I'm scared of the mindset I can feel myself falling back into. (Did I ever crawl out of it?) I don't feel real at the moment. Today on the way back from school, I asked my mum to pull over so that I could go into a shop to buy a drink. I didn't want a drink - I just needed to convince myself I was still real. That's the kind of headspace I'm in at the moment. I'm not seeing any of my friends, I'm basically sentenced to the house because of the precarious state my immune system is in, and up until today I haven't had any kind of tangible/fixed work schedule suggested to or imposed upon me. I sift in and out of a dreamland all day, and the only "real" thing I seem to be able to hold onto is my weight. The only thing that feels tangible, rigid, is the way the numbers have been slipping down on my scales every morning, slowly, steadily. The way I count out calories every day. 

Just move on with your life.

Everything is stagnant. My mother's depressed. My father seems to have magically produced a baby out of thin air.

Everything's shit. And yet, everything is wonderful. I'm the thinnest I've been in years. I'm going to take my A levels and, if it all goes to plan, I'll be off in the autumn to study at a top university. And, before that, a whole summer with my friends.

But first - surgery. Surgery, more illness, a desire to do well but a need to self-sabotage, and a little longer in this 2D magical bubble dead life.

I'm so scared of myself.

Everybody knows

Listening to Leonard Cohen's 'Everybody Knows'. What a fucking weird yet addictive song.

Work plan for today: I'm going to draft my English literature coursework, and start on my f*cking Yearbook page - such a waste of my time. I am just going to print out a big picture of my face and scrawl endless words all over it that make no sense.

Blah

I have some actual solid work to do now - my literature coursework starts this week, and the deadline is Easter. So I have to throw myself into that one pretty soon, at the deep end, because I'm not in school and won't be for a while. On top of that, I need to address language coursework, AND I have a BIG BIG university interview on March 14th - it's the university I want to go to! (I think!) For that, I have to prepare THREE essays (fuck my life, even if they're all on film and theatre, which I find fun and interesting). Next is art. I feel totally out of the loop. All my classmates have started their exam books and as I'm at home, I can't go and use the school studios or materials, and nor do I even have a title or a book to work in yet. Oh - and my sixth form has decided we want a YEARBOOK too. So I have to make a page for that. I'm always repelled by these kinds of things. I deem Yearbook a massive waste of everyone's time. Besides my own small group of friends, there's nothing and no one I want to remember from secondary school. The experience has been painful.

*Rant over*

I've lost 11 pounds since Christmas. Can't see where it's gone.

Baby

My baby half-sister has just been born. My sister and dad texted me half an hour ago. I can't believe it. I don't know how I'm feeling, it's just such a weird notion to wrap my mind around. They still haven't got a name for her, for now she's just 'baby'.

I weighed myself again this morning (which I probably shouldn't have done - am trying not to weigh every day). 142.6 lbs.

All I know is that this urge to lose weight is bugging me. It's niggling at me in the back of my head. It's always there. And all of this makes me think that me, sitting here, writing about recovery and trying to move away from the eating disorder, is all bullshit. If I'm still having exactly the same thought processes as before, and wanting exactly the same things for exactly the same reasons, then maybe this isn't recovery. Maybe I'm just simply... eating more.

I don't know.

I realised how much I've missed my mum's cooking. When I was about 16 and entrenched in my eating disorder I stopped having it because I didn't know how many calories were in what she was cooking. Estimating was freaking me out and then as time wore on and my calories got more and more ridiculous I didn't have room to fit any kind of meal into my allowance. I was living off empty carbs like rice cakes, and other pointless nutrition-less things like diet coke and sugar-free jelly that filled me up for minimal calories. Now that I'm on a higher calorie count I can fit them, which is so nice because my mum is an excellent cook and it makes her happy that I want to eat her food again.

I seem to be living off smoothies as well. We ran out of orange juice so now I'm drinking Innocent strawberry & banana. And I genuinely think all the fresh food is making me feel better, body-wise. I don't feel so weak, taking a trip down the hall isn't taxing. My mental energy is increasing and in a few days I'd like to think I'll be walking round the house a bit more rather than lying comatose in bed all day.

Well today I'm feeling pretty crappy, which is a shame because the weather outside is great. I want nothing more than to just get better and back on my feet, and to see my friends. They've all offered to come and visit me but I just don't know if I can handle it right now. They visited me at the beginning of my hospital stay when I wasn't as unwell as I became this week (ie. I could still talk and hold a decent conversation, and I wasn't groaning in pain all the time). I'm like a vegetable at the moment. I am still able to write and think intelligibly but too much human interaction is taxing and it hurts to use my voice.

