fear no more the heat o' the sun

Do you ever look back at who you were and smile? Just remembering what it felt like to inhabit that skin, however it felt? I read through all my old posts and it's like looking at someone else, not just a smudged reflection. I weigh about a stone and a half more than I did the first time I posted, and I've eaten about... well, I'm not sure how many calories I've eaten today. The girl living next door has an eating disorder. I hate her for it, but she doesn't trigger me anymore. We bake together - she purges, I don't.

This all sounds horribly smug. It's grim a lot of the time and I still flick through magazines longing for skinny arms, tiny thighs. I had those once. I also had a beard, the shakes, constant hunger pangs and rotting teeth. And I couldn't even look at that tiny body I spent so much time perfecting. I still think about the ex-Boyfriend all the time and when I'm drunk I end up crying outside the American's house, hoping he'll open the door and forget I dumped him and tell me he loves me. I dream about being touched, about fingers tracing my silhouette and being held. About being loved. I've done casual sex, I've done anonymous sex, I've done crazy sex, I've done irresponsible sex, I've done in love sex and it still didn't stop the loneliness. So I made myself a promise the other day - no more sex until I'm in love. I kept my other promise - no more hating - and it took me a few years but I'm still here. And I'm so fucking grateful.

There's a phantom in my bed// And I'm all alone now

I'm not sad or numb, just paralysed by inertia. And a man is the cause of it all, or maybe he's the symptom. Or men. Or sex. I started seeing the American again. Originally he was just a body to numb the loneliness and make the drunken wander home that little bit shorter. Except he wasn't into casual sex, originally, and he became one of those challenges. Daisy vs Morality had a certain ring to it - it seems that persuading 'moral' men to have sex with me became a way to prove that in this chaotic world I have power. It might just be the power to destroy someone's moral integrity followed by the brief satisfaction of winning. But then again, as my psychologist pointed out, I've stopped seeing men as people. Objectification. Revenge. Every man is revenge on the ex-Boyfriend, every time they fuck me, your touch is forgotten a little bit more. The American started off like that - just, he held me tightly after we'd had sex, told me how amazing it felt, how grateful he was to be fucking a teenager. And when we fall asleep, I fall asleep with his arms wrapped around me and pressed against his chest. And I feel safe, I know he'd never hurt me. But as I finally told him last night - our relationship is entirely disposable. I feel like the time has come to end it - this casual sex, this make believe relationship. I want the real thing, what I've always wanted and what I keep losing and destroying. I'm just terrified of being alone. Inertia//terror.

I couldn't stay away. There's something about writing exactly what you think and feel and knowing that somewhere someone is reading your words and for that moment you're not alone. For months I carried on reading your blogs but it was like having my tongue cut out. So I went to therapy for a bit just so I could talk to someone. But it meant very little. I binged and purged. Binged some more. Felt apathetic about it all and hated myself for a bit. Purged. Read a blog. Binged. Tried to fast. Felt hopeless. Binged. Felt apathetic. Couldn't purge. Stared at the toilet with my fingers in my mouth unable to move. Felt stupid. Binged. I think this is what recovery feels like. I stopped counting calories. The numbers feel irrelevant. I can't really remember hunger. Free, and still disatisfied.

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.