“Anger is sadness that has had nowhere to go for a very long time.”

Unknown

I feel like I should be honest here, if nowhere else. I also feel like you, my dear friend, should know what you are getting into. Please do not look if you struggle to be kind to yourself – I know my thinking is wrong, disordered, and I wouldn’t wish it to spur anyone else’s.

I am quite unwell. I have spent a long time, a portion of it documented here, feeling uncertain of nearly every aspect of my life. I am uncertain of nothing now – I know that I am not enough. Or maybe I am too much, but when it boils down, does the distinction really matter? There is something in me that cannot mesh well with others. I am unhappy being myself, and I am unhappy changing myself to fit with what I think people want.

I’ve struggled with disordered eating for longer than I haven’t. It has always been painful in opposite directions, too much or not enough (how eerily familiar), and it has come back in full force this time. I am entirely convinced that this body, every inch of it, is uninhabitable and unlovable. Maybe not in that no one could love it, but in that I could never allow it. No one could convince me, not with words, with actions, with anything, that there is anything worth loving here. I have handed myself over to this hope and been destroyed by it. I cannot survive it again.

When I do not eat, it fills something else within me. It makes me feel like I am 11 again, 14 again, 19 again. I am in control of something when everything else is out of my hands. It is almost like sinking to the bottom of the pool. The blurred silence, the transcending of space, the warmth of the water holding you like the womb. There is something in this that I have known before, that is welcoming me back. I am sinking, but I am the water, too.

What of romance? A deathly craving. The sharp desire to be known and loved regardless of what they find. When this expectation is not met, the result is devastating. I feel as though I am spiraling out of myself. I can’t grab hold of anything. When I experienced my first real heartbreak as a teenager, the pain was so palpable that I could hold it in my hands and beat it to a pulp. I could feel so vividly, so immensely, that the overwhelming nature of it withered at the feet of my fire. But then I picked everything back up. I got older. I pushed all of the pieces back together and stapled the skin so that, hopefully, nothing would look out of place. To see it all come apart again was nothing like the first time. It was not a wild understanding of how humans were able to hurt each other. It was a reminder. It somehow hurts worse, this time.

I don’t know what to do with myself. I would do anything to escape this place, but there is nowhere to escape to.

Best wishes to you,

G.D.