I talked with my therapist yesterday about my trip to Arizona and what's been going on lately. He said something that interested me, he said I'm going to have to learn how to "eat with your head". I'm still pondering on that one, I think I know what he's getting at but I want to be absolutely sure first.

Yesterday the eating situation wasn't too bad. Apple, green beans, cereal, and some cheetos...which I threw up, but just the cheetos. I want to stop that though. I want to be able to eat some friggin cheetos when I feel like it, that's a completely rational, normal thing to want to do.

Anyway, I packed a slimfast drink for school today, drank about half of that...it wasn't cold so it was unappetising. Anyway, I'm having some carrots right now for a snack, and I think I might make some onion soup for myself tonight to enjoy. I feel kind of proud of myself, I think I'm doing a better job. I mean, despite how I feel, I'm doing a better job. I feel fat, I feel out of control, I have this immense self hatred problem going on...like I feel incapable of doing simple things because I feel like a overweight failure. But I have to let myself feel those things, and then move on, you know? There's no sense in keeping it in, and I have to let that voice say those things, but listen to the more rational, sensible part of myself too, and let her run the show. That would be a first in...well, my whole life.

I'm sorry to anyone reading this if listing what I eat daily is triggering or problematic to you. It's just that it's a good way for me to feel in control without doing anything unhealthy. It's easier for me, personally, to sit down and run through things and mull them over so that I don't have a panic attack and jump to silly conclusions.

I'm feeling pretty calm, pretty chill right now. I did end up weighing myself last night, I gained about half a pound (we have a digital scale) and I was really upset for a few minutes. But I realize now that I'm in a more realistic state of mind that half of a pound...that's water weight, that's nothing. And even if it was real weight gain, so what? Well...I know what, but I'm tired of ruining my whole day because of a number. And yes, I will probably weigh myself again tonight and pray for the number I see to go down...but at least now I won't try to kill myself if it doesn't.

When I got to Arizona, I slept. I was exhausted and really didn't want to go see my dad that night because his family just bugs me and I can't get used to it. They make me, in a word: miserable.

My mom woke me up, and after much whining and arguing, I packed my stuff back into the rental car and we drove to my dad's place in Phoenix. After about half an hour there. My step mom, Sandy, decides I need a new wardrobe. I try to tell you I don't have room to pack new stuff, I am exhausted, and I want to spend time with my dad not her.

We go to Kohls or however you spell it. She says, "We'll only be here an hour." We do my least favorite thing in the world: go to the dressing room and try things on and on and on again. Just give me a panic attack. She doesn't let me get anything I like or want in the first place, tells me it doesn't look good and basically gets what she wishes she could wear if she were younger for me. We're there for three and a half hours. She decides I need to get new make up, jewlery, shoes, make up, and a new hairstyle. She was pushing for a peticure too, but I changed her mind. I was exhausted, to the point of fainting.

She makes me change into my new clothes which are tight and make me feel enormous. We go to the mall and get my ears pierced dead at night. Then, around midnight, I get a haircut in the kitchen. No food. I guess I don't 'need it'.

She spends two hundred dollars of my dad's money of stuff I don't want and won't use. And I have two little studs in my ears which I really hate having to clean.

Yeah, I know this is no reason to complain but it made me mad because during this whole time I didn't get to see my dad or my aunts or my grandparents or my mom. Just her and her annoying laugh and tight death grip on my life.

The next day we go to church, I feel extremely out of place and uncomfortable, that's okay, I brought a book. My new church clothes are itchy and baggy on me and I feel fat.
When we get home the baby won't eat. And then we discover something, he'll eat if he sees me eat. This here has to be the worst situation I could ever find myself in. Sandy gives me this heap of caserole on my plate and tells me to eat it so that the baby will. I sit there while everyone watches me and the baby eat, one bite at a time. I was holding back tears trying to do this for the baby, and I realized that him and I aren't much different. We immitate what we see and we are weird with our food and we both take each day one bite at a time.

I go home. My family on my mom's side are all having this huge Italian dinner. I take a piece of garlic bread and eat it for about an hour. And then I go throw up.

It seems like going to Arizona, as much as I love it, unearths all this crap for me and sets me back into a relapse. There are all these burried emotions and...hungers. I'm always so painfully hungry there. Back at home Louisiana, I feel nothing, no hunger pains, nothing. But in Arizona with my family, I guess that emptiness becomes apparent to me. All of the love swirling around me and them just makes me feel empty and hungry. I am straving for love and affection and to be normal. Just as I am starving for some unattainable body ideal.

The next day I eat and eat and eat. It's all this huge cycle of binges. Lasagna, french fries, chocolate, dr. pepper, and cookies. I eat in secret when no one is around in the middle of the night or when everyone is watching TV, and when they are around I eat nothing. My stomach is killing me all this time.  
I eat and eat until I can't take it anymore. My mom tells me my aunt is worried about how thin I am and my weirdness with food, she tells me about a time when all my aunt ate was an iced tea a day when she was modeling and how screwed up life became after that.

