Unraveled

This is supposed to be a catch-up post, but I'm too disheveled for it to be only that--I'll try at the end of this tirade to pay tribute to some of that backlog of events.

I woke up in a shell of my former self.

It started in my dreams. I was dreaming of eating uncontrollably and quite literally unable to stop myself--primarily fastfood, which is usually how my binges manifest themselves. I remember feelings of panic associated with this part of the dream, represented by distant crying and screaming. People were surrounding me, faceless, and did nothing--nor did they seem to take notice of my terror. Then, I began to balloon. The food was suddenly gone and I was just growing fatter. And fatter and fatter. The people around me started to fade away...until they were all gone. I was the gross thing getting fatter and fatter completely alone.

My alarm woke me there--and I never really woke up completely. A part of me is still walking around with this idea that I'm fattening up and up and pretty soon everyone around me is going to vanish. Some distortion. Some nightmare. Some way to start out a morning. I resolved to just make it through the day with the plan I had and avoid my fastfood triggers as much as possible. I had a piece of fruit for breakfast...and that wasn't sitting right. I kept being reminded of filling myself up metaphors, and images, and it made me really anxious at my desk. I threw myself into my work, but the work I was doing was so routine that it left my brain plenty of time to do some thinking on the side so there was plenty of scheming of how I am the fattest one at the office, how I can't be seen like this, something has to be done--and going over what I've done wrong, what I've eaten in the last week, what I should've done... By the time I got to my psychiatrist appointment, I was absorbed completely in food: what I should eat, what I shouldn't, what's good, what's bad, what makes something good, what makes something bad, etc. Obsessive thoughts lead to obsessive urges... NO! I said no fastfood this morning! I screamed at myself in my own head. But I knew that I had to have something or I'd snap and binge for sure.

So, I had a "safe" food. I bought a sandwich and chips from a gas station that were similar to a fastfood fix, but were "safe" according to my rules. Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I was ignoring the current rules that I was listing, and living by my old ED rules. I ate half of the sandwich and chips and ended up having a near-anxiety attack. What makes fastfood bad also makes gas station food bad. Same parts, same building blocks. Image run: fat, bulge, gross, explode, desert, disappear, alone! I threw away the rest of it and the rest, as they say, is history (I purged).

In the aftermath, I somehow managed to have what I could of the lunch I brought originally. Somehow, through all of this, I managed the get work done--shocking for me, actually. I spent the whole day recounting the calories in a cup of rice and estimating the different amounts in a mixed cup of potato/chicken curry, as well as totaling and re-totaling my lapse from earlier. It's like a twisted little math game my mind goes into. The numbers have to work or the system will break. The "system" being the "thin game" in all of this.

I'm lucky to have Arun in all of this. He was patient and kind enough to talk me through it after work on the phone, and then to be with me and distract with me this evening by playing Dominion. I'm in a much calmer place now than I was when I got off work. I am still writing in the shell of my former self, but my recovery-centered voice is awake now and talking too; it's good to hear her voice in all of this again.