#grxcie

[u-r--lovely]

“All I wanna say is the amount of emotional pain someone has to be in to turn to physical pain as a means of escape is much more severe than people realize. Selfharming in itself does not contain moral value beyond those that do not. We aren’t just sitting around wanting to do this to ourselves—you get to a point where it’s no longer a choice you have and that, that is what makes it so incredibly difficult to treat. That is why the world has to leave the judgement behind not unless you know—really fully know the immense pain one is in to do this to themselves over and over again.”

—Excerpt from My Future Memoir

[u-r--lovely]

Not many people talk about how embarrassing it is to be an adult with an eating disorder. Not many people talk about how shitty it feels to be obsessed with something as shallow as how you’re body looks or what you weigh—especially when at the same tome you’re also trying to stay afloat and pay bills. At this point, you know exactly what you’re doing to yourself and why you’re doing it. At this point you’ve probably spent time in treatment or therapy and everyone knows about it but you promise them, no you swear to them it’s a thing of the past. What might have been something of a bad habit you could justify as a teenager just becomes a burden. You stop being seen as dark and mysterious and interesting and become seen as sad, pathetic and even a tad immature or attention seeking. Eating disorders aren’t something you just grow out one day. They are cycles and cycles of back and forth, attempting to regress to an age that feels safer. An attempt at time travel and a one last ditch effort at controlling the terrifying future that lies ahead. It never works though thats the thing. At some point you must accept that doing the same exact behaviors you’ve done since you were 14 years old isn’t actually going to solve anything. You must see clearly that growing backwards isn’t sustainable, it isn’t worth it, and honestly? It’s just sad and weird.

—Excerpts From My Future Memoir (Gracie M.)

[u-r--lovely]

It’s interesting how most times it’s in my darkest moments I find such comfort in this website.

As if I’m back to being 16 and falling in love for the first time posting about all the butterflies or I’ve found the most perfect quote to describe the feelings I couldn’t understand.

I’m supposed to be an adult now..half way through my 20’s and my mind feels frozen in time between growing up too fast and never feeling like I had the space to be a teen.

Flicking through my archive, seeing the days I thought I’d never get through. Seeing the shadows of love and loss and love all over again.

Maybe I’m allowed to be these different parts in time all at once. Click. There’s my first day of highschool outfit and the black eyeliner contorting my skin. Click. The posts titled “venting about my mom” and “I’m never going to be okay” and “okay, maybe everything is fine after all”. Click.

Today is the present, and I smile with tears in my eyes thinking to myself “I’m still here. What a gift it is to look back”.

[u-r--lovely]

In two weeks I'll be 25. But I still feel like the 15-year-old scrolling tumblr searching for meaning in pictures of pretty girls and diets. I'd talk about what I should wear or if I should break up with my boyfriend or if I should try out for the cross country team even though I can barely jog a mile. I remember thinking every weekend was my last weekend on earth to hang out with my friends.

I didn't know there would be loneliness like this. In my apartment alone, paying bills, and planning on making plans with friends but deciding of course that I'm too busy so I send them tiktoks instead.

Back then I couldn't see the beauty of growing up. I couldn't have known that I'd fall in love or move out or actually get a cat. I simply saw what was right in front of me.

What a marvelous thought. To be able to see what's within me, what was, and what could be. I mean, I'm only in my twenties. I wonder what else there is to see? And if that version of myself is looking back on the me now..wishing I would make memories, not just plans.

[u-r--lovely]

Sometimes I fantasize about how miniscule my life was with the eating disorder. The way I didn’t have to worry. Numbers and food, the inches around my waste-ing into nothingness. My mind an exposed clock calculating a never ending sickness. I can only see it now.. past it all. How alienated and small that smallness had me become. My life now, is brighter and wider and bolder. Memories string together with friends and family onto a clock pushed through the right direction. A sereness that echos past stories and hope flickering in this sense of self. Life outside in this vastness is eerily beautiful and free. Interests and hobbies; true joy. A widness to life that doesn’t feel so small anymore.

[u-r--lovely]

Last year on my birthday, I was sick and stuck in a starved body and lost mind. I was consumed with the agony that an eating disorder brings and had no understanding of hope for the future. Two years ago on my birthday, I was surrounded by counselors and therapists and woke up that birthday morning in my treatment bed scared and alone.

THIS year on my birthday though, I am surrounded by friends and family. I am dancing and laughing, still scared but doing the hard work. I am eating cake and tasting the joy that comes with life. Healing takes time. Don’t give up. That birthday cake it WORTH it.

[u-r--lovely]

“When you start to finally feel like you’ve got a handle on genuine recovery.. the eating disorder will fight like hell to get back to you. It will take every bad day or mess up and pile it on top until you break. It’s waiting for you to slip. You’ve got to get back up..over and over again. It’s not an easy entity to get rid of. You’ll fall over and over in order to create tough skin and scarring and a strength inside yourself that doesn’t stop your fight. Slip ups happen, temptations rise and in the middle of the night all the memories of the safety it gave you will flood into your mind. It doesn’t know that you are stronger than you were before. Your skin tougher, heart brighter, mind clearer. So no matter what the eating disorder tell you—don’t you ever say that are too far gone. You arn’t too far, actually you may be just about to beat this thing”.-Gracie M.

[u-r--lovely]

I think the reality of recovery is that it’s fucking uncomfortable. After years of sickness and being inside the safety of treatment center after treatment center and ER’s and doctors--it’s confusing as hell. It’s confusing because we’re used to using the eating disorder to be taken care of...and now we have to do that for ourselves. I’m a grown ass adult and I really am out here learning how to be responsible, figuring out how to get a job, be in a relationship, pay rent. Eating disorder’s keep us from growing up and I don’t know about you..but it’s the most beautiful thing and most terrifying thing to realize you’ve got your whole life ahead of you and finally after years and years--you can actually live.

-Gracie Mandel (Excerpt from my future memoir)

[u-r--lovely]

Through the years I’ve always used my body to communicate how I feel. Harming my outsides to show what was going on inside. Whatever was going on in my head I could release in a very concrete tangible way. Now..years later I’m still using the way I look to communicate. I carry around papers with crumpled scribbled letters. My stuffed animal from when I was a kid. I wear dark cotton clothes that suffocate me with an intractable sensation. Cheap eyeliner to mask the dark circles under my ever awake eyes. I use books and the characters in them to live through the emotions I can’t say out loud. Whether it’s seen as negative, maladaptive or outright accepted I’ve got to slowly learn to use my voice, speak my worth, and find the value in saying EXACTLY what’s on my mind.

-An excerpt from my future memoir (Gracie)

[u-r--lovely]

I want to let love in again. I'm so tired of being cold.

[u-r--lovely]

My Story In Seven Chapters: “Underneath The Marks”

Ch.1 Flowery Sheets

Sometimes late at night I’d pretend to fall asleep on the bottom of my mom and dad’s bed just so my dad could carry me in with his strong arms and warm heart. I remember my childhood as an old movie playing on the screen of a projector dropping in and out of my consciousness. Growing up in a large family I was often overlooked, and quiet, so if you could imagine it was easy for me to feel invisible. From a young age I’ve learned to pretend, to disconnect, to venture into a world of my own. I had imaginary friends who were fairies that followed me everywhere. I hid under books, and stuffed animals as my older brother shot up heroin and older sister got drunk in the upstairs attic.Cop cars lights were a common presence in my driveway but I didn’t mind because at least my brothers and sisters would be safe from the drugs that way.  On the hard days, I remember the flowery pink sheets I kept myself in, the silhouette of my own hand comforting my soul. I remember holding my bunny tight as my mom sang me Amazing Grace as I fell asleep. I remember begging my brother Jeremy to open the bathroom door when he was shooting up Heroin one time, and the day he stole my babysitting money for drugs. Then, came the day I asked where he was and my mom freaked out because she had forgotten about him and suddenly... he was gone. Actually gone. I was twelve and didn’t know much about death (I mean what twelve year old should), but I knew that he had been sick for a really long time and that he was finally finally free and that made me happy and sad at the same time.

Ch. 2  Scratchy Beards

When my dad told me he got sick with Cancer, I sort of thought it was okay because that meant he’d be at home more. That meant he would actually make us real dinners instead of having hot pockets every night and cold burnt spaghetti. Between the ages of twelve and fifteen I filled my life with making origami, twirling, and writing songs about pretty girls, fairy dust and sunshine. I hated when my dad came to my school because he had to carry around this huge oxygen tank with plastic wires creeping out of his nose, and I pretended I didn’t know him. I still feel bad about that to this day. The most iconic thing about my dad other then him being secretly gay (which I didn’t know about until now), was his scratchy beard and large tattooed forearm. I miss his hugs most of all, maybe that’s why hugging people feels wrong at times--no one’s hugs are quite like his were. My mom and dad left for Europe to seek alternative cancer treatment the last year he was alive. This just so happened to be when my sister got sober. As she was parenting her own baby boy out of wedlock, she also was supposed to be parenting me. In a flash of an instant,  me and all my siblings gathered around his hospital bed and sang Amazing Grace to his subconscious mind through the rumbling of the machines keeping him alive. Walking out of the ICU each of us said “see you later’ because we all knew it wasn’t goodbye. I guess, not really. On the Christmas morning before tenth grade,  he had left us and I felt my heart shatter into a million pieces. I had told myself a few days before that if he didn’t call me beautiful one last time, then something just something was wrong with me. I knew exactly how I was going to change that.

Ch. 3 Safety Pins

I forgot to mention, that while my mom was saving my dads life in Europe I had decided to try to change my own, in the only way I knew how. I decided to stop being the good invisible quiet christian girl and become someone who was seen. At the time, I believed I just wanted to make friends, yah know..be a part of something-- but in a desperate need to distract myself from the losses I endured I had to find a way to become alive again. I self harmed for the first time at fifteen and didn’t think much of it, I thought it was cool and something other people in my friend group did. I didn’t know safety pins weren’t all that safe, I didn’t know hurting myself would become an addiction I’d struggle with for the next six years of my life. I thought that if people saw the pain on my body they could hear me asking for help. Even as I hid under long sleeves and smiles and laughter I started to feel the deeply distant darkness pull me away from myself. Even though I thought I didn’t want anyone to know about it, I felt as though I was screaming yet I wouldn’t allow any sound to come out.

Ch. 4 Porcelain Bowls

A few months after my dad died my mom ran off to Florida every weekend with her new but old boyfriend whom she had been with before my dad 30 years earlier. At the cost of losing my dad, and subsequently losing my mom, I found solace in toilet bowls and diet colas. My friends and I had sort of made a game of it, we’d talk about dieting and then talk about feeling bad for giving into the diets and then feel bad for feeling bad. What started off as a game between friends, began to become a dangerous game of Russian roulette. I remember high school as a blur of calories, cheese puffs, and washing my hands in sinks. I kissed boys that I pretended to like behind tennis courts and eventually began treatment for my eating disorder and self harm during my senior year of high school. I got better ( or so I thought), but beneath the perfect recovery girl I created, laid a deep fear of still not being seen, still not being heard.

Ch. 5 False Safety

I went to college and fell in love with a girl I didn’t pretend to love and went to therapy twice a week.This is a time in my life I like to call “False Safety” because although I felt somewhat okay, I was relying on others around me to take care of me, I never learned to do it myself. I ran around college from club to club pretending to be the recovered girl I thought I had to be, but others couldn’t see what was truly underneath. During therapy I was being seen and loved and everything felt okay... but outside of that small room I believed I was alone. I mean, I  thought things were better, and they were... yet I continued to run from the pain through self harm. I craved so much attention from my girlfriend that if I did not get to be her world, I felt I couldn’t be with her at all. I was so scared of her leaving me like my mom did, I left her before she got the chance too. Back when I was ten, I waited for hours and hours for my mom to pick me up at camp and as each car passed by  and it was not her my disappointment grew deeper. In my adulthood I learned to instead stop waiting for her--or anyone,  I decided to run away and never be found because then I wouldn’t have to face being abandoned.

Ch.6 The Pink Room

It was a month or so after the breakup and I hid behind doorways so I wouldn’t have to see her look away from me. I hid in bathrooms during panic attacks and cried into my cereal in the back of the cafeteria. My world stopped when my therapist told me she was moving (leaving me is what I heard). I had completely attached myself to her and I felt that the one person in my life that truly saw me was leaving. Leaving. People are always leaving me I thought. I decided to fill up the hole she left with alcohol in coffee cups and pills and more cuts and more fake smiles and more “recovery” articles and speaking engagements. It wasn’t enough. None of these things were ever really enough. In the week my therapist left me, I decided to get as drunk as I could and pretend to be happy and flirt with boys I didn’t know because that would make everything better right? I didn’t know the boy with black hair was seven years older than me. October 13th October 13th October 13th. I didn’t know he’d be so mean and when the drinking game got out of hand I didn’t have the capability to say yes or no. I didn’t know walking drunkenly into that pink room, he’d hurt me the way he did. It wasn’t rape, but it was terrifying, violent, awfully painful physically and emotionally.  He was a giant dog playing with a glass doll and he shattered me into a million pieces, he shattered my fake smile right off my face.

