This last week has been a strange mix of gastritis, scaffolding noise, and small victories – including the day I defeated Optimus Amazon Prime and hugged a loaf of bread.

Lately I’ve not been blogging about these kinds of things because I tend to save my posts for bigger reflections or thoughts that I think are REALLY IMPORTANT. Mostly because I’ve been inundated with epiphanies lately. Those posts take a lot of time and effort to write, which means they’re often published quite a while after the original thought or epiphany happened.

The downside of that is that I rarely end up writing about the smaller things that make up the actual texture of my life day to day – the chaos, the annoyances, and the occasional tiny victories.

So here are a few of those things from this week.

I’ve Been Hugging Emotional Support Bread

I have still been eating despite my stomach staging a rebellion every time I do. Lately I’ve been surviving mostly on protein shakes, soup, sourdough, quark, and the Mini Biscoff Weetabix of early recovery is back. I almost have a sort of nostalgia for it already, and it’s only been a few months. It’s very comforting and easy to eat once I soak it in loads of milk.

I am really missing my pistachio crème and various other nuts, nut butters, and sausage rolls from the glowing altar of Greggs, but my stomach reacts really badly to fat when I have gastritis.

Yesterday though, when my son came home from uni and saw I was still feeling rough, he surprised me with my favourite bread – Jason’s Malted Sourdough – and a coffee from Greggs. I was so happy about the bread that I hugged it, and then hugged him later. Priorities.

Coffee isn’t great for gastritis either, but it’s my one vice and I am not giving it up. I already had to give up pistachio crème; I am not giving up the elixir that makes life feel slightly more worth living.

I’ve been on a proton pump inhibitor for three days now, so I’m hoping it will improve what and how much I’m able to eat. At the moment I get full very quickly and get pain in my sternum even with small amounts of food – or even if I drink too much water.

The tablets do seem to have helped by halting the rapid weight loss I was experiencing despite still eating. It’s weird to feel glad about that, given my eating disorder. I think I just see it as adding distance to the path I was on, so that once I’m better I’ll have to walk much further back to where I was before attempting to continue the path toward my pre-relapse weight.

At least my son is there on the path as a marathon steward, handing me emotional support bread to hug along the way.

I Defeated the Dreaded TikTok Algorithm

I was feeling pretty rough, and my brain was VERY mad about being forced to sit still and not do the things it wants to do. In my last post I talked about all the tasks it thinks are VERY IMPORTANT and should be done RIGHT NOW, even though I can’t do ALL OF THEM THIS INSTANT because I’m not well.

I hadn’t opened TikTok for months, but I tried it again hoping for some distraction from my brain’s restlessness.

I did NOT find that. AT ALL.

The problem with the TikTok algorithm is that if you don’t use it consistently, it just remembers who you were the last time you opened the app. Apparently the me of now is VERY different from the me of six months ago, because my feed immediately made me irritated, angry, and even a bit triggered.

My six month old feed had a lot of ED recovery content. I completely agree that social media shouldn’t allow obviously triggering ED content, but I’m increasingly of the opinion that some recovery content can be just as harmful, and sometimes even worse.

There’s a lot of medical misinformation disguised as healing, often from people who are nineteen and have suddenly decided they are unqualified experts in nutrition. There’s misinformation from people who are very clearly still unwell themselves.

If you’re cutting out entire food groups, that’s still an eating disordered behaviour – even if the foods you’re cutting out are now protein and fibre. It’s dangerous too. Protein is extremely important for rebuilding bone and muscle, yet you’ll see people in “recovery” calling out other TikTokers for eating a single protein bar in an otherwise completely normal day of eating and declaring it “not real recovery.”

They then insist their approach is the only way to recover. Again, medically incorrect. Recovery often looks different from person to person depending on medical issues, other mental health conditions, neurodivergence, medications, and even age.

That last part was another problem. TikTok wasn’t showing me anyone like me – even though people like me definitely exist. There are plenty of older people navigating recovery. Instead, my feed was full of the accounts I mentioned above.

And while I genuinely wish those nineteen-year-olds well, I don’t actually have that much in common with them. I’m now at the age where I’m stereotypically supposed to shout at teenagers to get off my lawn – or in this case, my feed. My son is twenty-one now, so I’ve even completed the full parenting-a-teenager campaign.

