So, I’m no longer a Bulimic By Deed. Where’s the sodding pay off?

Please file this post under, “Too Much Information”.  Yep, bodily functions and what not.  Just imagine me as you read.  Go on.  Imagine it.

Kerist, it is too inhumane to sleep.  Thank you then, little donated Macbook, that you keep me company at this time of exhaustion yet sporadic, “Oh for fuck’s sake” and getting up to stick my head in the freezer.  This room feels like sleeping in a sock of scaly slippery fish skin.  It’s uncomfortable and smelly.  I can’t open the window because those two slender bits of glass are what’s separating me from the ear-splitting parade of the busy main road, which would mean I couldn’t sleep anyway.  I hate to be British enough to moan about the weather but give it a rest, eh.  Sorry to complain, as the summer can be glorious, but bollocks to it anyway.  This summer is so far differing in that I am beginning to abandon the tyranny of long sleeves and am sometimes leaving the house in short ones, or tossing my cardigans into my bag halfway down the road.  I just can’t be bothered shrivelling and itching in a fabric prison while I watch with naked jealousy as people float by on clouds of chiffon feeling the gorgeousness of sunlight on their skin.  I don’t care if people look at my arms anymore.  In certain company, I’ll care, but on the streets, arses to it.  I don’t care about my bruised granny legs either (aha, you have never seen, but I have oddly discoloured, bruised legs).  I don’t want to wear tights all the time.  I want to feel free, to be bare.  For so many summers I’ve craved that feeling.

Thank you for your help regarding the previous post and a “portfolio” of sorts.  As well as kind comments, I have kind e-mails, so thank you.  It takes me a wee while to get back to people due to my general crapness, but I will.

Today, I hate my ridiculous body more than usual.  I wish we could be parted and I could rent somewhere useful and attractive to live in, like, I don’t know, a tramp on fire.

As it stands, it has been: six weeks since I last took a laxative, and over six months since I purposely shoved my fingers down my throat to re-taste my dinner.  I never believed I’d be able to say either.  I have gone from someone who used to vomit everything they ate, up to ten times a day, and who used to shovel laxatives down their throat like they were Smarties (albeit Smarties that meant you had to be near a toilet, manhole or enemy’s house at short notice to collapse in crippling pain and then pebbledash the area) to someone who…doesn’t.  And still my body refuses to act like a proper body should.  I’d fire it if I could.

My eating-disorderliness was rather like the rest of my disorderliness.  It was cyclical.  There were periods of time in which I didn’t indulge in any aberrant behaviour, other than the usual vicious self loathing that’s part BDD and part habitual.  And then there were times in which it was utterly all-consuming.  I hated walking back to my desk at work after throwing up my modest lunch.  Eyes streaming, and so sure I stank of sick and that everyone knew and were whispering about me.  The walk of shame wasn’t a walk.  I felt as though I was some sort of archaic, grotesque creature that stomped and was painfully aware of every single heavy, condemnatory step I took.

It has been years.  Years and years.

When I started taking psychiatric medication (Olanzapine first, which is, as you know, the medication that pretty much makes you gain a stone by even saying its name.  So here, we call it the “Scottish Antipsychotic”- oh bugger…), my eating disorderliness took a step up.  I gained weight on every medication and for the already eating disordered, that was frightening, so, I took the reigns.

I’ve always hesitated to call my eating-disorderliness by its name, which is bulimia (technically, it’s not, though.  I rarely binged.  I just chucked up and evacuated everything I ate).  As sensible and rational as I am about these things, I still have that mental block of, “I’m fat.  And fat people don’t have eating disorders.  All the other eating disorder kids will laugh at me.  They won’t play with me.  They’ll steal my lunch money”.  Saying, “I’m bulimic” seems to give it too much- fnar- weight.  Because bulimia is an actual problem, as opposed to what I had.  I wasn’t bulimic.  I just felt sick often.  (Christ, people thought have thought I was dying I “felt sick” so bloody often).

I didn’t take it seriously- when I needed dental work (nothing serious, just a few thousand fillings for my rotted to hell teeth, and root canal things I have yet to get, because I hate the fecking dentist), spent a good portion of my day feeling like I was going to pass out, pissing blood through my nose, wondering why my hair was thinning and finding myself choking on a bathroom floor, picking scabs from the cuts and bruises on my knuckles- because I was fat.  And I truly was- at my very worst, when I was frogmarched to a doctor and almost begged him to save me- I was edging up past twelve stone.  At my height, that’s big.  And because I was big, the doctor didn’t believe me.  And so, the, “There’s nothing wrong” denial kicked in once more.  People with eating disorders are skinny, gazelle like, delicate waifs and I was, and still am, a short fat mentalist.  Rationally, I knew that everyone, of every size, could have an eating disorder.  But not me.  And oddly, at my worst, I was also at my heaviest (which was nearly 13 stone).  I joined an eating disorder community and half my post was censored, I was reprimanded, so I left.

