journey not recovery

What does recovery mean for me? I am no longer living in the hospital but I'm sent there every few months. Enough that my life is constantly interrupted and it's hard to plan for anything. I'm not still 80 lbs but I am working to starve myself to death. My limbs are forever altered by disfiguring scars and I get comments and states wherever I go. I am working hard in therapy but I am tormented still by my trauma. I imagine recovery to be a kind of healing. A disinterest in dying and wanting to live. My favorite thing is self-destruction. How do I ever give that up when it is such a huge part of me and how I have been able to survive this long? Who am I without it? I am not happy where I am but why do I not wish for better? I guess I don't think I deserve it. I have a loyalty to suffering. It seems noble to me, it seems justified, it keeps things under control. I think to recover you have to be more sick and tired of being sick and tired than ...

I am a crime scene body, the chalk outline of a girl lost. Im a corpse that I drag around. If I were dusted for fingerprints I would be littered with them. But I'm not in any milk carton photos. I went missing before my mother's eyes; Maybe she wasn't even looking. Left in someone else's hands On me, Trapping me, Taking me over. I am willing to burn this body down for something better Something not already stolen Something innocent. I am a marrionette puppet, strings hanging from my limbs. I am abandoned house My bones turn to ash.

One thing you won't see on my blog, as you may have noticed, is a trigger warning when I talk about difficult things. I don't mind if people put a trigger warning when they share a link to my blog or a post....that's their choice. For me to put a trigger warning on stories from my life feels like a way of apologizing for what I'm about to say: I'm sorry this is hard, or ugly, or messy, that you have to look or listen. I had no trigger warning for my life experiences, and have been called a trigger to others. As though I have to walk around apologizing for the ways I have had to cope to survive. Yes I have scars and yes they are permanent damage. They are the result of other damages I have lived through. I once got kicked out of a treatment program for just bringing up the subject that I wanted to be able to wear t-shirts when I'm hot and uncomfortable. I was told this was bothersome to the sensabilities of others. Instead of having a conversation abo...

What if a hospital is the closest thing you've ever had to a home? Where do you end up? When I started getting admitted to McLean Hospital's PTSD and Dissociative Disorders Unit on a regular basis, it became this place I finally felt safe and loved for the first time in my life.  Why there ? You may ask. Seems like an odd place to find yourself to be at home, especially when hospitals have historically been a damaging experience for myself, stripped of rights, power, and sense of personhood. Proctor 2, however, was something special. Staff were kind, gentle, and uniquely trained to deal with individuals who had experienced major trauma, both men and women, though usually there were mostly women. When I was walked up to the unit for the first time, the first thing I noticed was the silence. Unusual for a psych ward at night. What is a home? A place one feels safe, like their physical and emotional needs are met. Family. Silent girls stalking hallways, whispers. a...

I haven't yet survived my life. What is survival if it hasn't been exactly voluntary? In mental health we speak sometimes about "resiliency." To me, that word means getting through something difficult and coming out on the other side. To me, it's not the same as strength. Instead, for me resiliency has not been a choice. I haven't made it this far because I have wanted to necessarily. I have endured pain, trauma, life-altering grief while being forced into hospitals against my will, hooked up to feeding tubes involuntarily when I wanted to starve myself to death, stitched back together when I cut an artery open, and had 911 called on me other times I've tried to end my life. Good luck? Rotten luck? Sometimes I can't be sure. But what I do know is that after all these years I don't feel like what people call a Survivor. I don't feel strong or really yet that I have chosen life. I feel I am living halfway, in a kind of Limbo. Alive but not ...

I remember all the times at Proctor 2 my nurses used to spend with me, trying to get me to eat something instead of waiting til my blood glucose dropped to coma levels and they had to administer glycogen. I didn't think that unless my body was blatantly in crisis that eating was even necessary. Alex would tell me the dangers; that if they ever needed to revive me they would end up crushing my body. He would urge me on with bites of an apple, with juice. Christina would make me hopeful English muffins with cereal pieces glued into a smiling face on top. Mini Gatorade bottles with "Drink Me" signs taped to it like I was Alice, forever trying to grow smaller when they wanted me taking up more space. The days my vitals would drop too low to be allowed off the hall I would gaze through the heavy locked screens, my face squashed against them. I knew I was missing out on friends and the world and whatever it was my life was supposed to be. Swallowed tubes slid down my throat, ...

In my disappearance I am more visible. Self-enclosed, not needing, I stare unblinking at my reflection as it fades and becomes more unrecognizable. I revisit traumas and wonder if they really existed at all. I bring myself back to the same scene over and over again. Overturned, struggling. Intrusive. Bleeding, I make pain visible in order that I may see a truth. My body translates for me where words lack. I watch my limbs shrink in, find myself in the spaces around them, become negative space. I know I am badly failing at survival but it feels like the only way to live. I wait to fall farther. All I'm left with is an emptiness, a powerful sense of loss.  I tear apart my life looking to find it and now my time seems almost up. I am still a five year-old child, just knowing she has to get away from the body, the scene of the crime. Hospital girl, in files and hallways, waiting always. Waiting for doctors, waiting to get out, my life is a series of waiting rooms. There is no end t...

My body gripped with fear, frozen, flashbacks smacking me in the head hard. My breath caught like butterflies in my throat, rabbit heart racing, my body the echoes of an Aftershock. The tragedy took place here and so I have never had a home. Too young to remember any different, who I was to become erased outright, over in seconds. They say the body holds on to the unsayable, buried in bones and blood I am an unspoken text readable in the braille bumps self-inflicted in my skin. I am a testament to what destroyed me. I am a white flag raised in battles lost.

One of the many challenges of having both a severe eating disorder and mental illness is that nowhere seems equipped to deal with all of me. When I'm in treatment at an eating disorder unit there is little to no support for my PTSD, depresssion, or BPD issues. I often get placed in strictly psychiatric wards to deal with my dangerous levels of self-harm and suicidalityehile my lakv of eating goes barely dealt with. When I was put in Tewksbury State Hospital it was for the above SI reasons but I was also dealing with the constant starvation and weight loss that comes from having anorexia. It was easy for me to keep it quiet and let my cutting and scars overshadow everything else. That's what using gets the most attention for imminent risk and it can be frustrating. My disorder is often complicit in allowing this to happen in order to avoid the refeeding and weight gain process that comes from eating disorder treatment. I have never received complete treatment that encomp...

Sometimes I wonder what progress I have made from the girl smashing soap dispensers and openly cutting on the unit, to the girl cutting quietly with glass mirror shards when left alone. 4 days a week of therapy and still I'm a crime scene body with screams that are silent. When will I not need to do this? How many people will have to listen to me before it's close to my parents hearing me and when will that just be enough? Because it never is. And I'm curious, when does the pain get to be enough? When does the suffering add up to something succinctly expressed?

I'm 34 years old and I've been struggling with what people call "mental illness" my whole life. PTSD, MDD, BPD, and anorexia are the labels they've settled on over the years. They, borderline personality disorder in particular, have been used to control me throughout my life, but labels don't define me anymore. As I've gotten to know myself, labels stopped being part of me, though I'd be lying if I said they don't still haunt me...damage has been done. the mental health system has hurt me as well as helped me. I'll continue getting into that in later posts. Mostly, this blog is to share my journey. I don't label myself as "in recovery" because to me that means something other than where I am now in my life as an adult. I still starve myself. I cut myself badly and frequently, struggle to get through the days. I just got out from another hospital stay just days ago. But I am working towards something like healing, if that exists. N...