the girl who cried woolf

Call me Montmorency* (Monty) Twenty-something ♀ Land of Oz In active recovery from: ♫ Sexual Assault (Rape) ♫ Chronic PTSD ♫ Major Depression ♫ Eating Disorder Recovered from: ♫ Suicide Attempts (Overdose) ♫ Self-Harm (Cutting) I'm so used to talking about the intimate details of my life to psychotherapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors, mental health nurses, dieticians or doctors suturing my wrists, that it hardly seems strange to be divulging this to an internet full of strangers. This blog is about things that make sense on the inside, when they don't on the outside. These are literally the pages of my diary. I do not post to glorify any part of my 'illnesses', behaviour or experiences, rather to seek comfort and support from those who understand, and perhaps can guide me on the path of recovery. I actively encourage all those suffering to seek treatment as I have. Inpatient Admissions: 4 Total Hospitalised Days: 117 *An alias, obviously.

[thegirlwhocriedwoolf]

Sometimes it's easy to ignore the voices. Other days I need reminding to say 'no, no, no'.

[thegirlwhocriedwoolf]

Sunday 28th January

Today marked only my fourth but also my final shift working in retail over the summer. It’s also the last time (at least for awhile) I have to watch in horror as a customer tries to be helpful and insists on putting the item of clothing back by themselves and doing it COMPLETELY WRONG!!

[thegirlwhocriedwoolf]

[thegirlwhocriedwoolf]

Saturday 27th January

Intake under 100 calories. Ran over 10 kilometres.

Today was a good day.

[thegirlwhocriedwoolf]

[thegirlwhocriedwoolf]

Australia Day

On Australia Day last year, mum and I flew back into the country after our European adventure. This year I spent the day at the beach and the evening at a BBQ with some of my theatre friends.

P.S. Hopefully I’ll look back and read this one day in a future where they have changed the date.

[thegirlwhocriedwoolf]

[onlinecounsellingcollege]

Everyone must choose one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret

Jim Rohn (via onlinecounsellingcollege)

[thegirlwhocriedwoolf]

[thegirlwhocriedwoolf]

I walk home in a daze, intoxicated with food. I actually feel drunk, my feet tripping over each other and my eyes glazed over.

At dinner with the friends tonight the conversation turned to weight loss. H told us how she’d been cutting out certain foods from her diet. A told us how she’s been exercising at the gym twice a day. TWICE!

I sat in silence. And I ate. I ate with abandon. I felt like I had something to prove. That I could be as I am, have lost the weight I have lost, without really trying. When in reality I am doing nothing but trying.

As I walk I have a drunken epiphany that in part I have relished obsessing over food and exercise so that there’s no space to think about all the responsibility I have been avoiding. And I cringe as all the responsibility I have been avoiding finds me in a rush.

Of course I regret it all. Terribly. Later I will be shrouded by a fog of failure when I look back at my intake, but for now, intoxication fills me with indifference and carries me home.

[thegirlwhocriedwoolf]

[thegirlwhocriedwoolf]

I'm burdened with my most trying first-world-problem: attempting a wardrobe cull again due to sheer necessity! Note the key word, 'attempting'. I'm not equipped for this level of ruthlessness! Usually what happens is I give up and start shopping around for an additional wardrobe.

Sifting through my wardrobe is a humbling whirlwind tour of all the sizes I have been in my adult life. When I was at my heaviest at size 16 and begun to notice weightless from eating healthily and exercising regularly (what a crazy notion!), I used to think I would be happy to be a size 10.

Now I am about a size 10 or so and there are still parts of my body I see as fat. So I have set my sights on a size 8, and told my increasingly worrying mother this is so I can audition to work on cruise ships.

As I’ve always done my entire life, I ordered clothes online in a size smaller than I am, but I was surprised to find when it arrived today that the size 8 skirt was a pretty perfect fit. When every part of me is a size 8, will it be enough? Will I crave size 6?

[thegirlwhocriedwoolf]

[thegirlwhocriedwoolf]

When I see my Dietitian G at her [location] practice, I’m always her first patient of the day. I usually wait for her on the bench outside in the sun but today I arrive after her as she’s unlocking the door.

My body is present, but only just. My mind is hostage to an ambivalence so paralysing *I* don’t even know what I’ll want in the next hour, minute or second, let alone be able to articulate it out loud. We talk (well, she talks and I respond mostly in variations of ‘I don’t know’) and when I try to smile I feel the emptiness in my eyes bore out instead and I look away so she doesn’t see.

“You seem… the most lost I’ve ever seen you” she says and I mentally reserve her the ‘understatement of the year’ award, despite being only January.

I want to help her. “Now’s your chance!” I’m screaming on the inside. I’m weak. I’m vulnerable. I’m utterly exhausted. If she asked me the right question I would have broken into pieces, admitted my craving for defeat and begged for mercy.

We talk briefly about my childhood, as she tries to armchair sleuth her way to finding a trauma that doesn’t exist. I tell her about being bullied together with my best friend in primary school, although I don’t remember any of the details, and for the first time I’m struck by the coincidence that she too ended up developing an eating disorder. But I’m certain it’s just that, a coincidence.

By the time we finish up we’ve run nearly double the length of our appointment time. I know I should feel guilty, I’m only paying for half an hour, but I need all the time I can get. Every minute spent with her is more time spent inhaling a will to live, sucking up any inch of hope like a leech or a parasite. I breathe oxygen in her office and then I hold my breath for two or three weeks until our next appointment and hope I don’t run out of air.

When I get home the ambivalence has eased ever so slightly and I open to a new month of my diary and begin to plan. There’s something so calming about plotting fresh goal weights. In the world that exists on that piece of paper, I am not a failure yet. Yet.

[thegirlwhocriedwoolf]

[thegirlwhocriedwoolf]

I want to give up.

I want to eat chocolate, and sushi, and sandwiches, and pasta, and a laundry list of foods so long it contradicts my life-long identity as a fussy eater. I want to eat without feeling like a failure. I want to be able to think about eating without feeling like I’ve ruined a whole day. I want to be excited for social events without the dread of eating. I want to think about anything else except weight, food and exercise.

I don’t want to run anymore. I don’t want to live with exhaustion coursing through my veins. I don’t want to play mind games to run just that little bit further, just that little bit longer. I don’t want to feel sad when the scale is honest.

I want to GIVE UP. I want to crumple and fall into unconsciousness. I want to crawl back into the coma I was in after I overdosed and be dead to the world. I want to lose a week of my life and a kilogram a day without even trying. Without being a casualty of this internal war.

I want this to END.

[thegirlwhocriedwoolf]