Vaughn: You know, it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a airlock with a con-woman from Pandora and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space, that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young.
Fiona: Why, what did she tell you?
Vaughn: I don't know, I didn't listen.
sometimes i like to talk about things to do with my own recovery & mental health, and just life in general on here. like a public diary that eleven thousand people read. anyway ! i’m going to do that right now. under the cut. i’m going to include a cw, but the post is mostly positive !!
cw - eating disorders, anxiety, self-harm
do not reblog this post.
i haven’t been doing too well recently. sometimes my anxiety flares up out of nowhere and i get incredibly anxious from the tiniest things. anxiety is the only mental illness that i have that i’ve been to therapy for, and it was super useful. it’s definitely under control most of the time. sometimes it gets triggers by something like exam season, and other it just happens. it’s less and less often now, and so much better than it was when i was 13 & 14. but it’s still rough sometimes, and that’s okay ! i’m getting there.
as well as that, my eating disorder has been incredibly loud. i think part of that is from my anxiety. i get anxious over eating fear foods, so if my anxiety is worse, so is my ed. i ate lunch today. and i ate takeout tonight. i literally haven’t done those two things in the same day in ,, years. oh my god i never thought i’d be able to do that. and i did it !!!! fuck. i always rationalised eating takeout - something i’m generally anxious about - by eating literally nothing else that day, not even a piece of fruit or whatever. which is super bad for my body ,, oh my GOD i always felt so bad physically those days. i feel awake and alert and just ,, generally better. it wasn’t easy at all. i felt awful about it the entire time, but i still did it. a lot of the time, i’d resort to self-harm just because i felt like i deserved to be punished for eating that food.
today, though, i wrote about it instead. i’ve recently started journaling whenever i feel especially bad. i never found it helped much for my depression, but it’s incredibly useful for both my anxiety & my ed. so tonight i wrote two pages about how i felt about what i ate and then just picked it apart. and realised how fucking DUMB it is. like oh my god eating disorders are possibly the dumbest thing in existence. i’ve always tried to rationalise my ed thoughts to make myself feel better about eating, but i realised tonight that that’s counterproductive. i don’t need to rationalise them, because they’re ,, not rational. instead, i need to replace them with thoughts that are rational. which i tried to do tonight ! i wrote a page on my thoughts & analysing them, and then a second on what i could replace them with / general nice reminders.
it felt so GOOD. i still don’t feel 100% about eating what i did, but that’s okay. i know that this won’t be instant. but it feels nice and good to know that i’ve finally found something that at least takes the edge off my ed thoughts. in the four years i’ve been dealing with it, i’ve never had that. ever. and so it feels reassuring to have something. it’s a start, and i’m proud of that.
i really really recommend this if you struggle with either of these things, or even mental illness in general. having somewhere to vent my feelings without sharing them is so nice. opening up to people is good, but sometimes you don’t want that. even if you don’t end up picking apart what you write (would absolutely recommend that though), just the act of physically writing something is so calming and makes me feel lighter.
