transparency

I feel like I haven’t been completely honest and I’d like that to end. In finding @talyngrace on Instagram last night, and finishing a heart-wrenching (but freaking amazing) book, 180 Seconds by Jessica Park this morning, I’d like to stop hiding. Completely.

So here goes, I guess.

Three days after I posted the long story… I was inpatient in the hospital again for four more days. I landed myself back on the bridge after another binge-purge-restrict-cut episode that, prior to the weekend before (the first weekend of school being out for Spring Break), I had completely rid myself of for nearly five weeks.

I had stopped cold turkey all my harmful coping mechanisms for 35 days, longer than I had ever, and still have ever, reached. All to be extinguished with some refried beans, tortilla chips, and me sticking my hand down my throat.

It was a few days after that when we received a school email saying that classes were online for the rest of the semester, that we were getting kicked out of the dorms, and that summer classes may very well be the same. Already struggling with my friends gone for Spring Break, added to not really having a place to live, I was stressed. Worse, I felt as if I were defeated.

I was at work when we got the email, and while filling mailboxes mindlessly with the key envelopes that were to be collected for residence hall move-out, something in my brain clicked and decided for certain that I was going to die that evening, that nothing else was going to work.

I went back to my dorm after my shift, realizing that I could take my time, make it less awful. And that for whatever reason, I wanted to look put together when I died. So I ate a bunch of food, threw it up, then got in the shower. I settled on a comfortable outfit, wrote a note on the back of a coloring page I had done with Julia right before the break, and turned off the passcode on my phone so that it’d be easier for whoever found me to figure out who I was.

Then I walked back to the bridge.

I’m not going to write all the details–they’ve passed now. But long story short, I texted my professor that has been checking in on me that I was sorry, and, luckily, she responded right away, texting and then calling me, and she came to pick me up and brought me to the ER. I was inpatient for four days, feeling slightly better but uncertain when I left.

For a few days I did better, then began slipping again–a lot. I started throwing up a lot more, cutting a lot more, all the things that landed me in the hospital. It got worse for a few weeks, but for some reason, I wasn’t nearly as suicidal, even as I was engaging in the self destruction.

Last week Wednesday I woke up really early without meaning to, and as I laid in my bed, I had the idea that I was going to be dead that day. I’m not sure why specifically that day, but there was some feeling that I couldn’t shake, that it was going to be the day.

At the hospital the psychiatrist I talked to told me that if I was feeling suicidal I needed to wait–that the feeling would go away. And, since I basically had class online, quarantine, and nothing else, I told myself that I wasn’t outright telling myself no, but that I could take my time. Nothing had to be done that instant.

That feeling stayed with me as I progressed through the day. I was stressed about my summer living and school situation and something just wasn’t working. I felt like I was trying to be better, but nothing was actually happening. I kept falling into the same holes, tripping up on the same things, and doing a lot of what I was trying to stop.

Around mid-afternoon I took a really long shower. I sat on the floor as the hot water poured over me, and I just thought about what I was doing. It started off with how I was going to die, but slowly shifted into when and how I could push it off. Soon it became a ‘well don’t you want to see what happens after quarantine?’ and a ‘this will be over eventually.’ I don’t know exactly how that shift happened, but at some point I got to a shift from ‘it’s never going to work’ into a ‘how can I do this?’

I got out of the shower, and directly below the entry in my journal that started off with “I think today might be the day I die,” I wrote a to-do list, followed by “Okay, so maybe not.”

Suddenly, although I didn’t like what was on my to-do list, I started to bite the bullet and do what I needed to do, one by one. I acknowledged what I wasn’t letting myself think about, and started looking for solutions rather than ignoring the problems.

I’m not going to say I’ve been perfect since then–looking for an apartment, another job, and trying to figure out my financial and school situation has me incredibly stressed and fairly overwhelmed.

But I will say this: since that day in the shower, I haven’t thrown up, cut, binged, or restricted. At all. It has been 8 days, the longest I have gone since before Spring Break. I’ve been doing more things I genuinely enjoy and look forward to–reading, writing, drawing, even a little choreographing in my tiny dorm room. It’s also been less of a struggle doing the things I know I need to do. I’ve started taking action, rather than passively being swallowed by my problems. It’s scary and so so hard, but I’m just trying to take it one step at a time.

I might have more lapses, and maybe next week I’ll feel like crap again–or maybe I won’t. There’s something really powerful, though, regardless of if I stay this motivated, in the fact that I’m succeeding in all of this while all of this craziness is happening in the world around me. Only being in physical social contact with one other person consistently (my fabulous walking/quarantine buddy, Jessie!), I’m still doing it. My healthy choices are beginning to be done for me. I’m beginning to more fully see the point in the whole idea of recovery, and I’m beginning to understand more why I want it.

So moving forward, I want to be more transparent. I didn’t write about the second time in inpatient because I was ashamed. I felt like a fraud, writing only a few days earlier having written about how I was so gung-ho in recovery, only to return to the bridge. But I’m not ashamed. Lapses happen, mistakes happen, motivation ebbs and flows.

I’m hoping that moving forward, if I do experience a slip, I will have the strength to write about it the next day, as a further motivator for it not to become a spiral. And in that, I will see that I don’t need to be ashamed, and see it only for what it is–a slip. It doesn’t mean I have to keep slipping, it means I have an opportunity to get back up and learn from it.

I encourage you to do the same–be unapologetically honest when you make mistakes or you slip. Only then will you see how it doesn’t have to be a big huge, irreversible thing. Instead, you’ll see that you can get back up, and, eventually, that you’re worth getting back up for.

All my love,

Allie