Guess who's back, back again?!

I have been meaning to blog more for a long time. Writing is definitely cathartic, but I suppose I have become lazy. Last year, when I was in hospital, I wrote a lot.......mainly as a way to pass the hours. In January 2009 I was admitted for just a fortnight, before discharging myself and later being re-admitted in May, and I recently found a letter I wrote to my doctor during the time between the two admissions in which I acknowledged that leaving hospital had been a mistake. After that I'm not sure what else I wrote, because I wouldn't let myself read the letter properly. Partly because it still hurts too much too remember that time, and partly because at the moment I have really strong urges to go back to the anorexia, so I don't want to remember how bad things were as that might stop me.

To anybody on the outside, the above statement must sound insane. Why would a person willingly choose to go back to something which caused them pain and made them unhappy? All I know is that right now I do not like myself very much. My body and weight disgust me to the point where I can't look in the mirror and I have found myself looking back a photos of myself at my lowest weight and wanting to cry because I am so much bigger now. Getting back to that weight is a very appealing thought, although I am so far from where I was that it doesn't seem achievable, which depresses the hell out of me.

It has never left me. Even when, on the outside, I have appeared to be doing well, it is there in the back of my mind. Some days I listen to it, and then some days it is easier to ignore. But I can feel it slowly creeping its way back into my life and I am too tired to fight it.

In my mind, I fear I will never be free from the grip of anorexia, and that even if I return to a healthy weight, the thoughts will still plague me. I have just come back from two family holidays in Spain and New York, which were fantastic. But I don't think anyone really knows what a struggle every day is for me. For example, in order to do things like having a cocktail, an ice cream or eating steak, things that the average person wouldn't think twice about, I force myself to either restrict the rest of my intake, or to walk for miles, in order to compensate for any extra calories. Calories that my body needs simply just to maintain my weight, but which I don't believe I deserve. It is an utterly selfish illness in so many ways, and when I look at everything that is happening in the world right now, I do feel terribly guilty that my internal world is so small and trivial.

Maybe this is happening because there have been a lot of changes in my life recently and I am nervous about the future, so the eating is becoming my safety net again. Maybe I will snap out of this blip as quickly as I slumped into it. Or maybe I really am just going to be nothing more than another anorexia statistic. I just don't know right now.....

And I know that it's a wonderful world, but I can't feel it right now.

I thought that I was doing well, but I just want to cry now.

~ James Morrison, Wonderful World