Anyway, the feed drove me mad. It didn’t matter how many accounts I blocked – TikTok was convinced I still wanted to see them. So I did the only logical thing and deleted my entire TikTok account and started a new one.

The algorithm on the new account immediately blessed me with videos that restored my faith in humanity. A man feeding a seagull called Steven. Another person visiting empty restaurants wearing Meta glasses and promoting the businesses so they suddenly get a boost in customers. Lots of Welsh humour videos. Long Dark clips. Gaming content. Even grief content which has been really helpful.

A HUGE relief.

It distracted my brain for a while, which was exactly what I needed. I used to love sending TikToks to my son, but I’d been too wary of opening the app for ages. Now I can again.

I Defeated Optimus Amazon Prime

I’ve been struggling with moving much after I eat without getting very nauseous, but I’ve been trying to do one small thing each day to keep my brain happy about my flat being slightly chaotic.

So far I’ve managed a few drawers. Today I decided to tackle the Amazon Prime Mountain, which had grown so large it had effectively taken over a room in my flat. My long history of watching 80s cartoons had convinced me it might transform into Optimus Amazon Prime at any moment. I was just waiting for ammo crates to randomly spawn before the main boss fight began.

It had got so bad because my son and I both order things, the recycling bin is down several flights of stairs, and I haven’t been well enough to deal with it properly. But today I destroyed the mountain. It all THANKFULLY somehow fit into one black bag.

When I finally took the Amazon box mountain downstairs, the lift decided it didn’t want to cooperate either. I pressed every button like I was trying to launch a nuclear missile just to get the doors open again.

A man waiting nearby after I explained the lift wasn’t working said “That’s fine, if I go missing or something just send a search party” and I heard him get in and press all the buttons hoping to make it move.

Which felt like a very appropriate level of optimism and absurdity for the building at the moment.

I’m relieved the transformer threat has been eradicated – especially because we have floor-to-ceiling windows, which meant the workmen outside could see the entire Amazon mountain situation unfolding inside my flat.

Which felt mildly embarrassing.

Oh yes. The scaffolding still a thing.

I’ve Been Dealing With Scaffolding and the Horror Game Ambience

The dreaded scaffolding I mentioned months ago is still surrounding my flat. I still haven’t been able to feed my pigeons, though I do occasionally spot them nearby.

The work has become much more intense too. There’s drilling and hammering every day from 8am until around 5pm, and sometimes even on weekends. As I mentioned before, they’re removing the external cladding and insulation and replacing all of it. I’m fairly certain it’s the loudest work you could possibly do.

I’m regularly woken up by drilling in the same wall my bed is against, with my bed vibrating across the room like something out of a cartoon.

Then there’s the night, when it’s finally quiet and the workmen have gone home. Unfortunately they leave all their rubble, tools, metal buckets, brooms, and general debris scattered across the scaffolding. This is Wales, so it’s usually windy or raining, which means all of it starts moving around.

Metallic clangs from buckets rolling around. Rubble shifting that sounds like footsteps. Random banging noises.

It genuinely sounds like a horror video game outside my window all night long. Silent Hill: Scaffolding Edition. To complete the ambience, at 3am one night I also heard an ice cream van jingle drifting through the darkness. I prefer RPGs to horror games personally.

The scaffolding has been up for months now, and they haven’t even finished buildings they started on long before they began working on mine. So it looks like I’ll be living with it for several more months yet.

It’s incredibly dark in the flat too. The scaffolding is covered in netting, which blocks most of the light, so it still feels like the middle of winter in here even during the day. I have to keep the lights on all the time.

I don’t think the lack of sunlight – or not being able to see my birds and the trees outside and being woken up frequently – is doing much for my mood, or my sons. There’s not much I can do about that though. My son did buy me a Jellycat pigeon because I was missing my pigeons so much so at least I still have pigeons in my life.

So between hugging bread, defeating Optimus Amazon Prime, and resetting the TikTok algorithm while hugging plushie pigeons I suppose I’ve managed to survive the last week after all.

Even if it did occasionally feel like living inside a horror survival game.