Blessed Beyond Depressed

Today I am 122 days in recovery with maybe twelve slips.  I quit counting after five but I'm going to make the official count 12.  That's an average of one purge every 10 days for the past four months whereas before I was in the binge purge hell cycle that was hours turning into days turning into weeks where I would binge and purge every day.

To be completely honest, part of what has helped lessen the purging was being put on wellbutrin.  Wellbutrin is an antidepressant that can cause seizures in patients with eating disorders. For the longest time I was terrified to purge at the risk of having a seizure.  Unfortunately the fear has faded some and four of these slips happened while I was on the Wellbutrin, but I digress.

I think too much.  I spend probably 80% of my waking hours thinking.  While I was driving home this evening I was thinking about how blessed I am.  The Lord has been so good to me and I tend to get lost in the pity hole where everything feels terrible and nobody wants me and I think myself into an unnecessary panic attack.  I have started replacing some of the thinking with talking, but even then all the conversations are about how terrible I feel and how I don't understand how people stand me.  I have been challenged to put an end to the negative self-talk and to change the negative thoughts when they occur.  I have decided to start this by listing ten things I am grateful for each day.  I won't blog all of them, but I just bought a brand new journal that will be my daily gratitude journal.  Even if I'm having the worst day of my life, there is no excuse for me not to take ten minutes out of my day to write down ten things I am grateful for.  I'm honestly excited to print out this entry and take it to my therapist because she will love this (she tends to love my good ideas as much as she hates my bad ideas).

Today, I am grateful for...

1) My loving church family
I have not been attending church for very long. I believe I went to my first church service this year in August. However, the welcoming I felt from day one surpassed every ounce of love I felt from my home church that I attended for 20 years.  My Pastor genuinely just loves people for being people.  He embodies everything I could ever want or need in a Pastor.  The only thing he wants to do is love you and pray for you and that is exactly what he does.  I don't have many friends in the church yet because I don't go very often, but the love I experience in those that I do know is such a strong Christian love.  I even have a church best friend (even though she's my mom's age). I am so grateful for the genuine Christian love that my church family has shown a complete stranger.

2) Accessibility to treatment
I denied going to therapy for the longest time.  I didn't think I wanted it.  However, being a part of the eating disorder community for as long as I have been, it should be obvious to me that I need to be grateful for the fact that I have a treatment team.  Help is honestly difficult to come by.  Especially with the healthcare system in America, getting mental help is hard and it is expensive.  I am grateful that I found a center with a sliding scale that is still willing to see me even when I can't meet my payment that week.

3) My therapist
There was a time where I thought my therapist wasn't a good fit.  I have almost quit therapy eighty-five thousand times because the brutally honest truth is she makes me think about uncomfortable things and my feelings get hurt.  Well that's her job.  She has told me probably a thousand times that if it isn't uncomfortable then it isn't working.  I understand this on a cognitive level, but emotionally it can be very difficult to sit with.  I'm grateful to have found a therapist on the first try that I clicked well with and am as comfortable with as I am. 

4) Mary
Shout out to my favorite person.  Nobody can deny the fact that she is my best friend.  I was blessed when God brought her into my life.  She is such a strong person and I don't know if she knows it.  She can handle my intense feelings and provides me with much-needed stability while maintaining healthy boundaries.  Having BPD makes it hard to maintain friendships and I am so blessed to have such a strong and loving person in my life.  She never rejects my phone calls when I'm having a "crisis" and she gives me the tough love I need to hear regardless of whether it is going to hurt my feelings or not because she knows I need to hear it.  She's an empty couch when I need one and she's my release when dealing with my grandma just becomes too much.  She's the middleman between me and finally owning a dog.  We have done so many things together and I am blessed to have the memories with her that I have.  I've never had a closer friend in my whole life and I am so grateful for her friendship.

5) My family
Even though I have my gripes about them, whenever I need a helping hand someone is always there.  When I overdraw my bank account, someone always digs me out of trouble.  When I'm hungry and need food there are always groceries in the house.  They have a very poor understanding of my mental state, and while that is hurtful, they can't really help that they don't understand.  They have always provided me with more than I have ever needed and I am grateful that I have people to count on when things get tough.

