I will keep the bad things from you.: 2011-11-27

I had to make it a little more dramatized.

I couldn't make it too realistic because then my teacher would come asking questions.

I know its long but please read the whole thing and tell me what you think <3

Here you are :)

Fucked up.

That’s what my life is right now.

In complete tatters.

One day I woke up and my entire life had completely disintegrated.

Time changed.

People changed.

Important people changed.

People who made up the foundation of my life.

When they got up and walked away so did everything else.

Which leaves me to now.

Here.

In the ashes trying to rebuild some semblance of who I was from who I am now.

I’m scarred from the fires that ruined me.

I’m lying here burnt and waiting for the rest of my existence to end or coming crashing down on top of me, taking the last of my breath away.

Sometimes there are those moments in life when you want time to stop. Your breath catches in your throat. Hot blood pumps through you’re dried out veins. Your eyes open wide. Fingers tingle at your sides. A soft buzzing rings in your ears. You are alive again.

You flick on the light. Your hands start to shake. Wait for the click of the door. The sound of the lock makes your heart skip. With tingling fingers you pull the shirt over your head. Don't turn around. I know you’re tempted but don't. One look in the mirror will ruin everything. You pull your jeans down. Stand there in your bra and underwear. Cold chills run up and down your spine sending goose bumps over your pale skin. You gulp down the hot stomach acid and slowly step up to the plate. This is it. The last game of the season. Your time to shine or fail so terribly you'll never play again. Judgment day. Slowly you tilt your head down almost too terrified to look. You stop. Your heart skips. No. It's not true. You step off and step back on. The scale flashes those same numbers at you. Is this true? You can't help the involuntary smile that creeps up on you. Down five pounds. You spin around and check the mirror. Is it just you or do your hipbones jut out a bit more than they did last week? Were those ribs poking out that much last time? How about your collar bones? They are definitely more defined. You grin at the girl in the mirror. Progress. You run your trembling fingers over your bones. Count them. Caress them. Beg them to never leave you. Your heart is pounding. Your breathing is shaky at best. Every nerve in your body is twitching with joy. You are alive. You lost five more pounds.

I don’t remember when it started. Everything gets a little hazy after being stuck here for so long. After a while you forget what it was like before. A before stops existing for people like us. We turn into someone else; become reborn with the first refusal of consumption. There was a person before, but they died. Now all that’s left is you. Forgetful you. You forget what normal is. You forget how to eat, sleep, breathe, and live. Life just doesn’t hold the same interest to you anymore. Time moves differently in your world; erratic like a heartbeat, it slows and stops and sometimes it leaves you. Time drops you off in the middle of your fucked up little never land. You get lost in the fun house mirrors and when time finally gets back to you you’ve already begun to lose what is left of your mind.

The past five and a half years of my life are skewed by the snap shots of my little secrets. The feeling of fingers shoved down my throat in haste, the cold porcelain of the tile floor bruising my knees permanently. The sight of blood spattering on the carpet, tell-tale scars that snake up and down my arm like a jumbled horror story. The screams that fill my head on a daily basis making it impossible to really watch my life as it sails passed me. There’s nothing glamorous about my life. There is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Instead there is a never ending streak of red that shoots across my sky beckoning me to follow it. It is only there to tease me, giving me the hope of succeeding while only failing to do so. I will never reach that end. Blissfully achieving my goal will never happen.

My goal.

Isn’t possible.

At least, not for me it isn’t. Reaching my goal would mean loving myself. Accepting who I am as a person, flaws and all. It would be wonderful. To never have to think about what others thought about me because I’d be content in the skin I wear. But there’s one problem. Even before the voice in the back of my brain told me to stop eating. Even before I lost myself in my reflection. Even before the calories and fat content of my morning coffee had me recalculating for hours. Even before my insecurities ate me alive; I didn’t love myself. I don’t think I ever learned how. I don’t recall a time when I was ever satisfied with the person I was or am. While all the other kids laughed and played in the sunshine of a warm summer afternoon I sat inside. Hiding away from the world, the people around me, and myself. I’d bury myself in books and make believe I was the main character. I’d pretend I was someone worthy of love and for a long time it worked. Until she walked into my life, ripped the book out of my hands and sent to the mirror. She was the one who taught me that I was fat, disgusting, unworthy.

