Hi, I am a binge eater, who has suffered from anorexia in the past. My reason for doing so is because I needed some form of control in my life.
I have not had an easy life. My mother is an alcoholic, my father is a dead beat dad, and my sister suffers from naivety. As a child, I was punished by my father who used excessive force and lived my life as if I was in a war zone. In our household, we couldn't show any emotion because we lived in fear everyday. As a child, I showed early symptoms of eating problems because I refused to eat what my parents would eat due to my picky eating habits and I would have special meals made. I lived with a father who treated domestic violence as if it were a sport. I would watch him hurt my mother and I would listen to her make excuses for him. In sixth grade, I got to watch a hot iron held 1 inch away from her face. I went to school that day scared to go home, my sister never saw or heard a thing about it. She only realized the fact that we were moving out of the house the day we got home and that is all she ever knew.
When we got settled into a new place in sixth grade, I started getting bullied in school. To hide my pain, I would binge eat. Kids began to tease me by saying that I was fat and ugly. So in seventh grade, I stopped eating school lunch and went to anorexia. Later on I graduated to skipping meals. Then I stopped eating all together for a while. I became so weak that I began to eat the bare minimum to survive, even though I was disgusted by food. In eighth grade, a rumor went around school that I would sleep with anybody, which was untrue. Guys came up to me asking me for favors. At that point, I planned to commit suicide, either by slicing my wrists with the sharpest kitchen knives or by taking enough pills to kill me, but my cousin caught me and convinced me to stay on this earth. I can no longer cut what little food I do eat with a knife and I can no longer give myself medicine because unwelcome thoughts come back to me.
Now, I am back to binge eating because food was my only constant. I have reached out for help to a friend that I hold very dear to me. She has been here for me to listen to and to help me through stressors that trigger my binging, but at the end of the day, she has her own life that she needs to sort out. So then, I turned to a boy who was there for me no matter what and we fell in love. For a while, life was great, but then I was sexually assaulted. He wanted more and I couldn't give him more, so I broke up with him. Then he went out with a friend of mine. Later on we reconnected, only for him to go out with my sworn enemy and a friend of mine. I had to let him know my feelings though because I couldn't take it anymore. I did something that I promised myself that I would never do, I let myself actually feel feeling and I made myself vulnerable enough to let those feeling be known. It hurt me in the end because he told me that he was shacking up with my other friend at the time and that he was sorry for playing with my already unstable emotions. That night I binged and cried myself to sleep. I wanted to hurt myself so badly. Afterwards, I gave up on emotions.
I had to deal with my mother and all that comes with her. She and alcohol. She has been an alcoholic for as long as I remember. She doesn't even care about how it affects me. She says she is trying to quit, but then she goes back to doing it again. So I made a cry for attention and refused to eat and finally it went noticed. My mother realized that I wasn't eating and so did my sister. So now they are trying to force the food down my throat, but that doesn't help at all.

So, im still kind of in a rollercoaster of emotions about all of this. Im definitely better than i was at the start because when you hit rock bottom you can only go up (or stay rock bottom i guess, but thats too pesimistic even for me).

But i still feel like when the guilt is partially gone and i feel like what i did wasnt that bad or that uncommon i feel like i might want to go back to reading pedophillic hentai or fanfiction or i might not regret having done it and i start feeling guilty about that too. Though i hear urges arent uncommon with ocd or pocd or whatever, i dont know if id really call it an "urge". Maybe its more of a "but other people are doing it and not feeling bad about it so why should i?" which is a feeling i dont want to have because i want to be better than those people. Any time i came across something similar to guilt when i read that kind of content i thought something like "well, at least im not the person who wrote it". And i really dont want to have that feeling of "im not doing anything bad because theres people doing worse things". If i kept to that mentality technically id never be a bad person because theres always someone worse out there, and i dont want to have to compare myself to awful people to make myself look good.
Also, whenever i feel less guilty about the whole thing and i feel like i technically didnt to anything that bad it makes me feel like i mightve only felt guilty because i worried about what other people would think of me if they found out about it and not because i thought what i did was wrong. Which, of course, was (is) a huge part of my distress but i dont know if id call it the sole reason of it. I already knew people thought if you read fictional stories or comics about fictional anime kids in a sexual setting youre a pedophile. And it really did bother me but at one point i started listenting to them less and less.

To be honest, i have a double standard where i have an extremely hard time seeing women as predatory or disgusting/bad people. Which is a huge reason why i didnt think of my actions as creepy. I think i even used to think men who liked lolis where creepy gross pedophiles but when i found out women did it i thought it was another deal. And then, as not to have double standards, i started thinking it was ok for men to like lolis too. I know im wrong in this, because women can be gross and predatory but i still have a hard time getting rid of that mentality. I remember i even sympathized with this girl who had many tweets saying she liked zoophillic porn and many people said she raped her dog but i guess i either didnt believe she actually did it or something? Though i tend to side with marginalized people because i feel marginalized myself... Though i shouldnt have sided with her because obviously zoophillia is wrong and even if the animal isnt harmed youre still taking advantage of them for your own pleasure and thats disgusting. But like i said, i have a hard time seeing women as creepy or predatory, probably because even if women can be as disgusting and evil as men can, they probably dont act on it that much since we dont see that many female predators or female rapists or whatever. This isnt to say i think women can do no wrong, im aware my thoughts are wrong. But its a hard mentality to get rid of.
Still, i dont think most of the women i followed that also had similar problematic tastes in fiction as i did were bad people. I think it was a harmless way of exploring their sexual interests and they knew that kind of stuff was ok in fiction yet would be awful and unforgivable in every way in real life.

