Born This Way? Trigger – Self Harm talk.

First I’d like to say thank you – so much support and kindness has been poured out to me through this blog and your comments. Your words DO make a difference.

Today I thought I’d just do a quick, short post – or my version of short, which seems to be other people’s version of ‘normal length!’

Reading Gel’s recent update on her chicks, and how they are adapting to being able to go outside after being weaned inside – I had a sudden light-bulb moment.

Gel’s chicks have never had a chicken ‘mamma’. Instead, Gel is their mamma. And she’s done a good job. But Gel can never teach them chook things like a chicken mamma could. Like dust-bathing. Dust-bathing seems to be a behaviour that chickens are born just ‘knowing’. It’s natural to them. It keeps their plumage looking good, and free of mites (and looks like fun, too!)

Let’s have a bit of a demonstration here!

 

What does this have to do with my blog?

Well, nobody taught Gel’s chicks to dust-bathe. They just instinctively did it. They were born with the instinct to perform those behaviours.

The first time I ever self harmed, I didn’t know that people even did such thing. I’d never heard or read about it, I had never encountered the term ‘self harm’. The closest I had come to that, was knowing that people did commit suicide – and thinking of wrist slicing – but apart from actually actively trying to kill oneself, I never imagined that anyone would harm themselves on purpose.

I still don’t understand what led me to do it. If I remember correctly the trigger was piercing my finger on the sharp edge of a tin and seeing the blood. But I don’t think I will ever understand how from that, I had the idea of actually causing harm to myself.

It freaked me out! And I hid it. From that day on, long sleeves became part of my daily clothing. Nobody would have ever known, had I not at some stage blurted it out to a counselor at uni. I was freaked out by what I was doing and asked her if I was crazy. To my shock and surprise, she calmly asked me how many stitches I had needed! I hadn’t needed medical care – I only scratched at that point – but to realize other people did that nearly blew my mind.

I wonder, looking back, why that lady didn’t bother to seize on that admission as a way in and ask me what was actually wrong. She brushed it off as though people did all the time and we never spoke of it again. It went secret again for years until it got to the point where I had to get stitches and no longer could keep it hidden.

Likewise, nobody ‘taught’ me to starve or not drink enough. It’s a behaviour that came naturally too, aside from my mother’s own abuse of food as punishment, I remember feeling some sort of inability to eat despite being ravenous and liking the food at age 4, and hiding the food to get out of eating it. At 5, I had weekly IV’s due to being so severely dehydrated from my refusal to drink, even when it was a green rehydration solution that I actually quite liked.

I was a very ‘goody-two-shoes’ sort of kid, so I wasn’t doing it to be ‘bad’ or to get attention. I only wanted to please my mother. Refusing to eat or drink definitely accomplished the opposite of that. So it wasn’t something I was doing because I wanted to, either.

I do think that many of us are born genetically ‘wired’ to develop these behaviours. I believe I was born with the eating disorder, which in turn, was then triggered by events during my life. It’s also been found that starvation can itself trigger an eating disorder – and I can see that being possible since I had a history of difficulties from childhood.

Maybe eating disorders are leftovers from a day when we needed to adapt to survive times of famine? I think  Shan Guisinger‘s  theory is very interesting.

From Adapted to Flee Famine: Adding an Evolutionary Perspective on Anorexia Nervosa:

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is commonly attributed to psychological conflicts, attempts to be fashionably slender, neuroendocrine dysfunction, orsome combination ofthese factors. Considerable  research reveals these theoriesto be incomplete. Psychological and societalfactors accountforthe decision to diet but not for the phenomenology of the disorder; theories of biological  defects fail to explain neuroendocrine findings that suggest coordinated physiological mechanisms. This article presents evidence that AN’s
distinctive symptoms of restricting food, denial of starvation, and hyperactivity are likely to be evolved adaptive mechanisms that facilitated ancestral nomadic foragers leaving depleted environments; genetically susceptible individuals who lose too much weight may trigger these archaic adaptations. This hypothesis accounts for the occurrence of AN-like syndromes in both humans and animals and is consistent with changes observed in the physiology, cognitions, and behavior of patients with AN.

Also check out a letter she wrote to Harriet Brown – some good reading.

I’d love to know what you think!

Honesty Amidst Setbacks

I find it incredibly difficult to be completely honest about how I’m really going. Especially on such a public forum as this blog.

There are perhaps a couple of people I’m always totally honest with – and that is because they are part of my treatment team. Being honest with them is obvious to me. They can’t help  me unless they know what’s happening! Scarily enough there are many people with eating disorders who cannot be honest with their treatment team – in fact, it seems to be very common in the earlier stages of being so unwell, or when the person is lacking in insight. Insight makes a huge difference in this fight – being able to understand that you are unwell, and why, and that the people around you are trying to help you, not persecute you.

It’s quite obvious in the blog world, actually, to come across people who blog about their supposedly ‘healthy lives’, but don’t have the insight to acknowledge the elephant in the room, their eating disorder – and the fact that they are becoming more and more unwell and more people every day are speaking out in concern for them. I can never understand some of these people when they so blatantly ignore the concern and pretend they are fine, or worse, they are well - and it’s often hard to find respect for them. There are so many people, especially younger and more vulnerable people – who read these sites and take on board the messages these sick bloggers are putting out there. If there is one thing I would absolutely loathe myself for, it would be inadvertently causing or triggering someone else’s eating disorder.

But despite it being so easy for me to stand in judgement – we often forget that eating disorders are by nature, an illness in where the person suffering from it often lacks that insight or is in heavy denial. That they often act in ways that infuriate, irritate, frustrate, people around them. That deceit is a classic behavior  born of shame and fear and the need to hang on to their disorder. Being sick doesn’t make someone bad. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been thought of and told that I was a bad person, because I was too unwell to just eat and keep it down and behave. And I would have done anything at those times to ‘behave’ so that I could stop hurting, worrying or frustrating people – I tried with all my heart to do that. It wasn’t something I was capable of doing at that stage.

One of the main reasons I find it so difficult to be honest with people about how I’m really going, is deep shame. Long before I had the foggiest notion that I actually had an eating disorder, I saw people with anorexia on current affairs shows on TV and just was heartbroken for them, and frightened for them that they were so fragile and that they would die – and I couldn’t understand at all why they were doing that to themselves. It shocked me to think they had actually chosen to do that to themselves and then to continue to do so in the face of imminent death and the pleas of their loved ones. I just could not get my head around it.  I thought they were also incredibly vain, to be killing themselves to just be skinny – I didn’t even see the appeal of being skinny. All my life, I had found skinny quite ugly. Instead, I strived to be strong, and to be able to dance. I was extremely proud of being able to dance at the level that I had gotten to, and at what my body could do. Even as a young child, It had been obvious to me that the worst dancers in my class were the skinny girls, who just couldn’t get anything right and always looked gangly and out of place. Conversely, the biggest girl was also the best dancer and always front and centre. She was bouncy and full of energy and personality.

And I have to admit – I thought they were brats. Sick, scared, lost, hurting brats, but brats nonetheless. I thought they were selfish. I thought they were manipulating everyone who cared for them in order to get attention and mollycoddling. I truly did.

So when I finally had to admit just after my first hospital admission for anorexia (spent protesting that I had needed to lose the weight and that I wasn’t at all like the ‘real anorexics’) that I had anorexia too, it brought incredible shame and disbelief down on me. I couldn’t believe I had an eating disorder. I who had been overcome with fury when other class mates had whispered “That’s what Fiona has” during a biology class discussion about anorexia, who had disgustedly retorted “that’s what spoilt vain brats do, and I would never do something that stupid” had indeed, done exactly that. Talk about irony!

Now I know better. I know that’s not true at all. I’ve never wanted the attention having an eating disorder has brought me. And I didn’t have anyone to mollycoddle me – my family has never cared. My dad, when he tracked me down a few years into my hospital admissions, tried his best, even offered initially for me to move in with them in the Far North – but I was too scared to, at that stage he was a complete stranger to me. And I didn’t want to impose on him and his family. I didn’t want to bring my problems into their world, they didn’t deserve that. He persevered with me – and I stayed with him a week or two here and there over the eight years I knew him – it was such a blessing and a privilege to be given a second chance at having a real family. I loved my stays with them – I was made welcome, treated with kindness and respect, and my little sister was always all over me which warmed my heart – I loved her dearly. (Still do.)

Unfortunately, despite wanting more than anything else to be able to just ‘stop’ being unwell when I was with them, I couldn’t. I tried so hard! I usually lasted at best a few days. In those years, I wasn’t even really able to eat ‘normal’ food, so great was my fear, so I usually had my own food and created meals to eat with them, mostly dinner meals. I tried to make these meals look large and as close to ‘normal’ as I could – hoping that my family would just think I had other preferences and was feeding myself satisfactorily and not worry or be sad that I couldn’t enjoy some of their delicious meals. I wanted them to believe I was happy. I didn’t want them to worry at all. I failed.

