumatised, but you can make peace with it, and after years have gone by you don’t think about it every day, or even every week, and even when you do it doesn’t hold as much power as it once did. I have been in possession of rather large holes at various points in my life, and I don’t seem to have much of one at the moment. Not like it was when I was very depressed years ago, or even back in September when everyone started going back to university and I began to grieve over everything my illnesses had taken from me. You can think of it as a grieving process if it helps. When someone dies you can never fill that hole either because you can’t bring them back, but that doesn’t mean that you will spend the rest of your life in abject depression, unable to move on or think of anything else. I know you’re an impatient person and I hate to sound patronising, but you’re not exactly a senior citizen and you’ve only been in recovery for a few months (and I apply that sentiment to myself as well, although I certainly feel bloody ancient sometimes
), so you can’t know that you’ll never be holeless. I don’t know that holes are a condition of life because I haven’t lived my entire life yet. Uh, I hope not anyway. You wait, I’ll go and get run over by a bus tomorrow now!
K, so you’re drunk and I’m sleep deprived, anyone else reading this exchange will be rightfully confuzzed
Have fun in Dublin! I am really looking forward to seeing you next week xxx
Fiona said,
July 22, 2010 at 10:35 pm
oookk let’s not talk about this. clearly I am not good at getting my point across. and ‘I hate to be patronising’ is one of those phrases like ‘I hate to be racist’…what’s the point of saying it?
)
(btw let’s not make this a thing. I may not have been like this when I was a skinny troll but lately when I am annoyed I get annoyed out loud. I’m not angry with YOU or anything that was just annoying
Katie said,
July 23, 2010 at 6:41 am
I was just pointing out that you’re only in your early 20s and that you haven’t been in recovery for very long, and that the same goes for me, so neither of us can know how we’ll feel in a few years or even decades time. That’s more factual than patronising, it’s not like I’m 60 and telling you that you don’t understand a thing because you’re a young’un. I was trying to be tactful or something by saying that I didn’t want to be patronising, but to be honest I’m failing to see the offence here. Fair enough if I didn’t understand what you meant, feel free to delete the last few comments.
Fiona said,
July 23, 2010 at 7:19 am
never fear – no call for censorship on my blog
and now I need to catch a plane to Dublin!
~Jessica Zara~ said,
July 23, 2010 at 7:55 am
How did I miss this post!? So sorry ~ my head’s all over the place (well, when isn’t it?)
Anyway, I think that the void you speak of is your equivalent of my running: when I’m injured, I feel that I have no identity or purpose and the problems I face can’t be resolved by pounding the pavement and escaping into the open air, so I’m forced to confront them head-on. It’s not quite the same, obviously, and I can imagine that for you it must be so much harder…almost like learning to live again. It’s probably a transitional period and I am sure that you have the strength to make it through: there’s so much more to you than anorexia and being underweight, as I am sure you know.
I am amazed by your mark ~ with all the other things you had to deal with in terms of recovery and everything else, to come out with a grade that most people with no mental health problems have to work very hard to get is so admirable. But if your heart’s set on a first, as you say this year doesn’t count anyway (which always seems bizarre to me
)
Argh, I can relate on the stomach woes. I sympathise so much and hopefully you’ll get something conclusive in terms of a diagnosis so the problem will be resolved soon.
Great to hear from you again
*hugs*
~Jess~
xxxxxxxxxx
P.S Literature and Terrorism sounds fascinating: almost makes me want to study English BA all over again….almost
Em said,
July 27, 2010 at 5:55 am
Fi-
I don’t think I’ve ever said hello before as I finally begun my blog after your last (well, second to last now) post. Anyhow, I just wanted to drop in and say hi and tell you how much reading your story (I’ve been following for quite some time) has meant to me. You’re strong and brave and inspiring. I’m sorry to hear you aren’t feeling so well right now, but I’m glad that you aren’t letting the eating disorder suck you back down the rabbit hole. Keep going Fi. You’re most definitely worth it.
-Em