healing part 1

i’m not a perfect human being. that being said, i don’t view myself as being superior to any other person, but i also don’t see any other person as being superior to me. i don’t love any one person any more than i love any other person. i have issues, and so does literally everyone else, including my mother. about a week ago she read something i’d written on here months ago about her, and has spoken approximately two words to me since. she’s a good person, who has lived a good and beautiful life, but obviously her life was never perfect. she has her own struggles, hardships, and traumas to work through, and plenty of growing to healing to do, as we all do, up until the very last second of our lives. so, her and my dad did the best they could to give me a good and happy childhood, but naturally they’ve made a few mistakes, and passed a bit of their own pain and unhealed traumas onto me, as all parents do. everyone has trauma. no ones life is better or worse than any other. we all suffer. we all experience joy. it just manifests itself in different ways in all of us. for me, it mainly presented itself in my eating disorder. my parents have never, as far as i’m aware of, acknowledged that any of the ways i acted out when i was hurting and hadn’t yet learned how to react in a healthy way, could possibly be even partially their fault. i forgive them for their mistakes, as I’ve moved past them as an individual, and i’m evolving. but together as a unit, us and our relationship can’t evolve an further until they become more mindful of how they react, and are able to see where they still need to learn, grow, and heal. healing comes from keeping each other accountable.

this is one of the first things i ever seriously wrote, inspired by a prompt we were given in eating disorder treatment

 i want to grow
not just physically,
into a beautiful, healthy body
that i can call a home

i want to grow
into a real human being.
i want to grow into more 
than a body or a hollow shell.

i want to grow
i want to be more than an object,
than a fixture at a party
like the booze and the drugs and the music

i want to grow
i want a purpose
for my own self

i want to grow.
i want my purpose to be for
my own longterm happiness
not to please a stranger for one night.

i want to grow
i want to grow my soul,
and feel my spirit fill my body
until it overflows and radiates outward.

i want to grow
and grow
and grow

fomo

i’m in a weird spot in my recovery right now. when i find myself becoming more accepting of my new, larger body, and when i allow myself to comfortably enjoy what was once a huge fear food without having to compensate, i feel proud of myself. but at the same time, i feel so alone and separate. i see a lot of my friends from treatment still struggling, and several heading back into higher levels of care. i see this and i miss being able to relate on such a close level to their struggles. i miss the sense of community within a treatment center. i feel bad for doing well and knowing they still have to struggle. doing well just seems so wrong for me, like its not something i was ever supposed to do. i feel like i’m still supposed to be in the eating disorder community, but i feel so separated from that now that recovery isn’t my whole life anymore.

letting the light in

As I stated in my last post, these past few days/weeks/however long its been has been really good to me. I’ve been allowing myself to take up space, both physically and figuratively, and letting myself feel joy and goodness and warmth so powerful it nearly overtakes me. Things that seem ever so simple, but have always been a struggle for me. I’ve been learning to stop second-guessing what makes me feel good. If I want a cookie, I eat a cookie. If I want to go out, I go out. If I want to stay in, I stay in. Choices that seem so obvious, but for whatever reason seem so hard to make. I’ve learned to ride the waves of life and just let it happen. Letting it all become easy, has been far from easy. Its a constant and conscious effort to stop myself from searching for a reason, an “oh I have more energy because I’ve been eating more of this and less of that,” or “Oh I must be happy because I’ve been spending more time with friend-x, -y, or -z, and based on our natal charts we are wicked compatible, so he/she/they must be the love of my life and we must get married so I absolutely cannot mess this up or say one wrong thing at all or else my life is ruined.” Basically, I jump to conclusions. Drastic conclusions. Rapidly. Don’t get me wrong, a healthy diet and time spent with good people could definitely be, and actually is most likely, contributing to this upward spiral I seem to be in. I acknowledge that. But I am learning that it is super unhealthy for me personally, to get so fixated on the why and how, and make it an obsession. Its a control thing really. Control is good when needed, but if things are good the way they just happen, maybe I should let them just happen. Good feelings won’t last forever, and I know that. But I have made a decision to not worry about the decline until it begins.

should i be writing?

another unorganized rambling, sort of an overthinking out loud part 2, if you will. enjoy!

