february 17th: far green country under a swift sunrise

This past Christmas, my sister and I watched the entire Lord of the Rings series again. I hadn't seen it in years, and I'd forgotten about this quote at the end that Frodo says, that makes me cry every time I hear it:

"How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart, you begin to understand - there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend, some hurts that go too deep - that have taken hold."

My friend Katie and I have discussed this so many times - can we ever really be "normal" again? Can we ever really go back to being fully functional human beings? I realize there is no such thing as "normal"; I've been told this ad nauseum, whenever I've discussed this with anyone else. But I think there are levels of normal that people who dismiss normality take for granted. Things like waking up without wanting to die; breathing without having to focus on slowing every intake; communicating with others without having a panic attack; eating the appropriate amount of food to survive. When I say I want to me normal, I don't mean in an existential, socially bounded manner; I mean that I want to be able to function, on a daily basis, without simple necessary tasks taking up every ounce of energy I have.

This quote can apply to so many situations, many much more serious than mine. War, genocide, abuse and violence. What has always struck me about Frodo, though, is that in a sense, he failed. Without Gollum (another character I will need to write about, another time), Frodo would've kept the ring. I think, in the end, it wasn't what was done to him that haunted him, but the choices that he made. The others could heal, despite the travesties of war, because war was done to them. Frodo made his own bad decisions - heavily influenced by the ring, of course, but still in the end his own warped choices.

This, I think, is why it's so hard for people to feel sympathy for those with many mental illnesses. Because in the end, we do this to ourselves. We make the decision not to eat, to purge, to slash our wrists. To sit in bed and do absolutely nothing. To those outside, it seems so horribly selfish. And we see it ourselves. We know we shouldn't do the things we do; we wish we could be more appreciative, more capable, better.

It's a very fine line, between taking responsibility for your actions and blaming yourself for your disease. This is one of the things that still sticks out most strongly in my brain from treatment, that one of my favorite therapists (S) used to say to me over and over (from anyone else, I'd've gone bitchface on them. From her, it was hard to ignore.) It's so easy to say that you "just can't ____". Can't eat, can't get up, can't stop. "You can," she'd always say to me. "You choose not to." I hated her, every time, for saying this. Because so often it feels incredibly, absolutely impossible to do these things. But physically, I could put food in my mouth. My jaw could chew it. My legs could carry me out of bed. I am physically capable of these things; it's my mind telling me that I can't.*

*There are points where this logic breaks down. There are points you sink to, when your body is so malnourished, when you are so fucking hungry that the need to eat is entirely overwhelming. And I say this as someone who starved herself for 10 years, and controlled it most of the time. There is a point where that control breaks down.

"But at some point, the body will essentially eat of its own accord in order to save itself. Mine began to do that. The passivity with which I speak here is intentional. It feels very much as if you are possessed, as if you have no will of your own but are in constant battle with your body, and are losing. 

It wants to live.

You want to die.

You cannot both have your way." ~ Marya Hornbacher (Wasted)

I'm not sure S would agree with this. I'm sure many professionals wouldn't, and maybe even some people who have had eating disorders. Maybe it's something you have to experience. But I can tell you that the body will do things all on its own, when necessary for survival. It's a bitch like that.

This is important. It's empowering. It's also incredibly disheartening and shameful. It's something I still struggle with, every day; how much of this is my fault? How much of this could I turn around if I just tried harder? My current therapist has reached the end of her rope. She doesn't know what else to say to me to get me to move on with my life. Let me tell you how awesome it feels, to have a therapist give up on you. Not that she'd ever say it in so many words, but we're down to the "You just have to do it" argument. (Try telling someone with an eating disorder to just eat, I dare you.) I feel like I'm defending my depression to her, like I'm making excuses for myself. (I have this written in big letters across my binder from my first inpatient stay - EATING DISORDERS ARE AN EXCUSE. Because they are; they're an excuse not to function, not to grow up, not to participate in life. They're an excuse to feel miserable.)

Mental illnesses are so, so hard. Because there is no cure, no single treatment that works. Because sometimes someone needs to be told that their behavior isn't their fault, and sometimes they need to be told that this exact same behavior is them making excuses - and both these things will be true. Because mental illness is, in the end, a paradox, a conundrum, an incongruous juxtaposition of states of being. It wants to live, you want to die. You cannot both have your way. The illness becomes it's own demon, one you want so desperately to destroy - but one you cater to. One you keep alive with your actions. How much of this is my fault? I feel like so much of it is hardwired into my brain, like these are the threads of my old life; they were always there, just not yet woven together completely. Maybe I can unravel part of this tapestry, maybe I can tear it to pieces, but I still have those same threads to work with when I try to put myself back together.


At the end of the movie, when Frodo leaves Middle Earth with the last of the elves, my sister turned to me and said: "I still don't get why he had to go. Why didn't he just stay?"

I was quite literally speechless. I knew that if I opened my mouth, I'd start bawling. And I had no clue how to answer her, because it had never occurred to me that someone might think that way. To me, Frodo's leaving was always a blissful, peaceful end for him. The scene where he says goodbye to Sam and the others broke me more than any other in the film, but I understood. He smiles, on that boat, for the first time in so long. He was free.

I can tell you this much for certain; if I were Frodo, I'd've run onto that boat and never looked back.

February 17th: 

(normal trigger warnings )

february 15th: and all we have is who we are, and where we've been got us this far

I am raging right now. Or rather, I was raging, and now I'm just exhausted.

I will never understand why mental illnesses cannot be seen as diseases. Why they aren't treated by society and medical professionals as legitimate problems. Why it's so hard for people to even talk about them, why there is such a stigma of shame surrounding them. I had an entire post on this the raged its way into my brain, but then it just left me disheartened and weary so who knows where this is going to end up going.

I cannot tell you the number of times I've wished I had a physical problems, whether a disease or a disability or an accident or an assault. It sickens me, that these thoughts go through my head. That I find myself truly wishing for these horrible things, not out of masochism, but just so that my pain could be understood. Could be accepted. This goes for all mental illnesses, not just mine. They are DISEASES. They have physical signs, symptoms, and consequences (see The Anorexic Brain). Google any mental health issue along with brain scan, and you'll come up with a host of studies that have been done, like this one:

I'm so tired of hearing that mental illnesses are the patient's fault. Would you tell a cancer patient that it was their fault? That someone in a wheelchair needs to just get up and walk, because it's all in their head?

But the part that really bothers me the most is not in the active hate and misunderstanding, but the passive disregard for sufferers of mental illness. When someone's cancer goes into remission, they are hailed as a "survivor". That term gets thrown around a lot, both with chronic illness and with abuse victims. Not that I have any problem with that; they are survivors. What they've done is incredible. What bothers me is that mental illness is never covered in this blanket term. Someone who stops cutting themselves is not called a survivor; if the topic is even broached at all, which it rarely would be, people don't know what to say other than  "I'm glad you don't do that to yourself anymore". An alcoholic ten years sober is never called a survivor. Neither is a cocaine addict two months clean, nor someone with OCD who only checks the locks on their door three times instead of ten, nor someone who resists the desire to kill themselves and lives for another day. These people aren't survivors, they're just crazies we don't want to even acknowledge. They're hurting other people with their behavior, and if they'd just stop everyone would be a lot happier.

Foundations rarely focus on mental health. What celebrity wants to go visit someone in the hospital because they've been binging and purging 100 times a day, instead of a kid with cancer? (There are kids with eating disorders too, just in case you were curious.) The general response as I've seen it is, "Well, it's their own fault." People see physical diseases as more deserving of treatment, of care, because these are so much more clearly not their fault.

Part of the problem, I think, is that most mental illnesses never go away. There is no such thing as full recovery. (There's a lot of disagreement on this. I personally think that the level of recovery one can achieve is inversely proportional to the sustained length of untreated illness. Thus, the longer you're sick without treatment, the less chance you have of ever fully recovering - as with any physical illness.) It's hard to celebrate someone's strength when there is no set stopping point. When the markers of "getting better" are things like "yay, I only skipped one meal today instead of all three!" This is different for every mental illness, of course. Addicts and alcoholics can never use or drink again, and are always considered "recovering". One of the most powerful eating disorder analogies I've heard goes like this: Unlike with alcoholism, those with eating disorders cannot just stop eating cold turkey. You need food to survive. Eating disorder recover is like telling an alcoholic they MUST have one drink, and ONLY one drink, every day for the rest of their lives.

