Beauty and the Beast

Shall I start this post with the perfunctory "it's been such a long time"?

Lately, life just feels like a job I am not qualified for.

Soon I will graduate, and instead of this wonderful stasis I have ensconced myself in, I will be thrust into the real world of trying to find an actual job that I actually will be under qualified for. Ah, the beauty of college life.

I was supposed to start calling places to find an internship back in August, but I haven't even begun and the deadline is sometime in the first week of November. Hello, anxiety. Can you say hello to something that never really leaves?

On my best days I feel the tinge of mania that sometimes rests on the edge of my mind. On the worst days, I am simply floating through life, not really registering anything.

I actually have people to talk to in class now. I have people to commiserate with. However, that is not the same things as having friends.

The boy I was deeply in love with still calls every day. We're getting better at communicating, I guess. Is six years too long to try to make things work?

I dream of graduating, starting my repetitive job, learning how to cook for myself, spending my nights reading, going to museums, finding actual hobbies like trivia night or book clubs. I dream of being a person surrounded by beauty- art, history, writing, music - and yet a part of me knows I will never be that person. I will instead hole myself up in my apartment and live a sad, lonely existence because I am terrified of life.

I am, of course, still fat. Come on, did you think I'd make it through a whole post without addressing the elephant in the room?

My greatest yearning is to be in my mothers house, wrapped in warm pajamas, shuffling around her kitchen while a crockpot full of delicious food bubbles, a bookmark in the Iliad, waiting for me to return.

After all, why shouldn't I read a book about getting lost? I am already there.

Instead, I try to keep up with my school work, write the essay, wish I were dead.

I force myself to step on the scale every day, and yet my heart isn't in it. My heart isn't in anything anymore.

For extra credit, I am allowed to write my own obituary. I disguise my own self-loathing with jokes, but I am afraid the professor will read it and become concerned. I do not even know how to write about myself anymore.

I hope you are all doing better than I am.

<3 Lee

Tried to ride the storm out and crashed the boat, could've drowned but I grabbed the rope

I am okay.

The boy who broke my heart and I had sex. A lot. And then he left for a year to be stationed 1800 miles away. We talk every day. He still loves me. I am a mess of emotions and confusion and anger.

I am doing really well in most of my classes. I keep writing essays for one of my professors and he keeps giving them back with a bright and shiny perfect score on top. I knew I failed a 2 point question on my quiz, and thought it was going to be along with a few other things but turns out that 2 point question was the only one I missed, and that professor only docked me 1 point because I demonstrated knowledge about the subject, even if I got the answer wrong. My professor, who is the Smartest Man I Know gave me a B on my paper, and that is exciting because he is so hard to write for.

I am doing okay.

My weight is a mess.

I have to find a new place to live at the end of the semester because my roommate is moving out unexpectedly and I cannot afford this place on my own, and I do not want to search for another person with whom I might get along.

I have been trying not to stress so much about my future. I've been trying to trust that the universe will take care of me and place me where I need to be when I need to be there. But it is so hard, y'all.

Today/yesterday was my dad's birthday and it marks yet another year that I did not speak to him. Last month my mother held a house party and while obscenely drunk, I cried to her and our old neighbor about how he'll never love me. It was messy and it made her really sad, but it helped me kind of come to terms with the fact that he'll never be the father I want him to be. He'll never be the dad who will walk me down the aisle, or tell me he's proud of me, or tell me he loves me. He's the dad who will criticize and manipulate and provoke me into anger and I cannot have room in my life for that anymore. My peace is more important.

And with that sentiment, I sign off.

I hope you all are finding what you need.
<3 Lee

You gotta deal with the demons before they deal with you

I have not yet disappeared from the blogosphere.

That surprises me.

This semester is intense and I'm only a month into it. I have decided that although I had a mental breakdown that landed me in a psych ward less than four months ago, I'm going to double major and add on two minors. This means that to graduate on time, I will have to take a full summer course load and 18 credit hours for my remaining semesters.

It's fine. Everything is fine.

I am struggling in a lot of my classes. They are all just...intense. I've used that word twice now but it is the only one I can think of that encompasses the true pressure of them.

I'm trying really hard to take care of myself this year.

