“I think we need to ban the scale.”
My eating disorder has been out of control.
And my life factors have made it so much easier to go along with it. No money this week? Perfect. We don’t need food anyway. We can stretch out this last cup of rice and make it last a week.
But it’s so much more than that. There are times when I am in such horrible denial that I have a problem. People ask me if I’m okay because I don’t look well. Well, I ate the other day. Isn’t that enough? In those moments, I can’t process that no, going days without eating isn’t normal. I can’t process that, in that moment, I look like hell because I haven’t eaten.
And then I sit in therapy and battle with my therapist. Did I eat today? Well, I had coffee. Coffee is food. Just stop. What is the big deal? I am FAT. I don’t need food. I ate the other day. I am still alive and doing just fine. What is the big deal? No, I’m not about to pass out. It’s the lighting.
I was so angry at myself during our session on Monday because I had gained three pounds over the weekend. THREE POUNDS. I had lost 23 pounds in the last 17 days, but now that I gained 3 back, I only really lost 20. And I was pissed. I told my therapist I couldn’t eat this week until I made up for the gain.
“I think we need to ban the scale,” she said to me. “It’s becoming a problem.”
I weigh myself every morning. Obsessively. And I know that. It is a sick obsession, but I need it. I need to know how much I weigh because I need to know if I deserve to eat that day. Am I too fat today? Someone will notice that extra pound and judge me for eating that bowl of rice. I just can’t do it. We’ll try again tomorrow. It’s a sick and twisted cycle that I keep getting caught in.
I go through periods where I can manage quite well. And then there are times, like now, where my eating disorder becomes full-fledged and affects my everyday life. I sit in therapy sometimes, half out of it, unable to think, because I’m tired and haven’t eaten. And I can sense the frustration in my therapist as she tells me we can’t work through much if I come to therapy starved. I can’t work through my issues if I’m not fulfilling my most basic needs. And I know she’s right, but I keep fighting it. I’m fat. I don’t need food. Why doesn’t anyone understand this?
Why can’t I just have a normal relationship with food? Why did my mother have to point out how fat and disgusting I looked all of the time? “Pull your skirt down, no one wants to see your disgusting legs!”
Why did she have to complain about how much our food cost her? To make us feel guilty for having basic needs. How dare we have basic needs and take away from her. Why did she have to take it away so much? Why did she send me to school with nothing and then yell at me when school would call that I didn’t eat? Why was it my fault? She set me up for failure every time. Food could never be a simple, fulfilling experience.
Why did I only get food if I deserved it? Why did food always have to belong to her or my brother? Why did she turn food into a tool of manipulation?
Do you know what it’s like to be told you can only eat certain food once it goes bad? Do you know what that does to your sense of worth? It destroys it. Whatever sense of worth I had left was no longer. It didn’t seem to bother my father that he and I were treated like shit. He looked forward to when some of his favorite foods were nearing expiration.”I see those doughnuts are just two days away from expiring!” and he was so excited about it. I was horrified. I saw it as my mother’s way of telling us we were worth nothing. But hey, she can say she feeds us, and she wouldn’t be lying. Sick. It’s sick.
I’m not sure I have ever mentioned it here before, but I have a sixth sense for scoping out expired food and beverages. I can walk past something and just get this feeling that it is expired, and sure enough I check, and it is. It helped me a lot at my last job, as I cleaned out a lot of expired merchandise in their grocery department. I’ve also filled up baskets of expired foods while shopping at stores and dropped it at their customer service areas. I don’t know why it happens, it just does.
And I never made the connection before, until I was laying in bed last night and thought, have I trained myself to scope out expired food because that’s what I had to do at home? Have I done that without even realizing it? I don’t know how else to explain it. It makes me sad.
Deep inside, I still feel an immense sense of worthlessness, that I am in many ways unworthy of food, unworthy of the basic necessities of life. A piece of her is still inside of me, telling me I am worthless.