We go out to eat at a Mexican restaurant. I try to order all the healthy food, my aunt watches me and smile and says she's proud of me, I did good for eating. I want to hug her and have her tell me there is an end to this in sight, that I will be okay and beautiful and happy like her someday because right then I felt so disgusted with myself in every matter. But instead, I take a sip of my diet coke and smile.

That night I can hear my grandfather talking about my brother Peter. How fat he is, how he's a screw up. I run to the kitchen in a blind fury and grab the loaf of bread in the kitchen and the jar of peanut butter in the fridge, I slather peanut butter on a slice, fold it, eat the crust off, and shove the rest in my mouth. I do this with every single slice, all twelve from start to finish. I feel nothing, nothing but anger at my grandfather which I take out on myself. The voice in my head tells me everything I've eaten that day and says things along the lines of, "you fat bitch, you never do anything right."

I go to sleep with the worst stomach cramps in my life.
It seems during my vacation all my hopes for recovery just evaported momentarily because I was in unfamilliar territory.

I still haven't weighed myself and I don't know if I should.
More happened during the trip, good things. They just don't seem as important right now.

I just got back from my trip to Arizona about half an hour ago. The first thing I thought when I walked through the door was, "I have to update my caringonline blog!". I don't know if that's a good thing or not, hehe.

It was a terrible, wonderful trip. So much happened, not physical but mentally that I can't fit it all in one post so I'm going to post a few more, one about each day in a little while. I have to sit down relax, unpack and think about it, and then I'll post about the trip.

Anyway, let's talk about today. Woke up in the morning and for some strange (okay, not strange but suprising) reason felt determined to fast all day long. Around six I softened up and got a plain bagel and an apple and a bottle of water and ate it on the plain trip from Houston to Baton Rouge. It was funny to look at my family. My mom had a fruit cup and a chicken caesar salad, my little sister had a slice of pepperoni pizza and a coke, and I had my apple and bagel. We don't go together at all.

I just felt terrible about eating the apple and bagel for the whole plain trip which was stupid. And then, I don't know, I just snapped. On the drive from the airport back home we stopped at a restaurant for dinner. I ordered the biggest meal I could find and binged. I threw it up in an old french fry carton I found in the car on the way home. I knew it would leak but I didn't it silently, secretly anyway, talking to my mom between lurches. I guess you could say I've "perfected" the silent barf. That's nothing to be proud of, believe me.

My hair smells like barf, so do my clothes, I'm sure the car reaks. So if my family noticed, they didn't say anything.

Well, I will fill you all in in hopefully an hour or so, I need to bathe. Oh, one more piece of hopefully good news: I haven't weighed myself at all through the whole trip. It could be a bad thing, so I'm trying to put off finally doing it to a time when I'm more emotionally stable.

Stay strong, you guys.

I'm visiting my grandparents in Arizona and I won't be getting back until Wednesday, so I probably won't have any new posts until then unless some miracle occurs and I get a hold of a computer. I am nervous and excited about the trip, I don't know whether it's a good or bad thing. I'm hoping it will be good, even though I don't even know what good is anymore, haha.

So, I suppose I will catch up with you guys later. Stay strong, keep up your fight, and wish me good luck.

It's laughable that a few handfulls of popcorn is sending me into a huge spiral of anxiety. I haven't had anything all day, it's almost five p.m. And the fact is, so few calories will only make me lose more likely than it will make me gain. And yet...I have actually made myself so sick that I find that hard to believe. I feel that I am the one acception to the scientific facts, I'm the one who can't eat, I'm the only one who has to do this to lose weight, and that I must lose weight. I really have made myself believe all this. People seem to be worried. My mom is following me to the bathroom, talking to me while I pee to make sure I don't throw up the popcorn. She could read through my eyes and could see how it was making me freak out.

I find this utterly pathetic. Anyway, I wanted to just get that off my chest. I'm going on a walk with my friend, and then I have to pack.

The first day of school was good...except I zoned out during a pre-test and started thinking about dieting, and our time was almost up and I was only half way through. So yeah, today was better than yesterday. I have to take it one enormous, painful second at a time.

So I wanted to apologize for my extremely weird outburst in my last post. Haha, I'm not insane, promise. I'm just not feeling well. Anyway, it's about an hour since my last post and I've simmered down. I feel the same way, but not so unbearably strong, and I'll be all right tonight, promise.

Anyway, I was just thinking about how I speak in codes. Not that I talk strangely or anything. It's just that when I say something is wrong, or when I'm asking for help, I do it in a very strange way. I don't say it directly, and I'm not clear about how I'm feeling because see, I feel bad enough already about conversing about my weaknesses, it feels like giving in to me. So I usually say things that don't indicate much but they mean a lot to me. Maybe some of you guys go through similliar stuff, so I wanted to post this.

