By far the hardest thing I have ever said out loud is:
‘Mum, I can’t eat.’

There was a pause…
‘What do you mean, you can’t eat?’
‘I don’t know, I just can’t eat.’

It took me about a year to muster the courage to tell my mum that I had anorexia. Not because I was scared, but because I knew it was going to hurt her as much as it was hurting me, if not more.
It is a conversation that I can remember as if it were yesterday. It is a conversation I pray I never have to have with my own children. Should I ever be lucky enough to have them.

Living with anorexia is almost impossible to understand unless you have been there yourself. Much the same as any mental health problem. Anorexia is a disease, a killer, it consumes you and sucks all that is good about your life. It is indiscriminate, it will attack and feed off anyone. Boy or girl, black or white, young or old.

I have often tried to think how best to describe anorexia. As a kid I likened it to having a Dementor from the Harry Potter books constantly on your shoulder. Creatures that ‘glory in decay and despair, they drain peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them.’ Anorexia will leave you with just enough energy to fight the temptation to eat, to exercise obsessively.

Essentially, anorexia keeps you alive just enough to allow you to slowly kill yourself.

I don’t believe you ever truly recover from anorexia. You never fully get the Dementor off of your shoulder. Instead, you get better at dealing with it. Day by day, month by month, year by year. Most people eventually begin to gain weight and get healthier habits. In my case I gained 7 stone between the ages of 17 and 21. I doubled in weight. That was my journey. But does this mean I have recovered? No. Does this mean the journey to a healthier, happier life continues? Yes. Am I strong enough to keep fighting? Yes.

Anorexia kills 10% of the people whose life it enters.

Anorexia was the worst thing that ever happened to me. No question. But for the first time in my life, I now consider myself to be lucky enough I’m still here to continue that fight.

Ejaculation is the discharge of semen (normally containing sperm) from the male reproductory tract, usually accompanied by orgasm.

Verb – He is ejaculating all over her tits.

I’m going to write about a topic some people (myself included) sometimes find it uncomfortable to talk about. But it is important in my opinion to delve into it somewhat. That topic is, ejaculation a.k.a cumming, spunking, spaffing, shooting ones load, blowing ones beans (delete where applicable for your audience).

The first few years of my sexual life consisted of frantically using my allotted dial-up broadband evening time (20 mins) to find the most erotic image on the Nuts website to try and masterbate to. Sorry Mum, but I wasn’t innocently doing the BBC Bitesize GCSE Geography quiz. Sorry Dad, I wasn’t reading about Utd’s 3-1 win over Everton.

With the dawn of broadband, cheaper laptops and the discovery of proper pornographic websites (Youporn > Redtube > Pornhub (in that order)), my masterbation options were blown wide open (pun unintended). I was no longer bound by restrictions. I was free to wank when i wanted, whenever I wanted. Within legal and societal boundaries. And it was great. The myriad range of genres, the ability to load numerous videos up all at once in case one wasn’t enough. Not having to wait 10 minutes for 1 minutes worth of video buffering. It was a time to rejoice for every teen at the time. And quite possible the worst thing that ever happened to my sex life.

As I got older (lets say around 18), I begun to occasionally replace ‘Mum Teaches Daughter..’ with real life female women. With real life female breasts and real life female vaginas. Great, you might think. After 6 years of learning everything there is to know about how to have sex and all the different places you can finish and ‘what girls like’. However, things weren’t that simple…

As it turns out, if you are lucky enough to make it into a girls bedroom, her ‘busty’ 35 year old mum doesn’t just appear out of nowhere and proceed to demonstrate to her daughter how to suck your cock. Nor do a group of cheerleaders selling brownies appear at your door with the intention of letting you have a different kind of brownie altogether. And, if you can believe it, not every woman is going to be willing to offer payment of a different kind for her taxi/coffee/rent in lieu of cash.

And so I soon learned that the long hours of downloading and streaming I had littered my teenage years with wasn’t preparing me at all for real world. It was completely distorting my mindset, and in turn, completely fucking it up for me.

To describe my first sexual encounter as a disaster would be like describing the Titanic as unfortunate. It was absolutely abysmal. Not only could I not see anything (they keep the lights on in Porn) but nor could I feel anything and thus i’m pretty sure neither could she. Is it in? Not sure. Maybe now? Shit, now what do I do? There’s nothing in the training programme for intimacy, or kissing, or affection. Just keep moving around a bit, that will do it. Why isn’t she making the all the groaning noises they usually do? Shit she isn’t enjoying. Shit, I’m terrible at sex.

