A Letter To Say What I Can't

Dear Girl-I-Worry-About-In-My-Year-Group,

Hi. I'm sorry I couldn't tell you this face to face, but - you see - the real problem is that I can't deal with your problems as well as my own.
It sounds awful, but please, let me explain.
Last March my problems were just heating up, and you told me you were worried about me. In a haze of my own tears you took me aside and insisted that I tell you that I was getting help. You told me of your own problems - so many problems, and so similar to mine - hoping that it would make me feel not so alone. What I must now tell you is that although I fully understand your good intentions, and know how sweet they were, I was in a place where I couldn't deal with what was going on in my own head - let alone yours as well.

That night I went home and had my first anxiety attack, and my mother took me to the out of hours doctors.

I haven't told anyone what you told me, but it prays on my mind almost every day.
You're not a small girl, and you work hard. You remind me of how I used to be before I admitted I had a problem. Stressed out to the max, doing far too much work, wanting to loose weight, no time for friends, and unsatisfied with every good grade. Wrapped up in a little bubble of me, not knowing how to relax. This is a bubble that I still often find it hard to come out of.

Every time you tell me about your stresses, I'm torn between running a mile and telling you all of my deepest secrets in the hope that I can shock you out of what you seem to be becoming.

Yet, I also need to admit that this could just be my mind, searching for someone else like me. Scrutinizing your figure to judge if you've lost weight. Obsessing over finding "the same" in someone else.

Sometimes it may seem like I don't care, when I break off a conversation or seemingly snap at you. Please don't take it that way. Its because I care that I run a mile - I don't want to hurt you when I finally fly off the handle or do something stupid. It sounds crazy, but somehow it makes sense. By protecting you from what I know maybe you won't go the same way I did.

Please forgive me. Please don't think any worse of me for protecting myself.

Yours,
G xx

Naming Your Eating Disorder

Sometimes it helps to think of your eating disorder as something other than just EDNOS, Anorexia or Bulimia. Sometimes something more expressive (or abusive) is called for - something to help you stand up to it.
Also, there are names that your eating disorder likes to be called, and although they can feel quite fitting at our weakest of times, it should be acknowledged that by calling it by these, you are giving in to it!

Names Your ED Likes


friend
ally
cohort
comrade
alter ego
comforter
ruler
aide
confidante
monarch
boss
ringleader



Names Your ED Doesn't Like


dictator
oppressor
taskmaster
foe
enemy
nemesis
opposite
saboteur
problem
tyrant
illness
abuser



Names To Call Yourself And Stand Up to Your (Insert name from above)

Revolutionary
anarchist
rebel
radical
over-thrower
over-comer
persecutor
fighter


Do you have any more ideas?

Yours,
The Anxious Foodie

A Letter To My Oppressor

Dear Problem,

Would you be so kind as to take a step back, look in the mirror and regard yourself for what you truly are?

Beneath your façade of protection and comfort can be found a layer of lies, and through your veneer of friendship shines an aura of contempt.

You have misguided me for God knows how long - only you can tell when I first fell into your mammoth trap - whether it was three years ago, or ten. Was my anxiousness about trains, planes and petrol stations and my obsession with order as a child a misinterpreted forewarning of your gloomy arrival?

Yet although I know all of this, I still can't seem to shake you off. After at least eighteen months of being fully in your grasp I am at last beginning to find the chinks in your armour,  although were it not for the others rallying around me I feel that I should still be cocooned with you in our own cotton wool padded world of ignorance.

I get the feeling that you have been loitering  in the background of my life for so long, casting your incantations and spells, that I will never be able to fully shake you off. Will your rules and guidelines always plague me, niggling away at the back of my mind - an unwanted reminder of an unhappy past?

I hope with all of my might that this will not be the case, for I want to lead a happy life, free of lies. I understand that there will always be problems with weight and body image associated with the female kind, but I will do my best to only look back at you as a victor does, reflecting on a past triumph - the time I overpowered the eating disorder! The time I burst free of my oppressor and grabbed the bull by the horns.

Now, have I helped you to see what I see? What the others around me see in you? Have I given you something to think about? Knocked your confidence? Taken away the spring in your step?

I hope so,

G x

New Year, New Declaration

Its hard to put an exact date on when I started my slippery descent down the sticky slope of an eating disorder. All I know is that it was just over a year and a half ago that we knew something was wrong, and decided to seek help.

Things can progress extremely quickly once in the grips of an Eating Disorder, and its not an easy thing to escape from. Some people take the attitude that one should just be able to "pull yourself together and get over it", and trust me, we would if we could. I like to think of my eating disorder, the "The Problem" as I call it with my psychologist at CAMHS (the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service), as a viscous dictator like Lenin or Stalin or a progressing relationship from that of  a manipulating, delusional friend and deluded, cheated victim to harsh dictator and oppressed peasant. 

I've been toying with the idea of starting a blog for some time now, and at last have given in to my curiosity. My intention is to not only write about what I love, (culture, literature, languages, films, travel and food), but also to find an outlet for the complications inside my head that arrived with my EDNOS (Eating Disorder Not Specified) and have stayed with my progression into anorexia, and if I can reach out to just one person who is going through something similar to me, and help them to feel not so alone and trapped, or help someone understand in more detail what an eating disorder can involve, I will have fulfilled my purpose and be able to live a little bit more happily. 

I won't claim to be a master blogger, since my previous forays into the complicated world of the internet based diary have been slightly silly and very short lived, but I hope to stick this one out.

I look forward to sharing my wisdom and foolishness alike, and hopefully contributing usefully to the online community. 

Yours,

The Anxious Foodie <3