The End

Hello beautiful people. This is my last post. I've decided to choose life and living and being alive instead of just existing. Thank you for all your comments - all the support, all the anonymous people who often said what I couldn't and all my followers. Knowing that I wasn't alone probably saved me. I wish you all the very best - we deserve happiness and love, but until we realise that, we'll never be free from the sadness and the loneliness and the desire simply to disappear.

As always with love, Daisy xoxo

Sometimes, I think this is all just an illusion. Layers and layers of self-deception, the lies of others that we happily accept, the impossible dreams we chase, the lies we tell others desperate to believe in the happy ending. Today I saw the ex-boyfriend and I felt nothing until I remembered how quickly he told me he loved and how much I wanted to believe him. I did. And then I remembered how quickly it was over. And how quickly he replaced with a new, more beautiful, skinnier girlfriend. I wonder if he tells her he loves her. Or whether he thinks about me when he fucks her. Does he fuck her the way he did me? The violence I loved. Does she make him hurt her too? Does he tell her it's the best sex he's ever had too? When he looks at her body is he grateful he dumped me? Does she love him the way I did?

And I think it's all a lie. The lies we tell each other because we want to pretend that we're in love, that we're loved, that we're real, that we matter. And truly we don't. The realisation that you're utterly replacable is heart breaking. I want to cling to some memory of him but everything seems so tarnished and fake and transitory. I want to believe I was loved but I can't. And I want to so badly.

"The end is where we start from" T.S. Eliot

I search for patterns in everything, in numbers, lists, initials, letters, shapes, time. Any way to impose meaning on the arbitrary events that shape my life. And some times I see the pattern leading me through the chaos. I got back from holiday with a close friend, just me and her and our suitcases in a beautiful foreign city. I felt free for the first time in months, away from the memories of failure and a summer totally saturated in apathy. I thought maybe I was really free. I ate without the numbers, the guilt, the fear, the planning, the purge. It was beautiful. Total sober silence.

It always seems the kindest people I know unleash the demons inside me, the ones who try to destroy everything I've built. Or maybe being around these people just lets me be myself. I haven't made up my mind yet. We had been off the plane for about 12 hours before I noticed that she was deliberately skipping meals, insisting we walked everywhere, the way she scrutinised every packet and how she couldn't resist reading every menu we passed out loud before insisting she was still full from the raisins she'd eaten four hours before. And I saw what I used to be. Yet, what disturbed me most was the smugness I felt. She was thin but not skinny. And clueless. She'd starve herself and then eat ridiculous high calorie, low vitamin shit. She told me about her diet and how all she wanted to be was thin and I smiled and told her she looked gorgeous. I didn't tell her the breakfast bars she munched were a waste of calories, that her hatred of fruit and vegetables was a joke and that she'd never be really thin. Not the way I know I can be. I felt so arrogant - enriched, empowered by my knowledge, by the blogs I read, by the weight goals I achieved back in the 'bad old days'. And I knew then and there that I couldn't be normal.

I want to scream - I was getting better - and she ruined everything. Or maybe she just reminded me what I'm meant to do. The patterns I'm meant to fulfill.

"Kill all my demons and my angels might die too" Tennessee Williams

Ophelia wrote - "when I neglect my true spirit, the demon simply grows stronger"

After leaving my job in disgrace, I've lived in my bedroom, eating and eating and crying and making arbitrary lists of things. I managed to look in the mirror for the first time in months and I am an absolute mess. Fortunately I haven't seen any friends so I haven't had to endure the whole 'oh... you're looking... healthier?' or 'oh lucky you - you actually have breasts now!' Reading what Ophelia wrote, I realised how sick I am of wallowing and feeling inadequate and ugly and invisible. So I made a list (of course) of the things that made me happiest. And there it was: Sex, alcohol, starvation.

That is who I am and in that order. What if that is my 'true spirit'? Some anonymous cunt told me I was a "dirty whore" which made me irate. If I was a man, then I could fuck whoever I wanted and I would be worshipped but as a woman, I'm despised. And the idea of being "dirty"? It's my body - I've fucked it up enough, why not literally too? But seriously, the whole notion that a woman's honour could be 'tainted', 'stained', 'tarnished' by having or even, horrifyingly, enjoying sex is deeply offensive. Perhaps what terrifies me the most, is the invisible misogyny and the irony that a large proportion of the media portrays anorexics as victims of this misogyny.

