Self-Harm (TRIGGER WARNING)

If you knew me in high school, here's what I assume your description of me entailed: got good grades, parents worked at school, did some sports, chorusband, Michael's girlfriend, Ben's little sister, prom queen, nicenormalfriendly girl. You know what you forgot on that list? Self-harmer.

If someone were to tell you to picture someone who "cuts," I bet you a million dollars you're picturing an "emo" teenage girl (or boy) with jet black hair, pounds of eyeliner, listening to Welcome to the Black Parade, carving their perceived sins out of their forearms. Yeah, a lot of people who cut do look that way, but not all of us. Now, I should start off by saying that I didn't "cut" per-say. I could never make myself run a razor blade or knife along my arm. Instead, I would take my thumbnail and run it back and forth on my wrist until it was deep enough to bleed. Took longer. Prolonged the pain. 

The good thing (HA "good thing") was that it looked more like a burn than a cut so I could tell people I burnt my wrist with my curlingstraightening iron on accident and no one would be the wiser. There were some people who questioned it. My best friend, Tyra, my other best friend, Zach, my college boyfriend, my mom. But I could explain it away so easily, it never became an issue. It was never a cause for concern. 

I never wanted to kill myself. That isn't always the point of cutting. "So why do it," you ask? To feel something. To release. Sometimes, things would happen and I would get this feeling that my whole body was swelling like a balloon, not in a "fat" way, but in that all these emotions were blowing me up, trying to escape any way that they could, I could feel them trying to burst out of my fingertips. They needed somewhere to go. They needed a way out. So I opened up my skin and let them seep into the universe, hoping never to see them again. 

The last time I self-harmed was in 2016. Since then, I have gotten a tattoo on my wrist that covers most of my scars although if you look closely, there are still a couple that are visible. It helps remind me that I can cover up my past, but I shouldn't want to. I am my past. My past is what made me. I don't want to forget that this happened in my life. I want to use it to fuel my fire and to remind me that things WILL get better, then they'll get worse, but ultimately, they'll get better again.

The Bad Days.

If you've never experienced any type of mental disorder, this isn't going to make any sense to you, but I hope you'll try to understand anyways.

When it comes to anxiety, some days are worse than others and then there are some days that are the worst of the worst. Yesterday was one of those days for me. The kind of day that I am me without being me. It's as if there were two sides to my brain. One side thought like myself and the other side, someone completely different. The "different side" controls my body and my mouth, then the "me side" is almost floating above me, judging me and hating everything I'm saying and doing.

The "different side" makes me say and do things I don't mean and then I regret them with my whole being for days afterwards. By this, I mean, I feel physically ill with regret about the things my "different side" has made me do. I feel like I'm going to vomit or I punch into my hand repeatedly or scream while I'm in my car. All these things, just to try and get that regret and anger out of my body before it explodes. I would do anything to make it stop. I want to send everyone a message saying I'm sorry for things that I don't even know what I'm sorry for, just to make the overwhelming feeling of regret and guilt go away.

This sounds insane, I know, but I'm being 100% truthful. They say that mental disorders are a chemical imbalance in the brain, so I kind of have a theory. Most of my really bad days come after days that are extremely good. They come after days where I am happy and feel amazing. My theory is that my brain tries to level out the chemicals in my brain when there is too much "happy" chemicals by emitting "downer" chemicals but it doesn't know how to regulate the amount and ends up pouring in a whole cup when the recipe only called for a teaspoon. Now, I'm obviously not a scientist or a psychologist or anything really, this is just how I like to think of what happens to me.

I don't know why these days have to happen to me, and I'm still working on ways to control them or at least manage them. Until then, I'm sorry to anyone I shut out on those days or disappoint on those days. I truly don't mean to.

"I'm Fine..."

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing, I'm fine."

I've said before that "I'm sorry" is my catchphrase. If so, my second catchphrase would be "I'm fine." I don't like to talk about myself, and more importantly, I don't like to talk about my feelings. This is not a good trait considering last night I nearly had a mental break down regarding the stress that comes with juggling three jobs. I was freaking out and cried multiple times, harder than anyone should cry because of any job. But the thing is I don't believe I was freaking out solely because of the jobs. Most the time when I cry or have these breakdowns, it's little things that have built up over time from feelings that I don't allow myself to feel. I don't allow myself to feel these feelings because, "I'm fine."

