Yet another attempt at recovery

I am trying for yet another attempt at recovery.  I have spent many periods in hospital, mainly in Eating Disorder units so this shouldn't be an unfamiliar place but it never gets normal, never.  Maybe that's a good thing, I think that it is.  I wouldn't want this to feel normal, the ED however, does feel normal.  So feeling more nourished feels horrendous and truly terrifying.  I am longing for emptiness and my body is taking a long time to normalise.  I realise it is still early days but I am a terribly impatient creature and so the idea of having to take things slowly is terribly foreign.  It is a work in progress.  Something to learn, to practice, to home.
I have been away from home too long.  I spent the first two and a half weeks in a psychiatric unit this time before they found a bed in a unit.  A psychiatric ward isn't the best place for someone who is ill with an ED, it needs a specialist unit but beds are in such short supply and I was too ill to be home so the psych.  unit at least gave me a chance to mentally stabilise a tad.  That's the plan.
An ED is something that possesses you, so that you are unable to identify which part is it, which part is you.  I guess it becomes a bizarre, somewhat obscene version of a Venn diagram...part of recovery is learning to identify what is who.  Which is you, which is it, which is the part that cannot be separated, may never be separated,  How to live with that, how to accept that, how to accept you.  How to live with what you with the illness have done, who you've hurt. who you've let down, who you have made sob in the early hours of the morning.  The tears that no one hears or sees but that you with ED have caused.
Those are the things that you have to live with.  The ED doesn't, the ED is like a virus, it has no cell of it's own, it relies on invading yours and claiming it's conquests as it's body now.  So you own all the pain it causes as pain you've caused and it is pain I've caused.  I hate myself for that.  I don't know if I can ever make peace with that.  I don't know if all it will do is haunt me till my dying day...who knows.  all I know is that at the moment it haunts me, the guilt is massive and I hate myself for it.  For my weakness, for the hate, for the hurt.

Weight of staying alive...

Some days I am overwhelmed simply by the responsibility of staying alive.  It's something that most people rarely feel, something that normally happens in response to parenthood.  Not for me, it's not the worry that I might accidentally be taken, that's the worry that parents might have, the fear of not being allowed the opportunity to see their child go through the rites of passage that we expect.
Mine is I am worried that the fear of life and the intense pain that suffocates, hinders my every step will be more than I can take.  I am worried that I will take myself by my own hand, I fear that.  I am so very frightened by life.  I am frightened of the future, I fear more than I can express.  It's more than fear it's a paralysing terror that grips my limbs and threatens my heart with arrest.  I know that my suicide would break my family that it would be their destruction and that it would be my own doing.  What I fear so much in life yet my suicide would, without doubt, cause.  It's a permanent 'Catch-22' that I cannot answer, a life of ambivalence.

Hate is not too strong a word...

Some I feel that being in the mental health system has been like being in an abusive relationship.  I've been told so many times that I cannot survive without them that most of me believes it to be so.  No matter how bad things have been, I stay around because I am scared that without them I may die.  That I'll fall forever and there will be no ledge, no way of stopping.  I do not believe I can stop myself.
They pulled apart all I knew.  They systematically destroyed it.  My world and they never helped to repair it.  They took all my resources, threw me out, took away everything that made my life worth living and told me it was all my fault.  Kicked out of my nest, no skills for adult living and they expected me to flourish.  When I didn't, they blamed me.
They ruined my life, obliterated everything.  Took away my family and my home, made me distrust everything about myself, told me my family was bad for me, told me it was fault that everything was falling apart.  Made me feel there was something intrinsically wrong with us, then the disappeared and rejected all responsibility.
Thou Shalt Not Harm?!
"'For your own good' is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction" Janet Frame

Tak flight...

I feel lost, very alone.  Really what I want is to numb myself into a place where there is no space for fear.  Fear is there all the time and it's presence is depriving me of everything.  I hate that I want it but I want the freedom of the other night.  The induced stupour of nothingness, the oblivion of chemical overdose, the flight of being held against a wall, finally held and still.  The fear is more than I can manage, I need to take flight.
I want the years that come from living your life in impossible times.
Some of us live a lie that belies the festered torture inside.

marsha linehan...

marsha linehan who created dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) has come out of the BPD closet.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/health/23lives.html
thankyou to her, an incredibly brave thing to do.

words....

i spoke early and since then words have stood for everything i was trying to get and as a barrier to everything i needed.  articulate is one of the main words used to describe me.  however, intelligence and being articulate can impede as much as they can aid.  sometimes i am overwhelmed by the lack of words that describe what i feel.  i can tell you how the book says i should feel but there aren't enough words in the English language to adequately converse to you what is going on inside me at this moment inside and visceral noises just tend to frighten.
the thing is, words can make you appear intelligent but they also decieve both you and everyone else on each level.  they can aid an appearance of clarity and togetherness but sometimes you really need someone to be able to see between the protesting syllables to see a self that is crumbling quicker than the lies can fall out of your pursed lips.
sometimes, maybe, i just need someone to hug me and to sit with me in a silence that says all that needs to be said.

anger...

anger...
it's so very difficult to deal with, well for someone of us it is.
why?
as much as i hate to be the stereotype, i cannot cope with feeling two things about someone at once.  i cannot manage loving (or liking) someone and being angry at them.  i cannot manage the paradox of feelings, i cannot handle the ambivilence.  i split, they are good or bad.  there is no grey area, only dichotomy, black or white.
maybe some day i will manage the middle...i hope so, living in a world of extremes is terrifying, there is no consistency.  there is no image of a whole person, everyone is two people.  no one can be trusted and you most importantly, cannot trust yourself.