Suicidal

Guilt And Depression – “What Do You Have To Be Depressed About?”

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 4 Comments

When it comes to physical illnesses, it is rare that someone is told that they shouldn’t feel the pain or discomfort they feel. If someone has kidney stones for example, it is unlikely they will be told that they have no reason to complain of the agony (I haven’t had kidney stones myself but from what I have seen on television it doesn’t look like a pleasant experience), but are accepted in their distress and treated accordingly. You would think then that the same would apply to mental illnesses which are after all as legitimate and debilitating as any physical illness out there, but for some reason this is not the case, especially when it comes to things like depression. 

Over the years I have been diagnosed with depression, one of the most common things I hear is that I shouldn’t be depressed.

Indeed, several times after people have heard that I have depression I have been told to imagine I am a person in a concentration camp during the holocaust. Now I am all for using one’s imagination, without people using their creative abilities to imagine scenarios separate to the ones they were experiencing we would never have had Harry Potter (cheers J.K.Rowling. Good work there mate), but I find it hard to understand exactly what benefit using my imagination to pretend I am living in Nazi Germany will have on my mental health. 

I think when people give me this advice the purpose is to illustrate how lucky I am in comparison to other people. They think that people in concentration camps who were unhappy were allowed to feel that way because their circumstances justified the emotions. They didn’t need to feel any shame or guilt for complaining about their situation because their situation was truly horrendous and beyond comprehension. So what is my excuse? What have I got to be depressed about? 

I am not being held captive in disgraceful living conditions, I voluntarily inhabit a light and bright flat with running water, heating and a television with over a hundred channels. I do not have an army of Nazis in my life, I have two loving parents who often go out of their way to make me feel better about myself and demonstrate how much they value me as a human being. I am, compared to many people in this world both past and present, incredibly lucky, so I suppose I understand the confusion someone would feel when they hear how incredibly unhappy I am on a day to day basis. That said, when people tell me to compare myself to someone who has been in a situation as traumatic as the holocaust it doesn’t make me feel better or happier at all. Instead all it does is make me feel guilty for sounding so ungrateful in my privileged existence, ashamed of my emotions and, like many people with depression, likely to bottle my feelings up to avoid stigma attached to them.

It is almost as if people think that people with depression need to carry around a permission slip with them at all times to justify their condition and thus mean they don’t have to feel guilty about it. Who on earth would decide who had permission? I know when I was unwell at school my mum was allowed to write a note to the PE teacher excusing me from playing sport, so does this mean she is the one who needs to write my little “Katie is allowed to be depressed” note. If my mum is the authority does that also mean that she needs to write depression permission slips for everyone out there? Do people realise how many people out there have depression? Where do people expect her to find the time? More importantly where the hell do they expect me to keep this document that must be carried at all times. Most of my clothes don’t have pockets and my rucksack is already full of things I need on a day to day basis. My bag is not a bottomless pit! I AM NOT MARY POPPINS! (Though I am practically perfect in every way and am rather fond of a spoonful of sugar alongside my antidepressants every morning). 

Without a permission slip then, clearly I have no right to be unhappy and should be taken to court for the crime of feeling emotions without just cause. Its odd really because people would never complain about a person who is feeling unexplainably happy. Sometimes a person might wake up in a good mood for no particular reason, they may walk with a spring in their step and a merry tune hummed between their lips, yet if someone asks why they are so cheerful that day and they reply that they simply are, nobody whips out the truncheons to demand they provide a valid list of reasons to justify their emotional state with the threat of shame and judgement were a list not to be provided. 

I really can’t help but wonder how on earth people telling me how to feel expect that to resolve the situation. If someone complains that they were hungry, me telling them that they aren’t hungry isn’t going to take the pain away and magically make a well filled baguette appear in their digestive system. Similarly, when someone hears that I am depressed and then tells me that I am not or that I shouldn’t be, happiness doesn’t suddenly start flowing through my veins. All it does is make me feel invalidated, guilty, ashamed and embarrassed, all of which are emotions that are a large problem in people with depression and are reasons that many don’t speak out to seek treatment. Depression as an illness makes you feel enough guilt and shame as it is without other outside influences supporting those inner voices. To feel the need to keep quiet because of those outside influences is an incredibly dangerous game and unfortunately one that I would argue is a reason many people lose their lives to this illness.

When it comes to depression I honestly think that the best thing to do is not to deny that it is a problem in the hopes that will make it go away, but to accept that it is the way it is and that that is ok. Obviously it doesn’t feel OK to be so desperately painfully unhappy for no reason at all, but that doesn’t mean you are not valid in your experience. When you actually listen to someone with depression rather than trying to make sense of their inner turmoil, you are far more likely to help them than you would be telling them to picture the bleak and terrible atmosphere of a Nazi concentration camp. When you listen to someone with depression you are allowing them to feel validated and sometimes feeling heard and validated is all people want. When someone speaks out about a mental health condition it doesn’t mean they are demanding you provide an explanation or solution for it. Sometimes they just want people to hear them. If you have depression it is OK to feel whatever you feel and rest assured that you don’t need to come to my house to get a permission slip to justify your emotions (you are more than welcome to come over for a cup of tea of course but as for the permission slip thing there really is no need to bother.) You are allowed to feel and justified in feeling sad, whether you are suffering in a traumatic situation or if you are “lucky” enough to live in Buckingham Palace with a crown on your head, five hundred corgis and are able to pay for your daily newspaper by simply handing over a self portrait printed onto a circular metal disk. Feel whatever the hell you are compelled to feel whether that feeling be positive or negative, even if it makes no sense (especially if it makes no sense), and don’t let anyone tell you that you should do any differently. 

Take care everyone x

Judge1

What It Is Like To Be Taken Into Hospital Under A Section 136 Of The Mental Health Act

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 26 Comments

I honestly don’t know where to begin with this week’s blog, as lord knows it has been a fairly traumatic seven days.

I guess I will just have to start at the very beginning (a very good place to start according to a certain Maria Von Trapp), the beginning being Saturday afternoon when things with my mental health blew up like some atomic bomb (and by atomic bomb I mean a really massive nuclear weapon of mass destruction and total insanity. There was even a mushroom cloud). 

So, picture the scene, it is Saturday afternoon and I am with my mum in the car outside my house (as in the family home where I grew up, not the flat) and we were talking about the fact that from today, my parents are going on holiday for two and a half weeks. Now, I realise that I am 26 years old and should therefore feel fine about being left alone for two and a half weeks, but due to my issues I am incredibly reliant on my parents and in reality they are more like a pair of carers as opposed to members of my family. Indeed, as I may have mentioned before, my mum gave up work to look after me full time as my level of independence is quite low, especially when I am struggling as much as I am now, and in fact my level of independence has been rapidly falling in recent weeks because the noise in my head is so loud that I have been finding it hard to take care of myself properly. I also fear this holiday because due to my diagnosis of Borderline Personality disorder (or Emotionally unstable personality disorder as the kids are calling it these days), I have an extreme fear of abandonment, which manifests itself in me doing anything I can to keep people from leaving me alone. I want to write a full blog about this fear of abandonment thing one day but for now just know that the idea of being left by my parents strikes absolute terror into my very core.

When mum and I were talking about the holiday then, I became extremely anxious and things only got worse and worse as time went on. It was then after about ten minutes of conversation that it happened. I snapped. 

It is extremely difficult to explain what I mean by that but basically it was like a switch went off in my brain and I became so terrified of being left alone that I completely lost control, so the rest of the scene happened in a total blur with me sort of watching the action and what I was doing rather than taking part in it. As soon as the thing in my brain snapped I just started hysterically screaming and crying and then for some reason I started to lash out. Like I said, all that happened was a total blur but from what I have been told afterwards in this lashing out I ended up hurting my mum and then in an act of total wildness I grabbed her phone and smashed it in the road. Naturally, my mum was terrified so she ran into the house without me, at which point I was left alone in the garden and the screaming in my head got worse. As you know, I have OCD with an extreme fear of contamination and in my daily life I barely touch anything unless it has been antibacterialised before hand, yet at this point I was so out of control that I started actively tearing up plants from the garden, running my oh so perfectly washed hands through the filth and soil, ripping roots and flowers like a maniac. I could feel the dirt wedging itself in my fingernails as I grabbed at the earth but still I couldn’t stop until the point where the anxiety in my mind reached such a point that I realised I need to stop the noise and the only way I could see to do this was to end my life. At this realisation I ran from the house, sprinting faster than Usain Bolt on steroids, the only thought in my head being that I needed to end my life. I won’t tell you exactly how I planned to do this as I don’t think that is helpful for anyone, but just know that I ran and I ran, desperate to reach the moment where I could end it all and in turn end the terrible thoughts. 

For about half an hour I was running alongside a river, looking around in fear that someone was going to save me and it was at about this point that I saw the first policewoman. As I saw her I started to panic but she let me pass without a word so I thought I was “safe” and continued on. Soon however I reached a pub, and it was here that I spotted two police cars in the distance as well as two police officers coming towards me. It was then that I realised that they were here for me and I froze like a deer in the headlights. I wanted to run but as I turned I saw the other policewoman coming from the other way and I found that I was completely ambushed. Still I tried to escape, but the three of them managed to trap me in a corner where I stood crying and shaking uncontrollably. As we stood there they asked me a few questions and then told me that I had to go with them. Naturally, this was not what I wanted at all, I wanted to be left alone to die but I had no choice in the matter and after a few more words I was escorted by the police through a giant crowd of people in a beer garden, enjoying their drinks in the summer sun, and into a police car. It was quite possibly the most humiliating experience of my life. Once in the car I was then driven home, but as two police officers went into the house I was left locked in the vehicle with the third police woman who was trying to calm me down. I however could not calm down and this fact was only made worse when the other two police officers came back to the car and told me that I was being arrested for assault, and criminal damage against my mum’s phone and the garden. It was honestly like something out of a movie with the police officer saying that whole speech about how I didn’t have to say anything but anything I did say could be given in evidence etc etc. Desperately, I pleaded to be allowed to speak to my mum or at least give her a hug as I was so afraid, but the police officers refused and with that I was driven to a police station where I was supposed to be interviewed by a sergeant. I however, was far too distressed to talk, so I was taken into a police cell with a new policewoman, an extremely empty, cold and uncomfortable room with nothing in it other than a bench. Together we sat on the bench, me frantically asking questions and begging to go home but the woman would not talk to me. I don’t know how long we stayed in the police cell (it felt like forever) but eventually one of the previous police officers appeared to tell me that because all of my actions were due to mental health problems I was being “de-arrested” and instead sectioned under Section 136 of the Mental Health Act. It is likely that if you have any mental health problems yourself you will know what a 136 is, but if you don’t it is basically a Section of the Mental Health Act under which police can detain you if they deem you to be at extreme risk of hurting yourself or other people. This then meant that I had to go to a hospital, so without further ado I was placed into an ambulance, driven to a 136 hospital and then I was escorted inside by the police. Once there a mental health nurse came out to ask me a lot of questions but I was still so distressed that I just cried and could barely speak. Questions over I was then escorted to my room, possibly the barest room other than the police cell that I have ever seen. Naturally, because a 136 suite is a hospital where people who are trying to end their own lives are taken, there is nothing in the room that you could hurt yourself with which basically meant that there was nothing at all. Ok I have been in mental hospitals before but this was an entirely different kettle of fish, with nothing other than a bed nailed to the floor and not even a door to the bathroom or a seat on the toilet. 

I am sure the place was clean (after all it was a hospital) but because I was in a new environment it was this point that OCD kicked in and I totally freaked out. As I had been picked up by the police I didn’t have any belongings (they had searched me and had taken everything away from me at the station) so without my trusty hand sanitiser I was at a loss and started having a panic attack. Thankfully the staff were absolutely amazing and a kind HCA talked to me to help me calm down. She then went to find some anti bacterial wipes as well as a mop and bucket and together we cleaned the whole room. Even when clean though I was still desperately suicidal and at risk of self harm, so she stayed with me and helped me to shower and get into some clean clothes . Naturally I continued to beg to be allowed home to see my mum, but obviously because I was sectioned I wasn’t allowed home for 24 hours or until a mental health team could come and assess me, so to my dismay I had to stay the night. Thankfully the staff there were completely amazing and kept me safe until I fell asleep around 3am. 

I must have been tired after all the drama because I slept then until 3pm (other than a few five minutes during the night where I was woken up by the screaming of other patients) and at 3pm I was awoken by a nurse telling me that the doctor was there to assess me. From there I went in pyjamas looking like a right scruff bag (not that I really cared at the time…I was so out of it and traumatised that I would have probably been assessed in a penguin suit and not been embarrassed) to another bare room with a few chairs to talk to a social worker, a doctor and a psychologist. Naturally their main goal was to assess how at risk I was to see if I needed to go to a longer term hospital, but I was so scared of that that I am ashamed to admit that I lied. They asked me if I felt in danger or suicidal so I told them that I felt safe over and over again. I must have been convincing because thankfully they agreed to not renew my section and said that I could go home, which I guess takes me to this point right here, writing this blog in my flat feeling as unsafe and at risk as ever, all alone and traumatised by the past 24 hours. On the plus side, if any of you out there have ever wanted to know what it is like to be picked up by the police and taken to a 136 suite, now you know! Hoorah for small mercies! 

I am not really sure how to end this blog other than to beg all of you out there not to see me as a terrible person for all that I have done and explained in this post. I will admit I have behaved disgracefully and I am extremely ashamed for all my actions (especially hurting my mum who like I said I love more than anyone in the world and would never hurt whenever in control of and feeling rational about my actions) but I really want you all to know that all that has happened has happened because I am really not well at the moment and am more out of control than ever. As you know I was un-arrested in the end and was taken from the police station to a hospital, so please do not think any less of me or assume me to be some kind of criminal, as when I am in my right mind I would never behave as I have done this past few days. I cannot control what any of you will think of me after admitting this (I hate admitting it but as I have always said on this blog I am nothing but honest) but if I could influence your way of thinking whatsoever please do not think of me as some violent, nasty person, but rather as a person who is very unwell and struggling with their mental health problems more than ever. 

As I go forward after this incident all I can do is hope that I can manage to keep myself safe even though when I told the psychologist this, it was a lie. The next two weeks are going to be extremely tough for me as my parents are away, but thankfully I do have friends who are coming in to look after me and the crisis team are visiting every day. I hope I can stay alive for them and equally I hope that I can stay alive for all of you too. For now though, I will end this post and simply hope that you have all had a good week. You all mean so much to me and I am eternally grateful for all the friends I have online who supported me during this “incident”. 

Take care everyone x 

Handcuffs

Can Some Treatment For Mental Health Problems Make Issues Worse?

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 13 Comments

Peanuts are a great source of protein, anti oxidants, and have been shown to be beneficial to heart health. When I eat a peanut, my heart throws a little fiesta in celebration and uses every ounce of peanut to make itself extra awesome. When my imaginary friend Jimmy eats a peanut however, he explodes and turns into a bucket of water (Jimmy has a very severe imaginary peanut allergy. Don’t worry though, I gave him an imaginary unicorn to ride on as compensation for his unfortunate condition). 

Clearly then, sometimes, things that are supposed to be good for us and that are supposed to be beneficial to our health don’t work for some people, and the same can be said of mental health treatment. 

Now before I get carried away I would like to express that I am VERY grateful for all of the mental health treatment I have received over the years, even the things that haven’t worked out, because they have taught me what kind of things do and don’t work for me. I know I am very fortunate to have had so much and such a variety of support, as there are all too many people out there who don’t get any treatment at all and that is heartbreaking. Anyone suffering with a mental health condition should be able to access treatment, end of discussion, so I am not saying “screw all of you people who have never had any help, I have had some unhelpful help so pity me”. 

Instead, I think it is important to look at some aspects of mental health treatment that can maybe cause more problems than they solve so that we can improve that treatment and make it better in the future. It is all well and good to say “all treatment is good treatment and you should just take it no matter what” but if we did that we would never move further in the ways people with mental health problems are supported and increase the benefits that support can bring.