And now, thanks to all of this shit I’ve dealt with, I can’t even eat like a normal person. Every time I consider eating a piece of food, I have to go down an entire mental checklist. Do I deserve to eat today? Am I fat today? Is this going to make me fatter? Do I even want to eat this? Am I even hungry? Should I bother? I’m too fat to eat this. I can’t eat today. I’m bad. I didn’t earn this. I can’t.
I ate today. But only because I weighed myself this morning and lost six pounds in two days. The cycle continues.
What do I deserve?
I don’t know what I deserve.
I was abused for 29 years and 4 months of my life and then I ran away, thinking that would surely be the end of it.
But then I found myself in a situation that is in some ways eerily similar to my past life. And it sets off panic inside me. So much so that I chose to run away from my life last night.
I’m breaking down at work. I’m breaking down at school. I’m breaking down in the bathroom. I’m breaking down everywhere. And I don’t need to be.
There’s so much I need to write about. So much I need to think about. But I can barely write because I am without a computer right now. It seems like everything happens at once, and then God likes to throw you some random extra thing just to fuck with you a little more.
I’m hanging on by a very thin thread. Very. Thin. Thread.
As I sit here at my favorite coffee shop, waiting out of the cold before I start work in half an hour or so, I’m thinking to myself how long am I going to make myself suffer?
I am running on two hours of sleep. I’ve just used up the last of my gift card for a small iced coffee that I am hoping will be enough to get me through my next eight hour shift at work. I have a case report due for my psychopathology class today, and a discussion on consultation for my ethics class due as well. And I’m already running on empty. The sun has just risen, and I’m already dead.
And this isn’t the first time. I go through this over and over again, telling myself that things will change, that people will change. But nothing changes. I have to change. I have to realize that I have enough worth in this world and I have to make a change. I don’t deserve the life I’m leading right now.
I have so much going on. It may not seem like a lot to some, but it’s a lot to me. I work a job that I really happen to enjoy, with coworkers that I really have grown to appreciate, love, and care for. I don’t care if you think it’s not a real job just because I don’t make more than you. I wake up every morning and go to work and earn a paycheck. I write my blog every other week. That’s real work to me, too. It matters and it makes a difference in others’ lives. And I deserve to be able to write my articles with a clear mind and in a decent environment. I should be able to move forward with my advocacy work, but I keep falling behind because I’m so exhausted and stressed out from everything else going on in my life that could probably be avoided. And school. Grad school is a lot of work. And I bring my books and my laptop to work just so I can get a few moments of clear thinking in because I just never know what life will bring to me elsewhere.
I’m fucking tired. I deserve peace and solitude and respect and love and care and decency and all of those positive things, but my situation is holding me back from that and it needs to change.
I just need energy, strength, courage, and maybe a rich husband.
I hear everything.
Part of my PTSD makes me extremely alert to sounds in my environment.
This can be a good thing. It can keep me out of possibly dangerous situations and keep me safe. But it can also be a bad thing.
Yesterday at work, I became overstimulated. I was already stressed out by the amount of work I had, there were unknown people going in and out of the door right by me, a lot of voices, and an extremely loud vacuum. I just couldn’t take it anymore and I started to have an emotional reaction. I couldn’t focus on anything because there was just way too much going on around me and I felt unsafe. I almost wish I had earplugs just to shut myself off from it all. So yea, not a positive experience of the effects of PTSD.
I also have sensitive hearing. I will startle awake with any sound and stay awake if it continues. So then I end up laying in bed all night wide awake. At times, frozen in fear. I could be exhausted and still not sleep. You can’t sleep if it’s not safe.
And I’m exhausted. And I have so much schoolwork to do. And reading. And I come to work looking very obviously exhausted and my anxiety and panic attacks have been increasing. Even though I do great work, I’m an emotional mess.
I’m tired. I want to close my eyes and put ear plugs in and just not know anything that happens in my world anymore. Maybe that will be safer.
The D Word
I hate the d word.
Depression.
It came up recently because my primary doctor put Major Depression on my record. And I, of course, flipped my emotional shit.
Because that word has such painful connections for me.
And sure enough, for the last week, the memory of my father has been playing over and over in my head. I’ll give you a reason to be depressed. Pain. Pain was all I felt. And then I felt nothing at all.
