Along with Bipolar: Eating Disorder

 

I was 14 when I first encountered a mental health clinician. She was a psychologist, and there I was in her office, after a suicidal gesture, depressed, feeling very isolated within family issues, and full of fear about how to grow up. This psychologist administered psychological tests, including lengthy questionnaires and Rorschach inkblot tests. The process was intimidating and made me feel odd. At the end, when all summations were made, I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, but no explanation was offered, and, in fact, my mom and I were told not to probe into it. I was referred to a child psychiatrist for therapy and things didn’t improve. That clinician had me draw a picture and then tell a line of a story, and then she’d add a picture and add her line to the story, and so on, and it was a bit infantilizing and failed to open me up to discuss my problems.

I quit that therapy and struggled along on my own.

A couple of years later, I found a book, this book:

 

I latched right on to it and began following the diet recommendations religiously. I’d count calories, step on the scale daily, watch the pounds fall away, and swell up with pride at myself, with a sense of control I hadn’t experienced before. I didn’t realize I was developing an eating disorder.

But I was. I developed anorexia and stayed mostly underweight, sometimes dangerously so, until I was nearly 40.

My life revolved around daily listing of calories, food I’d eaten, and hours spent at the gym. I checked myself in every mirror I passed to see if I was still thin, still thin enough. I compared myself to others, often judgmental of those who didn’t monitor body image like I did. On the flip side, my own body perception distorted in my mind. I’d see swells and lumps and horrible ugliness where there was none. I’d obsess over fixing my image.

In the early 1980’s, when I started restricting calories, exercising maniacally, and even purging at times, eating disorders were poorly understood and treatment programs weren’t available. Once an inpatient mental health nurse, at a facility where I was held for self-harm, told me to eat or I’d start growing body hair all over as my body attempted to stay warm, and that was the only time my eating disorder was called out. It’s not in any of my official diagnoses or noted in my psychiatric records, other than when I’ve insisted it should be.

Eventually, bipolar was determined to be my major diagnosis. That wasn’t properly treated either, and my reaction to bad treatment scenarios was to escape them and do my own thing. That escape would include restricting food, nonstop activity, cannabis use, and many short-term jobs. Somewhere in there I found my interest and competence in art and earned a degree at an art college. But even during that time, I recklessly threw myself into experiences and situations that exacerbated my bipolar symptoms, the creation of art acting as my only anchor.

Life went on, and I had jobs and relationships and more psych hospitalizations and countless psychiatrists and therapists at me with a plethora of meds and treatment methodologies, and always the eating disorder, the one component I relied on to bring back my sense of power over myself.

I drove my whole life erratically and haphazardly, emotionally unpredictable, but under the delusion that keeping my body a certain way meant I had good control of the wheel.

Around age 40, I became simultaneously disenchanted with cannabis use and the constant attention to my eating disorder. It took some work, but I got myself clean and sober. I didn’t do any specific therapy toward ending my eating disorder; it was more of a weary feeling and a resignation.

The thoughts of wanting to be extremely thin or to recapture that weird energy and focus of hyper-regulating food intake still pop up but they don’t stay long. I’ve finally found the right and proper and good treatment for bipolar. Stability and self-acceptance are life qualities that I now have and that I value and respect. The eating disorder that once dominated me can’t find its way into that.