My eating disorderliness has been as part of my daily life as manic depression has been.  It’s just so much more shameful- it’s dirtier, grimier, embarrassing.  It’s conducted in public disabled toilets and on cracked bathroom tiles.  The disabled toilets are the best friend of a bulimic.  On the occasions that I had to ask for the key, I’d wave my Freedom Pass in their faces to prove that I am technically disabled therefore deserving of their grand facilities.  It’s burning with self hatred at the supermarket queue,  then throwing up pound coins and avoiding checking your bank balance.  And it’s alternating between chemists because your usual refused to sell you any more laxatives.  It’s clandestine and humiliating.  So, I don’t talk about it as much and, whereas the extent of my whole, “Hooray, bipolar disorder!” is clear to everyone that knows me in its irritating obviousness, very few people knew the true extent of eating disorder.

A while back, I lost it and decided that I wanted to stop and eat like a normal person, with the usual normal person neurosis that didn’t translate into feeling as though I was sipping hydrochloric acid for tea.  Not, “Just like that”.  It was a combination of total mental and physical exhaustion (and having been on holiday and feeling a wave of complete shame and defeat because all through the tasty holiday food I had been thinking of how to get rid of it, and there I was, wiping vomit from my mouth with their fancy holiday toilet paper, flushing away the lovely food, leaning against the posh holiday sink to stop myself from shaking, watching tears plop onto the immaculate enamel, then going into the bedroom and lying to Rob about it), watching the toll it was taking on Rob coupled with his love and encouragement to get better and being taken seriously by a therapist that meant I began to ration my throwing up, and introducing food again.

For a while, it was okay.  Difficult, very difficult, but okay.   I “relapsed” a few times, especially when I decided to do the Cambridge Diet to lose weight.  The Cambridge Diet is pretty much liquid anorexia, but I did it for a month, then pretended I did it for another two when I was mostly throwing up instead.  The very same thing happened when I embarked on the Atkins diet when I was taking Olanzapine.   Both diets have so much that is forbidden, to the point of demonisation.  The Atkins diet gave me a complex about carbohydrates that I still have to this day, and thus aggravated my eating disorder.  But hey, that’s okay, I have PCOS, so carbs are bad anyway, aren’t they.

Gradually, however, I began throwing up less and less and eating more “normally”, or whatever passes for normal in this insane, pressured, glossy, judgmental world.

Something strange had happened to my body in the meantime, though.  I was eating.  Not a lot, admittedly.  I have always kept below the recommended amount of calories, but I am short, so I can. But even when I ate more than I’d normally allow, even if I did so for a few days, I didn’t immediately gain weight, as I had feared.  My weight, after a long time on the seesaw, began to stabilise.   And I settled around the 8st 7lbs mark.  Which is still on the high end of “normal”, but I had been almost thirteen stone at my worst.  And here I was at my best, and my weight was normal.  And I wasn’t even really sure how that happened.

Despite psychiatric medication.   I thought it was inevitable I’d be thirteen stone forever because of my medication.  But that stabilised, too.

But I hate, still hate, will probably always hate, the feeling of being full and having food in my stomach.  It makes me panic, and controlling that panic was like a kind of drug withdrawal.  Every time I ate I was assailed by a strangulating fear.  Must. Get. Rid.  Had I the pleasure of owning those kind of beige, battered armchairs you see in gritty British films,  I would have sat in it popping my rigor mortised fingers through the fabric, staring crazily ahead.  It was very difficult to deal with having food in my stomach.

My body was also somewhat, “Eh?” about it and didn’t quite work properly.  So I initially used that excuse to take two laxatives, which, as you know, turned into about twenty a day.  And so I replaced one for another.

Buggeration, then, I was saddled with a laxative addiction.  Laxatives do absolutely feck all for weight loss.  What you lose is water weight that quickly replenishes itself when you hydrate yourself again.  But the feeling of emptiness- a similar one to the almost holy triumph that follows a bout of vomiting- is intensely beguiling to people like me. And I did love hopping on the scale and seeing I was a few pounds lighter.  (I weighed myself, for years, over ten times a day.  After a wee, after a bath, in the morning and so on).

Anyway, eventually laxatives began to take their toll on my physical health and I was tired constantly, due to not absorbing vitamins and minerals and all the good stuff properly.  My social worker mentioned prescribing supplements, and I generally felt like I couldn’t really carry on. I tried- and failed- to go without, but that old panic would set in and I’d be outside the chemists again, rattling the shutters like a dead eyed zombie.

I went to the GP and asked for help and she told me to pick up a healthy eating leaflet.  Wonderful.

When I stopped it was by accident.  I was going to visit a friend and I didn’t want to spend most of my time on the toilet, like I did when Paula visited me. So I tentatively didn’t pack laxatives.  And I didn’t buy any.

