I feel so goddamned fat today.

I binged and purged last night, and again tonight. I managed a week and a day without it before I caved. The biggest problem was not the actual stopping of the bulimia-- it was what happened as a consequence of stopping. Basically, I've been spending the last week overeating/binging... er, well, a lot. I didn't really bother counting how many times it happened, but it happened almost every day. There might have been one, or maybe two, days when I didn't "really" overeat or binge.

I weighed myself the other day and found out that in a period of not quite two weeks, I gained FIVE AND A HALF pounds. So that made me freak out. And then I freaked out more when I started scrutinizing myself in the mirror, as I am wont to do to check to see if my fat deposits have grown or shrunk, and I saw that they had grown. Given the weight gain, I am not at all convinced that seeing the enlargement of my fat was even close to being an image distortion. I mean, if you look at yourself practically every goddamned day in the mirror, minute changes are not that hard to see.

I am just so fucking sick of being fat. I was at a healthy BMI for my height when I weighed 20 pounds less than this, so WHY do I have to weigh so fucking MUCH??? Why do I feel like I should stay somewhere around this weight? Because my new pants won't fit me anymore? Because I'll start wearing my older jeans, and someone might notice I'm wearing all my smaller clothes and suspect I'm losing weight? Why does it even fucking matter if anyone knows I'm losing weight? I mean, it's MY business, not anyone else's, and if I want to lose weight, I am perfectly within my rights as an adult woman to do so. I'm 21; I go to university; I paid for my own tuition; I have a job. I'm not exactly independent and responsible, but I'm not a child either.

The only reason people are able to have that weight-maintenance influence on me is because I let them. And I let them because their opinions matter to me, and I don't want them to think I'm weird, or suspect that I have even slight food issues, or have any reason to know or even guess that I have and/or used to have mental illness problems. I just want to seem normal. Really, I want to BE normal. The problem is that I'm not even sure normal is attainable for me. I do know that the appearance of normal is fairly attainable, although I will always have quirks that come out despite my best efforts -- but so do most people. So even that can be normal, as long as I don't talk about certain subjects to certain people or what have you.

I'm just so sick of having to put all this effort in just to seem okay, normal, stable, well. Sick of how much thought and planning it can take just to both look and feel somewhat normal about food on a given day. Sick of how much thought and planning it takes to organize my life: I have to make sure I get this or that thing done, make sure I eat enough calories to live but not so many that I gain any weight, make sure I get good grades in school, make sure my coworkers don't start hating me or thinking I'm a slacker or a crappy employee, make sure I socialize some, make sure my friends don't feel neglected or like I hate them, make sure I am being somewhat active so I'm not a lazy slob with too much body fat, etc etc etc. I mean, the list could go on for days. There's so much in there that it fucking exhausts me. Is it any wonder I just want to get rid of it all so often? How can anyone person be expected to perform optimally in everything all at once? And yet I feel that I must, because people who are only part of one area of my life have no idea if I'm being a wonderful, stellar achiever in everything else -- if I do badly in the one area that THEY see, they will still think that I am horrible. And for some reason I just can't handle the thought of that.

So, yeah... I'm perfectionistic, I guess. But I really have been my whole life. Making sure that things look awesome -- that people perceive me as someone who can do things, who is good at something, or who has talent or intelligence -- has always been a way of making sure my world stays in alignment. Everything will be okay as long as it looks okay. Such an astounding illusion, really, but such a powerful one. Even yet, I still believe that if I can make everything look okay enough, eventually I will HAVE to be okay.... or maybe even good enough. Maybe, someday, good enough to be liked. Good enough to be loved.

Too bad I've never quite managed to reach that stage yet.