This weekend, if I have the time in between all of my homework, I'm going to take myself to a movie. There's one out that I'm really interested in. My grandma saw it and told me she thinks I'd like it. So I'm going to do it. This terrifies me. Doing anything alone, completely on my own terrifies me. We'll see if I actually follow through with it.

This summer, my family will be together for a week on the coast. I have a lot of fun things planned that I want to do, including going to a museum that has the crime scene photos of the Manson and Black Dahlia murders, as well as a rather sizable coffin collection. Also, an ice cream place that serves a flight of all 32 of their flavors. Its called balance, y'all. Haha.

Turns out, there's this suspension bridge that hangs 90 feet in the air and apparently sways really hard, especially when you get to the middle of it. It's nearby the house we're renting. I'm determined to conquer it. I hate heights. But this is my year, and I just feel like maybe I need to do this. I need to prove I'm stronger than my mind.

Now if only I could conquer my food fears LOL.

The guy I can't seem to stop writing about texted me. I had made a deal with myself that if I didn't get a definitive sign by the 7th, then I was going to move on and forget about him. And I was ready to. I was picturing my life without him in it and then...Sure enough, he texted me. On the 7th. Y'all know I believe heavily in signs so...I don't know. He sounded really lost, and I came away from the conversation feeling as though I had the upper hand for once. It felt good. But maybe not healthy.

Life just feels really heavy right now. I don't have a lot to say.

I hope everyone is doing okay.
<3 Lee

It pays to kill with kindness when you are your own worst enemy

I read through my blog the other day and I am just so sad for my younger self. My posts read like a pre-teen wrote them, all drama and no substance, but the truth is that I remember how scared I used to be. It was constant voices in my head picking me apart, constantly having to be on high alert for the next situation in which food would be involved, constantly lying to the people I loved. It was exhausting. It was eating an entire candy bar with a smile only to spend the next two weeks replaying every single chew and hating myself for it. It was imaging putting a gun to my head but not being able to because I was positive that people would come to my funeral only to talk about how fat I was. None of that made it on to my blog, because I didn't have to tell you guys that. You knew. You lived it with me.

Looking back, I can admit to myself that I was probably never truly in recovery. I still obsessed about every calorie going into my mouth, and there was never a time where I was simply okay with eating the amount I should have been. I spent my time begging to throw up or slicing into my skin to punish myself. Honestly, there was not one single day all throughout that period where I even came close to normal eating. Even if I ingested all of the calories I was supposed to, they came from a binge. I wrote about losing my mind one day when I had all three meals, and then never replicated that incident again. I was obsessed with losing weight, but couldn't admit to myself how deeply entrenched in this I actually was. I didn't want to be eating disordered anymore, but I still wanted to disappear. Maybe that sentence should be in present tense.

I keep thinking back to the way old Blogger used to be, before everyone abandoned it. Remember when we would all log on and show each other pictures of our new haircuts, gossip excitedly about our real life thinspo, and roll our eyes as we typed out how our teacher/friend/colleague/random person commented on how good we looked? Half of my brain yearns so much for that again because it was solidarity, it was not having to be so goddamned alone all the time, but the other half recognizes that it had the potential to be sincerely unhealthy. I know that for me, every single number is a competition. Even still, after so many years of "recovery", when I hear someone's BMI or how much they weigh, or how many calories they burned at the gym, I have to physically stop myself from trying to be better than them.

(The other day my friend posted a picture from his treadmill that stated how many calories he had burned and I had my hands on my keys and was finding my gym card before I even realized what was happening. I don't want to think like this anymore.)

The girls I used to be friends with on here haunt me. I have an entire spreadsheet of hundreds of blogs that I used to read, and 90% of them are ghost towns now. Realistically, some had to have beat this, right? But also some had to have...not. I wonder which category I will fall into. It has been almost five years since I first started this blog, but my eating disorder was very much prevalent before that. That's such a large chunk of my life, how much more of this can I possibly do? But also, how could I even think about not doing this anymore?

I don't have it in me to continue this way. As much as it pains me to admit it, I cannot take care of myself without supervision. I have a roommate who I never see and a mother who does not notice when I come home smaller than I was before and this freedom has allowed me to restrict. No one watches me the way they used to, and I simply don't have the energy to fight with my own fucking head about having breakfast, lunch, or dinner. It seems pointless. I know what the outcome will be, why waste all of that energy?

