Old Writings... from the same head full...

How far back does my pain go?
I forget sometimes, how long I have lived with this... and no, my pain didn't always manifest itself in the shape of an eating disorder - or at least as ferocious an eating disorder as I have now.
I was trying to remember a poem I used to love... and it led me to search back into my old computer files to look through the poems and writing that I produced when I was 17 and 18.


It struck a chord with me.
The pain was the same back then.
I just hadn't learnt to channel it through my relationship with food.
I never got better, I never got happier, I never found what I was looking for...
I just got worse; I just got older; I just wasted more of my life.


19th May 2006
I am so scared. I am so lost, and so confused. So many times I have been falling, and sometimes I have even been soaring, but right now, I’m on the outskirts of a whirlpool, spinning rapidly, awaiting to be sucked into oblivion. I’m just swirling round and round, feeling sick, with only a blur of my surroundings. I’m not heading up or down, and I have no control of it. For the first time in my life I have complete uncertainty of what lies ahead. It’s not my usual clear cut case of total despair and hysteria or the dreamy promise of joy and success. This time, I cannot taste either happiness or sadness ahead. I have no idea where I’ll end up, what to choose, what is right, what is best, or even what I want. Everything that I held so sure has gone, and I’ve no idea when I lost it, or where to find it. I am so scared.



I want to be safe again, to be held in the warm arms of someone who loves me unconditionally. I miss that so much. But yet I sit here spurning the greatest love I ever had. And for what? I’m pursuing a love that I’m not even sure I want, and am almost certain doesn’t exist. I just wish some greater power could reach out to me and tell me what I need, who I need. But like always, I’m all alone. Just a little girl lost, and don’t know which hand to take or which sign to follow. I am so scared.


I left school today – the place I blame for learning to hate myself and fear myself. The corridors I walked were long and menacing and I stood three inches tall against every doorway. But now I’m out. And though this means I will grow from strength to strength for the first time as a person who I love to be, I’m still frightened, because it’s been so long since I stood completely outside my prison walls that I don’t know if I can survive. Maybe I am too weak, or the scars are too deep, and I will never be anything but a girl I hate to be. I am so scared.


I don’t understand why God made me a human sometimes, or why he put me here on earth, because I seem to struggle with everything he puts before me. Nothing about life makes any sense to me. However much I try to make it work, there is just something stopping me from embracing existence. Sometimes, it feels like everyone else is just living out their lives through the good and the bad, but I am on the outside of my life, looking in at their world and wondering how to be a part of it - and I so desperately want to be a part of it - and I am so scared that I never will be.

 
I never got out. At 18 years old, on my last day at high school, I was already on the wrong side of the mirror. I've never found my way out.

When I was 17/18 I predominantly tried to write poems. Please forgive the putrid lack of depth in my writing; I am no poet. It took me these few years to learn that my gift for words lay not in poetry but in prose. But still, you can see the fear I wrote of.
I'm not sharing these with you because I think they're any good - in fact I find my juvenilia positively embarrassing - I want to remind myself how far back it all goes. This didn't just 'happen'.



Anything - 22nd March 2005


I’d do anything
To take back the hell I’ve made.
Mistakes sulk by the footsteps
Of the path I walked
The path I walk still.
I see them looming,
Jeering,
The past exists just to haunt
Like a banshee screaming
All my humiliation
In all my desperation
I smother my ears
And gouge my eyes,
And though I choke my senses,
The laughter scoffs louder
The aching stings harder
Until all I desire
Is to cut them down.
Hack.
Hurl all the pages of my past
All the dried ink written in my hand,
Drown it all in the fire
Of the hell I forecast.


I’d become anything
Just to belong
Somewhere
Don’t care
Just here
I don’t fit in,
So I’m out in the cold
Where I’m losing my hold.
But I’m gripping so hard
That I’m breaking my fingers
And the breathing’s so hard
That my grip barely lingers,
But I hold anyway
Don’t know what for
Don’t know for how long,
Just in that one hope that I’ll make it
To any place I belong.
 I’d give anything
Took my sanity already
Nothing left of value
To hold on to
To keep me steady.
My face is a silhouette
Whose features they design
My life Russian roulette
In their tangled outline.
But if I begged and begged
Would you release me?
Would you deny, that if I try
To cry and cry,
Then weeping the tears
Would make me feel lighter
Since no-body has no concern
For a fighter.


Anything
You say,
I’ll do
I’ll become
I’ll give
Just for one
Single


Something.


All the way back to 2005. Aged 17.
No one ever knew.
No one had any idea.
I was 17, I was white, I was female:
I was a drama queen.




So why have I not grown up?
Why?
I can see now, I'm not ill.
I've always been like this.
It was here in my head long before I learnt to stick my fingers down my throat.
It was crawling inside me long after I tore up the sheets of calorie lists.


I am 22 years old. It is 2010.
I'm not going to get 'better' am I?
This is me. This is who I've been all my life...
what do i do

I've considered, maybe I turned to an eating disorder when I was 20 because I'd finally had enough, I wanted to self harm, I wanted to die, slowly.