The Perfect Stomach

Society’s ideal: a flat stomach and jutting hipbones.  My version is grittier, with rotting flesh and deep gashes (the model was also tan before I desaturated her).   I, like many others, struggle with my own concept of physical beauty and my own body ideal (I’m a mostly-recovering bulimic).  I was having a particularly low self-esteem day and I guess I wanted to take a pretty torso and dirty it up.   I did this in May 2005 under my old deviantart account.

[Actually, there's more to the story, but that's for another day.]

The Noose

My eating disorder has a death grip on me at the moment.  I’ve been lying to myself; oh, I’m doing better, progress not perfection.  But I’m bone-chillingly scared because I’ve realized tonight how deeply I’ve relapsed.  I just woke up from a series of nightmares, all of them featuring me with a noose tightening around my neck with every bite I take and every bite I purge.  I woke up and I couldn’t breathe and that isn’t much different than how I feel in reality.  My noose might be figurative instead of actual rope, but it’s there, squeezing the life out of me.  And not only am I not trying to cut myself down, I’m actively wrapping it around my neck.

My birthday is next week and I feel like I’m at the crossroads again; that place where I have to decide:  live or die.  I think that — mostly — I want to live, but even typing that out in such wishy-washy fashion shows my ambivalence on some level.  If I am going to slay the dragon, I need to believe in my sword.  I don’t know if I can do that, because for so long I’ve been fighting futilely.  Surviving, not actually living.  And part of me thinks what’s the point?  Why bother?  Just do what I want and maybe I can die on the bathroom floor like the nothing I am.

I don’t know what the point of this post was.  I guess I wanted to acknowledge out loud somewhere that yes, I do know what’s happening, even if I keep pretending I don’t.  I wanted to cut through my lies for a moment to show myself the real face in the mirror; the one that is tear-stained and haggard, without the fake smile and false twinkle.  I am dying, and if I don’t change my behavior, I will die.  That’s the bottom line.

Now what do I do about it?

Letters

In thick files, there are strings of letters following my name.  Not PhD. or Esq. or anything like that.  My letters are BPD (borderline personality disorder), C-PTSD ( complex post traumatic stress disorder), ED (eating disorder – bulimia).  There are debates about whether I’m bipolar type II or whether I have major depression with psychotic features (currently bipolar disorder is winning).  There are notations about my anxiety disorder, the repeated sexual abuse, the severity of my SI (self-injury), the suicide attempts/ideation and how “difficult” I am to treat because of the time span of my “problems.”  (As if it’s my fault I wrote my first suicide poem at the age of nine and thought I was “fat” at the age of six.)  Every set of letters comes with its own hellish set of stigmas.  Because just having a mental illness isn’t enough evidently; they need to make it more judgmental and stigmatizing.

Those letters follow me everywhere I go — including in my own mind.

A former therapist told me I should say “I have …” instead of “I am …” because he said I am not my illness.  But if you look at my file and all those letters that add up to a hellish picture, it’s hard to believe that I’m not my illness.  When people (including family members) think it’s okay to call you “psycho” as a nickname (“oh honey, we’re just kidding”), it’s hard to believe I’m not my illness.  When a licensed professional tells me that my problems are “too complex” for them to treat and dump me, it’s hard to believe that I’m not my illness.

But I am not.  There are other letters you could use to describe me, like c-r-e-a-t-i-v-e.  Or i-n-t-e-l-l-i-g-e-n-t.  Or l-o-y-a-l.  I can be loving and funny and full of joy.  There is more to me than those thick files could ever hold.  So all I ask is that you don’t judge me solely on labels.  Erase the labels and see the person.  Get to know me in all my moments of normalcy and madness.

People are more than arbitrary letters.  Please remember that.  End the stigma.

XO