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[prismaticbleed]

Today was the worst day I’ve had since North Carolina, in terms of the eating disorder. Looking back on the day, I can pinpoint a few reasons as to why. First, my sleeping schedule has been disturbed by the several days the plumbers were here-- they would stay until almost 10PM, and their movement, the smell of the paints and glues, and the constant social interaction overwhelm made sure that I also couldn’t leave the kitchen or relax or function in a healthy conscious manner until they left… meaning, until after 10PM. I’m usually asleep by that time, so this was a huge problem. Three days forms a pattern and there were three solid days of that, and I got stuck. Furthermore, with all the doctor’s appointments I’ve had lately, I’m now stuck back in the routine of not being able to eat breakfast until 3PM or later. This promotes later eating and also huge fasting times, both of which wreak havoc on my body and brain. But on top of all this, I’ve been getting “trauma triggered” way too often lately, and that is disturbing. I really, truly wish I could just forget it all, and live as if it never happened, as if my life was pure and clean and real and good. I know I try, but all I do is run and bury things. My mother told me to my face today, that my eating addiction is just me “running away from my problems” and “refusing to face what’s wrong with me.” I didn’t say anything in response because that was a point-blank straight shot and she’s right. It hit hard, and it was a shock, but she’s right. It’s humiliating and embarrassing because honestly, I don’t like to think of myself as someone who would run away from her problems. I never used to, and honestly my self-image keeps desperately grasping at who I was around 2007 or earlier, in that “pure period” before I met Jacob and when I first started socializing online, when I was an absolute saccharine goody-two-shoes who everyone thought was a little old lady because I called everyone “sweetheart” and “honey” and didn’t have a bad bone in my body. At least, that was how I was conscious of myself at the time, God bless. But that was the ideal. I was severely dissociated at the time but I had no idea. Everything negative and traumatic and evil inside of me was hypercompartmentalized and God knows I wish I could do that again now, but North Carolina utterly destroyed all of that. Would you believe that was already three years ago? How is that even possible; it literally feels like it was yesterday. And that is disturbing too, considering it all feels like a fever dream still, most of it covered in thick bleary fog to prevent me from seeing anything too clearly, and absolutely to prevent me from feeling anything that might very likely make me want to die. Nevertheless, things leak through, and break through, and that has been happening a lot lately, despite my running away through the eating disorder, and in a real sense refusing to admit that because I keep trying to rewind to high school and pretend nothing ever happened and I’m still a Mary-Sue who doesn’t realize that people can be abusive in the first place. So there’s that whole thought process looped back around, I hope. I’m not paragraph breaking here because I have to write two full pages for therapy per day and I miss typing and I want to get as much as possible written, haha. Also I must admit, I’m cheating a little bit for my bloodwork tomorrow, please allow me this non sequitur before I jump into some hard typing. I’m supposed to fast from midnight but with the frankly terrifying day I had in terms of the eating disorder, I’m letting myself drink water until 1AM, which means I have 7 more minutes, good Lord in heaven how is it this late, this is like the college days, or even worse, like North Carolina. So let’s just go right to that topic. I barely remember anything about that time period for two very big and very significant reasons: 1. It was devastatingly traumatic, and 2. I was not present during that time. Oh yes! Lest we forget I lived as a profoundly fractured multiple personality system for ten years straight before North Carolina completely annihilated that entire function, God knows I still haven’t recovered and yet I still won’t look at it because I don’t think I can cope yet… but yes, people have been waking up in tiny ways lately, thank God, thank God, let me drink some Pedialyte here before I run out of time, wow this is one heck of a stream of consciousness document, ah well, at least I’m getting two pages in, hooray, congratulations. You can tell I’m sleep deprived and depressed because I’m in “semi-manic mode” with this behavior which means that