Let's see, for me:

"I'm tired." = I'm tired of my life, of myself, of what I do.

"I don't feel good." - I am about to have a breakdown.

"I might eat a little, I guess." - I'm about to binge my brains out.

"It's okay, you really don't need to worry." - I can't believe you noticed something is wrong, I need to work harder to hide this.

"I'm kind of feeling bloated right now." - I feel like a fat pig and I am severely depressed about my "big" size.

"Oh, I was just thinking about such and such..." - I'm thinking about food and dieting.

"Haha, I guess that's another thing I've done wrong." - I'm a failure at everything.

"Well, thank you for your concern." - Please, help me.

"That's okay, I'll take care of it." - I'll just not eat for a long time.

I was just thinking about how a lot of the time I will get angry at people for not noticing that something was wrong, and then I feel bad for getting angry and get mad at myself. It's a viscious cycle, you know?

So, what I'm thinking is that maybe I need to start stating my needs more clearly, I'm still afraid to, but I can try.

I didn't post anything last night like I usually do because my blog was being weird for some reason. Last night was very, very not good. Again, I had a problem with my extremities thing...eating nothing but an apple all day, and I felt bad because I was at a friends and everyone was eating ice cream and I felt like I should too, I'm getting better right?

So I did and for some reason my mind immediately said after I took the first bite, "And now I'm going to kill myself." It wasn't overdramatic or desperate, it was just a calm, nonchalant fact I was stating in my mind. I don't appreciate that, I spend a lot of time controlling my thoughts so that I don't let the emotions over rule me and that little gem just popped up there.

Spent the night pacing, fighting myself. It physically felt as though someone were pulling on me, punching my stomach, telling me to throw it up. I dragged myself to the sink and puked up what I could of the ice cream, it felt so terrible, it hurt so much I swear.

Tomorrow is the first day of school. A lot of the people I know right now are not in a good place and I just decided something: so what? What am I supposed to do about it. It seems like everyone I know behaves a certain way around me, does things around me to get a reaction. They want to affect me, so I can act hurt/scared/sympathetic/happy/numb/angry whatever. They like to see a reaction because people for some reason like it when I behave as if I care. And I do, if I didn't I wouldn't be mentioning this. But right now, I don't feel like reacting. I don't feel like caring about everyone's little breakdowns. I'm tired of playing the part of my life, and if I say what I want to say and do what I want to do and stopped hiding everything, I would end up losing a lot of people. So that's something I need to think over.

So today was not much better than yesterday. This morning I had dropped another pound but now I'm back up another. It's probably water weight anyhow. I feel I may be relapsing, I'm pretty sure I am and I hope it doesn't last because I don't like myself when I'm sick. I'm always sick, but I don't like the voice in my head when I'm sick, it's loud and it's screaming and blarring and controlling me and I feel weak and stupid and used. That's how I feel right now. And I don't want anyone, anyone to know about this. I don't want any of my friends to ever think anything is wrong. I don't want them to care about me, I wish they understood that. I wish they'd go away and leave me alone so I didn't have to worry about them. I hate having to care about people at all, and I hate hiding myself, it's exhausts me. I just want to dissappear, everyone probably thinks I'm stupid or weak but I could care less.

Today I had an apple and some milk for breakfast, I thought that was good. But then I skipped lunch and my mom just HAD to go out for Chinese food tonight. I ate some and my stomach bloated, I gained a pound, like I said. I ended up throwing up a bit, but I stopped myself, my chest hurts so badly which scares me. I know I'm not going to die or anything because I know I look normal, I'm not super thin. Just thin. And it ashames me.

I really need help right now, I think. I don't want to get better right now. Which isn't true, I do, I think I want to live. But I'm so tired, and I feel like punching myself in the face, my brain won't stop, her voice won't go away and I just don't know what to do. She wants me to stay up all night exercising, and I just can't, I have the first day of school, I can't do it.

And then the thought pops up again, then just kill yourself. NO. I won't, you know? That's just so selfish and terrible and I am stronger and better than this. It's hard to tell yourself that everyday when no one else says it and you're the only one. Well, I'm not, but it feels like I'm the only one.

How can I expect people to help me when I don't want them to think or know I'm sick. The thing is, I'm just so angry above anything else right now, so angry. I'm angry at myself. I'm angry at my friends for being my friends. I'm angry at my family for never noticing and for being annoying when they do notice. I'm angry at my shrink for saying the wrong things and for making me even more angry and costing my mother so much money. I'm angry at whoever put me here with this problem, and I'm angry at my eating disorder for being here in the first place. I'm just so, so angry at this.