Now I’m sure that I’m not only person who can relate to such an experience. I hope. And I know I cannot put all the blame at the door of pornography. And sure, things have marginally improved since. Again, I hope. But I still find myself struggling to associate love, care and affection with ejaculation. And for this I do, at least partly, blame Pornography. In fact I am so wary of the fact that porn is not real life I completely try to avoid anything related to what you might be exposed to in such a video which in turns turns the whole experience into a mental struggle at times. Because there is no ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ between consenting adults. Some people like ‘it a bit rough’ and some people don’t, some people might like to include third, fourth and maybe even fifth people to the experience and some might not.

Porn unfortunately helps condition you to believe that all women want that or that that is the only way sex should be. And it is this that is the problem.

My sexual career is hopefully not over but it certainly hasn’t been helped by the long years searching the internet for a very unrealistic artificial replacement.

The devil makes work for idle hands.

Chaucer, c. 1450

With the above quote in mind, my first foray into the world of blogging has begun. I don’t expect it to turn out to be a great success but right now I need something to take my mind off everything else. Most notably drugs, alcohol and how truly fucking lost I am at this moment. Depending on how many posts you see, you should be able to determine just how much of a success it did indeed prove to be.

As I sat here, typing on a Mac, in a fancy, millennial coffee shop in SW London (I know), I have become everything I once hated and promised to myself I would never become. That being said, this is my third day of visiting coffee shops and generally trying to look busy and interesting. For ‘trying’, please also see ‘failing’. I am joined by various other 25-40 year olds who are I can only presume are doing the same as I, albeit better. Still, comfort in numbers. I am however, beginning to enjoy myself and beginning to wonder if I can somehow find some way in which someone would pay for me to come and sit here all day. Sample every variation of almond, oat, soya skinny macchiato that can possibly be made up and sold before someone realises there is fuck all difference. If only I could find something to let me live that dream.

I have always had an irrational dislike (more of a hatred really) for those who could enjoy the slower paced/freelance style of life that is an ever growing phenomenon in an ever increasingly fucking annoying society. Why don’t they have to do a miserable commute? Why don’t they have to sit in a fucking miserable office all day pretending to give a fuck about their job or what Jane did at the weekend? It is for this reason, I had always a contempt for the kind of people who ‘work from home’ and go for ‘lunchtime runs’ or do ‘hot yoga’ in the middle of the day. I hated these people because I was so fucking jealous. I want to do hot yoga at midday. Or something like it at least.

You may be wondering why it is then that I am sat here on a Tuesday afternoon and not, for example, doing some sort of job. This would be a fair question. The answer is one of a complicated manner and one I will address in a later blog, maybe. For now, all that is important is that I am trying to deal with the fact I am not at work and trying it all costs to avoid doing anything overly destructive.. thus I made the decision the best and indeed only place to do this is a coffee shop. A coffee shop in which the closest thing to contraband is full fat dairy milk. Imagine that, tolerating lactose.

So far it is proving to be a relative success. Barely checked twitter, barely swiped mindlessly through girls in a 5 mile radius of Balham and barely even thought about the fact that i’m not working and or/intoxicated. Maybe this whole blogging thing is the answer I’ve been looking so hard for all these years. Now all I need is few a few hundred thousand people to read it and we will be in business. Based on some of the other idiots in here, how hard can that be?

Keeping one’s mind busy when lacking any real stimulus is tough. Really tough. I’ve always thought it’s more difficult for people of a certain level of intelligence (emotional and intellectual). I’m not trying to say that I am to be included in this group. I guess I’ve just always been jealous of the people who are content with their lot. Happy to float through life without really making an impact on it in any way. Happy to take their 2 weeks Thomas Cook holiday with their ‘missus’ and, money being sufficient, a week somewhere with the ‘lads’. Happy to get a nice little semi-detached, 5 minutes away from where they grew up. Happy to do a 9-5 that doesn’t require much thought.

But then again, is that a such terrible way to live?

Yes, yes it is.

I’m not sure if this is too long or too short for a blog. I guess if it’s too long people won’t be reading this bit. In which case, this is all a waste of great words.

So around 40 minutes into my blogging career and I’m going to call it a day. Watch this space fellow internet bloggers/tech people. There’s a new daytime, mac wielding, coffee shopper in town.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton