This is a post I told Jen I would do after she shared her story on her blog, Drazil and Jen gave me the courage to talk about my secret and why I am overweight now.
It is very hard for me to type this blog as I will have to face facts I do not want to see in front of me. I should see them and I think to be able to lose this weight I need to face them.
I don't know where to start because it is a complicated story but I think I will write it in the chronological order it happened to me.
When I was 13 I started to have night terrors. For those of you who don't know what night terrors are, they are very violent nightmares everynight. Many of them beng the same over and over again. I was already a bit overweight at the time but nothing major. I was so scared of falling asleep. I couldn't do anything to stop it. There was that dream everynight, in a car with 2 babies in their car seats at the back, they both looked like me and they are both crying. suddenly very brights lights and a crash. a few seconds after just one of the babies voices.
I have had that dream every single night for over a year until I decided to say it to my parents. They brought me to a child psychiatrist. I explained to him all my night symptoms. He said to me usually you see that when there has been a strong emotional shock. and with people with amnesia.
I started to feel like I wasnt complete, that there was a part of me missing, I was feeling lonely and even my friend and family could not fill that gap. I had no idea what would fill it so I started eating, every day more and more. I became bulimic, I would eat enormous amounts of food and make myself sick afterwards. One of my friends found out and told my parents.
The psychiatrist started working with me to stop this as well, and focused on me stopping making myself sick. but he didnt do anything for the eating part of the problem. At some stage we were going nowhere. so he asked if he could see my parents for one session to see if they could help, if they had any elements I didnt know about that could help me get better.
And finally they said it one day. I will never forget that day when the psychiatrist asked my mum to tell me something she had hidden for so many years. something that made me understand why I was hving that dream. why I wasnt feeling complete.
We had a car accident and I was injured quite badly, my mum too, a drunken man crashed in the side of our car and killed my twin sister. It suddenly made sense the other baby me in the dream wasnt me, it was her, I didnt even remember her. My mum explained that i suffered head injuries and I had no memories from before the accident. She explained that the doctors in the hospital told her that and she had to choose if she wanted to tell me about my sister or not. She was so hurt at the time she decided not to. And for years they lived like if she never existed.
I needed to know everything, I wanted an explanation, I was angry, but nothing. They wouldnt say a thing. They couldnt talk about it because it was hurting them too much. I felt devasted, broken, helpless, empty, sad... And I was hating them. For hiding this from me, for not helping me to get better, for pretending she never existed, for not wanting to talk to me about it. And the only thing that would calm me down was food.
For years I have researched everything I could, harrassed them to tell me about her. And finally turned to my granny who saw how distressed I was and made me promise not to tell my mum she had talked about it. She gave me pictures, her teddy bear, and told me about her. She brought me to her grave.
I have worked with a hypnose therapist to work on the memory I had lost and managed to remember a few things. Not much but still a few things, when I turned 20 I was not bulimic anymore. I did a lot of emotional eating but it was not considered as bulimia anymore. I put on the rest of the weight by yoyo dieting.
I am not fine with all this story yet, I still have difficulties understanding why thing happened this way, I still have to control how angry I am with my parents about it. I still have too many questions that are not answered and I still don't feel complete. I probably never will. therapist told me to learn to live with it instead of trying to make myself complete with a substitude but it is easier said than done...
I feel naked now that I have written my biggest secret down . I am scared of being judge, but I needed to do it. I don't have the courage to read what I wrote again to check for typos and misspellings because if I do I will probably delete everything so I will take a deep breath and hit the publish post button now!
