In bed

I started to cry as I forced another spoonful of cereal into my mouth.

I am too scared to stand on the scales. I am too scared to go to work tomorrow. I am too scared to go to my therapy session.
Oh God, I don't want to do it. I want to believe this is just the depression talking. I don't want to feel like this anymore. I don't want to... it is so frightening. The way I felt at the end of 2010, I swore I'd never feel it again... In my first post of 2012 I wrote that this would be the year. It's just another year of failure. My career thrown off the rails, my eating disorder back to its worst...Everything...I failed.

I can't start to comprehend how I did this.

How the fucking hell did this happen. I want to say it's not fair. But deep down I can only blame myself. I mean, it has to be me, it has to be me, what else is there, it must be me, evil and tainted and cursed.

I want to stop myself from sinking under, I know that I am a fighter, that I always fight my way back up to the surface, kicking and screaming for air. But, knowing that isn't enough. The here and now is too much, too painful.

God dammit, I just don't want to go to work tomorrow. I cannot bear it. I cannot bear to sit in front of my doctor again and try and tell her how awful things are. I can't.


I want to run away again, like I did last time, but further. I want to run away from the pressure, the memories, the people who remember me, the shops and the money, the men and their eyes, the application forms and failure, the women and their fucking judgement.
I feel so suffocated by my identity - because it is not connected to the heart beating in my chest.

I can't go away, I can't run, because I am tied here by my mother. As she has done for 24 years, she ties me down to my identity. I can't run away and give up because I have to prove THEM wrong, I have to show them how great I did without them and despite them. THEM. Alex, Theo, the girls from school, the pigs from university, the bastards I used to work for, the privileged City Boys I hate but don't even know.

"What did you do over the Bank Holiday weekend Ophelia?"
"Oh nothing really... I just lay in bed for three days." I shrugged my shoulders casually.
They looked at me almost confused and said nothing. My reply had been truthful and matter of fact; to them it was sad and awkward. They had asked the question politely with no expectation of receiving that sort of answer. And only when they looked at me in that way did I realise how sad and inappropriate it had been to say.
I have wasted so much of my life curled up in my bed unable to bear my life and my identity.



"As psychologists we believe that memory is the essence of who you are. We believe that unless you know where you've come from, you cannot place yourself in the present and then you cannot plan things going forward."