The one and only time I ever tried to "use" my ED as a disease was right before I went into the hospital. I was a senior at UCLA, at the end of a quarter, at the end of ability to cope with anything. I wanted a one day extension on my final paper. The therapist I was seeing through UCLA wrote me a note, explaining my situation (she tried to get me to apply for disability, but I refused. I didn't think I deserved it; I still don't. I still, on many levels, after everything I've just said, believe that this is my fault. That I deserve all the consequences.). I emailed the professor the note, asking for an extension. His reply went something along the lines of "Okay, but this is HIGHLY unorthodox, so please discuss it with no one."

That was the last time I ever tried.

So here's this: I'm a survivor. I spent the first 20 years of my life pushing my body to its physical limits, to the point where I'm honestly not sure how I didn't die - but I didn't, and here I am. I spend every day battling the voice in my head telling me the world would be happier if I just died; that I would be happier if I just died. Things that probably seem so simple to you - getting out of bed, taking a shower, emailing a friend, eating your lunch, stepping outside your door - these require great effort on my part. Some days I feel like I've fought a war, when all I've done is walk to the grocery store and not had a mental breakdown. Each day, I am a survivor. Each day, I don't let the eating disorder or the depression or the anxiety win, because each day ends with me still alive. 

Here is my daily journal archive. Trigger warnings as always.

february 14th: i have only two emotions: careful fear and dead devotion

Reading these posts from 10 years ago, I want to cry. I want to go hug myself and tell myself it will be okay, things will work out - but they won't. They don't. Things suck, and then they suck more. Reading through 10 years of loneliness and self-hatred and pain is enough to make me rage. When I can disconnect from younger me for a moment, when I imagine her as someone else, a friend in that much pain - I would do so much to help her. And it makes me unbearably angry and sad that no one did that for me. That I fell through the cracks for so long.

I don't want this to happen to anyone else, ever.

I feel horrible when I say things like "some people shouldn't have children", but it's an unfortunate truth. I feel even worse saying it about my own parents. Because I know they tried their very best. I know they believe they did alright. On paper, they were perfect. They supported me physically and financially. They put me through more school than strictly required. They fed me and clothed me and loved me, they were never intentionally cruel.

It's easy to say someone is bad for physically abusing a child, for intentionally causing them pain, for physically neglecting or withholding things necessary for that child to survive. Physical hurt is visible, tangible, leaves evidence one can point at and say THERE. THAT'S WHY. Emotional abuse has become much more openly recognized problem, even if the effects aren't physical. The intent to harm is clear, to all involved, to bystanders.

Emotional neglect, though, is something that's hardly recognized, that doesn't show up in scholarly articles or studies. The most comprehensive review I've seen of it (here) is a single woman's lifelong study. It isn't in the DSM ("neglect of a child" listed there is treated as malignant, not benign).

The idea that I'd been emotionally neglected as a child never even occurred to me until one day, at the end of our session, after hesitating over it for a good five minutes, my therapist finally said that it sounded like my parents had been benignly emotionally neglectful.

I threw a shit fit. I defended them backwards and forwards, up and down and sideways. They've always supported me, I argued. I still argue. They've financially supported me far longer than they ever had to. I left that therapist months later after leaving her facility, and she never brought it up again, not once.

I didn't really consider it again until years later, when I found the above website. And reading through the testimonials, the lists of symptoms and thought-patterns that so pervade my life - I started crying harder than I had in a long time. I've felt, for so long, that there's something wrong with me. Something that no one has ever been to completely explain. I have a myriad diagnoses, but none of them ever got to me like this one. None of them ever hit home so hard. I've always felt like such a fraud, a faker, because I'm not a trauma victim, or an abuse victim. My childhood was stable. I've never had a reason to be as screwed up as I am. I think emotional neglect usually gets swept up in other labels, seen as a part of the abuse or the trauma. On its own, it's never recognized. It's never treated. It isn't really even seen as a problem; were I to face my parents on this, they'd probably just stare at me blankly. My current therapist has never broached the topic, although my parents are definitely a major topic of discussion.

The problem as I see it lies in that it's not an action that causes the harm, but rather a lack of action. And that is so, so much harder to pinpoint. It's easy to tell a parent not to hit a child, but how do you tell them to show more emotion to their child? My parents don't believe in emotions. Discussing feelings was never something we did, was something ridiculed by my father especially. It was "girly", god forbid. It was weak. One therapist had to give me a feelings wheel, and had me write down with every meal how I was feeling, because I truly had no idea how to differentiate the emotions inside me. I'd never been taught how to express them, not to others, and not to myself.

