There’s maybe a few more boxes and then it’s good to go.

I was asked, on one of my posts, if I knew the reasons for my current relapse. This separation is one of them. I am bad at goodbyes at the best of time but this farewell feels particularly challenging. It is entangled with my eating disorder and my recovery; and, even though the move is something I desperately wanted, I am still experiencing the wrench.

So this is a post about my flat which isn’t, I admit, the most interesting of blog topics; but it feels like something I need to write through in order to let go. It is an acknowledgement of the sadness that I am currently trying to throw up because I’m still not sure where to put it; and also of why my flat was so important to me.

From institutionalisation to…a little flat with sloping ceilings and the most amazing view.

My flat was my first home post a three year stint in rehab that had been preceded by a few years peppered with admissions, and a temporary move back to my parents’ home in between. I had become accustomed to NHS walls and signs about the hand basins; and, suddenly, I had a space that was all my own.

When you’ve been looked after for a long time, it’s strange to make the move back into the “real world”. Difficult to not wake up to a knock or know that, at the other end of the corridor is an office filled with people who can help –

My flat was the transition.

It taught me about responsibility and it helped me to start to care.

DIY Queen

During the first few years, my eating disorder remained particularly active, and my flat became the place that I binged.

I had thought, which I finally managed to break free of the bulimia, that it would be impossible to break the associations; but I found that my flat could actually help –

And so, for the first few months, I painted myself into recovery. Each evening after work when I would historically have been bingeing, I picked up a paintbrush and worked my way around my flat. I discovered – and carefully filled and concealed – every crack and hole in the walls; knew where the dents and curves were; painted over the food that had splattered up the walls beside the TV where I used to crouch –

And made myself a home.

My home

Last year, my house became a home. It became a place where I could invite people (because there wasn’t food hidden in every spare storage space), and share with people (because I was learning, for the first time, how to share meals), and feel safe, and secure, and warm, and all those things that are really important….

It also helped me to find me.

Each chosen colour was an act of self-discovery; each arrangement of furniture or selected picture or carefully constructed painting or stack of books, was a step in the journey to discovering what I liked as a person. To creating a place that represented me –

But was, as I’m beginning to realise, only one step in the journey.

Moving on

I have done things in reverse. Have gone from living alone to flat-sharing, from building a home to a room that will never be mine.

The upheaval has thrown me more than I expected; the sense of loss, been hard to vocalise – but only because it is new. Only because I have carefully re-entered the world and now I am moving out of this first gentle re-introduction.

This is, I keep reminding myself, not about rooms and roofs: it’s about opening up my world and truly moving on. The learning remains, even if the things that assisted it do not.

30 years is a long time to spend in one place. Ironically, I never wanted to remain where I grew up before I became so ill. It was one of those twists of fate where circumstances dictated the outcome, and I wasn’t in a great position to move on.

Writing this post has reminded me of this. Of the hopes and aspirations that exist alongside the sadness. Of the feeling of being trapped that characterised my life, even though the freedom has knocked me sideways.

I don’t want to go back, despite the sadness. I just haven’t quite got used to what’s next.

I am in my flat. I find a door that I haven’t noticed before and discover three or four unexplored new rooms. At first, the rooms are dated and unwelcoming, and two of them are kitchens, often filthy and filled with food. The dreams are deeply unsettling and I wake up feeling displaced and like something has tarnished my home. Eventually (over a few years) the rooms change and become full of amazing things– like a piano or a spectacular view or a fireplace – and I wake up a bit disappointed that they don’t really exist.

I was telling a friend about this dream when it was visiting me, nightly, and she interpreted it as symbolic of self discovery. As mirroring the process that I was going through of uncovering new parts of my self –

They are there, waiting: it’s just a question of seeing what’s behind the doors.

I have been struck, recently, by this notion of the self. That we might only know the areas that we have already opened, and there are therefore parts of ourselves waiting to be unlocked. It suggests that there is a step beyond self awareness or consciousness which, when I have let go of the knee-jerk fear, is kind of exciting…

I have had three half written posts on my desktop for a while now. This was one of them. The second was a link. I think they are connected. The link goes to this quote:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us”. (Marianne Williamson).

The quote holds me hostage. It is so exactly how I feel – and have felt – that I was too overwhelmed to mention it, at the time. It captures the moment just before I went into self sabotage; and, possibly, is uncomfortably close to what I am feeling now…
The third post was about last weekend. I went dancing, last weekend, on the spur of the moment. It was a sparkling night when I was unusually spontaneous and, for a short time, deliciously carefree. It struck me, as I woke up the next morning, that all the rules and limitations that I have been living by are self imposed. That it might be okay, just for a little while, to wander with no direction and learn what it feels like to relax and have fun….

