Despair

Lately I find myself getting upset over the littlest things. It doesn't take much to send me off into a fit of crying. Some days I wish I could just sleep all day. I feel like I am turning into someone I despise, someone I loathe... someone I hate.

I fear that I am pushing everyone away from me. Even the man I love. Yet somehow I can't stop it. For most of my life, I've felt like I've been at war with myself. It was only recently that I at last seemed to have found some peace. But now I see my peace lying shattered. For the first time in months I thought about ending it all. It wasn't even intentional. The thoughts came unbidden. I know I would never go through with it, as I couldn't do that to myself, and I have so much to live for.

The only explanation that comes to mind is the environment. It can't be healthy being back in a place that holds so many painful memories. My mother promised I would be safe, but she has said that so many times before. Being back here is doing much for my mentality either. The negative feelings that persisted last summer are back in full force. I fear that the behavior I've been practicing has been messing with my meds. Yet I feel powerless to stop it.

Each day I tell myself "Not today. Not today". Yet each day I give in. I thought I might actually make it today. the day started off fairly well. I got up, I watched one of my favorite episodes of Criminal Minds. I checked my e-mail. I applied for some jobs. I played some AO. But then things started to go bad around 4:00.

I found out that my love was going to be away all day. It wasn't the fact that he was going to be away so much as the fact that he didn't tell me. I had to hear it through someone else. This especially hurt since last night when I was going to bed he told me he loved me and he would talk to me in the morning. I know I overreacted, and this knowledge just makes it worse. But I miss him, and I need to lean on him, and on his inner strength he may not even realize he has, in order to make it through the day.

Anyways if I keep talking about this I am going to start crying again. I may have to talk to the 'rents, since I may have to see a doctor about this. I don't like feeling this way... so down and drained of energy. I would rather be happy and fulfilled.

First post of 2010

Yes I know it's like a week late for a first post. But here it is anyways, a little belated.

I suddenly realized that the suicidal ideations I talked about experiencing a while back have dissapeared completely. And I'm glad of it. That's alleviated some of my anxiety as I am not longer constantly worried I will do something disaterous not becuase I want to, but because I feel compelled to.

Oddly enough, the dissapearance of these thoughts coincides pretty closely to the return of a certain person into the regular flow of my life. It may be silly, but I really do think he may have chased away the demons, as I care about him deeply, and I know he cares for me. I just won't tell him that because he may think me crazy. Plus I don't want him to worry over the fact that I was having those thougths, since they weren't intentional or anything.

He told me something a while ago that stuck with me. About how he could never commit suicide knowing the people he would hurt. This has stuck with me, and helped me fight off the urges whenever they came.

Test Jitters

So this morning I had to take a test. But not a normal kind of test. It was a test that would measure 28 different things, including attention, processing speed, and impulse control. What made me nervous was not just the test itself, but was the fact that it was being used to test how well the new meds are working. I feel like the meds are working, but then I thought that too, sort of, about the old meds and guess what? They did nothing.

It's not just that. I worry that they might actually be working but I might screw up on the test. What if I'm just not fast enough? What if the test is just too hard? All these things get me down. I feel like it's my fault the other medication wasn't working, and that I wasn't working up to my full potential. I think I would have felt disheartened if I found out the new meds weren't working either.

The good news is the new meds are working as well as can be expected, which is pretty darn good. The bad news is... well there is no bad news, at least not on this front. But now I feel silly for putting myself through a pointless bought of midnight worry, all for nothing.

Anxiety Like Crazy

I am really worried about my weight these days. Especially since I have access to a scale for the first time in a couple of months and lets just say the results are less than stellar. When I came home and weighed myself I just wanted to die. And I mean that in the literal sense. I've gained some weight and I'm not happy about it.

Over this Christmas break I've been careful about what I eat, but I feel like my behavior is out of control. For one thing I weigh myself daily, or several times a day. I know that's not good since weight can fluctuate daily, but I can't help myself. I am alternatively starving myself, or engaging in purging behaviour when I do eat.

I think my mother suspects something. I sometimes turn on the water when I'm doing it and my parents noticed the water running. My mom asked me what I was doing up there. I lied and told her I was washing my hands. I can tell she didn't believe becuase she said it doesn't take that long to wash your hands. I lied to her again and says it does if the smell won't come off. She didn't say anything to that but I don't think she believed me.

And I weighed myself not to long ago and the results made me want to cry. I know I should stop doing this to myself, but I can't help it no matter how hard I try. It's part of the disease. A part of me knows that. But I just don't know what to do anymore. What I really need is my good friend, the only one who knows about it...

wait that's not true. Another friend knows about it. I told her about it to try and make her feel better about herself. I don't think it worked because I'm just not that great at explaining these things to other people. Maybe I am in the wrong field.