6) My sister
I could throw this together with my family, but the bond between my sister and I is stronger than the rest of my family.  She is my twin, she is my best friend, she is the one who understands me on an emotional level.  Having someone to understand why you're feeling the way you are is such a blessing.  Having depression and an Eating Disorder is such a lonely feeling and knowing that I have at least one person who has been there and has gotten through it gives me so much hope for my future.  Even when I can't imagine having a life without my eating disorder, Tricia is living proof that the hard days don't last forever.  She has been through so much in her life and she has come out of everything so much stronger than I think she knows.  I won't go into much detail here because I don't know how much of her personal life she wants to be put out there, but she is one of the strongest women I know.  She gives me hope. I am so grateful to have my twin to call my best friend.

7) My car
Clarisse is the only grown-up decision I have ever made, but boy does that little beetle bug treat me well.  I needed out today.  I just needed out to process my emotions and to give some things a good long thought and she was there for me to have my alone time.  Material possessions are far from everything, but they are also something we should be grateful for because they can be taken from us in the blink of an eye.  I worked hard for my car and I am grateful for the ability to pay for her and to drive her whenever I want.

8) My coworkers
I genuinely feel bad for people who don't like the ones they work with.  While my job is my job at the end of the day, I am blessed beyond measure to love my coworkers.  My walmart family is absolutely a second family.  They've seen my bad days, they've seen my good days, they have seen me smile, and they have seen me cry and they always have my back.  A coworker gave me the phone number to my psychiatrist.  I can't even imagine where I would be had we not had that conversation that day.  My manager has talked me through some breakdowns before they turned ugly and will always drop everything if I need to talk.  I am so grateful that I am never far from a listening ear when I need one for 40 hours a week.

9) My cat
I have no idea what I would do without Snowball in my life.  She gives me a reason to stay alive.  I have said before that I can't kill myself because Snowball wouldn't know what she did wrong.  If you don't have a pet that might sound silly, but truthfully she has kept me alive sometimes.  She knows when I'm sad, she knows when I'm sick, and she is the best cat I've ever had.  She always cuddles with my Grandma and honestly I think my grandma needs her more than anything.  She's asleep on her as I type this.  Not only am I grateful to have my cat, but I am grateful that my grandma has her too.

10) My brain medication
I had a meltdown this morning because I couldn't find a little orange bottle.  This little orange bottle is filled with pills that help my brain balance out chemicals that it can't do on it's own yet.  I also have little cards from my psychiatrist that have seven days worth of pills that settle my moods and quell some of my background anxiety.  I have another little orange bottle for when I'm having a meltdown out of the blue that settles my heart rate and helps me complete the tasks at hand.  Without each of these medications I wouldn't be on the path I am today of wellness.  I have struggled with being on medication to make me happy, but honestly there is nothing wrong with relying on a medication to live my best life.  Just because it is for mental health over physical health doesn't make it any different.  It is medicine that I need to live my best life and to thrive as a human being instead of just survive, which was all I was doing before I was put on medication.  I'm grateful to have an aid in my journey to wellness.

Part of me thought thinking of ten things to be truly grateful for today would be difficult.  Not because I'm not grateful, but because I take a lot of things for granted.  I take my pills for granted every morning and night because I hate taking them.  One of them makes me sick and another one could give me a seizure.  Sometimes I feel like there is something wrong with me because I have to have medication.  I take my cat for granted when she's getting on my nerves or keeps me awake at night.  Lo and behold, though, the second she escapes outside I worry sick until she comes home.  I take my car for granted when I just hop in her and go to work or the store, but there was a time less than a year ago where my options were wait until someone else's car was available, or walk.

I don't think gratitude will fix everything.  I am still mentally ill after writing this post.  However, taking the time to really be grateful for the things in my life takes my mind off of my depression and anxiety.  It takes my mind off of being upset that my grandma's brain is mush.  It took my mind off of the fact that I don't want to take a shower.  Even though this took just a little while, I already feel better than I did before I wrote this out.

