Honesty.

As I said in my last post, I wanted to make a video about this, but I still can't get my webcam working, so I've decided to write about it instead. I think doing it this way will probably help me to be more honest, and that's really what I need right now.

I know why I'm struggling so much. I can see the cause and the effect, I know why it's happened now, and I even know why it's manifested itself in the eating disorder side of things rather than any of my other self destructive behaviours. The last ten years have really taught me to know myself and to analyse what's going on in my own head, and why I behave in certain ways (I started self harming when I was 12, and abusing alcohol when I was 15, as well as the ED that started when I was 14). I know the whys and thr hows, and in therapy I even wrote (and laminated!) a list of early warning signs and coping mechanisms, but right now I just don't want to put any of them into practice.

So, here it all is, honestly and without any sugar coating.

In May 2011, me and my bf decided to start trying for a baby. I've always wanted kids, and we were both in a place in our lives where we wanted to make that step, we were settled and happy and we wanted to bring another life into the world. I'd been in a healthy place in my body and mind for quite some months. We talked and figured things out a lot before we even started trying, and when we did I was so excited and felt like everything was finally falling into place. Long story short, but by October, nothing had happened, we'd been trying and trying and every month I was just getting big fat negatives. I knew that I had other health issues (which I'll go into in another post) that may have been hampering things, but I'd been seeing my consultant regularly and he'd given my the green light when we started trying that everything should be fine. The negatives were getting hard to take and I was starting to get worried that we wouldn't be able to conceive naturally as I'd had a long time when I was severely underweight where my reproductive system just wasn't working at all.

On my birthday in the middle of October, my bf proposed to me. I was over the moon, I'd always wanted to get married, and it all felt so right. We, again, talked a lot about what to do next, and we decided that we would stop trying for now, and concentrate on getting married, so it was easier on us both to stop getting negatives, and also to give my body some more time to adjust to the medication I was on and give it more time to settle so it would be easier to conceive. A week later, I found out I was pregnant.

We were both so, so happy. It was everything I'd ever wanted, we were engaged and having a baby!! At this time I was also so busy, I was working full time in the evenings and I was going to college too and my stress levels were pretty high, and with the added strain of being pregnant as well, I was so tired all the time. I didn't panic though, I decided to 100% concentrate on being healthy for my baby.

A month later, on the day of my first antenatal appointment, I started getting pains, which got steadily worse, and then that was accompnied by bleeding. Fortunately, where I live, there is a specific women's hospital only about a mile away, and I ended up in there emergency room and after hours of waiting, severe pain and distress, I was told that I was having a miscarriage. The next three days were probably the worst of my life, I was in and out of the hospital, I had my blood drawn 11 times, I was sent for a scan to check it was ectopic, and all of this time at the hospital I was surrounded by happy, healthy pregnant women who were coming out from having their scans done, waving their little pictures around. It was completely and uttery mentally, physically and emotionally devastating.

I took a week off work and when I went back it was the run up to Christmas and I decided to concentrate on that. Just focus on having such a lovely Christmas time, and for the most part, this distraction worked, but that's all it was. I hadn't dealt with any of it. Two days after Christmas my bf and I had a serious talk about what we should do next. I knew he'd not been happy for a while, but he's such a closed book sometimes and after much coaxing he eventually told me that he didn't want to get married, and that he'd only proposed because he 'panicked'. I assume he felt guilty for not being able to give me the baby that I wanted, and decided that proposing was the next best thing. He also said that he wanted to just go and have fun again,  spend some time not having any responsibilities and deciding what he wanted to do with his life. Normally, I would support this desire completely, I've always wanted him to talk to me more, and also to find what he's really passionate about and chase his dreams, but the timing was just so bad, and I was utterly devastated. He said he felt lost in our relationship and needed to find who he was again. In only a couple of weeks I'd gone from having everything I'd ever wanted, having a baby, being engaged, just being so happy, to having what felt like absolutely nothing. It'd all just been taken away so fast and I didn't even have time to process.

I didn't feel like I wanted to put any of my coping mechanisms into place. I wanted to fall apart, I wanted to melt down, I didn't want anyones help, I just wanted to be on my own and mourn my baby, and to wallow in my own sadness. Of course that's when the eating disordered part of me piped up again. It felt so comforting to have something familiar again, almost something that felt like it was looking after me. It knew me, and I knew it, there's was no pretence there and it felt like I was striking back up a relationship with a friend I'd not seen in years, but who I knew inside out. It was easy and it was safe. The concious part of my brain even thought, I've spent the last 8 weeks nourishing my body, being as healthy as I could, and now I don't need to, now I can be as unhealthy and destructive as I like and it doesn't matter, I don't matter. I felt like such a failure, I couldn't even look after my own baby before it was born, what kind of mother would I have been.

Since then I've been declining slowly more and more into my disordered way of thinking. I've not really tried to fight it. I quit work because I couldn't cope with college and work, and I just didn't care anymore, and some part of me regrets it for being such a failure for not being able to do both, another part of me knows that its for the best so I can concentrate on doing what I really want in life, and a big part of me is excited to finish so that I can have more time to put into my disordered ways. I'm scared of that part. And I'm scared of what's coming next. I wish I had people to talk to.