(no subject)
This ramble is cut so you don't have to read it if you don't want to.
This is my ED. My experience with it.
9 years old was when my eating habits started. Yep, 9 years old...after my parents got divorced. It's a pretty early age to start worrying about your weight and about food, but it happened. I'd binge so badly back then...eating a huge amount of food (for my size, anyway)...eating until it hurt. I never really thought anything of it...but I did feel guilty when my mom would say things like "you had better watch your weight."
I started to watch what I ate after she said that. It was nothing too big...I'd skip eating a hamburger and eat a salad instead, or I'd eat chicken or turkey instead of beef. I ate fat free everything. Different things like that. My mom noticed, but never really said anything. This went on until I was 12.
I also had this preoccupation with being fat. I remember always feeling like I was larger than everyone else I knew, yet I don't really know why. I wasn't an overweight child by any means.
However, these habits were small. I never really had a problem or preoccupation with it.
Then I moved to Florida (at 13 yrs old), and that was when the REAL trouble began. Food was a huge comfort, but I'd refuse to eat until I got home. Eating around people was gluttonous...so I'd binge when I got home and eat ice for the rest of the night.
My health deteriorated...my complection was so pale that at one point, my face looked almost completely white besides the dark circles under my eyes. I didn't even recognize myself...it scared me, but I was too depressed to even try to stop it.
After a year of living in West Orlando, I moved to East Orlando. I made friends, got into band, and my eating habits went away. I actually ate meals, and band was a good form of exercise. My body image didn't change, but I felt better. My mom told me I looked better.
Then in sophomore year, I started liking Joseph. This was no ordinary crush, though...I really fell hard for him. He never liked me, though, and I was crushed. My body image went down even lower and I was never good enough. My grades were straight A's, and I still thought they were crap. In 2nd semester of that year I took personal fitness and found out my weight...and I was appalled. Yet the worst experience was when I was getting clothes from the store. I saw my pant size...a size 7...and I wanted to die. My mom and my brother poked fun of me all the way home, and I wanted to cry. I felt overweight and horrible-looking. So I started to exercise. I went back to my old habits of gorging when I got home, when nobody was watching. I'd eat at night and felt bad about it...and I couldn't sleep.
I got a diary on teenopendiary.com and, as I was randomly looking at different layouts and such, I found an ana(anorexic) journal.
I was captivated. She talked of tips she did...her struggle with weight. I saw a picture of an emaciated woman that she had and I wanted to be her. This became the image of beauty to me. Bones were beautiful.
So I started to starve. A breakfast bar in the morning, gum at school, and an apple and a handful of cereal when I got home.
My weight went down. People noticed. "You've lost weight." "Don't turn anorexic, Jamie."
I hated comments like that. I didn't feel like I had lost weight, so why were people telling me this?
The binging was still there, even through the starvation. My lust for food was like a bad habit I couldn't get rid of, and I did this every now and then. I had tried to purge a few times, but it never worked very well. I never got any instructions or anything...I just tried what I had heard, but I barely got anything up. It all seemed so disguisting to me at the time, so I think my fear of it all was what held me back. I took laxatives as a way to purge. I felt like a lowlife for doing this disguisting thing to myself, but I didn't care at the same time.
After my box of laxatives was gone (I didn't want to make my mom suspicious of me by asking her for more), I knew I had to do something else to control the binging I'd do about once a week or so...but purging still didn't work for me.
My weight went up again. I had to get the weight off somehow.
I remember this day like it was yesterday. I sat in front of the computer and ate almost an entire box of Better Cheddars, and I couldn't take it anymore. I went in the bathroom and tried to purge again.
I was so desperate...so frantic to get it out that I kept going. I tried different positions, from standing to sitting to switching hands.
Then it happened. That first heave of food came up. I did it again and again, tears rolling down my face, until the lining of my stomach was all that I saw.
I looked in the mirror, with my face red and my eyes bloodshot, and I felt...better.
After that I stumbled into my room in a euphoric state and fell asleep for a few hours (which wasn't normal for me, since I never take naps during the day).
My starving started to go away, and the binging and purging became easier. That euphoria was something I wanted more and more. The feeling of emptiness in my stomach...it was different than not eating for a few days. It felt as though all of the weight that had been put on my shoulders from school, friends, and family was all thrown away.
In the midst of my growing addiction, my mom and I really started to butt heads, so to speak. At one point, my mom and I got in a fight like the one we're in now. She was mad because I had only gotten her a purse for Christmas, and my brother had spent more money on a coffee maker...making my present unthoughtful. She didn't talk to me for 2 days.