Here's to ending 2017 on a stronger note than I started it on.

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1-800-273-8255

This is the phone number that saved my life.

This is the number for the suicide hotline. I made that call on June 29 at 10:11pm.  That call was the beginning of saving my life.

The next day I got the number from a coworker for a local psychiatric center. The second call I had made that saved my life.

It got that bad.

To those who don't see me every day, you may only have an idea of my struggle from what I post online. I've been very open about this struggle because I fully believe that every conversation you have chips away at the stigma of mental illness.  If you were one of the unfortunate ones that see me every day, you probably had every idea that things had gotten that bad.  The cutting, the suicidal ideations, the intrusive thoughts taking over my life, the purging, the starving, all of it was at the worst it had EVER been.  Every time I thought I had hit rock bottom before was never anything like this.

I lucked out and got an appointment that day. I was immediately taken off of my current medication and set up for a psychiatry appointment for two weeks later. The two weeks of pure hell that was being unmedicated will never leave me. Everything was at its worst. No exaggeration, the amount of times I thought about just ending my life was enough to make me consider putting myself in the hospital.

Then the slew of diagnoses.

Major Depressive Disorder, Bulimia, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and a High Suicide Risk. My new therapist insisted on seeing me again in one week.

This is the part I haven't been totally open about.  The depression, bulimia, and anxiety, yep. I would have laughed at her and left that day had she said anything but those.  The PTSD makes a lot of sense in retrospect, but I still don't totally feel like I deserve that kind of diagnosis. Apparently though, when someone close to you commits suicide, it complicates situations as opposed to losing someone through a natural death.  Particularly when that person dies from the sister disease of yours.  It turns a bleak thought of "It won't happen to me" into a very stark reality that yes, it can absolutely happen to you.

I still do not enjoy being labelled as a high suicide risk.  As correct as she was, I hate it.  I hate it and I feel like it's an over-exaggeration because I flat out told her I didn't have the balls to off myself.  In those words.  However, with my mental state and the instability I had been in, I honestly believe any successful attempt I would have made would have been an accident. I wasn't me.

I still don't think Tori intentionally killed herself.  I just don't.  That's exactly where people saw me at that point in time.  Nobody would have really thought it was intentional, just an unfortunate accident in the light of mental illness.

Missing Tori is incredibly hard for me still.  It's hard because sometimes I'm angry that she's gone.  Then I'm angry about feeling a perfectly normal stage of grief because she was mentally ill.  Being on both sides of the suicide spectrum is so hard.  I knew deep down that everything I felt about losing Tori people would feel about me.  There was still a significant part of me, though, that felt the pain would never stop.  There was no light at the end of the tunnel.  When one of your best friends commits suicide, you feel like a shit person.  You feel like you should have done more, you should have been there more, you should have seen the struggling.  You feel angry that they couldn't just hold on because it always gets better.  The funny part of depression, though, is that you never feel like it gets better.  Everything feels like one thing after another, and with all of that piling up on you, the breaking point finally comes.  You start pushing people away because you feel like they don't care about your problems, that they are insignificant to anybody else, even though they are the literal end of your world. Those are the moments you need to seek out people the most, and even picking up the phone will be the hardest thing you do.

Part of me wanted to live that night.  That's the reason I picked up the phone.  There was a rational part of me that still had some sort of desire to live and to see for myself that it got better.