The funny thing is that I could spend hours listening to other people tell me about their problems and feelings and be perfectly fine with it and want to help them in any way that I can. But if I spend one minute talking about my feelings to someone, I immediately feel guilty, like I'm taking up their time or that I am a burden and then I apologize profusely and quit talking. I normally end a sentence about myself with, "I'm sorry for talking about myself so much. It's no big deal. I'm fine." I'm not sure what made me this way or why I feel the need to apologize for having emotions. I just don't want other people to have to worry about me or my problems when I should be able to handle them myself. I shouldn't need help with my emotions. I should be able to control them and I should be able to fix myself. I don't know if "fix" is the right word, but it's the only word I can think of right now. The problem with all of this is, like I said earlier, when I tell other people that I'm fine, I'm mostly trying to convince myself of that and in doing that, I don't allow myself to feel the emotions that I should be feeling. This is where the trouble starts. This is with the emotions start to accumulate behind this dam I've built in my brain until the cracks start leaking and the dam finally breaks and what happened last night happens again. 

In group therapy, my therapist used to give us hand-outs on "mindfulness" and "distress tolerance," etc. One of them was called "Cheerleading Statements for Interpersonal Effectiveness," which I thought was incredibly stupid at the time, but now I kind of get it. Two of the statements it lists are:

1. It's OK to want or need something from someone else.

2. Giving, giving, giving is not the be-all of life. I am an important person in this world, too.

These are two statements that I have been trying to frame my life around. I am important too. I am not a waste of space. I am not a burden. I deserve help too.

"Coming Out": Mental Disorders

Trusting someone enough to tell them that you have a mental illness is one of the most difficult things to do. There's always that fear that they'll think you're crazy or that they'll tell you to just "get over it." So, you keep quiet and go on believing you're in this alone until it eats you alive. Let me be the 10,000th person to tell you, YOU'RE NOT ALONE. I know, I know, it's the most cliche statement and has been drilled into all of us, but it's true. You'll realize this once you start sharing your problems with people you trust...or in my case, the entire internet. Just recently I've been told by people I love and have known my whole life about the troubles they have with mental health that I didn't know were happening. It makes me so sad that they have had to go through it but it also brings me comfort to know that mental illness is NORMAL. 

"Coming out" with your mental illness to your family or friends is a really difficult task and sometimes, depending on the illness, impossible. I know that for me, texting, emails, or notes were the easiest and probably the only way I could have told the ones I love about my problems. Most of the time, I am not able to talk about my problems with anyone. Now, when I say I'm "not able," I mean the words in my brain refuse to work their way out of my mouth. It's as if there's a shield blocking them from being spoken. So, I turned to writing and it has worked the best for me. 

The first person I told about anything was my mom. For me, this was the most obvious choice because she's my best friend. Even then, I told her by text message. I was a sophomore in college and writing my 10th journal entry about how I really wanted to start therapy when I thought, "instead of writing this over and over I should do something about it." So I texted her and told her what was going on. The next week I had a session with my first therapist. Now obviously, telling someone about this stuff isn't always going to go 100% okay, there are some people out there who still think it's all "no big deal" and you can just "get over it." But I'm telling you, a majority of people will understand and want to help you out.

I told my dad by email and he let me know that, while he doesn't understand mental illness, he was still there for me. I didn't have to tell some of my friends, they just knew and understood. My best friend has always just somehow understood that this is the way I am and has loved me anyways...I don't thank her enough for that. I told my college boyfriend about it all by writing him a long note and hiding it in his backpack. When he found it, he sent me the sweetest message about how it doesn't change who I am and that's something I think is really important. Your mental illness doesn't change who you are. You're still you. 

No matter what you're going through; anxiety, OCD, depression, an eating disorder, etc., you're still YOU. Although, mental illness will always be there to tell you that you're alone in this, at the end of the day, the people that actually care about you won't care what kind of crazy shit is going on in your brain, they'll just be there to love and support you no matter what. 

Don't Mind Me, I'm Just Overthinking About Overthinking...

You know how at the end of Finding Nemo, all the fish from the dentist office finally make it  back to the ocean but are still trapped in those plastic bags? That's what it feels like to have anxiety. 

You can see the whole ocean and all these possibilities of endless things that you want to do but you're stuck in this plastic bag and you just can't do them no matter how hard you try...except the ocean is life and the plastic bag is your brain. 

All too often, people assume social anxiety is just being nervous around people or being too scared to try new things, but once again, you're wrong. Anxiety is crippling. 

