This Feels Familiar

i haven't posted in what feels like forever! there are a few reasons for this:

1. My perfectionistic tendencies and wanting to post the "perfect" post.
I don't even have any idea what the hell that would be but for some reason i want it.
2. Photos- i've had photos i wanted to share with you guys all weekend but couldn't find my computer connector so i didn't want to post w/o my photos and now that i found the cord i accidentally forgot my baby <--- (who forgets their baby?!) camera in the car and have yet to go to the garage to retrieve it (it's a cold and windy five blocks away, alright!?)
nevertheless, here are some older photos that i've been meaning to show you forever...

coffee+cicero. check out my crazy latin notes. yeah,
latin studying requires abundant caffiene

Look it's Olivia. In Latin! Check out her super-cute toga :)
 Did i mention that i love all things classical?

and finally, some birthday photos...

trying to illegally sneak pictures in jcrew.
I love everything in that store. It's a bit of a problem.

bought myself an expensive bouchon coffee+croissant

(twas delicious. looks it right?!  It was so chocolatey though
 that even i couldn't finish it...so i ate half and then saved the rest for later)

Later i went out to lunch with my friends, P and B.(not peanut butter
and jelly, don't worry) We went to this new middle eastern place
right next to my house. It was amazing and they gave me a free baklava just because
it was my birthday! yay!

got in trouble shortly after for taking pictures in Sephora...
Oops. How cool is all the "Philosophy" stuff though?!

I loved this when  I saw it.

"Remember to dance in your nightgown, sing in the shower, ride a bike, fly a kite and take an occasional wind bath in your bare skin. Give those you love big kisses, huge hugs, and the words i love you often and always. Nurture your body rather than starve your soul...remember that you are not guaranteed tomorrow and that today is as good as it gets"

Anyway, i had a really good birthday. i know i said that already but in the midst of all my complaining i thought i should just say that again. Because i'm really grateful. I couldn't have asked for a better way to kick off this eighteenth year. I have  a feeling its going to be a lot better than the last few....
back to our usual programming.
Ah, yes, of course...reasons why i haven't been a good blogger as of late:
 reason number  three:
3. E x h a u s t i o n.
It reminds me of back when i was really sick. When i was deep into my bulimia, I couldn't get out of bed some days. I ended up missing so much school just because i would beg my mom (through tears, usually)to let me stay home, because facing the world was too hard.yeah, ive been exhausted beyond belief recently and it's been really hard to get out of this funk. I think it's slightly chemical but mostly emotional and its really kind of scary.
Luckily, it doesn't feel that extreme yet, but nevertheless the wintery, fatigued, sad feeling is kind of building in my chest and it scares the shit out of me. 
I don't want to go back there.
Not at all.
Speaking of things that I DON'T WANT TO DO...i've been messing with my food lately and its really dumb. It NEEDS to stop, i know.
I've already proven to myself that i always feel much better when i'm IN recovery and doing well, not when i'm playing my restriction matches.
Seriously, though, rose, cut it the fuck out. 
Like it's not even doing anything, its just making me be weird. Today, for example, I messed with my food and now i just feel dumb and like shit. I ate breakfast, and then I didn't eat anything until lunch (faux pas numero uno) and then at lunch all I got was a wrap with salad in it. I mean, if you don't eat anything between seven am and 1230, aka for seven and a half hours, you should have more than a tiny little wrap with salad. So, naturally, i was starving. And i ended up going to the store with my friends and getting an entire hersheys bar and eating it and now i feel like S*!# and like i "can't" eat dinner. 
So what does messing with my food do? Absolutely nothing.
Besides probably increase my exhaustion, give me reasons to beat myself up, and that's about it.
Okay, lets be fair here though, what does it do that "helps" or is serving me? There has to be a reason that i've been fuckign with my food, right?
I guess the first reason is it gives me something I can control, yadda yadda yadda. But it's true! Everything is so not in my control right now, or at least it feels that way. In school, i basically just feel like a fish out of water 98% of the time (and an awkward one at that) and messing with my food gives me something that is actually in my control as opposed to all the social weirdness that feels so awful and yucky and sad.
Did i mention how much it sucks to be repeating a year? ;)

(source: http-/www.flickr.com/photos/ihearnoises)

i need to remember though, i'm OKAY. And, it could be worse ^^^ ;)
The second reason is probably that it gives me something to tell that voice in my head that won't shut up recently about my weight.
I've been having a really hard time lately controlling my urge to lose weight. I don't know what to do about that part...