Hundreds of years ago, people with what we might potentially diagnose with mental health problems, were seen to have evil spirits lurking inside of them and were treated by having a drill shoved through their skull to let the spirits out. If nobody had ever stopped to think “hey, maybe this bashing people about the head isn’t very helpful after all”, we might still be doing that today (which would make my weekly trip to my psychologist even more terrifying), so although I don’t think anything around today is as detrimental as head drilling, I have personally found some treatments to be quite problematic. In this post I therefore I want to be seen as looking at the peanuts and trying to keep all the goodness in whilst getting rid of all that stuff that turns imaginary people like poor Jimmy into imaginary buckets, rather than as throwing all the peanuts into the bin and declaring them all to be useless. 

I am sure there are a lot of people out there who can attest to treatments that have been more detrimental than helpful in the sense that a lot of times, group treatments and inpatient settings can be rather triggering. I have known many people who have picked up behaviours from other people they have met in hospital, but I think this is less a problem of the style of treatment and more a problem with the competitive/comparative nature of certain illnesses themselves. It would be unrealistic to say that everyone who is ever hospitalised should be kept in a separate room away from other potentially triggering patients because that isn’t real life, there are always going to be people who trigger you no matter where you are, and the key is to learn to deal with and manage that. 

When it comes to problems with treatment however, an important example for me in terms of an actual treatment style that made things worse for me, was a certain inpatient unit I was in for my eating disorder, and their extreme “this is the most important thing ever” focus on weight. 

Before I went to that unit, I did not weigh myself, nor did I care about the number of kilos on the scale or what my BMI was. 

My eating disorder was all about how I saw myself in the mirror and how I felt inside. Some days I would struggle more because I “felt” and saw myself as extra disgusting, whereas other days I would do better because I maybe didn’t feel as terrible about myself. 

If I had been weighing myself during those times, there probably wouldn’t have been much difference between the numbers shown on the scales on the days that I “felt massive” compared to the days I “felt not as bad”, like I said, it was all subjective and all internally measured by my emotions as apposed to any little plastic square I could stand on that would then flash numbers at me. Ok, I counted calories obsessively, but when it came to weights, numbers were irrelevant to me, and if you had told me what I weighed it wouldn’t have had any meaning to me. 

During my first inpatient admission for my eating disorder however, all of that changed, and it is since that admission that my eating disorder has progressed to the point where my it is still concerned with how I feel but also obsessed with the number on the scales and the great significance “what that means” (spoiler alert: it means very little nothing at all in terms of a person’s self worth or value on this planet. That kind of thing is instead measured by how lovely you are to people and whether or not you are one of those cheeky people who puts an empty carton of milk back in the fridge just to destroy someone’s morning hopes of a bowl of Coco Pops. THE MILK CANNOT TURN CHOCOLATEY IF YOU DON’T LEAVE ME ANY MILK).

I understand that in eating disorder treatment it is important to be aware of weight to a certain degree for various reasons (not that the weight of someone with an eating disorder will tell you how ill they are or how physically at risk they are of serious complications), but in this unit, weight meant EVERYTHING and every number on the BMI scale had a significant consequence to it. It would have been one thing if there was a rough weight band stage thing to use as a guide, but instead of that each number specifically told you what you were allowed or not allowed to do. 

Some I could vaguely understand. There was a weight at which you were allowed to do yoga for example, a weight at which you could go bowling, and a weight at which you were given permission to walk around the grounds. It is the more arbitrary number obsessions that I think should have been focused more on the individual and their struggles/progress, rather than simply basing it on silly numbers. For example there was a weight under which you were not allowed to pick your own food at lunch and instead had to keep your fingers crossed that the nurse wouldn’t pick the one option that you genuinely hated for reasons outside of your eating disorder, a weight at which you were allowed to pour your own milk into your cereal, even a weight you had to reach to earn the right to spread butter and jam on your own toast. 

Again I get the importance of this, very early on in treatment people may be unable to spread an acceptable amount of toppings on their toast or decide what option to chose at lunch so that extra support may be warranted, but who is at what stage should not have been decided by weight alone. 

For example what if someone who was severely unwell came onto the unit above the weight of toast spreading privilege. Was it fair to leave them wrestling with the marmalade on day one just because their weight was a few digits out? And what about people who mentally progressed very quickly and although they came in at low weights were able to manage marmalade responsibility before their weight reached acceptable levels. I knew of several people whose bodies struggled to gain weight no matter what they ate and they got frustrated in feeling mentally held back by not being allowed to spread their own toast or pick from the options at lunch themselves, skills that would have been beneficial for them to practice to carry out responsibly. 

Obviously if they had started demanding dry toast and a celery stick for meals it might not have been the best idea, but neither is holding people back or pushing them forward simply because of a number that doesn’t measure the mental part of the mental illness. 

Like I said, before that admission, weight was not a concern, but ever since then, what I weigh has always been significant, and I still think of my personal weight as a measure of how well I am to some degree, regardless of the mental struggle. Even now I still see those weights as the “well enough to spread jam” weight which allows my head to use these opportunities when I am at these weights to convince me that I am “ok now” (clearly when one has the ability to spread jam on one’s own toast it means that a person is fully recovered and needs no other progress to enable a healthy life…YAY EATING DISORDER LOGIC.) It just seems a bit confusing to me how so many therapists and eating disorder services over the years will tell you to “ignore the number” and tell you that “it doesn’t matter”…yet then go on to measure your level of wellness by that number and dictate your rights accordingly, showing that it actually matters and means a lot…contradictory much? 

The second example of treatment that I personally think caused more problems than it solved was my first admission to hospital when I was about 11. Admittedly I needed to be there, my OCD behaviours were controlling my life, everything was completely out of hand and someone needed to step in, but remember I was a scared 11 year old suddenly waking up in this mental hospital and  living away from home for the first time. I needed treatment yes, but primarily, I needed mental support, and that wasn’t what I got.  

My shower and soap rituals were instead physically controlled by means such as locking me out of the bathroom and stealing my soap. Now, exposure therapy for things like OCD is a very valid method of treatment, you are scared of something, you expose yourself to it, people help you through that exposure with support and you keep practicing until it isn’t scary anymore. 

Problem was, I had nobody to help me work through that exposure, all treatment was physical and ironically there was no mental support whatsoever despite the fact it was a mental hospital. 

Therefore, instead of working through my problems, I was just traumatised for weeks and left to struggle alone in absolute terror, so naturally, when I went home, I was not a fan of psychologists and would refuse further treatment. Had they worked with rather than “on” me, I would have trusted them and would have seen them as people I could work with to get through my problems, but in my 11 year old brain that experience taught me that therapists were nasty people who take you away from your parents, lock your bathroom, leave you to suffer alone and then send you home with all the mental pain you had before plus a little bit of bonus anxiety. Consequently, there were several years where I refused to see therapists and would lock myself in our home bathroom when they came to visit, refuse to go to clinics, or “forget” to leave lessons when they came to visit at school for sessions (that’s right…I hated therapy so much I voluntarily stayed in Maths lessons that I was allowed to get out of…MATHS!)

It has taken a long time for me to get to the point where I can trust therapists again, actually talk to them, see them as humans rather than soap stealing villains, and still every mention of exposure therapy sends me bananas because my first bad experience of it has not left me excited to give it another go… 

So, can certain kinds of mental health treatments actually make a person worse? Well, yes, and though I think it is important to try new things and approaches, it is equally important not to label all treatment as helpful and to be able to critique the bits that maybe aren’t as helpful and could use a bit of a rethink so that we can improve them, keep the good and edit out the bad, or else we would still be in the time of drilling people in the head, and nobody wants that. By all means use a drill to put up a nice painting or build a table, but when it comes to my noggin, I would rather you kept all power tools at a safe distance. 

Take care everyone x 

Bucket

Struggling With Body Self Hatred

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 29 Comments

Trigger warning: This post contains graphic descriptions of bodily self hate and suicidal ideation so if that would trigger you then please go and make yourself a cup of tea and a biscuit instead of reading. I care about you all too much to cause distress to any of you.

