I saw two things today which I wish to chronicle here because they really made an impression on me. The First was an old man. I was sitting, writing away and smoking in a tobacco shop and across from me, one table diagonally to my right, was this man who moved more slowly than I've ever seen any human being attempt to move before. He rose from his table, reached out, shoved his wallet into his pocket and by that time five minutes (roughly) had passed. He had to be nearing or in his 90's. He struck me as the sloth embodiment of human age.

The second occurrence was actually a conversation I had with a man who must have been in his early 30's who was partially paralyzed on his left side. We got to talking and he told me that when he was 19 years old, he had a hemorrhage in his brain that caused him to go into a coma for two weeks and wake up completely paralyzed and unable to speak. Now he can walk on his own with only a brace on his left calf-to-toe and a shuffle. He carries his left arm without any coordination or proof of much control over it, yet still he is a functioning human being with what seemed to me (at least at the moment) to be a very peaceful, optimistic attitude.

I am very close to the lowest weight I have been in over a year. That weight is, embarrassingly, 112.2 pounds. I have not weighed myself since 113.6 pounds this morning so I may actually be in the 112's right now - I plan to take a nap and weigh myself after. I also may not have lost any weight at all. That is a distinct possibility that I am keeping in the front of my mind so that I am not disappointed when I finally do weigh myself later.

I realize that it has been a very long time since I have been in the double digits weight-wise. I am looking forward to being there again. I think I have tracked that last time to being January and early February of 2009. There is a lot that I used to be or have or do that I am not or haven't had or done in over a year. I think in this last stretch of time between then and now so much has changed that my life now is practically unrecognizable as the same life I breathed then. I don't even know where to begin to track all of the changes. But I can feel them now, when I come across something familiar that is not a part of my life anymore. That sticks out to me, and is even sometimes painful - even when that familiar thing was ultimately the worst thing for me. I still miss what I have lost... I don't know what I have lost though.

Sitting in that tobacco parlor a couple of hours ago, I had this overwhelming sense that I was losing something at that very moment. Something worth grieving over. Something that I will spend the rest of my life missing and longing for. But I don't know what that could possibly be!? I was just sitting there, writing. I wasn't doing anything, making any decisions, changing my life in any radical way. I was simply feeling an awful, charbroiling, conflagration of grief absolutely booming in my sternum. I don't want that again. I've lost and grieved so much in my life, and still do - I really don't need anything fresh to grieve for. There is only so much I can afford to feel before my body is too full of it all and it has nowhere to go but out.

Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you have conquered human nature.
-charles dickens

Life is complicated. I want to enumerate on here a promise I made to a friend, who may someday read this blog. I want her to be reassured that I meant what I told her. So, to T. I do plan on fasting for three sets of ten days, however, there is a huge caveat to this decision. If I start to feel as though anything is going wrong - medically - I will stop fasting. I will eat, no matter how uncomfortable that makes me or how much I really don't want to. T is dealing with an incredible amount of shit that keeps piling and piling up. The last thing I want to do is add any more worry or pain to that load. So I won't. To the best of my abilities, I wont.

On another note, I woke up at 113.6 pounds this morning (11:30am). I don't have any urge to consume anything at the moment. That is a blessing, seeing as this is day two, that wretched day I haven't been able to get my ass over for the last 6 or so days of attempted fasting. I've gotten through day one and failed on day two, it's been like a black-and-white-tiled floor, one colored tile after the other, for those six days. That's an annoying fact and I don't want to repeat the pattern today. I need to succeed - for my own sanity.

I hope nobody minds, but I want to put some pictures on this blog - in this post. I'm going to try to figure out how to do it so that they are covered for the casual viewer and then I will add them. To warn you, they will very likely be of food. I'm having an incredible fascination with the most beautiful types of foods and things lately. I may also include some small photos of things that made me smile in the last couple of days.

-Run With Me

Frozen Bananas blended with water and vanilla to make a delicious, healthy Ice Cream!





