I forget this, though it would probably fall under my lessons about life category. Sometimes, there is a seismic shift in thinking or a way of being that is at odds with how big or small the movement is on the outside. Sometimes, one small step beyond your comfort zone can dramatically change the landscape.

It is too soon to tell where I will end up. Tomorrow brings another suitcase and another hall, and it is still very early days. I suppose this is yet another pause to catch my breath, and re-orientate myself before I move again. Now that I’m doing, rather than acting, I have moved beyond the fear; but I am yet to throw the anchor down and there is still a disconnect: travelling can be a lonely venture, especially if it’s mostly taken place in your head.

This might explain the yearning to come back here, the longing to ground myself in words and create a written bridge between myself and the world. It might also be because I want to share this experience as it’s been quite amazing. Like stepping through the next door.

So this is a reminder.

This is a reminder that, before I got lost under the panic, and before I started resisting the changes, which is always a recipe for disaster, I was so excited I could barely breathe. It is also a reminder that when I focus on the things I haven’t done in the past few months, I lose sight of how many great things I have notched up along the way.

The great things I have notched up along the way.

Six weeks ago, I was full of grand planning. There were visions of spontaneous holidays; mountains; a whole new blog; sea swimming…maybe even a night in a tent. They didn’t happen. None of them. And, while I have been listing all the things I should have done, I have overlooked some of the great things that have happened…

Like trips to the theatre and walking around London feeling that I was seeing everything through new eyes. Meals out with friends and afternoons spent crying over Maggie O’Farrell on the sofa. Zumba classes on Monday mornings that taught me how to swing my hips and made me smile. Spontaneous evenings out with new cocktails and new people, followed by lazy Sunday mornings and the unfamiliar sense of not rushing life along. My first period and a flicker of romance and the very overdue sense of enjoying being a woman. My two year binge-free anniversary. Watching films and drawn out cups of coffee and hours spent on Twitter just having fun.

Just having fun.

Before I got scared.

Fear deadens excitement. You get tangled up in it. Before I got tangled up, I was excited. Really excited. I forgot that until today.

I forgot that it was incredibly liberating to be following my heart and listening to my gut, rather than my head. That I was breathless excited about throwing myself down a new career path and seeing what I would learn along the way; about following a passion, rather than just going along with whatever cropped up. I was smile-when-I-talk eager and sleepless-night-looking-forward to moving down to London, and living the life that I skipped all those years ago. I was full of energy when I thought about the future, and full of optimism about where I might take my life.

Full of optimism.

I still am.

I’d just forgotten that I made the choice –

And overlooked that it’s not all change. Some things will still be the same.

Getting grounded.

I was going to write myself a post for a few weeks time, for if I was feeling shaky and needed a little pick-me-up. I don’t want to pre-empt this need though, so I’m going to leave this reminder here, instead, in case I wobble.

There are lots of things changing at the moment, but there are also things that will stay the same. Lots of variables that I have no control over; but some constants that I can hold on to, if I start to lose my way.

Like myself. I am still me.

And my friends. Who are still them.

And the many many lessons I’ve learnt over the past year, that won’t just disappear because the context changes, but will continue to help me find my way.

There are things that I can do, regardless of where I am, that will mean that I am still me; like talk, and tweet, and go to Zumba, and read Emily Dickinson in the bath, and spend obscene amounts of time chatting nonsense on the phone, and write, and learn, and watch Family Guy DVDs. And many more.

It will still be Autumn next month, and X-Factor will still draw me in, and the days will continue to get shorter, and I’ll probably still lie awake for hours at night –

Because though lots is changing, there’s also some stuff that will be the same.

Living on my own has given me complete control over food. At first, the control was warped into binging; but, for the past two (wow!) years, it’s been used to manage needing to eat. This is a distinct improvement, given the alternative, but it means that I’m still quite rigid with my meals. I cook everything from scratch, know exactly what goes where, and rely a little too heavily on things like scales to make food feel okay.

It sounds bad, but it’s the first time since I was a child that I’ve eaten three proper meals every day. I’ve got a routine that works and, okay, it might be a little isolating and, yes, it sometimes present a few barriers but, ultimately, it’s meant that I’m standing strong today.