So good news: as of today I am one week and three days vodka free and I don’t want to toot my own horn but TOOT TOOT, considering I was on at least a bottle a day for the past three months I think that is pretty damn good! Ok I still have a long way to go and I still crave a drink everyday,  but as a start I have to admit that I am rather proud of myself and if I was a flexible human bean I would be giving myself a well earned pat on the back right now.

Bad news however is that I have woken up into a nightmare, that nightmare being my body.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, over the past three months, due to drinking alcohol and consequently eating things I never have before, I have gained a lot of weight and to be honest when I was drunk all the time it kind of numbed me to what that felt like. Obviously I was bothered by the weight gain on some level, but at the same time there was a large part of me that was too drunk to care. Now though I am sober and I really care. A lot.

I have quite literally woken up into a body that isn’t mine. 

For three months I have been practically unconscious but now I am awake and I can see the dramatic changes. There is simply flesh everywhere, thick rolls of the stuff where there never was before. The gap between my thighs is gone, I can no longer get my fingers around the top of my arm, my hands are puffy balls with thick ugly fingers stuck on the end, my face is smushed and piggy, I have several chins, everything wobbles when I walk and my stomach is a giant gelatinous mass. I cannot look at myself in the mirror without staggering back in shock and crying because I simply do not recognise myself and I hate it. I hate what vodka has done to me and what I have become, I am in all honesty a monster. 

I am just so angry at what has happened and so distressed because it is going to take me months to lose all this weight again. As I sit here my skin is literally crawling with disgust. I want to get a knife and slice all this flesh from myself, I want to grow nails like talons and rip my skin to pieces to claw out all this lard, I want to tear the fat from my bones and leave my body looking as broken and torn as I feel on the inside. 

Ok I will hold my pudgy little hands up and that admit I have never been happy with my body and even at my lowest weight I thought that I was fat, but the disgust I felt previously was nothing compared to what I feel now. I see my reflection in the mirror and I want to be sick, I am a grotesque, ugly, disgusting creature with glasses and nobody reading this blog can tell me otherwise because none of you have seen me in person for months because I have been hiding away. Trust me, if any of you saw me you would be shocked and as disgusted as I am right now. 

It is just so frustrating because I wish I could write a blog that was inspiring, telling you all how I have gained all this weight and how great I feel, to inspire others to do the same. I wish I could tell you how happy I am now I am a healthy weight and I wish I could be the strong recovered person you all deserve. I would love to be able to come on here and say how it is all sunshine and rainbows, how I sneezed the other day and a unicorn flew out with a multicoloured mane and a horn made of candy but to tell you this weight gain has been a positive experience would be to lie. It is hell. I just want to be thin again more than anything in the world because despising myself this much is unbearable. I cannot get across how angry I am with myself for letting things get to this and all I can think about is how I wish anorexia had killed me when I was in hospital last admission. All I can say is that I damn well hope it does this relapse because I never want to feel like this ever again. 

I just don’t know how to deal with this level of self-hatred. Hopefully, now I have stopped drinking alcohol by the gallon and eating all food in sight, the weight will start to come off but it will be Christmas before I am anywhere near where I want to be and I just don’t think I can keep myself alive for that long. I know that people will probably say that losing weight isn’t the answer in this situation and that what I need to do is learn to love myself as I am, but that is simply impossible. I hate to be so negative but once again I am crying as I am typing because I just cannot physically stand to be within myself. My body feels like a prison that I cannot get out of and I want to break free. 

I just wish I could go back in time three months to before I started drinking, before alcohol ruined my body and consequently my life. If I could turn back time I would have never had that first drink and then I wouldn’t be in the state I am in today. 

It sounds so melodramatic to say this but I hate my body so much that i don’t know how much longer I can live in it. I know all of the classic things they say about how it is what is inside that counts and I know I shouldn’t be bothered by something so superficial so much, but I cannot help it and I feel absolutely ridiculous. Honestly, I am on the brink of another suicide attempt all because I cannot stand my body, how pathetic is that? What you look like doesn’t matter and if it were anyone else I would be telling them that it doesn’t matter what you weigh at all, but knowing that doesn’t make it easy to put into practice. I know I shouldn’t care about my weight, that I shouldn’t be this tied up in physical appearance but yet here I am crying about the fact that my trousers no longer require a belt. I probably sound incredibly vain but that isn’t it at all. I don’t want to be thin because I want to look nice or because I want people to think I am attractive. Hell, being as thin as I want to be doesn’t make people think I am attractive, I know that from experience. I know that in the past at my lowest weight everybody thought that I looked awful but at least then I felt safe. Ok I wasn’t safe, I was so close to death and in so much danger that they stuck a tube up my nose but it felt safe to me and that was all that mattered. I have said the phrase “I wish” so many times in this blog post which is ridiculous as I know that wishing won’t make any of this go away. You don’t get things simply by wishing for them, there is no fairy godmother out there with a magic wand and a fabulous gown and yet I wish regardless. They say that one in five people die from anorexia and I wish that last autumn I had been that one in five. I just don’t want to be here anymore especially in this disgusting body. It isn’t about vanity, it isn’t about wanting to look nice, it is about not being able to live with a level of self loathing so high it makes my stomach lurch and my eyeballs spurt tears like never-ending waterfalls. It is about being so distressed that you go to bed every night and pray to God that you don’t wake up in the morning because another hour in this existence is just too much for you to muster. 

I am really really sorry to be so negative today I don’t know what is wrong with me, I am just struggling so much at the moment with the level of self hatred going on in my brain and I guess I needed to use this blog post to vent it out. I just need to get things back to the way they were. I wish I could be the inspirational healthy weighted Katie you all deserve rather than this fat mess who is determined to be thin again. I wish I could find my sense of humour again and make light of the situation, make jokes like I used to be able to do but my sense of humour has all but disappeared and all that is left is lard. I just can’t do this anymore and I want to give up, I want to disappear, I want to die. I am so sorry I cant be the person you all want me to be or at least the person that you all deserve. I wouldn’t blame you if you all turned away and gave up on me now, lord knows I have all but given up on myself.

Take care everyone x 

SelfHatred

Eating Disorders And Gender Identity

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 18 Comments

As you can probably tell from reading my blog, I am pretty open about my mental health, and I suppose, by putting my life online, you could argue that I am pretty open and honest about most things I experience. Nevertheless, there is one aspect of my identity that I have kept secret for years, not just online but with friends, something which I have only spoken about to my mother and certain therapists. In the past few weeks I have been asking myself why this is, and the answer to that is fairly easy (far easier than answering the question what is 4504 divided by 789 at least…NO CALCULATORS PLEASE), that being that I fear judgment and still see this aspect of myself as somewhat taboo. 

However, I have started to realise that by keeping this part of me on the “down low” because I feel embarrassed, is only perpetuating the idea that this “secret” is something I should be ashamed about, and that isn’t going to help anyone out there struggling with the same thing. What if there are people who are feeling as uncertain as I am about things but who are scared to speak out? What if they feel as alone as I do?

Ok, so it is probably time for me to stop beating around the bush and get on with the topic (the bush is fairly battered by now…there are so many leaves about I can barely see the keyboard…sorry bush, you didn’t do anything wrong…not that if you had done something wrong that would be an acceptable reason to beat you…I don’t condone violence of any kind…gosh I feel I might still be beating around the bush…SORRY AGAIN BUSH). 

The topic around which my “secret” revolves? Gender, though more specifically, my personal gender identity and how that affects my mental health and experience of anorexia. 

As you have probably all assumed, I was born and am biologically female, yet I do not see myself that way. In all honesty I feel quite ill when people refer to me as “a woman”, and every time a stranger refers to me as a “lady”, I feel physically sick. Saying this may make people think that therefore, inside, I see myself as male, but again this is not the case. With regards to my gender, I do not feel like a woman (just one of the many personal emotions Shania Twain and I disagree upon), nor do I feel like a man, in truth, I feel simultaneously like neither and both all at the same time. Thankfully more and more people are talking about gender these days what with the transgender FTM/MTF bathroom debates going on in the US, and there are even labels out there to describe people like me who do not see themselves as belonging in either of the binary box options presented on health forms. Names like agender/gender-non binary/genderqueer/gender neutral are now words many people, rather than just those whom they affect, are familiar with, and there are even more pronoun options and gender identities available in the “about me” section of your Facebook profile. Which of these “non binary terms” I best identify with I am still not sure as I find my gender identity rather confusing. 

