I'm not responding but I still really care

I normally have texts to reply to, facebook messages to read, letters I ought to be writing and sending but sometimes I just don't have the brain space to respond. It's hard when you have a day when you're feeling low or finding it hard to muster together the motivation to do all of the things you need to and then there's being sociable added in too.

When I was first admitted on to Naomi, I became a bit of a hermit, it was all too stressful and intense to think about any other aspect of life. I was attending to my needs and trying to get well; fighting the everyday battles, some of which took place in my own head. But throughout that time I appreciated the contact from my lovely friends and family. I couldn't quite manage to respond or get into conversations about how things were or what it was like, how I was doing. But I took a great amount of comfort from the friendly messages from the people I loved.

Now I'm in the real world, again I still have day's when socialising or getting in touch with people is just a little extra that is a bit of a struggle. The delight of replying to everyone, getting in touch but then getting replies and once again feeling a little snowed under is all too familiar. But again, it really really doesn't mean I don't care and don't want to talk to everyone, I'm just not quite up to speaking right at that second.

I realise it must be really hard to keep trying to message and talk to a friend who doesn't always reply, and no doubt a lot of my friends and family must have times where they think they won't bother to keep trying. But know that your friend/family member will reply when they have the brain space to, and they will definitely appreciate knowing you are there, care for them and will wait until they are ready to talk.

Hopefully that rambling makes a little sense!

A carrot on the end of a stick

Photographs by Lizzie @elizabeebeebee

Recovery is a hard journey, that much is clear but how do you hold on to the reasons you're doing it and manage to get through the dark and difficult times. When I began my recovery journey, I wasn't totally sure I wanted to be well. I was advised and subsequently talked a lot about 'giving it a go and deciding at the end whether I wanted to continue to recover or not'. It was something that filled my family with trepidation, would I make the decision to stay well or would I opt for the eating disorder again. I *think* I'm continuing to make that recovery focused choice each day, it's hard but it is achievable if you break everything into bite-sized (ironic I know) chucks and tackle the little bits as they arise rather than focusing on the end goal all of the time.

Photographs by Lizzie @elizabeebeebee

Something that did help me was thinking about an obtainable goal that I could achieve at the end, post discharge *if* I made the decision to stay well, my carrot on the stick (ironic again I know) was to aim to be able to get back in the saddle and riding again. Animals have always been such a big part of my life, from working in the veterinary work to having a whole heap of lovely pets. Horse riding was an obvious goal, something I adore and have done in the past and something that absolutely requires health, concentration, strength, stamina... all the things that I could gain from a healthy body as opposed to an unhealthy one. Riding is also a time where I'm completely unaware of my body, ok obviously I have to be aware of my position, posture and what my body is doing as opposed to how it feels in an ED way. There's absolutely no time available to bodycheck or think about what other people may be thinking about my appearance when you're riding without stirrups and concentrating on where your leg should be to ensure you're not going to fall off!

When I started as an inpatient on Naomi, I was so physically unwell. My body was exhausted from all of the damage I had done to it over the years of my eating disorder. I was then put on modified bed rest because of the unhealthy relationship I had with activity. When I eventually got to go for my first walk around the grounds with staff, I struggled to keep up and nearly didn't make it the whole way round. I didn't really imagine how much different life could be, what it would be like to regain my health and fitness and get back to being able to enjoy activity in a non-driven way. I'm also mindfully running the race for life... insert shameless bid of sponsorship here!

My plans to horse ride really helped my to think about recovery in a more mechanical way. I needed to eat a certain amount to enable my body to repair which would then allow me to ride again. It helped me to have a really SMART goal to work towards.

Photographs by Lizzie @elizabeebeebee

I'm so happy to have been able to go for my second riding lesson today and I've actually improved a bit. My body is doing what I want it to, I'm getting stronger in different ways and it's allowing me to build a bond with a wonderful, if cheeky pony!

