I Am A Selfish Dichotomy

I am a selfish.  Even with all of the people helping me, (okay my family kind of epically fails at support) but even with all of my friends supporting me and people praying for me and wanting recovery for me my desires are not changing in my heart.  For some reason I'm not wanting to get better anymore and that terrifies me. I love the safety of restriction and the flood of calm that comes with purging.  I ache for the lightness I feel when I go days without putting or carrying anything inside of me.  Whenever something terrible happens I run screaming towards my disorder, I've turned it into my God and look to it to teach me how not to need.

I am a dichotomy.  I want recovery but fight like hell to stay sick.  I want advice but cling desperately to my own tainted perceptions.  I want love but without intimacy.  I want to be able to let go but I cling to my control like it's my salvation.  I want to be alive but I walk with my impending mortality at my side like a companion.

I do not underestimate that the desire to live is both powerful and potent.  I believe that the desire to live can outweigh the desire to die and that that desire can propel my recovery forward.  I guess that the question for me just becomes: how do I decide that I want to live?

"Bear in mind, people with eating disorders tend to be both competitive and intelligent. We are incredibly perfectionistic. We often excel in school,athletics,artistic pursuits. We also tend to quit without warning. Refuse to go to school,drop out,quit jobs,leave lovers,move,lose all our money. We get sick of being impressive. Rather,we tire of having to seem impressive. As a rule,most of us never really believed we were any good in the first place." 
— Marya Hornbacher

Next to Normal

Most little girls wanted to be a ballerina but I kind of wanted to be a vampire.  I never remembered feeling settled or calm, nor do I ever feel those things now.  I was always feeling chaotic things, overwhelming things, things to big and too complicated for a little girl to make sense of so I spelled them out on my arms and they spilled out of my mouth in waves of nausea and word vomit.

Secret: I still hold my breath whenever people touch me or hold me.

Rape

Rape is such a primal thing.  It's an act that strips you of all of your humanity, ignoring your protests, disregarding your wants, your needs, thus reducing you to nothing more than a body.  It's a crime against sleep and memory that echos into all aspects of your life, voicing itself in quiet moments.  I often wonder if I'll ever be the same.  I wonder if there will ever be a kiss that doesn't remind me of his, a touch that doesn't cause my skin to shudder with remembrance.

I really thought that everything I thought about that night-the shame, the terror-would fade in time.  But that hasn't happened.  Unfortunately these memories have just grown stronger as the light I'm shinning in this dark place is revealing details that for so long were buried.

This remembering brings up a barrier between myself and the people I meet.  I suppose it's the distance of marred memory, of a twisted and shape-shifting past.  When people talk about their childhood, I laugh along and try not to think: that was when I was purging in the elementary school bathroom, when I was feeling like I was suffocating under the weight from the men on top of me, when I was crying in my bathroom at night terrified to step into my bath lest their be another one of them there, waiting for me.  That was when I lost sight of my soul and died.

I became aware that my body was a separate entity from me.  My corporeality became very clear to me, the physical imposition that I had upon space was always a point of contention for me.  It seemed that the body was the problem-my body.  A body that had its incessant wants and needs and feelings and aches.  A body that was too small to fight attached a mind that couldn't make sense of what was happening.  So it seemed only natural for the two to be split, it seemed they could be better dealt with separately.

I'll burn in hell for saying this but there are days, so many days that I wish I could go back and just want it.  So many times I've thought that it would be so much easier to just go back and lay there, not fight, and accept it as sex.  The word rape is loaded.  Sex is easier.  It's easier to accept that I am a whore than it is to accept that I am a victim.

Remy


"And, what's more, this 'precious' body, the very same that is hooted and honked at, demeaned both in daily life as well as in ever existing form of media, harrassed, molested, raped, and, if all that wasn't enough, is forever poked and prodded and weighed and constantly wrong for eating too much, eating too little, a million details which all point to the solitary girl, to EVERY solitary girl, and say: Destroy yourself." 
— Emilie Autumn (The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls)

Ambivalence

"We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need." -Marya Hornbacher

I want to get well but I want to stay sick.  When I started trying to recover I never would've expected the ambivalence.  I thought my desire to stay sick would thin and diminish over time but it seems that it's only fighting harder to survive.  Every bite of food I put into my mouth is a battle to get it there and an even bigger battle to make it stay there.

I suppose this is what they call the letting go.  The weird aftermath when it's not quite over but you know that you've given into recovery.  So I sit and bicker with the bitch in my head and try not to grimace as I sweartogodinheaven that my thighs are expanding before my eyes.

I know I could vomit.  I know I don't have to eat it.  There bathroom is precisely 15 steps from where I stand and the trash bin 5.  But I won't.  I don't.  Sometimes but not always.  I hang on to the sometimes because they get me through the terribly horrible.

Remy

Chasing the Wind

I feel like my eating disorder makes me endless promises that it has no intention of keeping.  It dangles sparkling, shinning things in front of me and laughs as I chase it further and further down into the rabbit hole.  It whispers in my ear like a lover in the dark, telling me of all the wonderful things that we'll do together.  Perhaps the reason I'm so pissed off is because I'm just starting to realize that my ED has been mocking me all along- making promises of treasures that lie just ahead and laughing as it watches me die in the search.

