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