Dear God please give me the strength to endure this woman -
I graduated a couple of weeks ago and now at home, an unemployed graduate, stuck in the house with my psychotic mother.
I want to sit and stare at the wall and starve until it's the only thing I feel.
Not this. Not this grey rage towards her and hopelessness. Absolute hopelessness.

The Road

So my uni course has a mandatory creative writing paper. And I can't write about sex or starvation. They say write about what you know, but I'm not sure anyone would believe the things I know. I really want to win but I'm not sure where to start either.
My childhood? The people who left me? The anger, hatred and desire for revenge that's always there, every day, every night, in every person I meet the suspicion that they too will leave. I can't write about that - bare my soul on the page for some marker to shred to pieces and award me a 2:2 for some cliched story about a traumatic childhood. Didn't we all have one?
And reading back this blog, all I can see is some pathetic, drunken girl wandering from man to man looking for some form of self-transcendence and then running away sober in the morning desperate to purge myself of the filth, and the sadness. I've drifted so far. The year I began this blog I was so focused, 800 calories a day or less. That was all that mattered. Now I'm in recovery, I sometimes go to the gym, I occasionally add up the calories in everything I eat but then I don't stress. I go to sleep at night because I don't have hunger cramps and I'm on track to graduate this year. I think when I decided to get better, I had to lose part of me. It was the exchange - life for creativity. A fair exchange. I don't write any more. I don't take photos. I don't explore or dream. I gave up on the dream of being a model. I gave up on being an actress. Gave up on being a journalist. Gave up on going into broadcasting. Gave up on being 50kg.
It's my finals in a few months. There is no way I'm going to sacrifice the chance of getting a first to be thin. I nearly gave up going to university to achieve that - and then I realised I'd be stuck at home with my mum for the next ten years or worse, be in a hospital with people thinner than me making me feel like even more of a failure. So I know that it was worth it. I really do.
I just wish I could still write. And dream a bit, too.

"You're a cunt. You know that?"
"Yeah I guess. I wish I felt bad about that. I don't. I'm glad I fucked him. I hope it really fucks things up between them. Teach him a lesson, or something."
"You're a bit a psychopath when it comes to sex Daisy."
"I didn't realise there was another way to have sex. It wouldn't be any fun otherwise if someone didn't get hurt. Or at least the possibility was there."

I fucked my childhood sweetheart's cousin in his swimming pool. I decided to fuck CS's cousin the week before when CS came round to our holiday house for a barbecue. My sister's friend was there - the minute CS walked in she transformed completely. Hair flicking, eyes fluttering, suddenly interesting, talkative. I've always despised this friend of my sister's. 16 years old and she's already been suspended several times from school for anorexia, drinking, smoking and suspected drug taking. It gives me grim satisfaction to say she isn't even that thin. A bit like looking into a mirror of the past. CS responded to her flirting. I was disgusted. I've always seen CS as my territory - my first crush, my first kiss, my first dance - everything I hold to be innocent and good about my sexuality. The night progressed, more and more alcohol consumed, we're upstairs playing drinking games, it's dawn, it's only me, CS and sister's friend left. CS and I climb onto the roof to watch the sunrise. His arms are around my waist, I think finally, we're alone and this will happen. And then she climbs up the side. Inserts herself between us. Looks up at him with that searching look, longing for approval, knowing she's already won it. I resist the urge to push her over the side. CS checks his watch, he has to be at work in a couple of hours, he leaves. I try to go to bed but the urge is too strong. I storm upstairs to where sister's friend is getting into bed.
"HOES BEFORE BROS, CUNT. BACK THE HELL OFF." I scream and rage for a while, revelling in my revulsion at this girl, aware I'm completely submerged in the deep end of crazy, completely oblivious to the overwhelming sense of the crazy. She looks destroyed and slinks off to bed after grovelling for a bit.
A week later, CS introduces me to his cousin. We immediately hit it off. We go out clubbing, the night draws to an end, he invites me back to his. He suggests we go swimming. I strip. We fuck in the pool. In the morning, we fuck. His mother is delighted to see me - turns out her and my mum are best friends and I've just never met her son before. 'He's such a gentleman giving up his bed for you when you couldn't get home last night' she gushes. I nod.
CS warned me about his cousin. Womanizer, fucks around, massive dick, the usual.
And I'm not ..?

Hope - Recovery

I am not an alcoholic but I thought I would share my source of strength with all of you. Above is my favourite photograph - I took it in the woods behind my garden a couple of years ago after a three day fast and thought I was hallucinating something as beautiful and as pure as a daisy. I sincerely wished I could be that daisy, that I could bloom into perfection for one day and then wither away satisfied. 


This is what keeps me from returning to that place -


The Promises ©1939 Alcoholics Anonymous


If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are half way through.
We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. 
We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.
We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace.
No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others.
That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear.
We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows.
Self-seeking will slip away.
Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change.
Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us.
We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us.
We will suddenly realise that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.
Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled among us - sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always materialize if we work for them.


I find the twelfth sign of recovery the most inspiring and is what I remind myself of everyday I wake up:
We are restored to sanity, on a daily basis, by participating in the process of recovery.