This photo is my friend Lauren's. It's from her collection
" a day in the life of an eating disorder".She's a beautiful artist.
you should check her out. She also has a youtube channel
and a new blog. She's a love.

Anyway, i decided i needed to post today because i need to break this weirdness of me not posting because i don't like it at all and i need to tell my perfectionistic and eating disorder voices to STFU, because they are impinging on my ability to live a generally happy and normal life.

(source: http://weheartit.com/entry/4755989)
Thought y'all would appreciate this. I should listen to it...

Okay, hope everyone had a good start to the week! i'll try not to be so MIA, its not good for me and i miss all my lovely readers and writers out there. :)
xo,
Rose

failed promises

i'm sorry, my dear readers, that i'm such a poop. <---(and so eloquent)

i didn't post on sunday or yesterday, grr! I'm sure i'm much more upset about this than anyone else actually is, of course, but i'm just mad that i didn't meet my self-made challenge. I'm gonna try to tack on two extra days (this coming saturday and sunday) to make up for it, so i can see "consequences" (not that writing a blog post is a punishment, of course) for my actions. I just want to take some responsibility and keep to my promises to myself. 

This is one of my nasty-ass cupcakes from this weekend.
It might not have tasted good....but at least it looks yummy?

Anyway, how are you all today? Yesterday and sunday were kind of uneventful, but today was slightly awful until about thirty minutes ago. You see, for some reason I just had a really rough day after I woke up from a dream about someone who I really, really miss and kind of have a complicated/broken past with and then my day kind of just spiraled down from there.

I went to Dean and Deluca w/ my pops on Saturday.
Check out the fancy (and expensive!!!) hot chocolate...
18 dollars for a box?! I'll stick with my Swiss Miss French Vanilla, thanks.

I need help! I've been so messed up about my food today (and it's kinda been building all week), and I really don't like it. (Well, part of me likes it, but we'll get to that.) 

I baked brownie/cookies last night from (recipe taken from this lovely site) and could barely even get myself to taste one. Then today, when I brought them into school, I had a bite of one of my friends(we all baked stuff for an english class 'party') and i immediately freaked out and decided i needed /wanted to purge. I couldn't though, thank goodness. Then at lunch, I ate but not really enough and I didn't have any type of snack and the day was just generally bad food wise as I was spinning in my head for most of it and almost came to the conclusion that I was going to b/p after school. (I didn't). But yeah so then I had an appt with my dietitian, without whom i would be nowhere, and that went okay. Except for the end when she weighed me. I always get blind weighed, and I can always usually tell by her reaction (i've known her for three years) whether i've gained, lost, maintained, etc. Today when I stepped on the scale though, i got really nervous all of a sudden and started rambling because I could just tell by the way it felt to step on that I had lost, ya know? That's weird for me. It's not like I'm used to "hiding" my weight from professionals or anything, since, being bulimic, I never lost a significant enough amount of weight that it was really the issue, the focus was usually much more on the purging, etc. 

Um yeah I was bored so I took a picture of some toothpicks. Don't judge.

Whatever I'm rambling. But i just wanted to say that. That I'm having a hard time. Because a really large part of me right now is glad that I lost weight. (Even though it's definitely a miniscule amount). That part of me wants to keep restricting/effing with my meals, etc. It's not okay. I'm not going down this road. But i want to. No, i don't. My eating disorder wants to. Gah. 

This. Is. Frustrating.

One step at a time. I can do this. I ate dinner tonight (a good amount) and I actually just had one of my cookies (it was good!!!). Okay. Tonight is good. I'm on track with my work (can you believe i'm doing well in school- wow actually being able to focus& not being distracted by my stomach growling all the time  is really great! ;) ) I'm going to be okay. I can do this. I want recovery. 

okay. 

breathing.