Next week, I’m moving. For the first month, I’m staying with relatives and, hopefully, during that time, I’ll find a flatshare where I can stay more permanently. I definitely won’t be in control for the first part; and I have absolutely no idea what will come after that.

And so I’m scared.

I’m really scared.

I’m scared that it will be uncomfortable, and that I will have to confront the foods that I would normally manage to avoid. I’m scared that I won’t be able to check what’s going into what, and feel okay with what’s on my plate. I’m scared that the fear will get in the way of the adventure, and I will end up obsessing around calories instead. I’m scared by the sheer number of variables on the table… and I’m also sad. The relationship I’ve developed with food over the past few years isn’t that healthy, but it’s made it bearable to move away from the close ties we previously had.

I am not very good at giving up control.

I have held on to it with an iron fist ever since I got ill. If it has been taken away from me, than I have fought like a banshee; and, if I have given it away in a moment of desperation, I’ve always found a way of wrestling it back. The last few years haven’t been as destructive, but I’ve always been totally in the driving seat and I’ve never let anything – or anyone – wriggle their way in –

Only this is more important.

I am prepared to give up this control if it’s part of my future and necessary for my move.

I’ve just no idea how it’s going to work out.

It is a little hard to acknowledge these thoughts.

I’ve been digging around rather uncomfortably to see if I can find out what they mean…only I already know the answer. They mean that I have to stop pretending that I don’t care.

Over the years, I’ve picked up a particularly destructive little voice. It likes to tell me that I don’t care. “I don’t care what they think of me”; “I don’t care if they don’t like me”; “I don’t care what they say”. It is intimately entwined with the eating disorder; in fact, it is possibly the closest that the eating disorder comes to having its own voice.

The “I don’t care” voice has served a number of purposes. At first, I think it was a childish response to hurt or disappointment or anger: the kind of thing you say when you care too much. Later, it got a bit twisted, and the eating disorder commandeered it to pass through whichever behaviours it wanted me to act out. “I don’t care what people think” (if I am walking through the streets bingeing); “I don’t care if people stare at me” (because it looks like I’m going to collapse); “I don’t care if I am on my own” (because the eating disorder is more important than anything else). That kind of thing. At some point, the two parts merged: hit me with your worst world, because I don’t need you when I have food.

My eating disorder was my fuck off shield. It was marble hard and shoulder thick and cold as ice and absolutely nothing got through.

Nothing.

So, anyway, up until now, I’ve gone through any major transitions (and everything in between) with the protection of this rather warped shield. Yes, I’ve been nervous and things have kind of mattered; but there’s always been the food to immerse myself in and there’s always been a little voice in the background re-iterating the fact that it doesn’t matter what happens because “I don’t care”.

Only it does matter and I do care.

Bitterly, I care bitterly. I care that the job works out and that I do it well. I care that the people there like me and that I make new friends. I care that I’ll meet expectations and that it will all turn out alright…

I care a huge huge amount.

I have been kind of numb to this experience. I have dampened the panic with food and taken the edge off the caring with defence. I have prickled at people rather than left myself open and taken refuge in my eating disorder because it provided a place for me to hide. Or that was the illusion.

That was an illusion.

The “I don’t care voice” has not served me well. I get that it thought – at first – that it was acting in my best interests, but it has denied and weakened myself. It has pretended that I didn’t care about the things that actually matter, and it has inferred that I could not cope with the stuff that caring brings.

We’ll see.

This time I’m going properly in.

This isn’t a post about flexibility, though there’s an analogy in there about that. This is a post about life, because it grows, like a muscle, when it is stretched.

I did not realise this until recently. I viewed life and all the things it offered as finite and within eyeshot. I didn’t get that the horizon keeps expanding if you push beyond it; and that, though each experience and thing may be unique, there is an ocean of experiences and things to explore.

This opens everything up for me.

It means I don’t have to cling on to the particulars; and that the more I participate in life, the bigger it gets.

The muscle story caught my imagination because muscles seem to operate in a similar way: an initial twinge of discomfort when you stretch out of that comfort zone – and then the gradual extension and the wider reach that the action brings.

The past few months have been full of stretches. I have been pulling myself into new experiences and testing out how far I can go with life. When I started, I assumed that there would be a list to tick off as I passed through every first and each new activity. I also assumed that firsts and new activities were in short supply, so each came accompanied with a twist of loss. About half way through, something shifted, and I realised that there are always more firsts and they appear the further you go. Or grow.