So what's my kind of take home message of today. Think about something you'd like to achieve, it could be something you used to do or something new. Try and think about something that's achievable, picking running the London Marathon if you've never run before might be a little bit of a step too far, but think about something that you could do if you really focused on your recovery. It doesn't have to be recovery from an eating disorder, it could be any mental health condition that has prevented you from being able to do something that you adore and love in your life. Once you've decided on your goal, tell people about it, get excited, get pictures all over the walls and keep that carrot on the stick firmly in your sights so you can grab it when the time is right. And once you reach your goal, mark it and celebrate it, then get working on the next one. Mine is clearly to move up from my 1 foot jumps to something a little bigger or maybe a few in a row!

Please follow me by clicking on the bloglovin button to the right, and feel free to comment and share your carrot or get in touch with me to talk about my blog/ideas/feedback/suggestions.

Stay strong wonderful people xx

Here's why I've spent the day throwing stuff out...

I've had some amazing blog requests which I will get started on tomorrow. Please click on the contact me box to the right hand side if you're got any suggestions for a blog topic. Anyway, as it's only just still Thursday (I'm sure it will be Friday by the time I'm finished... I thought I ought to sneak in a quick blog so I'm vaguely keeping up with my promised blog a day for #MHAW2015. The reason for my lack of blog any earlier than now is that I've been having a major spring clean.

I have way too much stuff, something that has become apparent over the time of living away from home and then being in hospital for 9 months, my piles of stuff have accumulated and there's definitely bits I really don't need that could be donated to charity or sold on ebay. This part was the simple part, have I used this in the last year- if not in the charity bag, simple!

Then came the tricky part, the clothes. Now, having been unwell for a number of years and having lost weight, restored weight and repeat; I have clothes in a range of sizes for different stages of illness. Now, some of these clothes are definitely not clothes that I can wear if I am well or healthy, some of them are absolutely relapse clothes. It was a difficult decision to make to get rid of them all, I wanted to but I only part committed, throwing out the worst ones but not fully wanting to accept the fact that if I am going to continue with my stab at recovered life, there are just some items I won't be wearing again.

Today I made that commitment to get rid of any of the clothes I own that aren't the right size for me. I'm going to give the less sellable ones to charity and put the rest on ebay, the proceeds will be spent on clothes that fit me and my recovered life. I don't think you can properly continue with recovery with the ghosts of illness past in your wardrobe so I urge anyone who has any pre-recovery clothes to work to get rid of them, then you won't be facing a trigger and temptation everyday.

And that ladies and gentlemen is a wrap

So there we go, now is my time to leave the Naomi program and begin the rest of my life. When I arrived on Naomi I was completely under the control of my eating disorder and the lies it told me, I didn’t believe recovery existed and I didn’t believe that I was unwell enough to need to stay longer than my initial plan of six weeks. I’m so glad I have completed the Naomi program, I’m proud of everything I have achieved and I feel like I am definitely now on the road to recovery. I have achieved so much whilst I have been on the program and I’m really proud of the work I have done. I have grown in confidence, really worked on identifying my needs and how I can get them met, challenged unhelpful old system rules and core beliefs and gained so much more of an understanding of myself and my difficulties.

I have really taken a step away from my eating disorder and identified the underlying causes of it and worked on these meaning it has a low weaker grip on me. I can't thank the team and community enough for such amazing support. The last 9 months has consisted of some of the most challenging and difficult points of my life. I have battled against my eating disorder and really got to understand it, faced really difficult and sad times with my family and overall learnt a huge amount about myself. Despite my struggles, I feel I really have a different relationship with my eating disorder now and I've learnt to really be able to fight it.

My life really has changed and I can't thank all of the people who have supported me to get to this stage enough. I'm still the same person as I was at the start of the program, just a different version of myself, hopefully a better version that is less diluted by my illness. It's been a long road and it's not been easy but I feel like I've got what it takes to keep choosing recovery each day. Now the real work begins as I practice doing it independently, the prospect of the rest of my life is a little daunting but I will gradually work on it and become the best version of me that I can. I truly believe everyone can recover and sometimes it just takes the right support; like a seed the time, place and conditions must be right before germination can take place and the seed become a flower. I hope that this was and is my time to bloom.

