Erosion @kiriise - Tumblr Blog

mitten

who were you?

(by Owlgardens)

wet shape. by BRYAN M. FERGUSON Via Flickr: Website / Twitter / Vimeo / Cargo

love-personal

Most people think of their first loves and crushes fondly, but my memory fills me with shame and fear. When I overheard the words, "how could I like someone like that?" slip from his lips, I felt the inadequacy wash over me in a way that I still feel in trembling waves to this day. The laughter of his friends echoed in my head the first time I stared down into the toilet and slipped my fingers down my throat. I prayed the fan was loud enough to cover the gagging and splashing. As I heaved, disgust and relief mingled with the bile and blood. You never forget the first time.

As a slightly chubby tomboy who stuck to reading books and playing games, I was all too aware of how unsightly I was compared to the girls at school who began to wear makeup and cute clothes. The binge eating and purging started in middle school and eventually evolved into obsessive calorie counting and starving in high school. Freshman year of high school I was at 105 lbs and eating about 500 calories a day. I was at my heaviest in college at 137 lbs from drinking myself blackout drunk almost every weekend. The rest of my days were spent getting high by myself and eating nonstop. Now that I look back on it, that was the only time I sincerely did not give a shit about what I ate.

The cycle started again when I met some people from League in real life and they told others that I looked better behind a computer screen. I'm still terrified of meeting people in person and I feel all my pictures make me a borderline catfish. I have never felt that I'm genuinely pretty or skinny enough and hearing that reawakened the self disgust. Summer of '15 began the obsessive calorie counting and starvation mode again when I went to Korea. I wanted to be as skinny as all the girls there and I felt huge and plain in comparison. I was eating about 500-800 calories a day and felt so proud of myself for staying within that limit. I went from 137 lbs to 118 lbs within 3 months. I think this period contributed greatly to my Crohn's flaring back up when I got back home. I cut off contact with the few people I did talk to and stayed holed up at home where no one could see how ugly the pain made me. It'd come and go like a storm. I would lay in fetal position drenched in sweat and cry multiple times a day. I couldn't sleep for longer than 3 or 4 hours at a time and I was constantly exhausted from throwing up and losing blood. In the dark of those nights, I wished for death more times than I can count. It felt so cruel that I'd have to live with this without a cure. Months passed and treatments and medications failed. At a time where my old friends were graduating and getting salaried jobs, I was stuck in a vegetative state where I lost any and all motivation and passion I once had. The only thing at the time that could control the inflammation was Prednisone. The side effect of it was that it made my weight skyrocket up to 130 lbs. My face was inflated to the signature Prednisone moon face. I felt so insecure when I went to meet my online best friends for the first time because they were so tiny and beautiful. I truly felt like the ugly and fat friend that somehow ended up in the group. That trip has so many happy memories, but it makes me uncomfortable to look at the pictures we took. A few months ago, I found out that a group of guys I was friends with posted those pictures in Discord and said I was fat and didn't look like my selfies. That was the first time in a long time that I cried for hours. I avoided looking in the mirror and taking selfies and began exercising and calorie counting again. I started working out in April and stuck to mostly cardio. I was doing 60-100 minutes of elliptical 3-7 times a week. I thought I was doing good by being consistent and trying to eat healthy, but it's not really sustainable to do only cardio the way I was doing it. I got down to 115 lbs and plateaud. My solution was to go on keto, a super restrictive macro based diet. I got down 111 lbs but again, it wasn't sustainable. Instead of counting calories, I was obsessively counting macros and constantly thinking about what I would be eating. I missed carbs too much and shifted my diet back to calorie counting. At the time, my period came and I went on a binge eating spree the entire week. I gained back all the weight I had lost and was back up to 120 lbs. I had a breakdown and made myself throw up 3-5 times a day for a week straight. The sides of my mouth were ripped from forcing my hand down my throat so many times. The skin of my knuckles peeled away and bled over and over again. The scabs are still there as a reminder of what I did to myself. I meal prepped yesterday and promised that I wouldn't throw up anymore. My goal is to eat 1400-1600 calories a day. Even if I gain a little weight, I'm going to be okay with it because my body needs to fix it's fucked up metabolism. I'm finishing up BBG week 3 and will try to cut back on cardio as a purging method. Even if I don't feel skinny and pretty now, I will work towards taking care of myself.

I won't let the words from insignificant people haunt and control me forever.