if I stop and let myself feel the crushing devastation of my addiction and the reality of my sinful idiocy and the fact that I don’t think God is talking to me anymore because He’s mad at me because I’ve potentially committed mortal sins with my absolute stupid behavior lately concerning food = drugs??? I took $25 out of my grandmother’s purse today so I could buy ten entire cans of Italian wedding soup which I promptly threw up. Why do I do this? Because something in my head says “I have to figure out if I like them” and why is that? What does that accomplish? Well, I think I know. It’s-- foolishly-- trying to figure out “who I am.” It’s trying to form an “identity” based on likes and preferences and such because hey guess what, it’s never done that before, thanks D.I.D. But you know what? Screw likes and preferences, pardon my language but it’s bitterness and intense grief talking. Absolutely to hell with likes and preferences and soup and cereal and all the other garbage I’ve been “addicted to” for conceptual and symbolic reasons lately. Milk addiction? The child-voice in my head demanding pudding cups because she wants to remember what it was like to be 7 years old in the body when the family was still together and grandma was still making desserts and nights were warm and cozy and safe and I didn’t have to worry about IBS or trauma and I could just sit down and eat tapioca pudding with strawberry sauce out of a crystal cup before going to bed in a golden-carpeted room. That part of my brain-- an actual alter that survived somehow, untouched by trauma somehow-- is crying because she just wants to eat pudding because she associates it with gentleness and innocence and child-life and really, there’s a sort of fragile pitiable quality to the whole idea: a sort of tininess, a softness, a meekness and weakness and need to be protected associated with the very visual and sensual concept of a small child with tousled hair sitting on a chair twice her size and eating a pudding cup. It almost makes me want to cry. Milk-based foods, especially puddings, have this sort of textural and “social” association to them that is absolutely childlike. Adults don’t eat them because adults are strong and stable and mature and powerful. Only little kids eat pudding because it’s soft and simple and weak and easily hurt and you need a spoon to eat it because it’s the total opposite of hard and tough. You don’t even chew it. But you also don’t drink it. And there’s another huge tangent I must get into. My brain associates food with trauma, explicitly, for many reasons. Most are too frightening to talk about. But, there’s another interesting aspect to it-- eating, even the word itself, is inherently violent. Biting and chewing are acts of violence. They are, by nature, annihilatory and angry and a form of attack. When I bite something, it is a predatory act, often accompanied by feelings of destructive wrath. But swallowing things is terrifying. It’s traumatic. This is why I am chronically dehydrated: because I realized, about two days ago, that drinking is inherently traumatic as well, because it is the opposite of violent. Whereas biting and chewing are actively aggressive, drinking things is passive and receptive and hey guess what, that’s exactly what sexual trauma feels like. Swallowing is associated with rape and drinking is all about it. This is ALSO why I absolutely cannot eat with someone else nearby, except my grandmother who is absolutely safe and desexualized, because I immediately feel invaded and violated and I start to panic and throw up and cry and scream and attack people and hurt myself and generally just want to die. And that’s exactly what happened today, almost immediately after I started to eat “breakfast” around 14:00 after having fasted for approximately 18 hours straight again! My mom came up the house with literal bins full of food ingredients, brought my brother into the kitchen-- who is, weirdly, almost always doped up during the day so he shows far too many passive schizophrenic symptoms for my flashback-prone brain to bear-- and began talking and cooking at a manic rate. And my brother decided to stand right next to me to peel potatoes and beets, cornering me between the sink and stove, with the room full of noise and food and
