I have consulted the technology fairies and the pixie dust has been waived, the credit card swiped, and I’m back in the land of the cyber living. Phew!
I’m also in the land of man flu so nothing of any significance will be gracing my page for a day or two, but I just wanted to say don’t give up on me. There are good things to come this year. Really good things. I can feel it in my waters!
For me – I feel good about 2019. I choose to believe the worst of my grief and issues are behind me and my journey forward is now much closer to everyone else – ie I’m sure I won’t get everything right but I’ll try not to make a royal fuck up every time a little snag comes my way. I’m calling resolutions ‘goals’ this year.
Until today, I’d never heard the phrase abuse by omission. But now I’ve heard it, I feel like I’ve come home.
If you’d told me three years ago that my poor, long suffering psychologist would still be listening to my woes at the end of 2018, I would have said, No way! (Possibly in much stronger language.) But here we are, 42 months later, and I still grace her couch on a regular basis. And not just for the lols.
Decades of maladaptive coping mechanisms crashed down around my ears, and the words severe depression and chronic anxiety were bandied about – in relation to me. I was in the depths of self-induced starvation, self-harming, highly suicidal, too depressed to function, and suffering the physical misery of high anxiety – pounding heart, shaking hands, internal catastrophising, panic attacks. I’d become one of “those people”.
It’s 35 days since I touched down on terra firma. Jet lag’s done and dusted, the big adventure receding into once upon a time status, and I’m settled back into normality – taking for granted the luxuries of my pillow, my car, and our pristine drinking water. Yet for most of those 35 days, my mental health has been really shit.
There are moments – hours, days – when I feel overwhelmed with anxiety. Not nervousness. Not stress. Not worry. Not even depression. Just anxiety, with all its accompanying physical misery. Five years ago I didn’t have anxiety at all – so I believed. I certainly didn’t seem to experience the effects of anxiety. In fact I didn’t really experience emotions at all. Which is why, I realise, that girl is never coming back.
It’s the unfun bit of travel – going home. And after three months, it’s the bit to look forward to – going home.
I arrived in Lisbon a mental mess. The two hour flight from Pisa airport, on our most budget airline, turned me into a blithering ball of batshit crazy. It was time to see a doctor before my oldest and dearest friends traded me in for a better model.
My fondest memories are sitting at our villa, eating dinners outside and toasting the magic view of Lucca in the distance. The evenings were warm, the food spectacular, the drinks convivial, and the company exquisite. These are the precious memories I cling to. As our week came to a close, we packed up and headed to Pisa for the flight to Lisbon. With my anxiety now peaking and bordering on full panic attack, the flight became an interesting affair.
Contrary to a vaguely popular (and really fucking irritating) belief, anxiety is not stress or worry – although stressing and worrying are part of anxiety. And it is most certainly not a choice. It’s not a lifestyle. It’s something you have – like chicken pox. Although thankfully chicken pox is a once (perhaps twice) in a lifetime affair. Anxiety on the other hand, can be a daily curse. Forever. And just like chicken pox, it needs to be managed.
Yep – I spent a week in Berlin, and by day three I was bored. By the time we arrived in the city that birthed Oktoberfest, the Brandenburg Gate, and Adolf Hitler, we’d been away from home for 46 days. So looking at old rocks, old churches, and old history, was wearing a little thin. As are funny-tasting tap water, pay-to-use toilets, European heatwave, and whatever-that-yellow-stuff-is-they-call-cheese.
While you’d think fear and loathing around body size would make me eat less and move more – proven methods of weight loss – it does in fact increase my anxiety which makes me eat more food, more often, and much faster. Counter intuitive. But my reality. This in turn makes me more unhappy and I find myself in a vicious downhill spiral.
For me, “triggered” means feeling a compulsion to succumb to the disorder. As a bulimic, that means compensatory eating behaviours. Binging, purging, or both. Finding any means possible to compensate for having eaten. Finding any means possible to reduce the size of my body so clothes hang loosely and my bones become visible. Feeling triggered means a huge risk of relapsing.
I’m searching for something – and I don’t know what it is. But I do know what it isn’t. It isn’t physical. Or psychological. It isn’t health or wealth or happiness – although they’re lovely and I’d like more please. I’m not looking for religion – I need something far more personal. The only word that makes sense to me, is spiritual.