She is the mirror. The little reflection in the eyes of the people around me that tells me they are lying. She is the one who takes my hand and forces me to put the fork down. She is the one who points to all my flaws. She is the one who pushes the razor down just a little deeper on my swollen flesh. She is the one whispers ‘Soon’ into my ear like a lover. She is my lover, my only friend. My solace when everything around me turns to unfamiliar mush. The one who holds me when the world and fate turns on me. She is my everything, and I am hers. To keep. To love. To hold. To kiss. To eat alive. To control. To murder. ‘No matter what’ I promised her, ‘I will never leave you.’

And I haven’t.
She is me.
Just not really.

Disordered

Dizzy. Light headed. Shaky.

Gravity changes all of the sudden.

Your head hits the floor.

Your breath shallows and your heart beat thunders.

You wait.

And wait.

Pull yourself up with trembling hands, no one is going to come to your aid.

Head throbs.

You have fallen.

Not yet a black out.

Your empty stomach twists into painful knots.

With every pound dropped they get harder to ignore.

Grab the black coffee you chilled this morning.

Hold your head

The nightmares.

Sitting in hellish kitchens while people shove food down your throat.

Drowning in cupcake frosting.

Being forced to stand naked in front of people you know at 257lbs.

Of course they aren’t realistic.

At 2:00 am after being thrown out of sleep by the thought of magically gaining weight; these things don’t seem so absurd.

Cold sweat drips down your back.

You shudder.

Dehydrated.

Mouth full of cotton.

Drink the stale water by your bedside.

Whisper sweet nothings to yourself.

No food got into your body from the time your head hit the pillow until now.

You’re fine.

You didn’t gain anything.

You toss and turn in half sleep for the next four hours.

Get up go to school.

The headaches.

Throbbing pain at the base of the skull.

At first you can ignore it.

But after a while the pain escalates.

It becomes so intense you can’t think.

The words on the page jumble.

You forget how to read.

You cry.

What is happening to you?

It’s called malnutrition. After a while when your body is done eating away all your fat it begins to eat up muscles. It’s trying to keep you alive. You don’t give a fuck.

In your mind this is all just another reason not to eat.

How are the two connected?

Who the fuck knows but they are.

You can FEEL it.

It’s your fault.

Stop eating so much.

Thin never comes. You don’t know that at first. You think if you just lose say 15lbs everything will be okay. Skip a meal. You feel good. Skip a day of eating. You feel BETTER. Look at the scale it says you lost 20lbs. Why stop? You don’t look the way you wanted to yet, and anyways this feels so GOOD. Then three months later you start exercising in secret. You make up rules for yourself. You have to take 2 and a half hours to eat that 6oz cup of JELL-O. You begin to become disgusted with your bodily functions. You hide food. You begin to chew and spit your food so as to give the impression that you are eating. And you are eating. You may skip a day here and there but you don’t ever STOP eating.

You start to binge and purge. One day you come home and everything in the fridge needs to be GONE. NOW. So you eat. And eat. Anything you can get your hands on. Halloween candy from three years ago. Stale Special K with WHOLE milk. Jelly. Cold pasta. You put peanut butter and sugar on bread. Cheese and tomato sauce. If someone dared you; you could eat a whole loaf of bread in one sitting. You would eat the fridge if it was edible. If it was a contest you’d win the grand prize of heavy weight fuck up.

After you eat you realize you made a mistake. The god-awful feeling of ‘WHAT HAVE I DONE?’ sinks in. It’s too late to go back so you decide to push forward keep eating. And when you can’t possibly fit anything more into your stomach you shove your fingers as far down your throat as you can. Hack. Gag. You throw up until you see blood. Crimson on white porcelain. Little rips in the back of your throat. They get larger with every episode. You know the risks. Gastric rupture. Perforated esophagus. Lesions in the throat. Infections. Ulcers. It doesn’t matter. You tell yourself afterwards that this is IT. You are done. No more binging. But every time you feel like you’ve gotten back to a steady pattern of starvation something sneaks up on you. Like an infection. It slides into your brain and begins to take over. Rots away at your control and screams EAT NOW. And you do. But you aren’t one of those ‘Bulimics’. No. You don’t purge after EVERY meal. You don’t force your fingers down your throat EVERYDAY. NO. That’s DISGUSTING.

