#during lockdown i literally went off the grid with my phone off for months on end

[notevenanna]

the sadness i feel when i find such a good fic account and they were last active months ago is unmatched :(((

[destinyc1020]

How do you think the argument after the NYC pics started? Mayte Tom texted her while being angry lol

Idk Anon lol 😆

But I'm assuming it prob started off as text messages, if it even escalated to a phone call. 👀

Either way....Whether thru text or phone call, all I envision is a lot of shouting 🙈 Idk why lol....

I def don't think it was a "calm" conversation at all. 👀 I think Z is naturally zen, and I don't get the impression that she usually likes a lot of confrontation, but I think even she prob raised her voice or wrote in all caps lol on that occasion.... because I think Tom was HOT that day 😤, and I don't think he held back.

Smthg DEF went down, coz he started unfollowing ppl on her end, and she never paid him any attention on social media for months after that... even though he re-followed Darnell days later. 👀

So yeaaa..... smthg went down for sure. Cuz you don't act that way just because your ex unfollows your friends... esp not if you've already "moved on" and are dating someone new anyway. 😏 Why would you be upset? Unless..... 👀

And the way Z just seemed to slip into some type of depression during the beginning of the pandemic was also kind of weird to me. She was like off the grid for like over a month, and then her mom was posting all these stories about moms for mental health of their children and stuff..... 😔 I just feel like she was going thru a lot during that time from like Feb - July 2020 (ie. the NYC pap pics coming out and outing the rlshp with JE, the fallout with Tom, the covid-19 pandemic, being shut in during lockdown, not being able to use Euphoria as her therapy to distract her from her problems, JE leaving to go back to Australia, going through a quarter-life crisis and not knowing who she is without WORK, Tom dating Nadia - you know she had to know, the Jacdaya breakup, the death of George Floyd, the BLM marches, Trump and his craziness 🤪, etc). There was just SO MUCH going on!!! 😩😭 Ugh last year was depressing!

When she told Sam on the set of M&M that she "hasn't been doing too well....", I believe it! I could sense it too! So much stuff happened to her starting from 2019 onward. I think M&M really helped her to kind of let things out and slowly get out of her "funk". She seemed waaay happier after she won her Emmy imo. 😁 She seemed more back to normal from what I could see.

But Feb - July 2020 seemed particularly rough for her. I also remember her looking a bit "buzzed" right around that time back in Feb when she had gone from NYC with JE to then Australia again..... She just looked so weird around that time....and then there was that weird interview where she was looking out of it.

Maybe it's just my eyes lol but....

Chiiiiiiilllllle..... She was going through it! Who knows what he was giving her when they were together.... 🥴 👀

Anyway, whew! Thank goodness those days are OVER. Z looks much happier and more lucid these days lol. 😊

Like literally GLOWING! 😍

So happy for my girl. ❤👌🏾

[letsdiscoverkitty]

Treatment/Recovery Update - May 2021

Okay, I will try to ramble less in this one (so sorry!) ^ well that didn't happen!

In terms of when I did leave hospital, as I mentioned a tiny bit in the last post, my EDP was completely AWOL. A month before I was due to be discharged she came to a meeting with myself and my consultant, during which we set up 4 appointments that would be over zoom before I was discharged to help with relapse prevention and the transition home, as well as setting out, in principle, the therapeutic support that I would be getting once home...it all sounded great, so great. But as usual when it comes to my team, it was too good to be true (should have called it). I attempted to contact her when our appointments never happened but I kept being met by a brick wall; no one knew what was happening, all I got told was that she was "off"... Time passed and I was discharged with only a phone call booked in from someone from the general team to check I was safe a few days later (it was literally 5 minutes, long if that) and an appointment to do physical monitoring the next wee....a far cry from the original discharge plan *sigh* Coming home was a bit of a whirlwind. We were approaching Christmas but we were still under a lot of restrictions with COVID, so it was a very strange/messy/weird few weeks.

Time continued to pass and there was still no confirmation around therapy or support, even the ED team didn't know what was happening with L, I just continued to go to two weekly physical monitoring. In the end, with nowhere else to turn, I contacted my consultant from hospital. To say that she was mad that nothing had been in place/I had no support would be an understatement and I thank my lucky stars that she was able to get involved. It took a couple of weeks but I finally had my first session with a therapist in February. In total it took about 8-9weeks from discharge to see someone, which, well, was hard.

