Leila's Journey to Life: Mental Health

Showing posts with label Mental Health. Show all posts

Wednesday, 30 January 2013

Day 172: My Dirty Little Secret

This blog is a continuation to:
Day 155: Introduction – Starving Myself
Day 156: Wanting Passion and Purpose in Life
Day 157: Generating an Eating Disorder – The Power of Thought - Part 1
Day 158: Generating an Eating Disorder - The Power of Images - Part 2
Day 159: Generating an Eating Disorder – The Power of Writing – Part 3
Day 160: Eating Disorders and Contradictions
Day 161: Become an Image and be Treated as an Image
Day 162: Eating Disorders and Unforetold Consequences
Day 163: Mistaking Obsession for Passion
Day 164: Eating Disorders as Perfection of Mind Dominance
Day 165: Eating Disorders and Real Self-Perfection
Day 166: From Anorexia to Bulimia

Day 167: The Big Fall

Day 168: Always Just out of Reach

Day 169: Turning my Back on Anorexia, Anorexia turning its Back on Me
Day 170: Starving and Binging - Two Sides of the Same Coin
Day 171: Hiding behind Anorexia

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to have resisted writing about having had an eating disorder

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to have judged my eating disorder period as me being ‘superficial’ and consequently not wanting to write about it because of fear of being seen as ‘superficial’

I forgive myself that I haven’t accepted and allowed myself to see and realise that by not writing about ED I am only further perpetuating the taboo around eating disorders as some weird/disturbing phenomena within this world which is not yet understood – instead of seeing and realising that an ED is the mathematical outcome of having experienced particular reactions and having participated within particular thought patterns which were acted upon, resulting in ED behaviour – there is nothing good or bad about it – it merely is what it is

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not have wanted to write about my ED within fear of being seen as ‘superficial’ – not seeing and realising, that our world is superficial and as never achieved anything of real substance and within that my ED was merely one of the many faces of superficiality within a world of inequality where the nature of the mind and actual living is not understood

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to have judged myself and others as myself who have and still are participating within a form of ED -- without judging or scrutinizing the society which promotes and brews such behaviour through a distorted value system of valuing image and imagination over physical reality – not seeing and realising that the one is merely the outcome of the other

I forgive myself that I haven’t accepted and allowed myself to see and realise that through hiding and being all ‘hush hush’ about having an eating disorder I am accepting and allowing myself to protect disorder and disharmony in the world at large – where hiding, being shameful and not talking about the problem, I am putting myself in a position where I will not talk about the problems that exist at large in society – where I will protect the dirty secrets of the world as long as I can protect my own

Friday, 25 January 2013

Day 169: Turning my Back on Anorexia, Anorexia turning its Back on Me

Day 167: The Big Fall

Day 168: Always Just out of Reach

I was looking some more at the point of when I stopped as described in Day 167: The Big Fall -- where I caved in and surrender myself to stuffing myself and after that day 'never looked back' so to speak.

What's interesting within this point is how I always told myself and portrayed this event to myself and others as 'the day I decided to stop'. And this is not actually a correct description of what happened.

What essentially happened was that I gave up, I couldn't do it any longer - I failed. But instead of looking at it that way, I made it seem like I gave up on it, because that made me look like a 'stronger' person. It's like dumping someone before they dump you so you're not seen as the weak one. So that's kind of what happened there.

I mean if I could have - I would have continued. And like I mentioned before, I tried from time to time but the moments were short-lived as I would soon give up again and then tell myself 'Nah, that's not interesting / worth it anymore', where I was the one turning my back on ED while I actually experienced it the other way around. But it was easier to tell myself that it was 'my decision' and to take on an attitude of 'I'm over you' so I didn't have to face the sense of failure and giving up on myself that I experienced.

So me 'turning my back' on participating within an Eating Disorder had been a point of spitefulness instead of letting go and actually changing. And so within that, the Eating Disorder still 'won' because I am still carrying that sense of failure and being without direction within my life, where it's still luring over my shoulder from the shadows, reminding me of what I wasn't able to do.

Tuesday, 15 January 2013

Day 162: Eating Disorders and Unforetold Consequences

I was 'lucky' to have two friends who also had eating disorders – although it was never specifically states as such, their behaviour and attitude towards food, eating and gossip about other people and themselves made pretty clear what was going on.

I would spend my days around them if I could, since we supported each other's state of mind and would not ask questions about the other not eating - quite the opposite, we cheered it lol.