I think I am on the edge of letting go.

Not there yet, but nearly.

I think I have been trying to stamp out any potential or, at least, iron cage it – and I am curious, now, about what would happen if I stepped out of the constraints. The possibility makes me slightly shaky and might explain why the struggle has stepped up a notch over the past few months…

I can stamp it out, again, as I did however many years ago. Or I can take a deep breath and adventure on.

Practice.

She is spot on. What happens when you’re not hiding from the world, for whatever reason and through whichever medium, is that you get to practice being with other people and learning how it all works.

I am still catching up on this bit.

The conversation stayed with me, not least because it gave me an action plan for tackling an area that has felt, recently, like a closed off brick wall; but also because it highlighted the other stuff that goes on around the analysis.

Self awareness is not something I lack – its practice that I’m short on; and, unfortunately, the two don’t equate. Lots of one will not compensate for a little of the other – and the interaction between thought and action can change the direction again.

This is what recovery taught me, although the lesson was a long time coming.

You can not think it out.

It gets easier with practice.

It can feel, before you start practicing, like you will never be able to make it to the end – but doing moves you forward, and the movement changes the knowledge and the perspective that goes in.

I guess the same is true for other areas of life. That there is a bit beyond analysis where you just learn by experience. Where you have to accept that you can’t think life out in isolation and you have to realise that practice is part of the process –

Rather than waiting until you’ve figured out all the gaps.

I am not sure where I am anymore.

From the moment she woke up, to the moment she went to sleep, it either dominated her thoughts or tugged at the edge of them so that, in returning to the thought, she realised she’d been thinking about it all along.

It has only been two years since I actively moved towards recovery, and the length of time before this is obscene.

She could not imagine a life without food, though this life of food was a slow kind of agony; nor imagine any other kind of relationship, though it was unlikely that the eating disorder was really her friend.

I was talking about recovery last week. About how I moved from one life into another. It left me shaken. I am unrecognisable, even to myself. I walked back towards the tube, after the conversation, and realised that I do not know, at the moment, who I am. I am not the girl who was paralysed by the thought of eating a piece of toast or planned her binges as she fell asleep, only to wake the next morning to start the whole agonising process all over again –

And yet for so many years this was me.

And so, I am stuck in this strange disjoint between a life characterised by

Fear. Please don’t make me eat because the fear is unbearable and frustrating because if you ask me to explain it I don’t know that I can

And

Loneliness. Because if I let people in, they might try and stop me; so I will reach out in desperation and then flinch if you come near, until I’ve worn you out and proved that I’m somehow made up all wrong

And

Despair. Because nothing else matters. Nothing else matters. And I will be okay as long as it is just me and the food.

And chocolate wrappers hidden in CD cases, and clothes smeared with food, and thick woollen tights to keep the cold out, and the rubbery squeak of hospital sheets, and the heavy shame that avoids eye contact, and the effort that every single moment saps, and the horrible significance of weight, and shape, and a quarter of a kilo either way –

None of this makes sense to me anymore.

And yet it was me.

I stood on the platform at London Bridge waiting for the district line. It was the tail-end of rush hour and, plugged into my headphones, the clashing of selves made everything, and everyone, seem unreal. It felt like, in the act of laying one life beside the other, I had slipped down the gap in between. I find it hard to relate to the old Melissa and yet there is an air of shiny unfamiliarity in how things now are.

I don’t know if any of this makes sense.

I don’t know if I can capture how incredibly different I am now, from how I was then.

Maybe there is a lag between shooting yourself forward and growing into where you have arrived? Maybe the transition from then to now took place emotionally, before it took place physically, so it feels like a sudden surprise but the clogs were slowly creaking into motion before the recovery begun? Maybe this is all normal, it’s just the extremity of the difference highlights the process?

Maybe we only find ourselves when we let go of the need to know?

Once upon a time, there was a girl.

Maybe this is part of the self discovery: a shift away from the need to define or find.

Once upon a time, there was a woman.

Maybe it is enough, for the moment, to appreciate that I am growing, instinctively and authentically, and still exploring who I am.

No longer defined by food. No longer trying to be definable.

And so this is me.

I’m not sure why and I can’t work out what happened; but, at some point, I got scared about being okay. I worried that I’d be nothing if I was ‘normal”, that I was letting myself go because I was letting myself enjoy life.

