If a food makes you feel yucky, don’t eat it: What’s wrong with traditional eating disorders treatment

Nutritionist at ED hospital:  Julie, you must drink whole milk.  It is part of your meal plan, which, by the way, is exactly the same  as every other patient’s meal plan that ever walked through these doors.

Julie: I don’t like whole milk.  I don’t like the way that it feels in my mouth.  My tummy feels yucky after I drink it, and to me, it doesn’t taste very good.

RD: Your options are whole milk or chocolate milk.  You must drink these.  It’s our “protocol.”  We have a blanket protocol for the entire floor.  This means that even though a “rule ” doesn’t apply to you, you must follow it.

Julie: I tried the chocolate milk and it tastes disgusting. Like plastic or something.

RD: Well, er, we do have soy milk.

Julie: I tried that, too.  The brand you use is disgusting.  It makes me feel horrible after I drink it.  Why should I drink any of these, since they all make me feel yucky?

RD: Your food makes you feel yucky because you are not creditable.  You are sick.  You lack what the established psychiatric community now calls “insight.” We are right and you are wrong. This is always true. We encourage complete compliance. We encourage passivity.  Let us help you and control you.  Let us control all of your bodily functions and watch your every move.  And to prevent unrest, we will monitor your conversations.  See those cameras all over the unit?  See those microphones?  See the staff strategically placed in rooms where conversation between patients thrives? We are doing this in the name of protecting you against this thing we determined is evil, this thing called “triggering.”

Julie: So that’s why you told me to shut up when I mentioned that you can die of these diseases?  Is this why you immediately shut me up when I mentioned the horrors of refeeding edema?  Is this why you shut me up when I told patients that most likely they were being given drugs such as Seroquel not to  help them with anxiety, but to put weight on them?

RD: We don’t want the truth to get leaked out. We don’t believe in informed consent.  All we care about is what you weigh. We are totally obsessed with this number, but we won’t tell you what it is, and we require that we control it and determine what this number is, and that you will never control your body ever again.

Julie:  Hey, I see these starving people here.  Many speak in a manner that is barely audible.  Have you ever wondered why?  We come to you seeking help.  Apparently, your assumption is the helper is the ruler and teacher, and the helpee is stupid, uneducated, incapable, unworthy, inferior, and has bad morals.  Well, let me tell you this: it is this very attitude, an attitude of disrespect, bigotry, and complete totalitarianism that is causing our starvation.  We are hungry for change.  We are hungry for love and acceptance.  We are hungry for common sense, equal rights and equal access to treatment, and full treatment options for all.  It is time to bust loose, tell our stories, and change the world.

Before Puzzle’s walk

I am waiting a bit before heading out, because according to weather dot com, the rain will end shortly. Meanwhile, I have brushed Puzzle’s teeth and put my shoes on.  We are ready.  We are waiting.  We are hungry for our walk.

Over the past week I have watched my body and lived in it while it restored itself.  I kept records of the changes, as I always do.  This morning my blood pressure is closer to “normal” than it has been in months.  My pulse has dropped 25-30 points and is now what it usually is.

I am thankful to free my body of the drug that raised both my blood pressure and pulse to a rate that was far from normal for me, and caused me great alarm.   But I have also made some other necessary changes to the way I live.  I discovered what I needed to do through experimentation at first, until one day, I fell into a groove, a place that feels okay for me.

At some point I’ll speak aloud what happened to me, but for now, I think I need to keep it to myself.

Something like this happened to me once before.  I had a sudden shift, and felt changes in me.  Of course, people like me have shifts and changes all the time.  Life is all about shifts and changes.  But the time that this happened before, I knew within days that I was stepping into something brand new that was scary and different and colorful, and with that, stepping out of the hell I’d been living in.

They tell you that these changes don’t happen overnight.  Is this a rule?   As a writer, it is my duty to break every rule.  Likewise, my tendency to live my life a bit contrary to convention is what works best for me.

Last night I read my records from around the time of my 40th birthday.  I have always said I suddenly got well on my birthday.  I said I woke up and was free.

So I flipped the pages, one by one, and got to January 8th,  my birthday, and no, there wasn’t really a change.  I wondered if I had made it all up, just a fairy tale in my mind.  I flipped the pages further.

