...every day in every way...

In Singapore airport, living through the same eveing for the second time. Timezones timeszones timezones. I felt horrible having eaten the in-flight meal on the way in. OK food, pointlessly eaten when I wasn’t hungry. So. I refused to eat the breakfast. I sent it away. Even though it was free. Then I got to the airport and ate a packet of prawn crackers (130 cals) and drank some iced tea (100 cals PER SERVING - there being 2 serving per bottle, which I overlooked). Have written THIN on my hand in biro, to remind me what I want to be. Tho may have to reduce the dosage of one of my slimming pills, due to excruciating pain. The floor is bucking and swaying beneath my feet, mostly through the sheer fatigue of having emerged from a 12 hour flight next to a child who kept falling asleep on me and keeping me awake. Is this what they call jet lag? Methinks it may be. I have applied false nails to disourage self-mutilation.

(& yes. She is. Monstrous.)

“I am not a robot.” I am more than the fat (or lack of fat) on my body, I am more than the hair (or lack of hair) on my head. These things are affected by my actions, which are affected by my emotions (which are affected by other people, which I just can’t seem to cope with). If I eat too much, it’s probably because I want endorphins, dopamine, people who I love and who love me (platonically and nonplatonically). If I pull my hair out it’s because I’m frightened and want to dissociate (to get AWAY from people, or myself and my own sense of overwhelmedness even at being with myself). I understand all this. The yoyo-ing between needing people and needing to escape. Needing to know that people are there and no-there as and when I want/need/would-like them to be there or not-there. (Developmental attachment issues, anyone? My mother booked herself into a psychiatric institution shortly after I was *loathes word “born” and all the appalling biologicalness that it implies but, despite of actual I-suppose-somewhat-neurotic nausea resultant in thinking it aloud, uses it in lieu of any clear alternative* born. My parents were never together after I was … born. Despite my apparently wanting them to be, and subtly conniving to try to make them be, in the belief that everything would be alright if they were, and loathing the strain of their antipathy. My father was sent away, prevented from seeing me, when I was 4 or 5. I remember clinging to chairs sobbing while being told that I wasn’t wanted anymore and would be sent away. I also remember trying to have myself put into care - and failing. *cue violins*) I’m going to Australia tomorrow. With a father I’ve only met a couple of times since I was 4 or 5, to meet tons of relatives I’ve never met before, and I’ve absolutely no-one to talk that through with. My mother spent some of the day, when I simply asked her not to talk to me because I was concentrating on something, leaning over me, spittle flying in my face, calling me a “cunt” and a “troublemaker” and raising and lowering her fist with a suddeness calculated to make me jump, and I shouted “Leave me alone! Leave me alone!” to drown her out, and cried, and shook with fear, and my vision blurred, and I thought she was going to hit me (again - I remember her hitting me so so hard when I was - not even terribly much younger - and that makes me frightened), and she threw her handbag at me, hard, and threw my grandmother’s bank card (which I am going to borrow (at me again and again, asking me why I wouldn’t take it - by now, of course, I was so frightened that I couldn’t co-ordinate, couldn’t see, just tried to steel myself in case she started hitting me, tried to stay calm enough to be true to my resolve to call the police if she did, though in retrospect that might have been what she wanted, to cause enough chaos to try to stop me going to Australia with my father). She told me again, of course (this is the drill) that I would “have to” “find somewhere else to live”. As though I had done something wrong. Which i terribly terribly weird to live through. When someone is behaving so appallingly and simultaneously behaving as though one has oneself behaved appallingly - when one evidently hasn’t. A mark on my face, I kept thinking, would be useful evidence. But - what earthly good would having her prosecuted to me? The threat of police action is more likely to benefit me (or keep me safe from a serious beating - not that all beatings aren’t “serious” to some extent) than actual police action. “I’m not afraid of you.” I said. She called this “goading”. As though she wanted to prove me wrong, to MAKE me afraid of her - to MAKE me … something. It’s all about her powerlessness. And she IS powerless, really. Or she wouldn’t feel the need to corner me and yell at me. Apart from that? I got POST today! Good post. Hand-addressed post. Books. CDs. Like supplies to someone in the trenches. It’s nice to know that someone, rather than wanting to frighten me, rather than threatening me and swearing at me - actually wants to MAKE ME HAPPY. I feel more human. Last night, in a dream, incidentally, I found myself asking someone, some generic (but older-than-me) man, rather desperately, to “Make me happy!” “That’s not what you’re after.” he said, as I clamped him ever tighter between my thighs.

