I can’t work out whether I should be going forwards or backwards.
It is as though I stepped into a strange No Man’s land when I started getting ill, and closed the door on one life without pausing to look behind me. Before is strangely barren. Afterwards is a slideshow, spiked through with memories that scream.
I thought that I had frozen when time stopped, but separation is not that clean.
These come next.
(more…)
It’s easy to know when you have lost a physical item – it’s not there when you want it. Knowing that you have lost your identity is not so obvious. You don’t often pick yourself up before leaving for the office in the morning. You don’t often check to see that you’re still there.
You just wake up one morning and realise that you have got lost.
That all the things that made you you are not there anymore and that all the things that you have become and all the things that you do feel like they’re coming from somewhere someone else…..
An eating disorder is a gradual erosion.
It’s a chip chip chipping away.
A squeezing squashing compression; a slow, insidious takeover that removes all traces of an individual, erases all suggestion of an identity, dominates thoughts, actions, feelings….and articulates one devastating message: “without me, you are nothing”…..
It is a lie.
You’ve just got a bit lost along the way.
Time anaesthetises.
I’d forgotten how bad it felt.
I’d forgotten how many twists and turns an eating disorder can take.
8 years ago, I started looking at the whole process. My aide-memoire: captures the stuff that time heals; gives the whole process a bit of shape – from the first, fatal slip, to full blown subjugation; sheds a little light on how it happens.
Once an eating disorder – or, to make it more psychologically viable, the mindset of an eating disorder – is in there, then it can really start playing havoc.
It will tell you what to do and what to think and how to act.
It’s like your own personal Paul McKenna brainwash. It’s hard to switch off, good at shouting over you.
A quick recap.
Stage 1: Getting ill. You know that something’s wrong. A little voice in your head has made its debut – and the puppet on a string analogy begins to take shape.
Stage 2: A subtle takeover. The little voice makes itself at home. Word by poisonous word, it gets inside you. It talks its way into your head.
It’s a wily enemy – but it starts out as your internal friend. The perfect ambush for the next attack:
Stage 3: Consumption.
Two voices become 1.
You get eaten up by it.