And so, I put the brakes down. Hard. I re-erected the walls and re-instated the rules. It was not okay to be okay.

We know what happened.

I ended my last post before I reached the end. The moment of insight that had been eluding me has finally clicked into place. This re-animation is the same as I felt at 17 – only this time I’m not afraid of it. It is alright to be okay.

The inspiration that I have been waiting for has stalled and is yet to catch up with me. Any insights that might prompt a blog post are suspended, somewhere, far above me; so, for the moment, all I can say is, “I am okay”.

I think this is enough.

I think, in fact, that it’s more than enough. It is a giant breakthrough in the light of my previous aversion to the flatness of okay-being, and a million miles away from the terror I felt a few weeks ago. It is also totally alien to how I typically am –

I have absolutely no idea what I am thinking and haven’t yet found the time to analyse everything that’s going on. I’m sure that will come…

But, for the moment, I’m getting up as the sun begins to rise and getting used to the hum of planes flying across from Heathrow. I am smiling on the way to my Putney Bridge bus stop, because the river makes me excited and I like feeling part of the trainer-clad suit-wearing crowd. I have found that I can actually eat breakfast when I arrive at work which is something I never thought I’d be able to do; and that it is okay to stray away from my old morning routine.

It is okay to not live by a routine.

And so, I am coming back into London as the commuters go out; and the drawn out bus ride is one of my favourite half hours, because it gives me time for Twitter and it helps me to wind down. I have gone ‘home’, on some days; and, on others, I have found myself haphazardly wandering through the tree-lined side streets and noticing things that I didn’t notice when I was here before, even though some of the areas between now – and then – overlap –

This is okay, too. I am not who I was then.

I am not who I was then – because I have been able to eat supper with friends, without worrying what’s on my plate whilst the conversation fizzles out around me; and, I have let my Aunt cook me supper, and found that I can manage okay. I have come home at 7 on some nights – and at 10:30 on others – and, regardless of the time, or situation, or how I am feeling, I have ultimately been okay –

This has been the fear. That I will not manage. That I will not be okay.

I might be a little lost for words at the moment, but I think that I’m doing okay.

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.

There’s stuff going on in my head that I can’t quite seem to work out. Passing snippets that have paired themselves off without quite explaining the pairing, and insights that still remain partially hidden. There is one common thread. It is the word fear.

Fear.

I’m scared.

Belly scared. Paralysed scared. Scared silly….yet not quite sure of the source (there’s so many); nor, if I’m honest, of the emotion (it’s just what I always feel).

Some people say that excitement is the flipside to fear. If this is the case, I wouldn’t recognise it as such because I have only referred to the experience with one word….

Fear.

And me.

Me and fear go way back. For as long as I can remember, I have been scared. Scared of people (who might not like me, or might try and hurt me, or might be out to get me). Scared of change (which might lead to failure, or end in disappointment, or feel different from that which has come before). Scared of living, loving and losing. Scared of feeling, wanting and hoping. Scared of getting it wrong. Scared of getting it right. Scared of not being able to cope.

You get the idea.

Fear has been my default setting, or so I’d come to believe…

It might, upon reflection, be more accurate to consider that the default is the belief that I should be scared.

Seth Godin’s rooms

I said this would be random.

I was reading a post from Seth Godin’s Blog which talked about rooms and moods (and brands and lots of other interesting things). My head has decided that the post belongs with my consideration of fear. There were two sentences that stuck. The first occurs in relation to an analogy of emotions being like rooms -

“But most often, we seek emotions out, find refuge in them, just as we walk into the living room or the den.”

And the second, about the feelings evoked by experiences (again, described in terms of rooms) –

“…it’s something you choose to do, because going there takes your emotions to a place you’ve gotten used to, a place where you feel comfortable, even if it makes you unhappy.”

I wonder if I do this with fear? If I keep entering the fear room because it’s an emotion that I’ve become accustomed to; one that I am familiar with and able to define.

Why fear?

Seth acknowledges that we sometimes go to emotions that aren’t very comfortable and this would certainly describe fear; so, the next question in my random chain of thinking is why I would gravitate to a state that is so paralysing and has caused me such distress. Where, in other words, is the comfort, for me, in fear?

Time to get uncomfortably honest.

Maybe if I’m scared, then there’s a safety net for failing? Maybe if I build up life into a series of insurmountable challenges, I have a little get-out clause if it goes wrong? Maybe I was scared by one thing and blew it up until it took over the world? Maybe I caught the fear, like a virus, and it stuck? Maybe being scared lets me bury my head in the sand? Maybe I don’t have the emotional language to describe the feeling in any other way?

