Can nature be a type of therapy?

One of the most infuriating things about mental illness is that there is no one cure. There's lots of things proven to make people feel better, therapy, medication, even time is sometimes a healer, but there is no one, universal cure.
I want to talk about the impact nature has had upon my mental health, and in specific, gardening. For people who don't know me, I started experiencing depression and struggling with self harm when I was 16. This snowballed somewhat for a few years and in my late teens I developed an eating disorder. Around April-May last year was when my mental health really took it's toll, I dropped out of university, was finally officially diagnosed as anorexic and my life came to a complete stop.
Through anti depressants I eventually found a little bit of solace and I started therapy.
However the thing that really made a difference to me was being outside, being around nature, and eventually when I had more strength I started gardening.
I'm not going to write about numbers or weight, because it isn't helpful to anyone, but at first I was so underweight that I didn't have the physical strength to try gardening, so I would just sit outside and look at the trees and plants.
I especially love sitting outside in the rain. There is something magical about nature because it is not man made. There is something amazing about looking at a tree and acknowledging that that tree was alive long before you were and likely will be long after you are gone. Many times when I was unwell, I would be so caught up in my own mind, my dark thoughts and my pain. I would sit outside and look after at the flowers and trees and I'd think about how these plants would be alive no matter if I wasn't.
Does that make any sense? I don't know but it makes sense in my head.
When you are mentally unwell, you lose your faith in everything.
You lose faith in yourself because your mind tells you you're worthless.
You often lose faith in services because more often than not treatment isn't available, takes so long to access or isn't what you need.
You lose faith in the world and the world becomes black.
Nature helped restore my faith in the world.
We see nature every day but do we really look at it?
When I started to look properly I saw colours I'd never seen before. I started to realise there was beauty in the world that mental illness could never destroy.
When I started gardening, I started to grow vegetables and I continued doing this through the ups and downs of recovery.
I'm no where near fully recovered now, but I'm a healthy weight and I'm able to work again, and nature played a big part in that.
On bad days I go to my allotment and look at the all the vegetables, all these vegetables that I'd grown and nurtured from tiny seeds.
It felt so good to care for something else living when caring for myself was often so difficult.
Being around nature and gardening is not a cure, but it's peaceful, it's grounding and it's reassuring that there are still pure, wholesome things in the world and you can create them.
You can plant flowers and care for them and see them bloom into beautiful things.
When your mind is screaming and racing at a thousand miles an hour, being outside surrounded by plants and trees can ground you. You finally feel able to breathe.
You see there is so much more to life than mental illness, there's so much more in this world than humans.
It's not a cure but it's a type of therapy. It's breathing space, somewhere safe. 

A letter

Dear ED,

You tore me to pieces.
Physically and mentally.
You reduced me to nothing more than a mess of anxiety, sickness and loathing.
I've come quite far in my recovery.
I have the strength to live again, I went back to work and started to rebuild my social life.
You're still here though.
You don't talk to me quite as much as you used to, or maybe you do but I can quieten you better now.
Still you don't let me sleep through the night.
Still nights spent on the bathroom floor.
ED why did you do this to me?
I was my own person and you killed that and made me yours.
I eat better now, three months ago my weight came back up inside the healthy range.
This is both good and bad for me.
My hair stopped falling out and my energy became more again.
I eat more so you laugh at me more.
I disgust you you say.
You used to control all of me, but therapy gave me the power to differentiate between us.
I can be someone without you, I just need to carry on and find my way.
You say you do all of this because it's what's best for me, because you love me you want me to be thin.
You say you know better than anyone.
If you love me then let me rest.
I miss sleeping at night, I want to sleep when the rest of the world sleeps, not half way through the day when I'm too exhausted to stay awake.
Let me rest.
Let me heal.
Let me go.

Yours,
C 

When is the right time to end therapy sessions?

When is the right time to end therapy sessions?
Through my teen years I watched Sex and The City and the girls talked about seeing therapists as if it was trendy, as if it was the thing to do.
I started seeing my therapist in October 2017, and seeing her has been beyond helpful in teaching me ways to break my obsessional traits and take back some control from my eating disorder.
When I went to her I was clinically classed as anorexic, lacking in mental stability. I had no concentration, I couldn't care about anything properly.
Since seeing her my weight has gone up to 8 stone. My BMI is now in the healthy range, at the low end but still in the healthy range.
I know she has helped me a lot but I do long to see if I can manage alone.
6-7 months isn't a long time in terms of having therapy, not at all, so I wonder am I ready to try alone?