This post got rather sidetracked. I've tried for so long to pinpoint where things went "wrong", what made me so broken. I know part of it is genetic; my parents both have their own host of psychological problems they largely refuse to admit to. But it's partially environmental as well, and given my lack of trauma, I was always stumped. I'm still stumped, in many ways. So many times, I've wished I HAD gone through a trauma. Not in a masochistic way, but because then I could have a reason. Then I could tell myself and everyone else why I am the way I am. I'd have something to "work on" in therapy other than "I'm depressed and suicidal and I have no idea why." It frustrates me and it frustrates everyone around me.

I still don't understand how I got so far, so lost, with no one noticing, or doing anything. My parents were truly shocked when they finally found out about my eating disorder, despite my emaciated frame. My friends were probably not as oblivious (my parents have disordered eating problems of their own), but none of them ever said anything to me. It became a game to me, to see how far I could go before someone called me out. And in the end, it became clearly apparent to me that I could kill myself before someone would say a thing. And I came so, so close to getting there.

This is why I think emotional neglect is so, so dangerous. I never learned how to communicate my emotions, how to ask for support or help, and so I withdrew. I withdrew, from such an early age, that people stopped trying to connect with me. I never even knew that was something I should want. But humans are social creatures, and whether I knew it or not, I needed connection. But I didn't know how to ask, how to communicate, how to be an emotional human being, and so that need festered inside me. It broke through in horrible, self-destructive ways that no one in my life could understand, that I didn't understand, that no one wanted to understand.

The moral of the story is: feelings are important, bitches. Expressing them may seem silly and cheesy, but it keeps us from turning into cesspools of ten thousand indistinguishable emotions that claw their way out at inconvenient times, in horrific ways. Every time I see parents tell their children to buck up or not to cry I want to shake them. I want to hug their kids. I want to hug past me, little baby me who had parental interaction on a set schedule, who held hands with her father once a day when he walked her into school

If every post is as long and draining as this one I might not survive the month, holy shit. Sorry about that. I got carried away. I'm incredibly, hilariously uncertain about posting this. Especially the pictures. I'm about to give myself a panic attack over this, even though I know no one will actually read or see it. I'd like to think it might make a difference, somewhere, somehow. Maybe I can shock one person into getting help, or helping a friend.

And for myself, note: never, never go back to this. Never. Remember how much binging sucked? Yeah? Yeah. Let's never, ever do that again.

I'm writing now just to procrastinate posting. This comes with a massive ginormous TRIGGER WARNING. And pictures with partial nudity & photoshop-covered boobies. I'm probably going to regret this, but. HERE GOES.

february 13th: a day in the life. or something.

February is always a bad month for me. For a lot of people, probably; it's that horrid time after the holidays, when the new year has really set it and spring/summer/vacation time seems so far off. It's cold and dark and rainy/snowy. (The cats are cuddly, so there's that.)

Anyway, I have a lot of crappy anniversaries around this time, and for the next few months. It's easy for me to get caught up in reliving the past, in combing through journals and looking through pictures and remembering how much shit sucked and romanticizing it in my head and thinking how much I want to be back there sometimes. It's National Eating Disorders Awareness month, and this always makes me want to make some sort of comprehensive post of my story, which of course always features the "best" parts. The pictures from the few days I felt mildly attractive, or one of those rare days I hadn't binged earlier.

So, this year instead I'm going to post entries from my LJ from this exact date, for whatever years I have them. (Including non-mental health related posts, because the contrast still boggles my mind) Not cutting out the horrible, gritty, disgusting parts. Not just posting pictures for shock value, which is a lot of what "eating disorder awareness" posts do. Because yeah, that's part of it, but 95% is the hell-hole of your own mind, spinning itself into oblivion.


This will be TRIGGERING MATERIAL. (a.k.a. KATIE, GTFO) I'll tag/warn each post individually, but in general there will be: eating disorders, self-injury (cutting), exercise addiction, depression, anxiety, suicidality - in writing and in pictures. The pictures are GRAPHIC. Like, SI graphic blood, and photoshopped out nudity. Cause that's what we do, my friends. It's a sick sort of self-worship, of self-preservation, of sharing in images what we cannot express in words.


I'm mainly posting this for myself, to remind myself that no matter how bad things seem right now, I'm not where I was. And things are so, so much better than they were. And I have cats.


So please, don't read this if it'll trigger you. I debated greatly with making this public, but I think I'll give it a try.