The flipside to fear

One of my dearest friends is always reminding me that excitement is the flipside to fear. The same emotional experience – just a different way of referring to it.

When I was thinking about my current fear (an imminent flat move) earlier, I felt the little flutter of potential and a gasp of energy, which might be what she was talking about…..

Only, I am also a little scared of excitement. It raises an expectation – so then you can get hurt.

Oh dear. Round we go again.

It takes longer than a couple of hours contemplation and 639 words to change a lifetime of believing that “I’m scared” –

But it takes about a second to ask whether there might be an element of choice in the experience – and whether the vocabulary actually fits.

Read the full post: The places you go

WHAM

Like a cartoon character with the tweeting birds and my head twisted 90 degrees, I have fallen flat on my face.

Ouch.

I am waiting for the birds to stop tweeting and the dust to settle before moving to vertical.

I think this is the downside to my up. The highs are electric and energising, and the lows leave me gasping and stunned. I have not mastered the art of walking the middle ground yet, nor fully acknowledged that life is yang and yin: a little bit of good and a little bit of bad with the beauty lying in the contrast. Nope, the centre still needs a bit of bolstering and I keep ricocheting between the two.

This is, I think, probably inevitable. Up until this point, my strategy has been to neutralise, negate or control. To remove myself from opportunities of excitement, and pleasure, and enjoyment, because their loss is almost unbearable; and to plaster over the downs with eating – or not eating – or thinking thinking thinking it all out. For many years, I opted out of life all together; then, I created my own see-saw in a daily routine of bingeing and purging: high, followed by low, but with the knowledge that tomorrow it would be the same again.

Round and round we go but at least we know the end….

Life does not work like this.

There are glorious rainbow-coloured ups where everything seems wonderful and connected and full of potential, and then moments when it’s really rather black. The difficulty, for me, is keeping my feet on the ground when I’m exploring the magic and also when the grey clouds start moving in. It’s about accepting that sometimes it is neither stormy nor golden, but somewhere, cloud speckled or slightly overcast, in between.

It is harder than I anticipated.

You have to be exposed to the storm, maybe, in order to appreciate the rainbows; but then, you also need to remain standing, come rain or shine. At the moment, I am still at the mercy of the weather, and haven’t quite adjusted to life’s ups and downs.

“I am angry nearly every day of my life….but I have learned not to show it; and I still hope to learn not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do so.”

(Chapter 8, Louisa Alcott)

For anyone who has not read Little Women, it’s the story of four sisters: Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, and written in the 19th century.  I can only remember the plot in fragments; but it is hung on the girls’ characters, and their presence, for me, persists. Meg is the eldest and most sensible; Jo, a hare-brained creative; Amy, blonde and pretty; and Beth, goodness incarnate.

Gentle, kind, sensitive, selfless and slightly needy; everyone loves Beth. And that included me.

The quote came without a context and my copy is buried in a box somewhere; but, reading it last night, I was immediately bristled by the sense of repression and control. The idea that emotions like anger (or desire, or want, or frustration) should be squashed – and then negated – seemed uncomfortably strong.

I could write a whole post on anger and the difficulties I experience in relation to it; but it is the idea of squashing and re-shaping myself that has remained in my head this morning, along with the realisation that I have always tunnel-visionned myself into Little Women like stereotypes. That I have, historically, believed that I need to be a Beth or an Amy or a Jo – when in fact, we are a mishmash of characters and qualities, alike and unlike everyone else.

At 8, I unsurprisingly lacked this insight.  I was terrified that instead of being like Beth, there was far of me that was like Jo.  With a tendency to fly off the handle and the shared dream of being a writer, this was probably quite an astute recognition; but being universally adored was far more appealing – and so I decided to model myself on Beth.

This meant that my list of New Year’s resolutions included things like: be nice to everyone; be good; do one kind thing every day; don’t get angry with people – and included little space for just being me.

Inevitably, this caused all kinds of self-acceptance problems…

I believe that people can change, and improve, and develop – but the starting point needs to be yourself, and not someone else.

I’m only just beginning to realise that I am not, nor will ever be, like Beth – and that’s okay. That there will be similarities between me – and Beth – and Jo – and this person – and that person – but variety is what makes the world go round. There is not, as a younger me believed, one definitive idea of a “good” or a “bad” person –

Just lots of individuals in between.

Related Posts: Formative Fiction and “Good” Food.