July 29th - no weight, but serious progress (see end)...

I’m sort of tired of rehearsing things to say and personas to adopt when I arrive at Hayes Grove. There is an awareness not that I can’t be ‘me’ but that I am simply not going to be the recognisable me who objects openly to the diagnosis of ‘eating disorder’ because of my beliefs over where, when and how my illness developed. The sense that I am not going to be able to maintain the strength of belief that I fought so hard to find is not daunting – what is affecting me is the searching for the behaviour and the personality traits/mental stances which are going to replace it. I know I can never know them until I get there but sometimes it helps me to feel I have an ‘in’, an ‘approach’ in mind which will ease my passage through the time I spend there.

And I’ve been meaning to write since yesterday about a comment from one of the nurses about her life in an Arab country where she moved with her husband and stayed years ago. She was remarking that there was the potential of a coup at any time and the first to be thrown into camps or murdered were going to be white Europeans. Determined for it not to be her she was under constant strain to watch what she said, what she did and be perpetually aware of how it may be perceived or interpreted. There was immense stress that she was placed under and it made her ill and very underweight (along with an active, unhappy lifestyle). I suddenly knew that my next blog would have to contain the phrase:

“I’ve been living in another country.”

I don’t quite know whether ‘another country’ was pre-hospital – although it was because it feels like for four years, the duration of my illnesses, that I have had to constantly observe my actions to guarantee they elicited the ‘right’ response and the ‘best’ out of the situation and those others within it. Constantly not trying to rock any boats or be disbelieved I have made it a 24/7 occupation to watch and observe just in case I was though of or judged in a certain way. I don’t know if it was different when I came into hospital – probably it just magnified the whole dilemma and focussed attention from everyone on the physicality and the ‘obvious’ problem of eating which must go along with it. Psychologically, there is no resistance to eating whatever. I know that but nobody else has any guarantees. If the guarantee is to continue eating then that I can do – and I also hope I can do weight gain although upsettingly I cannot trumpet from the rooftops today and I am actually heartbroken at having not put on any weight. I remain 34.25kilos

That is upsetting, and I can justify it in many ways, explain it in many ways and attempt to understand it in many ways. Essentially what I was doing before has ceased to work – whether that is because I am heavier and now need even more to gain weight, whether the stress of the last few days has taken it’s toll not on the amount I have eaten but with what the body has had to do with it in order to keep itself together and OK…and I genuinely haven’t lessened the amount I’ve put in. In actual fact according to my calculations if anything I’ve done a little more. But it hasn’t been relaxed and responsive – I’ve been anxious and simply couldn’t fit it all in…it’s been a difficult time trying to mentalise the food intake. Which in some ways makes it an enormous relief that I can forget about engineering my meals now and simply go to a dining room and let them give me options and I’ll take a choice. I can guarantee I won’t always like it but it’ll be a damn sight better than this hospital food and I’ll be a damn site more aware of what I like/don’t, can cope with best and do not want to touch…it truly will be in response there and fingers crossed that response will be to continued and increasing weight gain.

On the positive side my weekly weight gain is 0.7 kilos – only 100 under the target. This means I need to up things slightly – but then fuck slightly – I need to up things even more than slightly and that’s totally OK with me…and I mean that…

And I need to remark for you all how different that is. Usually I put ‘slightly’ and ‘slowly’ and ‘gradually’ in sentences simply to give myself a breathing space I sense I am going to need. My body is very attuned to its willingness, readiness and preparedness to do what is being asked of it and in the past I have been aware of moments when I am saying the right words (that 24/7 ensuring I am not persecuted or judged) but not feeling totally on board with some element of what was being asked of me – usually the time scales and the pressure they imply. Somewhere in the previous paragraph I computed all the minutiae of grams and logically could see that I ‘only’ needed to up it 100 grams worth of calories over a week – that’s about 75-100 calories more per day. Easily do-able actually and probably something I would have appreciated from a calculated point of view. But in actual fact observing that ‘only 100grams’ would be ‘what is required’ I felt a genuine surge of resentment from deep within at sticking to that limitation. Yes I could do an extra glass of milk/juice – a bigger dollop of mayonnaise at both meals, more salsa, more something…somewhere…at each individual intake of food…but it is a focussed restriction. If the goal is simply weight gain – without a limit of 2000 calories per day, 0.8 kilos per week and a focus on amounts to meet and obtain (therefore structures which limit and bind) perhaps (and I sense this is the case) I will over-come that, overdo things…up things and supersede the ‘requirements’ in a total embrace of the larger picture, not the refined, restrictive and limited goals…

And this morning that not only felt possible, but positive, desirable and dare I say the point. This hospital has been a limitation – a foreign country where they’ve spoken a foreign language and hated me for being here and through not understanding what right I had to be here…

And in turn I’ve hated their limited perspective, their rules, their limits, the fact that I have had to respect their quantitive, qualitative mentalities. I am already seeing Hayes Grove as a semi-liberation. Perhaps I can lose the ‘2000 calories, 800 grams’ thing there and overcome it, transcend it and ensure that I am both responding (and therefore eating more than they may prescribe) but responding and eating as much as I need to put on the weight in the timescale that my body wants. In previous ‘countries’ that’s always been slower than they may have prescribed. Now I sense, I know, I can feel within that it may just – given a menu, a liberated place and perhaps a liberated and less tired, stressed me – be a little bit quicker, faster and more easily done.