You are full of shit. No you aren’t technically classified as bulimic because you have too many characteristics of an anoretic. There is a middle ground that not a lot of people know of. EDNOS. What the doctors call Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified. It could be that you have too many bulimic characteristics to be labeled an anoretic. Or the opposite. Or you could also have BED. Which is like bulimia except without purging of any kind. So it would be binge. Cry. Hate. Starve. Repeat.

This is how it is. How it’s always been since you first started the eating disordered tango. This is how it will be from now on. Because there is a secret line on the contract. In very fine print. You don’t really pay attention to what you’re reading because who cares? It’s a simple decision skip a few meals and you magically drop all that strenuous weight. Easy. But what happens afterwards? When you’ve lost the weight you planned on losing, what happens then? And this is what you didn’t know when you skipped that first meal. There isn’t an end. There is no stopping. You don’t just lose the weight and go back to normal life. ‘Normal life’ doesn’t exist anymore. Neither does the girl who knew how to live normally. Now she’s been replaced by a girl who’s quiet. Her eyes are hard like stone, but inside she’s falling to pieces. This girl wants to die. She has nothing left. See this ‘little habit’ of skipping dinner doesn’t go away. It sticks to you. It stops being a ‘diet’ and becomes a full blown out of control eating disorder.

Anorexia Nervosa by dictionary definition: absence of appetite of a nervous origin.

Bulimia Nervosa: abnormally voracious appetite or unnaturally constant hunger.

Binge Eating Disorder: is a pattern of disordered eating which consists of episodes of uncontrollable eating

Defined like any other disease. You have your basic information. Anorexia is an absence of appetite. So why not feed the severely anorexic girl a cheese burger? Why not feed her ‘delicious’ greasy foods? An absence of appetite? Bullshit. If it were that simple then it would be ‘curable’. It’s not. When someone contracts an eating disorder it is there for LIFE. It isn’t bipolar disorder or depression. It can’t be treated with pills. An eating disorder is a disease that attacks your mind and body. It seeps into your flesh; a simple idea. Do I really need to eat three meals a day? I could just throw up after I eat. Food is so comforting, I eat and I feel better. A thought that beckons; seduces the most prude of all people. It coaxes you into its bed of lies and deceit and slowly but efficiently eats away at your life. Your family. You friends. Your school work. Performance in any and all activities. It rips you to shreds.

“It’s a life style CHOICE.”

“A lack(over abundance) of serotonin and/or dopamine in the brain.”

“ A loss of appetite.”

One day Suzy just didn’t feel like eating so she didn’t and then the next day she had Anorexia Nervosa and died three months later of malnutrition.

NO.

“I can stop whenever I want to.”

“This isn’t a disorder it’s a DIET.”

“I just wanna lose a few pounds.”

None of that shit exists in this world. You don’t decide to skip a meal to lose weight. Maybe initially you can lie to yourself but it stops being a diet when it stops being about your appearance. When it stops being about how you see yourself. It isn’t ‘about’ anything. Forget the why. Why isn’t worth shit if Suzie is dead so stop pointing fingers. No one really gets past the why stage. You may think they do but they don’t.

“She was troubled.”

“Bullied.”

“Molested.”

“Raped.”
"Abused."

“Grew up in the wrong type of family.”

“Her mother had the disease too, she had a predisposition.”

No. This is a lie. ALL of these things are not true. Sure maybe when she was little someone called her fatso and she felt very strongly about it. Maybe he saw his favorite wrestler do it and thought maybe it’d make him better too. Maybe they were emotionally scarred from the trauma and needed a way to control everything. Sure they could all pertain to the factors of what cause an eating disorder but no one knows what ‘causes’ an eating disorder. And like I said the cause doesn’t matter.

What matters is that it happened. You’re here. An eating disordered fuck up. And as you go through this people will start to find out. They will judge you. They won’t understand. You will begin to feel more worthless. You will watch your family tear apart at its already fragile seams. It will be all your fault. You will sink even more inside yourself. You don’t know how to fix this so you don’t. Instead you punish yourself. Cut back on your eating even more. Stop trying, classes go out the window. Who cares anymore? You probably won’t survive this anyway. You stopped caring about what happens after.

After means death. You have encountered girls who have ‘recovered’.