Whatever, I am just trying to get by day by day. Any day when I don't wish I were dead is a good day in my books. Sometimes those days seem few and far between.

It doesn't help that I am trying so hard not to worry my mother. She told me before how she hasn't had a proper nights sleep in years because she's too busy worrying about us. I feel bad for making her worry. But in my effort to stop her worries I think I might be harming myself. I'm not getting the support I need, so I end up feeling like I'm drowning with no one to turn to. With things going the way they are, the future looks bleak indeed.

You Made Me Bleed My Own Blood

There was blood on my hands again today. I tried to look where it came from but I couldn't see any blood at the back of my throat. That doesn't mean much. Either the blood is from further down, or quite possibly the blood could be from my air passage. I may have accidentally scratched it with a nail when I was too forceful. My head hurts, my stomach hurts, my throat hurts. And still I feel like I can't stop. A little blood is never enough to make me stop, unless I feel like the anxiety has gone away enough that I can last. The time I really scratched up the back of my throat, I kept going even after I saw blood. It wasn't until the actual pain from the scratch hit me that I stopped. And even then I did try to continue but it just hurt to much. I am weak. That's the reason I can't stop, the reason I go on and on. There's a patch of skin on my hand that is ugly and will probably scar. It's from rubbing against on of my teeth... most likely my messed up eye tooth. It's gotten calassed so it doens't even hurt any more. That very fact makes me sad, for it shows me just how bad it's gotten. And yet still I continue.

I am weak


The title of this post is in reference to a line from a movie or show I don't really remember. And in reflection it's not really appropriate for the content but since I couldn't think of anything better I stuck with it.

Home Trouble

I always have the hardest time at home... the hardest time getting along with my family. I get... aggressive at times. I've come to realize that I never really gotten over their failure to protect me. They knew what my older brother was doing to me.... they knew becuase I told them. Sure they gave me the usual advice on how to protect myself... and they always talked about doing things like making it so we were never home alone together, or putting a lock on the door, but they never got around to doing it. I once told them about a dream that I woke up and he was in my room with a flashlight, and I was scared and he shushed me... what I never told them was that it wasn't a dream. I don't know what he was planning in my room that night, he never did anything, but somehow I don't want to know.

One of the worst memories I had came back to me recently... I had almost forgotten about the incident, even though I never forgot about the aftermath. It was one of the worst experiences of my life. I was down in my brother's room, even though I don't remember why I was down there in the first place. Nor do I remember who was home at the time. What I do remember was his hand covering my mouth so no one could hear me scream...

The pain, the fear.... I've spent my life wishing I could just forget. I've even tried to forget, drowning everything in a bottle of Vodka. A lot of good that did me, since I ended up turning to him when I got sick. And not before he had the chance to hurt me again. I'm somewhat glad that the effects of alcoholic blackouts blocks out almost everything except bits and pieces... what I can't block out was what he told me the next day. I think his words may haunt me forever.

In the Depths of Depression

Back in January of '09, I went through a bout of depression. I was stressed out from my co-op job, and my less than stellar performance in my classes the previous semester. Add on top of that the fact that I was thoroughly convinced I would never be able to take care of myself properly (since sometimes I forget to take care of my basic necessities) and it was a recipe for disaster. During that time period I came so close to ending it all. I thought about suicide constantly. I broke down crying at work. It was such a horrible experience. Every day I went to bed panicking because I hadn't done it earlier in the day and it was too late by that time (since I figured the easiest way to do it would be through poisoning but the chemicals I needed were kept in the basement and my brother was always down there at night). I felt extreme anxiety and I felt like it came from the fact that I had no immediate way to kill myself. what I felt was overwhelming.

I can honestly say that one of the few things that kept me going through it was friends. One friend in particular. One of the worst things I could do would be to cause her more pain than I know she has already suffered. I couldn't do that to her and so I kept on living. So in the most unintentional way, just by being there and being a good friend, she saved my life. How do you tell someone they literally saved your life without even knowing it? I feel like I should be thanking her every single day, and yet I don't think she would understand. Ah well, such is the depth of human emotion.

What Scissors Can Do

The other day I was just sitting here and a sudden urge hit me. I started of small, with the same knife I used before. I started off in a rather unusual way, my upper forearm near the shoulder being my chosen target. "It's easier to hide" was the thought that ran through my mind. Of course the knife did no better a job of cutting than it did the first time. All it did was scrape up the skin, though my lack of co-ordination may have had something to do with it. Next I tried using a metal nail file, becuase of something I had seen on tv ages ago. But I didn't have the heart to stab the soft tissue, and I suspected it wouldn't work anyways because in the tv show the nail file had been stabbed through someone's eye, which seems much easier to stab then the arm, for obvious reasons.