The place of true healing is a fierce place

The reality is, recovery is shit but gradually you get used to that and it becomes more tolerable, eventually you don't even realise you're doing it anymore... well that's the hope anyway.

Once again the timing of my blogging has been quite apt, I seem to have a knack of starting a blog post and then having a conversation of the same theme with someone, or seeing it in real life. This happened again today. Last week I wasn't well and as a result I was under quarantine and 'banned' from the ward. Now so close to my discharge date, a bit of independent practice wasn't a bad thing but it showed me that actually living a 'recovered' life is exhausting and a real challenge. The nice shiny idea I had of leaving the program all better was possibly a bit of an unrealistic expectation because I actually do still have an eating disorder. This realisation, I suppose, has been something I've been coming to over a number of weeks but the time to myself completely independently just brought it to the forefront of my mind.

I have a cartoon on my wall that depicts the road to recovery as two lines, the expectation of a line that goes directly from A to B and the reality of a line that goes backwards and forwards in a form of a scribble, ultimately getting from A to B but not straight away. As long as the general movement is in the right direction then it's ok if it's not exactly the way you would expect, it's ok for it to be good enough. Nb. I've added the cartoon now! Because it made more sense to have it in my blog.

So one night, at the dining table, we were discussing the difficulties we were facing and wondering when it would start to feel easier. At the start of the program, we complied with the boundaries because we had to which became doing it for ourselves because we had worked out our reasons for recovery which often also included recovering for others. The reality was that recovery was and still is hard work, a constant battle and drive to keep on track and make the 'recovery' focused decision multiple times a day. The silver lining, I determined, was that gradually you get more used to how crap recovery is until, hopefully, it would become so routine and mundane that it would be the automatic choice rather than requiring an internal dialogue each time. It all sounds somewhat depressing but actually it feels like real life. The hard things become tolerable, you may not always love doing them but you have an inbuilt understanding of why you need and want to be doing them which then becomes almost innate. And overall, faced with the alternative, recovery sucks a while lot less than life with an eating disorder does! So yes, recovery is a bit shit, but I will be choosing it as it holds the key to the life I want to leave and I'm ok with the fact that it's going to feel uncomfortable until I've got used to it.

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There is always something to be thankful for!

A page from my relapse prevention

It can be really difficult to have any outside perspective on life if you are feeling low. It’s so easy to get really stuck on your failings, how bad you’re feeling or all of the little details with inadvertently keep you really stuck and trapped. If you’re feeling bad physically or emotionally it’s so easy to end up in this trap and the prospect of it ever being any different can be unimaginable.

I’ve recently been doing a lot of work in a couple of areas that I have found really helpful and empowering; gratitude and personal values. I think both of these kind of fit in with this idea and are kind of the antidotes to think internally and getting really stuck in the moment with how you are feeling. In my relapse prevention, I’ve tried to think about all of the things I’m grateful for, and unsurprisingly (…well now I’ve done it!) there’s a hell of a lot I have to be thankful for. The key for me now, is to look at it as a positive and not as another means of beating myself up and thinking… well look at what I’ve got, I need to buck up my ideas and fix the rest of me. I think it has been really helpful to be able to refer back to my list on days where I feel a bit low and hopeless and like everything feels really difficult, these are the things I already have that are amazing and can’t be taken away from me. It’s such an empowering thing to do and once you get started you really can get carried away with all of the different things you have to be thankful for.