I don't even know. Are we victims of our own creation? Everything I've done to destroy my life has been my fault. I'm sick of being a victim of a mental disease. Am I sick? Probably - but absolutely not in the way my doctor thinks.

Thanks Ophelia, I think I've just had an epiphany.

"What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to choose life" Leo Buscaglia

Half a kilo of dried sour cherries.

Four chicken and sour cream enchiladas.

Three peanut butter cups.

100g milk chocolate.

A whole tirimasu.

2 cups of coffee with whole milk.

1 rhubarb crumble with double cream.

1 glass of strawberry and lime cider.

I still don't feel anything.

This Too Will Pass

Or nothing lasts forever.

I remembered this, repeated this over and over as I stood in the shower, the freezing water beating against my blistering skin. Waiting, praying, cursing, pleading, weeping, waiting for the antihistamines to work so I could continue to live in my skin. This was my sign. When I was nine, the same thing happened and that was that - no more nuts. But ten years later the unopened kilo bag of almonds lay on the table and without thinking I found myself on the kitchen floor, stuffing fistfuls of nuts into my mouth, my throat already beginning to tighten, my ears burning, my hands burning, numb and still stuffing between my swollen lips.

As I stood in the shower, I could see the weals red and accusing against my skin, I thought of this blog. Never before have so many people cared, commented. And I want to thank every single person who has ever commented on this - your words clung to me as I stood in the shower, resisting the urge to flay my skin off, bringing me back. I took this photograph this afternoon. It kind of reminds of me of all you faceless people who seem so much more real to me than the people I see in front of me.

I haven't taken a photo in weeks. It sounds petty in the grand scheme of things, but I used to rationalise that when you're as self-consumed as I generally am, at least I could see beauty in the tiny details of the world around me. Even when everything I do seems to be somehow tarnished or destined to fall apart then it was a comfort to know I could draw massive pleasure from the tiny petals of a perfect flower or noticing the way the light illuminated a vase of flowers. Knowing that the flower would inevitably decay and yet, I had captured that moment of perfection. It's rained for weeks. I spend my days in front of the tv until someone yells at me to get a job, at which point I usually change the channel. I just have no motivation to do anything. I live off cabbage soup for three days and then when someone offers me approximately 16, 789 calories in the form of a family meal I'm too apathetic to refuse or even purge afterwards. Even my new form of self-torture can't shake this apathy. Inevitably after bingeing, I find myself on the facebook photos of the ex-Boyfriend's new girlfriend. (yes, he did dump me because he had too many 'issues' to cope with a relationship and because he had too little time for me and because he didn't want to hurt me anymore and because...) I'm pretty sure she has an ED. Spindly arms, bony legs, jutting hips, chiseled cheekbones. Everything I want. And I imagine them having sex. And I imagine him holding her and telling her he loves her and holding her hand and making his awkward jokes and her waking up and finding him next to her.

So clearly he didn't dump me because he didn't have enough time for a girlfriend. You just have to read the comments people have left on here to realise that. And I have this overwhelming desire to passively be a victim. I want to stay and cry in front of my computer and then eat and eat and eat and cry and eat and cry and cry and eat.