I am struggling so much.

My hair is falling out by the handful every day. I have to clean my brush after every use because so much of it comes out. My nails are so brittle that tapping them against the table will shatter them. My metabolism has mostly kept trucking, but I am always so tired, always so cold, always so preoccupied with calories and exercise and the size of my fucking thighs. And the worst part? I am STILL nowhere near the weight I want to be. Cue hysterical laughing.

I hope that every one is doing so much better than I am. Please reach out if you need anything at all.
<3 Lee

'Cause I Was Never Taught to Give It Up

It took a lot of faith to fight my battles and tackle a couple of habits I never thought that
I’d have to
But did, bottle the water under the bridge and toss another written page of my history to the wind
When it blows, cause all of this disaster has lead me home and left a lot of room for me to learn to grow
Yeah you are not alone

Third day in a row of posting, so I guess pretty soon it'll be time to disappear for three or so years haha.

Do y'all believe in signs?

I do. When the boy left me, I asked the universe for so many signs. I need to know whether it was time to move on from him or not. We've been best friends since we were fifteen, and he was my first love. We had plans to move in together and probably get married soon. I want so badly for there to be a reason we keep coming back to each other. But I don't know if the signs I'm receiving are because I so desperately want to see some or if they're actually there. I am still so angry. I am still so hurt. I am still so completely in love with him.  Thinking about being with someone else makes me sick. And there have been so many signs. I got a piece of  mail from his branch of the armed forces, the plane shook while I was praying "if we're meant to be together, have us encounter turbulence", I saw a license plate with his initials, and every single book I pick up either mentions his name or the place he was stationed at while we were together, just now as I was writing this, I somehow found a piece of paper that has to do with him under my leg even though I have no idea how it got onto my bed, plus a million other smaller ones. Or am I looking for all of these things? Am I so preoccupied with him that I unconsciously note these coincidences while letting the signs I'm not supposed to be with him pass me by?

I am just really fucking struggling.

In other news, I don't know how much I weigh. I mean, I stepped on the scale and took note of the number that popped up because of course I did, I'm eating disordered. But my scale does this cute lil thing where it shows 15.6 pounds higher than what is accurate. I don't know how to fix it. First time I stepped on it I almost killed myself right then and there. So. I know the number it showed me, but I have yet to subtract the 15.6 from it. I obviously have a rough idea, because I can do simple math like that, but I'm putting off figuring out the official number for as long as possible because right now I can keep telling myself "well at least I'm definitely not this weight" and feel okay about it. Knowing the real number would mean throwing away the last vestige of my sanity and giving myself completely back to the constant number game.

And of course a little voice inside me asks: what would be so bad about going back?

This entire post is clunky and terrible but so am I sooooooooo at least I'm consistent.

My roommate came home today, which is fine, I like her, but I wasn't expecting her back until Monday and I had all these plans to clean before she got here but now I'm hiding in my room because my anxiety says its been way too long since she arrived to go say hi now, and the apartment is terrible so she thinks you're terrible and its better to just stay holed up even though I'm am literally so freaking thirsty.

Its casual.

Okay y'all. It's time to wrap this up. I hope everyone is doing okay.

<3 Lee

Releasing With Your Hands (T.W Rape)

But the rain can't wash you if you're laying in the dirt
And the pain can't change you if you blame it on the hurt

I don't know why I'm here. Which is true of life in general, but more applicable to right here, right now. I don't know why I'm back on Blogger. Maybe it's more comforting to release these words out into the internet where there is a chance someone can read this, reach out to me, and tell me I'm not as desperately alone as I feel. It's not like I've ever been a big blog, obviously, but I reread all of my posts last night and the outpouring of love and acceptance I used to get really overwhelms me. It reminds me of a different time in my life when I didn't have to be drunk to feel genuine happiness.

In September of 2014, I wrote 'This man, he looked right at me and said "When you are angry, when you refuse to forgive someone for something they have done, that's you handcuffing yourself to that person and letting them tag along with you for the rest of your life. You have to overcome the bitterness." 

But what if I can't??'