If this is your first time reading my blog, welcome. My name’s Audrina and this is where, for only about the past week and a half or so, I have been spewing words in the forms of poetry, story times, and jumbled-up thoughts turned into even more jumbled-up words. What I’m trying to say is, I’m very new at this. I’ve toyed with the idea before, with sharing my thoughts, feelings, and ideas. I’d do this on a different platform for a short while, and then quit because it felt “wrong”. I’d start a food-centric Instagram page, and then delete it as soon as I realized it was making me focus even more than I already was on food, which was ultimately detrimental to my recovery (I’ve been struggling with an eating disorder for almost half my life, granted I’m only 20, but still). I’d write and write and write until I would discover that I’d been writing for all of the wrong reasons. Sometimes I would write so that others would perceive me a certain way, and post pictures that made my life look a certain way, and give the illusion of a perfect, dreamy aesthetic. A common reason was that I wanted to help others, and give hope and guidance and relief to the people who related to my words. Don’t get me wrong, helping others is lovely and great. We should all help others. The problem is that everything I’ve done with my life for the past almost 21 years was to serve others, never allowing anything at all in the universe to be of service to me and only me. This time around is different. I’m writing and sharing because it is therapeutic to me. If you’re reading this, thats cool, but please stop if you’re not thoroughly enjoying it. Frankly, I just don’t care. Its not that I don’t care about you, dear reader, I really do from the bottom of my heart. Although I don’t know you, I love and care for you from the bottom of my heart, and it greatly pains me to see anyone at all suffering, regardless of if they’re someone I get along with or care to be around. I’m not saying this because I want you to view me as a kind, caring, compassionate, whatever you personally might call it person. I really don’t care what you think of me, or even if you’re aware of my existence. I’m just saying it because its who I am as a person, and maybe someone out there wants to know that about me. I don’t care if anyone sees this, if anyone reads or follows my blog, or likes any of my posts. I recently decided to take a break from all social media, as my life was ruled by trying to live in a way that was beautiful to other people, and doing things to make them happy. Long story short, I’m a people-pleaser. Always have been, and perhaps always will be. Which I think is ok, as long as one of the people that I’m pleasing is myself. Anywho, writing this blog felt wrong, too much like the social media that I haven’t so much as looked at or scrolled through in several weeks. But I realized it was different, not only because, to my knowledge, no one here knows who I am. But also because my thoughts and attitude behind this platform are so separate and detached from my views on social media. I deserve to write, so I will.

another poem

as i was writing my last post, about feeling stuck in the past and fearing that i may be struggling more than i realize, i couldn’t help but to think of a couple pieces that i had written, one being an essay, and the other being this poem that i wrote, while i sat in a rather soft and cozy chair in a cold, rigid treatment center, where there were too many bright and stale fluorescent lights, but it felt like one of the darkest places on earth; a poem i wrote about the days of my life that were simply cold and dark, any way you tried to look at it.

buried in snow,
i reach out,
forcing my arm through the wall,
of frozen icy crystals,
for you.
others try to help,
but i insist on waiting for you.

on a mattress on the floor,
in a locked room,
of a dark,
unfurnished apartment,
my bare skin,
pressed against your warm, naked body.

seeking comfort from those
who cause me fear,
the more you hurt me,
the stronger i cling to you.

overthinking out loud

WARNING: this post won’t be at all organized and probably won’t make any sense. It won’t be beautiful or poetic. its just a spewing of my thoughts, as they are, in my mind.

I can’t write now. I’m doing too well. I’m not having any crazy thoughts that I need to get out. I’m existing. Happily. Existing. Its mundane but content. I always think I’m doing well. When I look back to what I can now see as some of my worst points, I thought I was doing well. So does that mean that I am hardcore struggling right now, and that I’m in denial? Maybe. What will it take for me to feel my pain? Will I know when I lose X amount of pounds again? Or when I find myself waking up in a hospital again? Maybe I have to put myself through some more trauma, spend time with people that I know are dangerous, put myself into situations that are just, well, bad. Maybe this is just how my life is meant to go, waves of feeling good about how good things are going, crashing and trying to fix things, thinking that I’m doing oh-so-well again, just to crash yet again and realize that my progress was all a lie. I often find myself reminiscing on previous phases of my life, innocent youthful audrina, hot-mess high school audrina, wild party girl audrina, soft and vulnerable in treatment audrina, and whatever other versions of me existed in the past. I wonder what I’ll call this part of my life in a few years. I think about these different pieces of me often, and all of them still exist, coming out in different ways every now and again. Some people might say that I live in the past, spending my morning showers thinking about who I was a year or two ago, falling asleep at night while reading journal entries from when I was in treatment for my eating disorder. I disagree. If we don’t remember the past, and think regularly about the ways we moved on from it, can we really keep it in the past? If I don’t reflect on the worst nights of my life, whats stopping me from reliving them? Or maybe they’re right. I do feel stuck right now, yet unsure what I’m stuck in. Maybe I am stuck in the past. Who knows.