I got to January 11th, three days later.  That morning, I woke up different.  It’s all true.   Without much question, I found myself headed on a different path that day.  What I am not remembering correctly is the exact date of this shift.  But I don’t think it’s very important.   We have feelings about birthdays, especially “landmark” birthdays such as my 40th, much as we might tell ourselves that these dates are arbitrary.  I was ill then and in a bad way, and a big party would have felt very out of place.  Instead, I received something that would last longer than a few hours of cake and cards and hugs from people I hardly ever see: I received a new life.

They say that when you start to get better, you are the last person to recognize it.  I think I broke that rule as well.  I took a few steps and waited a while and tested my limbs, and yes, everything is working about how it should.  I guess I’ll keep on walking now.

I’m here…

I’ve been a little busy cleaning up after the mess I created last month and that’s why I haven’t been on.  Meanwhile:

1. I’ve been doing amazingly well eating-wise for about a week.  It’s been maybe a year and a half since I ate this well.

2. I’ve been getting out of the house to do constructive and helpful things for myself every day for a number of days.

3. I’m wearing nice clothes today and I went to church.

4. Puzzle is healthy and enjoying a happier mama who treats her like royalty.

5. I am thinking clearer than I have in a long time.

I’ll save the rest of later, alligators.

Abusive therapist

You put your trust in these people.
They mess with your head.
They have the power to call the police on you and put you in the hospital at their whim.
When you try to tell anyone about the abuse, no one believes you
Because after all, you are the sick one.
You don’t even want to believe it yourself.
You don’t want to admit you stayed in this situation and didn’t leave.
Came to this person, week after week, asking for help.
This person said, “You need me.  I am the only one.”
No one believes you because she has the degrees and training and reputation.
She seems so nice and talks smart with fancy clinical words.

If this has happened to you, you are not alone.
I am sitting here Sunday, April 29, 2012 so totally fucked up.
I always thought she was the best therapist I ever had.
See, that was just how brainwashed I was.
I quit her because I finally saw the bullshit.
If this has not happened to you
Maybe if you did some reading about domestic violence and rape
You might get some ideas about the dynamics going on here.
Everyone assumes she is right and I am wrong because of our roles.

“Everyone” means my other treatment providers
Every hospital I’ve been in
And many well-meaning friends.
Because behind all that compassion, that supposed dedication
Is a lot of control and ego and her own issues.
These people should not be doing therapy.  Period.

I’ll be back in a sec.  Just trust me on this.

My experience being brainwashed by the Moonies in 1979 and my experiences as a patient in therapy 1981-2012

In the summer of 1979, I met a couple of guys on the streets of San Francisco who invited me to lunch at their cooperative home where they lived with a bunch of other people, and then to stay for the weekend at their commune in Boonville, California.  Within days, I was going to give my life to them, give up everything, my job as nanny, my education plans, my future.  I was twenty-one years old.

When you become brainwashed, it doesn’t mean you are weak-willed or had bad parents or are unintelligent.  Plenty of stable, educated, and scientifically-minded people fall prey to brainwashing.  When a person gets brainwashed, what it does say is that the brainwashers were skilled and used good brainwashing technique.

How does this happen?  Looking back, the Moonies did a lot of things to brainwash me that worked.  I go into this a lot in my book, Summer in November, but I don’t really discuss it from this angle.  Summer in November is about spirituality but it is also about the body and it is also about being controlled.  In This Hunger Is Secret, I refer to the Moonies as The Family, which is what they called themselves.  They didn’t say that they were the Moonies because I would have run in the other direction right away!  At any rate, on the streets of San Francisco, the first thing was that these two guys assumed that I was straight, so they were guys, and this supposedly was going to appeal to me that they showed interest in me.

I was kind of suspicious, actually.  What were their motives?  What did they really want from me?  I liked that they showed interest in my dog.  I liked that while kneeling there petting him, they weren’t staring straight at my boobs, cuz if they had been, I would have walked off immediately.  So I decided that they were okay.  But it took a bit.

So this whole sex appeal thing they try on you.  Then the food.  I haven’t a clue if they drug it or not, but it was very high in starch and they did add sugar, interestingly.  It was usually beans and rice or something like that, vegetarian.  High sugar and starch is part of the brainwashing.  It is supposed to do something to your brain, and the timing of the meals and the “lectures” to make you more suggestible…trust me, this was all based on careful planning on their part.

