Thanksgiving Break

I hate schoolwork. I have this pathological avoidance of it. Even if I like the assignment, I'll put it off and put it off until the due date passes, and then a week more, and then maybe I'll turn it in 3 weeks late or just quit the class. I hate this about myself. It's lazy and self-destructive and a complete waste of a valuable education. At present I'm only delinquent on 1 assignment, and I'm trying to convince myself it doesn't matter that much. But it does. I'm graduating in a few weeks and I need to just buck up and do the work.

Weight loss, same thing. I binge on bad foods, make constant poor decisions. I came home to find my skinny little sister even skinnier after an autumn of field hockey practice and a new diet. "I'm trying to be healthier" she told me in the American Eagle dressing room on Black Friday. I'm hovering somewhere around 140 pounds, meaning this autumn I gained around 10 pounds. Part of it is definitely that I stopped purging so much, part of it is that it's cold out and I don't walk and bike everywhere anymore. I really need to start a gym routine. (I say for the thousandth time)

Yesterday at the mall I saw my best friend from high school. If I weren't with my sister I might have just walked on by, never saying hello. But we did stop and pretend to exchange pleasantries. As we walked away from each other my eyes filled with tears and my stomach clenched with grief. I hurt her, back in 12th grade when I was blinded by my own raging pain and emotion and self-hate. But then I tried to make amends all summer, I reached out over and over again throughout college. She's polite, but makes it clear with her actions that she wants nothing to do with me. Last night when I got home I cut all our social media connections, seeing her pictures only makes me sad now.

My mood was lifted though, when we got to the movie theater and I stopped in at the bathroom. My period. Thank God. Three weeks ago the condom broke and I've been a ball of nervous tension ever since. I really need to go to the doctor and get on the pill or get an IUD or something. I never want to deal with this shit again. I texted L, who is now officially my boyfriend btw, and he was super relieved. I knew he was too afraid to ask about what was going on, but I wish he would have just let me know he was nervous, too. It would have made me feel a lot less alone.

Three weeks left and I'm no longer a college student. I can't wait to be free and yet I'm completely and utterly terrified. Nothing will change, and yet my whole identity will change. I won't be a "student" for the first time since I was 5 years old. It's time to finally figure out who I'm going to identify as for the next phase of my life.

Just keep swimming

Decided that I need to join a gym. I think I'll feel better if I start working out and eating better. So I'm going to try and go carb-free for a few days to see how I like it. Unfortunately I eat mainly carbs so it's going to be a bit hard to find new foods. But I think I can do it if I don't over think the whole thing.

L and I have been sleeping together lately. Spending a lot of time making playlists and smoking pot and talking about where we want to travel. He makes me so happy, but he still hasn't broken up with his girlfriend. Part of me never even expects him to. I'm not worth it for him to end that relationship, I'm a distraction, a blip on his radar, a nothing.

School work hasn't beaten me down too badly yet. I'm up to date on all my classes and I think I'm going to pass all of them this semester. Tomorrow I'm going to a climate change talk and there's going to be a senator there. I really can't wait to write about it.

Talking with my roommates the other day about it, I realized that I really want to be an activist. Or maybe a scientist. But climate change is really important to me, and I want to do something to help save the environment. I don't know what yet, but something.

Ennui

Currently climbing my way out of a several-day-deep hole of depression. Of the last 72 hours, I spent about 40 sleeping, 12 at work, 3 having sex, and the rest binging and watching television. Is it depression thats causing this overwhelming laziness, or is the laziness making me sad? Cause that's all I feel, overwhelmingly sad. All I want is to be sleeping so I don't have to be thinking. When I'm awake and thinking (or worse, talking to people) the insecurity and the self hate grow so strong its hard not to cry. I've cried a lot in public over the past week.

There was at least 4 homework assignments due today. I've only done one of them so far and I feel like such a huge failure. But it was me, these past few days, who actively procrastinated, knowing this would happen. I can't write, I can't do the work. I just do not care about any of this.

up and down and up

After my last post I only made it a few more days before the binging started again. It's embarrassing to admit here what a failure I am. I've been eating bad foods again in large quantities all alone. And then I run the bath so my roommates won't hear me purging. They think I don't do that anymore and I wish I could live up to their expectations of me.

Each morning I wake up and either remorsefully take a stock of last night's damages or happily congratulate myself on a low intake and bounce onto the scale. One wonderful morning it actually read 131, a great number for me. But this morning it was 134, still not awful, but up over the past week. My goal right now is to see 129 or lower by October. I don't think it's completely impossible, especially if I find a little time to actually get in some exercise.

Dieting is so boring. I wish I had some better news to tell you all.

A little optimism

Somehow, by some miracle, I've been binge-free since last friday. That's 10 days! I feel so fantastic, I can't even say. This has been a plague of mine for 13 years, which, not so coincidentally, is also the number of years since my mom died. It's kind of odd to type something like that out onto this white space. I have a problem that I've been embarrassed about since I was 8 years old. I binge eat and that's the thing I hate the most about myself, and I hate a lot of things about myself. And finally that I'm feeling just a little control over this behavior is so liberating. It's like if I could solve this than I could do anything.

My 21st Birthday

Just returned from a trip to Martha's Vineyard with my friends. 3 of my roommates, 1 friend from school and 1 friend from work. Two of my roommates grew up on MV and we stayed at E's house with her lovely parents and brother. We had a really great time in that classic girly vacation kind of way. Singing Beyonce and J-Lo in E's Dad's huge truck, three in the front row, three in the back row. It was what I imagined having friends would be like when I was a kid.

Luckily I wasn't the fattest girl on the trip this time, only the second fattest. One of my friends, who I love more than words, has let herself balloon since last summer. She complains about it all the time but she eats so much food constantly and hates to exercise (hmmm... sounds a lot like me, except without the purging.) The great thing about being with people constantly is there's not much time to eat secretly. I ate too much for sure, but it was in more reasonable quantities than I usually eat. 1.5 cups of pasta instead of 4, 2 cookies instead of 10, etc.

Today my weight was 135.5, higher than I'd like but not outrageous. But it's a huge mark of failure this year. I swore to myself I'd be 121 by my 21st birthday, but that's tomorrow and I'm still 15 pounds away. All I care about is eating, where I can get my next food fix from. I plan in my head where I'll go and where I can purge. How much I can eat and where I can eat it without anyone seeing me. I wish more than anything that this could all stop. That I could just be normal and eat healthy and be the person I should be. But I can't. Because I'm hopeless. I have zero potential to be anything worthwhile at all.

Karma

My work crush kissed me on Saturday night. I was so happy about it, I was in a good mood for days after. Now I'm pretty sure it was all alcohol induced. We both have the day off today and I asked him last night if he'd like to do anything. He said no and immediately my cheeks went hot and pink. My stomach hurt so much from embarrassment that I thought I was going to throw up.

But then karma kicked in, because 10 minutes later this guy who's been trying to ask me out for ages gave it another shot and I was so shocked that I said yes. I mean, how weird is that coincidence? Then, I think because the universe was trying to give me an ego boost, the guy who runs the trivia night gave me his number on his way out. How about that? 

And yes, I'm still fat. I'm still puking. Life goes on and it hurts every damn day.