A huge pile of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, and a million carrots (nibbled mostly during the evenings when I just badly wanted to EAT everything in sight) does not look like a good nutritious meal to anyone. Neither does a pile of brown, terribly overcooked cabbage. I only fooled myself. It was plainly apparent to anyone that I was sick, and even when I wasn’t staying with them, my dad worried. He would phone me (in the days I was still trying to communicate via phone) and ask me how I was doing, and I’d tell him I was going okay, hanging in there. Unfortunately he could tell just by my voice that I wasn’t well at all, he later told me, and instead reached out to someone he thought was a friend of mine – who had given him her details at a time he’d visited me in hospital and she had been there. She wasn’t a friend – I thought she was too for a while, she turned out to be an enemy – she fed my dad the nastiest of lies – told him my eating disorder was to hurt him, to ‘get back at him’ for not being around when I was younger. That it was for attention. That I was dying, when I was very sick but definitely not on my death bed (she also tried to force me to make a will once visiting me – and got promptly kicked out, who does that?!) She also contacted my sister, who was in her very early teens at the time, perhaps even a tween still at that stage – this forty-something year old (really)parent’s basement-dwelling woman, friended a kid. And fed her lies about me too. Told her that if I loved her, really loved her, I wouldn’t be doing this to myself, and that my dad died of cancer – melanoma – because of the stress I had caused him.

I have deeply regretted that I wasn’t honest with my dad about how I was really going, no matter how unwell I was. If I was honest, he wouldn’t have felt the need to ask someone else how I really was, and he might never have been fed such a pack of lies that probably coloured his views of his own daughter, nor would my little sister have been fed the lies that led to her gradually hating me more and more until the last straw was me actually doing something deplorable – shoplifting binge food and getting caught on the morning of dad’s funeral – for which she cannot forgive me. She hates my guts now. What’s more, I just reinforced the lies by what I did. Shoplifting is the thing I hate perhaps most about me. I haven’t done it for a while now – but I haven’t let my guard down and I never will. There have been so many times in my life that I have stopped, for years sometimes – and then fallen down that hole again. The urge to grab food is always, always so strong, even more so when I’m upset, stressed, unwell and definitely, hungry. And the bingeing and purging is the most horrible thing ever, I wish with all my heart I’d never started down that road, a road I feel unable to break free from now. I would never have struggled as much as I have, and I would never have shoplifted food – something so, so wrong to me.

I fear judgement so much. All my life, I have been harshly judged, by my own family, and by society. My own family (apart from dad) never made any attempts to understand me. When I got out of there  they didn’t know me. They had had nearly 17 years living with me from my birth to get to know me – and they didn’t have a clue. This was because they simply did not care.

Everything in my life was something I was judged for. My mother spent my life berating me for all the good things she did do for me – telling me endlessly that if only she didn’t ‘have’ to take me to ballet, the car wouldn’t be wearing out, she’d have more money for other things, she would have more time to spend with my brother and sister. She would have been able to finish her studies and be working now. She would have been a successful artist. She would have fixed our filthy, unfinished house up.  It didn’t matter that she took me to ballet perhaps 3 times a week, which took about 2 – 3 hours at a time tops. That is not the lions’ share of the week. She had all day that we were at school to be an artist, to do her schoolwork, to clean up or fix things and so on – and she instead would sit around watching soapies on TV or working on the growing pile of receipts she kept to create another bill to send our dad of money she wanted to demand from him. She spent all day with my older sister who was home all day too, they were like best girlfriends rather than  mother and daughter. She had time to take my brother to soccer and martial arts and basketball. They weren’t starving for attention or time with her.

The last couple of years I lived there she didn’t even have to take me to ballet or pay a cent for me aside from absolute basics – food and clothing. My ballet was paid for by scholarships and sponsorships I’d won, and I got myself there using public transport. My days were long – a school day for me was up at 5am, chores, breakfast, cold bath, try to iron dry damp clothes I had to wear. Catch bus at 5.55am. Transfer to train, for nearly an hour. Transfer to another bus to school. We started dancing at 8am with Limber, followed by usually ballet class, then jazz or tap or repertoire or pointe or contemporary or something else afterwards. I danced during the class breaks, and danced afterwards til everyone had showered so that I was in there mostly alone to avoid the bullying that was happening all those years. Showered and caught our bus to school to begin academic work at about 2pm, going through til 4.30pm. Then reversing the transport home, at 6.30pm where there were more chores, homework, and endless family battles to navigate. I would practice most nights and end up either lying in bed all night exercising or falling asleep at about 3am at my desk, to repeat the next day. This was six days a week, there was no time for me to get a job and between the ages of 14 to 16, I was still extremely immature and probably wouldn’t have been able to find anyone to employ me anyway. (I did try – volunteering during my holidays and canvassing local businesses for work with my resume.) My mother, who was paid a single parent pension, an allowance for me for my disabilities, and maintenance from dad – refused to supply most basics for me aside from food – and very cheap food at that, usually buying food for the family and cheaper food just for me. She even refused to buy me a school uniform, and the school supplied me with one out of their spares cupboard, kept for accidents, four sizes too big and stained. One of my school teachers helped me tape the fronts of my shoes together and paint over the tape so they stayed on my feet. I also tried to keep my shoes together by nailing nails into the sole from the inside – and ended up walking painfully on them all day as they worked themselves upwards. (And I was grateful – it was a uniform, just like everyone else had.)

My point is, my mother was not only needlessly cruel, she seemed to blame everything on me. I was just a kid, and one who had been tightly controlled too, so that I was very emotionally immature, and she was my mother. My PARENT, who was meant to feed me, clothe me, look after me. Instead, she taught me that I was some horrible, unworthy and inherently wrong creature not worthy of what other people took for granted, and the bullying I suffered due partly to  my constant scruffiness (especially during ballet school where most of the others were from affluent backgrounds) and partly due to my ineptness socially, just reinforced this. I grew up deeply ashamed of myself as a person in every way.

My own family never cared enough to really find out who Fiona was, and they made it clear I wasn’t even worthy of being understood or accepted,  and so they certainly didn’t even try to learn about or understand eating disorders. They believed every stereotype there was – to them, my eating disorder was a sign of me being the spoilt naughty selfish girl they’d always told me I was. In later years they accused me of using a ‘made up illness’ to basically be a lazy bludger, never working, never achieving anything but sponging off the taxpayer, and this stung deeply. They of all people, knew how hard a worker I was, and how I surpassed all expectations, winning a local Australia day award among other acknowledgements for my striving and perseverance. They used their words and their cruelty to basically ally themselves with the eating disorder and strip me of the last vestiges of self – invalidating my past, and stripping me of even being able to hang on to knowing I was a hard worker and an achieve who was capable of better things than this, or that it wasn’t laziness that had stopped me in my tracks. That my whole life hadn’t all been a complete failure.

It makes sense to me that if your own family judges you so harshly, what can you expect from people who don’t know you? I went straight from leaving home into the arms of the man who raped and stalked me for years. It was a very familiar situation for me – and it felt like all I deserved. I’ve met quite a number of people who were more than happy to feed my insecurities like the so-called ‘friend’ who lied to my dad and little sister, and a certain number of ignorant people who don’t seem to realize that not everyone is born with the privileges they take for granted, that some of us have to really fight to even survive let alone enjoy the milestones that they are assured of achieving. In my own heart, I feel like the biggest failure ever, I reflect on my life and see missed opportunities, on so much hard work thrown away, and so much support and belief from people I failed in some way – let down, failed to meet their expectations, or cut off. I feel as though at 35, I haven’t even achieved as much as most teenagers have, and that there is no way I will ever be able to catch up to them, let alone those of my own age group.

I’m just so deeply ashamed.

I’m reminded constantly by those who have taken the time to get to know me, and who genuinely care, that I have come a long way, that I can’t afford to compare myself with anyone else, because nobody else has had to fight the same things I have in my life – same as there are so many people out there who have faced circumstances I have no idea of and for me to judge them on their face value at any point of time that I come in contact with them would be so wrong, and totally belittling how much they HAVE achieved – just in a life completely different and therefore with different milestones and measures of progress to mine. And yet, I am so scared of others judging me harshly and finding me a failure, a loser, that I judge myself the most harshly of all.

And here is where honesty comes into the equation – I’m already ashamed of the fact that I have an eating disorder. My shame when I am struggling more than usual or I relapse is many times greater than that. Throw in the harsh judgement towards people with eating disorders that I often come across online, particularly if they blog about it, and the shame of having fallen from my position of being able to say “Here I am, I am proof that a chronic severe eating disorder doesn’t have to kill you or mean you can’t turn things around.” and most importantly of all – “There is hope” – and it’s extremely hard to face up to people and be honest with you all about the fact that I’m not doing all that well any more.

I don’t consider myself to be fully in relapse – but I’m borderline. I’ve slowed down, perhaps stopped the weight loss, but I can’t seem to get it to go back up again – and what’s more, am sitting just above what used to be my discharge weight from hospital back when times were bad. And as always, ED brain has taken over – I struggle to keep hydrated, struggle to eat, struggle with bingeing and purging. Physically I have lost a lot of strength and the chronic pain I worked so hard to rid myself of is plaguing me again. And I’m so angry at myself – I know how hard I worked to get where I was – and now, I’m no better than I was on leaving hospital during those bad  years again. I am so disappointed in myself, and so scared not only for myself, but more so, for Shalimar. What if I get so sick again, what will become of her? I don’t want to send her back to the pet motel all the time – she’s getting old now. She deserves so much better than this. And I don’t want to miss out on sharing a single moment of her life with her. I missed too much of her life when I was in hospital. I’ve let her down, most of all. She depended on me and I am not living up to those responsibilities.

