The Dark Years

Before I launch into the stories about my diet and eating disorders, I think it is important to mention something to maybe get a chuckle out of some of you. Despite give or take 4 years of being in an alcohol dependent coma (which I will get into at a later stage) I think I should let you know  that I have broken two parts of my body and both have been food

related. I broke my collarbone falling off my high chair and I broke my toe… running for Mr Delivery.

Right, so I was 13 going on 14, still rather hefty and so deeply depressed. This was, for the most part, well hidden by my need to be the funny one in the class; always happy, always

joking around, sometimes a little too much maybe. 

I had joined the diving team in Standard 5 (Grade 7), quit and joined again the following year. One of my best friends and I were both of the larger category and decided to take on diving. I can only imagine what I must have looked like. You know when elephants or hippos in cartoons step onto a diving board and it goes so far down it nearly touches the water - they bounce on it, enter the water and empty the pool, and when they come out of the water because they have such a different perception of themselves, they look

quite surprised to find the pool empty and the spectators drenched in water? Well I think that was what I was like. I thought "if I am on the diving team I am the image of a diver; skinny, toned, long and lean", but... not so much! 

I wasn’t actually that bad, I bounced the hell out of that diving board, so to speak. However, after one particular competition where i saw girls diving, who were in my mind 'real divers' I saw my self as an an amateur ball. I was embarrassed, I was way out of my league. Whenever a girl looked at me it was almost as if to say, “shame you poor thing, do you really think you can dive in that body?”

So I asked the diving coach if I could train with the divers but not be

in competitions, I couldn’t face it. She said no and I quit the team, took up a

more challenging cardiac sport, chess. Just kidding.

I then started a diet my friend was on. I had to take a white pill with every meal. This

pill came in a bottle with no label, no ingredients, no writing on the bottle what so ever. All it read was your name. Regardless, the dietician person was selling it

very well. The pills contained Lamb Thyroxin. While I was taking them I was

always hot, even just walking to the toilet from the classroom a mere 10m away. I could

feel my heart beating as if it were trying to break through my rib cage. Even so,  it

made me lose an abnormal amount weight in an incredibly short amount of time.

I was on the pills for maybe a month but my mom wasn’t happy. She is a nurse see, and having no ingredients on the bottle  with plain white pills that could contain anything, and the responsibility of her child’s life, she refused to take me back to that dietician ever again. We heard a couple of years later that that woman and her Belgian colleague (who reminded me of Lurch from The Adams family and looked both dodgy and creepy) were shut down completely.

I then started a protein diet: no carbs for 6 months and then slowly introducing them again thereafter. I lost 14 kilos on this diet but it did take a while,  maybe one to two years of dropping and gaining a couple of kgs here and there, but it did work. People

started to notice me, noticing the weight I had lost. Boys began to ask for my

number. Sad thing is for the most part when this happened I thought it

was a big joke like: who ever gets Jubes' number and texts her as a joke wins the

bet. I never actually thought it was real and when it was I got so excited and clingy I think I scared most of them off. 

Anyways, I had a boyfriend or three for the usual length around 1-2 weeks long. Seeing them at a house party, giggling in your girl group, cuss words being shouted in the boy group and then a quick and sometimes awkward smooch. All of this before your folks fetched you after a couple of cigarettes which you pretended to smoke as if you were the very Marlboro man himself. I was making my way up. I was finding glimpses of happiness in a seemingly terribly morbid world.

After a while, my mom remarried and  I didn’t take it too well. I was impossible. I made our lives miserable; I was cold, selfish, unfriendly and grumpy everyday. All I could

think about was myself; how unhappy I was, how crap my life was, how hard I had

it. I gave no thought to others, my dad had died. I was awful. When people tried to

say, “I know how you feel,” as clichéd as it sounds, I knew that no one does and no one ever will until they experience it themselves. Even then its not the same  as everyone has different experiences. Sometimes people would say that  "it was all right" as long as I had my memories and as long as I was still here, and I would just want to tell them that they were wrong,  I would rather not be here... I would rather die than have to deal with this kind of pain. When you feel like that you actually stop caring about how you behaved or what you said to people because you had lost all adoration, all ambition, for everything including yourself.

