Triggered

So I downloaded a book. You know when you start reading something and you know you shouldn’t? When your mind is already teetering on the edge of 'so high you're barely getting away with acting normal' and 'falling deep into forgotten pain' and yet you do it anyway, because so fucking much about this mental illness bullshit is fucking doing it anyway.

 Against better judgement, whatever that is; it seems I wouldn’t know.

I look into the mirror now, my un-made face wrinkled and old looking, dark circles frame my usually sparkly blue eyes which are currently lifeless and grey, the white parts bloodshot from crying pointless tears about a fictional situation, a story that never happened, in a place that never existed and yet so possibly could have and nearly did; to me.  

Triggers piss me off, I don’t want to be one of those fragile people who need a trigger warning on anything and everything just in case the way something is worded offends me or sets me off into a downward spiral of self-loathing and regret.

Should I not be ‘adult’ enough to recognise what is and isn’t good for me? Besides this book might as well have had ‘trigger’ in the title, but I thought I was strong enough right now, guess not.

Mental health topics always catch my eye as I scroll through the Amazon shop on my kindle. I am, like many other people, drawn to things that help me learn to understand myself, or at least make me feel less alone.

I downloaded a book about a girl with Anorexia, it was unclear whether it was fact or fiction initially, although it soon became apparent that it was fiction dressed as fact, it was portrayed in a diary style, the rendition of a teenager suffering from an eating disorder. It fairly accurately described the fall down, somewhat glossed recovery and then dived headfirst and on target into relapse. Fucking relapse.

Thoughts and feelings I have been squishing down and stomping on, bubbled straight to the surface. I was taken back to my youth, back to various mild relapses, back to my major relapse in 2013/14. At some point I realised this was affecting me too much and that it wasn’t healthy to keep reading.

I considered putting down the kindle and going for my run, but instead I ate 6 hot cross buns and continued to read anyway, fully aware of the almost rebellious irony in my actions.

Perhaps now is a time in my life when I need ‘Prince Charming’s’ to come swooping into every tale promising me roses and a happily ever after, to treat me like a child and hide realities awful truths that I am inept to handle.

There seemed to be an air of authenticity to the ‘anonymous’ writing that I can only imagine that the author indeed suffered from that bastard disease herself. I eye the rest of myself in the mirror. Part of my brain screams ‘Fat Whore’ and I wonder what the point of it all is.

I have gained around 20kg since they weighed me on my first day of an involuntary hospitalisation for mania in 2014. I had been becoming increasingly manic for almost a year, the manic lack of hunger triggered a brutal Anorexia relapse to add to the fun, I was fluctuating between flying high and suicidal on a daily basis and my weight had slowly dropped by close to 30kg.

That short hospital stay was ironically when I got my period back for the first time in over 8 months and if I had not been locked in a secure ward when that happened, I am sure I would have killed myself on the spot. It began a slow and steady weight gain and subsequent slide into depression.

I was disgusting.

After my suicide attempt and long hospital stay in May/June/July 2015 I realised that I had put 20kg back on, I then shed a lot of that without effort during a hypomania in the following October – I spent 6 weeks writing my book day and night and constantly forgot to eat, surviving mostly on black coffee. 

That episode came and went without hospital, and while my eating was still definitely disordered rather than restricting I began binging but not purging and as such put on some weight. The doctors focused on the bipolar aspect of my mental health rather than the eating disorder because I was no longer “too thin” for physical complications, even though the ED has probably done way more lasting damage than the bipolar ever did by itself. 

To compensate for the gain I took up running but even despite that slowly and surely the weight has piled back on and I am currently back to the size I was when I got out of hospital the second time. When I hurt my ankle in January and couldn’t run I was devastated. Knowing I was this big while I WAS exercising made me terrified of what I would become when I wasn’t.

Somehow I didn’t really gain much weight over that time, despite continued binging. My ankle is better and I’m running again now, it helps keep my moods in check, I’m still fat, still binging and still hating my reflection but a recent hypomania had let me view the mess from outside my body and not “feel” it so I was coping.

Reading the end of this book today has thrown me hard and fast back into my body and I am exhausted by the weight of it all, pardon the pun. 

What didn’t help is that it didn’t have a happy ending, in fact *spoiler alert* the main character died; some would call this realistic. I call it just another reason to wonder why the hell I am alive to sit here and type this? There are so many times in my life when I should have died, each of them perpetrated by the state of my own mind. 

This is a seemingly endless cycle and I don’t think I can keep it up for much longer.