"I am so proud of you, like, when I look at you, I'm like 'God, Daisy has really changed, you seem so happy, so stable, so content. It's wonderful see."
"It's lovely that you think that... I really do feel so much better these days. God, I sound so bloody self-righteous these days. I must have changed!"
Joking around in the kitchen with my housemate I realise just how obvious last year's apathy and general disgust must have been to everyone. Giving up drinking seems to everyone like my latest attempt at reforming myself. In a sense it is. I'm sick of waking up with no memories and a rising sense of guilt. I'm also conscious in 25 days I will be in a bikini on a beach and I can't afford to be wasting calories on alcohol. That said for the first time in my life I'm restricting without counting calories, without purging and without obsessing over binges... too much. It's so fucking hard.

A year ago I slept with a complete stranger an hour after meeting him. We had great sex, although at one point during foreplay I text the American, who at the point I was also sleeping with. As he walked me to part of the way home I kept forgetting his name and when he asked me for his number, I answered: "why? so we can meet up and spoon some time?" and left him. He was in the bar last night. As he walked across the opposite side of the room, our eyes locked and I felt that pure libidinal rush I thought had simply dried up. He came over, we talked. I had a few drinks. I felt old Daisy resurface. I called him a cunt. I insulted him repeatedly. And as we flirted at the bar, people kept coming up to us, interrupting, girls obviously cockblocking, and it was only when a girl I'd been briefly chatting to came up to him and kissed him on the mouth, I realised.
"Is that your girlfriend? Well done, you've done better than I'd have expected"
So as his girlfriend and all her friends swarmed around the bar, he carried on flirting with me. And whilst I know she has a better body than me, I had the arrogance, the scorn that kept him there, leading me to a dark corner of the bar to evade the observation of their friends.
"How long have you been together?"
"Don't ask. Too long. Tomorrow is our anniversary."
Watching a man make the moral decision whether to cheat or not whilst his girlfriend is in the room is an extraordinary thing to watch.
"Daisy, are you propositioning me?"
"Perhaps, if I couldn't see your girlfriend"
I made my excuses, and left. I'd seen enough of the male ego. He offered to walk me to the gate. At the gate, he told me he wanted to walk me home, passing a club he sees his friends in the queue, and in full view of them, hugs me. As he turns to walk away, I tell him to enjoy his anniversary. He grimaces.
I go home and cry.

"If you don't want to fuck me, you must be straight"

After my last post - another awful night out. Three hours of blankness, absolutely nothing, just waking up with terrible, terrible guilt. Lots of crying and friends shouting about how crazy, out of control, selfish I am. So I decided to give up drinking. Decided that was impossible. Decided to give up getting drunk. Somewhat easier.
This weekend I was meant to go away and stay with the Beautiful One for the weekend to celebrate her birthday and make up for that disastrous weekend in which I got with her not-ex-boyfriend and slept with some guy I went to school with. When she called to cancel I wasn't exactly distraught having spent the last week contemplating the appropriate social etiquette when in a room with three people you've had sex with in recent memory.
I've been so good recently. Virtuous even. No sex, not even a kiss. The other night in the bar, a beautiful girl tried to seduce me. As she told me how much she wanted me, how fucking hot she thought was, as she drunkenly groped me, I felt that familiar shudder of anticipation knowing that here was sex. As she told me I was the reason she felt comfortable coming out knowing how well respected I was, I felt that other aspect of sexual anticipation I find impossible to ignore - contempt, scorn, disdain. I could have you, and I could leave you, and no one would know. And I saw myself in her. She couldn't believe that I'd rejected her. I made out with her, bored, for a while. And then I told her she was too drunk and greedy and to go home.
This weekend I just wanted to get drunk and get fucked.
I ate instead.
Progress?

The Tourist

- You're the only person I've ever cared about apart from myself - I think.
- How is your girlfriend? - I ask.
He smiles, laughs, we chat about their holiday in St. Tropez. I remember having sex with him in the early afternoon and the way he'd tell me how much he loved me just before he would come. I tell him about my summer and how I think he's too posh to function. He laughs and makes a joke about what a champagne socialist I've become. I remember how we used to be friends before we fucked that night.
I've slept with so many since you and still all I remember is being told how much you loved me and how much I wanted to believe you. And I feel like I'm going backwards and never forwards and the scale follows me charting each failure, each step away back into myself.
There's nothing here - just hunger for attention and desperate overwhelming need. Nourish me, nurture me, please fucking love me I think and let me starve until I deserve it so I look for annihilation wherever I can find it. Sex, alcohol, starvation - it's the same thing. Familiar pain - the kind you can open the wounds and look into it, like welcoming a forgotten beloved friend, remembering you could feel.
My holiday romance hasn't contacted me since my return back here - I've given up on that one. I realise I was just a tourist passing through, which is kind of how I feel about my life right now. I want out and I don't mean in the death sense of the word. I'm at one of the best universities in the world. This, as my grandmother repeatedly tells me, is the best year of my life. Never will I be more beautiful, intelligent and privileged, and all I can think of is sex. And calories.