suicide and silence

In cleaning out my alphasmart I found a few nested bits I wrote about suicide and silence, over the course of months. They all went unshared. I'm not sure why I chose today to put them up but here you go.

***

There have been quite a few articles posted recently about suicide. About how we don't talk about suicide, about how it's hard on those who've known someone who commits suicide, about how those who've thought about it are afraid to share their feelings.

There's a group that I've yet to find mentioned, or authored by. That's the group of us who are chronically suicidal, who may even have attempted in the past but for whatever reason, have decided to stay. When I tell this to people, when I say I will never kill myself, when I say I'm no longer in danger, people somehow equate that with better. It's probably true that there are people who fully recover from this, who no longer feel the depression or need to die. I'd like to believe those people exist.

But people like me, people who will probably never go another day in their life without thinking about suicide - we're shoved in the closet. We don't make good stories, you see. We aren't a dead suicide, who everyone can care about for a day or two while talking about suicide awareness. We aren't confused and hormonal teens, dealing with the terrible realities of today's world. We aren't survivors, with a friend or relative we know who died by suicide, with a sad story of loss and "this could be you" attempt to reach out.

We are not exciting. We are not particularly tragic, because we're still here. We trudge on in a life we don't really want, in a life we didn't ask for. We may not have a "reason" - we're not necessarily being bullied at school, or questioning our sexuality, or dealing with trauma. Quite the opposite, actually. We've been to every kind of therapy you can think of. We've talked our problems to death, we've tried a hundred different medications and treatments. We reach the point where our therapist just throws up their hands and says, "I've done all I can." We don't have repressed memories or emotions, and we're not scared to talk about our mental illness. We're just tired. We're tired of trying to explain a mindset no one understands. We're tired of no one listening. We're tired of people caring for a day or two, and then forgetting.

Because here's the thing - not everyone who is suicidal is in crisis. And crisis is the only state that the general public seems able to engage with, either too late, nearly in time, or just in time. We care about celebrities who kill themselves. We care about the viral story of someone being talked off a bridge. We care about these poignant, short-term problems because that's what they are - short term. Who wants to deal with suicide all day every day? Who has the mental energy for that?

No one. And that's why we are so fucking exhausted. Because we do. We deal with it all day, every day. It never leaves us, and we have to make it through each and every day in spite of it. It being SUICIDALITY, a word that just made every reader cringe. Because we equate suicidality with crisis, so understandably, hearing someone is suicidal equates with someone in crisis. But it's just not true. YOU CAN BE SUICIDAL AND NOT BE IN CRISIS. Repeat that a few times. Scream it from the rooftops. Spread it around.

I am suicidal. I will always be suicidal. I will never kill myself.

Let me tell you how much that sucks.

It's like having a broken limb, and knowing the fix is to set and immobilize the limb, but instead you keep using it. It's like having a cureable illness, and not taking the medication. All day, every day, for the rest of your life. Because... well, because someone told us we can't do that. Because we'd hurt people we care about. And the kicker is, we also can't use it as an "excuse" for anything, because then? Then we're just using it to get attention. Then we're just being overdramatic or guilt-tripping. We're saying, "I can't play soccer today because my leg is broken and it's not set or cast," and they're saying, "Don't be so dramatic, just come play." Be honest, if someone said to you, "Sorry, I can't make it to lunch because I want to die," you'd freak out. If they said it a few times, you'd think they were just looking for excuses. When the thing is? We do want to die. And sometimes it takes all of our effort simply to not kill ourselves. I know that's a hard thing for people to hear, because it's something they can't fix, so they either overreact or roll their eyes.

And that's why this situation is so difficult; because of the shame, we say nothing until we are in crisis. The general population then associates any mention of suicide with crisis, and those suicidals who are NOT in crisis feel like they're not sick enough to say anything. That they'd be told they're just making it up, that they're jealous (as though this is something anyone would WANT to feel. I promise you, it's not). And sadly, they're right. As with many mental illnesses in the US, no one cares when it's minor; it's only when it becomes serious that we consider treatment. And this is so, so damaging.