Upon reflection, I think one of the biggest things I struggled with with coming home was that I had literally no leave to practice beforehand. This meant that I unfortunately slipped back into old habits very quickly as, well I know it is no excuse but coming back to the same environment your brain easily slips into automatic mode and you find yourself doing what you "used" to do without realising it.

I was in, I would say, quite a vulnerable state when I left hospital (the last few months there were pretty rocky to say the least) and the day before I was discharged (as I mentioned in a previous post somewhere) I was handed 3 different, very conflicting, meal plans and the nutritionist who had previously been very horrible to me and who had been away for a number of weeks, told me that she did not think I could continue to recover at home and that the best possible case would be if I only lost a bit of weight over the next 6 months....I think you can probably guess how badly this was taken and how messy my mind was. So with 3 meal plans in hand, none of which I had practiced, with little to no support from the ED team, I was, essentially, crisis managing, simply trying to get through each day.

I know, I know. Classic kitty - stuck record. failure. mess. making a million and one excuses. trying to make out like she is fine to the rest of the world when in fact inside she was falling apart. sigh.

In terms of my weight recovery I was not discharged at a healthy BMI/weight, which my consultant was sad about, however I was in a much better place than when I was admitted (I think I had gained about half the weight I would have needed to from when I was admitted to get to a healthy weight). I will admit that part of me does wonders whether staying would have been beneficial, because on a very basic level yes it could have helped in some ways. However if I stretch my mind back to when I was still on the ward ,it actually still floods me with anxiety and fear because of how UNHELPFUL the environment had sadly become. It is hard to explain to someone who has not experienced an EDU, but the patient groups can and do make a massive of differences. I was vvv lucky that when I was initially admitted, and for the first good couple of months, it was a v supportive and recovery focused environment. However, by about late Sept/early October ,things turned completely upside down (which was not helped by the fresh COVID lockdowns either) and even staff were saying how terrible it had gotten and how they could not believe the things that they were being asked to manage on the progression ward. There were times when I felt incredible unsafe on the ward and feared for others patients, which is not "okay". I genuinely believe that staying any longer would have likely made my mental health decline further; I had already found the massive shift was negatively affecting me and I think staying would have been unwise. I had also gained quite a lot of weight and was, I hate to admit, struggling with both coming to terms with that along with dealing with everything that you are continually facing when going through treatment/recovery alongside working on trauma stuff. I know none of that is any worthy excuse, but that was how it was...At this time I was struggling a lot with my meal plan and had quite a few lapses whilst on the transition phase of the unit however despite screaming out for help/support from staff, because of the acute situation on the ward, I was just left. They knew I was struggling, I was told time and time again that they had not forgotten me, but did I get help? no. It was actually made worse by the then nutritionist who sat me down like a naughty school girl and basically told me that I was a failure and that I would never achieve anything in life blah blah blah (please see a past post if you want to know more) which made me even more scared to reach out for 'help'/'support'. So no, I don't think staying would have helped much, which is a real shame.

Therapy wise I had a bit of a rough ride in there (god I'm really selling this aren't I?!). When admitted I was not in a place for 'traditional' therapy what so ever; looking back I honestly have no idea how I was even 'functioning' (was I functioning? probably not) and even the group therapies were a struggle but my consultant stuck with me and with time I was able to process a little more. One thing that helped me beyond words was 1:1 Art Therapy. This was not something I had accessed before, only ever doing group sessions in the past which was mostly about getting away from the ward and doing a bit of art. I cannot reiterate enough how different and HELPFUL the 1:1 sessions were. The art therapy, who I knew from the last year and is an absolutely GEM, helped me to begin to process and work through the trauma that I had experienced with dad. It took a lot of time and persistence but I was able to use those sessions in so many ways and I will forever be grateful to P for supporting me (I was so lucky to be able to have 1:1 sessions for the majority of my 8 admission).

