I need someone to talk to but I can’t bear to talk to anyone because of overwhelming shame about how I have got myself in this situation. As good a reason as any to start a blog.
I have bipolar disorder, the multiple-drugs-multiple-hospital-admissions-count-the-things-you’ve-lost kind not the awareness-week-celebrity-headline-revelation kind. I sound bitter because I am bitter. At least today, anyway. A few months ago I was running in the frosty, winter dawns feeling super-connected to the Earth (I could feel it breathing under my feet) and in love with everything. Those thoughts and feelings were just misfirings and too much of the wrong neurotransmitters, surely? Pathological and not real. Are you so infallible that your thoughts and feelings are always sure to be counted as real and never generated by a brain gone wrong? Start dividing thoughts and feelings into what is real, valid, genuine, counted and what can’t and you’re fucked. It’s the same path that ends with “there are the superior humans and these are the inferior humans” or even just “these are the humans and these are not”.
Over the last few years, I have lost over 100lbs. I have had a normal BMI (though BMI is bullshit) for over a year. I have gained about ten pounds back from my lowest weight when I was last manic. I want to go back there despite the fact my GP and various family and friends thought I had lost too much weight and that I have reactivated my old eating disorder. I read the seminal Intuitive Eating this month after reading lots of people’s opinions on it over the fifteen years since I first discovered fat acceptance with Shapely Prose and the fat-o-sphere. The first time I crash dieted, I gave myself binge eating disorder which took a couple of years of no dieting to resolve. This time I have given myself binge eating disorder by strict calorie counting (I weighed and logged everything) for nearly two years. My plan was to continue strict calorie counting permanently so as to maintain my weight loss. My binges have escalated in size and frequency and are now every few days on average. But I still have this desire to lose weight. And to organise my life around calorie counting and eating by what I have (pretty much arbitrarily as there is a lot of conflicting information) decided are the correct rules. This gives me feelings of control and achievement. The rest of my life is on fire so this is pretty much the only area of my life where I feel those things. Except I keep binging and slowly gaining weight and every time I do, I get intense suicidal thoughts for a few days and these episodes are now merging into each other. I feel very hopeless that I can keep the weight off at all let alone keep the weight off and have some kind of peace with food and quality of life. The thought of going back to living life as a fat person and being treated with such hatred sounds impossible. Am I literally deciding between an eating disorder and dealing with fatphobia? Probably doesn’t matter what I decide, my body will make its own decisions.
There is a lot more that I want to get out of the maelstrom in my head but that’ll do for now.
Inadequate Clothing 