Before you start I would just like to ask you to read this blog to the end and not to give up half-way. I think it is important to highlight the struggles of living with and eating disorder and that ‘recovery’ doesn’t always involve two steps forward, that there are set-backs. However, there is always hope…and you must always fight.
Life can be cruel sometimes. Really cruel. In fact, I don’t know why I am saying ‘sometimes’ – my life seems to be a bitch all the bloody time.
I had an interview a couple of weeks ago for an internship alongside my Masters at Loughborough. I’ve been to several interviews over the last few months, always being rejected but I keep trying, keep applying, hoping that one time I will be lucky. So with this interview a few weeks ago, I wasn’t expecting to get it…and I didn’t.
And do you know what my feedback was? I showed no personality and wasn’t outgoing. Great. So everything I hate about myself she just confirmed to me in one blunt sentence. And these are things I can’t change – I know full well I have no personality, that I’m boring and not out going or chatty. But that’s just me and I can’t help it. And I’m not sure I can take much more.
There’s only so many times you can keep picking yourself up. I’ve been knocked down time, after time, after time and each time I try and get back up and dust myself off; forcing myself to keep going, to keep on trying. But now I feel knocked down harder than ever. Life and all its disappointments and knock backs are too hard.
My answer to all this? Anorexia? F***ing anorexia. I can’t cope with life so I run to anorexia. At least I can do that. And it protects me from having to face and deal with all the shit in life. It has never been so clear to me how much I use anorexia as my coping mechanism until now. But it seriously feels like that is my best option. Because life has become too much. Just focusing on weight and being thin – that’s what I know and it puts me back into a bubble where life can’t hurt and disappoint me. It feels like the easy way out and by god do I want to take it.
That’s how I felt when I wrote this last week. Complete despair, distress and disappointment, to which the answer had to be to give up. On everything. However, I went out for dinner with my old friend from uni on Friday and then on to a pub and I had a really nice time. More than that in fact – A brilliant time. And I also had a good time with my old school friend earlier in the week. Giving up on everything and going back to anorexia will just destroy these relationships which I have managed to rebuild and would porbably loose me two friends that I hold very dear. And they are two friends that I have wished to have for so long. So, whilst the feedback from the interview is still very upsetting, on reflection on the good times I had last week with my friends I am not going to give up on life. I still feel incredibly stressed about what to do in the next step of my life, what career, if to do a Masters and my depression is very much there at the moment. But I have got good things. Friends. And it is that I am going to hold onto. To help get me through this bad patch. I feel as if I am going through a mid-life crisis (although my friend suggested that it may be more of a quarter life crisis than a mid-life) and I have no idea where I am heading. My other friend mentioned fate. That everything happens for a reason. So maybe it was just a case that this internship wasn’t for me…but there might be something else…something better, round the corner. My sister sent me two quotes and they are good food for thought…