It is like love. Find a little and tap into a mine.

Not rocket science, maybe, but something I didn’t appreciate until my life muscle became unstuck.

I guess this is normal.

The last trip contained a bag of clothes. Not the outgrown clothes that I still haven’t worked out what to do with; but a bag of paint-sprayed clothes that had come to signify the reclamation of my flat. After the first few months of not bingeing and once I was no longer focussing on just holding myself together, I re-painted every room. In an attempt to remove the associations and make it somewhere I wasn’t afraid to be, I washed over each food splatter and splash of vomit with Dulux Indulgence paint, ruining an old tracksuit and a couple of towels in the process.

I didn’t throw them away at the time because they seemed a lucky charm.

Some of the other stuff is less positive.

I have an envelope sitting beside me covered with Roger La Borde butterflies and mussel shells, swirled in deep reds and rich violet blues and slippery greys. It used to contain stationery, but now holds a few papers and photos that have, for me, become intrinsically linked with the butterfly and the mussel. See one, imagine the other.

I’ve had the folder for years, but now that I’m moving, I don’t know what to do with it. I never look at it, yet in some dusty dark corner of my mind, I’m aware that it’s there. I wondered if, by writing about it, I could smash some of its power; but, it has been hard enough to name the contents. A time-softened weight chart in old style percentiles; a card from the other kids in my first inpatient centre; a few photos of razor sharp cheekbones and hamster cheeks; some hospital bracelets; a rosy-cheeked child snapped just before she became ill.

I should burn it. I just can’t.

I also keep stumbling over notebooks where I have tried to write my eating disorder out. They are, typically, immaculately kept and severely edited, so the content is bland and unrevealing: lists of reasons why I should change and the advantages of going through the whole recovery process. Repeated references to just how scared I am – “I am scared of everything. My life has become this tightly ordered box yet I am even scared of the order. It scares me that I’m ruining my appearance and my finances, that I am wasting all the talents I have been given. I am scared of how I feel. When I feel tired and sick, I am scared. When I feel fat and bloated, I am scared. I am scared that I will stay the same and scared of changing.”

The words are dead. Some turn into lists of calories and foods – pages and pages of numbers, and prices, and intricate mathematical calculations, which was easier than writing through the fear. Some of them fizzle out after a few pages, so I am left with reams of blank paper, charged with all the things that I didn’t know how to say.

I have binned them, spare pages and all.

There are a few other bits that I’m not sure where to put. Some undrunk ensures from last year; a coat that reeks of the Royal Free; various ‘feeling diaries’ from daycare; Oscar, the teddy bear my Mum brought me when I agreed to supervision… When I am brave enough, I will probably throw them all, apart from Oscar. It will be bittersweet.

Part of me is saying that the next step is a blank canvas, a chance to start all over again. Part of me is scared of saying goodbye so finally, of really letting go and moving on. Another part of me is aware that I have a tendency to slash my ties with things; to cut out parts of my life when I don’t want to think about them – and I don’t want to repeat that mistake again. When I divorce from things absolutely, I always end up trying to get them back.

I haven’t reached a resolution yet. I think there will be a balance between keeping enough to remind me not to return and appreciate where I have come from; and letting go of enough to move on.

I hope that I’m not tricking myself into making it okay to cling on.

I am a little embarrassed by how basic some of it all sounds – but then I’ve always been better with theory and academia then I have with life. Hopefully this will tip the balance. If it’s down in black and white, it might also stick around a bit longer in my head.

It feels, as well, like an extension of my recovery; as though I can apply the principles I used to explore my relationship with food to understand my relationship with life. Or something. Anyway, today’s lesson has been….

One Vs The One.

At the moment, I’m looking for a flatshare. As the need to move creeps nearer, I’ve become increasingly ostrich-like about my efforts to find somewhere to live. I’m worried about sharing with other people, not that hot about packing my flat into boxes, don’t handle uncertainty well at the best of times…

On Monday night, I found “the one”. After two disappointing viewings last week, I visited a beautiful house on a tree-lined avenue, minutes away from the tube, and with three people that I quite easily spent the evening with. The sun appeared, birds started singing, the worries evaporated…and it was all going to be just fine –

Until a friend of one of the housemates needed the room.