Lemon Cupcakes With Lavendar-Infused Lavendar-colored Frosting...




Coffee cake layered with gateau, coffee beans in a saucer, cup of coffee, chocolate/espresso candies topping the cake... delicious.




p.s. 113.6 pounds, just to keep count down here in case this is the only part you are looking at. I have no idea how I'm losing this much weight this fast. But I won't question it. Absolutely not. =D

3:30am

It's 3:30 in the morning and I am about to go to sleep. I just wanted to update that I am fully and totally exhausted. I spent the night playing games (both question games and board games) with friends at their various houses and apartments. I went through the process of sorting through all of their dramatic bullshit to get to the good parts of the night. But there were some good parts. I feel satisfied, happy that I went and a little sad because the night was long and unproductive and only placed me exactly in the center of quite a few messes.

There isn't really much to say this deep into the night about how I'm doing or who I am. I have no intellectual innuendos for you or gems of knowledge you can glean. I just have me. At 3:30 in the morning. Utterly tired to the far reaches of even my bone marrow.

I'm going to go to bed now. I'll say more in the morning and probably be more coherent in doing so.

-Run With Me

p.s. 114.2 pounds at this wee hour of night.

Today will be the start of my first ten days. Yesterday, I fasted successfully, but this morning from 12am to 1:30pm I consumed. The second day always holds me by the hair and beats me with a club of nails. I need to figure out how to stop that from happening again. I will be doing my research and racking my brain to figure myself out enough to fast the way I used to. The longest fast I ever did got me to 98 pounds after 15 days. It was meant to be a 16 day fast but I started to have some medical difficulties so I stopped.

I have literally two nickels to rub together right now. That should help me not to be able to eat. I do have a little bit of consumables here in my home... dried cherries... peanut butter - those are the things I failed on last night. Got me from the 115.4 pounds that I had reached by nighttime to the 116.2 that I woke up as.

I'm going to start my fast as of 2:30pm today, so that I have a midday start time and a midday end time. I am also doing it this way because I woke up about half an hour ago and I don't think I should count the time that I was sleeping.

I'm making some telltale tea - that's what I'll call it because it's a horror story on my digestive system - and drink that, let it have it's horrific effects on my body, and then go to meet up with my friends for an evening party that we decided to have before the school year ever ended.

I'm going to do my research and soul-searching now. I will post my results when I have some.

-Run With Me

p.s. I guess I lied that this wasn't going to be weight-obsessed... but it shouldn't always be that way. We'll see.
116.2 pounds

Who Am I?

I am a monster tracking the footprints of an eating disorder through the dark. I have an ED-NOS, am 117.6 pounds (as of this morning) loosing my arrow at an 86 pound target that is red only around the edges and invisible in the center. I am grieving for the loved ones I have lost, five of them on five separate occasions - they are not my family members but my best friends and my lovers from a past age. I am afraid - I have 2 very close friends now whom I cannot lose and stay sane. I accept that we are all in danger of dying and it makes me terrified for their lives. I have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder which manifests itself in various uncomfortable ways. I am the youngest in my family and in my group of friends and acquaintances. I am the youngest of everyone I surround myself with and yet I've had more experiences in my life than anyone I've met so far... I don't want to be this person. I don't want to be an 'old soul' or 'broken', a 'survivor' or 'tested'. These are phrases others who know me sometimes use. I want to be able to live a boring life; in order to do that I needed to have lived a boring life. I'm still so young. I'm trying to have my childhood now. I can still be innocent! i can have that, right? Everyone still has some innocence left in them. I believe that.

I'm sitting out in the sun righ tnow, in 90-something degree heat, writing this in my paper journal that I finally gave in and decided to keep. I have tasked myself with beign out here for three hours to try to lose just a little bit more weight today than I might otherwise.