The one thing I know for certain however, is that I am not female, and having a biologically female body has had a bigger impact on my anorexia than most people would understand. 

I have written before about how anorexia functions in my life, as a sense of achievement, sense of control, friend, identity and many other things that make it a lot more complicated than the common understanding of “people with anorexia just want to be thin”, but the other way in which anorexia functions for me is as a way of trying to minimise the “femaleness” I am uncomfortable about in my body. 

I see a lot of females on recovery websites listing perks of recovery to motivate themselves and others to keep fighting their demons, and more often than not one of the things on this list will be “recover to get your boobs back” (for when a person’s eating disorder leads to weight loss/becoming underweight, “boobs” are obviously a part of the body that will undergo some shrinkage.) Indeed I have known people whose cup size has fallen several letters of the alphabet due to their eating disorder (side note: who the hell coined the name “cup size” as a way to describe the space taken up by a boob? Why don’t we just say “boob size”? Who the hell is putting their boobs in cups? Don’t people realise those things are for drinking out of not measuring body parts? You don’t call your shoe size your “colander size” do you? No! So what is this…SOMEONE EXPLAIN). 

This loss of BOOB SIZE is often met with discomfort and people saying things like “I don’t feel female anymore” as if that is a bad thing, when for me, that is part of the point. For this reason, people trying to motivate me to recover by saying things like “recover for boobs” or “recover for curves” is more like a threat of “if you gain weight you are going to have to wear massive bras and stop running for the bus incase you knock yourself out with a rogue breast”, so I often find that I cannot relate to people with eating disorders despite sharing a diagnosis. 

In a way the idea of my chest increasing in size shouldn’t scare me as much as it does, as, in terms of revealing another aspect of myself that people are unaware of, I actually wear a binder rather than a bra. 

For those of you who don’t know, a binder is basically a very tight vest like thing that “binds” your chest somehow (magic and wizardry I think), to give you the appearance of a flat chest, and it is often a thing warn by transgender men. Indeed it was from a trans man that I myself first heard of such a garment and immediately picked one up because I too hated my chest. What I couldn’t relate to with this trans man however, was the need for things like testosterone hormone injections and a desire for facial hair, and it is there that my confusion of “what the hell gender am I then” began. 

I have worn my binder for six years now at both healthy and underweight BMI’s, so I know that technically, no matter how far I am in terms of physical recovery, when I have to go out in public I do not need to worry about my chest. At either weight I know that my binder will give me the appearance of a flat chest, but I also know that I cannot wear my binder in places like the shower which is where the appearance of my chest really bothers me. 

I know that in the past when in the process of getting to a healthy weight, one of the main parts of my body I have feared gaining weight on is my chest, and my bare chest makes me so uncomfortable that I have often refused ECG tests in the past to check how my eating disorder is affecting my heart (these scans are apparently very clever but involve you having to be naked from the waist up…not that clever in my opinion then). 

It has caused such issues in hospital before that even nurses have been confused and contemplated forcing me to stop wearing a binder as they wonder if it could actually be an eating disorder driven choice to “make me look thinner”. People have also suggested that me wearing a binder could link to my desire to remain a child and not grow up into the scary world of adulthood, but as possible as that is, it doesn’t explain the other issues I have with regards to being called “lady”, “she” or even “daughter”. You might not have noticed but if you look through any of the posts I have written previously mentioning my mother, I always refer to myself as her “offspring” and never as “the D word”. Maybe you thought that was just because I wanted to sound fancy, but in actual fact all of those instances were me trying to write on my blog honestly whilst keeping a secret, which is sort of like trying to make a cup of tea without any tea leaves. 

Other things I have seen on websites to motivate females to recover is the idea of getting their menstrual cycle back/being able to bear children, yet again this possibility is something from which I want to run away in fear rather than welcome with joy. When I lost my menstrual cycle I was secretly thrilled and as terrible as this sounds the idea that eating might make my womb work properly was terrifying. I feel so guilty saying that, as I know there are so many women out there who can’t have children so I shouldn’t be wishing my fertility away in such a manner, but I can’t help it, I don’t want a womb and I do not want a monthly reminder that I am trapped in a female body with no escape. When I was told I had osteoporosis (caused by the lack of periods), I even refused to take oestrogen hormone replacements because the idea of getting my menstrual cycle back was more frightening than the idea of breaking my spine, and my google search history has more searches like “can you get a womb or breasts removed” than I care to count.

Unfortunately, I realise that yet again it is one of those “here is a mental illness problem people struggle with” without any conclusion or advice to support those out there struggling with the same thing, which sucks because I know how horrible and complicated this whole relationship between eating disorders and gender can be. That said, considering I don’t fully understand my gender identity in relation to anorexia myself, I would be hard pushed to say anything of any worth, yet still I wanted to write this post if only to get the topic out there and the conversation started. I haven’t come to a conclusion as to “what” I am and I haven’t given advice on how to manage an eating disorder when gender identity is one of the things causing problems with recovery, but I hope I have at least shown another aspect of how complex mental health problems like eating disorders can be, and done something to dispel the idea that they are simply a case of going on a diet that gets out of hand to look as thin as the people in the magazines. More importantly though, I hope that I have made anyone else who feels as confused and alone with this as I do, feel a little less weird, knowing that someone out there does understand, and that though they are also confused, at least you are confused together. Maybe the more people who talk about it the more research will be done and the more will be understood, so as anxious as I am about posting this, I am doing it anyway to add to the voices of those telling professionals that this is a problem only to receive responses like “I have never heard of this happening before”. As I always say, when it comes to mental health problems nobody is weird or a freak, and none of you are alone in any of your struggles.

Take care everyone x

Gender

The Fear Of Moving Out With Mental Health Problems

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 17 Comments

So it has happened. My parents have finally had enough of my mental health problems and consequently I am being forced to move out this week on July 14th 2018 (it was supposed to be Friday the 13th but when I realised the date I, being a very superstitious bean, begged for an extra night at home.) I am absolutely dreading it and could not be more terrified if I tried (not that I imagine anyone would try to be more terrified than they were in any given situation…that would be weird). It is what I have been dreading my whole life, leaving home, especially now when things are particularly prickly in my old brain, but that is why I have to leave. 

Don’t get me wrong, I am not being kicked out with nothing more than a bag of my belongings and a tent, I am in fact going to live in a small flat my mum and I bought with some inheritance money (god bless Grandma and Grandad), but at this stage in my life I think I would be terrified even if I were moving into the Ritz. A lot of fellow 26 year olds may read this and think that there isn’t much to be afraid of, but I am not your average 26 year old and I don’t know how to do anything I should have learnt by now. Because of my OCD I have never done a load of washing nor do I know how to, I have never changed a bed sheet, done a weekly shop for food,  nor have I ever paid a bill. Ok my parents will be living five minutes away and will hopefully help me out a bit for the first few weeks but within a month of me moving in they will be jetting off to Malaysia for their summer holiday and consequently I will be all alone in my flat with no safety net for two and a half weeks. I don’t know quite what else to say other than that I am crying as I type this as I have never been so scared in all my life. I cannot believe it has actually come to this. 

My parents have mentioned that they couldn’t cope with me before, but I always figured that we would work it out like those previous times, yet this week there is no working out, I am actually going and it makes my stomach do all those fancy somersaults you see trapeze artists do in the circus just thinking about it. I just wish I could have recovered from all my illnesses before now so that it never had to come to this. To be fair I guess a lot of people my age are moving out from home, if not now then earlier, but i simply don’t feel ready. Maybe nobody ever feels ready to move away from home and maybe this is normal, but regardless I don’t like it at all. I want to stay at home in my childhood house where I grew up with my mum and dad. I want to live in my room that I have slept in for 26 years and I want to shower in the same shower I have used for all of that time too. I want to pour water from the same kitchen tap I have lived with all my life and I want to sit on the same sofa I have sat on for every movie marathon I have ever had with my mum. I am not ready to be alone, being alone is my biggest fear and now I am being forced to face it head on. I don’t know what I am going to do with myself. It is pathetic but because of my mental illnesses I have become so dependant on my parents that I seriously have no idea how to manage without them. How do I wake up without my mum there to help me get ready in the morning? How do I prepare food alone with all the voices screaming in my head? How do I avoid alcohol as I have been trying to and failing to do for the past month? How do I get through the day? How do I go to bed? How do I breathe? How on earth do I survive? 

I know I must sound extremely melodramatic and immature to be worrying about all these things at my age, but I think that when you have mental illnesses your ageing process slows down so in reality I am mentally nowhere near where I should be in comparison to other people my age. I have written about it before but I must reiterate the fact that when other people were growing up and learning to do all these things, I was too busy washing my hands or starving myself or crying into a pillow because I was so depressed. I never did the usual teenage rebellion of independence, I never snuck out of the house, dated people who were bad for me or got grounded, because I never had time to do anything wrong. I was mental, that was my identity and it still is and now I am going to have to live as this mental lunatic alone, with no idea how to cope. 

I guess my message this week then is that if you are mentally ill and are still living at home, seek help now before it gets to the stage where you have to leave home and figure it out alone too. Seek help now and learn to be independent before it is too late, cherish living with loved ones before they run out of patience and cherish knowing that there are people there when you struggle. Hopefully within the next few weeks I will be getting a carer from social services to help me figure all of this out in my flat, but for now that carer isn’t available so like I said I will be trying to do it all myself. Just please seek help out there even if you have the most loving parents in the world as I have, because at some point, with mental illness, everybody breaks down and gets to the point where they cannot manage. It feels weird to think that the next time I post a blog it will be from inside my new flat. I still cannot quite believe it, although I am sure reality will kick in and I will realise what is happening soon enough. Until then I hope you are all well and are keeping yourselves safe. 

Take care everyone x 

LifeChange

Why We Need To Stop Rating Pain On A Scale From One To Ten

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 6 Comments

Whenever you go to A&E or are admitted to a general hospital for a physical illness because of an injury or disease that hurts, you are always asked the same question. 

“On a scale from one to ten, how would you rate your pain?”

They make pain sound like a hotel that you recently stayed in on holiday. You know, those hotels where at the end of your stay you are handed a feedback form to let staff know what you thought of the experience provided (although with the pain thing ten tends to mean “the worst pain you have ever felt” and zero “no pain at all”, rather than the hotel ten to zero equivalents of “I found a dead man in my bed” to “the room service was excellent.”) I always find this question a difficult one to answer, which is silly really because it isn’t exactly a question that requires much revision (unlike GCSE biology. I swear I read those text books so many times that I will never forget the fact that most of the energy released during respiration comes from the mitochondria), and really I am the only person who can answer it. Then again, how can you answer such a subjective question and how can you quantify pain? When you are in pain, that is it, all you know is that you are in pain and the ability to rate it on a scale is somewhat diminished by the agony you are experiencing. 

Were someone to ask you to rate your pain on a scale seconds after you had just stubbed your toe, most if not all people would probably cry out “10” and then perhaps yell some abuse at the person who was asking such a silly question when they were leaping around with a potentially broken toe. In those moments when the injury has just occurred (aka the toe stubbing), you are unable to rationalise that really, the pain is unlikely to be the worst pain you ever felt. You don’t hear the question and really think about it, employing reason to figure that stubbing your toe was probably a lot less painful than the day you had your whole foot bitten off by a shark (suffice it to say you are rather careless with the body parts that exist below your knees). No, in that pain your stubbed toe is a 10, the worst pain ever, and you would say that whether or not that is true. 

The question is then further complicated by the fact that people have different pain thresholds. For example, I use an epilator to remove unwanted hair on my legs (lovely image for you there…enjoy it), and for me the “pain” that causes doesn’t bother me at all because I have been doing it for years and am used to it. My mum on the other hand couldn’t epilate because she finds the process agony, a pain that I have somewhat grown out of fearing through repeated experience. How then can you ask someone to rate their pain when one person’s 10 could be another person’s 4. 

All in all the question of rating pain in medical settings is problematic, yet I would say it is far more problematic in the way it is used when it comes to mental health problems. 

Whenever you are admitted to a psychiatric hospital or sent to see a new therapist, it is likely you will be given a form to fill out with a lot of questions, scales and little boxes to write numbers in. The questions are differently worded each time but overall they are pretty much the same and include things like “On a scale of one to ten how depressed have you been in the last 28 days” or “In the last 28 days how anxious have you been on a scale of one to ten” (Mental health professionals love measuring time in 28 day blocks. Weirdos.)

I myself have filled in many forms like this over the years, and the questions stump me every time. Asking me to rate how depressed I am with numbers is like that song in the Sound Of Music when all the nuns are singing about the difficulty of solving a problem like Maria being akin to pinning a wave upon the sand. When I am depressed, it simply feels like I am drowning. How on earth can drowning be rated? You can’t be more drowning or less drowning, you are either drowning or you are not, and if it is the first of those options then the important thing is to send out the life boats rather than asking exactly what percentage of your lungs have filled with water. On the most recent questionnaire I filled out I was asked to write a number from 1 to 10 describing “how suicidal” I had felt in the last 28 days and then there were further enquiries as to how many days I had felt that way and what each of those days looked like when rated and compared. What kind of question is that? Can you rate how suicidal you have felt? Much like with the depression question, when I feel suicidal it is a feeling with a depth and breadth far greater than I can put into words, let alone numbers. Never have I ever turned up in a session saying I feel like “a 4” or indeed “a 10”. Instead I try to capture what is going on using any adjectives to hand, hopeless, guilty, lost, useless, depressed, like a waste of space etc, and even those aren’t good enough. Furthermore, if I have been feeling suicidal for a length of time I am unable to distinguish the levels of the feelings with each day that passes because on the day I am asked, the pain I am CURRENTLY experiencing is all I can think about, much like the person with the stubbed toe can only think about their bruised digit. Even if I could distinguish the difference, how can you measure “how suicidal” you are? What are you supposed to think? Should I reflect on my week and think “well Tuesday was clearly better than Wednesday because I only prepared a noose without planning on a place to hang it and working out how to get to such a height? Isn’t the fact that someone is suicidal enough to ring alarm bells? Professionals should hear that pain exists and take action immediately because to feel suicidal at all is incredibly serious and not something that should be dismissed because the form rated the feelings as “1”. If the number is anything other than a 0 in whatever box, the pain should be addressed rather than swept under the carpet as insignificant. 

Of course I understand the need to rate pain in the physical illness world and to some extent in the mental illness world as well. If you need to tell a doctor where something hurts, telling them how badly it hurts could be a handy indicator as to what is going on. Indeed I think numbering pain has great value and for a brief glimpse into how life is for a certain person, it has a place, but it is still incredibly limited. I am not saying we should stop rating pain by numbers, I am saying that we need to rate it in other ways too. For people who are scientifically minded maybe numbering things is a helpful way to look at distress. I myself however, am not a mathematical person, I instead deal with words and images. When I am distressed I feel my heart racing at such a rapid pace that I feel it will burst from my chest, when I feel hopeless I can see nothing but a bleak black hole, and when I am overwhelmed the world is a screaming canvas of differently coloured paint splattered chaotically like a Jackson Pollock painting. How on earth am I supposed to get all of that into a little box on a form using a secretary’s leaky biro? Mental illness questionnaires need to offer a variety of ways for people to express themselves, maybe some lined paper so that they can write if the number system is unsuitable, hell maybe a watercolour pad and some paint to at least attempt to capture the uncapturable and intricate complications of the human mind. Patients need to be seen as individuals who all feel and express themselves in a certain way, and the questionnaires they are required to fill out should reflect this. 

In my most recent forms, to be honest I found myself writing random numbers in a lot of the boxes (or at least numbers that my head didn’t deem as “dangerous and likely to cause harm to a loved one”), because I couldn’t rank my levels of distress in numerical order and I would be surprised if other people hadn’t had to do similar things just to make the professionals happy when really the idea is that they are trying to help YOU as an individual get better, not YOU helping them fill out their paperwork. Let us explore the diversity of experience in diverse ways, use any method possible to express some of what is going on in the depths of our souls and listen, look, even smell what is really going on rather than capturing it in an insignificant number on a scale of one to ten. We need to focus not on rating the pain but acknowledging that its mere existence is a problem and that if someone is drowning the key is sending out the life boats, not waiting for them to be “more drowning” or to cry out a number that is in double figures. By then who knows? It might be too late. 

Take care everyone x

Pain1

My Alcohol Confession Part Two

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 28 Comments

It is currently 2am on Monday the 4th of June and this blog post is due up in a number of hours. Normally I have the blog and picture all prepared almost a week before it is due to go up, but this week I am unprepared because this week I am scared.

All week I have been trying to write yet I have been unable because I am so scared of letting something slip that I should have explained last week and therefore in holding my words back I am unable to say anything at all. You see last week in my post ….. I came clean about a new problem I have, that being the problem of me binge drinking alcohol, but what I did not mention is a consequence that has come from that binge drinking and it is that consequence that I want to talk about today.

 

I am so scared to admit it because it is something that has both been terrifying and upsetting me lately, even though it is nothing to be ashamed of. I feel like a right idiot and hypocrite for being so upset about it considering I would be the first person to tell anyone out there that what I am about to say doesn’t mean anything and doesn’t show how ill or well anyone is, but I cannot help it. 

I am shaking as I am writing this and it is so stupid because it isn’t even a big deal. I am sure all of you out there are going to be thinking that I am about to admit to murdering penguins or something as I am making it out to be such a big and terrible crime, when really it is all going to be incredibly disappointing when I actually get round to spitting it out. Oh God I am practically going delirious with fear and I can’t believe I am actually going to come out with it. Ok, shut up Katie, just get round to the point.

So here goes, here is my confession: I am a healthy weight. 

OH MY GOODNESS! I CANNOT BELIEVE I ADMITTED IT! WHY IS THIS SO HARD, GAH, WHY.

I have just read back all that I have written and good lord it is the biggest amount of codswallop I have ever read. What am I even doing? What is going on? 

Right, time to explain. So like I said last week, I have started binge drinking and I have been binge drinking every day for almost two months now, pretty much ever since my suicide attempt. When I started I was extremely underweight and you all probably think that that is still the case, but in actual fact it is not. You see, before I started binge drinking, I was barely eating anything, but then I got drunk for the first time and in my drunken stupor I started eating. I have heard of other people with eating disorders turning to drink and from several people I have heard that they tend to replace food with alcohol when this happens, but this is not how it has happened with me. You see when I get drunk, I get happy and I don’t care about anything and consequently I eat and that is what I have done for the past two months. “You have eaten food” I hear you cry “what kind of a confession is that?” But when I say I have eaten food I mean I have eaten out of control, drunken quantities of food and because of this I have gained a lot of weight. I don’t want to admit this because I am extremely ashamed but I have gone from being very underweight to being a healthy weight in two months. It has been extremely traumatic and what’s worse is that I cannot seem to stop. Weeks ago I said that I was going to stop drinking so that I could lose all the weight, but I still haven’t managed to do that and so the weight is piling on. Even worse than that is it is all a vicious circle. You see one thing I didn’t mention last week was one of the big reasons why I drink and that reason is that it helps me deal with all this new unexpected and extremely painful weight gain. Problem is, I drink to make myself feel better about the weight and consequently eat which makes me gain more weight, hence this most vicious of vicious circles that I am stuck in. It is like a massive whirlpool from Moby Dick (in actual fact there is no whirlpool in Moby Dick but I just wanted to use this opportunity to drop in a Moby Dick reference to show off the fact that I have read that massive book).

I have decided that from the day I put up this blog I am going to have a new start, no alcohol and I am going to try and lose this weight again because like I said it is making my eating disorder scream louder and making me want to drink alcohol more which I really need to give up. In the interests of losing all this weight again I have joined a gym and come up with a new meal plan to try and help me, but I have no idea how I am going to do it because I cannot seem to give up alcohol and I am scared. I am scared that I will never get sober and that I will gain so much weight I will get overweight .

I guess here is where I should probably take a moment to explain why I think all of this is such a big deal because in actual fact being a healthy weight is not a big deal at all as I have said multiple times. Being a healthy weight doesn’t mean I have recovered from anorexia, far from it, I am so distressed by anorexic thoughts that I have been driven to drink, and I am no less anorexic than I was two months ago, but I worry that all of you reading this will now think that I am not worthy of listening to. It is ridiculous because I would never think that of anyone else, but my brain is just such a mess. 

If anyone else were a healthy weight I would listen to them and hear them as much as anyone but I worry that all of you only read my blog because I am underweight and now I am a healthy weight I am terrified that you won’t like me anymore. Does that make sense? Gah THIS IS SO STUPID! WHY IS THIS HAPPENING? Oh purple pansies I don’t know what else to say because I am so anxious about posting this…maybe I can distract you from all of what is going on…OH MY GOODNESS LOOK A TURTLE!

GAH ok so what is the message of this post? What am I saying? Well, I have no idea and to be honest I am flip flapping all over the place, but basically what I wanted to update you on this week is the fact that I am still struggling to stop drinking alcohol since my suicide attempt and that this alcohol has made me gain a lot of weight which I now need to lose but please don’t stop listening to me because of all this because oh dear no please. Ok, now for me to run away and pray you don’t hate me. Cool…bye! 

Take care everyone x 

Fatty

Why Alcohol Doesn’t Go Well With Mental Health Problems

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 10 Comments

Ketchup goes well with chips. Rhubarb goes well with custard. But do you know what doesn’t go well with mental health problems? Alcohol, and this is a lesson I have learnt fairly recently. 

You see there is something I have been leaving out of my most recent blogs, partly because I didn’t think it was a big deal and partly because I thought it was an issue that would resolve itself fairly quickly, but it turns out that that is not the case. Basically, over the past month I have become dependant on alcohol to get through life with my mental health problems and it is causing a lot of issues. 

It all started five weeks ago on a jolly evening out in a rather sunny April, when I was at a concert by my favourite singer. The concert was brilliant, the music exceptional, but In between each song my favourite singer would pause to talk to the audience and on one of these occasions she stated how much she wanted a drink to help her to relax on stage. Obviously I have known about alcohol before this moment in my life, but as soon as she said about how it would relax her, my anxious brain got all excited and I decided to try drinking myself to see if I could relax too. Cut to today, five weeks later and I have not been able to have a day sober since.

Naturally, I have been trying to stop drinking for multiple reasons. For one thing I know that it is not good to spend your entire life totally off your rocker on vodka, but I can’t help it and it is now that I am realising how silly it was to start drinking in the first place. Obviously I never intended to get addicted to it but come on, we all know I have a rather addictive personality (actually I don’t think I have a personality at all, just a thick blob of addictive in its place) so maybe I should have seen this coming, but I didn’t and now I am left to try and deal with this extra problem on top of all the others and that is why I am writing this blog, to tell people out there with mental health problems that alcohol is not going to be a solution to your issues, rather it will add another issue to the pot. 