I've just finished showing and getting dressed and stuff, and it's already one thirty. Geez. I've taken my meds and had a bowl of cornflakes. I feel pretty good right now, like I will have a good day today. I think that I'm going to drink slimfast today because I figure it's not the best, but it's less stressful than worrying over food, and it's better than nothing, no?

My mother is working on getting a buisness loan at the moment, she wants to open up a used bookstore here in town. She has a location and a buisness license. Now she just needs the five thousand and we're set. She may even offer me a job there, which would be nice and less stressful. She's very busy which has been a relief to me. She doesn't have time to nag me every five minutes about how I am and if I feel like eating and what my therapist thinks. What's funny is that she never asks me what I think, always what I feel and stuff...but thinking, something like that is only credible when the counselor is concerned, I guess. Or at least, to her it is.

Anyway, I feel pretty good right now, I have lots of energy. It's reminding me of that high I would get off of no sleep or food, only now it's just this...excitement for who knows what.

I hope everyone is well today, be healthy and safe.

I've been thinking about this lately and I thought I would get it out in words because it seems important for me, and others, to think about.

For a long time, well forever, I've always been concerned and hard on myself about the subject of failure. Failing seems to be my favorite thing, a perfected art for me. See, I tell myself that I'm a failure at losing weight, I'm a failure at self control, I'm a failure at being thin, I'm a failure as a person, I'm a failure. That's what the voice inside is always hissing at me, "you've failed."

So, when I started making my transition into trying to get healthy, she swooped in like a hawk, harping at me and putting me down at the threat of losing her control. She said, "You're not sick enough to get better yet, you're a failure. And even if you do try to get better, what's the point? You'll fail at that too."

And for a while, that thought was always looming in and out of my mind, what if I fail? Failing seemed to always hit home hard for me, it hurt. But then I began to think about it...what it means to fail and to succeed for me.

The truth is, if I succeed at my eating disorder, yes...I will lose weight, I will be thin. But the question is, will I even let myself acknowledge that success? Probably not. And even if I would "succeed" at my ED, I would die. To be a perfect anorexic is to be dead. So, if I were to fail, like I seem to always tell myself I do, at my eating disorder, I would not be thin enough...I would not be starving, I would not be dead.

Now, on the other hand, let's see what it would be like to go down the path of recovery. If I succeed at health, then I will live. I will be able to feel things other than self hate and anxiety over food. I will be able to find time in my life for the things I've missed out on, I will live. I will feel and experience and be overall a very happy person who will be very much alive. If I fail during my trip towards health, then what? Then I will find myself still with an eating disorder, still sick, but still with the oppurtunity to try again and get better, or, if I choose to do so, get sick.

Now which sounds like the better path to take to you?

I saw my therapist again today, and I'm not sure if we made any progress or not...things are kind of at a standstill but not. He's basically just been talking to me about my eating and stuff and we've both argued a bit about things and I got to vent a little and that was good.

I went to the mall today to get new shoes, and I went to a used bookstore with my mother. I wasn't doing very good. My body felt like it weighed a ton and I was extremely lightheaded, I kept having to stop walking in the mall so I could sit down and let the walls stop moving and stuff. I didn't actually do too bad as far as eating goes today. Had a minor anxiety problem about the soup I ate though and tried to gag it up, but I did stop myself because my esophegus has been through so much already, I'm afraid to throw up more.

I started writing out a meal plan for the next five days, it was like I had forgotten that I was trying to get better. I started planning out what I would need to do to lose a lot of weight fast. I didn't even know why I was doing it. It wasn't until after I finished writing everything down that I looked at it and realized that I was being ridiculous. Just because I have some soup and toast does not mean I have to plan out a near starvation week for myself. I think it's because school is starting. I was so tempted to throw away the paper and tear it up, but I can't.

My therapist says that to get better I can't block out and ignore the voice that wants me to lose weight and stay sick because it's a part of me and it always will be and I have to learn to listen to it and then use reason. Because to block it out would be to cut off a part of myself, which will eventually make my emotions build up and boil over, which would be bad.

I'm at a strange point in the day right now to wear I feel just absolutely out of control. It's always around ten p.m. when I just feel so bad about myself no matter what I've eaten or haven't eaten. I'm trying to figure out why that is, and get beyond how crummy I feel right now. The prospect of tomorrow is exhausting and overwhelming. It's enough to drive a person crazy. I have to think about what I want to eat, what I shouldn't eat, what I should, what I should do to be healthy, what I should do to lose weight, what things I should hide from my family, what I should reveal, whether or not I should even get out of bed tomorrow at all.

School starts this Friday, just a couple of days away. See, that's not what I'm excited about...I don't care about that. I'm excited for it to start because I'll be out of the house, away from food and stressing and thoughts of getting better or getting worse. But I'm a fool for thinking I can ever get away from them.