And I’ve let you down, the people who read my blog. It was supposed to be a journey of hope, reclaiming a LIFE, of proving that just because everyone has expected you to die, doesn’t mean you have to.

Here is where I am going to take on board my own message. I am going to believe in hope, and I am going to remind myself that it is always within our power to change our behaviors and our thoughts, if we desire to enough. The more I walk on my chosen trail in a forest, the more worn and visible that trail becomes, and the less visible the trail I’m no longer walking on becomes as nature reclaims it and grows over where it used to be. Same with my mind – the more I practice new ways to think and new behaviors, the more natural they become to me, and the less natural the old ones will be, too. It’s called creating new neural pathways. It’s also called not giving up, being stubborn, and fighting to live – all things true of me.

I have so much to live for – even more now. I have less than two months to go until I am officially a uni student again. And I’m finally realizing that my hopes and dreams and goals these days  might be vastly different, but they are still things I’m able to be passionate about, and my life still can be for good, rather than have been pointless.

I’m not going to live up to the expectations of the people who taught me I would never be anything more than a loser.

I’m going to fulfil my own expectations – and those of the people who truly care and want the best for me. I’m going to fight and make this life truly count.

Thank you for reading, I hope to be able to bring a more positive post next time.

 

(Image sources: 1, 2)

Ugly Beauty Whinge

My eating disorder is an ugly beast of an illness. It’s made me old, dried out my skin and hair, ruined my teeth. Sucked my bones of nutrients, damaged my organs, and stolen the light from my eyes, the smile from my lips.

When I’m acutely ill, there is absolutely no point in painting my face, or dressing with style. Instead I dress to camoflague a body that shocks and disgusts and incites passerby to stare and spit. I don’t believe that clothes  ’look better on the hanger’ than on a fleshed body – as many claim they do – but the hanger sure beats my body. My body makes clothing ugly.

I don’t want to stand out in any way. I seek to hide. To slip by unnoticed. The hell I live is beyond the imagination of most who haven’t been there, and I don’t want them to glimpse my shame and despair, lest I infect them in some way – pull them in and drown them with me.

It is not a glamourous life.

I have quite a number of friends with eating disorders, severe eating disorders, just like mine, who have modelled, or do still model. Or aspire to model. I see their facebook pages every day – I see the continuous stream of photographs. Smiling, laughing, posed to perfection.

Here the wind whips my hair. Here I shake my hair as I laugh joyously. There I sink my teeth into a huge dribbling wedge of melon. I sip delicately from a glass of wine, or twirl on pointe shoes. I am glamourous in evening gown, or I’m an adorable pixie in a summery dress that shows off every single rib. Even in the dark emo shots, I am a glorious ethereal creature. Everyone wants to be me. 

Yes, even me. I have lived with my eating disorder for most of my life.  I know first hand the utter hell they live, even without having read their cries of utter distress on a daily basis – and yet, I want their lives so badly. I want to look like that. To be so beautiful. So glamourous, so perfect. To have people want to photograph me, to make inspirational posters from my own likeness. I want to look amazing in every single thing I wear no matter whether it is a hessian sack or there not be much more than bones to hang it on. I want to go to parties.. and I hate parties, I freaking hate them.

We are fighting the same illness – and yet we are so completely different. I know the majority of this I see is a sham – it’s a mask. A carefully maintained and perfected facade that hides the fact that these girls have shattered bodies, shattered dreams, shattered lives and shattered psyches. There are many ways of hiding – hiding in full view can be as successful as being completely out of sight.

I don’t understand these girls. And I doubt they understand me. But they make this monster look desireable. They make me want it – someone who has been there. What must those who have not yet experienced the reality of this think? I’m not talking about taking care of one’s appearance. I’m talking about flaunting something deadly, fully in the knowledge of what message is sent to others.

It is sweet deadly poison.

 

Happy Easter from Melbourne

Sometimes when you have lost all hope, hope is reignited like a flame in the darkness.

I have Missy to thank for that, today. Go check out her post if you are in need of hope, too.

And Missy’s hope was reignited by Sooz, and Melis. Two very special ladies, I agree a million times over. Sooz, no matter how much she herself struggles, has been a constant source of hope and support for me. Melis, oh my internet Big Sis, you amaze me. Missy coined it when she said that your ‘purging can Melis’, because boy did Melis ever kick that bulimia’s ass!

Then there is Greta. Greta, who daily reminds us of the beauty of life – we can become so bogged down in our battles that everything for us seems grey and mundane – Greta brings the life alive from the drudgery. There is never drudgery reading your posts, girl. They are sublime – as you are. I cannot never smile ear to ear, as well as hope to make MY world even a fraction as pretty as you make yours! And my heart as kind.

And Gel. What can I say. Such wisdom, such kindness, such quiet strength and perseverance. Gel, you inspire me day after day. You have taught me so very many things in the time I have had the blessing of knowing you. You are another of these amazing woman who, oh my, has kicked a herd of bulima asses.

I couldn’t forget Zoe. Every single day could be a battle, but Zoe turns every single day into a battle cry. She really does rise again and again like the pheonix rising from the ashes of a lifetime of appalling narcissistic abuse. It has not kept her down, it never will. And she reminds me daily, the abuse I lived through, will never claim my life either. Ever.

Lastly, a shout out to some special, dear, real-life sisters.

My Little Angel Sis, the Stunned Mullet – We fought. Because we love each other dearly. There’s no doubt about that. It’s my biggest fear that this extremely sweet and talented young lady loses her years of fighting like a fricken warrior to despair. I know she won’t let that happen. But sometimes  fear gets the better of me and I refuse to pretend that I think everything is okay. That, with my headstrong little sis, can be dangerous! It is my hope for you, that you can let go of the need for everyone to think you are okay and know that it’s okay to ask for help when needed, and that though you seem to have fallen into the laps of pretty disappointing and shitty professionals up to now, they ain’t all like that. You don’t have to do this alone. At the very least, you have me, silly girl, I love you every step of the way, no matter what. But beware, I don’t hold any punches when it comes to being blatantly honest about how things are from this perspective.

Jen. You are a quiet, loving big sis to me. Sometimes without even knowing. Every day I know you are out there. Every day I think of you and how far you have come. And how much love and kindness you have showered me with. I can’t wait to see you, or your little sis A, again soon.

Anya. You light up my world. Your life is a daily struggle with pain of the kind I can only guess at – and yet you, again and again, amaze me with your hope and your desire to reach out to and light up the lives of others. And all you ask of me, is prayer. I pray for you every day, every single day – and a lot of those prayers are in thankfulness for you, my dear friend. Hope your heart is flying over the waves with your surfing idols this Easter – a treat you more than deserved.

And Kelmonster. You probably don’t even know this blog exists. Because this world isn’t your world, thank God for that. She has given me a window to my disordered, hopeless world, for so many years now. We go way back. Her love for me has known no bounds, as has my love for her. Love has never had conditions, love has always been no matter what. She’s held my hand, and spoon-fed me in my darkest moments. She’s holding my hand and leading me out through that window into the big wide yonder today. She’s shown me a world I could previously only just imagine. It is real, it is worth fighting for. Although where we are, it will be more kicking herds of kangaroos rather than asses. She’s never let me leave my hope behind. Always prodded me to open my eyes and find it, open my heart and accept the love and forgiveness and healing that is mine. And her life is not without it’s battles, in fact, she is constantly overcoming a battle I could never imagine. Top nursing student? That’s hard enough. Top nursing student who just happens to live with Schizophrenia? That’s my girl. Exceedingly rare – she kicks kangaroos every single day. She is the family my family refused to be. And for that, for everything, I love her with all my heart. I know that with her, I will never be alone.

There are some very sore asses around the place. And Kangaroos.

Thank you my beautiful friends for the hope you give me every single day. There are so many more of you who might be reading this, or might not know it exists – nonetheless, I thank you. Life would not have been worth fighting for without you. Life is worth fighting for. And I will never give up fighting for my own future, peace, healing and happiness. I’ve come further than I ever dreamed possible in just a few short years – from death-bed to climbing out the window into the WORLD. And I am deeply, incredibly grateful, to all of you.

Every single one of us is important. Every single one of YOU matters. If you ever doubt that your voice has a place in this world – think of an orchestra. Think of how every single note from every single instrument – no matter how soft and subtle – is so exceedingly vital to the symphony. Without that little ding from the triangle? It’s ruined. Without that bloody loud tuba? It’s ruined. Missing something. The world would be missing something without YOU too. No matter how tiny your whisper is right now (for later, I pray, it will become a rawr!) YOU and your voice is vital to this world as part of the symphony of life – never forget that. We need you here – don’t give up fighting. Hunt down an ass, or a herd of asses, or a kangaroo or two, every single day and kick them from here to bloody Pussycat Flat (it exists!)

Well, today, after a whirlwind few days discovering Victoria – from rescuing a drowning echidna in the beautiful Dandenong mountains

Above, we scooped him out in a hat – and he hid his snout shyly behind the sharpest-clawed paws I’ve seen!  He now pretends to be part of the dirt and grass, burrowed in stubbornly.

to swimming in rock pools at Portsea and gazing in awe at the twinkling lights of all of Melbourne from the height of Arthurs Seat, and hand feeding tame Rosellas

Polly wanna sunflower seed?

and finding my new home to be

Shall I choose this airy shack, with room for many, many cats?

or perhaps this cosy and warm winter hide-away?