It is like making a cake. When you have mental health problems you have all the ingredients of insanity swirling around inside you, anxiety eggs, depressed flour, paranoid sugar and melancholy vanilla extract. Then comes alcohol which you think will wash all of those ingredients away and leave you free of all problems and to be fair, temporarily it does. When I drink alcohol, my anxiety goes way down, I laugh rather than cry and suicidal urges become a thing of the past. For once I am happy, dare I say merry to the point of feeling pure joy. If you could see all the things I have done in the past month you would be shocked at how much I have “achieved” under the spell of alcohol, from touching a door handle to eating out in public and for this reason you may think that alcohol therefore goes well with mental health problems. It takes the pain away so surely it is a great combination? Wrong. Instead, as I have learnt, alcohol only masks the problem by placing a big old blanket on top of all of your mental health ingredients so that you can’t see them, but underneath that blanket things are getting worse. The more you drink the more the mental health problems blend together, the closer they get to the oven and then BOOM! Before you know it you have sobered up and instead of finding your problems gone you find that whilst they were covered up things have got a whole lot worse and you are suddenly left not just with all these nasty ingredients to deal with but a giant three tiered cake covered in icing and cherries, and that is where I am now. 

I think alcohol is very sneaky that way and to be honest I wish I had never started drinking in the first place. It was just so easy to get addicted to it. When you are anxious and depressed all the time and then find a magic potion that takes all that away, why wouldn’t you drink it and then keep going? Even if the relief from your problems is temporary and the potion is actually creating more and more problems, wouldn’t you keep drinking it? Now I am sure some of you out there are reading this and are saying “no Katie, no I wouldn’t” in which case I have to congratulate you for being far more sensible than me! 

Like I said I am trying to give up alcohol right now and I have managed two days sprinkled in amongst the five weeks of drinking, but it is far harder than I ever imagined to go without alcohol, even though I have only been using it as a solution to my problems for five weeks. I don’t think one can become an alcoholic in that time but you can certainly become pretty damn addicted and that is why my team have referred me to alcohol services to try and nip this problem in the bud before it gets any bigger. Alcohol certainly hasn’t solved my problems, it has just added to them and that is why I wanted to write my blog about this today because I fear that other people out there are likely to fall into the same trap as I have, the trap of seeing alcohol as a quick fix to all the nastiness in your head and therefore becoming reliant on it for life, which seems good in the short term but in the long term will only create bigger problems and lead to more addictions and issues than you ever imagined. 

I can’t offer any advice to people like me who have already fallen into this trap, because like I said, I am still in it but what I wanted to do in this blog was to warn about the fact that mental health problems do not go well with alcohol and alcohol is certainly not a solution to your demons, it is instead a new one of them poised and ready to make itself at home with the rest of the insanity family. 

So that is my confession for the week, a jolly one I am sure you will agree! Still, at least in the past five weeks I have learnt something and hopefully in writing this blog maybe I can use that lesson to benefit someone else out there who was maybe on the brink of turning to alcohol but now realises that it is really not a good idea…I can only hope! In the meantime I m going to try and give up alcohol myself before services have to get involved, but considering how hard I have been finding that, who knows how well that is going to go.

Take care everyone x 

NoVodka

A Message To Parents Of People With Mental Health Problems

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 7 Comments

In life, people like to blame people for things that happen, regardless of whether or not it was the person’s fault. If there is nobody to blame, things that happen are random and don’t make sense, so really we blame people to make the world tidy. When I was younger I lost my banana scented gel pen (it was a tough time in my life but I think I am just about getting over it), and in my head it was incomprehensible that the pen was just lost. I didn’t think at all about the fact its loss was probably the result of many little events, dropping it somewhere, someone spotting it and tidying it away, a gust of wind blowing it off a table under a chair, that was too much to think about, so instead who did I blame? My cuddly monkey, a culprit who made a lot more sense than some complex chain of events I couldn’t figure out. It was the perfect story, my cuddly monkey was clearly having jungle withdrawal symptoms living with me in Bristol, in my eyes he had heard the call of the wild and hankered after the scent of his favourite food in his homeland. I assumed he must not like the invisible bananas and cups of tea I provided (let it be known I did pretend to feed him and in my eyes this thievery was not an act of desperation out of hunger, I am not a monster who starves cuddly monkeys thank you very much), and that the taking of my pen was for nostalgic scent purposes. Obviously, my monkey did not really steal my banana pen (I am 99% sure he didn’t anyway…), and it was silly to jump to that conclusion before the idea that the pen was just lost, but like I said, people like to blame people to make the world simple. 

Unfortunately, this desire to blame often happens when someone gets diagnosed with mental health problems. After the initial surprise has worn off and people have time to really think, they always look for someone to blame. They start wondering why someone is ill, what could have caused it, and often, especially in young adults or children, the conclusion will be that it must have been something to do with the parents. Even professionals say it sometimes. My mum used to work in a school and one day a nurse came in to talk about how to spot eating disorders in pupils. One of the possible causes for eating disorders listed in her presentation was “Troubled upbringing/home life”, which naturally upset my mum and had her worrying more than usual that the past decade of madness in our household has been because she failed as a parent. To her and to all parents I therefore want to say this:

If your child has been diagnosed with mental health problems, that does not mean that it is all your fault or that you have done anything wrong. 

Your child does not have anorexia simply because you tried a lot of different diets when they were growing up. Your child does not have OCD rituals around washing because you insisted they washed their hands before meals. Your child is not depressed because you didn’t hug them enough and they don’t cut their bodies just because you didn’t give lessons in self acceptance over breakfast. Maybe you did all of those things, maybe you did none of them, but either way they are not the reason your child is ill. Many people with eating disorders grew up in houses that promoted a healthy relationship with food just as many people without eating disorders grew up in houses with parents who ran weight loss classes at the local leisure centre. The complexities of mental health problems are not as simple as A causes B, they are often frighteningly random, they don’t make sense enough to have someone to blame at all, and sometimes you can do everything right and things will still go wrong. 

Like all illnesses, mental health problems do not discriminate. Depression doesn’t go door to door and interview the parents to see how well they have brought their child up before it attacks. If depression is going to happen, it will just charge in and make itself known, it will not peer through a window, notice that you have a lovely home with a matching three piece suite and freshly plumped cushions and walk away to find someone whose mum didn’t cut the crust off their sandwiches. 

Now I will admit, upbringing can have an impact on a child’s development and mental health, if you locked your child in a basement and beat them with a wet slipper every morning, that may have played a part in their low self esteem, but generally things are not that clear cut and the reasons are so numerous and so bound up in random life nonsense anyway that you can never pin point a cause. You can list a thousand reasons why I have mental health problems, a history of mental illness in the family, certain events, loss of loved ones, broken hearts, a desire to control a world whose unpredictability frightened me, being the geek with glasses, you can say anything and even then you could not grasp the reason why, because all of those potential influences are glued together with a million invisible things that nobody will ever know or understand. It is rare that an illness can be pinned down to one thing, just as you can’t entirely blame a cancer on the fact someone smokes, when it comes to any illness, it is too complicated to be anyone’s fault. If someone watches a man on a bus stop raise his arm and stop the bus they could conclude that the stopping of the bus was caused by the arm lifting into the air. Okay it may look like that on the surface and make sense as a neat tidy story, but it takes no account whatsoever of all the other knots in that chain of events stopping the bus. For example the driver had his eyes open to see the arm, his brain recognising it as a symbol for “stop” (and hopefully not “Heil Hitler”), someone else having already pressed the button, a foot had to go on the brakes and various cogs and things in the mechanics of the bus played a part too. Blaming someone for causing a mental health problem is like blaming that man for stopping the bus without thinking of all the other things that come into play. 

If you are a parent and your offspring has mental health problems, I beg you, please do not blame yourself and assume you must have done a bad job in raising the baby you dreamed would grow up to have a perfect life, that is unlike the one you see in reality. In life, shit just happens and there is very little you can do about it. Your role as a parent is not to stop the bad things from happening, to wrap them in cotton wool so that the monsters don’t get in. Monsters do not give two hoots about cotton wool. Don’t blame yourself for things that were not your fault and that you cannot change (for even if you could blame someone, talking about whose fault something is will never resolve the situation), instead do what you can with what you have. Love and support your child even when those monsters get in and help them fight those assholes until they flee the house rather than checking the locks and wondering how the hell they got in in the first place. Nobody can raise someone to not have mental health problems and that is  not a necessary requirement of a parent. Mental illnesses suck, but nobody can stop them, your only job is to offer love and support regardless of what is going on. That is what a good parent is, so relax, if you are doing that, then you are doing everything. 

Take care everyone x

Parents