I also think the fact that todays society, particularly in social media is obsessed with labeling everything as pedophilia. Of course we should take awareness of it and not sexualize children in any way but this obsession with labeling everything as creepy or predatory really contributed to my pocd. I really wish they...

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Sorry to the mod for so many blogs but I need to write.

My dear SO gave me 12 horseback riding lessons for my birthday. It was a terrific present. But lately it’s been harder and harder to go.

It’s a family operation and they always have a ton of people around. Every time I go to my lesson there’s kids there staring at me, glaring at me in some cases. I don’t know what to do and I’m afraid of looking at someone wrong or saying something wrong so I just stand outside and play fetch with the dog until my trainer calls me over.

I can’t escape the negative image people have of me. If I try to talk I end up freaking people out and if I don’t talk they look at me like I’m stupid or a serial killer.

I figure if I just stay out of the way it’s better for everyone.

Then it’s time for my lesson and my trainer calls me over and the tone is like, “What the hell are you doing, weirdo? Why aren’t you paying attention?”

I AM paying attention! I’m just trying to stay out of the way! Why can’t you see that?

And she’s getting the horse ready but there’s still people talking to her and I’m just standing there because I don’t know what else to do. And she looks at me and says in an annoyed voice, “I’m TRYING.” Like I’m standing there with my arms crossed, tapping my foot, and checking my watch barking out, “Will this be much longer?!?” No. I’m not doing that! I’m petting the cats, I’m getting the brushes, I’m picking out a helmet. I’m doing EVERYTHING I can think of to be helpful and patient, but that’s not good enough. I’m still a monster somehow.

Speaking of helmets on a previous lesson my trainer told me to grab a helmet, so I grabbed one. This girl was staring at me very strangely and when I went back to the horse it was like I had committed a crime. “No. That’s Grrl’s helmet. Don’t you know where the helmets are?” No I didn’t. I’d never been shown. Just the way her eyes got really big and the tone of voice was very negative made me feel like she thought I took someone’s helmet on purpose. Then she walked me back and pointed out the ones that I could use. She could’ve said, ‘On the hooks next to all the brushes.’ I felt very shamed.

During the lesson I felt so down because there were so many people around and I felt so unappealing.

My horse wasn’t listening to me. I was kicking, squeezing, making noise and he still wouldn’t trot when I asked. When she told me to cantor I wanted to ask ‘Why?’ because if I couldn’t get him to trot I wasn’t going to get a cantor. But I tried. And I tried. And I tried. Nothing. I came so close to crying I was one step away from blinking away tears.

What’s sad and what really made me almost cry was that my trainer saw how upset I was and stopped me and gave me this big pep talk. That kindness is so hard to take. I’m used to people thinking I’m stupid or a monster. But when someone is genuinely caring I lose it.

I managed to control myself and made it through. But I wasn’t really upset because I couldn’t do the cantor. I was upset because I am not valuable by any other measure. I can’t be social, happy, pleasant most of the time so I have no value to society. If I’m not instantly good at everything I try what good am I? (For some background on this see my earlier blog entry: Pieces)

Yeah I know: boyfriend, horseback riding? Must be nice. Some people are so down that they can’t leave their room, can’t hold jobs, can’t even bath. So what right do I have to complain? I’m not here to compete with you. All I can do is express myself. Sometimes I wish I were a little crazier maybe then I’d be taken seriously. Maybe people wouldn’t hurt me when I try to explain the way I act. Maybe they wouldn’t think I was just making up excuses for a behavior and would see it as a real disorder.

And I suck. I drank three beers, blew off work (got 1 thing done out of 7) and snapped at my kids, got into an argument with my husband. I hope and pray this is just because my time of the month is coming.

I am diagnosed as Bipolar mixed. I have had so much suffering this past holiday season. Especially with depression. I became suicidal in January. I don't like to feel like this. But it seems it is not my choice other than to seek help from the psychiatrist I see, as soon as possible to get my mood stabilized. More recently, I experienced the worst depression I've ever gone through. I did not attempt suicide but I waited until I felt better and I do feel wonderful now. I love life and I love how good I feel everyday. With my illness, I can experience a low mood of depression in the future, but hopefully it won't be as severe as the last time. I, however, know this illness already. It can be unpredictable, but I feel hopeful in knowing I have set in place a support-type set up to help me make it through until I am stable once again, if I got as depressed as I was this past time. There is set up phone numbers of people who love me, they can come be with me too, the suicide hotline, doctor, therapist, a hospitalization if necessary to help me weather the illness until I am well again and not a danger to myself. I don't want to get to that point. But it's set up there just in case. That plus faith, faith in God, faith in myself , knowing that things will be ok, that I will be ok whatever happens. I'm not afraid anymore, nor am I already giving up.