Recovery? In your mind it means you gave up. Quit yet another thing you’ve strived for. And you quit everything so you can’t quit this. You signed a contract. It isn’t happening. Get that thought out of your head. Now listen to what I have to say. This is important.

Since the beginning you have set specific rules for yourself:

Don’t eat after 8:00 pm.

Don’t eat anything with more than 10 grams of fat in it.

Don’t drink our calories.

Drink at least 10 ounces of water every day.

You must do at least 30 minutes of exercise a day except for fasting days.

Do not eat in front of friends.

When eating cut everything into sections, thirds. You will leave one of those sections untouched.

As you go on these rules get stricter:

Drink three glasses of water before you eat.

Don’t eat anything that has more than 5 grams of fat in it.

Drink at least 24 ounces of water every day.

You must exercise for two hours every day, 30 minutes on fasting days.

Don’t have any friends.

Leave one and a half sections uneaten.

And later on:

Drink five glasses of water before and after you eat ANYTHING.

Don’t eat any fat at all whatsoever.

Drink 2 liters of water every day.

Exercise for 3 hours every day and run EVEN when you fast.

Do not eat in front of family.

Only eat a quarter of your food.

These rules define you.

They shape your very being.

They are yours when you have nothing.

You add more and more as you shrink.

You develop systems.

Caloric and fat intake are measured very carefully.

You have lists of food in your head, the ones that you can eat and the ones you cannot.

You file them into little cabinets for safe keeping.

You devise a plan.

A number for your calorie limit.

You have four ‘meals’ a day.

You fill these meal slots with safe foods.

Celery (5).

Apples (80).

Nonfat yogurt (80).

Low-cal plain bread (35).

Pickles (10).

JELL-O cups (10).

Carrots (4).

Red/Yellow/Green peppers (40).

Bananas (70).

Lettuce (16).

Cucumber (14).

Eggs (54).

Tea (0).

Coffee (0).

Fat free creamer (25).

Unsweetened almond milk (30).

Fat free low-cal cheese (45).

Diet 1:

Mondays will be 345.8 calories.

Tuesdays will be 215.6 calories.

Wednesdays will be 412.3 calories.

Thursdays will be 336.2 calories.

Fridays will be 217.4 calories.

Saturdays will be fasting days.

Sundays will be 153.2 calories.

Diet 2:

"Ana Boot Camp" diet or the ABC.

A diet that ranges from 500 calories to 0.
With maybe a high calorie day in between.

It fluctuates numbers to make sure you don’t plateau.

This lasts 50 days.

Diet 3:

The 2,4,6,8.

Day 1: 200

Day 2: 400

Day 3: 600

Day 4: 800

Day 5: FAST

Day 6: 800

Day 7: 600

Day 8: 400

Day 9: 200

Etc.

Diet 4:

The 1,3,5,7.

Day 1: 100

Day 2: 300

Day 3: 500

Day 4: 700

Day 5: FAST

Day 6: 700

Day 7: 500

Day 8: 300

Day 9: 100

Etc.

These diets are your system. You alternate between them.

The system along with your rules is designed to keep you 'thin'.

To eventually kill you.

To take the life out of your eyes.

To make you perpetually tired; weak; cold.

This is you now.

You are going to be flawless you say in texts back and forth between twig like girls.

Girls who idolize skeletons and are repulsed by their own need for food; for substance; for love.

Love?

No. You don’t need love.

You are a one woman machine.

A girl on her own who holds the world on her shoulders.

You are not one of those needy girls that feels things and craves the love of other human beings.

You need no physical touch.

You have no empty hole in your chest that instantly brings bouts of tears when thought about.

There is no man or woman that will fill the unbearable hole in your heart.

The hole doesn’t exist and you need nothing; no one.

In fact men are just a distraction.

Yes you date guys.

You have mindless careless sex with guys you don’t care about.

Guys who don’t care about you.

In fact this isn’t dating.

You have sex no strings attached.

You are both fuck ups.

You sit and stare at the ceiling of their beat up Toyota and you think about your calorie intake.

You debate on whether or not you should do more exercises tonight.

Your legs are getting fat.

Boy squeezes them with his sweaty slimy hands.

Yes. You need to exercise more.

The longer you stay with these guys the more you wither away.