This is the only concrete memory of that night - a fading bruise clinging on. I don't remember the end of the meal, by that time I was far gone into my usual drunken repetoire. Guess how much of me is real? Guess how many people I've slept with? Guess the most horrible thing I've done? And somewhere in the midst of that blurry night, I found myself in the bed of a stranger and agreed to have sex with him. I remember flashes of it, kneeling on his bed, kissing his chest, him pulling off my knickers, pushing my dress up, pulling my bra down, kissing me hard, and then having sex with him. And then making him promise not to tell anyone before I got dressed and walked off. I see him later, I take the cigarette from his lips. He got his flight in the morning and I never spoke to him again. I will probably never see him again. The only connection I have to him is the friendship request on facebook. I see photos of him and his girlfriend. I think they'd just celebrated their year and a half anniversary. They make a beautiful couple. She is beautiful.
And I can't stop looking at his facebook, looking for clues. Who was he? And I don't know why. I don't know why I feel this need to give him a personality, to give him context. He was the anonymous stranger I get to fuck. The anonymous stranger whose meant to numb the pain for a while and stop me thinking of the ex-boyfriend. It worked. I can't think of the ex-boyfriend without feelings of overwhelming guilt. It wasn't just the anonymous stranger I fucked that night. I had sex with one of my female co-workers afterwards. She knew and she still had sex with me. In the morning she kissed me back, stroked my body and held me until I stopped shaking. She told me I was beautiful and asked me why I'd waited so long to make a move on her. And all I could think of was the Stranger as I lay in bed with this beautiful woman.

Why? Why? Why?

I don't know why I do anything any more. I knew I wanted to get drunk that night. And I knew it would end something like that. And I still did it, knowing fully that the next morning all I would feel is shame and guilt and disgust. I didn't even use a condom with the Stranger. But I can't get a test yet - I only went last week because I was so angry with the ex-Boyfriend and wanted to prove to him how I disgusted I was with Rose. But I am her. I don't even care enough about myself to use protection. What am I?

Birthday Flowers

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." C.S. Lewis

He dumped me. The day before my birthday. The end?

I feel so sick. Waves of nausea convulsing through my body and these images appearing in front of me, carved into my eyelids so even when I squeeze my eyes tightly closed, all I can see is her with him.

When the Boyfriend and I first got together, I was convinced he was in love with this girl called Rose. She's beautiful, funny, intelligent and has one of those bodies which fill me with gnawing jealousy. He promised me he'd never even kissed her. And then last night after we had sex, he just blurted out how I was a better fuck than Rose. I just lay there thinking it was sort of sick joke. I've always been so jealous of her, of her friendship with the Boyfriend, of the amount of time they spend together, driven crazy by the knowledge that she is far more attractive than me. He then said that it hadn't actually been sex but 'as good as'. And now I don't know what to do. It happened before we were properly together and before I fell in love. But it's the lies - the denials - the casual way in which he announced that I hadn't in fact been the girl he'd given up all his morals, his faith, for.

The post with the photo was meant to be my last post. I don't want to be anorexic daisy. I'm not, I'm really not - I had to go to the doctor's today and she weighed me as I fixed my eyes on the ceiling determined not to care. And then she said the number aloud. It was unbearable. I'm huge. I can't even write how much I weigh. It's disgusting. I just can't believe how far I've let myself go. How I let the fat wrap my body up. I don't want to me anymore. I thought I was getting better, that I didn't care about the numbers anymore, that I actually wanted to live, that I didn't want to be sick anymore, that I knew I had a mental illness and I chose life, and I chose to have children and I chose to have normal relationships and I chose to stop this. But I can't. Not now. All I can see and all I can feel is just fat, fat, fat, fat dimpled, flabby, repulsive. A couple of weeks ago I read all my old posts and I wanted to hug the old me. I wanted to tell her that it would be ok, she'd be free and she'd fall in love.

But that would be a lie. I'm not free. And all I can feel is everything crumbling around me. And nothing. I just want to feel nothing again.

I woke up this morning with alcohol sweats and for a few minutes I just lay there, sweating and shivering, without recollection of anything. It's strange - I've lived like this for so long and I still find those moments of utter blankness as terrifying as ever. I should be scared. I turn into this obnoxious sexual deviant when I'm drunk and the things I say - I can't even type them. They're just too awful, a psychotic haze of lies and ugly, ugly truth. I had to work today. My job consists mostly of unlocking and locking doors for hours on end, whilst smiling cheerfully and exuding an air of confidence and capability. Inevitably, I'm absolutely shit at this job.

Why am I even writing this? I'm just trying to put off typing it.

I cheated on him.

It was just a kiss, a few kisses, I was really drunk, he was really pushy

they're just excuses

nothing at all really

i cheated on him and i thought of him when i kissed this man

this man i turned down so i could be with the boyfriend

i'm sorry, i'm rambling. i'm trying to run away from my job right now and myself right now

"I am so in love with you. You make me so happy I want to die."

I'm back... I fell in lust. A month ago, stumbling home together, lonely and drunk, he asked me to spend the night with him, just spooning, so the darkness wouldn't be quite so heavy. Three days later we had sex. The type I've never experienced before - you know - the kind where you laugh and in the morning all your muscles ache because you're quite sure you've made up some new moves even the karma surtra missed. I spent the next week crying, chain smoking, listening to Courtney Love grieving, and choking back the scream: why me. Then a week later it happened again - another mistake for him. I was just trying to make him come back. Then on election night, two nights after then, suddenly it didn't matter what it was, who I was to him, why I was doing it. We were having sex every day, twice a day, three times a day. I was late for everything and looked even more dishevelled than usual. Then one night, he whispered something so hoarsely I thought it was a hallucination: "I fucking love you." Nights, days, mornings, evenings, the floor, my desk, his desk, my bed, his bed blur. Again, I heard those words "I love you" and slowly they became his mantra until I felt it. And I feel it in the way he looks at me, the way his eyes sear through my flesh, the way he holds me after we have sex and in the scent of his skin.

He knows everything but this. He knows about the bulimia, the anorexia, the self-hatred, the loathing, the casual cruelty. He's seen them all. All the demons. And he's still here.

Thank you everyone for the lovely things you said, and thank you to the anonymous bloggers who said what I couldn't. It's undeniably true - I love my mental disease far more than I love my body, my family, my friends, the people I fuck. I live in a place, distant from reality, where I can nurture my delusions. And they're beautiful too - if you pretend hard enough, eventually reality disappears and nothing hurts quite as much as it did before. I think I constructed some malleable notion of love in order to create the illusion that I could still come back. That some irrevocable connection would rescue me. Paradoxically, I know I'm the only person that can rescue me. I'm not lost, I'm hiding.

it's so easy to disguise the ugly truth when you hide in words, meaningless, pointless, futile, broken, empty, hollow words.

Anonymous said..

he probably cheated on you because you love this imaginary ANA more than him. end of..

Thank you.

Chubby, chubby, chubby. My will has utterly evaporated and now I'm stuck here in the body, encased in fat and wobbling. My exams will be finished in less than a month so finally - I'll be free to starve once more. It's just now that I've had this insight into life without weighing every single gram of food and not panicking every time a friend invites me round for dinner, I'm somewhat reluctant to give it all up once more to persue that unobtainable ideal. And yet... I haven't looked at my body in weeks. I get dressed, I shower, I have sex and if I concentrate hard enough, I can forget how much this body repulses me. The way my arms splay out against my sides, the bulge of my stomach and the way my thighs touch. I miss my old body. Since going on the pill, I now have breasts (as opposed to simply nipples) and curves.

So instead, I distract myself from the overwhelming sadness and claustrophobia. I've found a new way to torture myself, a new hunger: jealousy. After I broke up with the Boyfriend, he told me had sex with Some Older Girl. Quickly he added, how much he regretted it, how ugly she was, and how clingy she'd become. I brushed it off, after a quick search on facebook, I realised that she was a whale. Even I, with my dismorphia could realise she was fat. But I carried on clicking through her photos, realising how many photos she was in, her arm around the Boyfriend. And these photos were all taken whilst we were still together. And now... all I can think of is - did he fuck her whilst we were still together? Is she better in bed than me? Does he prefer her body to mine? Is he using me?

I keep trying to silence these voices, this grawning bile in my throat everytime I find another photo of them posing together like a couple. Mostly because the ex-Boyfriend and I don't have a single photo together and because I've lost control. I've lost control of my body and I've lost control of me. I can't stop, I just can't stop. I want out and the only way is to regain control of my once perfectly hungry body.