I started seeing a psychologist and this was to be the first of seven. I hated most of them and none of them kept our conversations confidential. They had trouble keeping

their mouths shut while another only had trouble keeping her mouth shut as she

tried to stop herself from yawning. Every session her lips grew longer as she

tried to disguise her yawns and I just thought 'stuff it'. Another psychologist had a room

which was painted beige, her chair was beige, the picture frames were beige. She was just beige, even her clothes, and this is not an exaggeration (I love  how people  now call beige ‘latte’. It still doesn’t change just how boring the colour actually is).

I lost trust in people. I thought if a psychologist is bored hearing about my

problems, a job she is supposedly interested in and making money off, how on

earth will anyone else be? So I kept a lot of my emotions and feelings inside,

I hardly spoke about any of them to anyone, and if people asked I would try

change the subject before I started crying. They boiled up and transformed into

something much worse than a bored psychologist. The only psychologist I liked

was my eating disorder psychologist. She worked at Tara an institution for

eating disorders and she was interested, she actually wanted to help me.

Before I started on my road to a serious eating disorder, and when I was still quite big,

I did try vomiting up a meal or two. I found it quite amazing how easy it was

but never did it religiously. To be honest the thought of hanging your head

over a toilet was quite sickening, on top of which it was bloody exhausting. To

be honest I must have done it twice before I started dieting properly. I

couldn’t do it, swollen jaw, sore throat, I just couldn’t face it.

After standard 7 or grade 9 I went to boarding school. It was a really stupid time

for me to go, my mom had just got remarried and I still had not come to terms

with the death of my dad. But I went, I had to go, it was all I wanted. And at

the time my mom just wanted me to be happy so she went out of her way to get me

into the school. Because again I made everything about ME. But the problems I

was running away from were waiting for me there. I was told by friends to get

involved in sport, extra mural, to distract myself from being homesick. I did,

I went back to diving, one afternoon and that was it, then got punished for

never going again. Tried hockey ended up in the recreational team where you

could basically have no hockey stick, pick the ball up with your hand and run

it into the goals. Jokes it wasn’t that ridiculous. Stopped going to that too.

I ended up sitting by the tea tray every afternoon while people were playing

sport. Some of them would ask if I had moved from when tea had arrived which

was like an hour earlier. Nope, I stayed by the cakes or what ever treat was

served that day and just ate. Sometimes I would wait in the place where tea was

usually brought, just so I could get first pick. SIFF. I grew more and more

depressed.

Weekends were tough all my friends went home and I was left in the boarding house. I was

so flat, and kind of spaced out. I felt like I was in a movie or a dream.

Before I went to boarding school my mom had sold our house, bought another one

which I said I hated, so for me she brought another one to make me happy and

put the first one back on sale, we then sold the second one and moved back into

the first one my mom had brought. I was a nightmare. Everything had to be my

way. Everyone was trying to make me happy while I was, being as cold and

selfish as anything.

I didn’t want help; I didn’t want anyone to help me. I, like most depressed people,

believed that I was alone, and the world was against me, that God had dealt me

a bad card. I left boarding school not long after I had started. I had made

friends and I was happy but something was just killing me inside and I got into

such a deep depression I started to make use of self-mutilation. I tried to cut

myself, but now before you think anything crazy, if someone is serious about

harming her/himself they will cut vertically down the arm, if not, if not it is

usually just a cry for help, it will be horizontal. And that’s what mine were

horizontal, and far up my arm not at the common wrist area. It was actually

quite pathetic, it looked like a graze, and I said it was when people asked, I

said I fell down the orange tree. Problem was I was so confused as to why it

was not making me happier, I thought it was suppose to relieve pain, but it

sucked me in deeper to think I could go to those lengths to feel better. I was

a little nuts back then, I was so lost and I was at that stage of moving from

young teenager to a proper one (only way I can explain it) I had no grounding.

Things for those 3 years were so blurry and dark, my feet were just dangling,

just touching the ground while my mind was pulling me forward, leaving my

senses behind.