I'm clocking up 22 pills a day in total.

I realise that, for recovery, the 1,200 calorie mark is still pretty low. Normal people eat more than this, and after all, normality with my eating is something I am going to try hard to achieve. However I've come to the conclusion that I am still trying to lose weight. Yes I'm trying to lose it more slowly over a period of time and get more nutrition and balance from my diet, but I'm still not perfectly happy with the weight I am. My body looks fine at this weight, but I will feel much more confident with it once it's been refined a bit and I've slimmed down in certain areas. Hopefully keeping my calories at a steady, fairly low but not dangerously low number, will allow me to slowly lose about 10 lbs, then once I've got a grip on maintaining the weight loss I'll gradually build my calories up to a more 'normal' number.

I'm back! + recovery (long post)

Wow, it's been a while.You're probably wondering what on earth happened to me... well basically, a lot of shit has gone down. I am trying my luck at recovery (properly this time).

On Thursday I got out of the hospital after a 2 week inpatient stay. I was admitted after a bout of tonsillitis got really bad and I slipped into the 'danger zone'. They checked my bloods and found that I have reactive neutropenia (abnormally low white blood cells) and thrombocytopenia (low platelets, the things that stop you bleeding to death and help you heal), my liver was fucked AND I'd had glandular fever. All that, in English, means that my immune system might as well have just been asleep over the last few months - no wonder I was getting so sick all the time :( My stay on the ward is a trippy and vaguely traumatic memory in my mind; maybe I will talk about it more when I feel ready, but for the most part I remember it as distressing and strange, so I won't go into the gritty details. So in short I was very unwell, have missed a great deal of school and will probably have to take out another fortnight next half term just to recuperate, and am basically having to rethink my options big time (regarding university, and whether or not I'll be able to pass my A levels at a high enough standard to meet my offers). It's stressful. But for now, I'm not on an IV drip, I'm at home in bed unable to do much but watch films and read and type stuff on my laptop, so I thought I'd use this opportunity to return to my blog and maybe turn a new leaf.

First - how this shot of recovery came about: I started building up my calories slowly and realised that I wasn't actually gaining any weight from it. One of my biggest fears about recovery has always been the weight gain, and especially since I'm not a tiny weight to start with, the idea of piling on the pounds through eating more terrified me. But I was managing to eat a solid 1,200 calories a day and my weight wasn't budging. Sure, it wasn't going down like I wanted it to, but it wasn't going up either, and the laughable thing was that I was staying at the same weight that I'd been when I was starving myself. Suddenly it seemed ridiculous to starve myself because I wasn't keeping any weight off that way either. What I was lacking all along was stability, and I'd been fooling myself that starving = stability when the rest of my life was chaos.

Secondly, I thought long and hard about how I wanted the next year to pan out, and could think of a million and one reasons why it was better for me to try and recover than to take this thing with me to university and beyond. Sure, the idea of being left to my own devices to starve freely at university with no one snooping and the typical student lifestyle of living wired off a bottle of diet coke and box of cigarettes still thrilled me. I'm in no doubt there will be the odd day like that when I'm away from home. But I started to reassess everything - my goals and aims and aspirations, and, all of a sudden, this thing that I'd perceived to be so liberating, turned into an entrapment. So it has taken a while to actually get comfortable with the idea of eating more. I've had a lot of days that have turned into mini binges (ie. not exceeding 2,000 calories, but still overeating by my standards).

I struck another problem when I went into hospital. Because of how bad the tonsillitis was I was barely able to swallow anything, even water. They had me on fluids through the IV and I was severely dehydrated. On top of that, strong antibiotics make your stomach freak out. I threw up a lot, even when there was nothing in my stomach to chuck up besides medicine and water, and was knocked out half the time anyway so I barely ate for about 8 days. But now I'm back at home I've gained a bit of weight back and am eating semi-normally again (for once I'm actually glad to have put on a few pounds because I looked so freakishly gaunt when I got discharged from the hospital. It wasn't an attractive look, trust me). I'm managing to total about 1,000-1,200 calories again, and most of that is made up of healthy food.

So my weight this morning was 142.8 lbs, which I'm fairly happy with. As far as weight loss plans go - I still want to lose weight, but I don't want to do it the unhealthy way anymore. My loose idea is to be 135 by the summer holidays. I'll try to make this blog as recovery-oriented as I can without it being overbearing.

Side news: I'm not a vegetarian anymore. Also I'm not allowed to smoke or drink until I have my tonsillectomy at Easter :( Life is going to suck for a couple of months...