I screwed my timings up but good this morning. Long story short I arrived punctually at quarter to nine for a lecture that started at eleven. I don't feel too bad about this though, I wasn't exactly sleeping well anyway so all I'd have got if I stayed in bed was another two hours of poor-quality sleep. Ever had one of those nights where you can't get off, and you lie there awake, and you're just drifting off when you start thinking about something that well and truly wakes you up again, and you have very shallow sleep and weird dreams involving farmland and Youji Kudou...

... well, okay, that last one's probably not a common feature of disturbed nights. That'd just be me thinking squiggly OTP thoughts last thing and suffering the consequences.

Anyway.

Today's update is the update I was going to do the other day. Hideously stunted adolescence, you're ruining my adulthood but all the same it is kind of amusing to look back on you and consider how far I have come. In all honesty, my teenage years embarrass the Hell out of me, but I don't feel much of a connection to them any more. I know I did all the stupid and profoundly embarrassing things I'm looking back on, but I've changed so much since then that it hardly feels relevant.

Yes, I was almost diagnosed with some kind of an eating disorder when I was fifteen. I have no idea how. Take a look at me and it'd be difficult to work out how that might have happened. Yes, I have a kind of complicated relationship with food and a crazy tendency to skip meals (but usually because I'd rather be in bed/online/writing/watching anime), but an eating disorder? No. How in hell did I almost become a diagnosed bulimic?

The background: when I was thirteen I was not a very popular kid. There's one in every class - call them the Token Social Rejects. People either ignore them or they just outright hate them. That's me. I'm thirteen or so, I have The World's Most Unflattering Bob, I wear trousers and Doc Martens all the time and half the class (well, more than that, probably) are convinced I'm gay. As if that wasn't enough to cement my reputation as a complete geek I'm also one of the smart kids, if reassuringly terrible at math, and I spend most fo my free time in the computer room. The one girl I was friendly with stopped talking to me several months ago - largely because she was a shallow, thoughtless bitch.

(Digression I: I was such a social reject that I was not just unwilling but actually unable to do group work. By the time I was in Year Ten, most of my tutors had accepted that it was a complete waste of time trying to get me into groups - I always had to be assigned to them and never looked very comfortable being there - and started letting me work alone. I did science experiments alone. I did poster projects alone. I wrote a four-page [not four sides, four pages] essay on Hitler's rise to power because it was better than having to join a group and make a poster. Yup, that's me at fifteen.)

I am not having a good time at school.

You who had the fortune to be popular kids, you know damn well why I'm not. And so do the former social rejects. Not that this makes the fact that I was being sent to Coventry by most of the class and actively bullied by the rest of them excusable, but there you have it.

(Digression II: One occasion on which a tease backfired... I was fifteen and one of the boys put a dead spider on my desk. I am not scared of spiders. Actually, I rather like spiders. I took the dead spider to the tutor and asked what to do with it simply to prove the point to whoever'd done it that I wasn't exactly overly bothered about it, and was granted the admittedly satisfying sight of him carrying the thing round the class and showing it to the popular girls, most of whom wouldn't give me the time of day. Most of whom cringed. Um, it's dead, guys.)

Anyway. In Year Nine I first came down with Illness of Unknown Aetiology. Basically this manifested itself as dizziness, nausea and vomiting (and not a lot else). All of which I could handle and left me largely free to sit around all day doodling and watching anime whilst drinking lucozade and eating dry toast. In the first instance this kept me off school for about a fortnight and led to my having to go on Complan to get my stocks of nutrients and calories. Yes, Complan. The nation's number one geriatric meal replacement. I rather preferred Build-Up, which you made with milk. Still, in time I got better.

Then I got sick again. And a few months later I did it again. And again.

Looking back, I don't think I was faking illness (it felt dead real to me, that was for sure). I think I was more sick to death with going to school and not fitting in.

What started to clue me in that the doctors thought I was some kind of a nutcase was the way they started talking about my weight and Body Mass Index and reassuring me that my weight was utterly average for my build when I went in, yet again, with dizziness, nausea and vomiting. I had a good few diagnostic tests run (blood tests and abdominal palpation and not, thankfully, small bowel follow throughs, endoscopies or OGDs) and was referred, briefly, to a consultant at the Kent and Canterbury hospital, but I guess they never found anything terribly wrong with me. Which might have been why they started thinking 'Oho! Eating disorder!'. Or maybe it was just because I was a teenage girl and I was being sick.

Hang on. If I had bulimia, why did I keep going to the doctor's complaining about the fact that I couldn't keep food down? I think this makes no sense. I had plenty of problems as an adolescent, but eating disorders, as one glance at my rather Rubensesque form would tell you, were not one of them. I take comfort in the fact that had i been born about 450 years ealier my body shape would have been the ideal - too bad for me I'm a Peter Rubens girl in a Kate Moss world. Bah.

Maybe I need to look into that eating disorder after all.

Maybe the sick weirdoes supportive folk anagirlz or proana4ever will take me on and help me attain the body beautiful of a dying ninety-year-old. Or maybe I'll end up losing no weight at all and start trolling the boards with pictures of chocolate gateux and bite-by-bite accounts of my last meal.