Sleep deprivation.  We got five hours.  They had us go to bed real late, and then woke us up super early, like 5am.  Old-timers fell asleep during lectures even.  This makes the brain more suggestible.

Well, on and on.  Eye contact.   People cried a lot, too.  Gearing the lectures toward individual members.  I have a book about a guy that went through all this a few years before I did, called Crazy for God.  It’s out of print but that’s about what it was like to be brainwashed by the Moonies in the late 1970′s.

After ten days, they kicked me out.  I think that this is really similar to what happened at Alcott last month, actually.  I figured out what was going on, that we were being deceived.  I tried in every way I could to communicate to other newbies that this was brainwashing.  I had to do this by secretly passing notes.  They were always watching.  They quietly took me aside.  They had all my things.  They didn’t allow me to say goodbye to anyone.  I had to go into a van.  They shipped me off and abandoned me at a dark, closed-down train station outside of Oakland at 3AM.

I have said it before and I will say it again, my experience with the Moonies changed me for the rest of my life and this experience makes me who I am.

Okay, okay, that isn’t what happened at Alcott, but there was a lot of talking I could have stirred up among the patients about this thing called “human rights” that I didn’t do.  I was hush-hushed out of there for sure.

But anyway, there’s one brainwashing technique that I want to focus on and that’s the lecture style that was used.  It pretty much goes like this:  Talk about the evils in the world, and how bad the person is, break him down, make him feel real bad personally, get him crying, and then insert the idea about how he can be better and improve and be saved and maybe it won’t be so bad after all.

Example:  There are many diseases in the world.  It’s terrible that so many suffer from these diseases while the rest of us walk around with money in our pockets.  When was the last time you thought about Blue Hair Disease?  Look at this photograph of children crying who have Blue Hair Disease.  You have not helped them all these years.  This is why your life is so miserable.  You will feel so fulfilled when you give money to the Blue Hair Disease Fund.  You are One of Us in the Blue Hair Disease Fund Church now that you have given us money.  This is the Way.  This is the Light.  Feel the Light.

And so on.  You can structure many forms of writing in this manner, actually.  It’s like a plot structure.  It’s a simple essay form or sermon form or political address or form for creative nonfiction.

But just think about using this technique as a form for the 50-minute therapy session!  A gold mine!

Typical therapy session:  How are you?  What have you eaten this week?  You won’t tell me?  That means you haven’t eaten anything.  You are starving yourself.  You are addicted to starving yourself.  You are doing this to be manipulative and provocative and are playing games.

To continue: This eventually will become a crisis and you will end up in the hospital.  Is this what you want?  Do you want to end up in the state hospital?  Or do you want to listen to me?

[Insert suggestion here.]

Just think of what this suggestion could be!  It could be anything, because the patient, if broken down enough and hopeless enough, will agree to anything.

This might be a good thing.  Might.  Like a therapist might save a person’s life and suggest that a person not jump in front of a train.

On the other hand, this technique, this brainwashing technique, can be used to convince a patient to do something that is not in the patient’s best interest, but in the therapist’s interest.  Or perhaps the therapist is just plain wrong.  Or perhaps the therapist wants to convince the patient to do what is in the patient’s parents’ best interest, because the parents are paying the therapist.  Or the spouse is paying the therapist.  Or the daughter or son.  Or maybe these well-meaning family members are sitting in on every therapy session, as “support.”

(How many times I have heard other patients tell me how frustrated they are that their domineering spouse or kids insist on sitting in on every therapy session and every psychiatrist session!  These patients tell me they have never been able to meet with their treaters alone!  What kind of treatment is this?  This is not treating the patient with respect and dignity!  How can any humane doctor allow this?)

Okay, like I was saying, the “inserted suggestion” could be anything.  The therapist could convince you to give up your apartment and move into a halfway house.  The therapist might convince you that this would solve all your problems.  I was afraid that my therapist might use my DMH services to find a group home for me and then try to corner me into giving up my Section 667 housing and move to this group home.  I was scared that she would present this to me in such a way that would make it look like I had no choice.

I HAD to get out of mental health altogether because I foresaw this down the road.  That is, I saw the end of the road.

The “inserted suggestion” could be some treatment that might save your life.  I have seen staff at hospitals talk diabetic patients at psych wards who have refused their insulin into agreeing to taking their insulin.