Thus I quickly switched to a pair of scissors. Not regular scissors, no but a pair of manicure scissors from my personal care kit. I used the tip of the scissors to scrape away the skin, one layer at a time. As layer after layer fell away, the pain increased. I felt a sense of deep satisfaction at that. For once this was something I could control completely. I didn't manage to draw blood, becuase after a time the pain became too intense that I wimped out and couldn't continue. But I did leave a mark, one that causes me pain when it rubs against my sleeve, a reminder in myself. And in that pain I find my solace.

On another note, I binged agian today. What follows was one of the harder times I've been through.... somehow I can't even bring myself to say the word. But at one point I almost stopped from the pain in my throat. I think I managed to make my throat bleed again, for there was blood on my fingers. This means a couple of days without food. But in starving myslef I will find comfort. As the song says, find comfort in pain.

My own eternal battle

So there's something that has been bothering me a lot lately. And I think maybe I am going to regret writing this post later on, and maybe delete it or edit it but as Garcia says "Once something's out there on the internet sir, you can never take it back".

It all started somewhere back during the summer between 10th and 11th grade. I had been chronically teased about my weight, and I was under so much stress. I became obsessed with my body image. I weighed myself constantly. I started off not eating if I could avoid it, and gradually fell into a very bad pattern that summer and began purging after every meal. I lost a lot of weight that summer, losing somewhere around 20 % of my body weight. But my parent's began to notice something was wrong. I managed to pass it off as being do to nausea. They told my doctor about it. It stopped for a while... sort of.

I did it on and off for the rest of high school. But gradually it changed. Instead of just purging after meals, I was eating large amounts of food, and then purging out of guilt. By now it was the summer between high school and first year of universtiy. By first year of university everything changed. I was living in a residence, with a common shared bathroom, and I just didn't feel comfortable there. The binging still continued, followed by periods of restrained eating, but it was never enough. Over the next two years, I slowly regained all the weight, even though I would falls back into my bad pattern whenever I went home.

This past summer, everything got worse. My weight started to become a big issue. I was working away from home for summer. I was living in a dormitory with shared communal bathrooms but there were so few of us there that I could usually get the bathroom alone. I stopped eating properly. I would purge after every meal except for those increasingly rare occasions when I would eat at work. By the time I got home there would be no point. And even then I didn't really eat 'meals' except for when I had dinner with friends. I would instead binge on junk food and then immediately purge.

This continued for the entire summer. I thought it would end when I went back to university. That I would stop being able to purge and so I would maybe start eating healthy again. But it hasn't. I found myself binging and purging, only occasionally eating a healthy meal on campus. I'm spending way too much moenney on junk food, but I can't stop it. I've tried, but the anxiety becomes to much, and I have to carry though just to make it go away. Even that sometimes doesn't work.

And the anxiety has only gotten worse. First of all... at the end of the summer I had a consultation with a psychologist for a specific reason. The consultation included filling out a one of these inventories, I don't remember which one. There was a question on eating habits there, and I lied on one part just becuase I knew my parents would be filling it out too. It didn't matter though becuase the psychologist still mentioned bulimia nervosa in front of my parents. From my reaction he could see I wasn't comfrotable and so he didn't really address it then.

But here I am, studying psychology myself. And one of the courses I took this semester was psychopathology. And one of the chapters was on... you guessed it, eating disorders. The lecture on eating disorders was given by a guest lecturer. I felt so uncomfortable during the lecture and almost ended up in tears. Between that and the text book and the good old DSM-IV TR I could no longer deny what I had been trying to ignore for the psat 4 years. That if I went to a clinician who had the proper additional 2 years of supervised training and qualifications necessary to preform such diagnoses, that I would probably be diagnosed with an eating disorder.

Yet even that agknowlegement does not help me at all. I can't bring myself to seek treatment, to bring it up withn my parents, or anything. I know the stats... the word chronic if untreated rings through my mind. I am tired of it all yet I just can't seem to stop. My life has suffered, I feel so down sometimes, yet I don't know what to do. earlier this semester I managed to make my throat bleed yet again, but this time it was worse than ever because I scratched the bag of my throat with my finger nail. And then had trouble breathing from the blood I accidently inhaled.

One of the reason I can't talk to my parents is becuase I know I still won't get the help I will need. They will just ignore the porblem like they have for the past 4 years and tell me to stop doing it, the same way they have ignored the problem every other time I have asked for their help. I can't trust them to do the right thing anymore, yet I can't do this alone.

it's taking time from my studies. It's costing me money I can't afford to lose. I have no one to turn to and I feel so lost and confused. This is my silent plea, my final cry for help.

Losing interest

I realized now that I am slowly starting to lose interest in all the things that kept me sane while at university. For example I don't visit certain sites as much as I used to, don't talk to certain people as much as I used to. The whole world is starting to bore me to the point where I just want to curl back into my shell and forget about everything.