Something unexpected happened though. I would still hang out with my 'bigger group' of friends with one of the two people who also had the ED -- and after they had noticed our behaviour and how much weight we had lost - they started doing the same thing.

Oh oh

I did not prepare for that.
I did not want them to go through what we were doing, because even though we were doing it, we knew it wasn't 'right' and it's something that starts consuming and controlling your whole life.

I always believed that what I was doing was 'innocent' from the sense that it was only affecting my life, my reality. But now through my acceptance and allowance of adopting an Eating Disorder, and the fact that 'no man is an island'-- I was having a direct, negative impact on the life of others. Not only did I aid in supporting my two friends their eating disorder, but was also part of the cause of other people going down the same road.

This is an example of 'living as an example' and a bad one at that -- where other people see you change, and start doing the same. This is where I realised that whatever I do and however I decide to behave either actively or passively through my acceptance and allowance, will have an impact, an influence on others -- through better or for worse.

Now, this was just what was happening within my small little circle of friends, but you could see the same pattern occur in the school in its entirety. It was an art school, so everyone's very much visual/image based and very much pre-occupied looking all 'cool' and 'artsy'-- and being a 'pretty skinny girl' was kind of part of that whole scene.

A lot of girls were unnaturally skinny, and each year as new people would join the school, you could see them 'turn', see them adopt the same destructive life-style as those who were already there, those who were functioning as an example of 'what it means to be someone in this school'. And I mean, it was scary -- but none of the teachers or other staff members seemed to notice. It was this whole secret, hidden, hush-hush subculture that existed and no-one talked about it.

Like I said before, with my friends who had EDs, we never acknowledged to one another what it is we were doing (because then also we'd be admitting to one another that we're 'superficial'). So it was more of a silent acceptance, a silent agreement.

So now, this is one group of friends, one school -- you can only IMAGINE what goes on, on a society/world scale. We are constantly being bombarded by bad examples, by unsustainable life-styles where we promote compromising our human physical bodies to attain some freaking image -- which most of the time is not even possible to attain because it's been manipulated and modified with make-up, specific lighting, specific clothing and photoshop and what not. So you end up compromising into infinity, chasing a reality which has never even been in your reach, it's such a trap.

I mean, is this what it means to live in the 21st century? Is this what it means to live in 'modern times', is this what it means to be 'evolved'? Sure, we have some nice gadgets and technologies which made our life more comfy (and even that, only for a minority) -- in the meantime you have the majority of the world living in physical suffering because we've been unable to overcome our selfishness and then those who do have material comfort live a life of complete unprecedented mental disorder. All in all - we're a very destructive race and are the worst example for future generations.

We really have to reconsider and re-evaluate our whole way of doing things and the way we live our lives, because it's simply not worth it.

Monday, 14 January 2013

Day 161: Become an Image and be Treated as an Image

An interesting dimension within eating disorders, is that of trying to become / attain a particular image. Every day you weigh yourself, everyday you look into the mirror and check: Am I there yet?

‘Be careful what you wish for’ is a point that I faced within ‘experimenting’ with eating disorders.

I believed that if I would look a certain way, that I’d be happy. That people would be nicer to me, that everything would just go ‘easy’ in my life. Was I in for disappointment…

The thing with trying to become a picture, is that the closer you get to being that picture – the more people start treating like you a picture. I was getting ‘negative’ attention more and more in town, would get harassed more easily when I would go out – even in my own hometown. I had always seen my hometown as a ‘safe’ place, nothing ever happens. But now the streets I had walked through pretty much every day of my life where nothing ever happened – suddenly became full of incidents and I was not as comfortable walking through them every day, especially when it was dark (when you can’t see people’s faces in the dark, that sense of ‘anonymity’ really gets people to say things I’m pretty sure they would not have said in daylight).

So I never really considered this point when I embarked in this project. I thought getting skinnier and prettier was going to be a ‘good thing’ – but now I was just being harassed and if did meet new people that were nice to me, their genuineness was questionable and these relationships would be very superficial and not last very long.

I mean, where are ‘skinny pretty girls’ portrayed? It’s in the magazines, it’s on tv, it’s on ads – and it all comes down to using sex to sell. They trust that the particular image is going to prompt a particular experience within the consumer (which is in essence a sexual one), which the consumer then hopefully, misguidedly, connects to the product/service – so that they go and buy it.

