Default Sim

TW:- Disordered eating, trauma, but no weights, BMI or numbers, grief, my best friends cancer, loss, suicidal thoughts , bipolar disorder, mention of anorexia relapse after 12 years. Hopefully that’s it because holy fucking shit bruh.

What the absolute fuck is 2024? I’ll tell you.

It’s 00:01 on New Years Day, I’m watching the stars and the fireworks with my teenager Coda. It’s so peaceful and it’s freezing cold so we’re sharing a blanket standing out on the balcony. The night is so clear, you can see a lot more stars than usual. I have this feeling of peace wash over me, and I’m feeling hopeful thinking of the fact 2023 was such a successful year for Coda, with their A levels, results, and getting into University. This year we will have a lot of time together before they start their course as they took a gap year and won’t be starting until September.

Then, out of nowhere, I feel her. It feels like my best friend who died is standing right next to me and my teen and I realise it’s now been 4 years since she died as the anniversary is in January. I try to swallow it because I don’t want to crush my teenager’s experience of this starry firework night and how peaceful it is. However, I am completely blindsided by the wave of emotion I felt. It suddenly dawns on me that she isn’t coming back, that her death is a forever thing. For the last 4 years I feel like I almost deluded myself that it didn’t happen, that she was still out there because I couldn’t bear to even bring myself to feel this. The title of “Best friend” doesn’t even begin to quantify our relationship, she was so much more than that. I try swallow it until I go to bed, where I cry all night.

I actually met her while blogging, I was in recovery from anorexia and so was she. I remember how we became friends, I was following her for a while and was blown away by how she writes. I was in awe of her really, she was also a year ahead of me in recovery and I remember feeling a lot of hope because of her blog. Anyway, I just commented, “Well, I think you’re as cool as penguins” as she was having a day of self-criticism which she totally didnt deserve, she is without a doubt one of the best humans I have ever met. She wrote back “Omg I love penguins”, and then we became friends, haha. It’s so funny that a random comment about penguins on the internet can lead you to meet someone who would change your entire life forever. My life was never the same again. We were then best friends for the next several years. We would support each other through any anorexia lapses, any other type of MH crisis, and it was just great as I never needed to explain myself. She just got it, and I really hope I did the same thing for her. She was the family I always wanted.

Then 2018 happened, she told me she had been diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer. I won’t go into detail about her diagnosis or what was happening because she has written it herself on her blog and well, she was always a much better writer than me, she was just so talented. If you want to you can read it here. I was devastated for her. It felt so freaking mean, and I am still so freaking angry about it. She had been through so much with her own anorexia diagnosis and MH struggles, to recover successfully for this to happen? What kind of fucked up shit is that? I lived in a delusion that she had fought so much before, that cancer was not going to beat her, so she would be ok. She would get through this, because she is a freaking warrior and probably write on her blog and help other people going through breast cancer just like she helped me when I was in recovery. I literally convinced myself she was going to beat it. I never considered the possibility that she might die, ever. I didn’t want to even think about that. This is the thing I regret the most because I think of all the things I would have told her had I considered the fact she might die. The fact she literally saved my life over and over, the fact that she made life worth living.

When you’re in anorexia recovery, the doctors and nurses for best interests reasons will sell you a fairy tale about recovery. How life is going to be so much better, and you can do all these wonderful things. How you’ll be so much mentally better. They go on about it so much that you start imagining skipping on a bridge over a waterfall, with a rainbow backdrop and butterflies floating around you like a Disney movie while holding one of your fear foods laughing because you can eat that now. How, this was the thing holding you back your whole life, and now you can go and have this life you always wanted. But then my best friend gets cancer, and I’m collecting more diagnoses from the DSM like they’re fucking Pokemon, “gotta catch em all”. I guess I can add complicated grief to that now. So I stopped believing in this utopia that it was to eat, because where the fuck are my rainbows and butterflies? And where the fuck are her rainbows and butterflies?

It’s December 2019, and I’m still eating somehow, well, I know how. My best friend often couldn’t eat well due to cancer and she’s been having chemotherapy on and off, and well, I knew if I didn’t eat it would give her reason to worry about me which I didn’t want. I am not making her cancer journey about me, fuck that, so basically I’m eating begrudgingly and eating for her. Also, despite being years in recovery at this point, we both still found Christmas hard, because food is apparently the most important aspect of everyone’s Christmas. It’s all anyone goes on about, it’s all the TV goes on about, all Christmas movies have lots of food (Except Die Hard and thats why its my favourite Christmas movie) and well I do not enjoy food when I am in recovery. I have no idea why, it just gets in my way and I hate it, my entire recovery has been this way. It’s the same as ironing to me, if I can avoid it, I will try and then feel bad because I should be eating like a responsible adult so eat more later. So every Christmas we would do a Christmas sandwich competition which involved trying all of the shop’s Christmas themed sandwiches and rating them out of ten. I actually looked forward to this part of Christmas, wondering who would win and who would dare to mix cranberry sauce with mayonnaise this year, the audacity. But this Christmas was the Christmas that my best friend told me, “The cancer has spread, but I’m going to be okay and fight this, there’s no reason to think anything bad”. Looking back, I know why she did this, she was trying to protect me still. But I feel really bad like maybe I didn’t do enough to make her feel she could tell me that it was in fact, really bad.

