So I just want to put something out there.
I have an eating disorder, anxiety and depression.
I am not looking for sympathy or judgement, I just want to put it into words and according to my brain it will make it present. I’m an anorexic currently going through a relapse and struggling deeply with socialization at the moment. Im becoming painfully withdrawn and am struggling to keep myself from becoming bedridden again. I am an adult and don’t live with my parents or family so there’s no one to keep me in check except for myself. The key is to notice the problem in the beginning and nipping it in the bud. Stop it before it snowballs into a much sinister phase.
What do I tackle first?
I have let my anorexia get out of hand and left it unchecked for a while. So much so that I’m down 40 pounds in less than a year. I won’t say my current weight because with eating disorders it’s all about numbers. How much?, how many? There’s so much guilt attached to it and so much shame.
For me it’s about control and punishment.
Control in my life when everything around me feels like it’s falling apart and fear about what may happen.
You know when you settle in for bed and you think to yourself , did I lock the door?, and you get up to check because otherwise you can’t get to sleep. Well anxiety is like that but instead of being able to check there’s nothing I can do to calm my fears. This years election has had a lot of impact on my mental stability for personal reasons and I feel myself spiraling into a disastrous chaos and the only thing I can hang on to is how much weight I’ve lost. If I gain a pound I panic and feel like a failure because it means I can’t even control a simple thing like that. I was happier when I weighed more and hardly ever got complimented and now it seems I get told I look good every where I go. If only they knew that I feel miserable and I have no energy and my lips get a never ending sore because of my vitamin B deficiency and I wear red lipstick to cover it up, not because I feel extra confident. I wish they knew I can’t sleep because the acid in my stomach keeps me up at night. I wish they knew I binge on chips because it’s the only thing I can bring myself to eat recklessly and I feel like crying right after. I wish they knew of the amount of hair that ends up on my pillowcase because it just falls off. I wish they knew that on my days off I can’t bring myself to get up all day and somedays I just drive around even if I have no where to go just to get up and move around. I have a fear that one day it won’t be just on my days off and that I’ll miss work because my brain is too exhausted to care.
That’s the reality of what I’m living.
That’s how my life is right now. I am capable of going to work and paying my bills and dressing up and putting makeup on. I don’t look depressed and I don’t look sick and I’m a very functional person, that’s why no one notices how bad it is. It’s a very dangerous place to be in.
I’m not alone and I will not be beat!
That is my promise. If I go down I will go down fighting. I know I can’t do it alone and I know I need help. I also know the easy way out is not an option. It never was and never has been. So don’t feel alarmed by my post. I will be ok just like when I was 15 and became bedridden for the first time and everyone rallied around me to show me the way out of the deep hole I dug myself into. I still have the ladder they built for me and I have people I can reach out to.
If you know someone that you haven’t talked to in a while make sure you call them. They may have stop posting on Facebook or they may not have been to work or they may look unexplainably thinner. They may look like they have everything under control, but it never hurts to ask. You may be the only person they can talk to and unlike me, they may not have any family to hand them that ladder.
scaredycat 