I genuinely believe a piece of me died that night. In all these years I have never been able to get over it. I still can’t hear the word depressed without hearing him yell at me. I can still feel my head hitting the wall. I can still hear myself begging him to stop. Fifteen years ago and it still plays like it’s happening now.
And I’m afraid of that label. I responded in anger when my therapist asked me what was wrong. “I’m not depressed! I fucking hate her!”
My therapist made the connection rather quickly on why I was against that diagnosis.
“If I were to pick up the DSM right now and flip to, let’s say, Persistent Depressive Disorder, would you say you wouldn’t fit that diagnosis? You wouldn’t fit under Major Depressive Disorder?”
“No, because I function just fine and I’m not impaired so therefore I don’t qualify for those diagnoses. And while I’m at it, I don’t qualify for DID, either.”
“I’m not talking about functioning just yet. Aside from functioning.”
I hesitated. I grumbled to myself. “Fine,” I said, “I fit every criterion. Every. Single. Criterion.”
“And while you do get up in the morning and go to work, and go to school, you’re not functioning all the way like you think you are. You are good in some areas, and really severely impaired in others.”
“I’m not depressed.”
“We don’t have to call it that. We can come up with another word for it if you want. But you can’t deny that it doesn’t fit. And I know that you know that.”
Damnit. Sometimes I hate being smart. I do know that. But I want to live in denial. Let me live in sweet denial.
Denial. That’s a d word I can handle.
Fat and Starving
I got my blood test results back the end of last week.
I prepared myself in the week before I went to the doctor. I tried to eat like a normal person. I loaded up on vitamins.
It didn’t work very well. My vitamin D level is laughable (but in my defense, most people up north are vitamin D deficient). I foresee the megadose of 50,000 IU being re-prescribed on my next visit. Iron is low. A little surprised there, because I was taking my iron supplements in the week prior to the test. But I guess that wasn’t enough. I guess I took enough of my B vitamins because those were right on the border of being low.
I forgot about one thing that I couldn’t change in a blood test. Creatinine. I should have known better, because that’s what messed me up last time. My creatinine levels are consistently low. It’s a sign of malnutrition and in severe cases, starvation, because your body breaks down muscle mass to use for energy when you’re not consuming enough calories. You can’t take anything to cover that up on a test.
Why am I blaming the doctor? I am the one not eating right. I have horrible fucking eating patterns, and I know it. I am fully aware that my eating sucks.
A few weeks ago, my supervisor bought me lunch. I didn’t really want to eat, and denied it a few times, but eventually gave in because I people please. As I was eating in the back with my coworkers, supervisor, and manager, my manager said “I think this is the first time I’ve seen you eat.” Mind you, I’d been working there almost eight months by that time. But she was right. It was the first time she had seen me eat anything.
Another person told me I eat like a bear. I can eat a meal and then not eat for days, like I’m preparing for hibernation. And it doesn’t even affect me. I’m so used to not eating for long periods of time that it’s normal for me. I don’t feel hunger when I should feel hunger. I’m sure my body is desperately looking for sources of energy so I can function, but I don’t feel it. I’m going about my day just like normal. People offer me something to eat and I tell them no, I ate three days ago, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
And now this medication is not helping my already fucked up eating situation. I am constantly nauseated. The thought of putting anything in my mouth is sickening. Even water makes me want to throw up at times. I’ve eaten twice in the last week, and both ended with me getting terribly sick afterwards, which I know is because I hadn’t eaten, but I just use it as further fuel for rationalizing why I shouldn’t eat.
My eating issues are complex. I’ve talked about them before. I think that is what makes it so difficult to tackle. I think a lot of it stems from childhood, and not having food accessible at all times. Then being told I didn’t deserve food. I continue that tradition on myself today. Did I really work hard enough today? No? Then I really don’t think I deserve dinner. I’ll try harder tomorrow. God, it’s like my mother is living inside of my brain.