The more traditional therapy initially took the form of 30min sessions with my consultant once to twice a week (as much as I hated them, she was bloody good). I also had a review and a few sessions with the lead therapist via zoom (she was heavily pregnant so was working from home) not long after being admitted, but she soon went on maternity leave. This left me to be picked up by her student, who was actually incredible. We did a long extended piece of work on my perfectionism which, again, was SO helpful but she sadly left (for bigger and better things) and I was left hanging for a while as there were no other openings. A new lead therapist started and after a while he did a few sessions with me before leaving suddenly (I think even staff only had a weeks notice, which was ridiculous), so I was back to twiddling thumbs for a few weeks. I then met with a therapist who worked 2 mornings a week that I saw a bit during my last admission but we didn't do many sessions and it just fell away. This was mostly my fault as by this point I was questioning my admission and whether I would self discharge as there were some not good things going on on the ward, so I wasn't really in the headspace to explore things deeply and had been picked up and put down so many times that I just couldn't do anymore. Throughout that time though I continued to see my consultant weekly, mainly focusing on mindfulness and other therapy styles thrown in there too at times.

I will forever be thankful/grateful for the admission I had, especially to be under a different consultant (for COVID reasons they had to split things differently as they would usually do it by area but that wasn't possible at the time I was admitted) as her approach made a huge difference. I still remember one of the first things she said to me was that she couldn't believe/was that I had been placed on the SEED pathway and that she believed that I could be more than that, which honestly, gave me a little bit of hope (something that had been ripped apart and shredded by my usual consultant multiple times).

But back to now.... I have now been seeing a new therapist weekly (when possible) since February and, in a backwards way, I am so glad that L disappeared off the grid because the "support" I was going to be getting under the original plan was just sessions with her to do some self guided self help stuff, whereas with this therapist we have actually been doing some HELPFUL work. In terms of L, I think the last I was told she never returned to work and has now left the team (we have a sneaky feeling that she either had a complete break down or that it was due to too may complaints (mum called this a long time ago as she was not qualified for the role at all and was utterly useless), which, yeah, was strange to not get an ending as I had worked with her for a few years. Anyway, I've been doing SCHEMA therapy with this new lady (I'd not heard of it before) and at first I was a bit reluctant but it's been incredibly insightful. I continue to learn more about myself and the reasons why I may have gone down certain roads each session. HOWEVER. and this is a big however. There has been a bit of a snag in the rope.

In short, yes I have been engaging really well with the therapy side, my weight and physical health has only continued to deteriorate since i was discharged. We are talking classic kitty of slowly slipped backwards, nothing dramatic, nothing to make alarm bells go off or warrant a review, but it's not been good. Anorexia is screaming at me for saying all of this, it shouts "but you weigh so much more than when you were admitted, you are a complete fraud blah blah blah" which is all the same old boring drivel it always spews out. But basically Im in dangerous waters now in terms of losing therapy/not being able to engage with therapy properly if things dont improve. Ive been in classic stuck mode, getting so absorbed by the numbers and the bubble that AN offers, that I have been numb to it all. The HCA I was seeing was really trying to help me to make changes but she left a while ago (she was going back to train as a nurse) and since then I have had the odd appointment here and there (I think it fell to every 3 weeks for a while as there were no available appointments) with people trying to cover the clinic until someone else is hired for the role, which is far from ideal as they literally just do the necessary obs and send you on your way.

Okay that sounds like yet another excuse, which is probably is, but it's not been an easy ride since I left hospital to say the least.

BUT this past week things have begun to shift a little. I was honest with my therapist about the whole food/meal plan side of things and we actually spoke about how we can't focus on therapy things until I am in a more stable place, which is both really hard to hear but also exactly what I need to hear. I am actually being more open to change, which is a shift from where I was just a week ago. It is bloody painful, even just thinking about it all hurts/is exhausting and I am still very much in the darkness /struggling with it but there is now a little part of me that is screaming out and trying to be heard. There is a little part of me that WANTS to get out of this endless messy limbo that this relapse has been and wants to start stepping back into "recovery". There is part of me that wants a chance. And I've got to start listening to that side a little more.

I promise, the next update will be a little more positive Stay tuned.

[musingsofasecretromantic]

February 2020

I met you on Tinder. I knew you were my ex’s little brother (said ex being from my 17th year on earth...hardly anything worth mentioning). We hit it off from the first message and you made me feel alive, instantly alive, which I hadn’t felt for a long time. 2 years to be specific. 