Today is Day One of my first (out of three) ten day fast. Between each stretch of ten days, I give myself two days to consume up to 1000 calories of healthy proportions of healthy, nutrient-filled foods. That is, to clarify, 1000 calories total for both days. Then I will fast for ten days, take two, ten days, and hopefully be at my goal weight: 86 pounds.

I DO NOT want to make this blog into an obsessive weight-counting diatribe. I want this blog to actually be worth something to someone. I will fill you in on the important things that can and do happen in every day of my life. I will let you know my Theories and Principles of Life which have saved my life and others' lives. I will hopefully figure out who I really am and who I want to be. I will make life goals on this blog, and I will pursue those goals with updates on my progress here.

What can you expect from me? Pain. Relief from boredom. Entertainment. The occasional witty phrase and perhaps a gem or two of unexpected knowledge.

Having said all of the above, I will recap this way: I am a young man with ED-NOS. But that is only one way to describe me. I will talk about most aspects of my life here. I want to be very clear when I say, please comment to your hearts content. This means that I need you to know that I WILL NOT MIND insensitive comments when they are made either with a grain of truth to them or with your wholehearted belief in them. If you are sending mean comments with no purpose to them other than to sting someone else for your own entertainment, give up now. You won't get any respect from me.



-Run With Me

p.s. I am now 116.0 pounds (3pm). This is how I will comment on my weight usually - as a small post-script at the bottom of a post.

"You have to judge by what is dead." - Sylvia Plath

Dear Orchestrated Self-Consumption,

If I breathe more deeply, will I survive on Nothing longer? I want snow. Not only that; I want to go places in the snow – walk a white strawberry field or traverse snow-slushed roofs and people-watch from that perch. I want to jump and feel the air rushing past my face as I plummet into a snowbank where I will sink, dissolving the snow with my own heat, until I'm drowning and have to drink my way out or freeze into a Popsicle for some bear to eat.

“Can I be a cold-weather sunshine addict and substitute warm rain for all these smarmy habits I've picked up, one by one, to caress? I ask because I am at once an injector, a smoker, a snorter and a popper. I do what's for pleasure, for forget, for a griefless night.”

There I was, a heroin addict. I was a junkie who didn't think that junkies existed but still had the theory:

the only person who likes a junkie is another junkie.

I used for six years, shooting into the backs of my knees after my first track-mark in the crook of my right arm. Then October 23rd, 2009 happened and I came clean. Haven't used heroin, alcohol, any illegal substances whatsoever since that date.

I want to hit the road and experience more in every day life. I feel I am in stasis. How could I have gotten here, this place that is the same as every day before it with only minor variations? How could I have let the stillness take me over, without even attempting to resist? And what can I do to fix this problem? I feel I am a failure. Already. I have failed myself. But if only I knew how I have done it, I would know how to fix it, how to avoid it in that place and time they call the future.

I see myself as reactionary, a self-preservationist with a knack for the more dangerous side of life.

I've come to some conclusions about life. That every experience is a cloudburst of chemicals released in some jitter and float across the synapses in the brain. That I care about that fact.

I have no sense of Weltanschauung. I don't need it.

Welt·an·schau·ung /ˈvɛltˌɑnˌʃaʊʊŋ/ [velt-ahn-shou-oong]–nounGerman.
a comprehensive conception or image of the universe and of humanity's relation to it.

Am I symptomatic of an age?

And if I don't eat,
do the incomplete protein chains go to the liver to be converted into glucose, forming energy from nothing?


Primary realization:

I am still. There is a tenseness in me that speeds my heart, the blood pumps in my temples, in my ears, around my brain. I feel it. And yet I am starving and it is numb. Not me. I'm not numb. The world attached to me, a limb, is numb. I can't feel it.

Who Am I? That is what you are all wondering. I will have to find a way to answer this question, soon, without submitting myself to that tendency to lie about the little things that no one cares about to begin with.... I have that in me. It kills almost everything good around me. In this, Honesty is my policy. But Honesty takes time.