That was almost three and a half years ago and I still have not uncuffed myself. I still have yet to label myself "survivor". Instead, I watch spoken word poetry on the subject and try to imagine telling my therapist that I was raped. It is too difficult for me to face, so instead I continue to pretend like that event has not tainted every piece of my life, has not affected every detail of me, has not dictated the way I allow myself to love and be loved.

How do you begin to forgive someone who you truly believe does not deserve forgiveness?

How do you begin to heal?

I do not want to be the person who hurts others because they cannot process their own hurt anymore. I do not want to be my father. I do not want this continuous cycle of violence that has been synonymous with my last name. I do not want to be incapable of letting another human being in.

I feel more okay about the future than I ever have before. Most days I can silence the anxiety and dread that swirls within me when I think about what comes next in terms of long-term plans. And yet I still find myself white-knuckling it every day, willing every fiber of my being to not step in front of that semi, do not stop your car on the train tracks and wait for the train to come, do not go buy a gun, do not spend all of your money on pills, do not disassemble your pencil sharpener, do not buy a rope and test how sturdy that ceiling fan is etc etc etc. 

We did this activity in the psych ward where one person sat in the middle of this huge tarp, and the others gathered the edges of it in their hands and pumped it up and down as hard as they could. It was a metaphor for anxiety, because while you were in the middle, all you could see was the tarp waving all around you, never ceasing. Anxiety doesn't let you take a step back. It grabs you and holds you as tight as it can until you cannot remember how to breathe. Meanwhile, all around you are the sounds of your friends laughing and joking, and you do not want to ruin their fun by exclaiming "Help! I am drowning in this!" so you endure it silently until your turn is over and it is time to crawl back to the edge of the tarp. 

I think about this activity a lot, probably for all of the wrong reasons. It was supposed to teach you that if you would just look up from the anxiety, you would see your whole support system standing around you, ready to do anything they could to lessen the pain. But instead it taught me that no one will ever be there for you when you really need them to be. It is all on you and you alone. 

My trauma will always only belong solely to me. I have to learn how to be okay with that, how to process that, how to overcome that all on my own. More than anything in the entire world, I do not want to be here again three years from now writing about how I haven't yet figured out how to uncuff myself. 

Dear Bella, you said you found my last post uplifting, and so if you are reading this, I am very sorry for how dismal this one turned out to be. 

I love you all, please know you can always talk to me about anything.

<3 Lee

The Comeback Kid

It's only been like a year and a half since I last posted, I'm sure y'all didn't even notice I was gone right? Lol. There's been a lot of changes in my life. I hit an ultimate high weight (surprise, I'm still eating disordered! Shocker). I started my junior year of college. I fell really hard for a guy from my past only to have it disintegrate in front of my eyes and land me in a psych ward. Losing him was so unbelievably hard because I thought I was going to marry him. We had our whole lives planned out, and when he didn't come back, I kind of lost it and tried to kill myself yet again. This time though, the hospital took it seriously and they slapped me with a 72 hour hold and dumped me in the psych ward. It was scary and hard but it ended up being one of the best things to ever happen to me. I met some of the kindest, funniest, most beautiful souls in the world, and got the opportunity to open up about some of my trauma and then just laugh about it. It was the most freeing thing I've ever done. When I got out, I decided I needed to start actually working through my problems, so for the first time in my entire life, I talked about growing up in a concrete way. With my previous therapists, I had always said stuff like "growing up was hard" or "my dad was...tough" but this time I fully admitted to her that he had abused me. She gave me a PTSD diagnosis, which wasn't surprising, because I knew I had it, I had just never admitted it to myself. It was scary, but I did it and I am a better person for it. I'm working on being friends with the guy who broke me. I gained my long-time friendship with a guy named C back, after months of not talking over hurt feelings and unsaid apologies. I fooled around with a previous ex and then gained the maturity to end things before he got hurt. I got right with God. I started analyzing my bad behaviors and figuring out where they stemmed from and learning how I can fix them. 2017 was objectively the best year of my life, but it was so spectacularly brutal too. I can't lie, being alive is so f-ing hard you guys. But I know that 2018 is going to be a good year. I can feel it. I really hope y'all can too.

I love you.

<3 Lee