Unbearable Lightness

By Portia De Rossi

It's scary that's it's been over six months since I last wrote here. I'm back at university. I'm failing. I don't want to talk about it. I'm still reading 'Fasting girls'. I find it quite heavy going compared to these memoirs. Below are the quotes I can relate to the most within 'Unbearable Lightnness', but since I got a bit carried away with discussing them I will summarise what I thought of the book first:

Surprisingly good. Due to Portia being a model, actress and celebrity, I feared that this memoir would come across as being a book written for the sake of writing a book, purely to make the person even more well-known. If this was the case it worked; I had never heard of Portia De Rossi before now. However I do not think this was the case here. Her writing came across as refreshingly sincere and there was no material that appeared to be there merely to provide extra padding. If it wasn't for the fact that her everyday work would appear on TV screens and she had to dodge the paparazzi, Portia appears to be a 'normal' person. By normal I guess I mean that she has the same fears and worries as everyone else, and stardom hasn't gone to her head. She also dedicates adequate space to describing the binge eating side of the disorder/another disorder, which can often occur alongside, pre or post-AN, but does not get as much attention paid to it in the literature.

I think the only downside is that it could be triggering to those currently suffering from or vulnerable to developing an eating disorder as she describes her exercise in quite a lot of detail (relatively), plus precise numbers are used to describe her food intake and weight changes. However I personally do not have a problem with this. I found the exercise description and feelings/the compulsion as something I could relate to which like binge eating, other books appear to skim over. 

P8 ‘When it’s quiet in my head like this, that’s when the voice doesn’t need to tell me how pathetic I am. I know it in the deepest part of me. When it’s quiet like this, that’s when I truly hate myself.’

People seem to think that the voice will get quieter if I ignore it. They think that will be a sign that I'm getting 'better'. But actually Portia is right in saying that when the voice gets quieter and goes silent; that is when it doesn't feel the need to shout any more. If I do start making progress, or let any therapist in to my thoughts, it shouts, throws things around my brain, trashing everything, it gets louder and louder until the SCREAMS of agony make me petrified. I lash out with the anger of the raging inside me, but also in fear. The pain is beyond any physical pain I could imagine, way beyond the pain of cutting through the layers of skin in my arm until I can see bubbles and bubbles of fatty tissue and can look deep inside the hole. It is like when Voldemort's diary is stabbed with a Basilisk fang in Harry Potter (this reference has completely ruined the serious nature of this description, but it does provide quite accurate imagery if you've read/watched it). It screams because it can feel people trying to kill it. That's where my rage comes from. That's the way it felt when I was 13, and that's the way it still feels now. You can't see it, but at the times when I can no longer keep it from piercing my mind through to everyone else's reality, it's using my lungs to scream and my limbs and force to punch and throw my body at walls like a rag-doll. Added to that racket is my own terror. It is as though someone has grabbed you, they have a knife and you're fighting for your life. I try to kill them. I try to smash this monster's skull against the wall until it breaks and the source of this pain, that brain, is crushed and lifeless. That is my head. That monster is me.

Hence the following statement I believe also to be true:

P279 ‘Gaining weight is a critical time. The anorexic mind doesn’t just magically go away when weight is gained – it gets more active. Anorexia becomes bigger and stronger as it struggles to hold on, as it fights for its life.’

I'm too tired to discuss the rest of the quotes, but they're probably pretty self-explanatory so I'll just type them down:

P241 ‘I sometimes saw a teenage girl with no breasts and no curves that would turn her into a woman with desires and complicate her perfect, sterile life.’

P278 ‘I was diagnosed with lupus. I had osteoporosis and was showing signs of cirrhosis of the liver. My potassium and electrolyte balance were at critical levels, threatening the function of my organs. I no longer felt lazy, like I was giving up because it was too hard, I felt defeated. I felt as though I simply didn’t have a choice.’

P280 ‘Recovery feels like shit.’ (The process that is, she is referring to, not the end product)

P281 ‘Being diagnosed with Lupus was like a pardon; it granted me the freedom to give up... I could no longer starve or I’d die. Therefore, it was essential to eat. So I did. I ate everything in sight... The floodgate had opened.’

P281 ‘Just because I’d stopped starving didn’t mean I didn’t still have an eating disorder. My eating disorder felt the same to me. It took up the same amount of space in my head... It was still there. It was the other side of the same coin... I went from 82 pounds to 168 pounds in ten months.’

P283 ‘Despite the fact that I thought anything other than anorexia was a second-class eating disorder not worthy of attention, when I was being treated by Carolyn I was severely bulimic. I was grossly overeating. The pendulum had swung the other way, and I was sicker than I had ever been in my life.’

P284 ‘I knew that I should work out again to combat the amount of food I put into my body, but because being fat caused me to be depressed, I didn’t have the energy. That’s the feeling of pulling away from anorexia. The anxiety of feeling fat turns into depression about being fat, and the lethargy and apathy that depression brings make it impossible to get off the sofa.’

P287 ‘I never wanted to think about food and weight ever again. For me, that’s the definition of recovered.’

Life Inside the "Thin" Cage

A personal look into the hidden world of the chronic dieter

By Constance Rhodes

Shall I start with the good points or the bad? I think I'll start with some observations then go on to the bad and finish off with the good ;) ... All in my personal opinion of course.

Okay so firstly, I'm still not sure whether this book is about eating disorders or not. The author suffered with a subclinical eating disorder and describes EDNOS as being in the middle of a continuum; with anorexia, bulimia and binge eating (serious disorders) at one end, and healthy eating at the other. From this we can conclude that the diagnosis of EDNOS is subclinical and not seen as an extreme problem. Before reading the book I did not realise that EDNOS was classed as a subclinical disorder, because in my view; just because someone has eating disordered behaviours which are not 'specified' in the criteria for anorexia or bulimia, it doesn't mean to say that their behaviours aren't as extreme, or life-threatening or not worthy of being classed as an actual disorder. To me, 'Not otherwise specified' doesn't imply 'mild', it merely implies that the DSM isn't advanced enough to label the disorder properly.

So, I think the author's intentions were good; to shed light on EDNOS and how being labelled with this puts you in a rather difficult position; It is as one professor she quoted said 'A wastebasket term' - Dr Harry Quirtsman.

I do not doubt that the author suffered from an eating disorder herself, however I do feel that the book gives people completely the wrong impression about what an eating disorder actually is. In my opinion, 'chronic dieting' is not part of a mental illness. I did work experience a few years ago at a hospital, and at lunch times I ate with the staff who were women aged perhaps between 20 and 40. There they were contantly comparing lunches, telling me they were allways on a diet and quizzing me about my skin and food intake. My mum says it is the same in her work-place. But my mum also says that she sees no parralells between the behaviour of the chronic dieters at work, and my behaviour as someone with a mental illness. I said to her 'maybe you just don't know what's going on behind closed doors?' However I suspect that she is right; An eating disorder is not a diet gone wrong.

'Life inside the "thin" Cage' seems to confirm the stereotype of eating disorders that the media flaunts; that EDs are just vain cultural values magnified; Starving to have sex appeal, to feel wanted by men, to make other women jealous when you enter a room, that 'thin' equals success. I can't speak for everyone and I know some people say their eating disorders are driven by this, but if this is true I feel it is the exception rather than the norm. I think emphasising this encourages people to believe that eating disorders in general are not a proper mental illness, and therefore not worthy of treatment.

That said, the book did make some very true and important points. For example the author acknowledged that the typical approach to treating eating disorders; making food diaries and weight charts, can in fact be detrimental to recovery, depending on the person. The author suggested a variation on intake recording which I hadn't thought of before; Instead of tracking the precise amounts of food ‘...I focused on tracking which food groups I was eating. I found this approach to be much more helpful and less likely to trigger obsessive thinking.'

Something she said which I think is helpful to apply to life in general was ‘The trouble with seeking to impress is that it requires so little of our heart and soul. But to inspire... that must be the greatest of accomplishments, for inspiring others allows us to be a part of something so much bigger than ourselves.’

My Kitty :(

Well he's not really our cat, but we fostered him for 9 months then yesterday we had to give him back to his owner :'( Every time I see a place in the house where he used to sit, I start crying again. I miss him so badly. So this post is dedicated to Gizmund.

EDIT: Giz was killed by a car just a few weeks after moving back to his owner :( RIP.

Morphing Disorders

I have not updated for a while, I am struggling to read right now due to lack of concentration. I have set myself the challenge of working through a self-help book, even though I have not had much success with these in the past. Therefore it is proving difficult to keep motivated. The next ED book I plan to read is 'Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa.' But on a different note, here are some recent thoughts:

There is a theory that Anorexia and Bulimia are ‘two sides of the same coin.’ I think this has a lot of truth in it, but I would also add BED in there as well. There are so many people who have gone from one disorder to another, or picked up symptoms from all three and developed an atypical ED or EDNOS. I think it is wrong for professionals to see me as being recovered from anorexia, and that I developed Bulimia as a separate entity. I have talked to many others who have never lost their anorexic mindset even though their behaviours may suggest otherwise. I am now addicted to binge eating because as long as I don’t let it go, it guarantees that the anorexia cannot take over my body again. However, no amount of binge eating can drive the anorexia out of my mind. When professionals refuse to accept that my disorders have layered up rather than replaced each other, they are in danger of encouraging my anorexic thoughts. It is a balancing act; they need to treat the anorexia and bulimia/BED simultaneously until I finally meet balance. When I was a restricting anorexic I thought that Bulimia was the opposite. Now I know that they are the same monster which changes tactics in order to fool.

Happy Pancake day! Even though I don't celebrate this due to the food content ;)

xxx

Doublethink

I got this term from the novel '1984' by George Orwell. There are many concepts in that book that I can relate to my eating disorder, but for now:

‘Doublethink means the power of holding two contradicting beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.’

