Keep holding on…
Saturday 8th September 2018:
15:00 - “He held my hand tightly and looked into my eyes, I could see tears glistening in them, ‘You can do it darling, we’re all rooting for you. But you MUST eat, you and I both know what will happen if you don’t’. I wish I could have even a smidge of that belief in myself, the belief that others have in me. But, with even the greatest will in the world, I can’t seem to.”
21:00 - “I feel absolutely petrified. I don’t know if I can do this. My stomach is in a tight knot and has been all day, along with a persistent headache. I so badly want to be able to do this whole ‘student’ thing, but I don’t think I can. It’s almost as though I’ve been out of real life for so long that I can no longer function in it. Life just doesn’t seem to work with me, I just can’t do it. Want to know what’s really going through my head right now? ‘If you can’t handle this, you should just end it all’. Yep, that’s how hopeless my mind makes me feel. ‘You can’t do it, just give up!’. The only thing that stops me acting on it, is the insurmountable pain it would cause to those I love the most. That old part of Mima, the girl who won the Perseverance Cup at school, that refuses to give in, that knows there must be more to her life than this, she’s still a part of me, and it’s that part of me that’s keeping me going. My diary is a place is for me to be totally honest, and today, it’s the end of moving in day, and I feel utterly petrified and overwhelmed. It’s not the people or the place, they both couldn’t be more lovely, they really couldn’t. It’s my illness, it’s the persistent pain.”
Firstly, I want to say how immensely grateful I am to everyone for all of their lovely messages of support and love since starting Norland this week. I don’t feel able to put into words how incredibly touched I am. Secondly, I want to shout to the world, that five days in and I’M ACTUALLY DOING IT! I feel totally different to Saturday, I feel like maybe I CAN actually do this.
Whilst many feel excited to start uni and all that it entails. I’ll admit I didn’t fall into that category. I’ve been kind of dreading September. I suppose I don’t have a very good track record with it… I was in hospital last September, started a degree that made me very unwell the one before that, and was sent home from my dream gap year job into hospital the one prior to that. September and Mima just don’t seem to agree, so it’s not really surprising that I felt very apprehensive in the run up to my move to Bath.
But look, I’m doing it! And anyone reading this who persistently belittles their self-belief can too! I keep holding tight to the words my nurse, Sharon, wrote to me, “I know that life without anorexia must seem very scary, but when you look back, you will see that life is so much harder WITH it”. I know it’s early days, and I’m taking it a day at a time, but today is another day ticked. Norland, and the people in it, really do seem one of a kind. I can’t even begin to say how blessed I feel to be here.