Making Sense

This post is not about giving up, it's about admitting i'm struggling and making sense of accepting what i'm facing right now.

Hi, it's me. I'm back. 

It's been at least 2 years since I last submitted anything on here. I guess I no longer felt writing was something that helped me through the pain. A lot has happened in those 2 years. As I scroll through my profile, I pick up on the common theme of a severely depressed teenage girl. That was no longer me. I emphasise the was.

Here I am this evening, feeling everything slip from beneath me. I'll tell you what I've been through since I was last here. A journey of my life. I relapsed hard into the grip of my eating disorder, causing me to be the illest in it that I had ever been over the 7 years of diagnosis. I was admitted to a specialised eating disorder unit in October 2014. I struggled. I lasted 7 weeks. 7 weeks of fighting those around me that wanted to help, those who wanted to save my life. I didn't want recovery, my family and friends wanted it for me and that's never going to be enough for anyone. Recovery has to come from within, and well, it just wasn't my time, I wasn't ready to accept the state of illness I was in, so after depression and anger completely took over me and began to possess my actions towards my surroundings, I decided to leave. Within a couple weeks, the weight I had managed to restore had fallen back off and my mental state decreased to a level I had never been drawn to by my eating disorder. February 2015, I decided it was my time to recover now, to stop wasting my life and watching those around me move on leaving me behind left in a world of pain and unhappy endings. I cannot say enough how it has to be the decision of the one suffering the illness to recover before it happens. I knew that if I made the decision, nothing would stop me and it didn't. I learnt a huge amount about myself, I took a deeper interest in the way my mind worked and why it worked like that. 7 months later, September 2015, I was discharged and completed my treatment. 

It's not over and I thought it was. The hardest part of recovery is what I am facing now. I am managing my food, I am keeping the thoughts at bay, but I am not progressing in to the reality of living, into the reality of the things that if you think about it logically made me ill to begin with. Yasee, I can't function like most people can, I'm not lazy, I don't want to be sat on my a*s all day, I'm bored, I'm getting sad, but I cannot move forward. I suffer with an intense fear of work, this I am beginning to put together to be due to my intense fear of failing, or not being good enough. The ultimate low self esteem element. A lot of you may not understand how sever this actually is for me. It's physically sickening for me. Not only that, but I also suffer with an extreme lack of attention span, I decided to re decorate my room, it's take me 3 weeks and I've painted one wall, well, almost. That wall took me half a day of 4 minutes of painting followed by an hour of walking away from it because I just couldn't continue, I can not find the motivation. 

I attempt to volunteer at a play group I am comfortable in for 3 hours a week. Even those 3 hours it's too much. My mind drifts, I lose interest before those children around me do. When that happens, those 3 hours turn into anxiety filled minutes, where all i wanna do is go home, to you guessed it, nothing. I cannot sit at home day after day doing nothing, letting boredom increase, and thoughts of self doubt and hatred become more and more to fill the gaps. 

Today is the first day I have felt seriously sad in a long time. I thought this was it for me, I thought I'd turned a corner, and I think I have in regards to controlling my eating disorder, but I'm scared I'm never gunna be able to turn that corner that enables me to join society and be an everyday human. I know what I want to do, I know what I have a passion for so stop telling me I just need to find that one thing I'm passionate about. I know what it is, but I'm sorry, that right now, isn't enough to push every thought of self doubt and hatred down to allow me to pursue my passion. All I want from my life is to be faced with a 14 year old child, a 14 year old me, and make a difference to their lives. Make them see they're good enough for this life before they get older and experience more things that just engrain that self doubt in deeper and give them the pain that I have to face now. Even this imprints impossibility in to my mind, it's all I've wanted to do since I became ill, and now my thoughts turn to, what if I can never do that. What if I'm faced with these children and they trigger me. It's a reality that's there. If that happens, I would have nothing else to aspire to. That's a bloody terrifying thought.

This isn't me giving up, this is simply me turning back here to write and work out what is going on for me. This is the only way I know how. I'm terrified of slipping, and I will not let myself if i have anything to do with it. 

This may be what I'm feeling right now, but at the top of my list, I still wanna campaign, I still wanna help children, families with mental health problems, I just have to find my confidence. Please do contact me, write a comment or a review if there's any experience I can share with you. 

Author's Note

welcome comments