I remember lying in the tub with bruised, bloody knuckles (from my teeth) crying my eyes out. Purging was hard sometimes, since my body sometimes needed a day of recovery, and I remember on that day I couldn't get anything up. I felt out of control again...
I knew this was becoming a problem when IAJE rolled around in January. While everyone went to lunch on that Saturday, I stayed at school, running back and forth down the hallways and up and down the stairs...I purged in the bathrooms at school and I felt like a lowlife; stupid and foolish. Yet I never thought of it as being bulimia. I felt like I wasn't worth being labeled with an eating disorder, since I wasn't like the "sick" people I had read about....the people who swallowed their toothbrushes from trying so hard to purge with it, or the people who drank detergent so that their stomach could be pumped to be free of food again. I wasn't like them, so I wasn't sick.
In March was when I hit my all-time low. I remember listening to music with tears running down my face, looking for websites about suicide help...because I felt that I was close to that point. I really didn't want to live anymore..I eventually fell asleep (crying so hard makes me extremely exhausted) and the next day I felt better. Like a weight had been lifted again.
It's interesting, getting to that point of wanting to end your life. You cant see the good in things anymore, even if you try, and that scares you. Happiness seems so far away that it isn't even a possibility or a goal...you just sit in misery, and at that point it feels like the only way you can get away from it is to die.
Just between you and me, the reason why I didn't want to kill myself was because I didn't want anyone finding my body. I thought of them having to take my clothes off and dress me for a funeral, and it sickened me.
Yeah, this was my twisted thinking at the time.
I'd have dreams about binging. I'd wake up in the middle of the night and almost get up to run to the bathroom to purge because I had thought that I had eaten an entire cake, when really it was all just a dream.
However, in all of this, I didn't want to stop. Recovery had never crossed my mind, and I never went to a recovery website even out of curiosity. I figured that if I kept my secret hidden that it would be okay.
I felt dirty when I purged in any other place besides my bathroom. I purged at a friend's house once, at Applebees, CiCi's pizza, the school a couple of times, and even in a plastic bag in my room. Every time that happened, I felt an incredible amount of guilt and shame...I cant tell you why, because I don't even know why...I was just guilty. I had to keep it at one area...one place that I could just isolate my illness at and keep it safe.
It was my one guilty pleasure...it was the one thing I kept behind my smile and my good grades.
My brother was put into the hospital after he tried to kill himself in April. I had to miss the premiere show for Les Miserables (which I was playing Trumpet in) because my mom had found out about his cutting. Then he tries to kill himself, and my dad comes down. It was hell, I tell you. Bulimia was my only escape.
I didn't talk to anyone about it anymore. I used to talk to a few close friends, but I completely cut that off. I'd just write in my diary. Every day I'd get up, take an energy pill and shake until 2nd period (side effect from the pill), come home and binge, purge, and then chew on ice and sit on the computer typing for the rest of the night. My diary helped me express the thoughts in my head. I was very open an honest on it, which was a break from feeling so dishonest around everyone in my life. Having a secret meant dishonesty to me.
I knew that something wasn't right with me...when I'd stand up, I felt dizzy and blurry for a few seconds. I had no idea why. Also, my skin had a sort of yellowish tint to it, and my nails looked a little purple. At one point I couldn't even get up the stairs to get to the media centre...I was so weak.
Garrett found my diary. He read it and didn't say anything for 3 days. I don't know why he did that, and to this day I don't know why he waited until we were fighting to say it. We were fighting about something, and he said it out loud. I was floored, since I had NO idea that he knew. My mom went nuts on me, telling me to swear that I wasn't doing it, and I just went in my room. She printed the diary and started to read it to me, telling me I was sick. I didn't know what to say. My entire world felt like it had fallen apart.
I hated it. Wade was still in the hospital, and I wanted her to focus on him rather than me. I still didn't think I was sick.
After that, my doctor diagnosed me with bulimia, and I found out that the dizziness was caused by anemia. My hemoglobin was so low that it could've killed people in their 40's. I was given iron pills and had to see a psychiatrist. She was a nice lady...but the sessions were $120 a pop, and we couldn't afford it. So I stopped seeing her, and my mom put pressure on me to recover.
I looked up the recovery websites I had refused to go to, and I read a lot about it. Most of it was common knowledge to me, but I read it anyways. I found out that I really was, in fact, bulimic (it hadn't sunk in until then).
