Unsnarling the web

I feel alone and scared, and yet for the first time in a while, hopeful.

I checked myself into Beaumont Hospital today, realizing the downward spiral was only going to continue. I was tired of my starving brain screaming at me that I cannot eat, I must not eat and I do not deserve to eat. The medical tests do not lie - my ketones are at the level of a diabetic's, and Dr. Sackeyfio said any higher and I could have slipped into a coma.

I was becoming so sucked into anorexia, I was becoming Ana. Angela was dying, both literally and spirtually. It final struck me how far I had fallen into Ana's web when I went out Thursday night and purchased a small knife, with the intent of carving Ana into my left hip bone.

I pulled over the side of a dark street, pulled out the knife and slipped down my jeans. I was ready to carve when I became horrified, wondering where I went and who I was. I wasn't totally safe - instead, I wrote Ana in large red letters, a reminder that I will never be free.

I refused to accept that reminder. In the shower this morning, I scrubbed and scrubbed the letters off, feeling dirty that Ana was marked on my flesh. Now there is a big red spot, and I'm proud of that spot, because it was the first step in taking my body back.

I still don't understand how became so enmeshed in Ana's web; snarled, tangled, Angela small and almost dead underneath the cobwebs. I couldn't see past it; I couldn't see anything at all.

And all the time my brain screamed at me, "You do not deserve to eat."

So tomorrow I will be put on a feeding tube, and I am afraid. But someday, I hope, I will remember this time from the distance of past, a memory of a bad relapse that almost killed me, and I will have a cup of hot chocolate, maybe a piece of pie, and lean back into my husband's arms and sigh, "Aren't we glad that's over!"