Some of them you keep around for longer than a month or so.

Those are the ones you pretend don’t affect you.

Your disorder is the only thing that matters.

So when said guy breaks up with you in a flurry of angry words, you feel your hipbones and tell yourself you need no one.

When he calls you fat and ugly a week later you let the tears fall and allow yourself to think it’s because of the extra fat you’ve got growing on you like mold.

You pretend you don’t hear him when he says to his friends that he felt sorry for you.

He lowered his standards for you.

Cut back on those carbs.

You see this is how it is.

People.

Relationships.

Life.

Everything is directly related to how well you starve yourself.

How much "self control" you have.
Self hatred.

The longer you can keep up a fast the better things will go for you.

Everything will be so much BETTER once you’re thinner.

Yes.

Just a few more pounds.

You do endless leg lifts.

You do crunches until you can’t move.

The elliptical can officially qualify as your best friend.

You see it more than any actual friend anyways.

Besides they all left months ago.

A year ago?

You can’t remember.

Who needs them?

Who needs friends?

Boy friends?

Attachments?

They only complicate things.

They make life harder.

It impairs your ability to keep a level head; to starve without thinking of what it does to others.

Your actions only affect yourself.

Thinner.

Get thinner.

You remember when you had friends.

You remember their questions; prying eyes always shoving food your way.

They would try and stuff you full of fat.

They are jealous you say to yourself.
But are they?
They speak words of anger.

Expressing worry.

Love.

Care.

That was earlier on though.

Now everything is different.

Now you have ‘friends’.

These are people who used to be real friends.

These are people who got tired of caring and now wave awkwardly to you.

They do this because it’s expected.

They feel an obligation to be polite.

It doesn’t affect you.

You wave throw on your fake smile.

You give hugs and laugh.

It sounds funny.

Disembodied.

It isn’t yours it doesn’t belong to you.

It’s wrong.

You skip dinner again.

When you get really sick this will lead you to tears.

Other things start to matter.

The glances you get from people who used to care.

The disappointed sighs from family.

The silence that reminds you that yes you are indeed as alone as you feel.

What has happened?

You ask yourself over and over again what went wrong.

You say that this isn’t right; this wasn’t supposed to happen.

The words; bitter bile on your cracked thin lips.

They sting you.

Burn.

Why does it hurt so much?

After months of being numb and dead to the world, feeling things is wrong to you.

You miss the numb of uncaring.

Blank dead eyes that didn’t see the damage.

The damage you caused.

You are disordered.

A fuck up.

You must accept the inevitable.

This will not get better.

No one will fix you.

There is no cure for the kind of crazy that you caught.

You have to deal.

From here on out everything will only get worse and worse.

The best you can do is wait and pray to whatever God you believe doesn’t exist that you may die early and not have to watch everyone suffer.

There are a few things that go through your head on a daily basis. They circle round and round. Every minute of every day they are there. A sick chant sung by the little people in your head that poke your brain with branding irons.

FAT. UGLY. DISGUSTING. WHORE. WORTHLESS. PATHETIC. FEEBLE. FREAK. FUCK-UP. DISAPPOINTMENT.

It’s a constant battle.

Someone talks to you.

You hear nothing.

You smile nod.

You give what you feel is the appropriate response based off their body language.

You don’t know what their voice sounds like.

You can only hear yours.

The one in your head.

The whispers.

Thinner.

You must get thinner.

Are you thinner?

Go step on the scale.

Do it now.

Step on five times.

Your weight could magically change within those five seconds.

The scale could be lying.

Make sure your eyes aren’t deceiving you.

They lie and you know it.

They tell you that you’re thin when the numbers say you have more to lose.

How could you be that thin?

You aren’t.

Try harder.

Thinner.

You are tired.
Tired of being.
Tired of feeling.
Tired of seeing what you are doing to yourself and those around you (because contrary to popular belief you are not blind).
Tired of living.
You wish nothing but the comfort of the cold forgiving hands of an early death.
And they are a comfort.
To normal people maybe not.
But you stopped being normal a long long time ago.
You stopped being you a long time ago.
Now you are hallow.
A shell waiting to expire.
Because everyone has an expiration date.

I will keep the bad things from you.

Thursday, December 1, 2011

This is my NaNoWriMo this year.