So when I see people saying we need to talk about suicide, I always get a little upset. Because they always mean people in crisis, or people on their way to crisis. People after crisis are forgotten. Because we're not headlines, we're not romantically tragic. We're not taken too soon. We live with a pain that is never allowed to manifest, and so we eventually die with it, and the cycle continues.

So yes, we do need to talk about suicide. We need to talk about those of us who can say "I think about dying every day. There isn't one single problem that comes up that I don't think, "I wish I could just die instead". There isn't one night I go to bed and don't think, "I hope I die in my sleep tonight"."

We're here. We're alive. We're suicidal, and we will continue to be alive. Does that make you uncomfortable? Try living with it.

***

Silence.

I wrote (am writing) a story about stillness several months ago, not realizing the parallels it would have today. /There are many kinds of stillness/, as there are many kinds of silence. This year, the suicide prevention movement has included hashtags like #whyispeak and #breakthesilence. And for some reason this year, more than any other, this has felt horribly rhetorical and useless. Silence itself is not the problem, it is specific types of silence. It's true, more people now mindlessly retweet suicide prevention posts and share hotlines and all other impersonal things you can do. Suicide as an abstract concept is not hard to grasp; it's only when it becomes personal that people suddenly care, suddenly have a hard time wrapping their minds around it.

Silence. The ways in which we speak of the dead, or the survivors. Today is the one year anniversary of the death of a girl I was in treatment with for an eating disorder. We switched between being friends and being unable to stand each other. I think she simply reminded me too much of myself to be truly close to. She had many congenital health problems, as well as those brought on by her eating disorder. I know she had been suicidal at points in her life; I have no idea how she died.

A week or so ago was the anniversary of the day a boy from my high school killed himself. I only learned of it at the time through hushed whispers, secret words dropped here and there. I remember standing with my sister that day outside the Covel dining hall at UCLA, her first year, my third. She'd just received a class email about a boy in her class killing himself, and we commiserated over our respective dead classmates.

That was seven years ago. I looked up the obituary for my classmate, and read it over with expected and undiminished anger over the words. How much he loved life (then why did he shoot himself?), how many congenital health problems he'd overcome, carefully insinuating that he'd died because on of those had finally caught up with him (I suppose it did, because he shot himself), ending with a call for donations to be made to the hospital that had treated said early health problems as though they had been responsible (he shot himself). While reading this, I remembered sitting in the student lounge with him and a few friends freshman year of high school; we were drawing on his right forearm, where he said he couldn't feel anything on the skin (an actual side effect of his congenital health problems). We would slowly drag a pen along his arm, mapping out the edges of what he could feel. This hit me, then, the metaphor for his life, for mine. We spend our days mapping out the edges of what we can do, how much we can get away with, before someone calls us on it. How far we can push the numbness, the silence. Turns out, it's pretty much boundless.

I began to doubt myself regarding his death; maybe I'd remembered incorrectly. Maybe someone had made it up. But the more I looked into it, the more ephemeral his death became. Obituaries for those who die of cancer or other diseases begin "after a long battle with ____". Those who die in accidents are simply stated as such. And then you get to "those who died before their time" and "those taken too soon". The ones that, like Jim, suggest more socially acceptable explanations. Or, like Sarah, simply give none at all.

Silence. When you speak but say nothing at all. When what you say is unintended or carefully conscripted erasure. When we, as a society, only speak about suicide if it crawls unavoidably into our awareness via celebrity deaths. Maybe people think it's disrespectful to remember the dead as having killed themselves, but let me correct that right now. It is disrespectful NOT to. What people don't seem to realize or understand is that someone does not just up and kill themselves out of the blue. They have likely been suffering for years, from depression or PTSD or whatever else ultimately triggered it. And for years, they fought it. For years, for /lifetimes/, we fight it. Every single goddamn day. And the fact that someone kill themselves does not negate the fact that they fought up until the end. Fighting and losing doesn't mean you didn't fight. Erasing that part of someone's life because it makes you uncomfortable is a dishonor to their strength. It's a discredit to those of us still living and fighting. It's disheartening to think that, when we die, no one will remember how hard we fought. I don't want my obituary to read "she loved life!". I want my obituary to read "she hated life more than she loved it, but she fought every day to make it through". The silence of speaking beyond the grave.