garbage so that there was nowhere safe to go either physically or sensorily, and then I made the absolutely stupid mistake of putting a slice of cucumber into my mouth as all this was happenning. And I am telling you honestly, it felt like I was being raped. It felt as if I was experiencing sexual assault. There was something in my mouth, and the environment was hysterically unsafe, and it was honestly traumatic. And right there is where my conscious memory blacks out. I was already having a panic attack at the time, unable to breathe and crying, and that eating trigger just shut off my brain. So that’s when my consciousness fails. Of course I was still conscious in that I didn’t faint, but my consciousness in terms of “am I aware, am I a person, am I going to remember any of this,” etc. was absolutely not working. Hence the eating disorder hell that followed. I know there was a bit of a conscious kickback as I was saying the Divine Mercy Chaplet because I wanted to be conscious so badly, but I kept wavering in and out. Same with the Mass afterwards, because my mom and grandma kept talking over it and whenever people talk and I get involved, actively or passively, I black out of conscious awareness. It’s something about conversation and it never fails, but it drives me into automated idiot mode and I am NOT myself at all, ever, and I hate it so much. But yes. Memory is SHOT and I kid you not, I was not aware again until I was choking down a bowl of Crispix around 8PM-- five entire bloody hours later-- solely because I was CRYING over it and begging God to make it stop, because I was tired and wanted to go to bed but I felt like I “had to eat it” because I had to “figure out if I liked it” and God only knows why I keep doing that. Why the cereal checks? No idea. I hate cereal even conceptually, but I keep buying and eating it and it might solely be because I’m dehydrated and my body is desperately seeking high-liquid foods, hence the soup addiction as well. But yes. Then I blacked out again and I don’t remember anything else until I was forcing down toast and yogurt as my brother data-dumped about Pokemon in the kitchen, and I only remember that because I was SO dissociated that I was AWARE I was “watching myself” act like an absolute moron and wondering why am I doing this, this is not the life I want to live, God help me, and then I lose it again until I “wake up” in the bathroom choking down ginger ale so I could vomit and crying because it was now 11PM and I was morally and physically and emotionally and spiritually exhausted. That’s when I started wondering about the mortal sin issue, and honestly I am extremely worried about it. Now I am obviously mentally compromised with this idiotic eating disorder, BUT just how “conscious” am I of its evil? Am I CHOOSING to sin with this? I honestly don’t know. I KNOW it’s not a good thing to do. Overeating, buying garbage, vomiting, wasting food and money, taking food and money from family members to fuel this horrific vice, etc. are ALL grossly evil things. BUT I DON’T WANT TO DO IT. I want to stop, I wish I never had to eat again, I don’t want to be like this. And yet I keep doing it, and crying all the while, and begging God to help me and stop me and save me, but He’s not answering, and I’m too much of a cowardly stupid idiot to stop on my own, and I keep buying soup and cereal FOR UNKNOWN REASONS other than possible dehydration and it’s just destroying me. I wish I could just sit and pray and read the Bible for hours every day instead, SHUT UP devil in my head, I know you don’t want to but that’s because you’re an absolute stupid morally bankrupt moron who wouldn’t know what happiness is if it punched you in the face. So shut up. Shut up. I WANT TO PRAY. I miss praying the Rosary every night with my grandmother, God I want to weep, I haven’t said it since the hospital I don’t think, what happened to me? Why is my schedule such an absolute moral nightmare? Why can’t I get things together enough to have the time to pray and sleep and type and be good? God why won’t you help me in these respects yet? I cannot do it alone, I’M just as much of a moron as that stupid whiny lazy selfish complaining devil voice which I hate. I KNOW I love you, God, and that I WANT to pray for HOURS every day but I can’t??? Solely because I cannot seem to be myself with this eating disorder and the fact that I keep losing conscious control of myself for unknown reasons, and it’s worsened by trauma triggers? I don’t know. It’s… I don’t even know if it’s a cross to carry. It just feels like punishment loops for my stupidity. All I know is that I’m utterly exhausted and I don’t want to sin anymore and I’m not choosing this in any “mentally sound” manner. Does that still make it a mortal sin? I know it’s wrong but I’m also terrified that if I DON’T eat all this junk my malnourished underweight body WILL STARVE AND DIE and although I wouldn’t mind a hospital stay again, I DO mind not being home to help my grandmother. It’s a mess. Honestly my brain is fried. I’m too tired. I have to be on the road in 6 hours so GOOD NIGHT!