I made an attempt. I really did. I stopped purging for an entire month, which was a lot better than purging 1-2 (sometimes 3) times a day. Yet my insecurities consumed me, and I hated it. Last summer was my recovery time, and it didn't work. My weight went up, and I was terrified of facing my friends. I didn't want them to think I was fat.
Now, here I am. I still purge...I wont deny it. Paula Abdul was bulimic for 17 years before she finally decided to recover. It's harder than it looks.
That state of euphoria...I crave it sometimes. It's still hard for me to eat things. I still cant eat in front of people. I still have nightmares on occasion.
When things get bad, I still run to it.
Yet that drive that I had in the beginning...that drive to lose weight and to be beautiful...to starve...it meant control. Control is what I still want to this day. Bulimia was always considered an alternative in my eyes, but Anorexia is what I wanted and still want. Is that crazy? I'm sure it is.
Joseph was a part of this. After I found out that he liked Jennifer Gasparri, I was so crushed that I had to stop eating. I wanted to be beautiful for him.
No, I don't blame it on him. It was my wrongdoing. That situation was just a trigger to a disease I had inside of me for all those years.
Now that I like someone and those feelings are coming back, I want that as well. I want to be beautiful for him. Maybe if he would like me, it would make up for losing Joseph...but knowing that he most likely doesn't makes me feel rejected all over again.
I just want to be confident again. Matt told me once "you're going to be that confident person you want to be." I don't know how to believe it.
I just want to be beautiful in another person's eyes. I want love that is requitted. I want true love...unconditional love...my family hasn't been like that, so I hope that one day I can find a man who will do that.
Is that wrong? Probably.
I feel like my connection with God is tainted because of the fact that I rely on something like this to give me comfort rather than coming to Him. That I rely on bulimia instead of Him. I know I shouldn't, and I'm working on trying to trust more in Him than this stupid disorder, but it's so hard.
Maybe one day I'll recover...and I'll find someone that I love who will love me...and maybe one day I'll be happy...
But today isn't that day...and tomorrow isn't looking good either.
:-\
I think I just want acceptance. I want someone who wont look at me and say I'm beautiful because I have cool hair or neat glasses or something...I want someone to see me. And to love me for it.
Acceptance.
I want to be me and know that it's okay...because I don't feel like it is.
This is my ED. My experience with it.
9 years old was when my eating habits started. Yep, 9 years old...after my parents got divorced. It's a pretty early age to start worrying about your weight and about food, but it happened. I'd binge so badly back then...eating a huge amount of food (for my size, anyway)...eating until it hurt. I never really thought anything of it...but I did feel guilty when my mom would say things like "you had better watch your weight."
I started to watch what I ate after she said that. It was nothing too big...I'd skip eating a hamburger and eat a salad instead, or I'd eat chicken or turkey instead of beef. I ate fat free everything. Different things like that. My mom noticed, but never really said anything. This went on until I was 12.
I also had this preoccupation with being fat. I remember always feeling like I was larger than everyone else I knew, yet I don't really know why. I wasn't an overweight child by any means.
However, these habits were small. I never really had a problem or preoccupation with it.
Then I moved to Florida (at 13 yrs old), and that was when the REAL trouble began. Food was a huge comfort, but I'd refuse to eat until I got home. Eating around people was gluttonous...so I'd binge when I got home and eat ice for the rest of the night.
My health deteriorated...my complection was so pale that at one point, my face looked almost completely white besides the dark circles under my eyes. I didn't even recognize myself...it scared me, but I was too depressed to even try to stop it.
After a year of living in West Orlando, I moved to East Orlando. I made friends, got into band, and my eating habits went away. I actually ate meals, and band was a good form of exercise. My body image didn't change, but I felt better. My mom told me I looked better.
Then in sophomore year, I started liking Joseph. This was no ordinary crush, though...I really fell hard for him. He never liked me, though, and I was crushed. My body image went down even lower and I was never good enough. My grades were straight A's, and I still thought they were crap. In 2nd semester of that year I took personal fitness and found out my weight...and I was appalled. Yet the worst experience was when I was getting clothes from the store. I saw my pant size...a size 7...and I wanted to die. My mom and my brother poked fun of me all the way home, and I wanted to cry. I felt overweight and horrible-looking. So I started to exercise. I went back to my old habits of gorging when I got home, when nobody was watching. I'd eat at night and felt bad about it...and I couldn't sleep.
I got a diary on teenopendiary.com and, as I was randomly looking at different layouts and such, I found an ana(anorexic) journal.