The toothpick picture got me thinking about color...so i tried to take a picture of my
bookshelf...which is nerdily color-coated. This is only like two out of 8 shelves and the lighting is bad...
but sometime i'll try to take a better one cause it is actually kinda pretty. :)

love you all. no more failed promises. I promise to keep going forward in my recovery & to keep blogging about it.

xo

rose

Body Image & the Weekends

I'm just gonna put it out there.

Weekends tend to be tough.

I know this is not just the case for me but also for lots of others (eating disordered or not).

Whether it's just the break from the normal routine, or the under-current of pressure to be doing something "interesting" "exciting" "cool", "productive" or "active" , or because we are not all distracted by the business of the work-week, for whatever reasons, as longed-for as they are, (especially apparent in the surge of TGIF posts, tweets, statuses, heck- t- shirts these days) Saturday & Sunday can be rough.

That being said, this weekend has been rather typical, but not terrible for me.

A weird pattern that I'm, noticing, however, is that my body-image tends to plummet on the weekends.

sundays, particularly. This is also true of my symptom-usage, sometimes.

I think part of it is the fact that my weekends recently have been super boring.

Not that the inherent couch-potato & TV lover in me has any problem with this.

My ego has a serious issue with it though. I always feel awful and loser-ish when I just don't do anything "cool" on the weekends. I mean, come on, I live in the city that never sleeps! I'm seventeen! Shouldn't I be out & about, painting the town green and bar-hoping with adorable random boys all night? Should I be out to brunch because it's Sunday and then down to SoHo for the new boutique opening? Should I have spent yesterday morning going for a jog and then the afternoon frolicking &being crazy on the Great Lawn with some cool hipster friends?

I don't know.

In reality, i spent most of the weekend either hanging out with my mom or in my room.

I didn't do nearly as much physical activity as I "should have", and I barely accomplished anything (save spending hours looking in my 2010 Fiske College Guide and creating a colored-post-it system to keep track of the schools that I okay-ed, liked, or adored...yes, i'm a major nerd who wants to get out of high school very, very badly.)

With all of this self-judgement flying around and lots of time to think about all of the things that i feel bad for not doing, I guess it's no wonder that my eating disorder seems to "flare-up", so to speak, on the weekends.

Today was no exception to this weekend-itis.

I woke up ravenous, ate breakfast, watched tv, read my Fiske Guide (lol@me), and napped. A few hours later, I was even more ravenous, so I went into the kitchen to make lunch. I ate. And then I wanted more. And then more. And then I threw up. Meh.

It was the only time i've thrown up this week, which I am really proud about, considering transitions tend to be hard & stressful, and stress increases my urges to either restrict or overeat/purge, blah blah blah, et cetera et cetera.

After that little 'party', i showered and then it was time to get dressed.

dum dum dum.

*enter dramatic music*

Yeah so my body image sucked. I couldn't find anything to wear. And my once tidy room is now in shambles.

Le sigh.

But, never fear, blogging saved the day!

I stumbled upon this (embedded below) video on forever_hopeful's blog, and it literally just made my bad body image crawl into a hole, shrivel up, and die for the time being.  WOOHOO! Rose: 1 ED: 0 cha-ching!

Seriously though, watch it.

I'm not usually one for semi-sappy, quasi-meaningful 'love yourself' videos or whatever, but this literally made me cry (maybe it's my vulnerable state ;) ??? ) and I just really recommend it. So, here it is. 

Hope it touches some of you the way it did me.

xo

Rose

Letter to my Body from Ally Marks on Vimeo.

Recovery Essay

As promised, here is my essay. It's kind of awful and incoherent and I'm really not sure that he's going to understand it but maybe i'll proof read it tomorrow if I'm a little more lucid. Or make any changes that ya'll suggest (if you do it before 1 pm NYC time!). We had to put a Huck Finn quote at the beginning as a sort of epigraph. Mine is the moment where Huck decides to help Jim get away, even though he's terribly conflicted.

Warning: It's kind of terribly long for a blog post. Feel free to skip if you don't feel like being bored out of your mind. ;)

“It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because, I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied it for a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell’ ­– and tore it up… and if I could think of anything worse, I’d do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog” (Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 223).