Then there are the issues with my weight, which I don’t understand because I really don’t eat enough to weigh what I do. I have a lot of sensory issues and refuse to eat a lot of foods, and end up with a very limited diet even when I do eat. There’s just a lot of shit against me.
Finances are also another issue for me, especially now. Food is the easiest thing to cut back on when money is tight. I can survive without food just fine. I can’t survive without money. I’m scrambling to get my paperwork together so I can get into summer session at grad school because I need the financial aid to live on – if I don’t get that, I’ll need to be cutting back on more than just groceries. And unfortunately, I can’t get assistance with food because I am not a legal renter and have no proof of residence anywhere.
I self-sabotage when it comes to eating. I buy food I know I won’t eat because that will prevent me from buying more food. I bought pasta because it was 50 cents. I hate pasta. But I tell myself I can’t go grocery shopping because I still have pasta in the house, and I won’t eat the pasta until I am absolutely desperate.
I think I frustrate my therapist. It is a constant battle over food. She thinks I need to eat. I tell her I am fat and that I’m not withering away any time soon. Then she reminds me that means nothing, because even the blood tests show otherwise. Then I tell her that I’m not hungry. She tells me I still should try to eat. I tell her I ate last Friday.
Why can’t I be normal?
Trapped Air
I’m going to write several blog posts because the topics are so varied, and I really don’t want to mash them into one giant clusterfuck of a blog post.
I’ve been feeling kind of shitty physically lately. I assume it’s because I am adjusting to the new respiratory medications (even though they are not new, I’ve just been off medications for the last several months because I’ve been sans doctor). Or I could be getting sick, because one of the unpleasant side effects of corticosteroid medications is that they suppress your immune system, making you more susceptible to illness. Isn’t that funny how that works?
Last week, my doctor explained to me how air was getting into my lungs, but wasn’t getting out – instead, getting trapped inside. For normal people, breathing out should not require any effort. For me, it requires a massive amount of effort, and even then, air is still trapped inside.
As I thought about this more, I couldn’t help but find it so similar to the rest of my life’s experiences. I took in trauma after trauma, and then it got trapped inside my brain and now those memories can’t really get out.
I was literally trapped in my house for most of my life. I was trapped in a family I didn’t want.
Why is “trapped” a recurring theme in my life? Trapped body, trapped memories, now trapped air.
I’m still in a little bit of denial. Once I moved, I just told myself all of my breathing problems were because I was living in filth. That was a possibility. My family was not clean. There was dust, mold, mildew, and bugs, aside from a menagerie of poorly taken care of animals (including five cats all sharing two small litter boxes). I was in and out of the hospital since my early teen years with pneumonia and unstable O2 labels.That was my norm. I thought that would all disappear once I moved. But it didn’t. Because it’s a disease. The damage is already done.
On a positive note, I have been smoking a tiny bit less. Still smoking. But less. In all honesty, it’s probably the medication at work, because I have not been making a conscious effort to do so.
On a less positive note, it’s really annoying to be talking to someone and randomly cough up a string of mucous.
Panic with a side of panic, please.
I had a horrible week last week. Really, these last few weeks have been fucking atrocious. But last week was a monster all its own.
I ended up spending St. Patrick’s Day night in the local emergency room with a bunch of people who got a little too carried away drinking. There’s nothing like being surrounded by deluded drunks, angry nurses, and the permeating smell of vomit.That’s exactly the opposite of how I wanted to spend my night.
I wanted to be at home sleeping. I was at home, lying in bed, preparing to go to sleep for the night when shitstorm 2.0 began.
I go to bed early. Hell, sometimes I’m in bed while it’s still light out. I have a horrible sleep cycle even when my sleeping is relatively stable; I sleep an hour or two, then wake, then sleep an hour or two, then wake. I have to wake up at 4:30 AM because I work early. When most people are eating dinner, I’m in bed reading a book and getting ready to sleep.
So anyway, I did not want to have any interactions or conversations. It was already past my bedtime. This really should have been respected. I was available during the day, but no, it had to be when I was tucked in bed. I politely declined a conversation. More than once. Initiate shitstorm. Screaming, yelling, cursing, name-calling, kicking, punching, whatevering my door. Well, I guess I’m not getting any sleep. And now I’m irritated, and upset, and frustrated, and scared. Violated boundaries. Flying off the handle.