For example, there was this one time in college where it was raining and I didn't feel like taking the bus to class so I drove my car and parked in in an apartment building parking lot near by. As I got out of my car and began walking towards campus, a guy said to me, "You know this is a private parking lot right? You shouldn't park here, you'll probably get towed." And just that comment from a guy, probably trying to be nice and look out for me, was enough to literally wrack my body/mind with anxiety and I got back in my car, skipped class, drove home and got in bed and didn't speak to anyone for probably the rest of the night. That was about three years ago and it has still stuck with me as one of the most ridiculous bouts of anxiety I've ever had. 

See the thing with anxiety is that you know it's ridiculous and unrealistic. You know this but yet you still can't break through that "Finding Nemo Plastic Bag" surrounding your brain. Logically, I should have just taken that guy's advice, parked else-where and still went to class but my brain told me that just doing that one small thing like getting noticed parking in the wrong area made me the biggest failure and I would be better off hiding from anyone so I couldn't possibly fail that badly again.

Another common occurrence with me (and why most of my friends hate me, I swear), is communication, especially through texting. I'll get a text from a friend while I'm working or busy in some way and I'll tell myself I'll text them back later. Then I, more often than not, will forget to respond until the next day and when this happens, I am sent into a over-thinking spiral of, "Did I wait too long to respond that it would be weird if I respond now? Because if I say I was busy or at work they'll wonder why I didn't just respond afterward and if I say I forgot then they're going to think I didn't care enough to respond to them even though I really do care about them, I just genuinely forgot..." When this happens, I usually end up just never texting back which is really awful because that really makes it seem like I don't care at all which isn't true.

Just typing all of this out really makes me see how ridiculous it all is while also making me anxious about how absurd it actually sounds...but that's also what I'm trying to explain. While my logical mind knows that it's unrealistic and absurd, my anxious mind is looking at it through that goddamn "Finding Nemo Plastic Bag" again and can't make a hole in the bag big enough for me to calm the logic of my brain and break out into the ocean. 

While my meds help with all of this a little bit, it's still quite a struggle daily. I'll talk about medication another time though, as that's a whole other lengthy explanation in which I'll probably use more crazy analogies such as cartoon fish in bags near P Sherman 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney. 

"But you don't look like you have an eating disorder..."

"I haven't eaten all day. God, I'm so anorexic."

"She's not skinny enough to have an eating disorder."

"Ugh, she's so skinny, she's practically anorexic." 

No.

Stop.


These may be some of the most toxic sentences ever spoken for someone who has an eating disorder.
As someone who has dealt with various types of disordered eating since they were 12 (not diagnosed until I was 18), I can tell you that there is no one way that an eating disorder "looks."
Yes, the most common idea of what an ED looks like is a very skinny female with sunken in eyes and bones protruding, but that is only a small percentage of people who cope with an eating disorder.
In the USA around 20 million women and 10 million men deal with some sort of eating disorder at some point in their life (NEDA). The most commonly known are anorexia and bulimia. But what you may not know is that there are other kinds of EDs and some people may have more than one type.
There are really four(-ish) types of EDs (NEDA):

1. Anorexia Nervosa: restriction of food/drink resulting in inadequate food/drink intake with a fear of weight-gain.
2. Bulimia Nervosa: the purging of food/drink through vomiting, excessive exercise, and/or laxatives.
3. Binge Eating Disorder: seemingly uncontrollable eating/drinking of excessive amounts of food.
4. EDNOS (Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified): any other eating disorder that causes significant distress in your life but cannot be defined by the other three categories.

Each of these types have many different signs and symptoms and can all be deadly.

Before I continue, I would like to make it extremely clear to anyone who doesn't know: EATING DISORDERS ARE NOT SOLELY ABOUT FOOD/WEIGHT/BODY IMAGE. Yes, those are major factors in what composes them, but what really drives an ED is perfection, and the definition of "perfection" looks different for all of us.

Most of the people who have EDs don't "look" like they have one. The reason the idea that there is a way EDs "look" is so triggering is that when we hear this, it flips a switch inour brains. See, an ED will always tell us that we've failed. "You're not skinny enough." "You don't have good enough self control." "You're not 'sick enough.'" Essentially, you're a failure. When we hear things like those at the beginning of this post, that validates these thoughts and the cycle gets worse.

So please, try and help change the stigma that mental health problems are not adjectives and are not to be taken lightly.