           

            There is no one moment that I can say it all started. No single glance towards the mirror. No stinging comments. No terrible, abusive father. I can’t give you a concrete answer to the ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’, or ‘when’, and certainly not the ‘why’. What I can give you is a lot of blurs. Blurs that mesh together and go from dark to light to dark to lighter and back to dark again. And the blurs eventually meander over to the lighter side, hopefully to stay, each step precarious, toes checking for quicksand or faulty rocks, just waiting to slide off a steep cliff.

            It’s hard to remember most of the facts. I can remember the feelings, or the lack thereof- the numbness. The pain. I can remember the frenzy to get out of the pain. I can remember the knots in my stomach as I sat in classroom chairs, staring blankly out at the world, counting the minutes until I could escape. My stomach would be twisting and turning in knots, my brain obsessing over food, my body begging me to eat something with all the power it could muster. I would watch the clock and jiggle my foot and anxiously wait until I could run out and do what I knew would help me escape. I could buy food -- lots and lots of food, and eat it as fast as I could and then throw it up. I’ll go back and forth from the mess of the kitchen to my sticky bathroom floor until my skin is pale, my temples are pounding, and my heart is racing ba-doom, ba-doom, ba-doom.   I'll go and lie face- down in bed, exhausted. Other days, I would sit alone in my room and makes lists and charts of calories, fat grams and pounds on the scale and obsess for hours. I’d make scrapbooks of pictures of anorexic models. I’d spend hours on the Internet looking at images and reading stories about girls who were sick and sad and didn’t eat. I’d stare at the mirror in disgust, seeing all the things that were wrong with me. I’d run to the scale hidden in my bathroom to hop on and hop off, clenching my jaw, hoping to see the numbers go down. I did anything and everything not to be in the world, to find a way out, to build a reality separate from everything I was afraid of.

            I remember those days in a blur. They were pain and sorrow and neediness and fear all wrapped up in my mind and made a little bit more tolerable by the insanity of an eating disorder. I don’t like thinking about, or writing about those times. Something about it feels unsafe. I don’t want to get to close. I fear that closeness may leave me teetering on the edge of a building and I can’t look too far down, or I might loose my footing, slip, and fall. It would be a long, long way down.

            What I want to talk about is the world where I live now. And how I stumbled all the way here. These days are different. And it’s taken a lot to get here. I still have a ways to go. I guess I’ll start at the beginning, although, to be honest, I’m not sure I know where exactly that is.

            The thing about recovering from an eating disorder is that it is, in fact, simple: you eat. The thing that is not so simple about it is everything that happens when you do. An eating disorder was the way I kept a precarious grip on life. It held me together, albeit minimally. When I let it go, I felt everything fall disastrously into pieces, and I was back exactly where I started, and with a few more wounds to show for it.  

            I knew that I didn’t want to die, but I also wasn’t particularly sure I wanted to live. I thought I’d give living a try, though, and if it just “wasn’t for me” I could go back. So, I ate. I ate and ate and ate. Eventually, I cried. The food filled me up and there was no more room inside me to hold back the tears.

            I remember the day that I looked at a slice of pizza and burst into tears. Rachel, a woman who was only a few years older than me, with a sweet smile and a borderline-cheesy-happy disposition, but who inspired me nonetheless, was my therapist. She sat with me when I curled up in a ball of agony, thinking of the pizza in my stomach, imagining it spreading to all the parts of my body and making me fat, as I had always feared I was. (I will learn later, very, very slowly, that “fat” is actually, in my case, a synonym for “unloved, undeserving, and fundamentally "wrong") I wanted it out. Stupid pizza. I wanted it all out. If only I could just throw up, just this one last time, I begged, I’ll never do it again. She came over and gave me a hug. She sat with me and rubbed my back. She braided my hair and told me that I was going to be okay. Eventually, I believed her. 

