Since I last posted, I’ve been struggling with a tidal wave of anhedonia. I think I got burnt out – with recovery, with grief, with my changing body, with food… with everything. I’m so tired all the time. Actually, tired doesn’t even cover it – I’m exhausted, physically and mentally.

But this isn’t me giving up. Quite the opposite. I’ve been eating more, hoping it would lift my mood, thinking maybe I was still in some kind of deficit. But it hasn’t made a difference. What it has done is make me grow out of even more clothes – which makes me think I’m not under-eating at all, not with the way my body is rapidly packing on muscle. It’s busy prepping for a bodybuilding show I never signed up for – despite never setting foot in a gym.

Mostly I feel completely lost. I’ve done so many things to try and help, and none of them have worked. In fact, trying to fix this is all I’ve been doing for the past week.

Good Mourning Night City

I was genuinely excited for the surprise update to Cyberpunk 2077, especially the self-driving cars. I’ve always wanted to just sit in the car and stare out the window while it takes me through Night City. When CDPR announced, “Heck yeah choom, we’re adding that”, I was thrilled.

But by the time it dropped – or more accurately, by the time my terrible Welsh internet downloaded it (about 18 hours later) – I’d already been hit with the anhedonia. Still, I tried. I logged in. I loaded it up. And I felt… nothing.

And that nothingness was its own kind of grief.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a special interest of mine.
To step into Night City and feel nothing made me feel like a stranger in my own body.

It hurt even more because, during my relapse, I couldn’t play immersive games at all – my brain just didn’t have the energy after over a year of literal starvation. Now, finally eating enough, I thought I’d be able to enjoy it again. But no. I still felt nothing. I’ve logged in every single day since, hoping today would be the day the neon lights of Night City light up my brain the way I’m needing it to – hoping Night City itself would give me the belonging and dopamine I’m so desperate for.

But every day, it just feels like a chore. And the longer this goes on, the more I grieve – not for the game, but for myself. For not recognising my own reactions. For not feeling like me anymore in a place that once changed my life.

Starbucks and Going Outside

So I thought, well… Starbucks will work, right?
I’ve talked about how much I love going – how much it lifts my mood, how comforting it is to sit there with my son, sipping coffee in a place full of nice sounds and kind baristas. So we went.

My son’s foot is still sore, but he thought he could manage the trip to town – the first time in weeks. That should have been a special day. It would have been a special day to me.

But it didn’t help. Not at all. I think I was already too overwhelmed by that point – I’d had to get even more new clothes because of my body changes, and Clippy (my ED voice) berated me the entire time. I’m so done with it. I’m overstimulated just from hearing its constant noise in my head.

I wanted to order an iced coffee – the one I actually wanted – but I got flustered. All I managed to say was “Americano.” I ended up with a drink I didn’t even want, sitting there blankly while my son took plushie photos.

I smiled at him. I didn’t involve him in the blankness. I just kept forcing myself into the role of “capable human” while quietly grieving that not even Starbucks is working anymore.

I’ve also been trying to go outside and sit by the river – when my anxiety and knee pain allow it. But the river makes me feel sad now. It mirrors my grief. Like my emotions are tied to the current, always swinging in and out, never still. I’ve reached a point with this anhedonia where even sadness is a relief – because at least it’s something.

Personal Self-Care

I’ve kept up with doing my nails, my hair, and trying to wear outfits I feel okay in – depending on what still fits, anyway. But mostly it feels like adding pointless chores I don’t have energy for. That’s self-care when it’s applied to severe mental illness – doing things you don’t want to do, just to try to feel human with little pay off.

That said, I do really like the OPI nail varnishes I’ve been using. They’re amazing if you stim a lot like I do – they don’t chip the way others do. Rimmel is a lost cause, though. May as well not bother.

Hobbies are nearly impossible right now. They feel like chores too. And if something feels like a chore, I don’t want to do it – because it just reminds me of how I used to feel about it. That gap is too painful. So no macrame. Nothing else, really.

Food

I’ve still been making an effort with my meals.

Historically, when I’m in this state of anhedonia, I default to microwave meals – because food loses all joy, and I just need to get something in. I’d buy the healthiest ready meals I could and shovel them down. But I haven’t done that this time.

This time, I’ve stuck with pretty meals – not because they make me feel better, but because they fight Clippy. Because putting no effort into my food is what Clippy wants. It’s how it tells me I don’t deserve care, or colour, or taste. That I should eat the most joyless, clinical meals possible.

Microwave meals are a great tool when you’re really struggling. I fully intend to go back to them again when I need to. But right now, I’m in such a delicate phase of recovery that I can’t give Clippy an inch – because I know it will take a lightyear.

The only thing that’s helped is the fact that my hunger has been intense lately – enough that a microwave meal wouldn’t satisfy me anyway. I started creatine over a week ago, and it’s made me hungrier than ever. I hate it. I hate feeling this hungry. It makes me feel greedy, and it’s been really hard to sit with that. My hunger used to ebb and flow – some days it was intense, and some days it wasn’t. But now it’s just intense all the time, and it physically hurts.