When I started going to therapy in 1981, I was not going there because I was “curious.”  I was desperate for help.  I was ready to try anything.  I had already contemplated suicide because my eating disorder was killing me.  The following October I entered day treatment, again ready to try anything and still desperate.

I was ready to try anything.  I had my ears tuned in and I was open to suggestions.  I believed everything anyone told me.  I didn’t question.  I didn’t look at anyone’s qualifications.  I did as I was told.  I followed suggestions.

Wimp.

I took the pills that were given me.  They didn’t work.  They said when I felt bad, I should ask for a pill, so I asked for one.  I said please give me pills that work for my problem.    I said these pills don’t work.    They said, “What problem?”  I took two bottles of pills at once.

Then I lost a bunch of friends, of course.

And on and on.  Brainwashing for 30+ years.  I’m out.

****************

Stay tuned for a report on my FIRST EVER ACUPUNCTURE SESSION!  Absolutely amazing!

Also stay tuned for a piece I plan to write on How to Lose Friends (written by an expert in the field, me)

Looking to the future

To reiterate:

“I have a lot to do today.  I feel positive. I am looking toward the future.  My eyes are placed on my head in such a way that they face forward, not back, always looking in the direction that my body is headed.  I think this is telling me something.”

I’m home and have finally turned on the computer

Hi everyone!  Wow!  I’m home!  Whew!  What a day!  Sorry I was “absent” for a few days.  It couldn’t be helped.  That was something beyond my control.  They asked me not to blog…so I didn’t blog.

I can only speculate on this and I won’t do so at the moment but I will get back to this issue on “blogging while inpatient” eventually…it is not what I want to focus on right now.

These were the highlights of my hospitalization….

First of all, I got there.  Well, no, let me back up.

First of all, I lived long enough to make it there on Wednesday.  I wasn’t sure that this would happen, and I’m damn lucky that it did.  When I walked into the Admissions Office, carrying a knapsack and a canvas shopping bag I could sort of keep my balance and sort of stand up.  What I thought in my head…let me say I wasn’t really thinking.  Thoughts happened and they were in my head but you couldn’t really call that thinking.  I guess in two weeks I’d “eaten” once and that had been a week previously.  Since then, no calories.  I overheard people saying I was “confused and disoriented” but this didn’t register with me.   My voice was hoarse for a few days and I only spoke in my normal voice (the one I usually have) for a few seconds following a glass of water, then I returned to a hoarse voice again.  But my dry, dry lips improved rapidly after only 24 hours.

In the first couple of days, it was animal instinct that drove me.  A few bites at each meal and that was it.  Not hunger really.  Just animal instinct for survival.  I drank sips of juice and ate bites as my body could absorb teensy crumbs of this and that.  This was Wednesday that I came to the Admissions Office.  By Saturday,  I was able to eat the full tray, slowly, but it would make me extremely uncomfortable, and my body was not okay with doing this meal after meal every few hours and also doing snacks, too, as you can imagine.

To reverse the body’s tendency to lose weight or maintain a very low weight, some people have to eat a very, very large amount of food.  Some people.  Not others.  It varies tremendously.   I learned quickly that it was to a patient’s peril to look on another’s tray and “compare” amounts and types of food and “calories.”  Some people’s trays were so loaded with food that you’d think it was enough to feed a family.  Other people were fed three or four items and that was it.  It was just plain dumb to try to analyze it or say that such and such person’s metabolism blah blah blah…everyone’s body is different and it’s all science and none of my business what happened in everyone else’s past experience with their body and how much they weigh and need to gain or not gain or how much they are eating off their tray (or doing whatever with afterward, though staff are rather mindful of this kind of “behavior” nowadays).

They have this “percent” thing.  The goal is to eat “one hundred percent” of your tray.  If you do this for twenty-four hours, you get some privilege.  I think this is that you get to go on fresh air break.  It’s incentive.  I think you have to do 100% for three days straight to get a Green Band, which is this huge deal reward because then they don’t go peek at your piss after you go to the bathroom every time you go.  The bathrooms are kept locked anyway, but they won’t peek if you have a Green Band.

I never got fresh air privileges and I never got a Green Band.  I never really wanted either enough to find it worth it to stuff myself to that extent.  I don’t like to go outdoors while I’m inpatient.  Never have.  To me, it’s fake freedom.  Supervised.  Like I’m in kindergarten or something.  Kid on a playground that has to be monitored.  It royally sucks, actually.  I’d rather wait, and I did, and today when I got out I knew it was totally worth the wait.