           Maybe this was the moment where the change happened, where the tables turn and I finally took the right fork in the road, or crumpled up the proverbial letter. I don’t know. What I do know is this: recovery, for me, was about love. It was about needing love, wanting love, and wanting to love others. In first grade, my teacher sent home a report card to my parents that said that I while I was shy, I gave the best hugs of any student in the class. I knew why this was. Whenever I hugged someone, I really meant it. I loved people so much that it scared me. I wanted to love all my friends all the time and get the same in return. When I grew up, and realized that this wasn’t “cool” or acceptable, I learned to cut down. Cut down on the love, and cut down on the food. What I’ve learned now is that I need to tell people I love them and show that when I want to, ask for the love I need in return, and eat and keep all of my food.

            Every time before, when I had wanted to return to the darkness, the black haze of sickness that had cradled me for so long, there was no one there to stop me. Now, this time, I had people who cared about me. Rachel, I knew cared about me. This scared me tremendously, I was afraid of caring back, afraid that I would lose her and be left more desolate and alone than I had before. But it was in those moments, where someone was there again and again, to rub my back because she didn’t want me to hurt myself that I learned to choose the love over the sickness. It was being loved that allowed me to eat my food. That made all the difference.

          After meals, my friend Laura and I used to go out into the backyard of the house we were living in, stand on the porch, and scream. We’d hold hands and wail until our throats were hoarse, trying desperately to get something out of us. We wanted some kind of release, because everything we were feeling was so intense. We knew we had to do this though, to let it all out, even if the neighbors wanted to kill us. It was this, or go back down below, to the numbers and voices and mirrors and porcelain. I think I’ve always been an intense person, and this probably won’t change. I don’t scream out my New York City apartment building now, though, because I’ve gotten used to all the madness that comes with eating, and with living in the world like a real person. Some days I still feel pretty insane. I can feel the intensity well up inside of me like a knot in my stomach and my head starts to go around in dangerous circles. I either find a way to cope with this or I slip and return to the obsessions and the loneliness on a cold, hard, bathroom floor. The thing is, now, when that happens I know how to get back out, I’ve learned how to peel myself off the floor, and go and ask for a hug.

Choices

So I was on the phone with a staff member from MNV today.
I love and respect this woman so much, and she is recovered so i really felt like talking to her was useful, especially today.
One of the things she said to me was "You have three choices. You can stay still, go backwards, or go forward."
This really struck a chord for me as I was recalling to one of my friends even last night that i was scared that i was going backwards, in terms of my food/thoughts/etc.
After I got off the phone, I actually felt like i had the strength and I got out of bed and went out and met up with a friend- so i went forward instead of staying still (wallowing in my misery) or going backwards (engaging in eating disorder/ self destructive behaviors to not feel the misery).
I feel like I actually accomplished and learned something today.
I'm feeling really grateful for the person who i talked to (lets call her "A") today, especially because she and I have not always been great buddies but, really, I felt so loved and supported today by her.
Hanging in there!
xxx
R

"I'm not okay."

The above statement has never been easy for me.
The statement above this is an understatement.
Saying "I'm not okay" is not only not easy for me, to do it  i have to collect all the energy in the world and stick out my tongue and cringe. It is the most unnatural thing in the world. Almost as unnatural feeling as, say, eating.
My eating disorder protected me from the fact that i was not okay and that everything was not dandy.
It allowed me to lie to myself along with everybody else, and pretend that i "didn't care" about things in my life that were truly bothering me.
The last few weeks have, in short, been really, really rough.
My food has been rough. I feel like I have take 3 steps backwards after the 100 steps forward.
It feels disappointing. Most of all though, it is just scary.
I don't want to go back to where i was before. It's hard to acknowledge that the language that i use when i talk about food recently seems more akin to that of 5 months ago then of 5 weeks ago.
The tricky part is that nothing drastic or horrific has happened.
I haven't binged, purged or severely restricted, i've just been toying with the thoughts and experimenting with the omission of food and the denial of my hunger.
The fact that this seems pale in comparison to the "not okay" that i used to know makes it all that much harder to be able to admit that i am "not okay" because i fear being the girl who cried wolf, when really, all that was  there, was a hamster.
I talked to L about this today on the phone and she told me to call R ( my therapist from MNV) or just call the office (at MNV) and demand to talk to someone just so i can say "I'm not okay". I texted R just now and asked if we could talk tomorrow and we have a phone date at 5.
I hope i can get up the strength to tell her what is going on, without feeling like a fraud or a faker or  just dumb. I need to do this. I need to ask for what i need and take responsibility for my own well- being. Otherwise, i will be really really not okay.
Wish me luck.
xxx
r