So obviously, if you live in a society that uses pictures to stimulate particular mind experiences and behaviour – if you’re then going to go and try and be that picture – those type of behaviours become part of the ‘package deal’. You want to become a picture? Fine – go for it, but then know you are going to have to deal with the repercussions as some very nasty behaviour coming your way because you’ve just given yourself and everyone else they okay to diminish you and reduce to a mere object, an image.

This is now also not very cool for those people who happen to look like the people in pictures – as they now get a lot of the same negative attention and not being taken seriously simply because of that one point. I mean, it’s gotten to a point where ‘pretty people’ go and get plastic surgery, not because they want to get prettier, but because they’re begging the surgeon to please make them uglier – so they can finally be rid of all the nastiness and be taken seriously as a person rather than only being considered for their looks (and where in some cases the surgeon then doesn’t want to do it because apparently it’s “wrong”).

So this is another one of the little realisations/insights I got while going through my experiment. How getting what you want is not always what you wanted because you didn’t take all dimensions/variables into consideration, how people are completely picture driven and that people can be very nasty. I’ve always had a general belief that people are ‘good’ – and this was one of the first times that random people, strangers acted really strange and almost demonic around me, which you know, is not cool, but in a way it was cool to go there and see what actually goes on within people’s minds and realise that hmmm, this world is not such a cool place to live in.

Saturday, 5 January 2013

Day 158: Generating an Eating Disorder - The Power of Images - Part 2

This blog is a continuation to:
Day 155: Introduction – Starving Myself
Day 156: Wanting Passion and Purpose in Life
Day 157: Generating an Eating Disorder – Part 1

Besides managing my thoughts deliberately to keep myself 'energized' and 'motivated' -- I also used images to further indoctrinate myself with my new 'lifestyle'.

The thoughts helped to some extent to 'keep me going', but it wasn't enough. So next, I started to play with images in various ways. I would become very specific about what I would watch on TV, to make sure that I only or mostly watched shows with lots of skinny people or fashion programmes. This was to everyday, as much as I could, imprint and instill my 'goal' to make sure that I do not stray off my path. I also made sure to go through all the regular and fashion magazines we had, to again imprint those pictures into my mind to keep myself motivated. Whenever I would slack on this 'picture' regime, I would slowly but surely start becoming less 'committed' and sloppy within my routine of doing and not doing things.

So just like with the reading not being 'enough' anymore to keep me going, where I expanded the point into managing my thoughts -- just 'looking' at the pictures had come to a point where it was not giving me the same 'energy dose' to submerge myself into my obsessions. So again, I took it a step further. Instead of 'passively' looking at the images/pictures and taking them in, I decided to 'engage' myself more actively -- I figured this would give me a 'higher return' of energy through 'investing' more effort in it lol. And I turned out to be right. I started a scrap book, where I started pasting in the pictures from the magazines that I liked the most, arranging them all very precisely and meticulously -- giving it as much attention as I could. The cutting, pasting and arranging was giving me some 'extra fuel' to run on, but I was looking for more. So I looked for another way where I could engage myself more within the realm of images: which was drawing.

I started keeping a sketch book aside my scrapbook, where I would draw / copy images and would attempt to draw them to perfection. This was very time-consuming and required a lot of concentration - so this was like the perfect activity to draw energy from, because it had to be PERFECT. I had to get the ratios, the lines, the curves -- everything had to be perfect before I would stop. And then I would go over those lines and curves that I liked again and again (like say the hipbones). The slow and meticulous drawing and correcting, really locked myself into my obsession-mode and worked quite effectively in terms of brainwashing myself.

This was when I learnt the power of putting pencil to paper -- where next, I explored the point of writing.

Thursday, 3 January 2013

Day 157: Generating an Eating Disorder – The Power of Thoughts - Part 1

This blog is a continuation to:
Day 155: Introduction – Starving Myself
Day 156: Wanting Passion and Purpose in Life

Since I didn’t ‘naturally’ develop an Eating Disorder – I had to manage my thoughts and behaviour very deliberately and extensively.

I guess that when you ‘naturally’ develop an ED that at some point in time a traumatic event happens from whereon one’s behaviour and patterns change and over time, through accumulation you set yourself up with a particular mind-set within which you lock yourself. I skipped that part, and I wanted to do this NOW and not wait for it to ‘slowly’ develop.