The true miracle is not walking on water or walking in air, but simply walking on this earth. ― Thích Nhất Hạnh

I have a new respect for life that I didn't have when I was seriously unwell last year. I was ready to let go of life and waiting for my way out.
Now, for the first time in several years, I really want to be alive.
Therapy has given so much back to me.
I am not fully recovered, or even close, but I have gone from 20-25 laxatives daily to 12. And I now have to knowledge to lower that number further.
I have more control now than I've had before with this disorder.
As we strive to destigmatise mental health, I know the thought of having therapy becomes destigmatised too.
Far too many people are afraid to ask for help or ashamed, I was for many years, but therapy has given me a chance at life again.
Whether I do the rest of this journey alone is not important, whether I continue to see my therapist every week or only once a month doesn't matter. What matters is seeing a therapist in the first place probably saved my life.

A love letter to laxatives

I want to sleep.
I want to sleep through the night without being awoken by the pain of laxatives.
Most nights I'm awake five or six times, the pain so horrible that I end up curled up on the bathroom floor.
No position in bed is comfortable, no amount of hot water bottles help.
I want you to leave me alone now.

Blossoms

My whole life I have loved writing.
I started writing stories and poetry when I was in my early teens, by the time I was sixteen I wanted to be a play write.
Although this wasn't a career I pursued, I never stopped writing.
It always brought peace to my mind.
When I became ill everything changed.
The only thing I knew to write about was being ill. Was my disorder. Was depression.
For a while it helped me to write about it at the beginning of the darkness, it helped me to navigate through it.
From time to time now I still find it a needed release, but I don't want to simply write about being unwell anymore.
I am in recovery, recovery is slow and some days feels impossible.
I want to write about life again.
This time last year, the year before and the year before that, I was quite sure the illness would end my life at some point, so documenting how I felt seemed the right thing to do.
When you are mentally unwell, life loses its colour and the world seems dismal shades of grey and black.
Slowly, as recovery progresses, the colours come back.
I can see colour again, I can see the pink and white blossom on the trees.
I promise myself I will never let an illness take the colours of the earth away from my sight again.
What is life if everything is grey? 

What should you believe?

Something inside me can't heal.
I force myself to eat the most 'normal' meals I can and with every bite I disgust myself.
Eight years I have had this thing living inside me.
I asked my therapist how can I know whether what my voice tells me is real or not? I have put on a little bit of weight so Beelzebub tries to force me to lose it.
My therapist asked was I happier at 40kg with nothing much left in my life, when I lost friends and my career path.
Maybe I was?
Beelzebub tells me nothing mattered except being the lowest weight possible.
How do you ignore that?
How do you ignore something that lives inside your very soul? 

Remember

Slowly you learn to let yourself eat again,
Maybe you put on a couple of pounds,
Onto that body that was near skin and bones,
It feels like the heaviest weight in the world.
The voices fly round your head,
Fat, big, huge, ugly,
Obese, enormous, disgusting,
You fight, fight, fight again those words.
It is not fat, it is the start of becoming healthy again,
The start of becoming you again.
Remember when you weren't too weak to go to the gym,
Remember when you could enjoy a meal in a restaurant,
Remember when standing up didn't leave you light headed,
When daily life didn't exhaust you.
Remember who you were before this.

...

There are more feel good, body confident quotes around than you could count.
There are many amazing recovery stories to inspire you.
There are cold, hard facts about what eating disorders do to people.
There are also the cold, hard facts of what anorexia did to my life. Even referring to myself as anorexic feels like a sham now. I suppose I was, my weight was in the 'anorexic boundaries' and I would restrict and starve. But now it feels like a joke saying it, it feels embarrassing.
My weight now is only a couple of pounds under the recommended 'healthy' weight for someone my height. My bmi is just under the recommended.
But barely.
Barely.
Putting on weight in the last few months has increased my energy, made me overall 'healthier' but it hasn't helped my thoughts at all.
I'm ashamed of my weight now. Ashamed that I used to be thinner.
I look constantly for something to inspire all of the self hatred and loathing out of me but there's nothing. 

