#love<3

This is a true story about myself in high school. 2017, I think, give or take a year or two; it may have been earlier, but not later.

I woke up one morning struggling to open my eyes enough to do anything, because of extreme light sensitivity. It was agony. I'll be honest, I don't remember a great deal of it. The long and the short of it all was that I ended up being diagnosed with an eye virus of some kind. Weeks and months passed, I was cleared by the ophthalmologist, it was all fine.

We went to India on our next scheduled mission trip as normal. While there, I complained of vision issues.

The bit where this changes from the narrative every other person around me would remember is the bit where I made that up near-entirely. I faked my way through the various eye tests and was prescribed reading glasses. While they weren't actually necessary, they did help (very mildly). I continued wearing them for reading for perhaps another year, and then my obsession with glasses faded, I wore them less and less, and they ended up in a drawer in my cupboard, never to see the light of day again for about seven years.

I was finding close sewing annoying recently, so I pulled them out, found them more helpful than they'd previously been and more than I actually expected them to be, and scheduled an eye exam, which I did not lie on this time.

The initial virus wasn't a lie. Some degree of the pain I experienced after the first very acute phase was a lie. The necessity for reading glasses which my parents paid for was probably a lie.

I have never told any of my medical team about these things. The eye stuff isn't the only part of my life I've lied about or exaggerated the problems of - there was that time I twisted my ankle and so played up my pain that my parents got it x-rayed a week later to check it wasn't broken, and I hobbled around on crutches for another week despite walking on it in private with no problem the day after the injury. There was another time I stopped moving my elbow for several days because I'd injured it in a minor fashion by tripping and landing badly out walking. Multiple times I've either fallen or almost fallen while climbing mountains or dicey bits near the summits, except it was more a piece of letting myself drop than actually falling.

I'm mostly past this. In fact even in scheduling an eye exam I was secretly terrified: am I faking this, too, and will they find out my eyes are perfectly fine? It was part of why, when I first went to the doctor about my anorexia, I was extremely careful not to mention the words eating, disorder or anorexia: thankfully she listened to me describe my symptoms as non-clinically as possible and drew the correct conclusion herself.

I don't tell doctors this, because I'm scared of the worst label of all: factitious disorder. They'd have good reason for it, too (though, again, in the past). I was a sickly kid, sure, but a non-zero percentage of that was self-caused because I was desperate for attention in some way I didn't know how to get healthily. I was the sick kid and that was all I knew.

I'm fairly sure I'm a pathological liar.

This is also why I don't go to hospital after self-harming, even in cases where I really should have (see: at least one genuine suspected artery hit, never mind the several arterioles I've grown blasé about), because it feels like a return to patterns I never articulated as a child because I was too ashamed. I couldn't explain why I was doing that, not in the ways I can now: only that I was desperately and unfathomably lonely, and was doing all I could think to fix that. But nobody saw it. All they saw was a quiet child born premature and remarkably healthy given how extreme everything had been.

The first time I self-harmed I did it for attention, and then years later the actual habit was formed in a sort of cry for help. (The cry for help did not work, but I sought help on my own, then discovered I'd opened a can of worms that was more like a hydra.)

So. Despise me if you will. I'm sure some people have suspected it somewhere along the way. I've mentioned it, briefly, once, to my figs, but never like this.

Sometimes I don't know what's truth and what's lies. Sometimes I lie for no good reason - even in things that mean I'll be forced to challenge some rule of my eating disorder, which is distressing, and which I wouldn't have to challenge if I was honest in the first place. Lies just slip out as easily as the truth, and the lines get mighty blurred.

Speaking of blurred, turns out that on the recent eye exam I did, I needed glasses. (Part time or full time as I tolerate - mostly for close work really, but once I get used to them I think full time is likely to be easier. The switch between having and not having glasses on is painful to my brain.) And I picked them up today and I'm wearing them right now. I'm not sure why my vision deteriorated, but given how these are definitely stronger than my previous prescription (though still mild) and they seem to suit, getting-used-to notwithstanding, I think it's true. I don't think I lied on this one.

also drink water x

YESSS i was literally in the same boat, it was a little slow but then i just could not stop watching it lol, im so glad you did and you liked it!!! who were your faves