Purged Purging Outta My Life
Gosh and does it feel amazing to be
clean.
Never would I have thought that I would never even think of leaning over that dreadful porcelain bowl with shaky hands and tear-strewn cheeks. *gosh so cliche but idk anymore lol*
I'm just going to share
Why
I thought that this day would never come
I had been so heavily reliant on it for almost everyday of 2015.
Gosh, but looking back on all the things I did to get rid of the food I had already consumed is just ahhh
I remember that time when I had purged my gastric pills just because I had thought that having it in me would enable me to live through my 5/6 day water fast. Additionally, wanting to do so again after my Dad mandated me to take an additional 1/4 cup of unsweetened soy milk on top of the 1/4 cup I had agreed to have after my 100h mark had hit. Seriously...
I remember those nights when I'd hide the binge foods under my shirt and carrying them to the bathroom to eat and right after just have them all flushed down the bowl. I remember times when I was so afraid of being caught in the bathroom that I gathered all my foods and stored plastic bags in my room and then I'd switched off the lights, hid under the covers to purge into a freaking plastic bag. Oh gosh...then that one time the bag broke and my sheets were screwed...and I had to scurry back and forth from my room to the laundry area subtly, grabbing detergent powder and stain removers and slathering it onto that spot on my sheets. OMG. but it didn't work so my dad spotted me and asked what happened and I lied by telling him oh I spilled cereal and milk on it so i needed to get it washed. OMG he then took over and I felt so bad that he was manually washing my mistakes CRIES.
Purging made me lose all the life I had binged on - literally and figuratively. I had mastered the art of deceit to leave social settings so subtly to go off into bathroom stalls to a secret no one suspected when they gave me the go ahead to leave right after a meal. For the most part of 2015, I was doing it before assembly, during break, etc idk anymore that my classmates just stopped questioning when they saw me right after, with bloodshot eyes, reddened and swollen cheeks and burst blood vessels speckled across my face.
I remember thinking that I would NEVER want this addiction out of my life, purging was my confidante, regardless of it being a demon, it was always there for me regardless of how messed up I was in life.
Numerous people attempted to help me and convince me of why I should stop; but it was just a quest of failure on their part because I was so closed off to change. I hated myself so much that I did not want that better life they had told me of - I obstinately believed that I did not deserve it. Nurses told me that they could stick up images of the horrific and gory physical injuries you could inflict internally or externally. I simply shrugged, disappointed that even that would not come close to deter me from continuing. I had wanted to tear my oesophagus , bleed internally till i died - for goodness sakes, I would be angry at myself or not be truly "satisfied" if I did not see blood when I used to purge. How messed up. I had been spending that whole time striving to die with my face in a toilet bowl.
I got so sick and tired of this hell
I realized how foolish I had been to be wrapped up in this delusional world of supposedly promised relief when all it left me with was regret and lost moments in time.
It breaks my heart and at the same time, it infuriates me when I see so many people, including my friends who stay victims of this self-perpetrating cycle and not get out of it. I may sound malicious or un-empathetic but I am just so done with people succumbing to purging because it's just awful to see so much potential just go down the sewage. I know them personally as amazing human beings and to see them hurt just makes me angry I guess. I have gotten out of something I never wanted to say goodbye to - the same way people don't want to say goodbye to this familiar pain. Seeing how amazing it is to be on the other side, free of any chains of purging urges, I think to myself - why can't ya'll join me in this happiness and freedom too?
I suppose I need more patience and understanding...but I guess I also wanna share of how I consciously and continuously made the choice to wring all the life of the purging demon I had personified.
I used to think that the urges would never fade completely, that I will always need to practice immense self-control every meal I consumed for the rest of my life. Yes, I had always heard the usual "it will always remain a part of you...you will have the urges, oftentimes, against your conscious will, but you can always choose to not act on them."
I agree with this to some extent.
oh gosh will all the Humanities teachers come after me for the unforgivable error of the italicised
At the beginning of abstaining from purging, the urges will undoubtedly be raging, screaming and hanging on the last strand of hope for existence in your life. As you say goodbye to something that has taken a large part of your life, it's hard to imagine not feeling lost without it. In those spaces of time, we may lapse back to excessive internal wars, overthinking everything - worrying about whether to purge, it's only a one off event right? (NO), exhausting so much time and energy into weighing the pros and cons of doing so... and even when you finally decide against it and friends praise you for controlling your urges, again, you overthink about why you are guilty for not purging as part of your automatic coping mechanism.
However, take one day as it comes, and soon the proportion of bad days will be overshadowed by better ones, and soon, the majority of negatives gets negated to a minority of moments in your preciously reclaimed life free of purging.
Wait. Just wait in hope.
I'm not really religious but, I find this ^ really apt
I remember telling my psychiatrist that I don't see why I should have purging or ED in general out of my life because with or without it, I'm doomed to failure and uselessness in society. And I'll never forget her blunt yet incredibly true statement that woke me up. She said "Well, you have never even tried to live a life without ED in it, how would you know? Yes, you hit Minimum Healthy Weight on some occasions, but for how long did you stay there before falling all the way back down? Even if you think you will always have ED, try to live a life without it for a substantial period of time and then see where that takes you because you can always go back if you want anyways."
I was impatient and I wanted results of a fully recovered state of mind immediately, and that is simply not feasible (in the cases I've encountered) Don't beat yourself up over a slip-up, but don't bask in self-pity and (for me it was sometimes 'pride' in being able to go back to that 'skill'/'ability' to purge which was not something everyone could do?) There is nothing to be happy about being able to destroy yourself better than others around you, I realized that it made me lose all respect people had for me instead - how self-defeating aye?
Sure, I can delve into the numerous 10 step program stuff to curb an urge but I'm pretty sure many of us are equipped with that knowledge,
it's rather the issue of our willingness to act upon it.
It took me a long while to realize that I am worth recovery and recovery in turn is worth the sacrifice and pain of eliminating what I had firmly believed as my rock in my life when everything else was crumbling or yknow smashing me like boulders in road runner episodes I used to watch on Cartoon Network.
It was the epiphany of internalizing that choosing to live and crush the comfort of my emotionally charged impulses that delivered me into this current state of eating when I'm bored, having lapses of binges occassionally but not running to the bathroom in a heat of anxiety, rather staying snuggled in my comfy position I had trial-and-error-ed more times than in any PSLE problem sum; transplanted from my reality of worries in a virtual distraction of Buzzfeed 'Worth it' or 'Unsolved' videos.