Body shaming

Body shaming really gets me so upset. I struggle so much to see how in 2018 people feel it's alright to criticise others bodies. Whether that criticism is based around being overweight, underweight, or too short, too small, or just a slightly unusual body shape, it's so wrong.
In some aspects of life like science and medicine, humans come along in leaps and bounds. In other aspects, we are quite slow and a little disappointing, like how long it took to legalise same sex marriages. Or how much racism and sexism still exist. Being English it's hard to speak for other countries, and after quite a long time we did legalise same sex marriage and people are be coming more open minded. We do make huge progress within medicine and drug experiments.
We live in a diverse country full of people with different skin colours, different accents and people from many different cultures.
Yet some people can look at someone, who they may have never even spoken to or even seen other than on the internet, and they can find flaws in that person's appearance. They decide there's a part of that person's body they think is ugly.
How can any half decent person do that to somebody else?
How can a stranger think they can decide for you that you have something wrong with your appearance?
Working in mental health has given meme thick skin. I've never cared how many times I get called the C word.
I've been told I'm no good at what I do, I'm selfish, privileged, a bitch. I've been told to jump off a cliff, been called a slag or a whore, and none of it ever really bothered me.
Most people were unwell or angry when they said those things and I'm a forgiving person so I could never be upset or annoyed by it. I understand rage, I understand distress, I understand a build up of feelings that just explodes.
But body shaming someone, calling someone 'anorexic' or 'fat' as an insult if something I can't ever understand.
I will always be biased because of my eating disorder, I know many people throw words around like that and do not feel anything. But when you carry a pain inside you like an eating disorder, it's a burden that will never go.
Body shaming is taking that burden that someone is trying to cope with and displaying it for everyone to see.
It is parading that person's pain and using it as a weapon.
Fuck body shaming.
Living with someone about yourself that you don't like or something you're conscious of is a daily struggle, fuck any lowlife who tries to make you feel worse about it. 

Getting nowhere?

The terrain of recovery changes daily, this is natural but this makes it very easy to want to give up.
I have days where I think I haven't gotten anywhere. Where I completely feel ruled by Beelzebub and I don't see that ever changing.
But I'm wrong and if you feel that same hopelessness then you may well be wrong too.
It is ED that makes us believe we are failing, getting nowhere, because ED wants us to give up.
Since I started seeing my therapist last year, I've gained 4 pounds - which is over 4 months may not seem a lot but anorexics struggle to put any significant weight on quickly.
When your body has become used to functioning at 41/42/43 kg, or whatever your weight was, or so long, it will take time for that to increase.
Since seeing my therapist I haven't self harmed.
Since seeing her I have trained myself to look at calories on food packets less and to try and stop calculating them constatnly in my head.
I have also got a job that I really enjoy and I have gone from weighing myself 7/8/9/10 times a day to weighing myself once or twice a week.
Now, my therapist is good but I'm not saying she has done all of this for me, she hasn't. What a truly great therapist does is give you the tools to make the changes.
With an eating disorder, only the one struggling can make the changes.
I have still have a long way to go, my eating habits are far from 'normal', my laxative abuse has not improved yet and my mind can still be a dark place.
But that doesn't matter right now, what matters is I have made progress.
If you are someone who struggles, and you feel you are getting nowhere, think harder because any improvement however small is a victory.
Recovery is not one big step forward, it is made up of lots of little victories.

My venomous thing

A venomous thing still lives inside my soul.
Acknowledging that was the first real step I took towards getting better.
I feel more positive now than I have for many months, if not years, but naturally the bad days, the bad thoughts still come.
As time goes on I know they'll become less frequent but when it's a bad day it's so difficult to divert your brain and remind yourself that these days will lessen as time goes on.
The one thing I do tell myself that does hit home is that if you have to restrict to be the weight you are, then you aren't meant to be that weight. If you have to purge or abuse laxatives or cause your body harm in any other way, then that isn't the weight your body is meant to be.
There is no 'perfect weight to aim for.
Your body knows what it wants and needs, let yourself live.
The voice of an eating disorder will tell you you are meant to be skin and bones, but actually your physical body knows what you need a lot more than the eating disorder that is clouding and controlling your brain.
Eating disorders are a fight to the death.
Either you fight until the eating disorder kills you, or you fight until your life ends due to a physical illness or whatever.
Whether you die at 19 or 90, an eating disorder is always a fight to the death.
I must fight to let myself live, fight against the disorder, against the venom.
Anyone out there struggling must fight to let yourself live too.

Life has to be the only option, then your eating disorder cannot win.