It’s hard to have a conversation with someone who is in an emotionally volatile state. I tried, but it wasn’t working very well. The entire time my heart was pounding and my internal world was imploding, until I finally broke and had a full-blown panic attack. I don’t even really remember everything that happened during the attack. I guess there were police there. I remember the paramedic and the ambulance ride. I remember being absolutely fucking exhausted and in fear that they were going to hospitalize me.
But they didn’t. Just an ER observation, thankfully. Got home eventually, laid in bed with my mind racing despite my exhaustion. Finally fell asleep only to wake up an hour later to shower and walk to the bus stop for work. Let’s just pretend like nothing ever happened. I’ve been so good at that all of my life. Nothing’s wrong here. Move along now.
I realized while I was waiting outside of work that I still had my hospital bracelet on. I was so exhausted, I didn’t even care. I just wanted to get through work. Somehow I needed to get through work. I’m surprised I managed to walk the mile without passing out. I was fortunate in that.
Work started out fine. I was visibly exhausted, but I still got my work done like a boss. I even finished my work early and started helping my supervisor out with another task. As my work day got closer to ending, I felt my anxiety getting worse. I was more on edge. I had less than an hour left of work and it just hit me. I started hyperventilating and walked to the back where no one would see me. I sat on a stool and tried to catch my breath, but after a minute, I knew this wasn’t asthma and that it wasn’t going to get better.
I started to panic even more, struggling to catch my breath and crying. My coworker heard me and went to get help, and before I knew it I was surrounded by my very concerned coworkers. I think I scared some of them. They weren’t sure what to do, if they should call 911. I told them no. I quite literally had just gotten out of the hospital hours before, I did not want to go back; that would have surely resulted in an inpatient hospitalization.
Someone brought me a bottle of water. My manager came and tried to calm me down. I was such a mess. I cried all over the desk, had snot all over my face, couldn’t sit still, couldn’t calm down. I don’t even know how long the attack went on for. But I know my manager stayed with me the whole time, rubbing my back and telling me I was safe and that it was going to be okay.
I eventually calmed down enough so that we could walk to the lounge. I still felt like I couldn’t breathe, but I wasn’t hyperventilating. I must have apologized to my manager at least 100 times, and I’m not even exaggerating. She continued to try to calm me down, asked me what happened to trigger it, and told me I didn’t need to apologize. I still kept crying. I felt so bad for taking up her time (it was at least an hour by this time). She stayed with me through the whole thing, until I eventually passed out sitting at the table from exhaustion.
I woke up a couple of hours later, still exhausted, though my mind was kind of blank. I stayed sitting there for a while, not really wanting to leave. I was in a safe place. My manager checked in on me, asked me if there was anything I needed or wanted, but I told her it was okay. She had already done enough. And she had a shitload of her own work to do.
I knew I had a panic attack, but didn’t really remember everything that happened during it. Coworkers had actually filled me in on some things that I didn’t quite remember. I got through it. And I realized that I had a really amazing group of coworkers who went above and beyond in their responsibilities, because anyone else I’ve dealt with would have just called 911 and been done with it.
I ended up staying at work for a while. I sipped on water and tried to keep myself awake. But I knew I couldn’t stay at work forever. I worked up the energy to gather my things. I found my manager on my way out and thanked her. She asked if I was going to be okay – and I gave my standard “I’m okay” response. She gave me her number and said if I ever needed to just hang out somewhere, I could call her. She must not know I don’t ever call people.
I wish I was okay. But as I walked through the parking lot in front of my workplace, I felt myself panicking again. Fast, shallow breathing. Shaking. This was not happening again. Part of me wanted to turn around and go right back to work. I talked to myself, focused on my breathing, tried to remain calm as I walked across the highway to the shopping center. I convinced myself this place was safe. And I stayed there for a few hours, until the last bus of the day came. Then I knew I had to go home.