Today I am going to be leaving civilisation behind on our long road trip north to New South Wales – and a camping festival known as ConFest. We will be off the radar to phone signals and internet! And perhaps that’s a good thing. Art and journalling and just relaxing amongst the real world – nature – await. And at night, I’m staying in a million-star hotel. Stuff 5 stars!

image source

So I won’t be around for a while.

I hope you all have a wonderful, hope-filled Easter. Even for those who do not celebrate – there is meaning there to be found, of hope and renewal and that there’s always a light to be found in our darknesses.

Never, ever give up. Kick those kangaroos! Or they will kick you!

the source of this evil

I miss Shalimar so much! She is living it up at a Pet Motel, in the lap of luxury with gourmet food (and, incidentially, she’s eating Kangaroo Meat among other things… the irony). It will be lovely to see her snarling, sweet cute whiskery face again soon She’s my love, my life, my light.

Happy Easter and take care, everyone!

Eating Disorders Make You Broke And Lonely

Hi! Oh boy have I missed the internet! I was forced offline for about a week, and it was hard – pulling your own teeth out hard! A mix of things being financially tight and even more than that, the fact that I’m still under the guardianship of a public trustee, meant that it’s been a long 6 month process (more like all out war) in order to be able to finally purchase decent plans to use both internet and mobile phone.

One of the long term side effects of living with an eating disorder is very often financial problems. For me, it’s meant I’ve been unable to have a paid job (so far) and living on a disability pension. I’m very thankful for that – but as most people will say, it’s already quite a pinch.

Add in an eating disorder and things can be disastrous.

Thankfully, as far as I can remember, I never defaulted on rent or bills, or paid them late. But things got more and more difficult as I was hospitalised so much. Back in ‘those days’ – the pre-millenium years – we didn’t have automated bill paying or money transferring services like BPay, Centrelink etc. Every week or fortnight, I made a trip to my bank to take money from my account, then a trip to the bank of my landlord, or the post office, or the real estate agent or leasing office to pay my rent in person. I paid my electricity bills and phone bills over the counter at the post office. Same for other bills and expenses that popped up here and there – you couldn’t jump online and electronically transfer the funds without leaving your home. You had to go out and do it in person.

You can’t do that when you are always in hospital! So it did get quite tricky, and  I was worried. My accomodation was boarding houses and hostels mostly at that stage – and it doesn’t take much to lose a room. I was frightened of what might happen if I got so sick I was unable to let anyone know where I was or pay my bills – I might get out of hospital to find I had nowhere to live at all any more.

More seriously, bingeing happened. Specifically, bingeing and purging. I had emotionally eaten before my most serious descent into anorexia to the degree that I was borderline overweight for a very short time. And I remember being so out of control with the stuffing and the musteat-can’tnoteat-can’tbearnottoeat feelings that I would be in physical agony and crying, and just lie down long enough for it to settle a bit and be needing to eat again. But I didn’t have the money worries that bulimia brings. I was able to go without the excess food if I didn’t have money for it.

Bulimia meant I was taking away just as much as I was putting in – still in starvtion, in fact probably making it worse because I was losing stomach fluids, nutrition already in my system etc every time I purged, and creating a chemical chaos for my bloodstream. Being physically uncomfortably full didn’t happen, or at least if it did, I ‘undid’ it. I could eat a truckload of food and still be starving ravenously hungry.

Purging is, in hindsight, the thing I’d most like to go back in time and ‘unlearn’. The rest of the eating disorder was hell enough – purging was like opening the very gates to hell and being unable to ever shut them again against the hordes pouring out. Even in my fight against dying from starvation from the anorexia – it’s more complicated for me because of the purging. Before purging, it used to be a battle to follow the meal plans and put on the weight, especially when not in hospital and on my own – but at least once I got the food in, the physical part of the fight was over. Ed thrashed me in my mind, but it couldn’t do anything about it, and that was the end of that.  But with purging, it wasn’t the end. Because hours after I’d won that battle to eat, I was still able to undo all my hard work in one moment. It was absolutely gutting to have fought so hard and to undo it all just like that, be back where I started or in even more a precarious position.

I had some savings, but it wasn’t long for bulimia to have totally eroded them and I was taking the last bit of cash to my name out of the ATM machine. That was a shock for me, as I had been in denial and not keeping note of how much money I was spending any more. Suddenly it was gone and I knew I had no choice but to stop this, now. I couldn’t say to myself any more that I could just do this for a while, eat everything I craved for once, and then stop it next week or next month and get back to normal. I had to stop it NOW or I was in trouble.

Except I couldn’t. I found myself frantic, unable to cope at all without the bingeing – which in the short time I’d been doing it had become my major coping mechanism after starvation – and yet unable to cope in other ways if I continued.  I could no longer pretend it was just about me ‘making up’ for all the missing out and starving, no longer pretend I was just ‘tasting all the foods I had never gotten to try’. The foods became the cheapest, blandest stuff on offer. Old, discarded, stale, it didn’t matter, if it was edible, it served a purpose.

I wonder if people who become addicted to drugs start off that way too, they care about the quality of the drugs they are taking, and then when they are desperately addicted and the funds run dry, they’ll take anything they can get. Same with drinking, where the person might start out with cocktails or beers and end up slugging down methylated spirits?

Long story short, if things were financially tight before, they were precarious now. As I said before, I didn’t actually default on my responsibilities – but I was terrified that it was only a matter of time. My pattern became that I’d get my pension, immediately pay everything that was due, then the rest of it – usually about $150 or so – would be binged away within about two days. The rest of the fortnight I walked everywhere and went without food whatsoever. I do have to admit, part of me purposely wanted to get rid of the money as soon as possible – because when it was gone, the bingeing was over. And sure, it was hell not being able to binge, but I preferred the numbed control of the starvation.

It was not sustainable, and I knew it. I started scrambling for help. And somehow I stumbled on the public trustee of my state. I’m fuzzy about the details, but I asked them for help, with the support of my case manager, and they took over.

Took over, completely. All my pension goes to them. They control every cent I own. They pay the bills – rent, utilities, pharmacy account, nutritional account, cat boarding account, etc – and give me a small allowance weekly for my food, toiletries, transport, household items, and most importantly, Shalimar. They have a strict budget to allow me to purchase items or pay accounts that come up during the year. By ‘strict’, I mean, blood flows more easily from a stone. The trustees are notoriously strict and out of touch with their clients – I’m not the only one who has complained – and I think they forget that they have a lot of power over our entire lives.

Asking them for a more affordable internet and phone option should have been straightforward – after all, we are in the business of saving money, right? But no. They wanted me to continue with a heinously expensive and unaffordable pre-paid option that I simply could not afford. I’d go through the tiny amount very quickly and then be fighting with them again for more. I gave them quote after quote for plans that were more affordable and better suited to my needs, each being rejected – “No plans over six months in length” or “You must have unlimited data allowance if you are on a plan” (which would be great, but I couldn’t afford that sort of plan. I am not even a heavy user, I probably use 4 GB a month) Finally they were saying, “You can’t have the internet.”

Most people will probably think, so what? What’s the big deal? Internet is a luxury. I fully agree, it’s a luxury. I could go to my local library and use it there, for example. But – I’m deaf, remember. Profoundly deaf. I struggle to pick up a lot of what’s said to me in person. When it comes to communicating over the phone – there isn’t a hope. I’m also extremely isolated. I live alone, and despite being so much better, I’m still physically pretty unwell. (Shalimar is great company, and I do not know how I managed to cope without her, I really don’t – but let’s just say she’s not the best conversationalist )

For me, the internet is a lifeline. I make phone calls online, using a relay service. During the day time, I communicate regularly with my case managers and support workers and even my therapists with SMS and email. And at night time especially, I use it to distract myself and to recieve and give support. I talk to my friends, both those I know in person, and those I have only (yet) met online. I use it for meal support in that it takes my mind off the meal to some degree, and then it occupies me and keeps me communicating rather than sticking my head down the toilet afterwards, and it keeps me out of the fridge and pantry at my most vulnerable times – or at least delays all these things, which is a good start.

Also, unlikely but extremely important – if I don’t have the internet, I cannot call for help if I need it. I cannot call our emergency services – because I cannot hear on my phone. We don’t as yet have text support to contact emergency services (although I hear it’s been on the agenda for a while). Unless I’m able to SMS a friend and ask them to call emergency services for me – and that’s time consuming and often not really something I want to do. I don’t want to worry them, for example. And they might not have their phone turned on or read the text for a while, and then I’m stuffed!

I used to be such a loner. So withdrawn and shy. I lived in my own world – I didn’t want a bar of this world. Much of the time I was actually dissociated – and I preferred it that way. My little inner world was safer than the real world. But these days, I’ve come to crave social interaction. It’s the people I’ve met, the friends I’ve made and come to adore who make my world go round, my life worth living. Even when I’m not up to talking, just sitting here and seeing people talking on facebook or somewhere else helps me feel not so alone in this world. It literally opened a huge window to the world where before, there was only the blank stone walls of my self-imposed exile.