Within this, I came across some interesting points in terms of how my mind works and much time, energy and effort I had to invest in my thoughts, imagination and physical behaviour.

I mean, it’s really hard to force yourself not to eat. For me food, and foods that I liked, were the highlights of my day – but unfortunately they were ‘in the way’ of my newfound ‘project’. The first few weeks/months I had immense trouble keeping up with my new ‘commitment’ and could barely focus on it – the passion was just ‘not there’.

Then, one of the first things I did was read books about anorexia which were kind of biographical in nature. I found that spending time reading this and engaging myself into these patterns as how these girls lived them, ‘motivated’ me and I literally felt ‘energized’ and re-committed to this. Interestingly, if I ran out of books to read or simply did not read for a while – the feeling would disappear and I would ‘drop’ again in my engagement towards not eating and end up feeling miserable. I would then go and read again, but after a while – it was just not giving me the ‘effect’ that I was looking for, like that resource had been exploited and depleted for me.

That wasn’t working anymore, so now I had to go and find a different point that I could use to ‘motivate’ me and ‘keep me on track’. Then I went and decided that if I *think* like someone with an Eating Disorder, that I could ‘simulate’ this and get the same result. This was quite a story, because this wasn’t happening automatically – I had to actually go and decide on what type of thought I was going to have and then formulate it specifically and then try and believe what I was thinking (which was really hard at first because it felt really unnatural and fake) – and then do this over and over again, all very deliberately and consciously. This was quite ‘exhausting’ but after many months, the thought patterns had integrated quite effectively and would just play out by themselves. I remember at some point actually getting scared, because I tried to stop the thoughts and they just wouldn’t – I kept being flooded and realised that what I had done had spun out of control. I had spent so much time and energy into a pattern of thinking, that it had actually become me, and now the it wasn’t me managing my thoughts – my thoughts had taken over and were in control – they were now managing me.

To be continued

Tuesday, 1 January 2013

Day 156: Wanting Passion and Purpose in Life

This blog is a continuation to:
Day 155: Introduction – Starving Myself

Where to start -

I didn't develop an Eating Disorder in a 'natural' way. Meaning, when I was first introduced to the concept of eating disorders, the way it was presented to me was as a 'disease' that just kind of 'happens' to you. To me this seemed weird, because it appeared to be a purely psychological point, and I didn't get why it was dubbed a disease. Either way, I believed that it was something that just 'happened' and went with what I had been told, because "obviously" the medical authority 'knows best'.

At that point in my life, I was pretty bored . My life was pretty much normal and everything was going quite well -- I just didn't have any purpose or goal and found it annoying to just go through my days every day without it 'going anywhere'. I saw other people having a particular passion or pursuing partiular things and I was jealous of how engaged they were and having a point of focus in their life. I found myself lacking passion and commitment.

Then one day, my and my mom and I were watching a documentary on anorexia. I was fascinated by the discipline these girls had to simply not eat no matter what. I wished I could be so commited and 'passionate' about something, and remember thinking 'too bad it's a disease and not something you can just 'do' '. Then as we were watching the documentary, a lot of attention was placed on what went on inside the girls' minds and what thought patterns they followed.

I then thought, well if I can't "get it" (as if its some infectious disease that you can 'catch'), then many I can 'simulate it' by managing my thoughts and my behaviour exactly to how these girls do it. I was really excited when the documentary was over - I had something to do!

Ever since I had hit puberty, I had put on weight and hadn't been satisfied with my weight since - so it was like a 'win-win' situation, because I could keep myself occupied with something and lose weight!

So it's interesting to see how I separated myself from these points of commitment, passion, focus, purpose and discipline and then instead of embracing and applying these points within myself as self-supported -- I placed them 'out there' and adopted them within a point of self-destructiveness instead of self-support. Even though I started applying these points within a context that was not supportive, afterwards I was able to take these points and apply them within self-support later - within the context of Desteni. So here is one of the dimensions that within this whole episode were quite 'fucked', but where if you change your starting-point and direct yourself towards something constructive - and align yourself with for instance the principles that Desteni stands for as walking yourself to Life and ACTUAL Self-Perfection, self-honesty and what's Best for All - you can still practice the same points minus the negative side effects as screwing your body and mind over. So even though this 'phase' I went through was not cool, I am quite grateful for these points, as I within going through this, could see that I was able to decide on something and make it my focus/goal and apply myself consistently within it.

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Wednesday, 30 January 2013

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