Ch. 7 Letting Love In

From October 2017 to May 2018, everything was a blur. A blur of multiple treatment programs for depression, anxiety, and the sexual assault. The Eating Disorder came back stronger and more powerful than ever and this time I was determined to run as far away as I could from that pink room and from the therapist that left me. After a week in the psych ward I thought I could get better on my own with the eating disorder, I thought that I could control my out-of-control-ness. In February 2018, I told my mom I was going to go to treatment, but would wait until Monday. Suddenly, I had a thought, an urge, a quiet voice in the back of my head telling me to go that Friday instead, which I did. I entered treatment for the millionth time and was quickly rushed to the ER for low potassium. It was late at night and no one in my family was picking up the phone. I was in an unknown ER, half asleep, half dead and I still didn’t feel sick enough. There was an IV stuck in my arm and doctors telling me my levels were life threateningly low and I still didn’t feel like I was ‘that bad’. I don’t know if I’d be alive right now, if God hadn’t told me to go that Friday. He truly saved my life. From that point on, I started listening to that quiet voice. A month or so of running from God, one suicide attempt and many family therapy sessions later I decided to go to Selah House. I finally decided to give up the demons that had become my identity. I decided to let love in again. I decided that I could only be free if I let myself be. I could only get better on God’s terms. I know now that I had to fight the ED, Depression, Self harm, PTSD, Anxiety, and Addiction with God by my side only. I know now that what went on in that pink room was not my fault, and I don’t have to be ashamed of it or put blame on myself in any way. Here at Selah is where I’ve found hope. Here, I’ve found healing. Here, I’ve found love. Love between God, others and myself. I know now that it was never actually about the food, the numbers, or the marks. I know that I have a future, a future of helping others heal in the same ways I did. A future full of laughter, crying, heartache, touch, and love. All of my life has really been what’s in between. In between moments of exhale, of tears running down my face, of dad hugs, and Real smiles. These things are all a part of my story but they are not at the core of who I really am.  My life was never meant to be a sad story because I’m not that girl anymore. I am healing, I am tough skin made of scars, I am endless nights crying and glorious mornings shining like nothing bad has ever happened. I am becoming free, becoming Real and I have so much yet to learn about the spaces in between.

[u-r--lovely]

Let me tell you something.

Eating disorders are not about weight.

They just aren't. You realize this slowly though, first you just want to lose a few pounds...cut out a few things, skip a few meals.

It's innocent game play really, tracking numbers, "forgetting to eat", replacing food with coffee. Subtle changes in behavior. And then you wake up six years later and realize the only thing you've accomplished is learning how to destroy yourself more effectively. It's impossible to think of college or how alone you are or grief or trauma with blood rushing to your head. With scarred knuckles and the smell of vomit, ER visits, and an IV dripping into your vein. You believe there poisoning you, with the medication and food and calories oh no, no, you don't need nourishment right?

Ultimately they just become painful, an addiction you want terribly to stop but you must face three times a day. Nothing about eating disorders are enjoyable but everything about them feels enticing, all consuming.

Eating disorders aren't about the food, but they have everything to do with pain. Running from it, hiding from it. Accepting and then rejecting love and care and hope and everything worth while.

when you ask me what I've done for the past six years

[u-r--lovely]

Just putting this out into the void:

I am a SCARED LIL HUMAN who’s supposed to be an ADult but I can’t even fuckin DRiVE and I’ve spent so much of my LIFE inside treatment centers and therapy and now that I’m STABLE enough I don’t know a damn THING about being an adULT. What in the actual FUCKERY is this???

[u-r--lovely]

THIS is what recovery brings you!!! True happiness. I am so thankful that I am one whole year purge free, I cannot wait to see the many more years to come. ❤❤❤❤

[u-r--lovely]

The girl always walks in at around 8am. I already know her order by heart. "Caramel latte with soy please". She's always wearing that same pair of black doc martins. Talking quietly her eyes make me feel sad. She's always skipping school too--falling asleep in between classes on the farthest seat from the window. One day I went up to her and gave her a free cup of coffee because she fell asleep. That was the first time I saw her smile and damn was it beautiful. I always wondered why she took so long in the bathroom. It was always a bit past lunch time and every time she came in she got smaller and smaller. Her eyes more sunken, and skin pale. It was as though her thoughts became louder then her body. One day. With out any sort of explanation she didn't show up. Days went by and I got worried. Weeks went by and I missed her and her half smile and doc martins. Then out of nowhere she showed up and said she was 'away' and I was confused but happy she came back. She's different now. The light is in her eyes and her cheeks are the color of pale rose petals. She seems to be talking to me more and her words sound louder now. I hope she knows that I missed her a lot when she was gone and that I'm happy that she's better now. I'm happy she's alive. I hope she knows that.

The Coffee Shop Near My School Saved My Life, I’m That Girl

[u-r--lovely]

This whole 'recovery thing' is so confusing. It's like I'm learning how to swim but the only way to learn is to throw myself into the water and start drowning. To get over my anxiety is to feel it and I find myself running towards what's safe (my eating disorder). You see recovery isn't safe--it's scary but that's okay because at least I'm feeling something. At least I'm learning how to swim even if I feel like I'm drowning.

recovery is drowning but that’s okay