OCD is Not an Adjective

Every day I hear someone off-handedly say, "God, I'm so OCD. I just have to have everything organized." This drives me crazy for many reasons. Reason number one, say it with me: "OCD IS NOT AN ADJECTIVE." You are not OCD because you like your car clean. You are not OCD because you like your desk tidy. You may be OCD if you think something bad will happen to you if your desk isn't tidy or if your car isn't clean. Reason number two, OCD stands for "obsessive/compulsive disorder." This means that it encompasses a variety of feelings, obsessive ones and compulsive ones. Compulsive feelings are the ones that people normally associate with OCD, having to do things a certain number of times, needing everything placed "just so," and keeping everything excessively clean. Obsessive feelings are when you focus on one seemingly insignificant aspect of your life and feeling like bad things will happen if you don't do it "correctly" or do it the same every day. Essentially, it's "obsessing" over these things. Someone with OCD may lean more towards the obsessive side of the spectrum or the compulsive side of the spectrum, or both.

I have obsessive OCD. I'd like to show you a glimpse into my brain throughout the day. These are the thoughts that go through my head every day. I tried to pick the most common obsessions I have and make them detailed so that maybe you'll understand what OCD really is.

6:15 am: My alarm goes off. I turn it off and lay in bed for an extra five minutes when my second alarm goes off. I get out of bed and go to the bathroom. Yesterday was a good day and I got dressed before I brushed my teeth, right? So today I should get dressed before I brush my teeth. Wait…did I get dressed before I brushed my teeth yesterday or did I brush my teeth before I got dressed? Okay, I’ll get dressed before I brush my teeth then see how today goes and if it goes well then I’ll continue doing it in that order.

6:40 am: While I’m driving to work, I press the button to use the cruise in my car, mentally reminding myself NOT to forget to turn it off before I park and get out otherwise I’ll have a bad day.

10:00 am: While messing around on my phone, I notice that the pictures in the album on my phone end evenly with four at the bottom. No wonder he hasn’t texted me back, those stupid pictures have been like that. I go through and delete two random photos so that the pictures line up the way that they are supposed to. Doing this reminds me to double check my Tumblr app and make sure that my fitness blog is the last one I reblogged to and not my personal blog because that would REALLY screw up everything.

1:00 pm: I change the lockscreen on my phone.

1:03 pm: I change the lockscreen on my phone again.

1:07 pm: I change the lockscreen on my phone back to the original lockscreen it was because I’m scared of what may happen if it’s changed.

4:30 pm: When I get home from work, I make sure that everything in my car is where it’s supposed to be and that all the trash is taken out and thrown away. Frantically, I put my makeup that I carried in my purse that day away in its proper place, I should never have brought it in the first place. It ruined my whole day because my purse should only hold my wallet, sunglasses, and chapstick. How could I have been so stupid?

6:00 pm: I take a shower. Okay, I’ve been doing the same routine for a while now and things have been going alright, right? So should I keep the same order or change it up and see what happens? What if I wash my body while I let the conditioner sit in my hair instead of rinsing it out then washing my body? What if I wash my body with the bar soap instead of the loofah and body wash? WHAT IF I wash my body: right arm, left arm, right leg, left leg instead of left arm, right leg, right arm, left leg? No, no that would be HORRIBLE. Just do what you’ve been doing. Wait, I have to shave my legs…which leg do I shave first? I can’t remember which one it was last week that worked right. Oh no…okay, whichever my hand goes to first will be the one I shave first and…it’s the right, okay, that’s okay, no problem. Okay, now should I dry myself off while standing in the shower still or do I step out onto the bathmat and dry off? I’ll step out and dry off.

6:40 pm: He doesn’t respond to my snapchat the way I want. Goddammit I should have dried off while STILL IN the tub. Why did I do that? I can’t go back and change it now! My life is going to be shit until tomorrow when I shower again.

7:30 pm: I start a crossword on the computer. Akeena barks at me because she needs to go out, but doesn’t she know that I can’t go out until I’ve finished the crossword?

9:00 pm: I get ready for bed. This t-shirt is so comfy and I want to wear it but he last time I wore it to bed, I got in an argument with someone. I better just be safe and wear the same one I’ve been wearing. I really like Friends…but the last time I watched it to fall asleep, things went badly the next day. I better just watch Criminal Minds again, to be safe.

 9:30 pm: I must make sure there are three alarms on the alarm app but only two are set for the morning. The other one is for my nap on my lunch break but it should be off for now. I can’t have two alarms or four alarms. It has to be three.

10:40 pm: I’m about to fall asleep when I remember that I need to make sure my phone is on the nightstand while I sleep instead of near my pillow because the other day when I had slept with it near my pillow I got disappointed by some bad news so it’s better to be safe than sorry. Phew, good thing I remembered that before I went to sleep.

6:15 am: My alarm goes off…