I will probably never know how Sarah died, or how the every-increasing number of other girls from treatment died. I remember a day I was actually inpatient, and news quietly floated in about a previous client who had died. She went by Nine, I think. I don't know why I remember that. I remember that time sporadically. I don't remember how she died, or who told us; I didn't know her, although some of the other girls had. I remember my friend pointing out where Nine had painted her name on the wall during art therapy. Blue paint on the wall; all that was left of her. I wonder if it's been painted over again.

Eating disorders are the special snowflakes of suicide. They're a beautiful combination of physical and mental health problems that can conveniently be shunted from one side to the other as needed. A great number of people never receive treatment for them, because they're "not sick enough" (test results all come back normal, weight isn't low enough, still menstruating, etc etc etc). Many places won't take patients who /aren't/ medically stable, which means they end up in a general hospital (if anywhere) that is ill equipped to treat the mental side of the disorder. And eating disorders are so, so tricky. We learn just the right things to say to get us out of any situation; we know how to shift the blame from mental to physical as needed ("I've been sick" or "I've been stressed", at its most basic level). We know how to say what people want to hear. We've expertly mapped out the edges of our shrinking reality like goddamn cartographers (I am now in cartography and just started second guessing my entire life). Eating disorders are long-term, slow-burn, passive forms of suicide. The kind that maybe don't start out that way, but by the end leave you aching for an out. If this sounds like a love note to them, it is; that, in and of itself, should terrify you. I consider myself in recovery, but I still see eating disorders as something agonizingly beautiful. I see grace in jagged edges, radiance in hollow, dead eyes. I see death walking and find it glorious.

And I refuse to be silent about this, because I am still here. I am still alive in the gray in-between. People see mental illness much the way we see (in fault) ourselves - black and white. Someone is either healthy or in crisis; no one speaks of the in between. Crisis is easier, because there is something immediate and definite to be done. But those of us in the gray live in silence, and it's killing us.

***

It's happened again, in the time I've let this sit on my computer, unshared. A prominent showrunner, who "died suddenly" "in his sleep". The only information I imagine we'll ever get.

I realize there's a fine line between what should and should not be public knowledge. If families want to keep things private, shouldn't we respect that?

But here's the thing: had he died in an accident (or murder), we would know. There would be safety awareness movements or dedications. Had he died of cancer, or some other disease, we would know. There would be charities to donate to. These things are considered "acceptably public". We are left to assume he either overdosed or killed himself, because that is what silence and "please respect privacy" mean. It doesn't mean privacy; it means "we are ashamed". It means "we want to forget this happened". If it meant privacy, we would never hear about car accidents or cancer wards. We would never hear about angels who battled so hard, lives taken too soon. But we do, and privacy means: you are not worthy like they are. Your life and death did not meant what theirs did. We celebrate their lives, but bury your death. It means your fight was not as brave, it means you didn't try hard enough, it means we are ashamed.

So you need to choose, society. You need to decide if the privacy of relatives is more important than the lives of those still alive, still suffering. You need to decide if your discomfort is more important than my life. Because this silence is not neutral or passive; it is active and pointed and deadly. If you truly believe privacy is more important, then stop reporting on accidents, homicides, deadly illnesses. The dead and families have no privacy there.