So the internet, far from a luxury for me, is essential. But I had to fight hard to get it. It took more than six months, and the last week or so, things were dire to the point that I had no internet, no data left on my mobile phone as I used it to tether to my computer for internet, and was running short on texts. The walls were closing in, and I realised again just how isolated and alone I am, how quiet things get, without it. I am SO relieved to be back on air.

If it wasn’t for my eating disorder I wouldn’t have the financial constraints on  my life that I do. I would be working and earning a decent amount, or at least more than the pension. I wouldn’t have the costs occured during binges or needing so many meds – the bill at times can be around $75 a week. I wouldn’t be needing to pay thousands in cat boarding fees every time I went into hospital. I wouldn’t have wasted thousands on taxis over the years when I was unable to physically get home due to weakness or imminent collapse. And so much more. Most of all, I wouldn’t be with the public trustee and having to fight to get things that I consider neccessities.

So I’ve been thinking a lot more about this whole situation lately – and with the support of some very close and wonderful friends – I am applying to come off the public trustee. This is a terrifying thought – much as I hate them, after all these years I don’t trust myself to manage my money. I feel like I have totally forgotten how. I’m scared that I’ll binge it all away immediately. But I have support I never had in the past. I have options I didn’t have like direct debit for bills. And I have come a long way in many ways including, I’m a heck of a lot more mature than back then. So I’m finally taking the leap. First step is applying for a tribunal hearing, collecting the paperwork necessary, and showing them that I can make decisions myself now. Then… I don’t really know. But hey, I know now that I can deal with it.

So, this blog entry began as a way to explain why I haven’t been online as much in past weeks and not at all the previous week – I certainly do ‘tangents’ well hey?

In other news – therapy is going well. And I’m just plodding along, at times just hanging on tight -because that’s sometimes all we can do.

Next week – in eight days actually – I’m going to Melbourne!  A long anticipated visit to a very dear friend – she’s going to show me her beautiful Victoria, and then we are driving up to New South Wales to attend a camping festival..  I’m so excited. And so terrified! I haven’t been camping since I was in school – I loved camping, but have no idea any more how it’s done… okay that sounds strange. When I was a schoolkid, life came a lot more naturally to me. And I didn’t have an eating disorder to deal with. Any trip away from home is extremely difficult for me because of the eating disorder. I have no idea how I’m going to go when camping – but it’s going to be a great opportunity to find out. I hope so much that I’m able to fully participate – and I’m going to try my best. I intend to enjoy campfire meals, toasted marshmallows, exploring the surrounds. I’m taking my art stuff and going to be doing a lot of just drawing what’s around me. A lot of reflecting and journalling. Chilling out. Reconnecting with nature. And at night – after all these years of city living, I’m going to be able to stargaze again without city lights for miles and miles. I’ve been told it’s amazing. I can’t wait.

Bring it on

Ironically it’s going to mean another week or more away from technology – there is not even phone service where we are going – but this is going to be a good sort of tecnology-free period!

Thank you so much to everyone who has commented and been reading – I have a heap of your comments that I’m dying to answer and just haven’t gotten the chance to yet. I have been reading them  - and I’m always extremely grateful, touched by your support, and intrigued by your views. Thank you for being patient with me while I’m so scarce lately! I also look forward to slowly catching up with your blogs – I’ve missed so much of what you are all up to and what you are writing about – and I’m deeply sorry for that.

Hoping you are all well! Thank you for reading

(Image Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4)

Flashback to 2009 – Hospital Days.

I was searching through my hard drive and came across some old writing – not journal entries so much as little random bits here and there. Times that I must have gotten on the computer and just let the thoughts flow.

This essay was written in 2009. I’d just been discharged from yet another hospital stay, and ended up in the same old spiral as I’d been falling into for years. The desperation and feeling of hopelessness in this saddens me now. During those years, I knew no way out. All I had to look forward to was more of the same, until my body gave up.

There was a better ending than I anticipated – I’m pretty sure that it was after this admission that I started begging the hospital team to help me gain more weight than I usually did – to the weight that I am at today. I had a couple more admissions to achieve that – but I did, and I have maintained – whether that is a fluke or not, it’s given me another chance at life that I really don’t think I deserved. But that I’m determined to make the most of.

Please be aware that this is a highly triggering piece of writing. It talks about hospital treatment, weight loss, food, eating disorder habits, death and hopelessness.

Monday, 13 July 2009

I was discharged from my 125^th hospital admission on Friday afternoon, 10^th July.

It was a nightmare in many ways and lifesaving in many others. For the first time I made a significant breakthrough in that for the first time in about a decade I was able to keep everything down (and eat everything too). I struggled most with the crap going on around me (petty molehills become mountains that lead to major arguments and tantrums in the stuffy HDU microcosm) and the crap going on in my head – either totally overwhelming, spending too much time sucked back into the things I never want to remember – or totally vacant.

When you’re too Ill to be sedated and so are restrained in bed in order to protect your PICC line and the TPN; when you’re too immune-compromised to be transferred to Wattlebrae as they now have swine flu there, but as soon as you fight off one infection you pick up yet another; when you’re traumatised already and undergoing way too many more invasive procedures; (the worst I think was one of seven PICC insertion attempts – in the ICU, without anaesthetic. They couldn’t get it past my shoulder and were yanking it out of the socket and kept cutting the site, then stitched it into place – I felt like a fish that’s been hooked. All that, and the x-ray showed it wasn’t viable anyway, didn’t reach my heart) – you lose yourself and become a body that seems to be everyone else’s piece of meat. Indeed, I often wondered if any of the Treatment Team ever considered what they do to my spirit? It’s shattered even more each time I’m there, ‘til I wonder if it wouldn’t be a kindness to actually let my body die. What point dragging this broken mess back to life again and again if there’s no quality of life and you’ve killed the person inside the body? My whole life has been spent being punished by others, punishing myself… and then I go to hospital where they punish me again for all of that.

I concede inferiority – all my life it seems I’ve been trying to convince people I’m not as bad as they think. But if I’m the only one who believes that (and I don’t, anyway) – then they’re right. There’s something very terribly wrong with me and always has been.

All my life I’ve been running from something. From danger. From violence. From myself. This time, I ran from Death. Or was it the fear of death? Whatever it was, it got me stuffing myself with my entire meal plan in a shock turn-around, and keeping every bit of it down. Of course, it was agony, in my mind and body. This body hasn’t had any solid food really stay in it for nearly a decade and it struggled, strained, raced, sweated. My mind thumped me in every way, every moment of the day. We’re trapped now. We have no choice. But I’ll get you, I’ll make you pay, when you are free from here. The eating cut the expected couple of months on TPN to just a couple of weeks. And I was home by the end of the week it was ceased.

No preparation. No maintenance. Just straight from two months in a bare hospital room to the chaotic big wide world.

I hoped I’d be able to keep things going. I want to LIVE. I know that if I can’t nail it now, I will die. I’m desperate to survive.

It’s been a mess. It’s been like ‘imploding’ – fragile, newly-bolstered hope caving in unsupported by any confidence within. Social phobia returning as strong as ever – now I know why it’s so hard to remember what the world’s like when I am hospitalised. I don’t look people in the face anymore, I go about anything I do with my head down in shame and fear. Withdrawn. Even at home, I don’t take in my surroundings much anymore. It’s chaotic and too busy on my eyes. They like to be closed, and words don’t come easily anymore either. I try so hard to be there for my beloved Shalimar yet it seems I am so vacant in my mind, she can sense it. And it frightens her as much as it does me.

I like that word – ‘imploding’ – for describing this parasitic eating disorder. It is like one is collapsing in on oneself as the disorder eats away more and more of your inner core. You pull away from others, curl into a protective shell as small and invisible as possible. In trying to feel ‘safe’, you find yourself increasingly alone with what’s trying to kill you, more endangered. ‘Exploding’ happens, too. I would describe that as the ‘fighting’ stages of this – when you’re resisting it’s pull as much as you can and it’s fighting you back. You fight to get the food in, it explodes it back out. You fight to save your body in every way you can, and it finds more and more violent ways to undo any good you’ve achieved.

Where to from here? I’m a mess. No matter how much or what I buy from the supermarket, when I try and put it together in my head, it doesn’t make any sort of sense. That’s if I am successful at the supermarket. I can write a concise list of what and how much I need, but being faced with aisles of cans and boxes and bottles, so many colours, so many numbers and letters and names and varieties and sizes and so on – I just freak out. Brain goes off. Autopilot takes over, I come out with a basket of stuff I haven’t a clue why I bought it and what to do with it. And none of it’s anything I even feel like eating. (Four packets of plain pasta… a bunch of different seasonings reduced to clear… one of every different variety of non-dairy milk in the UHT milk aisle… three tubs of margarine which I don’t eat and haven’t anything to put it on.. What can I do with that? )

The fruit and vegie shop’s still chaotic for me, too. If I can haul myself out there early enough in the morning, there might be a fair variety of stuff on the ‘reduced’ rack and that takes away the problem of actually choosing stuff. If it can be cooked and it’s colourful and tastes ok, then I’ll grab it. I end up with a lot of capsicums, apples, eggplants, tomatoes and sweet chilli, but that’s ok. I like them. The staples that I’ve always been addicted to – pumpkin, cabbage, carrots – are in season and plentiful. The hardest part is craving sweeter, water-rich fruits – they aren’t very easy to find at the moment. Lettuce used to be wonderfully refreshing when I could eat it raw, but even if I can (and I did try) at the moment my mouth is sore after just a bit of chewing and full of too many ulcers. Not to mention it’s fricken cold!