As for the Green Band, hey, piss is yellow.  Piss is piss and shit is shit.  There are variations here and there but those nurses and counselors have seen it all.  Mine is not going to surprise them in the least and they will not post on Facebook what mine looks like or talk about it on their dinner breaks.  I’m sure they hated looking at piss and shit as much as we hated their looking at ours.

I’m going to do a lot of talking about what it means to tell it like it is in the coming week while talking about my experience at Alcott, by the way.  It is very important to see this illness for what it is and not beat around the bush and avoid talking about the fact that people die from it for fear of “triggering” people.  Everyone should read the statistics.  You deserve to know the facts about this illness.  No one should hide facts from you to keep you from getting “upset” because knowledge is actually power.  Knowing these facts is very often a very important catalyst.   If someone is withholding knowledge from you (about medical facts or facts about medications or medical procedures, etc) then you are suffering under oppression.  I am quite serious about this.  Learn about your illness.  Do it on your own.  Read greedily and hungrily.  And encourage others to do so as well, including your family and friends.

Okay, I have rambled.  Back to 100%.  I generally didn’t eat everything on my tray.   There is a lot to be said about the concept of “100%” and what it means and why people do it.  I wrote a lot on this.  One of the things that I said (I will probably go look it up and find the exact quote at some point) is that first of all while I was there I made a point of focusing on my own tray and no one else’s.  I was fastidious about this.  I think this was one of the most positive choices I made while there, to focus on my own actual food that I had in front of me.  One thing I didn’t write about but had in my head was that the tray itself had a physical boundary.  It was rectangular and was kind of a boundary of me and separated me safely from the others at my table.  I generally kept all the dishes inside the rectangle to keep them “safe.”

I have just looked at the time and it’s late.  You know, before when I used to blog, I would go on and on and on, and insist on getting to some sort of “conclusion” to my article and it would get ridiculously late in the night.

Let me contest this, because first of all, I have barely begun to get going with all this talk about my treatment here and could go on and on for hours tonight with you all!  I am so happy to be back here!  I could sit here and write forever and ever!  But listen: I need sleep.  That was one thing I didn’t get while I was there.  Not one night of decent sleep.  I’m talking bad, bad, bad sleep night after night, not because of anxiety or anything wrong with me per se, but because of practicalities…bad luck mostly.  I expect to sleep tonight.

 

 

News about me and my writing

I can ‘t really backtrack my entire thought processes this morning.  I thought a lot about the link I posted yesterday, or maybe it was earlier today, the You-Tube done by, I assume, a high school girl who had anorexia.  I started thinking a whole lot about this kid.  I guessed that she was sixteen.  I don’t know why, but sixteen strikes me as an extremely miserable age.

Sixteen was miserable for me, and I didn’t even have an illness.  I was just a confused kid.  I think all the kids were confused.  If you ask most people, they’ll talk about the “good times” they had at high school, and look on their times participating in clubs and teams as fun and exciting.  They’ll remember how fun it was to party with the other kids, and to get a little naughty.

Sixteen wasn’t like that for me.  None of high school was like that for me.  You’ll see this when you read This Hunger Is Secret.  The experiences I had in high school were more than unusual.  They were bizarre.  No, I was not mentally ill at the time.  I was involved in a very twisted, abusive friendship, and let me twist your arm a bit more and tell you that I was the one being abused.  Bullying?  I guess if you had to give it a name, any name, maybe it could be called that.

We’re talking about someone who called herself my best friend.  We were always, always together, she and I.  We were known for this.  Such pairings, these close friendships, are not unusual in high school, and on the surface it appeared that we were just another of those duos that are inseparable, occasionally to the point of getting on everyone’s nerves.

But I had a secret.  Actually, I was full of secrets.  This Hunger Is Secret was given that title for a reason.  In high school, I pasted a smile onto my face and made sure it stayed there all day long so no one would know that I felt like a complete fuck-up inside.  I hated being her slave and I hated that she ran my life and I hated that I didn’t have a life of my own.  I was so completely dominated by this girl that if I wanted to do something, I had to ask permission, and she knew my every move, all day long.  I had no privacy and no dignity.  I was allowed no other friends.  What friends I had previously watched her turn me into her robot, and she either stole my other friends and took them as her own, or rejected my prior friends, pushing me further into isolation.

Perhaps, if you have been in an abusive partnership, you can see stark similarities.  But we were thirteen years old when we met, freshmen in high school.  I had only started menstruating and wearing a bra the previous school year.  She was the same age.  We were children.

And no, this wasn’t a one-week experiment.  This lasted four years.  For four years, I pretended to be thrilled to have this really close friend.  I pretended to be having fun.  Pretending itself was fun and challenging.  I practiced my faces in the mirror.  As the abuse worsened, I challenged myself to see just how much I could take.  Problem was, it had already gone so far and so out of control that as a powerless child, there was nothing I could do to make it stop.

We met right away when freshman year started, in the high school band.  Come winter, my family got involved.  They invited her to come skiing with us.  Now, there were four kids: me, my two baby brothers, and my friend, who was also one of us kids, one of the family.  She was blonde and so were my brothers.  I have brown hair, so it looked like I was the friend and she and my brothers were the family.  She started calling my parents Mom and Dad.  They let her do this.  She started inviting herself to participate in family activities.  They let her do this.  My parents  encouraged and endorsed this friendship, saying it was the best thing that could have happened to me.  Do you see the trap I was in?  For the four years of high school it only got worse and worse.

She started bossing around my brothers.  They were very little, and didn’t know anything.  She bossed me around and hit me in front of my little brothers.  She started bossing around my parents.  They didn’t recognize that she was doing this.  Instead, they started doing things to try to please her.  But if you’d asked either of them, she was a faithful, generous friend to me and a wonderful addition to our family.  Our sick, sick family.

One of my brothers started acting up in school.  He got in trouble because of temper tantrums and bad behavior.  He got kicked out of a bunch of things and I guess you could say that at the time he had become a troubled kid.  He ended up having to see a shrink and we went to a family therapist as part of all this.  Family therapy was hopeless with my parents, the way they were, never really listening to us kids or to anyone for that matter.  We burned out three family therapists over a period of, I  guess, a year, probably less.  I was sixteen then.  My brother seems okay now, and is married and has kids and stuff.  We don’t talk about it.

I was sixteen then.  I didn’t have an illness, and I wasn’t messed up on drugs, but every day, I seriously considered taking my life.  Sometimes it seemed like the only way out.  I had no one to talk to.  Everyone thought I was happy.  If I had the guts to tell them what I thought and felt inside, and what I thought about my friend, they wouldn’t have believed me anyway.

I am asking you to believe me now.  When my memoir, This Hunger Is Secret: My Journeys Through Mental Illness and Wellness comes out, the truth will also come out.  My chapter, “Locker #47,” describes my high school years.  It is written in my voice, my voice at sixteen.  My memoir is already out as an e-book, but the paperback version will be out very, very soon and it will be worth the wait.  My story will be in print, on paper, as a book that people can hold, and turn the pages, and see what happened.  And this isn’t the only story in there, of course.  But with this publication happening within maybe a month, six weeks maybe, my life is going to change.  A lot.  The book isn’t just going to sit there.  I am going to publicize.  I want people to know what it’s like to have a mental illness.  I know it’s really hard to publicize and market a book, especially when you’re not the super aggressive pushy type, and not even sociable, but I’ve got a handful of ideas, and the burning desire to want my voice to be heard.

I was thinking all this while getting ready to take Puzzle out this morning, showering and brushing my teeth and the like, when I realized that today is January 20 already, about a year since I left McLean Hospital in 2011 and began The It Notebook, a journal that I kept while I was very ill.  I kept the journal for two months, then ended it.  I believe every entry can be found here at this blog.  I have not yet written the Introduction and Afterward of The It Notebook, which are the only two parts of the book that I will write in polished form.  The rest is written once, then left as is.  It is, after all, merely a journal.  I plan to print out maybe two dozen copies of this very short book, and sell them for cheap, a buck or two, at readings, to anyone who may be curious.  I consider this book to be a historical document of a very hard time of my life.  Much of it is written in verse.

But I asked myself, when I thought of The It Notebook, what I had done since.  What have I written?  I have not been involved in any project.  Not really.  I started a novel revision course but I didn’t have the mental capability to concentrate well enough or work consistently enough on it to follow through.  I am So Cold, and Hungry in My Soul, my fifth and favorite book, the novel I was trying to revise, remains in first draft form.  (Dang, I love that book.)  Besides this?

