Finding hope in the hopelessness...
I wrote the post below a few weeks back, when things felt brighter, but recently, well, this week especially, I thought I’d lost the hope. The lights had gone out.
‘The thing about hope is that it’s often in the hopelessness that we find it’. She’s right, I know she’s absolutely right. I’ve drifted in and out of 14 Hallam Street a shell of a being this week, totally un-Mima; distressed, despondent and at times desperate. Late last night I left London and came home to Norfolk in a hunt to find my hope again.
As I lay in bed this morning I came across the piece below, the one I had written a few weeks back ‘to remind me of the hope; to re-read when the next rough one rolls around’. And as I read it I felt the hope in those words, my words, my hope.
“Thank God for the difference a year can make. No I literally thank God for the difference this year has made. Time alone hasn’t made the difference though, it’s been the people around me. The bravery and strength they make me feel, the love and kindness they continue to show. Tuesday 8th October 2019, ‘It’s been an incredibly hard day. I’ve felt totally alone, lost and anxious – it remains so too; unbearable. I burst into tears on the phone to Mummy earlier. Time seems endless at the moment, I wish it away all day, longing for the evening, to go to bed. God if you’re there please help me. I feel low, anxious and deflated. I just want to sleep and not wake up.’
I felt like my only option was to either continue deteriorating and let myself be taken inpatient, or just let it take me. I felt at the end, I really did.
Then on October 28th 2019 I began at Orri. The place I hoped could help me get my life back, but I never thought they would help in the ways that they have, and continue to. Orri don’t just carry the hope, they enable me to feel it too. Don’t get me wrong, it still flickers, I definitely lose sight of it at times, but my God, is life different to a year ago.
I’ve managed to live completely independently, I’ve looked after and fed myself throughout a global pandemic. I’ve build friendships and relationships that make my heart want to burst. And I’ve sat through some of the roughest days, and toughest meals. But not alone. Tears flood my plate less often now, I don’t run out every day, or make pathetic excuses to flee before supper (‘I’m just going to the bank’ lol).
Things are different, things have changed and things are changing. But it’s a process, anorexia won’t go down without a fight and it’s exhausting. But hopefully the more hard days I can get through, the more resilience I can build to face those days yet to come.
This isn’t to say ‘Orri’s cured me’ or that Orri alone has got me where I am today, no, there’s a lot more to it than that, and a heck of a lot more people to thank than that. This is a post to remind me of the hope, to re-read when the next rough one rolls around.
I still have a long way to go, but actually I am further ahead than I was a year ago, or even 3 months ago.
‘Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down’, apparently I’m like a Weeble and it’s okay to wobble..
… just don’t fall down.”
Shortly after reading this my phone lit up with ‘a memory from a year ago’, a photo of me on my first day at Orri… it’s funny and perhaps a little scary too how in sync our phones can be sometimes.
I often carry around one of my old diaries in my bag with me, and at the moment happen to be carrying my one from a year ago, along with my one from Lockdown too.
Having re-read a few pages, I realised that maybe what I wrote a few weeks ago still remains true, ‘Things are different, things have changed and things are changing’. Maybe a rough few weeks can’t cancel out the progress that has been made; perhaps it even lays the foundations for more progress to be made?
… I certainly hope so.