I really have to pull away from relying pretty much on just fruit and vegies though. They aren’t going to keep me alive – especially if I can’t keep them down anymore again. I’ve spent about $150 this weekend alone just on Up&Go drinks, Sustagens, etc – Nutrition Australia can’t get any supplements to me till tomorrow – though I rang them this morning and they might be able to get a few Resource+ drinks out to me today. But I can’t stomach them very well and they’re about a third of what’s in a Resource+. (360 calories and all your nutritional needs in one little popper) My taste buds must be screwed, too – it’s not helping that everything tastes like mud.

Whoa. All I do is complain! It’s a blessing to be alive, to be free again, to be back with my Sweet Shalimar. To sleep in my own bed again, wear my own clothes, keep my own times, be warm, have privacy, watch TV with teletext. Have nobody telling me that a few mills more of boiling water to soften my weetbix will blow my 1.2L fluid allowance for the entire day (since supplements and liquids in meals are counted, thirstiness is something I feel all the time in hospital) and nobody measuring my urine output, having to wipe my bum, wash me, even worse forgetting to wipe my bum – you end up smelly and damp from drip-drying into your undies. All dignity goes out the window in hospital. Not that I had any left.

I want to make the most of everything wonderful in my life. I want to stop taking it all for granted. It’s a miracle that I’m still alive, and I’m blessed with the most wonderful friends and some family. I have Shalimar, a place to live, clothes to wear, shoes for my feet, food to eat (theoretically, anyway) and all my basic needs. The biggest blessings are the people I love so much, and what’s left of this beautiful Earth. Je’aime la Nature.

I’m scared, God. I know I don’t talk to you very much anymore. Like everyone else, you’ve been shut out. It’s so hard to break down the barriers I keep rebuilding every time I manage to smash them down, and I’m tired, very tired. But please, my God, please hear my cry. Please have mercy – I don’t want to die, not this way. Please, I had hope that I could get around the mess in my head, that I had turned it around, but I find I am as trapped as ever. Will I ever be free, will I ever overcome this? I’m a survivor yet this battle is proving to be the most arduous I’ve fought. Terrifying how one’s own mind can be a stronger, deadlier foe than the physical dangers I’ve battled.

I can’t stop hearing [consultant] saying “You WILL die”, if the TPN was unsuccessful. I can’t help remembering how much of a struggle it was to insert a PICC line anywhere – my veins in both arms have been ruined now. I’m lucky to have even been alive to see another hospital admission – nobody thought I’d pull through last time and they all warned me that my body wouldn’t survive even one more physical relapse. What terrifies me is how sick I still really am in my mind. My body was bumped up about 10kgs really fast – but now I’ve lost nearly half of that in a weekend. Nothing was done for my thinking or my mind or learning how to care for myself. I’m trying so hard but as trapped and scared as ever, so powerless. Still fighting – ever fighting – but the feeling of hopeless futility is stronger than ever. I’m going down again already – and it doesn’t look like there are any options left now that will help me live. A long time ago, if I’d helped myself, I’d be far better off today. Now I’m beyond the point of having any control over this or even knowing how to fend off the blows in my head, the battering it gives me every breathing moment (even in my dreams/nightmares). Now there’s nothing left to even physically save me if I’m ever admitted to hospital again.

Please help me God. Help me help myself.

I didn’t survive all I have, to die of a piddly pathetic eating disorder.

 

 (image source: 1, 2)

Review – The Heavy

The Heavy – Dara-Lynn Weiss

I wanted to know Dara-Lynn Weiss’ side of the story, after a furore broke out last year over her putting her young daughter on a strict diet. Here is my review from Goodreads.

I’m actually glad I read this book – even though I expected it to be a complete food-and-weight-obsessed take on how to handle helping your child with a weight problem. I feel like it’s given me a lot to think about, changed some of my views on this delicate subject, and given me Dara-Lynn Weiss’ side of a story that you had to have your head in the sand to have missed when it broke last year.

Weiss famously wrote an article in Vogue magazine about how she put her then six year old daughter, Bea, on a diet, when told by her paediatrician that Bea was clinically obese. She was absolutely vilified from all quarters. There were supporters of her side – but they were mostly drowned out by a worldwide cry against her – she was called abusive, disordered, cruel, a bad mother, people said that child protection should be notified and so on.

I have to admit, I was one of those who was horrified. After reading Weiss’ book, I’m still not ‘with’ her, but I’m not against her either. What is certain to me in reading is that her actions came from a deep love for Bea and only wanting her child to have the best life possible. Bea was definitely aware of her size, aware and sad to be ‘different’ from the other kids, already had experienced comments and teasing. And there were also the health issues to consider. Obese children do mostly grow up to be obese adults. Now I know that a lot of people will argue the health at any size and Obesity isn’t necessarily unhealthy points here – but let’s just put those picket signs down and remember that this is the story of one mother, and her own daughter, a daughter she is charged with making health decisions for. Parents struggle with so many difficult choices when it comes to health – to immunise or not, for example – and judgement is rife. But it comes down to her right to make the choice for her child, depending on what she thinks is the best choice.

Weiss did take Bea to a nutritionist – in fact, she started out doing everything the way I’d probably have hoped someone whose child was obese would do – take the whole family to the nutritionist. The entire family have various issues and they work hard to follow the plans given to them – at this point their program is of the ‘green light, red light’ kind where they are allocated certain numbers of green lights and yellow lights to eat each day, and taught which foods and how much of them constitute each green, yellow or red light. Fruit and vegetables were ‘free’ as snacks.

I think this is where Weiss strays off the path. She has said that she has her own disordered relationship with food – and it’s obvious throughout this book. Weiss panics if Bea is wearing different clothes when she’s weighed – for example jeans instead of leggings – because of the weight difference. She refuses to allow Bea a snack before an after school appointment at one stage in case Bea weighs slightly heavier. She obsessively plans and re-plans her and Bea’s food plans, and obsessively embarks on a mission that many people with full blown serious eating disorders will remember well – to find out the calorie counts of as many different foods as possible, and to seek out ever lower calorie items. She gushes about the use of frankenfoods and artificial sweeteners in place of real nutrition because ‘low calories trumps nutrition’ and panics over lapse as small as 100 calories or so for Bea. This is not normal behaviour.

Especially, this is not normal behaviour for so young a child. Bea is growing. She’s 6 years old, 7 years old. Not only is she growing, but her relationship with food IS going to be affected by this for the rest of her life. And she IS pulling against the forced restriction. She’s constantly asking for snacks (fruit being free) to the point of having four or five or six snacks of fruit between each meal, and binge eating fruit into the night to the point of being uncomfortable. That is the behaviour of someone who is either starving, or deprived. I know from my own feelings of deprivation and consequent lashback into bingeing or hoarding food – that it can stick with you for LIFE. Bingeing and hoarding behaviors are also very common in foster children who have been deprived of food or food has been tightly controlled.

Then there is Bea’s lack of honesty when quizzed about what she’s eaten away from her mother. She’s scared of ‘owning up’ to having had three slices of pizza at a pizza party and tries to tell her mother she had only one at first. And when an unplanned ‘event’ happens in which Bea is faced with an array of food without her mother and herself having a ‘plan’ of what she can eat – she eats pretty much some of everything. Given that the point of some of these events was for the children in Bea’s class to try out food from other cultures, sampling a little of each offering was actually normal behaviour, but Bea probably would have been aware she was doing the ‘wrong’ thing, and definitely aware when she had to ‘own up’ to it to Weiss.

Then there are situations like at parties – where Bea wants another dessert or is still hungry, but has already eaten everything she’s ‘allowed’ to have. Weiss cops a fair bit of criticism from the other adults for not allowing Bea another cake or even to have the salad offered because it’s covered in a dressing. I do have to say, the other adults were not helpful. We don’t know what another child’s dietary issues might be. Bea might have been on a special diet for allergy reasons or she might have been diabetic and I’m sure the other adults wouldn’t have been so unsupportive then. And waving a food under the nose of a kid whose mother has just said NO to, is definitely not helpful, thoughtful, or kind.

Personally, I know very little about weight loss for kids. What I have heard (and believe) is that it’s not weight loss that’s important – it’s weight stabilisation – and allowing them to grow into their weight. In calculating what her daughter’s weight goals should be, at least Weiss kept her projected height in mind, but she was way too stuck on 77 pounds. If it was 77.2 pounds, that wasn’t good enough. To her credit, this weight was barely out of overweight into ‘normal’ for Bea’s height, so at least she wasn’t unrealistic on her weight – but just the general obsessiveness and inflexibility was a huge red flag for me throughout the book.

In the end, how is Bea? She’s lost the weight. She definitely seems happier, but at the same time, she still feels like a fat kid – she’s said she will always feel like one on the inside. She still needs to have her mother control her food intake – or it inches up again fast. Over time, though, Bea shows she is able to control her food intake herself and demonstrates this ability on a 3 week camp. This, here, is where I start to worry the most. Although Bea did very well – I feel like she’s too caught up in the ‘restrictive’ and ‘controlled’ eating – and it can very easily tip over into anorexia. That part of things just sounded off, and too good to be true to me.