Blogging

I’ve tried blogging a few times, but it’s hard to connect my feelings to words when I feel this flat. I also feel immense pressure to soften everything for the reader. Because I know what people want. I’ve seen what does well online.

People want an aesthetic healing journey. Something they can double-tap and scroll past with a smile. But if I were having that kind of journey, I wouldn’t be blogging about it. I’d be too busy living it.

Instead, I’m living a messy, very real recovery. And I’ve been hiding – because it’s hard to accept that hardly anyone wants reality anymore.

It would be so much easier if I’d gained weight, loved every second of it, and never had a bad day again. But that’s not recovery. That’s not what an eating disorder is. It’s not a diet and recovery isn’t a wellness trend. It’s a mental illness. I am mentally ill. And that’s why I feel so flat. That’s why I have anhedonia.

People question your intentions now anytime you dare to be real. Like you’re trying to manipulate them, or seek sympathy or attention. But I’m not. I’m just here, shouting into the void. And sometimes, the void speaks back. Sometimes, you find others in there who are going through the same thing. That helps. It matters.

If I was really seeking attention or notoriety I’d lie, say how I ate food and it was this magical experience of finding myself and I’m cured now – here’s how you can do it too. That’s an algorithm SEO friendly aesthetic blog post worthy of likes and attention right there – even if it’s a lie, even if it’s not ethical for me to presume anything about you and your situation so I have no idea if it would help you.

But that’s why I write for education too. People need to know this is what recovery really looks like. Otherwise, they’ll assume it ends the moment you eat and gain weight. And I don’t want to lie about my existence just to fit some ideal of what a blog should be. You can’t learn anything from fake aesthetics.

So here I am, writing this. Because I watched Black Mirror – and it reminded me of what matters.

Black Mirror

After trying even more ways to help and getting nothing back, I just gave up for a couple of days and laid on the sofa watching Netflix after doing chores. If everything feels boring and flat, I might as well do something boring and useful like chores. That’s an anhedonia coping mechanism I live by.

Well actually, the first day of the Netflix binge I was forced to lie down. Extreme hunger episodes – that are now thankfully getting more sporadic – still cause a hangover the next day and I can’t keep my eyes open. I don’t know what that’s about but I cannot move, and I fall asleep mid activity. It gets worse whenever I eat something which means I often fall asleep for over an hour after I’ve eaten and nothing shifts it. So I decided to try and watch Netflix between naps and give my body the rest it was forcing me to give it.

I hadn’t watched the new season of Black Mirror yet, so I watched those – and then rewatched the older episodes. So many of them are about authenticity. About how being fake, or full of toxic positivity, ultimately erodes our humanity. That’s something I’ve always believed in – that being real matters. Especially when you’ve watched the world get worse in that exact way.

Blogging didn’t used to be like this. It wasn’t majority AI-generated tips and surface-level aesthetic content. It was majority real people being real, even when it was messy. That’s how I found WeeGee. That’s how we met. We both blogged from the same place – brutal honesty. No filters. No pretending. Just real life, in all its rawness.

Obviously some blogs are still real, I’m following quite a lot of you real ones and I appreciate you so much. But the WordPress readers latest post tabs are full of duplicate AI-generated content and it makes it so much harder to connect with people. It takes so much longer to search through, because I can’t find you, and you can’t find me.

I guess I kept hoping it would go back to being how it was 13 years ago. I guess also part of me is grieving the world in which I met WeeGee. But maybe that’s on me, and I’ve reached the, “back in my day” while fisting at the ceiling to, “get off my reader” era of my life. I should just be real anyway. I know I’ve written that I need to do that before, but at the same time I just feel the pressure of, “No one wants to read this”. I feel like I’m burdening people with reality because I wont buy into softening every part of my existence. So I hide, because it’s safer.

I have to dedicate my life to reality because I have mental illness. It’s the only tether I have keeping me from the dark. So that’s why I’m posting this, it’s step one in living in line with my values about authenticity.

(Also: I went off on some tangent again, but USS Callister is still my favourite Black Mirror episode, and I did like that they made another one. I’ll rewatch both when I feel better. I know I’ll enjoy them again.)

Anhedonia Dreams

There’s a special kind of grief that comes when you try to engage with something you know you love – and feel nothing.

You grieve for yourself.
For your lost feelings.
For the identity those things gave you.
You feel completely untethered.
And when you try to claw it back, all it does is deepen the grief.

But I tried anyway.
And in a way, I’m glad – because what else is there? Just lie down and give up?

No. I know I don’t want that. Or I wouldn’t have fought so hard to eat, to stay here, to build something. I have to keep going – for the version of me that got me this far. Because maybe, one day, she’ll be back. And when she steps into Starbucks, or Night City…

…it won’t feel like she’s lost.

It’ll feel like she’s come home.

For the song an ode to my lost self:-

I step off the train
I’m walking down JigJig street again
And past your door
But you don’t live there anymore
It’s years since you’ve been there
Now you’ve disappeared somewhere
Like outer space
You’ve found some better place
And I miss you
Like the deserts miss the rain