We met 4 weeks after we started talking. By talking, I mean incessantly messaging each other all hours of the day. I’d be woken with ‘Good morning Sweetheart’ messages daily and I liked that. During the first few weeks, I jolted your memory and revealed who I was. You already knew and didn’t seem to mind (this would pose a further issue further down the line).  Our first date wasn’t what I would call ground breaking, but it was nice. It was fun. It was carefree. You had told me beforehand that you suffered badly from anxiety and this often stopped you doing the things you wanted, and although we were both crippled with nerves pre date, this seemed to dissipate quickly. We went to a bar (you were driving so only had one beer, and I classically decided to get hammered). After we had chatted about a million topics, we went to the arcades to play some pool. Something started to feel a little off about you, so I suggested we go outside. You told me it was your anxiety. We smoked and things seemed to ease a little for you. We finished the night in The Bell and you drove me home. We kissed outside your car and I felt so overwhelmingly happy. The next day was a different story and I was in the worst mood. Concluding it was probably a hangover, I tried to shake it off, but I just felt like I could burst into tears at any second. I have since concluded this was fear, self doubt, whatever you want to call it. I had emotions for the first time in ages and this was an intimidating thought. 

You had work on the Saturday, but we arranged to hang out after and watch the sunset at the beach. This date never happened. You messaged me on the Friday night around midnight to tell me you were in the back of an ambulance. Nothing else. I woke up in such a panic and after calling all the hospitals pretending to be your girlfriend, I was informed you were at the NNUH. They couldn’t tell me anything except you were in their care. A few hours later you messaged me and told me you had basically had a mental breakdown. I was furious. Who just sends a message saying ‘I’m in the back of an ambulance’ and not follow that up? In hindsight, I wish I hadn’t been angry. I remember the day so clearly. It was chucking it down and I went into the city and bought myself an Urban Decay Palette to cheer myself up. I ignored my phone all day and when I got home I saw a message from you telling me you had been ‘detained’ at Hellesdon Hospital. You explained exactly what had happened on the Friday night and I jokingly said ‘As long as it’s not schizophrenia, you should be fixable’. Another thing I wish i’d never said, but you didn’t tell me all the symptoms you’d been living with since you were 16 year old, so I wasn’t to know.  I came to visit you in Hellesdon on the Monday after work (you still being the sweetest guy i’ve ever met, offering to pay my taxi fee and telling me you would get the nurses to clear the living area so we could watch a movie the next time I visited). We walked the grounds in the dark and looked at all of the abandoned buildings, which is where you told me your diagnosis and you were likely to be in for at least 6 weeks. 6 weeks. 6 weeks and I knew somehow we would make it work. I told you i’d work at Hellesdon one day, and I did it, it’s my current place of work.  We spoke all the time as if you weren’t banged up in a mental hospital, drugged up, terrified. You sent me pictures of your room, we spoke about the physical effects the meds were having on you, we spoke about the voices you heard, we even spoke about our future and the off grid treehouse we were going to live in with my copper balcony bath and roses round the door. You even drew me the floor plan for our treehouse. I still have it. Was I totally deluded in thinking this was going to work out? At this stage, no.  The communication wasn’t always easy. You had your good days and you had your bad, but I wanted to be there.  On the Sunday, I picked you up and we went to Eaton park, drank coffee and walked for hours until it started to rain. Then we got in the car (and me being a new driver was freaking out, you held my hand and told me you were proud of me), and we drove around, stopping at all the Costa’s we could until your curfew. We sat in my car outside your unit and had a cigarette, you started to shake violently and told me the voices were telling you to hurt me. You gave me a kiss and left. I was never frightened of you, but I also wasn’t prepared that this would be the last time I saw you. I gave you a postcard that day telling you I would always be there for you, and I always will be, but not at the expense of my own health. We arranged to meet a few more times, but your mood was deteriorating rapidly and the meetings never happened. One Saturday morning (we were in lockdown by this point), I went to Mundesley to blow the cobwebs away. The last few months had been a lot for me. I didn’t message you that morning and you freaked out. I made the decision I couldn’t continue talking to you. This decision rested on my mind for months. 