It’s 13th January 2020. My best friend has been quiet for the past few days and I am getting concerned but, we both have a tendency to isolate when things go wrong and then we both reach out to each other like okay I am ready to talk now, so I tell myself not to worry too much. Weirdly my fire alarm has been acting up all day for no reason. I changed the battery and everything, it just keeps going off. I’m not sure I entirely believe in things like this, but, it happened for some reason. I feel like it’s some kind of sign and well I have a tendency to Carrie from Homeland’s cork board about signs (Bipolar urge to figure out the entire universe from one single thing amiright) so I still think not much of it, and I shit you not, within a few minutes of this happening I get a message from her fiance. He tells me that she had died earlier that day. Luckily my teen is with me, because, I just melt. I feel my world collapse in on itself. Suddenly the world does not have colour anymore, and everything around me is just black and white. The colour is literally ripped aggressively from my world. I am crying but I do not want to believe this. I desperately do not want it to be true, she said she would be ok.

I initially cry the hardest for her fiance actually. They were supposed to get married and she didn’t make it. I had drawn invites for their wedding for them on my iPad and I’m just like, that’s absolute fucking shit for him. I almost feel like I am not allowed to be devastated because, for him, it is so much worse. I know how much she loved him and he loved her. She talked about him a lot to me, and I knew he was the perfect guy for her because not once did she ever say anything bad about him to me. This is fucking shit. Life is fucking shit, cancer fucking sucks, and now its over. That life of rainbows, waterfalls and butterflies that she absolutely deserves is not going to happen because she’s not here. I don’t eat anything at all except coffee for 2 days and then I hear this voice in my head asking me, “What are you doing?”, and I say, “I don’t know”, and then I hear, “Please don’t do this”. So I eat, and think, that’s funny, that’s exactly what she would have said and I know she wouldn’t want this for me.

It’s March 2020, and the lockdown happens. All I am thinking the entire time is, “My world felt like it stopped when you died, and now the world has literally stopped for everyone”. It made me like lockdown, not the fact there was a pandemic no, that gave me crippling anxiety about covid and I had started washing my damn shopping when I brought it home but, that everything has stopped, because it had, for me. Mostly my grief at this time was severe anxiety and stress. Everything stressed me out, every single thing in my life apart from my teenager who is a freaking angel stressed me the fuck out. “I can’t deal with this” was a common phrase both used for big things, and tiny things I had made into a fucking giant Everest sized mountain when it wasn’t. Getting a letter of something I had to deal with? “I can’t deal with this, why can’t people leave me alone. I just really want to be left alone” (Again apart from my teen, my favourite thing is being alone WITH them). I had my own cancer scare in both the tail end of 2020, and again in 2021 or 2022 I forget, it’s a bit of a blur. Both times it turned out to be something that looked like cancer, but thankfully, it was not. I’m still eating this whole time, but now I’ve developed weird disordered eating, and not even freaking noticed. Seriously. It’s only been a week or two since I have and I was like, wait, what the fuck was I doing with food since my friend died, thats a fucking weird way of eating bruh.

My eating was, not eating a single thing all the live long day, and then eating my entire maintance calories in a 2 hour window so not to lose weight and to not have an eating disorder. Would not recommend at all by the way, I ended up with losing muscle, gaining fat despite maintaining weight, fucked up hormones, a constant severe flare up of acid reflux and iron deficiency because you cannot possibly eat 18mg of iron in 2 hours unless you ate 6 steaks. I can’t believe people actually recommend this type of eating on the internet, it was a disaster. It felt okay until my body literally screamed at me for it, because I could actually eat until satiety and not worry about eating too much because it’s pretty hard to eat any more than I did in a 2 hour window. Again though, the fat gain, muscle loss, iron deficiency and constant flare of acid reflux was not worth it. Basically, I was trying have an eating disorder, whilst not having an eating disorder because I wasn’t losing weight. I maintained my weight on it until I got iron deficiency which somehow made me gain 3kg for some reason. Anyway, that is how it has been since my friend died.

Then it’s January 2024 again and I try my very hardest to get myself out of this depressive episode I am experiencing thanks to finally feeling grief properly that my friend is never coming back. Grief is normal, but I have bipolar and grief can either cause a manic or depressive episode. Anyway, some of the things I do include taking my teen out for walks to the Costa near our home, going to Cardiff shopping which is our favourite place to go to, and I try and make an effort with food and eating more regularly because my stomach is so bad I can’t sleep for coughing and pain. I slowly start getting obsessed with food, and cutting things out, still doesn’t alarm me because I went gluten free for an entire year before and nothing remotely ED happened. It also made sense to me, I am now 40, I blatantly shouldn’t be eating as much saturated fat as I was eating to get all my calories in, in a 2 hour window. That is reasonable to think. I was eating over what you should eat. I also added iron to my diet with leafy greens and protein. Now, it feels like, I then woke up one day, and suddenly I now have anorexia again, that this isn’t just a lapse, but a full blown relapse and I am stuck. I don’t know how exactly this happened, but it feels like I just woke up like it. Suddenly, I cannot eat cheese, or potatoes, or over a certain amount of calories and now I’m literally counting calories and weighing myself. I remember thinking I ate cheese like 2 days ago what the actual F is going on? I’m not even below my set point yet, the iron deficiency caused me to gain a few kg so Id just lost that with my new healthier diet. The day after this, I fell down a hole, a big one. You know those ones you phone crisis team for but you don’t get an appointment until the end of February, yeah those ones. I have racing impulsive bad thoughts, you know the ones, the ones where everyone is just better off without you and no one cares. Then you ring the crisis team and they don’t really care either except to get your psychiatrist to see you in a month and a half from now which feels like a fucking eternity when you don’t even see the point of eating or worse, living anymore.

The worst thing about my relapse after 12 years is, what do you think it made me remember the most? My friend. If there was one person who would get why I am here, why I am struggling, it’s her and she’s not here to talk to about it and despite the fact I know that, I still can’t eat. Worse still, and this is fucked up, but I like it. I feel like I just stepped in a time machine, it’s now 12 years ago, me and my friend just met, she’s alive. It feels ridiculous also, I’m judging myself so much harder for being 40 with anorexia. I literally thought it was behind me, but since realised no, it isn’t and it hasn’t been. Nothing I have done in the last 4 years with food has been anything close to being normal. Oh, yeah, I didn’t lose weight, but that’s it. By the way, this has fuck all to do with what I look like, I don’t give a flying fuck what I look like, or what anyone else looks like. I know my ED likes to get all obsessed with weight and shit, and making numbers smaller but Ive always been a huge advocate for whats on the inside is what counts, individuality, uniqueness, wackiness. Weight has fuck all to do with any of that. That’s what draws me to people. Also, my ED makes me “feel better” which I had forgotten what this feels like, so now I’m not having those thoughts of impulsive suicidality because I “feel better”. Now I’m just depressed and fucking sad, but not like you know, that.

Also, I was having therapy since November last year I think, which did not help yet at all, in fact, made a lot of things worse because I didn’t get too far into it, just enough to let the damn skeletons out of the closet, you know, neglectful parent skeleton, and other abusive narcissitic parent skeleton. It turns out I have a lot of trauma obviously, I mean, look at the damn trigger warning on the top of this post. My therapist is nice, and I like her but, she said, “This therapy probably wont help because you have trauma, I think you need trauma intervention” and I’m here like did she just say I’m too messed up for this therapy? Ok. But I didn’t want to lose this therapy at the same time because it’s the only support I currently have and I know exactly what will happen, she’s going to discharge me and then I’m going to fester on some waiting list or be forgotten about, again and I wont get this other therapy. Also, my psychiatrist was not really concerned about my ED relapse, she just gave me anti depressants for my big sad, like that’s going to fix it and told me to go to this charity for help with my grief who also have a waiting list. I’ll do it but seriously, I now have nothing except a psychiatrist appointment every 3 months while continuing to lose weight and feeling stuck? Ok.

My teen is fine though. It’s kind of weird being in this situation, they were 7 the last time I went through it and recovered, and I didn’t go into detail of anything that happened, just enough so they knew it wasn’t anything to do with them. They don’t remember when I was severely underweight but they do remember that they liked when I gained weight because “It was more comfy to hug you when you were squishier heh”. They’re surprisingly good at all this MH stuff. They just seem to instinctively know what to do and what not to do despite the fact they dont struggle specifically with bipolar or anorexia. They still treat me like a functioning human even if I am not and I cant tell you how much I appreciate that. They don’t carefully dance around my emotions, which I hate so much it’s so patronising, they treat me the same if I’m depressed, manic or whatever. They don’t push, they instead offer self care suggestions, the ones that actually work for me. They tell me how normal it is to feel so bad and that theyd feel the same if any of their friends died too. They buy me things I like and tell me it is okay and to stop saying sorry.

So that’s where I am at. The fact is, blogging is also hard for me. That’s where I met my friend, but maybe I can somehow write this for her and honour her. I’ve written this whole post like I would telling her about it and since my own team are not particularly willing to help me maybe just writing it here will help somehow.

What a shit.
Anyway, this song pretty much sums up how I feel about my friend and what I am currently feeling like, because of the millennial urge to describe emotions in song lyrics.