You would have thought I was practicing labor breathing exercises the whole way home. I sat on the bus consciously breathing out loud, telling myself I was going to be okay. I walked the rest of the way home, unlocked the door, went straight to my room and right to bed. I just couldn’t deal with anything else that day.
I’m still planning my days waiting for another panic attack to hit. I stay places where I feel safe. I try to distract myself whenever I can. I’m living on edge once again.
I need to pee.
I made it a good three and a half minutes into my therapy session before breaking down into tears.
I was already feeling miserable. My foot was hurting so badly that I had to wear sandals, which I hate doing. I was tired. I was still angry about the doctor’s visit.
My therapist asked something about the doctor, I forgot exactly what it was. All I know is that is what started my emotional spiral.
“I hate her. I don’t need to see her again.” I turned away and started crying. My therapist sensed right away that something was wrong and gave me the box of tissues. She asked me what was going on. “Nothing,” I said, as usual. “It’s not nothing, I can see that very clearly.”
“She put COPD on my medical record. I don’t have COPD. I’m only 30. Why would she do that?”
Then I started crying even more, this time out of sadness as much as out of anger. My therapist knew about the COPD diagnosis, but didn’t really know what COPD was, or the severity of it; she’d only ever heard of the term in passing.
I told my therapist that this wasn’t the first time I heard the diagnosis, but it was the first time a doctor made it official on record. For some reason, there was something about seeing it on paper that made it sink in for me. And I hated it. I see COPD as a slow death sentence. There’s no reversing the damage. You’re basically fucked and doomed to a slow, suffocating premature death.
My therapist was doing her best to make me feel better. She said we had focused so much on preparing for how I would handle the actual visit, that we never went over how I would handle whatever medical problems may come up. She talked about how medical science is always improving and coming up with new advancements and treatments, and that a few years down the road, maybe there will be something for COPD and I could live a better life.
But I wasn’t having it. In my mind, I was envisioning a life on oxygen and a death before age 45. I spent 29 and a half years in hell only to free myself and experience a different hell altogether, for the remainder of my life.
I eventually stopped crying only to continue directing my anger at my doctor, finding other reasons to hate her. Then I started to get overwhelmed and stopped myself. My therapist asked what was going on.
“I need to pee” I said. It was true, I did need to pee, but it wasn’t why I had changed.
My therapist told me to go ahead and use the restroom. I told her no, that I would be okay. She told me again that I could go and come back and continue therapy. I said no, saying that my feet hurt and I didn’t want to get up.
“Well, you can’t pee in my couch.”
“I’m not going to. I’m fine.” This was not the first time we’ve had this battle. The humor quickly turned to seriousness. I clearly had to pee (my legs were shaking) despite my absolute denial and insistence that I was fine. My therapist asked me why this was so hard for me. I told her nothing was hard for me, that I was just fine. She asked, in a firm tone, why I couldn’t assert my needs.
I quickly responded without even thinking, shouting “because my needs don’t matter.”
And then I cried. Again. Because I realized the gravity of what I just said. And because I’m an emotional basket case. I was letting my mother’s voice overpower everything. I couldn’t have needs then. I’m still believing that now. It wasn’t about pee. It was about so much more.
On a positive note, I did eventually get up to pee. But only because I had made a horrible joke (that made both of us laugh) and ended up nearly peeing myself. When I came back, I asked if we could talk about the weather. I no longer wanted to talk about the COPD or the fuckery of my life. I just wanted to talk about the weather. She asked if we could talk about this again in the next sessions. I told her it was fine. I just need some time. It’s a lot to take in and I don’t think either of us were prepared for this.
My therapist reminded me that there are people who care about me. She cares about me, my other therapist cares about me, my coworkers care about me. The problem is me caring about me. I fall short when it comes to that, and I know that. My therapist reminded me that we all eventually die. Even if I only have 10, 15, or however many years left, I can still do great things. It doesn’t have to be a life spent in anger and bitterness. But I’m not there yet.
Let me be angry and bitter for a little.
Life Without Hurt 