fat ass

Gaining, gaining, can't stop gaining. This morning 137, 1 pound over my "healthy range." Just a few weeks ago I weighed 133, it's so soul crushing to gain weight and know that I'm moving in the opposite direction from all my goals. I really wanted to weigh 121 by my 21st birthday, but that definitely can't happen now. My birthday is in less than a month and I am failing astronomically. It's not that I'm just eating badly, making poor choices and whatever. It's that I'm choosing the wrong foods for meals and also adding thousands of calories daily with these monstrous secret binges. For example, yesterday:

• BREAKFAST peach
• practiced driving stick shift with my friend, hated myself intensely the whole time
• LUNCH very fatty mac and cheese
• SNACKwent to a movie and ate reese's pieces and gummies and diet soda
• came home from the movie and smoked with my roommate
• went out to buy binge food
• SNACK ate whole bag of chips, rest of gummies

It was probably 3,000 calories by the time I went to sleep. I know if I could only do the GM diet fully I could lose 10 pounds in a week. But I can never complete it properly because I'm surrounded by temptation. Fatty food in the restaurant, fatty foods in the store, roommate who love to order in and drink a lot of tequila and beer.

The depression is pretty bad this week. All my energy to do things that I normally love is just gone. Maybe I should quit smoking pot. It's making me too slow and hungry and sad. I love it, but I need to stop. I also wish I could quit my job but I need the money. Lately I just dread going and hate being there. I feel like I'm constantly messing up and I'm so sensitive about every tiny thing I do wrong. I've cried during the past 4 shifts.

In less than a week I'm flying to South Carolina for a vacation with my extended family on my mother's side. It just so happens that it'll be my mother's birthday while we're there. I wonder if anyone will make it a big deal, who will talk about her. It seems like no one mentions her at all anymore, she's almost completely gone now. That must be true death, when no one remembers you anymore.

Pity Party

Chatting with my dad, sitting with one leg tucked under the other on the couch. He's asking about our day trip to the beach and detailing the logistics for our up-coming camping vacation with our cousins. I look down in my lap for a moment, but my eyes stop on my thighs bulging out of my denim shorts. I'm so pale I practically glow-in-the-dark and everyone knows white makes everything look bigger, kitchens and waistlines alike. My thighs don't look like they belong to a 20-year-old, they look grotesque and way too old for me.

My stomach is a huge jiggling lump. It juts off my abdomen in the most disgusting way. Handfuls of flesh on my sides, innie belly button, rolls when I lean over. Big bubble butt, cellulite thighs, ugly wonky knees, short legs, pale too-wide feet. Fat wrists, no visible bones, fleshy forearms, pudgy childlike fingers, untoned biceps, round fat shoulders. Double chin, baby fat cheeks, The stretch marks on my hips and breasts are shameful white lines on my pale pink body, only making the fat more obvious. I am the fattest girl in the apartment, fattest member of my family, the ugliest person in every damn picture.

At the beach I spent all my time watching the people walk by and judging their bodies. The skinny girls made me jealous, the fat ones got my pity, scorn, and empathy. The kids made me wish I hadn't grown up fat. My life would be so much better, so much happier, if I hadn't been addicted to junk food, if I'd grown up pretty and likable. My personality is so bland, it's not fair that I have to look ugly too. Aren't fat girls supposed to be funny and smart? I got the worst of everything. It's so hard to keep up conversation when your head is full of self-comparisons and self-pity. There's no socially acceptable way to talk about the thoughts that plague me day in and day out.

Looking down at my thighs, I felt the chicken and diet dr pepper churn in my stomach. I excused myself from the couch to go chug a glass of water and throw up everything left in my stomach. This life is torture. 

A little self-hate for good measure

Lots of adventure in the past few weeks. I made a lot of friends and did a lot of fun things. But I've also gained. Not a ton, but enough to make me feel like absolute shit. I was maintaining 132 for a month or so, but then about 2 weeks ago I bounced back up to 135. I can tell on my body, too. I feel larger, like I'm constantly bloated. But unfortunately, feeling like shit always leads me to more binge eating. I binge maybe a third of what I eat, but I'm trying really hard to stop the purging. I need to protect my teeth and get healthy so I can move on with my freaking life.

My big goal for the year was to be 121 on my 21st birthday. That's only a little over a month away, I don't think it's going to happen. I eat way too much, smoke too much, drink too much. I don't like who I am or what I do, I need to become another person entirely. So I'm joining the Peace Corps. At least, I'm applying, I don't know if I'll actually get in. I can do some good in the world and find myself, or rather, find a better version of myself and learn how to live in that skin.

I wish I could peel away the fat like a heavy coat. This isn't me, this pudgy, ugly person. I'm a beautiful slight creature, small and worthy of love. I am just not who I'm meant to be at this size. Right now I'm a huge bulging girl, average and unattractive. I hate me so much this way.

Left out

There's this recurring pattern in my life. Maybe it's not a pattern, just a phenomenon that happens all the time but through my melodramatic lens looks like one. Anyway, there's this thing that happens when I feel like I'm finally confident in a group of friends and then all of the sudden I start feeling really left out. This happened in high school, and then again a few months after I joined the sorority. It's like as soon as I'm confident that I can trust them not to forget me, I start getting left out of everything again. I'm not invited to go out anymore, no one asks me to do things with them.

I found my group, my people, in my roommates this year. We became really close since we moved in together and lately we'd been talking a bunch about getting tattoos together. I know, I know. Friendship tattoos are kinda dumb. But whatever, it was sweet. And then yesterday a bunch of them went on a girls trip out of the city without me. My best friend didn't even bother to invite me. And then they all came home with tattoos.

I feel so juvenile to cry over this. I feel so left out and unimportant. We were all supposed to do this together, it was going to be special. Instead, while they were out having fun, I was alone at home doing nothing but watching Grey's and binging and purging. I've purged a lot the last few days. I just feel so let down by everyone in my life. Sometimes I just really want to lay down and give up, a lot of days I can't seem to figure out the point of living. And it doesn't help that I realize how stupid all these emotions are, how immature I'm acting.

June update

Only two more weeks until these summer classes are over. Thank goodness. They've been really difficult, and I'm feeling the desperate lazy crush of depression coming back again. I really don't know how other people do this. The whole living thing, the whole 'being an adult' thing. It sucks.

I've been seeing a psychiatrist, he's a cool guy. He put me on an anti-depressant, but so far not much has changed. Still the same sadness, still the same amount of purging. I must say though, my out look on the purging has changed. It's not a mental thing, or an emotional thing, despite what therapy and "experts" online have told me. It's a habit, a bad habit, but a habit nonetheless. And that doesn't mean it's going to be easy to stop, but I don't think I have to work out all this emotional bullshit in order to stop binging and purging.

Summer is here (finally) and that's made me a lot happier, I must say. Today I biked 12 miles and I feel really good about that. Biking always makes me feel free and accomplished. I like the trails and the peace of it. I want to try to bike from my home here in Boston to Cape Cod this summer. It's 70 miles, but I think I could do it in a day as long as I start early in the morning.

Just as before

Just got hired at a new restaurant. I feel like I'm wasting my time at the old one, not making enough money or doing anything productive with myself. But I will miss the people I worked with a lot. I really liked them, and I'll be sad to tell them that I'm leaving. 

After I quit therapy, I panicked and wanted to start it again. So I emailed my therapist and she emailed back saying that of course I could come back if I wanted to. I emailed about appointments a few times but never got an answer. I'm so confused! Now I have a plan to see a psychiatrist. Mostly I want to see him so I can stop crying all the time and get my emotions under control. Medicine isn't the same thing as a miracle, but I'm still hoping for one. 

On Wednesday night I'm taking the bus from Boston to Philadelphia to visit my family. My dad and my sister will both be home, but my brother will still be away at school when I'm there. In my little diet-obsessed brain, I'm worried that I'll eat too much of the comforting foods at home. Banana bread, tortilla chips, sugar cereals, pasta with cream sauce. I don't know how I'll be able to control myself in that environment, the place I got fat in the first place. Plus, this is the first visit home since my dad found out about my eating disorder and he'll be watching me like a hawk. If I'm caught with any suspicious behaviors, I know it's going to mean a very awkward conversation for both of us. 

I purged yesterday, and the day before that. Both days I felt under control until I ate what should have been a normal meal and freaked out. I feel the guilt start to bubble up inside me, and then I console myself with the promise that I won't keep the food down. I'll just get rid of it as soon as I find an isolated bathroom and a cup of water. And as soon as I've made that decision, I'm free to eat whatever else I might like, so long as it won't be too painful to purge. Then I quickly find my restroom, gulp a cup of water and purge. I drink water and throw up until I am only throwing up clear liquid, then I know everything in my system is gone.

Who would I be if I didn't have this food issue taking up so much of my energy? How could I possibly fill the time?

Lonely

Normally I live with 5 other girls, but last night I somehow had the entire house to myself. While some people might call that heaven, I was distraught. I turned on all the lights in the house, a movie on my computer. Then I poured a glass of wine and made a piece of toast. For the third night in a row I cried myself to sleep, overwhelmed by the loneliness. 

When I woke up at 7 this morning I walked through all the rooms of the house, looking for signs of life. No one. Turned on the shower, washed out my hair, and wailed ugly sobs to the empty house.

My time in Boston has been marked by extended periods of time spent walking the city alone. I shop and look at things, eat in cafes, listening to music and podcasts and books in my headphones. But I'm always alone. Of course everyone needs their alone time, but sometimes do much of it can be suffocating. Don't call me crazy, but I'm looking forward to when I have a husband and babies to look after, to keep me from being all alone. 

None of this is what I want right now, I want to travel and establish a career and do so many things before I settle down to raise a family. But oh, to have people I love to call my own and to come home to each day.