Weiss was approached by Vogue magazine to write about her daughter’s weight loss journey after she expressed interest in writing a book about it. She was counselled to not include Bea in the photographs, but caved in to Bea’s pleas to be included – a choice she later regretted. I would not have liked to be in her shoes with what followed the publication of that article.

Overall, it was an interesting book, but unless you are already interested in the subject or share an obsession with food, weight, and dieting – it could be extremely boring. The book pretty much is a lengthy account of the process from beginning of diet to end. Weiss obviously has done a good amount of research for the book – but suffers from confirmation bias – in that she’s set out to justify her choices and seems to have cherry-picked whatever research backs her up and excluded that which doesn’t. Despite this, there are some good and salient points that she raises – for example, even the ‘healthy’ choices in restaurants and in school cafeteria food containing far more energy than a child needs in one meal, and actual energy content differing to the provided nutrition statement. I do now see her point in that had she been less strict with Bea, Bea would most likely still be overweight, because there just are not healthy choices there for kids to make – even those that ‘seem’ healthy are far too large or aren’t as healthy as they appear.

I still don’t think Weiss went about helping Bea become healthier the right way, and I worry about whether Bea will end up with a serious eating disorder in the future. But I now see Weiss’s side of things and feel she was justified in making most of the choices she did – and only meant well for her daughter.

ANAD had this to say about the article.

The decision of Vogue to publish “Weight Watcher” in the April 2012 issue about a mother’s story of her 7 year old daughter’s weight loss journey is irresponsible.  Dara-Lynn, mother to Bea, subjected her daughter to a rigid diet complete with mixed messages around food, stigmatizing remarks, and damaging body image comments. Voguemust take responsibility for publishing an article that normalizes disordered eating and contempt for bodies.Experts and advocates in the field of eating disorders and obesity do not support the approach used by mother Dara-Lynn and urge her to evaluate her own relationship with food and body image.

Vogue’s decision to run this article adds to the child’s humiliation and shame. Bea is not an adult who can determine whether or not her journey should be public. With the publication of this story, readers from all over the world are privy to BEA’s story and she will likely be increasingly judged, based on her size, over and over again throughout her childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. This is worrisome for her overall health, including mental status.

Laura Discipio, executive director of ANAD comments: “Dara-Lynn stated that Bea has not exhibited symptoms of intense psychological damage, yet the article reports “tears of pain fill her (Bea’s) eyes as she reflects on her year long journey.” Dara-Lynn was engaging in behaviors that most clinicians and parents would agree were detrimental to Bea.  The methods and tactics used by Dara-Lynn in front of Bea’s peers coupled with public shaming in a well-read magazine may indeed produce long-term psychological damage, including an unhealthy relationship with food and her body. ANAD advocates for overall wellness not weight, including help for emotional, physical and social well being.”

Chevese Turner, CEO of BEDA adds: “Research indicates dieting at such a young age can actually result in weight gain and eating disorders, which have the highest death rate of any mental health illness.  Childhood is a dynamic period; professionals and parents need to think twice before prescribing or implementing a diet. They must also consider that research shows stigmatizing, shaming, and bullying around a person’s size can also result in weight gain and eating disorders. Every good intention can have a negative outcome”

We invite Vogue editors and Dara-Lynn Weiss to contact BEDA or ANAD so they can talk to experts and others whose life of pain and struggles around food began with eerie similarity to Bea’s experience over the last year.  We also ask that concerned people respond to Vogue editors with their dismay at using this child’s experience to sell magazines.

 The Condé Nast Building

4 Times Square #12

New York NY 10036

212-286-8398 or 212-286-2860

Email: talkingback@vogue.com

I would love to hear what you think. Should you ever put a child on a diet? And if you do, how would you go about it? Where would you draw the line and say you had gone too far? 

 (Image Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4)

Community Safety Announcement – ED Watchdogs.

This post comes with a MASSIVE trigger warning. 

In the last few years, I’ve seen so much that’s truly shocked me. And I’ve become aware that the eating disorders community attracts predators of it’s own.

There are some utter scumbags on the internet. And, being the internet, it can be hard, sometimes impossible, to police them.

Ideally, the internet never should be policed. But there are lines that should never be crossed – some of which in this case are paedophilia, rape,  preying on those who are vulnerable.

ED Watchdogs is a recently set up facebook community that is hoping to spread the message of keeping ourselves safe, and of keeping an eye out for each other. The facilitators have spent several years working silently behind the scenes compiling thousands of screenshots, messages and emails, endeavoring to try and remove the worst of these predators one at a time. Reporting them to facebook has been only a temporary measure – they always return. Reporting them to authorities usually results in nothing – not enough evidence. With very real abuse and assault going on – these facebook meetings do cross into real life in many instances – they put in hundreds of hours of work in order to get the evidence to present to police and have them actually investigate.

However this is just too much for a couple of people, themselves members of this community, to undertake alone – and they hope for the community to become their eyes and ears.

ED Watchdogs has an Ask.fm page for anonymous tip offs.

Screenshots and other files can be emailed to ed.watchdogs@gmail.com and if you prefer to stay anonymous, you can use a service like Anonymouse to do so.

I’ll leave you with an example of just what sort of person is among us. (Trigger warning.) 

I would like to take this opportunity to warn you all about the user ‘Myke Nihilist Davidian’.My alarm bells went off about this man a few months ago when I saw hints in his profile information that he may be the type of character to prey on young girls with eating disorders.

~WARNING: The following information may be triggering to those with abuse or rape in their past.~

I confronted Myke about his page and flat out requested to know what his intentions were. This image was the last reply I got.

This is an example of the kind of character we, the ED Watchdogs want to warn people to be wary about.
Please take care.

 

Images courtesy ED Watchdogs.

Compulsive Self Deprivation

As I’ve written previously, I struggle a lot with body image. But much of the time these days I still manage to accept myself enough to not want to stomp all over myself until I’m a pulp, preferably invisible pulp.

I try and remember that I’m doing the best that I can do, with what I have. That’s all any of us can do, really. I’m not superhuman, nobody is. And I can’t force things to get better NOW because I’m so over the way things are. (If I could force things better, I would have been better a loooong time ago!)

The most important thing to me is to try and be a good person. To not hurt anyone – that comes first. One day I hope I can help people, but I know that at the moment I have very little to give. I try – because no matter how little we have, we can always listen, always care, always have a hug to give, a shoulder to lend someone. I can do those things. And they might not be changing the world, but they are something.

I try and be a kind person, too. I’m not always kind – I’m human there, too. I have thoughts that are angry, or mean, about others. But mostly I try and treat people and think about people with compassion – the same way I would hope people would treat me or think about me. I know that many people do not – but that doesn’t mean that I can’t either.

And yet, I hate myself. I always have. I know I’m not alone. I’ve met so many others who struggle with intense self-hatred. I’ve never found anything about them that’s hateful, either. Never.

It’s really hard to look after yourself when you hate yourself. Nothing you do is ever ‘good enough’. Everything is always ‘your fault’. Other people must secretly find you disgusting. They must be crazy for wanting to have anything to do with you, let alone LIKING you. You feel so guilty if you do anything nice or caring for yourself – including basic self-care.

My mother never really taught me basics of self care like looking after my finger and toe nails, how to properly care for my skin, etc – but even as an adult, having access to the information on the internet and in books and magazines, I struggle to allow myself these things. For years I didn’t bother moisturising my face, because moisturiser is an ‘indulgence’ to me. I don’t wear makeup unless it’s a special occasion and even that is once in a blue moon, maybe once every few years.  I’ve had my hair cut by a hair dresser a few times in my life time – preferring to just let it be in a pony tail or have a friend/some unlucky person trim it (Many of my adult haircuts have been while in hospital – a good excuse to not have to consider going to a salon.) And I don’t bother with my fingernails or toenails. I keep them short, and neat as possible, and clean, but that’s it.

When it comes to clothes, I LOVE clothes. Love looking at them in fashion spreads. But they are, to me, something that other people can wear. I just am on the outside looking in, liking them, but clothing myself in op shop finds and plain shirts and jeans. As a child, I never had nice clothes like the other girls, but it was to the point that all I wanted really was a clean, unstained or torn t shirt and a clean, unstained or torn pair of shorts. And a pair of shoes that fit and weren’t breaking apart. Basic things. As an adult, I have far more than that – and I’m thankful. So although I love fashion, I don’t crave it. I also feel guilty and like mutton dressed as lamb if I try and wear it – I still feel like it’s not for ‘me’ because I’m so ‘different’ to others.

Other people are worthy. I’m not. That is how I have felt for my entire life. And that is what was instilled in me personally by my family as I grew up.

Where I’m going with this is, that as an adult, I still struggle with these messages of having no worth, despite the fact that I rationally know they are not true, and that I am as worthy as any other person on this planet. Old habits of thinking die hard.

CBT helps a little. My therapist gave me a list of questions to ask myself whenever I have thoughts like this. I write down the thought, so for example, I will write “I’m not worthy of having nice clothes, everyone will think I look silly in them and fake.” And I feel shameful, disgusted with myself – that’s the emotion that’s come up with this thought.