Besides this?  Besides this?  I have just turned 54 years old.  I have survived 53, the most hellish year anyone could possibly imagine, and for the entire year, every day, I came to the computer, and sat here for hours, blogging, writing about myself, yes, myself, telling the world exactly what I was experiencing, feeling and thinking.  I told the world about my suffering and misery.  I told the world things that I hadn’t told anyone before.   I wrote in my blog things I would never tell my therapist.  When I had no hope, I wrote about my hopelessness.  And when I felt that there was nothing left to live for, I said that, too.

I wrote so much about myself that I’d say that by now, I know myself very, very well.  I think I have so much understanding through my writing and so much will to share my words that it’s time to start writing a new memoir.

I started planning things out while walking Puzzle.  Chapters.  Topics.  What the heck I want this book to be about.  How I want to say it.  We came home.  I fed Puzzle, packed for the library, and left.  I stopped at the church on the way over and said hello to the minister.  He was the first to hear of my plans.  At the library, I wrote down notes longhand.  Just ideas.  Some came out as surprises.  Some were rather detailed.  Others came out in spurts.

But I had brought something with me that has never left the house.  It was my calories and weight notebook.  The secret notebook where I have written my food.  I began this notebook October 9, 2011.  The first page doesn’t contain any calories or food.  It has the letter “S” written on it.  S stands for starvation.  I didn’t want to write the whole word.  I was afraid, I guess, that someone might see it.  I read the entire notebook, from the beginning, in October, until now.  Then I wrote today’s entry.

“Friday, Jan 20, 2012
beginning my new book
My memoir about my anorexia
I did not eat today
Library.

Reading this entire notebook now
I have been so sick
I have put myself so close to death
Not just once or twice, but
every day that I have kept this notebook.  Begun Oct 9, 2011.

Not recorded: For a month at least, and ending mid-December, I bought 2 2L bottles diet soda, guzzled them @ night.  I stopped.

I still desire thinness and intend to continue starving myself.  This is how I survive.”

When the library closed, I walked over to CVS and bought a new notebook.  I decided to include the “S” notebook, along with last summer’s Starvation Spreadsheets, in my new memoir.  Somehow, I’ll figure out which parts need to be edited out.

After I got home, I read the entire “S” notebook again, and cried.  I’ll share some of it with you sometime.  Maybe.  Or maybe you’ll just have to wait for the paperback.

On our walk: January 13, 2011, midday

Last night I  joked with myself, figuring that
If I live another month
Within that month
Surely I’ll lose a tooth.
It’ll come out by itself
And hopefully this won’t happen in church.
Maybe more than one tooth.  Maybe several.

I felt each of my teeth, wiggling each
With my fingers, trying to guess
Which one of them would come out
But none seemed to give me any answer
Any peek into the future.

I bent over and picked up Puzzle’s poops
With a flip-top Baggie.
This I did twice on our walk.
I am thankful for such simple tasks.

Where does this surge of energy come from?
Not a calorie in sight.
But today
The sky, the moment.

This morning, I know
I must try to keep my mind sane.
My insanity protects me.
But today I am going to send an e-mail
To my favorite undergrad instructor
Whom I went to hear read
Not long ago.

I’ll tell him how much I cherish his words
The influence he had on me
Just thank him
And tell him that whatever happens
Well, you know, mixed
There will always be mixed
But basically I am okay with it.

Before leaving on our walk
I checked weather dot com
Power lines may be down
Well, so be it.
I brushed her teeth.
I brush her teeth every day.

I hooked up her leash.
I had a thought.  A fleeting notion.  I knew
There doesn’t need to be any logic to it
It doesn’t need to make intellectual sense.

I put on my headphones.
Just for old times’ sake, Bruce Springsteen
Louder than I could stand.

Down the hallway.
Puzzle is eager to get out and sniff.
She tugs on the leash.
The front door opens and I pass through.
I step into the strong, strong wind
And at that moment I know for certain
That my feet still carry me
That although I thought that I had lost my faith
God has been in my heart
And held me tightly
All along.

 

An angry letter to my T, written during a rare moment of clarity, the morning before an appointment

This is written in a moment of clarity.  That is, my head is working okay right now but probably won’t be for long.  I will take advantage of this clarity and try to be direct and explain specifically at what point, as far as I can tell, I turned away.

