Tonight was so much better than last night.
I finished most of my dinner, about 95%. So that’s now 2 meals and 2 snacks I have kept down.
I didn’t eat before treatment yesterday or today, but I couldn’t eat knowing that I had to go and eat dinner and snack and not purge.
I took the bus(es) to treatment this afternoon and had to walk about a mile to the bus stop. That’s not really very far at all, but having not eaten today, or yesterday except less than half of my dinner and some goldfish, I found I just didn’t have the energy for it, and my asthma began acting up about halfway through the walk. Silly me, I forgot to take my inhaler. I had to stop and sit for a moment.
However, I did make it to my bus stop and caught the bus.
I was extremely nervous the whole time I was journeying to the center. I don’t mind riding the bus if I’m familiar with the route or the area, but I wasn’t familiar with either. I experienced some anxiety along the route, but I managed to make both of my buses and arrive on time. So yay for that!
I have no idea what dinner was. I tried asking what was in it, but got very vague answers. I know it had broccoli, which is great as I adore broccoli.
We were required to eat cream puffs with dinner. I couldn’t, and neither could 2 other patients. I felt less bad not being the only one who couldn’t finish the meal.
Our first group was surprise art. We each had a large piece of paper and we had to draw something that represented our eating disorder. Then, we passed our picture to the person on our right and they had to add something to the picture. We kept passing them until everyone had added to everyone else’s picture.
Above is a photo I took of my picture. Mine started with the person (minus the tears and boots) with the green thing on her back and the butterfly connected to the green thing.
The green thing is the eating disorder. It has tentacles going into her brain, arms, and body. It represents how my eating disorder takes control of my mind and how I often feel like its puppet. The person is kneeling because I feel like it has pushed me down, has power and authority over me, and how I feel powerless to stand up against it or fight back. The butterfly connected to it represents the distraction, the allure of the eating disorder. Like the eating disorder is saying, “look here! Look at how pretty I am and how much I help you and don’t think about what I’m actually doing to you!”
I think that allure of the ideal in my head of how my eating disorder can “help” me and the comfort I find in it sometimes makes it hard for me to see the realities of it, what it’s doing to me, my life, my mind, my body, etc.
I like the things that everyone else added, but it’s way too late (and this is way too long) to get into all of that in this post.
Our second group was a processing group, which I had no idea what that meant. Basically, you just have to process, talk through, something that’s happened in the last couple days, then receive feedback and support.
Tonight, we worked on a craft during process group, which makes processing a lot easier.
Luckily, we didn’t get any homework tonight.
So tonight was still hard, but it was a lot less hard then yesterday. I’m hoping tomorrow will be even better. And hopefully I can finish dinner tomorrow!
Goodnight, everyone!
a2eternity 