I should sleep more. But I suppose if I did I wouldn't come up with highly interesting and somewhat amusing questions like that. Although maybe that's a good thing because a) I'm pretty sure I am the only person who finds my own humour amusing and b) questions like that keep up all night trying to answer them. Either way I thought of it and have been turning it over in my mind and on Google and unless I'm missing something obvious I still don't have an answer.
But that's unimportant really, just a (not very) witty way to start a post that I hope people will like because right now I'm going through a short phase of uncertainty and need validation from someone other than my children who are apt to telling me that I am awesome and amazing because I've bought them a Kinder egg. I suppose it also led to the thought process I'm currently toying with, what comes first? In relation to my mental health.
I have a number of mental health problems listed in my medical records. I actually saw it all the other day during an appointment and I had no idea that some psychiatrist or other at some point in my adult life had decided I'm on the spectrum of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Who knew? (Answer: not me).
Over the last few years I've noticed how my various disorders intertwine and a bad episode of one can easily result in a bad episode of another.
For instance, last year the first disorder to rear its ugly head was depression, in full force, absolutely out of nowhere. Quickly followed by crippling anxiety. The struggle was far more than real. Every day I felt like I was dragging my body along as if it were a corpse and the only break in the crushing depression that felt like it was a heavy weight suffocating me was anxiety and its corresponding panic attacks that genuinely did suffocate me because I couldn't breathe. While struggling to cope with the overwhelming emotions I fell into the obsessive and ritualistic cleaning and organising as a way to create some sense of order in my world that was suddenly complete chaos. At the same time the reckless spending and evening bottle of wine amped up, which at the time I rationalised as perfectly normal things that people do to cope. However while this is true, people often turn to alcohol or materialism to cheer themselves up, I am not people. I am a person with a personality disorder and these things are not nothing, they are the starting point of reckless behaviour that damages myself and those I love if I don't confront it. Which is difficult because when my borderline comes out to play I struggle lots with dissociation. It's difficult to hold yourself accountable or even recognise the extent of a problem when half the time your body feels like a car and you've suddenly handed the wheel over to someone else and climbed into the back seat (or sometimes the boot depending on the day). I don't know if lucky is the right term although I continue to use it regardless, before my BPD had the time to become what it could and has done in the past I stopped eating.
Being in recovery from an eating disorder is a long old slog. I have been diagnosed with Anorexia Nervosa - purging subtype. It's been a long time since I received my initial diagnosis (thirteen years to be exact) and longer still since I actually developed my eating disorder. And since then my life has been in part a journey of fighting it. It's long, hard and doesn't have any certainties even when I feel like I'm in the clear. Last year when I stopped eating I wasn't even aware of stopping. And by the time I realised I had stopped I had also rationalised reasons why it was a perfectly ok thing to do, for now. Despite being in recovery and actually doing very well (have you guys seen the muscles on some of my yoga pictures? #hollydoesyoga) eating still brought anxiety and guilt with it at almost every meal time. And as my anxiety was spiralling out of control it relieved some of it by not facing that daily challenge. That was probably the most rational thought in regards to my mental health for a long time. In part utterly ridiculous, but it made sense.
So within a month I had gone sort of loopy. One disorder either masking or triggering the next. My borderline an unwelcome symptom of my declining mental stability, my anorexia and OCD symptoms I was grasping onto to cope with my anxiety and depression. And as the year went on they overlapped more and more until I wasn't really at all sure if my sudden bouts of anxiety were a product of the initial anxiety or if they were coming from my borderline, and the same with my depression.
It's all well and good being able to map it all out on paper or screen like this where it almost makes sense if you read it a few times over. But when it comes to treatment I'm left with a problem. That question, what comes first? In a way my wellbeing depends on it. Because it's all well and good treating a symptom but if I don't tackle the cause then I'll be back at square one faster than I care to think about.
And it's not just last year that I'm considering. Maybe because I'm just curious or maybe it really does matter, I'm unsure about that too (I'm planning on hashing it out with my psychiatrist) but despite the fact that my anorexia was the first of the list to present itself diagnostically what if that was because I was predisposed to it because of another mental illness that I just hadn't been diagnosed with yet?
They say eating disorders come hand in hand with both depression and anxiety and science dictates that if you starve yourself you'll feel pretty crap and your brain will go a bit wonky. But not everyone starts with their eating disorder as their first diagnosis. I've also noticed that eating disorders and personality disorders seem to go hand in hand a lot. Or at least people claim they do (more on that later).
I often feel like the mistreatment of my body, the behaviours and rituals I adopt due to my anorexia mirror those I fall into when I have a particularly bad episode with my personality disorder. So then I wonder, did I only develop anorexia as a symptom of something else? Is that why I've been fighting this fight for so long? Because I haven't been treating the cause, just a symptom? Am I essentially putting a little Peppa Pig plaster on an open wound and expecting it to heal?
On the other hand I may just be making excuses.
But now I'm faced with decisions about my recovery. This is the first time I've been given the chance to properly discuss my options and it's a heavy burden to carry sometimes because I want to get it right. I need to get it right. Right now, despite my weight I am fighting against going into an eating disorder specific route of treatment. And of course that raises questions about my motives, and I won't lie, I don't want to gain weight. The thought terrifies me, and I have had genuine dreams of suffocating in fat.
But the thought of leaving the people I love scares me more. The thought of an NG tube scares me far more than eating does and that scares me a lot. So no, I'll admit it, I don't want to gain weight, but that's not why I don't want to go down that road.
I'm fighting because this time I truly believe that the anorexia didn't come first and at least in this case I have absolute and concrete evidence of that. And regardless of my weight, regardless of it being my first diagnosis tackling it first will leave me out in the cold and possibly/probably worse off than I already am.
How does an anorexic with untreated borderline personality disorder react to gaining (a lot of) weight? Answer: Badly. So, so badly.
And I don't want to go there thank you very much.
So this is where I am. I'm hedging my bets on a question I don't really know the answer to but I'm willing to risk it. I wager that I might know my own mind better than anyone outside of my skull and while I have the clarity and opportunity to be part of the (very important) decision making I shall do just that.
For the most part I'm back in the drivers seat as of the last two months and it's tiring but a lot better than being in the boot. (Remember the: my body is like is car analogy I made at the start before this post made your brain fall out of your ears?)
I've also decided that the mental vs mental question will probably join my list of things that bug me so much I don't sleep at night.
The current top of that list is
What came first orange (colour) or orange (fruit)? And was orange even a word before those two things?
Also isn't it really lazy that they didn't think of a different word for whichever came second?
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