One day in the early June, I went to Happisburgh and I just sat in my car and cried. I messaged you apologising for abandoning you, and you thanked me for standing by you through a really difficult time. You had been discharged from Hellesdon due to the COVID pandemic, but you seemed happy. We caught up and continued to talk very occasionally over the next few days. On the Wednesday, you were more chatty than you had been earlier in the week. However, this was the night things changed. You told me you had been thinking of ending it for a few days. I sent you messages of support, and didn’t really know what to do. I messaged you the next day, just sending my well wishes, I heard nothing. I didn’t really think anything of it at the time, I just thought you were being quiet again. Friday morning- I was sitting at my desk at work (the job I had literally just quit with the hope of the Hellesdon job coming through), and I got a message from your absolute twat head of a brother saying ‘Have you been dating my brother because he’s currently in a coma and your name is on his screen’. There are somethings I’d like to address in this message....1. This wasn’t his emotions speaking. He never came to se his brother when he was in Hellesdon. 2. What a way to tell someone. 3. It felt accusational. I later found out everyone thought this coma was induced by a reaction of meds. I blocked your brother as a jerk reaction and my blood ran cold. I grabbed my manager and went outside silently for a cigarette, barely able to get words out of my mouth. I knew what this was, and it wasn’t a meds reaction. It was a meds overdose. Luckily, I knew your best friend as we went to college together, and his girlfriend rang me to explain the situation. I had to break it to her, I had to hear her voice break and send her the screenshot of the message you had sent me on the Wednesday night. I carried on with my work day as if nothing had happened. That night, I got home and I sobbed, and I didn’t really stop crying for a week. I thought I had killed you, I thought by me doing nothing that I had killed you. I started visualising the police coming to arrest me for involuntary manslaughter.  The week ahead of me was long and worrying. After 6 days of the hospital staff trying to wake you up, with many unsuccessful attempts, you were awake. Your best friends girlfriend kept me updated with every single tiny thing, from the group chat screenshots to pictures of you in hospital, to all of the meds you were on, the potential long term effects on your body. I was like a zombie, I was just surviving day to day. I was in the hairdressers when you finally messaged me saying we couldn’t talk anymore as I was your brothers ex. I knew this wasn’t you talking, but after what you’d just put your family through, I understood. And that was that. We matched on Tinder a few months ago, but we didn’t really speak. I sent you a long message explaining how I felt and blocked you out of my life. I felt sad, irrelevant and pushed away, but how were you to know at this point how invested i’d been for the past 6 days or how worried i’d been, or that I even knew you’d been unconscious with potential death as the outcome. You had a lot of questions to answer and a lot of assessments to go through and I rightfully so, wasn’t important at that point. There was noone there living through this with me, and your brother didn’t even want to be in the group chat RE your progress, so literally fuck him. I was going through it alone, I could tell my friends, but they didn’t know you, they couldn’t understand how I was feeling. I don’t know why I stuck by you. I don’t know why we went on one date, and when you were sectioned I didn’t just run away, but the point is that I didn’t, and I was never going to go anywhere. Forever with you didn’t even seem like a long time frame. 

But, I miss you. I miss you crazy amounts, because I think we both knew we were meant to be together. A really stupid part of my brain still thinks that! I will never allow you back into my life, but I miss you every single day. I miss you everytime I drive into Hellesdon, I miss you everytime I go to the beach, and I go to the same beach over and over. Why? Is it because it’s the closest? Is it because I hope I might see you? I don’t know. It’s not a feeling of ‘missing’ i’ve ever felt before, I literally feel like a piece of me is missing. I never allowed my heart to break over you, instead a part of my heart left me. It left me to be with you, and it will stay with you forever, because I loved you. I wish we could have done everything for the rest of time together, I wish we could build our treehouse and be happy. Regardless of everything, you are still the nicest, most thoughtful and selfless man I have ever met, and that shows a lot about someones character. You’re a good guy. I’m not sure you’ll ever be able to have a normal relationship, but if you do, I hope she makes you really happy. Truth be told, i’ve been looking for you in everyone ever since February 2020. You made me feel seen, wanted, loved, valued, and happy. I won’t ever forget that. I’m not sure this situation will ever resolve itself in my head, i’m not sure i’ll ever be over this fully and I don’t want to be. Being with you was such a rollercoaster, and we had such a tight bond even though we never even got intimate. I’d have walked over hot coals for you and i’d do absolutely anything to relive the time I had with you. 

I’m really glad you didn’t die, just gutted your life isn’t with me.