A Head Full of Beauty

So, that trip to Athens that I was raving about last week? Cancelled. As I arrive back at my flat on Tuesday afternoon having purchased 200 euros and two boxes of cereal bars I get a call on my mobile telling me that there's a strike at Athens airport and my flight out will be delayed by 24 hours minimum. The man recommended I get a full refund. So, I did, walked back into my cold little room and promptly scoffed both boxes of cereal bars in agony. So, no pretty photos from Athens. Just plain words from England. I finished my final essay in the end, handed it in a day late, and it was a pretty poor effort, but like I say, not really bothered, I just needed that final pressure off my shoulders. Yesterday I ate about 6 bowls of cereal, 4 slices of bread and lots of biscuits in a binge, and I actually have a physical tyre around my waist. I'm disgusting. Just sickening. I've been thinking recently about a guy I know - an old romance if you will - or well, it was a romance in...

Today has been one of those rock bottom days. I hate it when I get like this. All I can do is sleep. I can't do anything else, my brain just won't function. Even if I've slept for 12 hours straight, if I get up and attempt to do anything, I'm just overcome by an intense wave of tiredness. I've just now got back from a binge-trip to the local supermarket, scoffing a double chocolate muffin and a wholemeal bread roll. I feel really sick. I hate muffins! Anyway, the usual thing to do right now would be to kneel infront of the toilet and shove my fingers down my throat. Well, I'm not doing it. My teeth have been really sensitive of late and I know they're rotting away with the amount of vomiting that I do. I have got to stop. I have got to stop. I HAVE GOT TO STOP! All day I've just been craving to get on this blog and write about how empty I feel today. And I kept stopping myself. No one reads your stupid blog, I said to myself. It's pointless and stupi...

I have, of late, been living a reversed life. Reversed in the sense that I stay up all night and go to bed in the morning. I've had a mountain of deadlines this week and more next week for all my university assessments, and for some reason, I just can't work during the daytime but work incredibly well at night. More than this, however, I think there is also an underlying fear of daylight. I've had this phobia since I was in my mid-teens. I remember in the morning before I went to school, I would spend so long getting ready, putting my make-up on, covering each single blemish, then re-covering it, then re-doing my hair, and then changing it again...I keep on and on amending myself until I looked bearable. I was frequently late for school, not because I overslept, but because I couldn't find the courage to step outside. In unnatural light or in the evening, I usually can cope with how I look. If I look in the mirror while I'm under daylight or very bright light, I a...

"Bulimia is not a pretty disease. It does not bring the admiration of peers, as starving does. Writer's have spoken about "the moral superiority" of anorexia nervosa. Being able to starve is an "art" because it involves self-control. One feels so morally superior! Society admires starving women. Not so with purging out-of-control women! There is no moral superiority in throwing up your food after stuffing yourself."

Bulimia is not an illness; it's a way of life. It is my life. That is how I live it. Scared of food, obsessed with food, intoxicated by food. Eating it knowing that I will throw it up in a minute. Eating with that knowledge that keeps me safe - the knowledge that keeps me fat. Bulimia is like any disease in that it begins to define you. I choose to be defined by bulimia, and yet, it is not a choice. I choose to cut myself. Sometimes I grapple with my emotions and force myself to stop...but if the knife is there, it's so easy and everything gets better. And yet, when people ask me why, I cannot explain it. To other people, I am just a girl on pills, a girl who can't sleep through the night, a girl that writes strange things and sees the world in a different way. I am a girl with scars on her arms. I am a girl who thinks she is fat. A girl who worries too much. I am an attention seeker. When I went to therapy last year for my eating disorder, I made progress, but still I didn...

I’ve just eaten a plate of rice with soy sauce because I was craving the saltiness. There is now nothing in my shared fridge at university which belongs to me :) I binged on a packet of cookies and a tub of Ben and Jerry’s this morning, but didn’t even enjoy a single mouthful. It was just compulsion I think. Last night, at about 5am, wringing my hands in madness at not having any junk food to binge on, I walked a mile up to my local 24 hour supermarket and ate a Sneakers Bar and a whole loaf of bread (yes, a whole loaf) on the walk back home again. To tell the truth, I had gone to try and buy some sea salt as well in order to do my first salt water cleanse. I could only find yucky table salt and didn’t fancy torturing my body with that. So, tomorrow morning I intend to search all the health food shops and supermarkets that I can in order to find some real sea salt! I’ve put on over half a stone over the Christmas period, which is, for want of a better word, disgusting. This is the fatt...

