This week at home has been massively triggering for me. Whether or not you agree with the concept behind triggering that is the best way I can describe what I have been experiencing this week. As I've alluded to I'm moving up North to start a PhD and I'm moving with the bf. This meant I needed to come home for a week and clear out my room. Fair enough, I've been gone for 5 years already it needed doing.
What I didn't realise until I got here was that I wasn't being allowed to leave anything, I've had to go through all my school books from year 1-13, read through all my diaries, go through clothes in multitudes of sizes and decide what to give away/recycle, go through all of the books on my bookshelf and only leave ones that will be appropriate for my nieces/nephew. I would have kept way more than I've been able to but moving space is really really limited and we will get charged penalties for going over the amount in the quote. I had to argue to keep the clay models I made throughout school, and a box of little bits that I want but can't take until Christmas. They are not wanted because they are ugly.
I've always used academia/work to escape from this house, to get away from my brother's particular brand of abusing personality, my mothers inability to see past the fact I wasn't a boy/thin/"girly". Used it on the weekends to get out of family activities. During summer to go to extra sessions so I could leave for a week and pretend I was someone else for a bit.
Flicking through my diaries has reminded me how strong the claustrophobic feeling was living here, how I counted down the days I could leave for uni, and the crushing feeling when I had to delay uni for a year and stay. Seeing time after time the start of the week with a new attempt at losing weight, another exercise regime to be done in my bedroom, another plan to lose weight. Even when I was 6 stone lighter than I am now at my lowest weight.
I see the same things in the mirror now that I did then.
I have tried and failed to keep keto in a setting where food has always been my crutch. There is no place I reach for the bread and butter faster than my parent's house. I do not write this to place blame at their door, but as recognition that while I have come a long way in my use of food as a cover all fix for any emotion I may be feeling, I still have a long way to go. My reaction is immediate, to eat next to nothing in front of people, and when the door is closed or the lights are out in everyone else's rooms to gorge on whatever I can find in the cupboard, or whatever I have snuck into the house and the cupboard next to my bed earlier in the day.
Part of my reason for picking keto in the first place as a way to diet is that it completely removed all the food that I commonly used to heal the pain. Bread, crackers, biscuits, while my house was a haven of fruit and vegetables and healthy meats those were always in plentiful supply. It is not chocolate and crisps that I used to dull my emotions, but a doorstop of bread and marmite.
That is a concept that I find very hard to convey to others when explaining I don't eat carbs, because lets face it, who wants to hear me talk about how a food group represents so much of my life that I choose to ignore on a daily basis when actually they want to know why I won't eat the bread sticks that come with my salad in Pizza Express. It is not just a fad for me, it is not just a way to once again be able to shop on the high street without dread. Sometimes it is just a means of survival.
