A Head Full of Beauty

"Why did you ask me out?" He paused for a few moments and considered his words. "Because I think you're really pretty. And I wanted to get to know you better." And on our fifth date, with those words, he dealt me another death sentence. Something inside me was desperately crying out for him to like me for more than how I looked. But of course I knew. It always is. Always. In my heart of hearts I know he is not the same, not as bad, not as soulless as the other men I'd known. But still, same enough in that respect. He tells me he thinks Miranda Kerr is really beautiful. Visions of her pencil-thin legs haunt me. I look at pictures of her and see I am twice her size. I choke. I have written about all the guys I've fallen for since I've been blogging but as yet have told you very little about Joe - the 'nice boy' mentioned in my last few posts. When I read my old posts about Theo, Alex, and all the others, it has served to give me ...

Being thin and beautiful does not make you happy. I rarely like to talk about other people I know in this blog, but I think this is a great case in point - an image of everything I do not want to be, and was so very nearly close to becoming... Two Friday's ago I went to catch up with a girl I worked with in my old job, Millie. She has long spiderly legs and a beautiful face. In a nutshell, she is thin and beautiful. I wrote about her first day in the office here . She can get any guy she wants, has men begging to take her out, dates a different guy every month, sometimes every week. This first time I saw her again since leaving that job, and she had invited me to a dinner party with some posh public schoolboy bankers. I don't want to write so much about the evening (which was a real non-event in terms of men) but more about her. She is 29, only left university the year before, had been very lost in life, and is still very lost in life. If God allowed me to name t...

I am fat. And yet, I'm the same size that I've been for a year. I'm not fatter. Shut up Ophelia. I have actually really been fatter than this - and I survived it. But I'm sure when I was fatter I was just as anxious and unhappy as I am now. My unhappiness is not a function of my weight. Oliver has disappeared off the face of the earth and while any boy would be likely to disappear off the face of the earth during his freshers at university, it left me feeling like a fat old woman. I can physically feel the grip of my eating disorder again. I can feel her hands around my neck, the all-consuming presence of her face in my mind, conscious of my fat body at every moment, seeing all the rolls, the spread, that face. The fear every morning when I have to get dressed, the fear of wearing trousers, a skirt, my bra digging into my back fat, my arms, my belly. Bend over and pinch the roll. It's not bigger...and yet it FEELS disgusting and out of control. ...

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...

I have neglected to talk about my eating disorder for a while. In some ways I feel like I don't have an eating disorder anymore because it has become so normal it barely hurts. On average I am throwing up once a day - of course at weekends this can often be up to three or four times a day. Being off work for two weeks between jobs was dreadful. While I had time to run between 6-20 miles a day, I also had time to eat and throw up several times a day. There was a period - April to May - when things really started to settle down. I was throwing up once or twice a week, my weight was stable, I ate breakfast, lunch and dinner... but I was also going to bed at 9pm and getting up at 5am, studying and staying safe, never going out, never drinking, never getting on to the stage... Weight wise I'm actually exactly the same. I have not lost or put on anything. But it all unravelled after I finished my exams, applied for the new position, got turned down, quit my job, begged fo...

Perhaps I was never in love with Theo, perhaps I was in love with a character I had created from the pages of the novels I had read and dreamt of. Part Heathcliff, part Sebastian Flyte, part Hamlet perhaps (though it feels sacrilegious even comparing them). But the passion and the fire and the pain were just... wonderful. God damn if I ever can experience that again... I wonder why I had loved Alex so much and clung on so desperately to him when it seems so glaringly obvious now that he could never have satisfied me? He is with a girl now, so perfect for him. I suppose, when I look at it from his point of view he had his fun, he ticked the box of going out with a wild one, then he went his way - the way he knew he always would. A lovely girl, plain, simple, safe, obviously lovely. Someone he can go on romantic walks in the countryside with, who will eat eggs and bacon and sausages with him in the morning. But Theo would never have satisfied me either. Satisfied my yearning to b...

I went out with Oliver last night. Wait, I'm starting the story too quickly. Let me take a step back. On Monday I started my new position. I am an 'intern' at an energy fund. At the time it seemed like a good idea. But of course it wasn't. I sit in a tiny office, with a few other people, all doing their own thing, all talking in another language... Most of all, I miss the markets, I miss the macro, I miss reading the newspaper in the morning and being exited to see how the latest crisis in the eurozone is going to make my day ahead interesting. Oh God, no one has ever broken my heart like the people who made the decision to turn down my application to move departments in my last job. How can it be that I work so hard and give so much and all I do is fail and fail and fail. How can they sleep at night knowing that they broke the heart of a girl who had been broken so much? What am I going to do, what am I going to do. No, really, what am I going to do? Get anot...