Finding Motivation

I had been having a really hard time the past few days with my motivation.
Motivation, in my mind, is crucial to the success and progress of my recovery. I have repeated many times that my problem is "not fucking whether or not i'm eating yogurt or cottage fucking cheese for breakfast---it's about the big picture!" (Excuse my french, of course ;) )
The whole problem with motivation, though, is that sometimes, it's just not there.
And if it's not there, i tend to get into a mind-fuck where restricting seems logical and eating seems like "a waste".
I was feeling today like "this whole recovery bullshit" is just that- bullshit, and that it's not worth it because my situation (home, Junior year X 2) is so sucky and i have so long to wait before anything good comes of all the hard work that is recovery.
My head was telling me that Eating* would make the situation worse, more unbearable and harder to deal with because it would not allow me to disconnect by using my eating disorder behaviors/thoughts and it would force me to really "be present" in my life.
What really was helpful though, in my conversation with Lyn, was the way she completely reframed what i was thinking in a way that totally made sense.
 The conversation went something like this...
(imagine an adorable british accent---it adds to the advice, i swear!)
Lyn: Rose darling!
Me: Hiiiiiii
Lyn: How are you?
(forget the fact that i totally just ignored her question...)
Me: Why am i doing this?
Lyn: Why are you doing what?
Me: Eating. I mean. You know--- all of this. It sucks.
Lyn: So that you can get the hell out of your parents' bloody house and live a fabulous life, of course.
Me: But its like...i feel like i'm holding my breath until fucking 2012. What the fuck.
Lyn: Rosie-posie, you need to eat your food and keep your food and take care of yourself darling so that you can have your wits about you to deal with all your parents' crazy shit and then you can go and have a fabulous life, and leave them in their own miserable lives. You are meant to be FABULOUS and you can only do that if you're eating your food, right?
Me: Oh, yeah, you're right.


So rather than thinking that Eating and recovering is making this bad situation worse, maybe it makes sense think that eating my food could maybe (dare i say it...?) help me function better and be more equipped (mentally, physically and emotionally) to deal with whatever comes my way!?


Never-mind the fact that Eating is literally necessary for my body and mind to function, my eating disorder is great at convincing me that eating will literally ROB ME of the ability to deal with life (by making me stressed, anxious, uncomfortable, alive- yes, i said that, and fat!)
In reality, however, Eating actually means providing my brain and body with the energy (calories, peace of mind that comes with getting rid of ED thoughts) to deal with the life i am living now, so that i can start to build the life i want to live!


It is interesting (and somewhat nerve-wracking) to see how easily i (and i consider myself to be a fairly rational person, relatively speaking (; ) can be convinced by the eating disorder of something that really makes no sense whatsoever, and then allows me to almost threaten my recovery.


I guess thats why we all need support people around us, to keep our crazy heads in check.


Lyn's accent also always cheers me up, and i assume that has something to do with my new found motivation ;)








* I use a capital E because by "Eating" i am referring more to the whole act of engaging in Recovery rather than a single isolated act of feeding oneself.

Make The World Brand New

My first blog post! I'm so excited.
So, this is, i guess, a record of my journey through recovery from an eating disorder.
I've been so lucky up until now with all the support i have received. I am finally home now after spending four months in residential treatment for my bulimia and i am now determined to lead a life bulimia-free.


I always thought people were exaggerating when they said that "everyday is a struggle" during recovery.
I kind of realized (laughingly, of course) to myself today that yeah, everyday IS really a struggle.
That might just be how i'm feeling right now, since it has been a rough week, probably the hardest i've had in the month that i've been home from treatment.


Anyway, I'm determined to keep moving forward in my recovery and to do whatever it takes and since i love writing and i also love reading other's blogs, i decided today that why the hell should i not make one?!


So here i am, typing away and i will be shocked if anyone reads this- but also greatly flattered.


So here's to recovery and the long road ahead. 
xo
Rose