I was captivated. She talked of tips she did...her struggle with weight. I saw a picture of an emaciated woman that she had and I wanted to be her. This became the image of beauty to me. Bones were beautiful.
So I started to starve. A breakfast bar in the morning, gum at school, and an apple and a handful of cereal when I got home.
My weight went down. People noticed. "You've lost weight." "Don't turn anorexic, Jamie."
I hated comments like that. I didn't feel like I had lost weight, so why were people telling me this?
The binging was still there, even through the starvation. My lust for food was like a bad habit I couldn't get rid of, and I did this every now and then. I had tried to purge a few times, but it never worked very well. I never got any instructions or anything...I just tried what I had heard, but I barely got anything up. It all seemed so disguisting to me at the time, so I think my fear of it all was what held me back. I took laxatives as a way to purge. I felt like a lowlife for doing this disguisting thing to myself, but I didn't care at the same time.
After my box of laxatives was gone (I didn't want to make my mom suspicious of me by asking her for more), I knew I had to do something else to control the binging I'd do about once a week or so...but purging still didn't work for me.
My weight went up again. I had to get the weight off somehow.
I remember this day like it was yesterday. I sat in front of the computer and ate almost an entire box of Better Cheddars, and I couldn't take it anymore. I went in the bathroom and tried to purge again.
I was so desperate...so frantic to get it out that I kept going. I tried different positions, from standing to sitting to switching hands.
Then it happened. That first heave of food came up. I did it again and again, tears rolling down my face, until the lining of my stomach was all that I saw.
I looked in the mirror, with my face red and my eyes bloodshot, and I felt...better.
After that I stumbled into my room in a euphoric state and fell asleep for a few hours (which wasn't normal for me, since I never take naps during the day).
My starving started to go away, and the binging and purging became easier. That euphoria was something I wanted more and more. The feeling of emptiness in my stomach...it was different than not eating for a few days. It felt as though all of the weight that had been put on my shoulders from school, friends, and family was all thrown away.
In the midst of my growing addiction, my mom and I really started to butt heads, so to speak. At one point, my mom and I got in a fight like the one we're in now. She was mad because I had only gotten her a purse for Christmas, and my brother had spent more money on a coffee maker...making my present unthoughtful. She didn't talk to me for 2 days.
I remember lying in the tub with bruised, bloody knuckles (from my teeth) crying my eyes out. Purging was hard sometimes, since my body sometimes needed a day of recovery, and I remember on that day I couldn't get anything up. I felt out of control again...
I knew this was becoming a problem when IAJE rolled around in January. While everyone went to lunch on that Saturday, I stayed at school, running back and forth down the hallways and up and down the stairs...I purged in the bathrooms at school and I felt like a lowlife; stupid and foolish. Yet I never thought of it as being bulimia. I felt like I wasn't worth being labeled with an eating disorder, since I wasn't like the "sick" people I had read about....the people who swallowed their toothbrushes from trying so hard to purge with it, or the people who drank detergent so that their stomach could be pumped to be free of food again. I wasn't like them, so I wasn't sick.
In March was when I hit my all-time low. I remember listening to music with tears running down my face, looking for websites about suicide help...because I felt that I was close to that point. I really didn't want to live anymore..I eventually fell asleep (crying so hard makes me extremely exhausted) and the next day I felt better. Like a weight had been lifted again.
It's interesting, getting to that point of wanting to end your life. You cant see the good in things anymore, even if you try, and that scares you. Happiness seems so far away that it isn't even a possibility or a goal...you just sit in misery, and at that point it feels like the only way you can get away from it is to die.
Just between you and me, the reason why I didn't want to kill myself was because I didn't want anyone finding my body. I thought of them having to take my clothes off and dress me for a funeral, and it sickened me.
Yeah, this was my twisted thinking at the time.
I'd have dreams about binging. I'd wake up in the middle of the night and almost get up to run to the bathroom to purge because I had thought that I had eaten an entire cake, when really it was all just a dream.
However, in all of this, I didn't want to stop. Recovery had never crossed my mind, and I never went to a recovery website even out of curiosity. I figured that if I kept my secret hidden that it would be okay.
I felt dirty when I purged in any other place besides my bathroom. I purged at a friend's house once, at Applebees, CiCi's pizza, the school a couple of times, and even in a plastic bag in my room. Every time that happened, I felt an incredible amount of guilt and shame...I cant tell you why, because I don't even know why...I was just guilty. I had to keep it at one area...one place that I could just isolate my illness at and keep it safe.