Shit happens.

I belly-flopped.

Within the space of 48 hours, I’d pinned all my hopes on one house; written off every other property and flatmate in London; and dreamt up a whole new lifestyle based on somewhere I’d been once. Oh yes, and somehow managed to link my success as a person to whether or not the flatshare came through.

Huh?

This pinning thing is something I keep doing at the moment. Be it a job or a house or a boy or a new opportunity, I narrow my vision to such an extent that suddenly my world is rotating on a single point – and, typically, one over which I have little control.

It is most unsettling and something that I really need to stop.

They can be snapped like that.

My lesson number one is therefore about not putting all my metaphorical eggs in one metaphorical basket, or clinging, limpet-like, onto the first rose-tinted solution that comes along. There will be other flats and other people and other opportunities: I have just got confused between one and “the one”.

There are lots of ones.

And, as a brief reminder, they are totally separate from and non-defining of me.

I guess the difference between where I am and where I was a few months ago is in the level of feeling. Okay, I haven’t got the emotional regulation quite figured out yet, and I am still ricocheting between the highs and lows like a teenager; but I have let down the defences and gone with the unpredictability of life, rather than trying to keep it all ordered and boxed in. I don’t think I felt safe enough in myself to do this until now. I certainly still had a lot of crutches and support structures in place to make sure that I was okay.

I am okay.

Wobbling like hell and falling over multiple times on a daily basis; but, ultimately, I’m okay.

There have been some hard lessons in amongst the amazingness. I guess that this is why I think I needed to make sure that I was safe; that I didn’t respond in the way I would have previously, and play it out through food. I have learnt that there are lots of things that you can’t control and more variables than I could have imagined. That there are more disappointments when you engage in life and certainly more risks. That uncertainty is inherent, and fear doesn’t go away.

This is all okay too.

It is just the stuff that I would have learnt if I hadn’t removed myself from the world. I have no doubt that there are plenty more highs and lows and lessons to come –

Unexpectedly, I find it kind of exciting.

It is also confusing. The tireder I get, the harder it is to decipher between the worries – and the thoughts – and the random stuff that’s weaving its way in between. And so, I find myself tangled up in half-finished sentences and ideas. Jumping frustratingly from one theme to the next, and just making the situation worse because there’s no resolution anywhere.

Sometimes I try going through the alphabet with different topics. A is for Austen; B is for Bronte; C is for Camus; D for Dickinson. Other times, I repeat the names of the people that are important in my life. When I am calmer, I let my imagination roam and find myself writing myself to sleep. More often, I resort to counting the calories that I have eaten that day. Counting seems to help, though the object is clearly unhelpful.

My GP has given me a list of 13 tips for sleeping. They don’t include anything that has succeeded in switching off my head although some hardcore sleeping drugs we tried for a while seemed to work. I’m not sure that hardcore sleeping drugs is the solution that I am looking for though, and they don’t really address the over-thinking, nor the intense loneliness that kicks in when darkness falls and the rest of the world goes to sleep. This is the other part that I find excruciating. I feel less alone in the daytime then I have for years; at night though, it’s just me again, and I am scared.

No. I think I might be okay.

I know that bright-light Saturday nights are the flipside to the dark underbelly and something quite different from sweaty tubes and early morning commutes; but I am not the same person that walked these streets weighed down by an eating disorder, nor the girl that was unable to see beyond the threatening side. The City might not change but I have, or maybe I’ve just re-accessed a feeling that I had lost.

This seems to be happening rather a lot at the moment: the pre-eating disordered Issa seems to be coming back to life.

I used to love London. A million years ago before everything was complicated and twisted by food, I used to travel down on Saturday mornings for my music lessons. We got onto the tube at Kings Cross and I could always feel my heartbeat quickening as the sound of buskers echoed around the tunnels. A childish combination of pride and excitement and the sense of being part of something that I thought I had permanently lost.

Like so many other things, it is coming back.

I know that real life is not all bright lights and excitement and moments when the world seems achingly beautiful; but for the time being, I’m putting reality to one side and enjoying the experience of being alive. After everything being monotoned and monochromed for so long, I can’t seem to take enough of the sounds and colours in.