Once my psychiatry appointment was over, I left with my prescriptions and started on them immediately.  I'm still not great, but I'm worlds better than I was. Three weeks tonight will be how long I started on my anti-psychotic, and I notice a difference.  My friends and co-workers are noticing a difference too.  Talking these feelings out with people that love me has been another way of getting relief from the thoughts and feelings.  I also rely a lot on distractions these days.  I try to fill my days with seeing people or doing things because when I'm lonely, I get myself in a lot of trouble.  It's no where near as crippling as it was, but it still sucks.  It's an awful feeling, being depressed.  I'm just...depressed.  I can't help it and I can't stop it but I absolutely hate it.  Days like today, where I'm just lonely and don't really have anybody to turn to are the worst.  Nothing is actually wrong.  I don't have anything to talk out.  I'm just lonely. At the same time though, I know this won't last forever and that these feelings absolutely will pass.  It's like I finally have a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel that everybody talks about.  I see it.  I see it, and if you're struggling I highly encourage you to get help so that you can see it too.  I don't recognize myself from who I was just three weeks ago.  There's no shame in needing medication, and I want people to know that.  I want to talk you through your problems with you because I've been there and I know the feelings you're having are hard but I promise you they aren't forever.  If you take nothing out of this post, please utilize the number that is the title if you need it.  There is a reason those people are there.  They may not know you, but they can help you.  They will listen without judgement.  There's no way they can judge you because they don't know you.  There is a reason you're on this Earth, and no matter how hard it is to see it right now, you need to stick around because you will find that reason.  This wasn't an overnight miracle.  The hard days are still SO hard for me, partially because I know how amazing my good days feel. Also, though, I know days like today are going to happen but they won't last forever.  Nothing lasts forever.  The good, bad, and ugly, everything passes with time.

Things will get better and you need to be around to see it.

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Crankypants

I'm so freaking irritated right now.

All I want to do is sleep.  I want to be out like a light and it's ten pm.  That's pretty normal considering I have to get up at five am.

This house is anything but normal.

Between my psychotic mother and my toddler grandmother, if I get to bed before midnight anymore it's a miracle.

I literally want to cry right now.  I'm so freaking exhausted.  But no, the kitchen light is on even though I turned it off, and it's nine million degrees in my room, and in approximately five minutes my grandma is going to start singing that god damn praise ye the lord shit.

Oh yay. Now my mother's in here. So I'm not going to fall asleep until she goes home at 11, 1130, when fucking ever.

This shit blows.

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Record the Good Days Too

I have a habit of only taking into account the bad and not cherishing the good when I'm in the middle of an episode.  Today, however, was a really good day.  I act like I have readers but honestly, if you've been reading the past few days I've been a depressed, lunatic, disaster basket case.  I decided last night that I wasn't going to give myself idle time to think myself into an oblivion this weekend.  I put myself on the schedule for work Sunday to help fill the weekend void, but that still left today.

I got up this morning and asked my mom if we could get pedicures.  Of course she said yes!! I haven't gotten a pedicure since last April right after I had gotten my coaching at work.  My feet definitely looked like it too.  Before we left, I texted Kim and asked if we could get dinner tonight, and she also said yes.  So obviously I spent three hours doing my hair and makeup.  I don't know what it is about sitting in the beauty room with my cat, my coffee, and my computer, but it's so relaxing.  I don't have my anxiety screaming at me, I don't have the eating disorder getting into my business, it's just me and my makeup.  The biggest problem I have in the beauty room is which foundation I'm going to wear and why more beauty vloggers haven't uploaded because I ran out of new videos to watch.

Our dinner was great too.  We got an appetizer (per my request) and I got a meal I wanted because it sounded good.  I got a salad instead of fries because I wanted it.  I skipped dessert because I wanted to.  I'm not a slave to the eating disorder today...well for the most part.  I only ate a pretzel earlier today and then dinner so it's not like I had the three meals and 1-2 snacks that a recovering ED patient should probably be consuming, but I also listened to my hunger and fullness signals and that's important too.

I weighed myself this morning. 193.  It's still not where I want to be, but the eating disorder is pretty quiet over it because I've been hovering around 195 for a while.  So two pounds is two pounds.

Look how gorgeous we are.

I literally love how my collarbones look.  I miss my cheekbone definition though.  It's still there some, but I feel like it used to be more prominent.

My mother keeps commenting on my natural highlights in my hair. I don't know what filter Kim used but they really pop in this photo.

I just took my nighttime crazy pills.  Hopefully I can talk myself into taking a shower so I can go to work tomorrow without feeling like a scrub.  Sometimes showers are really hard though.

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