It was my one guilty pleasure...it was the one thing I kept behind my smile and my good grades.
My brother was put into the hospital after he tried to kill himself in April. I had to miss the premiere show for Les Miserables (which I was playing Trumpet in) because my mom had found out about his cutting. Then he tries to kill himself, and my dad comes down. It was hell, I tell you. Bulimia was my only escape.
I didn't talk to anyone about it anymore. I used to talk to a few close friends, but I completely cut that off. I'd just write in my diary. Every day I'd get up, take an energy pill and shake until 2nd period (side effect from the pill), come home and binge, purge, and then chew on ice and sit on the computer typing for the rest of the night. My diary helped me express the thoughts in my head. I was very open an honest on it, which was a break from feeling so dishonest around everyone in my life. Having a secret meant dishonesty to me.
I knew that something wasn't right with me...when I'd stand up, I felt dizzy and blurry for a few seconds. I had no idea why. Also, my skin had a sort of yellowish tint to it, and my nails looked a little purple. At one point I couldn't even get up the stairs to get to the media centre...I was so weak.
Garrett found my diary. He read it and didn't say anything for 3 days. I don't know why he did that, and to this day I don't know why he waited until we were fighting to say it. We were fighting about something, and he said it out loud. I was floored, since I had NO idea that he knew. My mom went nuts on me, telling me to swear that I wasn't doing it, and I just went in my room. She printed the diary and started to read it to me, telling me I was sick. I didn't know what to say. My entire world felt like it had fallen apart.
I hated it. Wade was still in the hospital, and I wanted her to focus on him rather than me. I still didn't think I was sick.
After that, my doctor diagnosed me with bulimia, and I found out that the dizziness was caused by anemia. My hemoglobin was so low that it could've killed people in their 40's. I was given iron pills and had to see a psychiatrist. She was a nice lady...but the sessions were $120 a pop, and we couldn't afford it. So I stopped seeing her, and my mom put pressure on me to recover.
I looked up the recovery websites I had refused to go to, and I read a lot about it. Most of it was common knowledge to me, but I read it anyways. I found out that I really was, in fact, bulimic (it hadn't sunk in until then).
I made an attempt. I really did. I stopped purging for an entire month, which was a lot better than purging 1-2 (sometimes 3) times a day. Yet my insecurities consumed me, and I hated it. Last summer was my recovery time, and it didn't work. My weight went up, and I was terrified of facing my friends. I didn't want them to think I was fat.
Now, here I am. I still purge...I wont deny it. Paula Abdul was bulimic for 17 years before she finally decided to recover. It's harder than it looks.
That state of euphoria...I crave it sometimes. It's still hard for me to eat things. I still cant eat in front of people. I still have nightmares on occasion.
When things get bad, I still run to it.
Yet that drive that I had in the beginning...that drive to lose weight and to be beautiful...to starve...it meant control. Control is what I still want to this day. Bulimia was always considered an alternative in my eyes, but Anorexia is what I wanted and still want. Is that crazy? I'm sure it is.
Joseph was a part of this. After I found out that he liked Jennifer Gasparri, I was so crushed that I had to stop eating. I wanted to be beautiful for him.
No, I don't blame it on him. It was my wrongdoing. That situation was just a trigger to a disease I had inside of me for all those years.
Now that I like someone and those feelings are coming back, I want that as well. I want to be beautiful for him. Maybe if he would like me, it would make up for losing Joseph...but knowing that he most likely doesn't makes me feel rejected all over again.
I just want to be confident again. Matt told me once "you're going to be that confident person you want to be." I don't know how to believe it.
I just want to be beautiful in another person's eyes. I want love that is requitted. I want true love...unconditional love...my family hasn't been like that, so I hope that one day I can find a man who will do that.
Is that wrong? Probably.
I feel like my connection with God is tainted because of the fact that I rely on something like this to give me comfort rather than coming to Him. That I rely on bulimia instead of Him. I know I shouldn't, and I'm working on trying to trust more in Him than this stupid disorder, but it's so hard.
Maybe one day I'll recover...and I'll find someone that I love who will love me...and maybe one day I'll be happy...
But today isn't that day...and tomorrow isn't looking good either.
:-\
I think I just want acceptance. I want someone who wont look at me and say I'm beautiful because I have cool hair or neat glasses or something...I want someone to see me. And to love me for it.
Acceptance.
I want to be me and know that it's okay...because I don't feel like it is.