I guess this is another way of expressing the paradoxical nature of my thoughts and experiences. This is what makes it frustrating and so hard to explain. Some of my doublethinks are/were:

• I genuinely believe I have not lost weight, even when I know my previously tight trousers are beginning to hang off me.
• I will trully believe I am fat whilst being proud of how thin I am.
• The reason I don't like gravy is because it tastes nice. Or it did taste nice, after 8 years you forget.
• I feel superior when others have to eat, and I can resist, but inferior because they have the freedom to eat and I do not.

Some of the paradoxes are:

1. I binge because I can’t stand being satiated.
2. I hate being told I am doing well. Doing well causes the voices to get worse, not better.
3. The more I achieve in recovery, the iller I get; the longer I go without bingeing, the worse it gets in the long-run.
4. A big plate of veg is scarier than a chocolate bar; the veg is larger in volume.
5. I fear food, yet I binge all the time. I binge because when I stop, the fear gets worse.
6. I developed an eating disorder as a result of trying to be healthy.

My fears of what is real, and what is not.

I am scared to quit bingeing because...

I am terrified that if I stop, I won't be able to stop stopping, and then I will die. I tell myself of course that's not going to happen, I'm overweight, it'd take me a long time to die of starvation. But then I think, well, I used to be underweight, and I thought it'd take me a long time to get objectively fat. It did take a long time, two years of more or less none stop bingeing, bar the odd fast. But the end of a long time allways comes, and suddenly when it does come, it didn't seem so long afterall.

It's like there are two trains going in opposite directions, but these trains don't stop at stations so you can get off or take a break. They just carry on, hurtling along the track until the track runs out and they crash. And once they have crashed it is unlikely you will survive. I survived the last time, but I have no idea how. I remember being trapped in the debris that they called Anorexia, and the clock was ticking, time was running out. I went mad and that's when I knew I was dying; the effects of starvation torture your mind into madness.

A lot of the time I think I want that other side of this illness back, but then I realise that it's only the first phase that I want back; the phase of speed and exhileration; the high I get from reducing my food and increasing my excercise. The feeling that I am invincible. Although deep down I know I can't have that without the inevitable crash.

I am not sure where I am now. It feels like I can't bear another day, but I allways do. I am not at the end, things could get a lot worse. I am not mordbidly obese and my health isn't yet in dramatic danger. My only way out is to jump and hope I land on the platform, but the odds of that happening aren't good because my heart isn't in it. My mind very much doesn't want to reach the platform, because then I may get better and eat normally and be a normal weight and... this is were my sense of reality comes in. I feel like I would be a fake if I did that and I would be trapped and banned from getting back on the train because nobody would believe that the eating disorder was still inside of me. The train is only for people who are loyal to the creature that lies within them.

I am even more scared that I myself wouldn't realise the eating disorder was inside me. I was initially afraid of treatment because I was convinced they would brainwash me into being a normal person, then I would be stuck in a world which isn't real. The ED tells me that my world, in my head, is the real world, and that falling into the trap of believing otherwise would be a psychological suicide. I liken it to in the film 'The Matrix', where Neo is given the option to take the blue pill and return to his old life, with all memory that it isn't real, erased; or to take the red pill and be shown the reality. The reality is that the robots have taken over and are controlling the matrix. The reality isn't nice. And yet, I feel like letting go of my eating disorder would be like swallowing the blue pill to go back to a dream world. I can't do it. I can't let go of what I believe is the truth.

'The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.' - Morpheus.

Random thoughts of the day

The books I am reading at the moment are mostly not ED books, so I thought I would post something more personal in the meantime. Today I got up in the middle of the afternoon, and noticed light was streaming in through the hall. I opened the door, just to look outside for a few minutes and feel the fresh air. It struck me how wonderful it would be to just walk down the street. I have not done that in a very long time, and it saddens me. I feel like a mole popping its head out of its burrow, then retreating out of fear. I couldn’t step out of my own door alone, because the Ed thoughts get louder and louder as I walk, until the purpose of getting out is destroyed. I heard a neighbour move, and I quickly closed the door before they wondered what I was looking for.

When people ask me what my illness is, what is actually stopping me from doing these things, I feel my throat close at the back as though locking in something I want to explain so badly, but there are no words. I try and the thoughts get tangled and misinterpreted. You can throw all the logic in the world at me, but words don’t dint the creature inside, because it is not human. It isn’t even an animal, more like a spirit. I am not religious but in some paradoxical way, the closest thing I can liken this evil thing to, is God. I have this belief that I have to stay loyal to whatever it is inside me, despite there being no proof that it is real, just like there is no proof that God is real. Even when religeous belief causes harm, people don't stop believing. There was something about reality I wanted to write about, but I have just accidently taken my sleeping pills thinking they were paracetamol. So now I am all lethargic and keep stumbling when I try to write. I may come back tomorrow x