Of course, it helped that at that time I had completely gone off food and wasn’t eating anyway, but I digress.

I went a day.  Two, four, a week, two weeks, and now, six weeks.  To my great relief (fnar), my body works.  (It is very strange to have your social worker cheer because you can, y’know, poo).   The whole process (FNAR) was physically very painful, but I have gone six weeks now.

My appetite, however, returned.  And I am raging.

I did all this work.  I don’t throw up.  I don’t use laxatives.  I don’t overeat.  And although I still have the mindset of someone with an eating disorder (Let me be frank.  I hate my fucking body.  I hate my face.  I’d split it in half with a hacksaw and hope dogs ate it I hate it so much.  Although I do have a certain cockiness, the closest I can even imagine getting to living with my appearance is some sort of begrudging truce), I don’t “do” those things anymore.

So where the hell is my pay-off, eh?  I know it takes time, patience and so on, but just by the simple act of eating normally, I seem to be rapidly gaining weight.  At the moment, I am heavier than I was when I was briefly pregnant and found it too exhausted to move (and this weight gain is giving me pregnancy flashbacks, which are upsetting me quite a lot), and I still seem to be gaining.  I keep freaking out that my face is swelling, keep checking to see if my clavicles still show.

I am resisting the urge to resort to my measures again.  But at least then I felt in some sort of control.  Right now, I feel as though I have no control whatsoever, and it’s frightening.  I’m not at all slender and on my 4ft 11″, any weight gain is noticable.  I had dropped under 8st (oh to be 7st, oh the 6st…) when I had lost my appetite due to mixed mania, heartbreak and stress.  I am now nearly 9st.  What the hell?  Why?

I had optimistically hoped that when I surrendered (and it is a surrender, because for such a long time I didn’t want to stop) my eating disordered behaviour, I’d be rewarded with a healthy metabolism that settled at a hopefully healthy weight and healthy hair and nails and a generally healthy body.  Where is it?  Why is it still playing silly buggers with me?  I think I need an exercise addiction or something.  I am rubbish at exercise.  Partly due to laziness and partly due to the bodily exhaustion that taking antipsychotics gives you.  The mood swings don’t help, but that’s making excuses.  I’m not totally physically inactive by the way.  I do walk and my natural disposition is towards restlessness.  You just won’t see me running any marathons.

So the panic has set in again, and right now I have, “3 DAYS 1 ITEM A DAY” scribbled hastily on my hands.  I thought earlier, “Why, it’s such a good idea not to eat for three days, except maybe for an apple, and then I’ll get used to being hungry and lose my appetite thus weight, HOORAY!”  Yeah, great solution, Seaneen. (500 calories has always been my number, which probably seems extravagant to some of you.  It’s what I eat when I don’t want to eat but think I should).   That will REALLY HELP MY METABOLISM.  I’m a silly twat who probably needs a visit to the GP.

It doesn’t really ever go away when you have an eating disorder.  I still obsessively check the calories of everything I eat, still feel a clenching sense of fear when I go to a restaurant and can’t check.  I still scope out toilets with the astute eyes of a seasoned bank robber.  And my teeth are very discoloured and need a good clean.

But I don’t want to slip back into old ways because it would be such a huge step back and honestly, I am a bit proud of myself.  It is a worthwhile-if somewhat fraught- pleasure to sit and have a meal with someone and not have to be thinking of lies to excuse my after-dinner absence as I chew.  It is liberating to walk down a street without the terror of suddenly needing to throw myself in a ditch.  It is glorious to sleep through a night without being awoken by searing stomach pain.  And it is nice, of course, to not cough blood into my hand then wipe it on my cardigan before anyone noticed.

Of course, I shouldn’t care what I weigh, because aesthetically, morally, everything-ly, it doesn’t matter.  I would never judge someone for or by their weight, whatever that weight is.  I consider myself a feminist, and that includes being all about body acceptance and and being actively interested in and reading up on (surprisingly, I have interests outside myself and mental health- one of them is feminist theory) the social, economical and political mechanisms that turn women on themselves and each other.

But I do care and I don’t like that I do.  The only person I’m a body fascist with is myself. I do read websites about skinny celebrities and feel that surge of envy, anger and pity.  And although it sometimes made me furious, I did like it when people complimented me on my weight loss.  It’s not something in myself I admire.  My weight is a struggle.  Partly due to the medication I take, partly due to my metabolism being fucked and partly due to the fact I also PCOS, which makes it that bit harder to keep your weight down.  But it’s one I should fight sensibly, I guess.  OOH SENSIBLY.  There’s words I don’t use often.

This entry then is a retrospective to remind myself that it wasn’t all fun and games being in the toilet so much they could have renamed it the Seaneen Molloy Memorial Suite.  My weight stabilised before when I got a handle on my eating, and hopefully it will stabilise again.   This too, I hope, will pass, and it will be worth it.   I may even get to keep my teeth.