Who am I kidding? I’m still pulling my hair out. I need emotional support for this, & I’m not getting it from anywhere. And without that I don’t feel I can do it. *hopes but makes self no promises for the coming two weeks* Which is sad because it makes me SUICIDALLY sad, really it does. Which taints all of the rest of my life. I feel like a pseudo-person. Last time I went on holiday I managed to be 100% pull-free for 2 and a half weeks. Mostly because I was around people who cared about me, who I didn’t ant to let down by behaving compulsively around them. Being around my mother makes me want to self-destruct, anything to leave the world she is in, to fade out, to disconnect, to dissociate, to BE GONE! She’s that stressful. I almost want to kill myself and as I do it say to her “OK. You’ve killed me. Happy now?” And she’d glower. And I’d die. And that would be - pretty much - that. To be doomed to her makes me feel like nothing is worth trying to do - BECAUSE SHE’LL WRECK IT. I know this is silly coming from a woman of 24. But … I feel trapped by her in ways too twistedly convoluted to even explain. I’m just going to blame it all on her, OK?

That’s less than yesterday. Even after my buttered-bread-binge (brought on by the stomach cramps they signally failed to eliminate). Four doorstep slices of buttered bread (oh! oh! oh!) and a salad sandwich. Apart from that, I had four cherry tomatoes, one apple, one smallish carrot, one boiled egg, two diet shakes and one skimmed-milk-no-cream latte/toffee-cream-cooler (from Costa). Rather a lot, for someone who’s meant to be having one diet shakes and some fruit every day. But significantly less than I had been eating before I started trying to lose weight. I doubt I’ll actually PUT ON weight on some buttered bread, some salad, and a boiled egg. If I do, I am horribly horribly unfortunate. I’ll tell you/me how my day went, to give you/me some idea of how all this operates. I woke up around 11AM, not terribly hungry but feeling that I owed it to my body to consume something. So I had one of my diet shakes, and took my first metabolism-increasing pill, my first two fat-burning pills, my first two diet-vitamins-and-kelp pill and a valerian pill (to keep me calm, because I tend to have panic attacks just after I wake up or just before I go to sleep). I then ate an apple (because I like apples). I looked up Starbucks drinks calorie contents on their website. I sent out. In town, I was surrounded by things I really wouldn’t have minded eating. Toffee, particularly. And sherbert lemons. And I looked at the packets. And I was horrified by the number of calories involved. And I tried to be good. Looked at the packets of diet foods, of sugar-free-chocolate, etc etc etc. And It all still had more calories in it than I felt prepared to eat. And I had my superskinny latte, because coffee is important to me and I think that is something that I can keep and enjoy. And I was worried it would be less delicious with skimmed milk and no cream (this was at Costa, not Starbucks, because there IS no Starbucks in Boscombe town centre, I’d forgotten), but IT WAS DELICIOUS! And I was SO pleased. And I had such a sense of … almost superiority … wandering through town drinking it. On the way home I saw a tremendously fat girl leaning over a balcony, stomach exposed and hanging out of the top of her trousers. The flat she was … hanging out of … was above a fast food store. VERY bad publicity, methinks. And … she disgusted me. In a detached sort of a way. And I thought, it isn’t very nice of me to be disgusted, but perhaps that’s the way I need to feel in order to have the sort of relationship to food in which I … don’t end up looking like that. To clarify, the heaviest I’ve ever been was 13 stone (182lb). Years ago. And I just got tired of it and stopped eating and became, pretty swiftly, 10 stone (140lb). (Incidentally, I’ve decided I prefer the U.S. system of measurement: 144lb-121lb, a loss of 23lb, sounds far more achievable than 10stone3-8stone7 (eight and a half stone being my lowest “healthy” weight). From my heaviest ever weight to where I am now, I’ve already lost 38lb, far more than I have still to lose, so it shouldn’t be that difficult. *looks happy*.) I did that by eating an apple a day and drinking whatever I wanted. Future possible strategy: because my goal is to have zero proper meals a day, and because my current (always attempted and rarely achieved 2 diet shakes/500 calories just doesn’t seem to cover it, and leaves me panicky and shaking and in pain, because my body just isn’t used to that sort of onslaught, why not allow myself 3 shakes a day? Still only 750 calories a day, before fruit. Which is better than attempting something more extreme, running through my shakes before dinner time, getting to dinner time, and bursting into tears and giving in to SHEER HUNGER, which is what I did today. I’ve decided not to take scales with me on holiday again - because I get disheartened and eat as a sort of form of compulsive self-harm (which is how I became 13stone). Decide I DESERVE to be fat (and hated by myself and everyone else - extremes of thought I know, but that’s how I feel sometimes). I’m not going to set myself a weight-loss goal. I’m just going to work really hard and try to surprise myself when I get back in two and a half weeks. Adios!