Yesterday, she gripped my wrist as we walked together. I turned, and she pulled me into her and kissed me hard on the mouth. Her eyes closed, her lips soft and perfectly unconscious of the tourists leering at the two women making out in the middle of the tube station in rush hour London. And when I kissed her back, it was with the acute sense of performing and an uneasy sense of betrayal. Can she sense how I crave the Ex-Boyfriend? Would it disgust her to know how many times I've gone back to play make-believe with him? In the morning, when he sleeps I lie with my head resting on his heart, listening to it pound and pretend that this is love. And when he fucks me, I imagine that he's really in love with me and that this is how we're expressing our desire to be as intimate as possible. Last time, I promised myself. But I was drunk (I feel like I'm now obligated to be when I'm around him - it's the only way he knows me) and it just slipped out as I clung to his neck. 'I love you'.

Since we broke up, he's had sex with some girl in the year above. Accidentally he told me her name. And now, she's all I can think of. When he has sex with me, does he think of her? Just as when I kiss other people, I think of him? What a strange place to be caught in - somewhere between violent jealousy and a desire to purge myself of this guilt. Why play make-believe love? Those hours when it's just me and you and our game of love mean everything to me. And also nothing at all, it appears.

love me, love me, love me

just discard every expectation right here

i'm trying to disappear

and this too will pass.

I lied. I knew he'd come round on valentine's day. The casually keen text sent late on sunday evening from the Ex-Boyfriend. The one I loved, the one I felt so safe in his arms, the one who finally silenced the hatred and let me finally get undressed without shuddering and numbing myself with alcohol first. So I dumped him. It's only now I can see the cruelty. My casual invitation to drop round (only after my legs were shaved and my silkiest lace was on), followed by the banal chat at 1am. The casual suggestion he stay the night as it was so late and he seemed so tired. Oh where are my pajamas? Oh well nothing you haven't seen before...

I miss you, he says, forlornly. I kiss him.

And then we have the best sex of my entire life. The sort of sex they write about in cosmo with the bland promise that if only you communicate with your partner and buy the right lingerie you too will have mind-blowing simultaneous orgasms. Lies. All you need is one emotionally raw dumpee and a lover with voracious desire to prove you're still alive, desperate for bruised bones and you have an unbeatable recipe for the sort of sex that leaves your body shuddering in waves of ectasy and exhaustion, heightened by a sense of emotional betrayal and the imminent danger of heart-break. Oh well... I think he enjoyed it too.

Happy Valentines Day! What a load of commercial, saccharine shit. I absolutely despise the fact that we feel need to designate some day of the year to celebrate the fact we've found love and can express it in a tacky card or by making ourselves fat gorging on sickly, cheap heart-shaped hearts. I'm probably just bitter because I'm single and there is very little chance of me getting laid tonight. So tonight, I've decided to go on an anti-date with The Real Deal (my best friend from uni. Seriously, never had anyone like her before - an honest friendship) and we're going to get drunk on sake and eat deep friend noodles and not give a fuck. Then I'll go home and attempt to write an essay and then sleep and then tomorrow - I won't have any need to feel inadequate being alone...

End of rant.

Who else waits for the click? When you're so drunk, the edges blur and in the haze, there's silence. Or when you're so hungry, all you can imagine is the creamy centre of an eclair, and there's no pain: just that one image. Or, as I've been exploring so thoroughly, the click as you lie under someone and suddenly, as your bodies are as intimately entangled as you will ever be, unity and silence. How cliched. This is how pretencious people justify casual sex. I'm not sure why I'm so obsessed with silence. I write, I think, I think until I scream and then I write some more. I want to write a novel. I want this to become something a little more permanent, tangible. I'm sick of destroying things, the irony of wanting to make something based on self-destruction. That would surely make it worth it? On a lot of people of blogs they have their history of mental illness (because, dearest, most thinspirational ladies, we're on the fine line between sanity and intolerable craziness.) perhaps that could go somewhere? What do you think? - Honestly, bluntly, brutally.

Over.

We all destroy something beautiful, some of us with more diligence and application than the rest.