And some more relapse prevention

Then… values! In our Core CBT group, we looked at KellyWilson’s values worksheet. I’ve attached the link to the worksheet because it’s a really awesome tool to help focus you and work out what you want in your life and think about how successful you are being at fulfilling that value. You start by looking at the value ideas given on the sheet and rating them in their importance to you, I obviously added in pets/animals to the end of my list too. Then you think about the type of person you would like to be in each of the relevant areas, next you think about your success in each relevant area and finally you rank the values in the order of their importance of working on them at the present moment. You end up with a really focused idea of what’s important to you and what you’re neglecting at the moment. My values have really guided my relapse prevention and I’ve gone on to think about what the immediate steps you need to take to be working towards those goals. It’s really interesting because sometimes you have to work on different values before you can get to others, for example a lot of my values need to come second to me sorting out my health and mental health; without a healthy body, I can’t work on my family values and goal to have children.



More relapse prevention

The beauty of these two areas is that they can give you a real focus and kind of grounding to help you get back on track and work out where you want to go next and what that might look like. You can see what you have got and realise how fortunate you are and then think about the values that you want to guide your life and help think about yourself as a person. See recovery really is that simple... well possibly not but I think this definitely could help. I think the next step for me will be to think about my gratitude for my body and then perhaps tie all these into my positive data log and positive qualities work... all for another day!

My self-critical voice is looking at this post with an air of despair at the quality of my writing... and art work at the moment! My anxiety and self-doubt looks at different areas where I could have written better or more coherently or just differently, but my goal for today is to use the ‘good enough’ principle and think… sod it, it’s fine!! My perfectionist nature is trying to stifle me and I want to, for now at least, try and ignore it and post this piece anyway without judgement or regret.

Just keep swimming

I think I've been looking for a eureka moment in recovery when I wake up one day and think... 'jolly good, that's me recovered now'. I think, coming into an inpatient program, set me off thinking that I would defeat my eating disorder and be rid of it before I left. The scary reality is that I will be leaving this program with my eating disorder, it's not going to be completely squished as I hoped it would. The difference is that I am a lot more resilient now and able to manage it in a way that is compatible with real life. I have friends and acquaintances who say they are 'fully recovered' and I really do believe them. I suppose it really feels like this journey isn't going to be one that I reach the end of any time in the near future but one that's more of a slow burn... chipping away at my eating disorder and continuing to shift the balance to the recovered life I want step by step, bite by bite. 

It's so weird even contemplating a life without an eating disorder and a life out of hospital, where I've been for the last 7 months. It's weird to imagine having stretches of free time to fill and manage and enjoy! I have a realistic view that life won't be completely perfect and there will be times that are more challenging but hopefully the work I've done will keep me on the straight and narrow and on the right road to recovery. 

I also wanted to say hi to my lovely new followers! Please let me know if there are any blog topics you'd like me to talk about! 

214 days later

Today, on the Friday of EDAW 2014 (eating disorders awareness week), is the 214th day of my admission into 'The Retreat' in York for my eating disorder. Today I managed to enter the hospital's bake off competition with a cake I had made... at the last bake off, held in September, I had managed to only just stay in the room because of the strength of the smell of the cakes. A lot has changed in the last 31 (approx.) weeks. I would love to say that I'm recovered but that wouldn't be true at all, but I can safely say I'm well on the start of the long journey that will  be my recovery from my eating disorder. Eating disorder awareness week is an important week of raising awareness and funds mainly for the UK eating disorder charity B-eat who do a really amazing job of supporting and helping those with eating disorders. Eating disorders are a condition that can affect anyone at any time in their lives. I have had the privaledge to complete my journey on the 'Naomi program' with some of the strongest women I have ever met. 

Eating disorders come in all different varieties. I think the common misconception is that eating disorders only affect young, white women who choose to restrict their food intake until they are very underweight. Weight isn't an indication of how unwell a person is. During the time I have had my eating disorder, I have been a variety of different weights and even though I am now maintaining a healthy weight, I still very much have an eating disorder. 