Maybe he did die of natural causes. Maybe I'm blowing things out of proportion. But the fact that mental illness is the first place I jumped in the lack of given information is telling, and I doubt I'm the only one. Because we speak only in silence, far too often. And those who are brave enough to speak are met with silence. We live in silence. We suffer in silence. And our deaths are silenced.

eating disorder terminology

So, I've had a few people ask me questions about eating disorders, and I figured I'd answer them for all to see. But I realized that before I start, there's terminology that will make no sense to some people. I've lived with it for so long it's second nature, but outside my little mental health community it's gibberish. I also think it's important to get some of these terms and their acronyms out there, because people with eating disorders frequently use the confusing terminology so that "normal" people have no idea what they're talking about. *guilty as charged*

there is, in the end, the letting go

Four years ago today, I went into treatment for my eating disorder. It was the most terrifying, degrading, difficult and rewarding experience of my life.

I had a vaguely positive post drafted in my head last night about community and finding people and places that make you feel accepted and loved and safe, but this morning the positive just isn't flowing.

As I do far too often, I've spent the morning looking through old photos, old blog posts - remembering the rare moments I felt capable, functional, in control, and forgetting the other 99% where I was starving and miserable and dying. I didn't particularly care that I was dying then, and quite frankly I'm not sure I'd care all that much now, but the complete lack of control is something I never, ever want to go back to. 

(There will be a lot of quotes from Wasted by Marya Hornbacher in this post, because the way she writes about eating disorders and mental illness rings so, so true with me.)

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 you are losing. It wants to live. You want to die. You cannot both have your way. 

The passivity she writes about is so poignant, so dangerous. It's what all therapists tell you to reject - the idea that you are not in control. The idea that the decision to do these self-destructive things is not yours. And I see their point, mostly, because in the end it was my brain giving the orders and my body performing the actions.

This quote is one I repeat often, to blank faces and condescending nods. I think maybe it takes a certain level of apathy toward living, over a long period of time, to truly understand. When I say things like "you can't understand" it sounds so juvenile, but over the years I've found it to be true. I've found that there's a huge disconnect between people who have been to a place where they truly, desperately wanted to die, and those who haven't. When I say you can't understand, it's not meant to sound condescending. I hate finding people who do understand, because it means that they've been to this place as well, and it's not a place I'd wish on anyone.

As with most things related to mental illness, this isn't a place you just one day wake up in. It's one you slowly drift toward, wandering down a murky tunnel with a vague light at the end because, why not? There's nowhere better to go. This part, this first wandering, is when you are in control. When you make those decisions to fuck up your life that you have to take responsibility for, later. I have a vague notion in my mind of this time, of choosing to starve, of choosing to cut.

Some people find help along the way, friends or family who pull them back out of that tunnel. Some realize where they are, shake it off and run back. And some keep going, and going, plodding aimlessly, half-hoping someone will come pull them out. I don't know why some can pull themselves out, and others can't. We just keep wandering in the darkness, because that vague light at the other end is gone (and why don't we just turn around?)

There's no single moment, but at some point you'll look back toward the tunnel entrance and find a wall. That point, that wall, is what I mean when I say "you don't understand". And it's after that point that I really, truly believe you are no longer in control. The eating disorder (or other mental illness) becomes its own separate being, and it controls you completely. It takes over your mind, and you become it. (This is why I was so excited for the new movie about eating disorders called Starving in Suburbia; it portrays the main character's eating disorder as a literal separate person.)

I sometimes refer to my past as "when I was an eating disorder", and people say "no no, you had an eating disorder. You can't let your illness define you". I do understand this, and I no longer define myself that way. But at the time, it was true. I was the demon. I stand by this truth, no matter how unpopular it is.

I think it's one of the faults of the recovery world, denying this demon. We are taught to separate the "eating disorder voice" from the "recovery" voice in our heads. We're told to write dialogues between them, of our healthy self arguing against everything the eating disorder says. Which is all well and good, once you've actually separated them. For those stuck behind the wall like me, most of the time that takes 24/7 forced feeding and safe behavior.

There is something very freeing about giving up all your control. And I mean all of it. Even our bathroom trips were monitored. Once I got past the terrified degradation of being treated like a prisoner - they wanded us before going back to our rooms every night, we had bag checks multiple times a day, and most of my sweatshirts and sweatpants still don't have drawstrings - and utter hysterical panic at being trapped, it was surprisingly easy to give in. There was a deep sense of inevitability - if you don't eat what they say, when they say, eventually they'll tube feed you.

For so long I'd struggled to be in control, before losing it completely to the eating disorder, and then, quite suddenly, that was put in a straightjacket. It was like the part of me that had been possessed suddenly came loose, wriggled its way out of the eating disorder's grasp, stretched, and slowly stumbled toward that wall. For this part of me, the wall wasn't impassable. A part of me was able to slip out. By the time the eating disorder was partially released, it was too late; it couldn't regain complete control of me again, not without me knowing. That's one of the worst parts of recovery - you know. You can go back to the eating disorder anytime you want, of course, but this time you know what you're doing. This time you're not stumbling in the dark.

I honestly don't remember the moment the separation happened for me, but I know it happened during my second inpatient stay at BHC. I was there for two weeks the first time, before my insurance kicked me out because I was at a stable weight. I lasted about a week in PHP (partial hospitalization) at EDCC (where I eventually returned for another 5 months) before they sent me back to BHC because I still gave zero fucks about living. I was at BHC for three weeks the second time - insurance again kicked me out after 2 weeks, but my parents paid out of pocket (end cost $15k+ for that extra time, in case you were wondering).

I don't remember having any realizations, or vast changes in my life outlook. I do remember my intake phone call for returning to EDCC, a few days before I left BHC the second time. Specifically, I remember them asking "what was different" this time. I'm sure I had many answers, and the phone call itself was probably an hour, but the one thing I remember saying was "I learned to separate the ED voice from my own." It was probably the most important thing I ever did, and I don't even remember it.

When I returned to EDCC, I didn't feel all that different. But people kept exclaiming over how changed I was, how much more present and alive. How they could stand to be around me. (True story: one girl at EDCC the first time told me, after I said something about not caring if I died, that she didn't want to be in the same room as me.) I still don't see it, not really. I never had a "moment of clarity". But looking back at myself, four years and fourteen years, I suppose I can see the difference.

It's never over. Not really. Not when you stay down there as long as I did, not when you've lived in the netherworld longer than you've lived in this material one, where things are very bright and large and make such strange noises. You never come back, not all the way. Always, there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier, thin as the glass of a mirror. You never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad.

It is the distance of marred memory, of a twisted and shape-shifting past. When people talk about their childhood, their adolescence, their college days, I laugh along and try not to think: that was when I was throwing up in my elementary school bathroom, that was when I was sleeping with strangers to show off the sharp tips of my bones, that was when I lost sight of my soul and died.

And it is the distance of the present, as well - the distance that lies between people in general because of the different lives we have lived. I don't know who I would be, now, if I had not lived the life I have, and so I cannot alter my need for distance - nor can I lessen the low and omnipresent pain that that distance creates. The entirety of my life is overshadowed by one singular and near-fatal obsession.

These are the last pictures I have before going into treatment. (I was about 20lbs above my lowest weight at this point. Treatment and recovery really have nothing to do with weight.) (Cut for partial nudity and trigger etc)

"Stop Making the Thin Girl Ugly"

My short little response to this, because I like (most of) this post. I've seen it from both sides; I was (am?) anorexic, and I am naturally thin. I have an incredibly hard time putting on weight, or even maintaining a healthy weight. I've never maintained a BMI of over 18 in my life for more than a few weeks (let me tell you how happy my treatment team was/is about that). Anything under 18.5 is considered officially "underweight" (and the cut-off for the not-very-successful model bans). I was always the "skinny girl" - at school, at gymnastics, in the family. I grew into this role. I became this role. I became anorexic. I became anorexia.

There's more than enough written on how damaging skinny models are to young girls, on how they set up unrealistic expectations for the female body. There's plenty of awareness around "no fat talk" and accepting "bigger" bodies etc. And I certainly have no problem with this, but it's important to remember the other end of the spectrum: "skinny talk" can be just as damaging. Call a girl fat too many times and she starts to hate her body; call a girl skinny/anorexic too many times and, shocker - she starts to hate her body.

Obviously, it's more complicated than that. A discussion on the ethics and mentality of using super-thin models is the topic for entire books, and I won't get into it. But on the topic of all model body sizes, Jenni Chiu put it perfectly:

Thin-ness isn't the enemy -- exclusivity is. Instead of banning one body type, we should instead be demanding all body types.

I know that the knee-jerk tendency is to put down one to uplift another and that often, the pendulum swings high toward both extremes before settling in the middle. But I would caution against this particular fight being one of those times.

Ceasing to use one type of model isn't the answer. Starting to use other types might be.

We all have bodies, and society demands that we all wear clothes. Life is hard enough without the added insecurities body judgement brings us. So please do everyone a favor, and stop judging peoples' health and personalities based on a glance.

february 28/29th: TV taught me how to feel, now real life has no appeal

In yesterday's vein, it not only shocks me how I can fangirl and disorder all over everything at once, but how I can be so very ready to die and also care about school at the same time.

At some point I want to write a much longer piece on fangirling and mental illness, because I have lots of Strong Opinions on this. I don't care how cheesy or ridiculous it sounds, but fandom has truly saved my life, on many levels. It's given me an outlet for emotions I never had growing up. (Related, I find it hilarious that my parents & sister had a mini "intervention" for me. Said they thought I was "too attached" etc etc. OMG ARIA, YOU HAVE FEELINGS. STOP THAT.)

Anyway. Here continues my saga of downward spiraling. This weekend I'm planning (migraine-permitting...) to make a more comprehensive post of my experience. I will probably continue these posts on an off for myself.

February 28th + February 29th

usual trigger warnings.

february 27th: apocalypse

It will never fail to astound me, the rapidity with which I can switch from fangirl to disorder.

I am also so, so glad a bar of chocolate can no longer ruin my entire weekend.

February 27th

(warning: pictures - some covered nudity)

february 26th: death and living reconciled

Warning: tonight's post is depressing. It has no inspirational tea bag ending. Sorry.

Related, I think I should get a few weeks off at the end of February annually for my own personal suicide watch.


You see so many statistics when you read about eating disorders - 1/5 people with anorexia die. 1/3 people with untreated eating disorders die. Anorexia is the most deadly mental illness. Having been in school for a nauseating number of years, and reading endless studies and papers and methods, I never put all that much stock in numbers. (Ha, eating disorder, see what I did there?)

These are statistics that I know: during my 6 weeks in IP, we started the day twice with news that recent patients had died. I know that out of the 100+ girls I was in treatment with (and one guy), at least half went back in after discharge. I know that one of my good friends had a heart attack and died a few months after she discharged, and another two overdosed and were admitted to the hospital. I know that about once a month, a friend of mine will post a RIP status on facebook, and I'll wonder who died this time. If I knew them. How they died.

The mental health community is exhaustingly heartbreaking to be a part of. I have so many friends who have dropped off the face of the earth, who I hope are still alive somewhere. Some, I track with horrified fascinating, waiting for the inevitable moment when the tributes start pouring in on their facebook pages.

I only know what I've experienced, and personal accounts of friends. I know that for me, even after 10+ years of malnutrition and starvation and exercising to the point of collapse, my body refused to die. To the point where it became maddeningly frustrating, my body refused to give up and die no matter how hard I tried to make it.

This is not to say that eating disorders aren't dangerous, of course. My point is that of the many deaths of people with eating disorders that I know of, at least half were because of suicide. You hear many different statistics and points of view on recovery, on whether full recovery is possible, on the percent of people in treatment who do recover. I spend far too much time contemplating this, because for me, being "fully recovered" feels like it would require rewiring my brain.

"I should have died tonight. and now every damn second is just too fucking painful."

How does anyone really come back from that? I don't feel like I have, or that I ever will.

