Missing Helena

Today is the 4th birthday my friend Helena has missed. She would have been 40.

Eating disorders are cruel. They don't just take those deathly ill in the hospital, wanting to die. They also take the ones who are in recovery, who are doing well, who are finally enjoying life. Helena died suddenly of heart complications related to her eating disorder. She was not anorexic or bulimic, the "glamorous" illnesses; looking at her, you'd never have known she was sick. She had binge eating disorder, although it wasn't yet officially recognized and it killed her just as surely as the others.

Eating disorders are cruel, and they make you cruel. I won't hesitate to tell you most of my eating disordered friends can be bitches. I won't hesitate to admit that I was one can be a bitch. But Helena - Helena was one of the sweetest people I've known. She had that rare ability to be caring but not condescending, to truly make you feel like equals no matter your age. To make you feel like you mattered, and were loved.

The last time I saw her, we made plans to marathon Fringe; she had similar TV taste to me, and had never seen it. I still haven't been able to finish the show. I stopped on an episode, near the end, where for once everything works out, everything falls into place. I like to think that somewhere, in some parallel universe, Helena is still alive. Happy and healthy and free.

"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)

ED Qs: eating disorders & their relation to other mental illnesses

The depression, is it a cause or a consequence?

It depends on the person. Not everyone with an ED has depression, although it is very common. Anxiety is common as well, as are addiction problems, OCD, bipolar disorder, etc. I personally have found that although the ED is the most deadly part, it's rarely the underlying issue. It's usually a reaction, a coping mechanism for something else that was there first.

I personally couldn't tell you which came first; I used to think it was the depression (I have distinct memories of having depression attacks in pre-school), until I got out of treatment and my anxiety went through the roof. The ED was a way of managing the anxiety, of numbing the brain, although it unfortunately did nothing for the depression (shocker: low body weight & malnourishment makes you depressed. It also makes anti-depressant medications basically non-functional). I honestly couldn't tell you which came first, and which came as a reaction to another. All are genetic, to a certain extent.

In the past 4 years I've found that I have to maintain a sort of balance between my disorders - if I focus on the depression, the anxiety goes up. If I focus on the anxiety, the depression goes up. Or maybe it's the other way around, when one is bad the other is tolerable. Either way, it comes down to tradeoff management. My therapist once compared me to a patient with schizophrenia, who had medication to treat the symptoms. If she didn't take it, she was non-functional because of the illness. If she took enough to completely negate the symptoms, she was non-functional because the meds made her so out of it. So she had to learn to live somewhere in between.

Have I mentioned mental illnesses are Hard?

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.