This anger is new to me.  I'm mostly apathetic as my emotions are most closely related to that of a sociopaths but recently I've been feeling this overpowering, all consuming anger.  It's like something turned the embers inside my belly into scorching flames ready to burn away at any and all things it comes into contact with.  I can deal with sadness (restrict), I can deal with feeling overwhelmed (purge) and I can deal with happy when it seldom comes around, but unfortunately for me my anger manifests itself in angry, raging cuts blanketing my arms-a visual validation of sorts.

 I've recently begun writing on myself to try and quench my thirst to carve at my skin.  There must be something in my flesh, something innately ingrained into me, that I have unadulterated hatred for.  I think it must be the memories.  They are always there, like my ED, to remind me that my body is not mine, it's theres, and it nothing more than a series of entering and exiting.  They say our skin is our most basic barrier, that its purpose is to keep the good in and the bad out.  My skin is defective.

Remy

I have to get better. I refuse to let me life be about what goes in and out of my body.  But I know it's so much easier said then done.  But still let this be a testament to the fact that there is fight left in me.  My therapist told me to listen to the still small voice and that voice tells the other bitch in my who tells me I'm fat/whore/stupid/worthless/pathetic to shut the fuck up.  I'm alive.  I'm so lucky to be alive.  I just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other and trudge through; all the while reminding my self to breathe, scream and take it one bite at a time. 

My esophagus is torn.  My stomach stretches and spits up bile.  My potassium drops and drops.  My head spins, I'm weak, blood pours from a mouth riddled with ulcers as I've become a bucket of filling and emptying; woman who breaks into little girl sized pieces when any man touches her.  I am not going to have a happy ending am I?

This is the problem with sickness.  It brings us too close to death.  It's like being a teenager and meeting your first lover, feeling the thrill of touch turn to sheer terror when you realize that you have no idea what the fuck you're doing.  But the problem is once you've been there, once you've tested your limits-pushed them farther than you thought possible- you have a taste for it.  You have a new found need for the lack of need itself.  And it's intoxicating.  It's your drug, your lover, your anesthetic- but the problem is by the time you realize it's killing you you're already mainlining it.
Remy

Purging

The problem is that I have grown into my disorder and it has grown into me.  The edges that once separated us have blurred we've become this enmeshed thing, hell bent on its own destruction.  I've spent the better part of the past 12 years scarfing, barfing, starving, cutting and living in varying states of terror and rage only to find myself at 20 years old starring at a vastly abbreviated lifespan. But I do have this: I am thin.

Whoop de fucking do.

Remy

Disordered

"And so I went through the looking glass, stepped into the netherworld, where up is down and food is greed, where convex mirrors cover the walls, where death is honor and flesh is weak. It is ever so easy to go. Harder to find your way back."-Marya Hornbacher 

I do not doubt that desire is powerful.  People tell me all the time that I have to just want recovery bad enough and it will happen.  They tell me I can choose to eat, choose to not purge.  They tell me I can control the thoughts in my head that call me weak/fat/whore and choose to ignore them.  They tell me that if I want to live badly enough, that if I desire it enough, that I will choose to live.  And I believe them.  However, the question becomes: how do I decide that I want to live? 


Remy

Maddness

"Passion and death are implicit, one in the other. Past the border of a fiery life lies the netherworld. I can trace this road, which took me through places so hot the very air burned the lungs. I did not turn back. I pressed on, and eventually passed over the border, beyond which lies a place that is wordless and cold, so cold that it, like mercury, burns a freezing blue flame." 
— Marya Hornbacher


I want to kill the me underneath my skin.  The me that whines with her incessant needs.  The girl who lurks beneath the surface, aching for touch, for warmth. This fact haunts my days and nights. Because when you realize you hate yourself so much, when you realize that you cannot stand who you are, and this deep spite has been the motivation behind your behavior for many years, your brain can’t quite deal with it. So my brain, as will yours, will try very hard to avoid that realization; it will try, in a last-ditch effort to keep your remaining parts alive, to remake the rest of you. This is, I believe, different from the suicidal wish of those who are in so much pain that death feels like relief, different from the suicide I've often thought of attempting, trying to escape that pain. This is a wish to murder yourself; the connotation of kill is too mild. This is a belief that you deserve slow torture, violent death.  And an eating disorder is a perfect way for me to do that.  

But here's the kicker: I want to recover.  While I'm not sure I want to live, I'm fairly certain I don't want to die and the only way to avoid this fate is to recover.  But now for the paradox.  How do I manage to gain control over a disease that began as a bid for control?  How do I take back power from the thing that was supposed to give me power?  How do I manage to begin to ween off this anesthetic that's been my drug of choice for so long that I don't remember ever being sober?  


And thus onto my endless quest for answers.  Until tomorrow, 


Remy

Pathos

I was reading today and learned that in ancient Greece the word ethos was used to mean one's drive for life while pathos represented one's self destructive nature.  And while everyone is believed to have both in them, the goal of life is presumably to feed your ethos, and let your pathos be overtaken by it.  I'm not sure why I went and did the opposite.  Hell, I'm not sure why any of us did.

I feel like I've forgotten what it means to live.  I don't remember ever feeling alright, all I remember is feeling like shit and I don't remember what it was like before.  People take the feeling of satiation for granted.  They take for granted the fact that they can wholly fulfill their need to consume without the assistance of a feeding tube.  They take for granted the feeling of steadiness, of a head that does not spin every time you stand up to quickly.  They take for granted their throats which aren't torn and raw with bile and their stomachs that don't ache and protrude with hollowed emptiness.  They take for granted that they are able to just be, without it being a question.

I ache for the girl who came before this.

Remy