For me, my eating disorder wasn't really about the food or my weight. It has/had a lot more functions than I ever realised but I'm now learning a new way of life and slowly but surely I'm fighting for the life I want to be living and the future I want. I think of eating disorders like having a glass of fruit juice that's been diluted. The sufferer is the fruit juice and their eating disorder is the water. The eating disorder dilutes the person until it's hard to see them but with help they can find themselves again and gradually get more concentrated. The person is there, it can just be hard to see them. I've blogged about my eating disorder before and I encourage people to read and to learn more about eating disorders. They aren't the stereotypes that are shown to us in the media e.t.c. they are so different from person to person and unfortunately there isn't any one cure for them. 

Dog walking after Christmas, learning to love the 'recovered me'

When I agreed to come on to the Naomi program, I had agreed to be here for 6 weeks. Six weeks has become what will be nine months as an inpatient, something I really didn't think I needed when I started this part of my journey. It's funny, I thought I could do a quick fix of treatment and be better. I am so glad I stayed and am on the way to completing the full Naomi program. I've learnt so much about myself and so many really useful skills that I really hope will equip me to be really recovered one day. I believe I will be and I urge anyone who is worried about their relationship with food to get help. It's so worth it to not have to be completely controlled by food and be able to actually experience life. B-eat have recently completed some research into the cost of eating disorders in the UK and an overwhelming message is that earlier interventions and help would reduce the amount of money spent on eating disorder treatment... in other words, if you seek support earlier you can get well quicker. 

For me, recovery is becoming a norm that often I don't really like but can manage. It's not all rosy and nicey-nicey, sometimes it's rubbish but the promise of it not being rubbish forever keeps me going. You can't experience the good without having to experience the difficult too and I am sure I want to strive for the good! 

I'm tired so no doubt my blog tonight might be a bit of a waffly muddle, but hopefully I will have come close to doing justice to what an important topic this is! 

Acceptance is a small, quiet room

Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realise there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room. - Cheryl Strayed

I've been looking for some inspiration for a new blog post for a while and sought out ideas from friends, basically I've ruminated on the idea for far too long! I think perfectionistic tendencies have once again hampered my creative process and got me a bit stuck. I think writing scares me. It all ties in with the work we’re doing about self compassion at the moment. The internal self-critic screams at me to not bother, leave it, don’t try; because if I do try then I’m destined to fail. It won’t be good enough. But then… what is good enough? How can I ever be good enough based on all the unfair comparisons I make? I'll write some more about Compassionate Mind Training by the brilliant Paul Gilbert in another blog, it's really interesting and seems to be a bit of a turning point in my recovery from my eating disorder.

At the moment, I think, I just need to try and go with it; read and write as much as I can to try and find my voice. It sounds so cheesy, but I know the basic skill and understanding is there deep down. I just need to hone in on it and keep learning, exploring and developing. I'm reading a brilliant book at the moment, lent to me at the start of my inpatient admission by a fellow patient called Writing as a Way of Healing-by Louise DeSalvo; it talks about the healing power of writing and how it can transform your life and help you to reclaim yourself from the stories that have made you the person you are. I want to write to learn about myself and  find myself; to put the past to rest, be in the present and enjoy the future as it comes. I want to write to help people and become the person I am destined to be. I don’t know where to start or how to do it really, but I will find my way through it somehow I think.

I've had sparks of inspiration now and again but I think most of these can fall into two main categories, the depths of darkness that happen in the world and the beautiful moments of hope and humanity.

On Tuesday I saw the film Wild with my wonderful bestie. Wild is Cheryl Strayed’s memoir of her 1100 mile trek along the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert to the border with Washington State. She starts her journey after struggling to deal with difficult challenges in her life and makes all sorts of personal and spiritual realisations along the way. It was a really beautiful film and I left feeling a rekindled desire to find a way to write more. The timing of seeing the film was sadly right before a personal family loss which made the idea of writing to heal and process even more poignant.

I suppose this entry acts as the start of me resuming blogging. I hope to gain more followers, share more ideas and help people if I can.

Kate xx

If you want to buy any of the books I've mentioned, see below: