Day 162: Eating Disorders and Unforetold Consequences

This blog is a continuation to:
Day 155: Introduction – Starving Myself
Day 156: Wanting Passion and Purpose in Life
Day 157: Generating an Eating Disorder – The Power of Thought - Part 1
Day 158: Generating an Eating Disorder - The Power of Images - Part 2
Day 159: Generating an Eating Disorder – The Power of Writing – Part 3
Day 160: Eating Disorders and Contradictions
Day 161: Become an Image and be Treated as an Image

I was 'lucky' to have two friends who also had eating disorders – although it was never specifically states as such, their behaviour and attitude towards food, eating and gossip about other people and themselves made pretty clear what was going on.


I would spend my days around them if I could, since we supported each other's state of mind and would not ask questions about the other not eating - quite the opposite, we cheered it lol.


Something unexpected happened though. I would still hang out with my 'bigger group' of friends with one of the two people who also had the ED -- and after they had noticed our behaviour and how much weight we had lost - they started doing the same thing.


Oh oh


I did not prepare for that.
I did not want them to go through what we were doing, because even though we were doing it, we knew it wasn't 'right' and it's something that starts consuming and controlling your whole life.


I always believed that what I was doing was 'innocent' from the sense that it was only affecting my life, my reality. But now through my acceptance and allowance of adopting an Eating Disorder, and the fact that 'no man is an island'-- I was having a direct, negative impact on the life of others. Not only did I aid in supporting my two friends their eating disorder, but was also part of the cause of other people going down the same road.


This is an example of 'living as an example' and a bad one at that -- where other people see you change, and start doing the same. This is where I realised that whatever I do and however I decide to behave either actively or passively through my acceptance and allowance, will have an impact, an influence on others -- through better or for worse.


Now, this was just what was happening within my small little circle of friends, but you could see the same pattern occur in the school in its entirety. It was an art school, so everyone's very much visual/image based and very much pre-occupied looking all 'cool' and 'artsy'-- and being a 'pretty skinny girl' was kind of part of that whole scene.


A lot of girls were unnaturally skinny, and each year as new people would join the school, you could see them 'turn', see them adopt the same destructive life-style as those who were already there, those who were functioning as an example of 'what it means to be someone in this school'. And I mean, it was scary -- but none of the teachers or other staff members seemed to notice. It was this whole secret, hidden, hush-hush subculture that existed and no-one talked about it.


Like I said before, with my friends who had EDs, we never acknowledged to one another what it is we were doing (because then also we'd be admitting to one another that we're 'superficial'). So it was more of a silent acceptance, a silent agreement.


So now, this is one group of friends, one school -- you can only IMAGINE what goes on, on a society/world scale. We are constantly being bombarded by bad examples, by unsustainable life-styles where we promote compromising our human physical bodies to attain some freaking image -- which most of the time is not even possible to attain because it's been manipulated and modified with make-up, specific lighting, specific clothing and photoshop and what not. So you end up compromising into infinity, chasing a reality which has never even been in your reach, it's such a trap.


I mean, is this what it means to live in the 21st century? Is this what it means to live in 'modern times', is this what it means to be 'evolved'? Sure, we have some nice gadgets and technologies which made our life more comfy (and even that, only for a minority) -- in the meantime you have the majority of the world living in physical suffering because we've been unable to overcome our selfishness and then those who do have material comfort live a life of complete unprecedented mental disorder. All in all - we're a very destructive race and are the worst example for future generations.


We really have to reconsider and re-evaluate our whole way of doing things and the way we live our lives, because it's simply not worth it.

Related articles

• Day 161: Become an Image and be Treated as an Image
• Day 159: Generating an Eating Disorder - The Power of Writing - Part 3
• Day 160: Eating Disorders and Contradictions
• Day 157: Generating an Eating Disorder - Part 1
• Day 158: Generating an Eating Disorder - The Power of Images - Part 2
• Day 156: Wanting Passion and Purpose in Life

Day 5: Give me Something to Break!

Today I had a chat scheduled with one of my buddies. While I was busy chatting with my buddy my internet would "drop" and I would get kicked out of the chat program. It would then take 10-15 min to get "high" again and then I could chat for a minute or five until the internet went low again.  At first I was "okay" with it, I was a bit irritated but I told myself to wait it out. Then when it kept on dropping again and again and it would take longer and longer to get back up -- I got really pissed off. I had a bowl of oats in front of me and I started stabbing the bowl with my spoon, with the intention of breaking it. I had all this built up energy and I just wanted to get it out. I stopped stabbing the bowl after a few stabs because I saw that it would be pretty useless to break the bowl. I'd then have crappy internet and a broken bowl whereas before I would only have crappy internet lol.

Then I took a deep breath, looked at the situation and saw there wasn't much I could do so I sent my buddy an email to reschedule.

When I was looking at this event a bit earlier, a memory popped up from when my guinea pig died (again lol). When he died we were trying to look for an address of a vet on the internet. Back then we had an internet modem and the internet would tap into the phone line and it was pretty crappy . The modem made these crappy sounds and had little flashing lights. All I knew was that when all the lights were on, that it meant that the internet was on and that it was at (back then) a high speed. So I sat there with my guinea pig in my arms, wrapped in a towel sitting on a little chair next to my mom who was going to run the search. I just sat there staring at the modem and the flashing lights and looking at my guinea pig dying in my arms . In my head I was begging the internet/modem to work so we could find a fucking vet and save his life. I think I even ended up praying to God and Jesus -- anything that would make the freaking internet work. It took forever and I remember telling the modem in my head that it was going to be its fault if the guinea pig dies and I will never forgive the modem if this happens. We eventually got the address, but we didn't have the car available so we had to go by foot and it was going to be about a half hour walk. Seven minutes into the walk I opened the box where my guinea pig was in and I saw that he was already dead. I was really angry and kept on blaming that freaking modem in my head.

Afterwards, every time I would see the modem I would give it  my "evil" look to make sure that it knew that it was its fault lol. And I tried to avoid seeing it because it would bring the memory back up again.

So this is one of the points that I can see that led to this event.

The other point that I can see and which I think is more "prominently" responsible for what happened is the point of accumulation effect. Where I during my day will get slightly upset at something / someone but not say anything as to not create conflict and then instead of expressing the point I will hold on to it inside myself and "express" it as backchat within. All these little points then accumulate to an event where something's not working out -- like the internet -- and then I will use this event as an opportunity to "let go" and "release" myself from all this built up energy. Poor bowl.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to become emotionally reactive when my internet is not stable

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to blame the internet for how I experience myself

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to blame the internet for me wanting to break something

I forgive myself that I haven't accepted and allowed myself to see and realise that I am responsible for getting angry and wanting to break something -- the internet was just doing what it does and had nothing to do with it.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to believe that it is justified to get angry at the internet when it is not stable

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to start swearing inside my head and out loud at the internet -- which only makes the experience of myself worse and does nothing whatsoever to actually change the situation for the better.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to want to break stuff when I am angry

I forgive myself that I haven't accepted and allowed myself to question the impulse of "I want to break stuff"

I forgive myself that I haven't accepted and allowed myself to see and realise that when I want to hurt and break an innocent bystander such as my bowl of outs that there must be something seriously wrong with me

I forgive myself that I haven't accepted and allowed myself to realise the common sense simplicity that breaking something is not going to fix the situation.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to believe that the "situation" is the problem and that it is the "situation" that needs "fixing"

I forgive myself that I haven't accepted and allowed myself to see and realise that it is me who is the problem and how I allow myself to experience myself within a particular situation

I forgive myself that I haven't accepted and allowed myself to see and realise the common sensical truth within the observation of myself wanting to break something because apparently the "situation" isn't behaving the way that "it should" according to me -- that obviously nothing's wrong with the situation but everything's wrong with me!

I forgive myself that I haven't accepted and allowed myself to see and realise that wanting to break stuff isn't a helpful response to a perceived unfavourable situation.

I forgive myself that I haven't accepted and allowed myself to stop for a moment within my impulse of rage and wanting to break shit and asking myself: Why am I doing this?

I forgive myself that I haven't accepted and allowed myself to see and realise that when I experience a 'burst' of energy -- that this means that this energy must come from somewhere -- and that I should find out how it got to be all piled up inside myself

I forgive myself that I haven't accepted and allowed myself to see and realise that when I get angry and want to break stuff that I am not necessarily actually being angry at the situation that I am currently in -- but that I am using this situation as an opportunity to release much suppressed and compressed energies which have been accumulating over time through not speaking and allowing back chat to take over.

I forgive myself that I haven't accepted and allowed myself to speak when I disagree with something

I forgive myself that I haven't accepted and allowed myself to say something when I see that something's out of place

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear pointing something out to another out of fear of conflict

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to instead of speaking and communicating -- hold back and suppress the point inside myself -- where it will sit and fester in the back of my mind until I eventually find myself in a situation where I "burst" to let all of this undirected energy out -- which is not a solution as I am only temporarily "releasing" myself to prepare myself to carry around the next load of points until I burst again

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear conflict because I fear that the person I am speaking to will disagree and argue and I fear that I will not be able to give a proper response and within that will appear as "not having a point" and that I will end up just giving up and not argue to get my point through because I believe that it is useless and that the other person won't budge from their point of view

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear pointing something out to someone because of fear of conflict whereby I anticipate that the other person will not allow me time to formulate a proper response and whereby I anticipate an experience of embarrassment and humiliation inside myself  -- and where I within the anticipation of all those experiences simply tell myself to "not go there" as I don't want to experience myself that way (not that I will be experiencing myself that way, it's only how I think I will experience myself and how I think that the other person will behave -- in reality I really have no idea of what's going to happen) -- and where as a result I will simply supress and bury the point inside myself and let it sit there. And then later I allow myself to go over the point over and over again and start getting angry at the other person for whatever it was that I saw while the only person I'm supposed to be angry at is myself for not expressing myself and utilizing the opportunity I had to change the point. I have no right to be angry at the other as I allowed that person to behave the way he or she did through not speaking up.

I forgive myself that I have I accepted and allowed myself to then allow all these "little" points to accumulate inside myself over time -- not giving them direction through self-forgiveness and self-correction -- whereby the points just grow bigger and bigger until I cannot contain it any longer and I burst out in a completely unrelated event where I see it as "safe" to burst out -- such as bursting out towards the internet, my keyboard, pc as I know that they can't start an argument and debate with me -- I can simply scream, shout and hit stuff without these inanimate objects being able to respond to my tantrum.

When and as I see myself getting angry and wanting to break shit -- I stop and I breathe. I see and realise that what I am doing is destructive and does not assist and support me in anyway whatsoever. Instead I investigate why I want to break stuff: where in my reality have I allowed myself to accumulate points of discontent without communicating about them and allowing them to fester inside myself? Once I have identified the points I apply self-forgiveness and self-corrective statements in order to script the way before me to assist and support me in breaking this pattern and assisting myself with correcting myself within those points where I compromise.

When and as I see myself blaming "the situation" for how I experience myself -- I stop and I breathe. I see and realise that I am in fact abdicating my responsibility by projecting the cause of my experience unto my environment -- instead of seeing and realising that the cause was already existent within and as me and that the environment was simply functioning as a trigger to activate the point.

When and as I see a point that I would like to express towards someone and I start feeling anxiety, resistance and like a slight restriction of the chest coming up -- I stop and I breathe. I see and realise that I am accessing an ingrained behavioural pattern whereby I immediately see the situation as an argument/competition whereby I assume myself to already be the loser and within that not wanting to go through the losing experience thus I withhold myself from participating or starting a conversation in order to avoid such an experience of inferiority, loss and defeat. Within that -- I see and realise that I have actually already placed myself in a position of defeat by giving up before I have even tried and this this behavioural pattern does not assist and support me in my process of self-expansion.

I commit myself to investigate myself in every moment of emotional outbursts in order to identify where this outburst came from and how it ended up being accumulated to this point -- so that I may step outside my accepted and allowed energy limitations and direct myself instead of being energy-driven

I commit myself to the establishment of a world and a world system that is best for all where breaking things because you're angry is not considered "normal" and "good therapy" as a way to cope with your life -- but where a support structure is in place where one is assisted and supported to find the roots of one's anger problems so that they may change their life for the better and not have to be a slave to these experience of anger

I'll go into the guinea pig memory next blog post.