I was in the shower when I began to focus on October.  Something got me really pissed off then.  I mean like maybe late October, and I don’t want to waste brain clarity trying to look up exactly when.  I had suddenly started bingeing, massive bingeing.  My body is and was wicked fucked up from long-term starvation and I gained ten pounds every time I binged, that is, even one binge.  Since getting out of the hospital September 26, I had been sleeping two hours a night.  This took me completely by surprise and shock and I was incredibly out of control of my life.

Just for the record: I am physically unable to make myself throw up.  I thought about this the other day.  I have not actually vomited since 1997.  In August 1997 I took an overdose and they made me drink charcoal in the emergency room.  I think I threw up some of it the next day or so.   When I was throwing up black stuff and shitting my brains out at McLean in 1997, they said I had to go to the state hospital, but I didn’t go.  My insurance ran out and they set me free.  I have not thrown up since.  I went to college, though, and wrote five books.

I am starting to lose my mind unfortunately but I will continue to write.  In October I knew in my heart that–well, I looked online and it was as I suspected.  Yes, your stomach can rupture.  It does happen and it was so very likely to happen to me.  Every time your stomach expands, I mean, expands to the extreme, extreme, extreme, the blood vessels get cut off and blood supply gets cut off and part of the stomach dies.  We can safely assume that a lot of my stomach is dead.  When someone with bulimia binges, his/her stomach expands, then he/she throws up.  Well, I don’t throw up.  That’s a lot more dying stomach cells.  Dead cells aren’t stretchy.  They just snap apart.

There have been times in my life that I have been suicidal.  I have a mental illness and people with mental illnesses sometimes experience these feelings.  Sometimes very strongly.  But let me tell you, there are scenarios that I do not want.  I truly do not ever, ever, ever want to die in a binge.  For one thing, it would be extremely embarrassing.

Quick.  Hide the wrappers.  God is coming.

I have a photograph that I found on the Internet.  Anyone can find it.  The body is naked crouched by a toilet.  She was 19 years old, same height as me, had been anorexic and bulimic five years.  Photo of her body.  Her body had been autopsied.  The contents of her stomach were found all over her body.  The contents of her stomach were removed from her body, just a bunch of greenish liquid in plastic jugs, photographed.

My guess is that at the last minute, her body would not cooperate and she was unable to throw up.  Please keep in mind that during the month of October, no, no, for my entire life, I have been fully aware that I do not have this choice to begin with.  If I take too many bites, there is no reverse.

So here you were, in October, seeing that I had gained weight and telling me to accept my body?  I would sit there in your office, my stomach blown up and stretched, my legs full of sick, sick edema, even my hands full of edema, dreading looking at the round curvature of my puffy cheeks that I hated so much, barely able to walk or sit, and this was supposed to be my life from then on?  Well, you can’t even say life.  I was going to die.  Yeah, wasn’t it fabulous that I had gained weight.  Fuck.

Enter Imipramine.  Little wonder pill.  It did stop the bingeing.  This miracle happened mid-November when I was more or less out the door stepping on the plane to London.  I don’t think I really returned to treatment when I came back.  I’ve just gotten further and further away without realizing it, and keeping more secrets.  My book is  not called This Hunger Is Secret for no reason.  And then, enter madness of the mind.

It’s not that I’m any sicker.  It’s just a natural progression.  Time happens.  I was lucky enough to turn 54.  Treatment did not happen.

Just don’t get all defensive and pissy on me.   Yesterday all you did was accuse me of stuff and threaten me and make a face and use the word “bullshit” a lot.

Yesterday I left the office and felt wicked misunderstood and misinterpreted and not listened to and not cared for.  I didn’t know what to think.

Then later I felt alone.  More than ever.  Just me.  Puzzle.  The computer.  Tiny efforts to reach out.  It felt fruitless.  I turned out the lights.  I went to bed.

Two hours later, awake.  I was up, an hour, two hours.  Went back to bed.  Lay there.  Got up.  Realized I’d been laying there two hours without sleeping.  Anger.  I mean, wicked, wicked anger.  Wrote what I had to write, went back to bed, slept two hours, woke up, showered, here I am.

I want to be left alone.  I belong to a wonderful church and I have every Sunday marked on my calendar.  Better things happen on Sunday than can ever happen in this office.  Today is Thursday.  Sunday’s service is at 10:30.  I am always, always on time.