‘Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?’ I have no right to write this. This is a silent cry. The memory is a blur. But I remember his few sickening words. I can’t write them. The buzz that night set me alight and I was loving it. I set the part. I looked the part. I played my part – to perfection. I recall just two brief snapshots of it - but I can’t write them. I can’t put those two moments into words. They are just two images, engraved in the forefront of my mind, and every waking moment they haunt me. There I was, there’s my picture, there I am. Somebody help her, somebody get her out, somebody, please, anybody! Why didn’t you tuck me into bed and kiss me goodnight. Like a father would. Don’t you know that’s all I want. Perhaps I hope that if I don’t write it, it won’t be true. Perhaps I’ll forget. The spaces of blackness make me terrified. Sick. Horrified. Find me th...

It is 3am. I am sick. I have just been on another massive binge. My third of the day in fact. This time, however, I cannot throw up. The sound would echo like a siren through the silent house. It would wake my mother. My stomach is bursting with sickness and I have to hold it in and bear its swelling in order to keep my secret. I have a knife here, on my pillow. I scraped off my dried blood from it about an hour ago and held its newly sharpened blade up to the light. It was beautiful. I stuck it into my thigh, but it hurt too much. I just want the marks. And now, suddenly, I am tired. When I was a teenager it was a way of life; it was the way I lived my life. Depression, anxiety, anorexia - they were all just words used to label other people - ill people. I didn't know anything about them. Now, I am them. These words have become labels for me; my new name. I am now a mental illness. I am bulimia. I am ill. I am a liar. I tell people I am fine. I joke about my illness. "Yeah, y...

I have many regrets.I have many memories of which I am ashamed.I am flawed in the worst way possible: I am weak. I am fragile. I am not always completely there. I cannot blame anyone for hurting me because it is my weakness that left me open to feel pain.I am unstable. I cannot expect others to hold me up. I cannot blame anyone for letting me fall because I should be able to stand on my own two feet without them. I am a girl with standard brown hair and brown eyes. My thighs are too big. My self-respect is too small. I am an identity. I am. A fragile. Identity. I am a hypocrite and easily prone to jealousy. I am always so jealous, because I am so insecure.I am broken and I am torn. I am stuck together with lies. I have scars in neat rows and a head going round in circles. Night is for nightmare. Day is for daydream. Ophelia is for someone else in the mirror. I hate the girl in the mirror. I do not blame you for hurting me. I blame myself for wanting you to make it better.I blame myself...

My father died when I was 11 years old. I suppose you could say that that’s where it all started to go wrong. Somehow, between then and now – a period of ten years – I have managed to leave behind one life for another and grow into a woman that I deny is truly me. When my Dad died, I was left with no-one but a mother who oppressed and domineered over every part of my life. I had no other family to turn to when in need. A few months later, I left the only friends I had ever known behind at Primary School and went to a new High School. This is when I also left behind the bright-eyed and confident child I had always been. It’s a difficult time for most children, but when I came home in tears, I found there was no one there to help dry them. Making new friends was hard, simply because I had never felt so lost in my life. The death of my best friend, my father, had hit me harder than I had ever realised. If I could go back, I would have taken the support and counselling that was offered to ...

In early 2008, I discoverd that I have Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD). Before I read up on it, I never knew it existed, and certainly never understood what it meant. Most of my friends were familiar with my insecurities and bad times over the years, and it had been such an established part of my life that I didn’t really question it or see it as a problem. I hated the way I looked and I was obsessed with losing weight - that was just the way it was. I didn’t see it as a problem; it was just the way I lived my life. Even when I was as young as 6 and 8 I remember specific instances when I broke down publicly because I felt so hideous and beat myself up for being fat. Those were the happiest times of my life, and I was super skinny then!! I should probably have picked up on my problems long before I reached 20. Of course High School was the ultimate horror for me. I would not get on the bus because I couldn’t bear people looking at me. I would cry in front of the mirror and claw at my...

This is my very first anonymous blog! I’m an addictive writer, absolutely obsessed with it, and have, until now, always posted onto blogs on my myspace/facebook, so obviously everything I wrote had to be completely censored. I always had to write so cryptically that I felt like my words were being smothered in cotton wool – making them safe and inoffensive to any of my poor friends that stumbled across them. There is no one who really knows the true extent of who I am. No one really knows who I’m talking about, or what they have done. No one really knows how I feel or what is going on inside my head. No one….except you! So, here is some brief background info on me. I am female, 21, in my final year at a good UK university (studying English Literature funnily enough!) When I am not at uni, I live with my Mum. My Dad died when I was 11 and I am an only child. I suffered from anorexia when I was 15, but managed to scare myself out of it before I got too ill. In the past year I have b...