Idiot Savant--w/ emphasis on idiot
Dear Tumblrs,
*Warning: This will probably be incredibly long; don’t feel that you need to read it.*
I’ve been meaning to update you all since I posted about going to the hospital. I guess I will attempt to do that now. No guarantees that it will make any sense, though.
First of all, I’d like to say thank you to everyone who commented, emailed, IMed, reblogged, texted, and called. I had no idea I had so much support around me. You are all amazing. While I have begun to fight, the battle is far from over. Thank you to everyone who continues to check up on me.
I am just going to start off at the beginning. 2008 hasn’t exactly been a winning year for me. While I had gotten over my issues with food and had succeeded in not struggling with them for a good year or two, January brought that record to a screetching halt. I did talk to my doctor, and if I remember correctly, I started to do a bit better. Then I met a guy, a bartender, who got me into drinking. Drinking let to sex and sex led to doubt. I tried to end it, and somewhere along the line, it went bad. I never thought I’d end up being abused, but there I was. It was the first of many situations I didn’t think I’d ever find myself in.
Somewhere in the middle of everything with the bartender, the coworker sent me a text. I was completely taken aback, but given my history of compromise, I gave in. One thing led to the next and before I knew it, I was in way over my head. At the beginning of July, I decided I couldn’t do it anymore and I wrote him a letter. This was the first of many, many conversations. Along with the conversations, came the regret and guilt. With the regret and guilt, came the old coping mechanisms: the drinking (which I had been doing occassionally, anyway) got worse and the cutting (which I hadn’t done in years) returned.
What set it all off was a night at the bar with him, where I tried to be friends. It didn’t work; he wanted more. Towards the end of September, in an attempt to deal (or rather, not deal), I started drinking at work. The coping mechanisms that began as nothing, quickly became very serious; I had to get staples in my finger and I stopped eating, almost completely. The drinking went on, at least one shift we worked together a week, until tonight… which was the first night I hadn’t drank around him since months ago.
A few days after I took that first drink at work, my cousin died. That brought up a whole ton of issues, and I began drinking all the time (work, school, home). I was keeping less and less food down. I tried to make it clear to the coworker that I was not doing so well, but he didn’t seem to get it. I became quite bitter and hopeless. It seemed that no matter what I did, I couldn’t get ahead. Somewhere around this time, I started reaching out to fellow tumblr’s who gave me advice and listened while I fell apart.
That just about brings us up to the night in question. I drank too much and, coupled with the fact that no matter what I said or how good I felt about it, he kept making me feel awful about how I had set boundaries and finally shut him down. He became the victim, while I was the one dying.
The other night, this all sort of came to fruition in one big mess.
I talked with my doctor today, who said that we would get through this (my mom and my dad said the same thing. I guess the biggest key is that I want to get better. I want it bad enough that tonight at work, I told the coworker that I could not work with him anymore. I told him that our schedules needed to be worked out so that we didn’t have any shifts together. He made some comments, was rather passive-aggressive about the whole thing, but in the end - he said he’d take care of it. I have been trying to do better. As of this morning, I was still loosing weight, but I have been eating more and purging less. I have also been talking more and lying less, which is scary… but good.
When I get too anxious and nervous, when my heart feels like it’s beating out of my chest, when I’m crying and keeled over in pain, when I am worried about the “what if’s” and the “maybe’s” and the “someday’s,” when I feel inadequate and unworthy and like a failure, when I get caught up in asking myself, Is everything going to be okay?, I know that all I have to do is trust the process. Nothing happens overnight.
A book that was like a liferaft for me after I moved to a new city to be with my boyfriend (who then dumped me), was alone, lost, jobless, friendless, depressed. And that was all before my dad died out of the blue: Marianne Williamson’s A Course in Miracles. I was drowning and it was something to hold on to. I had to swim (and swim hard) to get out of the water, but that book gave me some very helpful bouyancy. Hang in there. Hang in.
