(only two days late!)

I was supposed to go to a friend’s house today, with another girl. I asked if three in the afternoon was okay for a time yesterday evening, and got no answer. So I assumed we weren’t going.

… until, at half three, I got a text message asking where I was. Panic!

I could have gone, but I’d have been an hour late and would only stay for thirty minutes. I ended up writing about twenty ‘I’m-really-sorry’ messages and hoping they wouldn’t be too angry.

The worst part, in my opinion, is that a part of me was glad I didn’t have to go.
I know I wrote about this last week, but people… are effort. If somebody starts a conversation with me, my brain goes into full panic mode. Okay, we’re talking about the weather or something, but what do we talk about after that? What if we run out of things to say? I do not know what to say!

It means I tend to spend conversations laughing awkwardly and thinking of any possible excuse to leave. I’ll do it with friends if we’re alone together- three of us, great! Two of us, good god, the world is ending.

I think it may be another one of those low self-esteem things. When there’s just two of us, I feel some kind of desperate need to be entertaining, kind, funny, nice, sweet… and instead I stay quiet and mutter ‘haha, yeah’ a lot. It’s overwhelming, I suppose.

If I try to be those things, then they might just find me annoying or boring and dislike me. If I don’t try, then I can’t fail.

It’s a depressing attitude, and one I think comes up a lot in eating disorder recovery. ‘If I eat that, I might purge, so I won’t’. ‘Recovery seems way too hard’. Things like that, you know? It’s something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you decide recovery is too hard and don’t try in case you don’t get better- well, you’re certainly not going to get better, are you?

It’s something I’m trying to get my head around. That, actually, if a person does dislike me- so what? Trying and being shot down won’t kill you. Trying to add something into your diet and then not quite managing all of it isn’t a failure. You can always try again.

If you try often enough, you WILL succeed. If you don’t try at all? Well, it might be easier, but is it really better?

With love,
Jess xx