The academic part of me is organizing studies in my head, ways of coming up with better statistics, better numbers. I think there are two "levels" of eating disorders: the first is self-punishment, a method of coping; the second is suicide. Thinking about all the girls I've met, the majority of those who consider themselves "recovered" were part of that first level. Those who hang in the gray area between disordered and recovered, living and dying, existing and thriving... those were part of the second.

I honestly don't know where I'm going with this. I only know that once you've stepped off certain cliffs, I don't know that there's a way to really get back.

February 26th

ED Qs: EDs & the weight of others

Do they (you?) see overweight ppl as less than a person?

No. It's very hard to explain the conflicting points of view that somehow share the same space in an (my) eating disordered brain, but it goes something like this: no matter how thin you are, you never think you are thin enough. You are never good enough. You are never enough, and yet you are entirely too much. You fixate on other people thinner than you, not because you think they as people are better or happier (you know they're not, you know they're sick and miserable and the human part of you wants them to get better), but because you want their disorder. You want to be that much sicker. It doesn't matter that it won't be enough; it doesn't matter that you will never, ever stop wanting to lose more. Eating disorders are massively comparative, which is one of the reasons people get SO BITCHY over them and why it can be SO HARD to talk about. Ultimately, we're not upset with anyone but ourselves. We just take it out on other people.

I am a huge supporter of "love yourself, whoever you are, whatever you look like." I yell at people when they call themselves ugly or fat. I get angry over beauty contests or anything that makes the way someone looks into a competition, as though that were the most important part of them. I don't think your body defines who you are, I think it's a product of genetics and circumstance.

I'm also a HUGE believer in the idea that your body really does know its shit. It knows what to do (not counting various diseases, of course). I get pissy when people talk about eating "healthy" and try to feel elitist over it. You want to eat ice cream? Eat fucking ice cream. Eat whatever the fuck you want. You will start craving "healthy" food eventually, when your body needs it, if you truly listen to it and override the signals society has branded on us. Yes, I know it's more complicated than that, with processed food and chemicals and blah blah. But go check out this article and remember that EVERYTHING IS CHEMISTRY, guys.

I wish my parents hadn't been SUCH MASSIVE sticklers on healthy food. I wish I hadn't had to count out 20 m&ms for dessert, or been allowed ice cream once a week on saturday night like clockwork. I wish I hadn't learned that some foods are Good and some are Bad. It's all food, and if it hadn't been so forbidden to me as a child I would never have begun to crave it the way I did. I've spent the past (holy shit almost 4 years) trying to learn to listen to my body and undo the previous 22 years of learning bad habits ("bad habits" being those our society would definitely praise. Brainwarp, anyone?) People complain about large portion sizes in restaurants etc etc and honestly, I love them, because then I get leftovers which make me happy. I walk a lot because I love walking, but that's the only exercise I do. We seem to have forgotten that for several hundred thousand years our bodies have done just fine without diets and exercise plans. If we stopped paying so much fucking attention to to what we were eating and how many calories we were expending, I think we'd have a lot less of a problem.

*gets off soap box*

So no, I don't think anyone's body makes them less of a person. In our society people who are overweight are shamed quite often, and while it may seem hard to believe, people with eating disorders feel that same shame. It's simply that they place it on themselves (for those not already overweight), rather than society forcing it on them. The hatred of "fatness" that we feel isn't a judgement on anyone but ourselves. I personally would rather be morbidly obese and happy than have a "perfect" body and be miserable.

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 16

No new posts tonight; getting this together was hard enough. I knew this would be difficult, but I forgot just how difficult. I knew February 2010 would basically be a countdown for me, but I forgot how bad things were years before. It's hard to read, because while sometimes things seem so much better, sometimes I read this and things feel exactly the same.

But they're not. I know they're not. I no longer have the food hanging over my head, the intense self-hatred I would never wish on anyone, ever. Ever, ever, ever.

Anyway.

Trigger warning: eating disorder, suicidality.

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.