Today it was the relationship. Tomorrow, who knows? He sort of sat there passively, looking, biting his lip, half-smiling. I want him to cry, to weep, to stop awkwardly making jokes, to beg me to reconsider. To tell me he loves me. I'm not sure why I'm crying - I ended it with all the casual cliches designed to minimally inflict pain upon the other. The cliche: We never see each other. My reason: I want you to love me, I want to lose myself in love with you and experience the most ineffable of experiences - a total annihalition of myself in love. I just wanted something more violent, more tangible, like rough kisses in the dark and bruised bones in the morning.

Liminal: a. gen. Of or pertaining to the threshold or initial stage of a process. rare. b. spec. in Psychol. Of or pertaining to a ‘limen’ or ‘threshold.’

Thanks for your advice everyone, coming here, ranting, weeping and moaning to you and finding out that people out there have actually heard me saves me a little everyday from crazy Daisy who is beginning to resurface her ugly, deceitful, terrifying head again. I know it's borderline psychotic to see yourself as two seperate people, but it's how am I and as long as I keep out of hospital and away from the doctors, then my dirty little secrets are safely yours.

I needed the Boyfriend but inside I can feel the restless growing, the nervous energy accumulating. Last night I went to a feminist meeting determined to meet androgynous, intellectual lesbians. Is that bad? I'm looking already for the next crazy to submerge myself in. Last time it happened I lost 6 kilos so anything goes. Surrounded by beautiful, skinny girls with the bodies of men I fell in love in my usual, superficial way. Bone lust. The men I fuck hold my bones together, the women I fuck - I guess I just want to inhabit their bones. Exist in their skin for awhile. Strange crossing the lines between the two, falling in love with these mannish women. Motivating myself for the next big starve. Liminal.

"I'm good at love. I'm good at hate. It's inbetween I freeze." Leonard Cohen.

How do you tell someone, tenderly, you don't love them? How do you let them go, gently? I know how to finish something brutually. I've been dumped enough times to understand the maximum pain/minimum effort principle, but I'm terrified of hurting the Boyfriend. He's the only person I've ever known who would pick up the phone at 3am and listen to me interrogate him about all his previous girlfriends. It took only one drunken night to destroy my carefully crafted illusion of well-balanced, respectable, even innocent Daisy. There's nothing to say to him. We have nothing in common. I just want someone here, to feel wanted in his arms. But it could have been anybody. Anyone. I want to be loved but I also want to love. And I don't love him and will not. So what is the point? I'm not sure why I bother with relationships. The loneliness is still here. But how do I tell him?

Back where I belong. I'm sitting at my desk back at uni, surveying my neatly unpacked room - my pot plants cluttering my windowsill, my fruit basket overflowing with apples and everything beautifully, perfectly, absolutely in my control.

I swore that this would be last family holiday. I cannot take another 3 weeks of being bullied, emotionally blackmailed and generally treated like a slightly dim 12 year old. Christmas dinner as ever was hell. But pleasant, sunny hell. Turns out my aunt wants to lose a stone so we were served steamed ham on lettuce. Normally I would have rejoiced, but you know those days you save calories all week for? Christmas is one of those for me. I was all prepared to gorge on as much fat-clad, calorie dripping food as I could wolf down. And there it was - the perfect meal. Twelve hours later and my mum had told her sister how she ruined her life, blamed her for her compulsive eating disorder and banned me from contacting my cousin (and best friend) until I was 'old enough'. Because apparently I'm not old enough to see how my aunt mocks me and uses me to hurt my mum. Frankly, I don't give a fuck. I love my cousin, I love my uncle and I sort of like my aunt. Despite this, my mum cut out our only remaining family from her life and dragged my sister and me out their lives 'until we're old enough'. Because she's 'protecting me'.

Protection: you can never save anyone who does not want to be rescued. So I cried the way I always do when I'm so angry I can't breathe and when I feel so hopeless I lack the energy to breathe. And then I screamed and yelled and raved because really, I'm not a pawn. So, once I'd sufficiently embarassed my mum in public (mentioning failed suicide attempts, eating disorders or any of our family secrets tends to bring out the diplomat in my mother) she promised me total freedom the day we got back home. limitless freedom.

happy new year everyone! thanks for all your comments... they inspired my new years resolution: if i want to change i have to do it myself. no one is going to rescue me except for me. i just want to be happy.