give many damns

Hello blue-hell site.

This tree I saw at the conservatory is giving major ME vibes. Being allowed to recover in place. What a concept. I’m coming up on 3 years entirely outpatient and things are altogether different and still very very hard. I still have, as much as it kills me to say, an active eating disorder - and - I don’t identify as a person with an ed anymore. The struggle is so much more multifaceted now as things have sifted and risen to the surface. 

Probably more than anything right now I’m really struggling with my OCD. I have so much shame, and then shame for feeling shame, about struggling with rituals and compulsive rumination. I’m super grateful for my therapist and her validation/frustration that my ocd wasn’t diagnosed for treated until just the last three years. It helps a little to know that my brain has always been this way - and now I have the choice to engage with obsessions and intrusive thoughts with more awareness. 

It’s really been a *journey* because I had/have so many ideas of stereotypical OCD and how I’m just masquerading as someone who has OCD. I have to SHOUT @ my brain that my obsessive and intrusive thoughts are not “me.” 

idk friends in the void., being a mentally ill person is hard. 

2023 mood board ✨🪴📚

Gift of the year from mags

Time for a little brain dump into the void: 

I reached a breaking point this weekend, fast forward to monday afternoon and I was journaling in a 2! Hour! zoom meeting and started really feeling feels and was crying (oops! not profesh of me), so I turned my camera off. I was trying really hard to sit in the feels (anger, which is VVV uncomfy for me) and not dissociate or shove them down. And actually the anger has turned out to be very motivating and ?grounding? What????

Long story short I’ve been stuck in a hamster wheel situation with my team and my recovery basically since May. Me, trying to gain weight and increase MP compliance, and then getting exhausted and hopeless and defeated and pulling back. Which leads to conversations with my team about if this LOC is sustainable and if they are truly serving my best interests - of course followed by me white-knuckling to show them that I can be successful and create change OP. Getting exhausted and hopeless again.....cue the cycle.

Sooooo anyways....I just got fucking ANGRY on Monday. Angry with myself. Angry with the eating disorder. Angry with my OCD. Fucking angry. And surprisingly the anger spurred some sort of feeling of #fuckitcapability. A big problem I struggle with is not feeling capable. And I’ve been truly fighting the last 48 hours to act as if. I’m not sure if I believe the actions I am taking will be sustainable, or ever feel less distressing, or even effect change. But maybe they will do these things? Maybe it’s worth finding out. And I’m so fucking angry that I’ve been “I’m going to fucking TRY bc not trying is just keeping me stuck.”

So yeah, I’ve done some Very Hard Things. I would like gold stars. I’m trying to just take it one day, one meal at a time. Offering myself lots of compassion and practicing disengagement from my OCD brain when it gears up with its intrusive thoughts.

Just need to shout into the void that is the blue hellsite. 

I am not doing well my friends. I’ve completely disconnected from my body and being in my body, but also am not being in my brain. I am ~*nowhere*~. I have ceased to exist. 

I am brain tired, soul tired, whole body tired. 

I have been trudging along outpatient for the past three years. Trying to stabilize, trying to gain weight, trying to build my life - through a pandemic, through cancer, through the isolation of working remotely, through the stress of grad school. 

There is no space to stop. And yet I am told to rest. How do I find space to pause if I cannot stop? I am afraid that if I stop and rest I will not be able to start again. How do I keep making small movements forward when I am exhausted and spent? I don’t know the answers to these questions. I do know that I am afraid of losing it all. I am afraid of it all falling apart.

I’ve fought to build this life, and now I am too tired to be in it.