trahax

[trahax]

There have been years when I thought of myself as fragile. When it was difficult to walk even medium distances, difficult to carry things, exhausting and difficult to do basic everyday tasks like grocery shopping or laundry.

Then, it made sense that other people saw me that way too.

It made sense when people offered to carry things for me, when they offered me a ride so I wouldn't have to walk, when they offered me a seat on the bus. I was self-conscious about it, but it made sense.

Now? I don't feel fragile. I feel hulking, huge, horrible. I know objectively that I'm still considered "severely underweight", but it's so far from my lowest point that I feel invincible, stronger than I have in literal years.

So it's strange to realize that people still see me as fragile, that they still offer to carry things for me and drive me places. I don't get it. I can walk now. I can lift things. I can do things. I'm cured. Right?

[trahax]

For my entire adult life, all I have ever wanted is to get a tenure-track job and stay in academia.

Now, as I prepare to go on the job market again at the end of my first postdoc, I increasingly wonder if I'm depressed or not cut out for academia. How does one even differentiate?

[trahax]

It is such a constant struggle to remind myself that mindlessly engaging in symptoms because "I've ruined everything anyway" only digs the hole deeper.

How many times in my life have I felt that and then looked back and realized that I could have changed course and everything would have been fine? How am I so goddamn stupid that I just have to let this play out again, over and over, creating endless monotonous mediocrity?

[trahax]

I used to spend a lot of time on tumblr, writing about my life which ended up mostly being about academia and my raging eating disorder. I was here for the birth of the #actuallyed, #actuallyanorexia, etc tags and at some point had a surprisingly non-zero amount of followers. I do not expect anyone to remember me (I think everyone from that era is long gone) but I blogged mostly as @swallowing--stones and have long since lost the log-in information.

I deleted everything in 2017 (I think?) because it had become so tied to my real life via people who knew me from treatment as well as on tumblr that it wasn't a safe place to empty my thoughts anymore. And I was desperately trying to imagine myself without an eating disorder anyway.

I don't feel like typing up a life history, but here's a tl;dr:

I developed symptoms in 2011 and then refused all attempts at intervention until 2015, at which point I was quite ill and simply could not really function anymore and was scared that I would not be able to earn a PhD if I remained that sick.

I spent the next ~4.5 years in and out of hospitals and treatment programs. Constantly feeling like I was being disappeared from my own life whenever my weight got too low or labs were too far off or whatever.

I walked away from treatment entirely just before 2020. To do so, I purposefully waited until a moment when my weight was high enough and labs stable enough that I could not be legally held.

I have never achieved a period of remission or recovery.

Somehow I did earn my PhD and am now a postdoc, still as eating disordered as ever.

Basically, I just want a semi-anonymous place to maybe write about some of these things again. I don't know if there's still a community here of adults who are just trying to live despite illness (and who are not pro-ED or glorifying their illness) but I guess I'll find out.