Then, I question my thoughts. What factual evidence to I have to back up this thought? Is there an alternative way to look at it? What might a friend of mine think in the same situation? And so on. I know that I have no evidence to back up not being worthy of nice clothes – and nobody is going to look at me any more than anyone else wearing the same clothing. An alternative way of seeing it might be to ask myself, would you prefer to assault the eyes of the public by wearing indecent clothing? Because they would most likely prefer you had nice clothes too. And I know that my friends, in this position, would probably not even think twice before buying the clothes for themselves – because that’s what people DO.

CBT is starting to help  me with a lot of things – not just whether I’m worthy of nice clothes or not. But it’s something that requires me to do it every single day, like homework. Seriously. And it’s worth it.

However – even though I have noticed an improvement in my thinking in that I am automatically asking myself the questions, automatically starting to correct my thoughts that way and tell myself “That isn’t true, that’s something you feel, but it’s not based on fact, the reality is..” I still find myself believing the old messages. I know I am worthy of nice things. I know I am worthy of self care. I know I am just as worthy as any other person.

But I don’t believe it.

It’s the same as when I’m telling myself  that I look fine, I’m not fat at all, that’s the eating disorder lying to me, my eyes and perception lying to me – I’m not believing it, because my reality is the opposite.

Also, the way I’ve thought for so many years is my NORMAL. When I’m feeling sick, hungry, in pain, fatigued – that is not pleasant, but it is normal for me. And so things feel ‘secure’ in my world, in some tiny way (because they aren’t really secure.) When I’m feeling satiated, strong, healthy, awake – that is such a scary feeling. It feels alien and wrong to me. And I know this sounds so screwed up. It’s like I am wired backwards.

It’s like I am wired for self-deprivation.

Recently I was reading an email newsletter from Psychcentral.com, when I stumbled on a blog entry about compulsive self-deprivation. The author wrote about it in the context of being the silent partner to addiction. (This blog is about sex addiction – ignore that, unless you actually do have a sex addiction!)

These paragraphs grabbed me:

“Where does compulsive self-deprivation come from?

Self deprivation has to do with how you care for yourself.  Most often .. addicts come from families in which they experienced a lack of appropriate nurturing.  In adulthood, people tend to care for themselves the way their parents cared for them, or failed to care for them.

In other words you treat yourself the way your parents treated you.  Growing up with less than adequate nurturance, you may have no idea of what good self care should look like.  If your parents were rigid, distant or withholding caregivers you will learn that you are expected to “disappear,” and to disregard your own feelings and needs.  By being compliant in this way you as a child hoped to please your caregivers and gain their love or approval.” (Source)

This is me. This is so true for me, for my history, for the people who brought me up. Another piece of the puzzle as to why I am the way I am – and understanding is a first step to being able to change that.

I related so much to the common features of compulsive self deprivation: (source)

Compulsive self-denial or self-deprivation can take many different forms. The behaviors can be superficially acceptable behaviors like religious asceticism and fasting or they can be extreme behaviors that qualify as mental disorders in their own right, like anorexia, workaholism and self-harm.

YES this is true for me

Not taking care of your basic needs

This includes neglecting all kinds of basic self care such as attending to medical needs and dental needs, neglecting hygiene, allowing garbage to pile up, not repairing things that break down, not paying bills or taxes and not reaching out to significant people in your life.

YES. I used to be so careful to take care of myself and do all the things I was meant to do – but for years now I have found it really hard to do these things, sort of like I am trying to let myself fall in as big and deep a hole as possible.

Denying yourself pleasure and tolerating pain:

This includes restricting food, going on unusual regimens and cleansing routines, compulsive exercise, excessive body piercing or tattooing, and cutting yourself. It also includes avoiding sex and other pleasurable activities, hoarding money instead of spending it on legitimate needs and becoming over-involved in religious or spiritual practices that demand excessive self-denial and withdrawal.

YES to the point that it’s terrifying to me to not feel really bad, painful hunger, it feels wrong to NOT feel that. It feels scary being ‘well’ again rather than feeling awful and sick, despite it being so awful. I do NOT ‘like’ the pain/unpleasantness/being sick – I just find it really alien to not feel it, it just feels too wrong. I only feel okay when I’m suffering.. if that makes any sense?

Avoiding success and abundance and living in fear

This includes avoiding opportunities for success, working for free or for too little, overwork, going into debt, living in minimal surroundings and with a lack of fulfilling relationships or activities, and letting go of previous recreational pursuits.

I want SO BADLY to have success, to achieve as I used to – and yet it does seem like I’ve gone out of my way to stop myself doing so. Right down to refusing to let them pay me when I used to volunteer because it just freaked me out and I felt too guilty.

Do any of you relate to this at all? 

Compulsive self-deprivation is very much a strong part of my whole eating disorder – and I need to work at permitting myself to meet my basic needs, believing in my own worth as a person, believing that I deserve to feel okay physically and mentally – and to practice staying with feeling ‘okay’ until that becomes my normal instead.

Of course, it’s not all that simple, life never is – but it’s helpful to have an idea of why we feel the way we do.

(Featured Image credit, Image 2 credit, Image 3 credit.)

Happy New Year! High Tea, Friends, Happiness, And More To Come.

Hello! I just wanted to quickly pop in and share with you my special, challenging day – and most of all to wish you all a wonderful, happy New Year.

I can’t believe that 2012 is coming to a close already. It goes so fast!

Today, I did something that a few years ago I never would have dreamed of doing. Another something – after Christmas and my Sleepover parties!

I met up with two special friends for a Fashionista High Tea at a pretty amazing place, the Palazzo Versace hotel on the Gold Coast. We had high tea in this amazing room – the Le Jardin restaurant -

High tea was sublime -

Eyeing off the goodies…

Of course, I take terrible photos. Focus on the FOOD, and the surroundings! The pool was amazing. We are all going to have to come back at some stage and get ourselves a pagoda!

That can totally be a New Year resolution.

I’m not really big on actual formal resolutions any more. I used to aim for the sky, far higher than I could possibly hope to achieve. It meant for me, that I fought harder and usually achieved more than had I aimed for what was ‘reasonable’. That was one of the secrets behind my high achievements of my younger years.

The biggest secret was that I was obsessive and relentless and pushed myself, body and mind, beyond the limit – and this contributed to my eventual break down. I guess there are ‘reasonable’ limits on most things for a good reason.

I often think just how much more I could have achieved in my life, had I stuck to limits that were reasonable for me. I might be in a career now, I might be married, or at least have a partner and kids, I might be a totally different person in a totally different position to now.

But we can’t waste more time with regrets. We only have right now – our future is made up of a series of ‘right nows’ – and it’s by making right now the best we can make it that we ensure our future will also be the best it can be.

And that’s what I’m going to focus on in 2013. Trying to make every moment count. Trying to continue the good things I’ve managed to achieve this year, and add more, but not overwhelm myself to the point of relapse.

In 2012, I achieved 2.5 years hospital free, and with a fairly stable weight at around 15 kilos heavier than what I used to fall to, and 5 kilos heavier than what my discharge weight used to be. I started volunteer work, graduated from physiotherapy after 18 months, started ballet classes, moved suburbs, completely cut off my biological family, and grown in many other small ways. I’ve taken up some more hobbies like gardening and sudoku, been painting and in an art show,  and I’ve been stretching myself so much more socially – getting out there meeting friends and DOING things with them instead of letting the social anxiety part of things cut me off.

I’ve eaten out so much, eaten so many new things. Like Christmas dinner, birthday meals, just meals at restaurants and picnics, high tea today. A couple of years ago, there was no way I would even put a speck of that stuff in my mouth, or keep it in my body,  and that’s before we even get into the ‘in public’ stuff.

I’ve  even gone swimming in a public pool and at the beach, and I’ve slept over with friends twice.

And I’ve started proper therapy and am working hard, making good  progress.

It’s been a great year. And there is so much more to come.

In 2013, I just want to keep expanding on these things. I want to increase my work hours so I can get a real job, and keep on volunteering because it’s good for my spirit. I want to do more ballet, and tackle the crippling anxiety that I have to fight to get to do it every single time. I want to do more things with more friends more often. I want to enjoy my own time more, doing more things I like or find meaningful or constructive rather than sleeping my life away or being sucked up by all ED thoughts and activities. And I want to progress even more with the therapy, and hopefully be able to achieve some peace – to that end, I already have an intake appointment lined up with an independent ED-based counselling/therapy service provider early in January and hope that when my 10 psychologist appointments are up, this fills the gap. (I also found the courage to ‘fire’ my private psychiatrist.)

I’m not making any ‘absolutes’ though – because we never know what is going to happen, and I think that as long as I’m going in the right direction, that is what matters.

I hope all of you have a wonderful, safe, happy new year, and that it brings better times – better health, peace, stability, healing. I hope that the good things are only a sign of things yet to come. And despite wishing you all so much more, in the same breath, I wish you all enough.

Okay, enough of my long winded ‘quick’ post! Go celebrate, go sleep, go see out 2013 in a way that makes YOU happy, and start the new year in a way you mean to continue.

And thank you all for being so supportive and lovely to me throughout this year of blogging.

(Image Sources: 1, 2 , 4, 5, 6)

(Ps, Shalimar has informed me of her desire to spend the new year eating, sleeping, catching lizards, and repeating it all over again )