Trillian
10-22-2003, 01:08 AM
This isn't directly about recovery from an eating disorder, because I'm not there yet, but I feel that I have recovered from depression. I want to share it for a couple of reasons. First, I think clinical depression is often not properly recognized and treated. And second, by its very nature depression can make you believe there's no hope. But there is hope, and this is how I know...
:trigger (ED thoughts and SI)
One day in February
...I bend my head over the papers I am supposed to be grading, pretending to work. The numbers on the page refuse to coalesce into meaningful combinations in my mind. My mind on this particular day, actually every day for... weeks? months?... was fully occupied with its own repetitive chanting. Evil, it hissed. Dirty, ugly, fat, hiddeous monster creature! It trips over the words like a broken record and repeats. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you...
My office mate gets up from her desk. (Panic. Don't leave me alone with myself.) I follow her with my eyes and sure enough, she invites me along and suddenly there are three of us walking towards the mall. Well, I'm trailing behind the others to spare them having to see me, talk to me. I'm just grateful to be momentarily in their presence, because I know that as long as I don't let myself be alone with me, with it, I'm ok. It won't hurt me. I won't hurt me. Not in front of other people. I'm safe. For now. Just for now, for now...
They are walking and talking but I don't follow the conversation because the world has turned itself inside-out through my head and the noise of the traffic is inside me, filling me with vibrations that echo in my lungs and my heart and head. My head, meanwhile, has been emptied and my thoughts have been forced out, they're floating somewhere above me in the haze, I'm sure of it, I'm sure I used to be able to think straight, sure of something, I'm sure I can't stand it, or is it me, horrible, hiddeous, ugly, awful...
They leave for dinner and I duck down a side street, saying I'm going home. I wouldn't want them to see me going into the Mexican place, which I double back to as soon as I am sure they're out of sight. Wouldn't want them to see me buying food, wouldn't want them to think I eat, not someone so fat as me, so fat already, so ugly, I hate you, I wish you were dead, please die, I can't stand it...
I don't remember eating the burrito I bought that night. The next memory I have is sitting curled up in the corner of my room looking at the dirt and blood on my skirt. The dirt is there because I haven't bothered to wash my clothes in months. The blood is there because there is a gash in my arm, spilling over... I bandaged it, and turned to contemplating the razor blade. For months, I had held the same conversation in my head: Should I kill myself tonight, finally, and get it over with? Tonight, or tommorow? Tonight? Tonight? Tonight? The word was a drumbeat, measuring out my time. On this particular day the rhythm changed: Tonight. Yes, tonight. Tonight!
I was sure of it. I'd had enough. In fact, I'd had enough way back in the summer, when giving up had first seemed like an option. I had run out of will power and hope a good long time ago, and I'd been running on empty ever since. Didn't seem like it was going to change. Time to stop wasting everyone's time and make my exit... But first I made a call. I'd promised I would. I'd promised, if it ever came to this, I'd call first. So I called, and left a message, and then turned my attention back to the blade.
She called back. I went to the hospital. It was well past midnight when the door closed behind me in a white room where the furniture was bolted to the floor. It was a relief, for a brief moment to realize that I when I was ready to let drop the heavy, crushing responsibility for a life I no longer wanted, someone had taken it from me. I curled up on the bed, pulled the dirty, bloodstained skirt around my knees, and finally fell asleep.
Fast forward a few months... This morning I woke up to the feel the fuzzy cheek of my kitten vibrating against my neck. I took a few minutes to snuggle him before getting ready for school. Except for the purring, the room was quiet. No broken record. No hateful whispering voice.
At school, I didn't have to pretend to be working. I recently started a new project, and my fellowship to continue my graduate work in astrophysics, which I was certain I would lose last year, was saved. After checking my email I pulled out a half-finished problem from the day before. It had equations so long they had to be squished into the margins. But they weren't just symbols on a page, they were a beautiful language, a melodic progression, a perfectly composed canvas; each line an incomplete piece of a small part of physics, yet containing in itself the potential of the whole.
Every day I notice the warmth of sunlight and the cold of shadows, the hardness of metal and the softness of paper and the grittiness of dust, the intimacy of air in my lungs and the overwhelming distances to the stars; I want to feel everything, to experience the world through my senses again and again because I realize how terrible it would have been to never again experience the joy of simply being alive. I want to take in everything with my eyes because every day it is still a surprise that the world is no longer collapsing in on itself in a collage of nightmare images. It became real again. I became real again. I love it.
No matter how much you might wish for it, clinical depression doesn't just clear up or go away overnight. I have had problems since I was eight years old, and over time the feelings would ebb and flow, sometimes seemingly calm, other times cresting in devastating waves. I did everything I knew how to fix myself, but nothing could stem the tide. Finally, while in the hospital this winter I was put on four different kinds of medications. I spent three months in an intensive outpatient program. I called friends sometimes at night, crying into the phone for an hour or more, convinced I couldn't get better, and it wasn't worth trying anymore. I was wrong. Absolutely, one-hundred-percent wrong! I did get better. and it was worth it. If anyone reading this can relate to how I felt, please don't give up. It will get better.
Copyright: :ufo me :canada.
Thanks for reading!
:trigger (ED thoughts and SI)
One day in February
...I bend my head over the papers I am supposed to be grading, pretending to work. The numbers on the page refuse to coalesce into meaningful combinations in my mind. My mind on this particular day, actually every day for... weeks? months?... was fully occupied with its own repetitive chanting. Evil, it hissed. Dirty, ugly, fat, hiddeous monster creature! It trips over the words like a broken record and repeats. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you...
My office mate gets up from her desk. (Panic. Don't leave me alone with myself.) I follow her with my eyes and sure enough, she invites me along and suddenly there are three of us walking towards the mall. Well, I'm trailing behind the others to spare them having to see me, talk to me. I'm just grateful to be momentarily in their presence, because I know that as long as I don't let myself be alone with me, with it, I'm ok. It won't hurt me. I won't hurt me. Not in front of other people. I'm safe. For now. Just for now, for now...
They are walking and talking but I don't follow the conversation because the world has turned itself inside-out through my head and the noise of the traffic is inside me, filling me with vibrations that echo in my lungs and my heart and head. My head, meanwhile, has been emptied and my thoughts have been forced out, they're floating somewhere above me in the haze, I'm sure of it, I'm sure I used to be able to think straight, sure of something, I'm sure I can't stand it, or is it me, horrible, hiddeous, ugly, awful...
They leave for dinner and I duck down a side street, saying I'm going home. I wouldn't want them to see me going into the Mexican place, which I double back to as soon as I am sure they're out of sight. Wouldn't want them to see me buying food, wouldn't want them to think I eat, not someone so fat as me, so fat already, so ugly, I hate you, I wish you were dead, please die, I can't stand it...
I don't remember eating the burrito I bought that night. The next memory I have is sitting curled up in the corner of my room looking at the dirt and blood on my skirt. The dirt is there because I haven't bothered to wash my clothes in months. The blood is there because there is a gash in my arm, spilling over... I bandaged it, and turned to contemplating the razor blade. For months, I had held the same conversation in my head: Should I kill myself tonight, finally, and get it over with? Tonight, or tommorow? Tonight? Tonight? Tonight? The word was a drumbeat, measuring out my time. On this particular day the rhythm changed: Tonight. Yes, tonight. Tonight!
I was sure of it. I'd had enough. In fact, I'd had enough way back in the summer, when giving up had first seemed like an option. I had run out of will power and hope a good long time ago, and I'd been running on empty ever since. Didn't seem like it was going to change. Time to stop wasting everyone's time and make my exit... But first I made a call. I'd promised I would. I'd promised, if it ever came to this, I'd call first. So I called, and left a message, and then turned my attention back to the blade.
She called back. I went to the hospital. It was well past midnight when the door closed behind me in a white room where the furniture was bolted to the floor. It was a relief, for a brief moment to realize that I when I was ready to let drop the heavy, crushing responsibility for a life I no longer wanted, someone had taken it from me. I curled up on the bed, pulled the dirty, bloodstained skirt around my knees, and finally fell asleep.
Fast forward a few months... This morning I woke up to the feel the fuzzy cheek of my kitten vibrating against my neck. I took a few minutes to snuggle him before getting ready for school. Except for the purring, the room was quiet. No broken record. No hateful whispering voice.
At school, I didn't have to pretend to be working. I recently started a new project, and my fellowship to continue my graduate work in astrophysics, which I was certain I would lose last year, was saved. After checking my email I pulled out a half-finished problem from the day before. It had equations so long they had to be squished into the margins. But they weren't just symbols on a page, they were a beautiful language, a melodic progression, a perfectly composed canvas; each line an incomplete piece of a small part of physics, yet containing in itself the potential of the whole.
Every day I notice the warmth of sunlight and the cold of shadows, the hardness of metal and the softness of paper and the grittiness of dust, the intimacy of air in my lungs and the overwhelming distances to the stars; I want to feel everything, to experience the world through my senses again and again because I realize how terrible it would have been to never again experience the joy of simply being alive. I want to take in everything with my eyes because every day it is still a surprise that the world is no longer collapsing in on itself in a collage of nightmare images. It became real again. I became real again. I love it.
No matter how much you might wish for it, clinical depression doesn't just clear up or go away overnight. I have had problems since I was eight years old, and over time the feelings would ebb and flow, sometimes seemingly calm, other times cresting in devastating waves. I did everything I knew how to fix myself, but nothing could stem the tide. Finally, while in the hospital this winter I was put on four different kinds of medications. I spent three months in an intensive outpatient program. I called friends sometimes at night, crying into the phone for an hour or more, convinced I couldn't get better, and it wasn't worth trying anymore. I was wrong. Absolutely, one-hundred-percent wrong! I did get better. and it was worth it. If anyone reading this can relate to how I felt, please don't give up. It will get better.
Copyright: :ufo me :canada.
Thanks for reading!