In which Rubiconia is self-pitying, again...

Content/trigger warning: anxiety and depression.

We can't all and some of us don't. That's all there is to it.

 It's depressing when someone tells me (and by 'someone' I also mean social media) to take a long, hot bubble bath as a temporary balm for anxiety or misery. My bath is full of junk, because it has no hot water and neither I nor the Penguin could ever be bothered siphoning the hot water from the sink to generate a hot bath and neither of us can get it together to deal with the junk so the bath seemed like a decent place to stash it. We pay rent for a two bathroom flat and don't have two usable bathrooms because we can't clean the place up enough to deal with asking the landlord to do something about it. How's that for an anxiety shitstorm stirred up by a supposed anxiety solution?

In which Rubiconia rejoined Weight Watchers...

Content/trigger warnings: me being incredibly insulting about my own weight in a way I would never condone if it was anyone but me speaking about anyone but me. Also suicidal thoughts & thoughts of self-harm.

Piglet ...felt so Foolish and Uncomfortable that he had almost decided to run away to Sea and be a Sailor...

Start Date: Tuesday 19th July 2016
Starting weight: 15st
Goal weight: 9st 7lbs
Ideal weight range according to my height: 8-10st
Starting health problems: 

• Clinical Depression & Generalised Anxiety Disorder (diagnosed 8 years)
• Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) (diagnosed 3 years)
• Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (diagnosed 1 year)

The short term why

I only decided to keep the appointment because I’d already arranged the time with work and I’m hopeless at making appointments when I need to so I thought I’d better not waste it. I’ve had an endless list of things I meant to talk to a doctor about for like a year: PCOS, medication for depression, fatigue, agonising pain in my ankles, wheezing when I laugh, poor sleep… (Have you noticed that ALL those problems are at least potentially related to being overweight? I hadn’t. Or rather I had but was deep in denial.) 

Because of my cocktail of meds, docs always check my blood pressure; “Your blood pressure’s slightly raised. We should keep an eye on it.” Not be a death sentence on its own but I had never been told that in my life. I’ve been increasingly overweight since childhood, but my BP has always been ‘fine’. Then, horrors, he wanted to check my weight.

I knew it would be foul. I’d been 93kg the last time I was weighed at the doctor’s, at the same appointment as I received my diagnosis of N-AFLD, and had solemnly promised that I would try to get down to 68kg (about 10.5 st). I had tried (a little bit, for a couple of weeks - walking to the station instead of taking the bus or the tram a few more times a week) and lost a few pounds but it quickly petered out and the pounds returned like work emails when you've been on leave. 

So I stepped onto the scales. I’d forgotten my glasses and couldn’t read the numbers. The doc read them out for me. “95 kilograms.” I felt sick. That was definitely the heaviest I’d ever been. And then he started calculating my BMI aloud. My heart sank further. “32? 33?” I guessed, wincing. 35. Oh god, 35?? The words ‘morbidly obese?’ waddled heavily through my brain. I felt so sick. The real kick in the wobbly, over-filled gut was this: the doctor told me I should speak to the nurse as I now qualified for a free subscription to Weight Watchers. Then and there, I wanted to die. My weight was now considered such a potential economic burden to the  NHS that they would pay Weight Watchers to stop it being their problem.

I walked from the surgery in a haze, and not only because it was 30 degrees outside and I was wearing the usual hefty, baggy t-shirt. I did not talk to the nurse. I went home and slumped on the sofa and cried. On one ten minute walk, all the lies collapsed. My clothes weren’t stiff from the wash, I was expanding out of them. My wheezing was nothing to do with pollution and everything to do with how massively unfit I was. And I wasn’t refusing to give a crap about my appearance because I hated the unthinking social acceptance of unrealistic standards of beauty (although I absolutely do); I was doing it because, if I allowed myself to care for more than the occasional vulnerable second about my appearance, suicidal despair was the only possible result. But even so, I was killing myself, one take-away at a time. I resisted exercise at every opportunity. I had a score of health problems that could be at least partially attributed to my weight. My fiance is and my late father was both diabetic (the latter died of a totally unexpected heart attack when I was 16) - I knew what was in my future if I didn’t change my ways but I had refused to really acknowledge it. As a long standing quitter of everything I started and harbinger of suicidal impulses, my first thought was that that was it. Dieting was a vile experience. It was going to be impossible. I might as well end it all right then. I didn’t, as you might be able to tell, for the same reasons I haven’t before: the people who would be left behind, combined with my own fear of death and basic tendency towards apathy rather than action. I bemoaned the problem to my mother, friends and my fiance. Then I signed up for Weight Watchers again.

That night I kicked my new diet off with about four days' worth of calories in the form of a Chinese take-away because that was the only way I knew of to make myself feel better. If that miserable emptiness couldn't be filled with unhealthy food, as I knew it couldn't, it could at least be temporarily eclipsed by it. And as PowerPuff (you'll be staggered to hear this is not her real name), my latest therapist so loved to point out, there's little my brain doesn't think it can solve by sabotaging me from the start.

In Which Rubiconia Regrets

Content/trigger warning: Body-shaming, depression, anxiety, graphic discussion of body shape, weight loss

Eeyore... looked at himself in the water. 'Pathetic,' he said. 'That's what it is. Pathetic.'
   He... splashed across [the stream]... Then he looked at himself in the water again. 'As I thought... no better from this side...'

Sometimes you look at your life and wonder how it got the way it is. Today, I've been wondering when it was that I started avoiding showering because of how much I hated my own body. 

I shower perhaps once a month. My hair gets so greasy I don't want to touch it. My arms get so dirty that you can literally see where they're smudged with general grime. And if I write anything on the back of my hand, well, that's going to be remembered long after it was relevant. On the rare occasions when I brush my teeth, I do not look in the mirror over the sink. 

All that is just the most extreme expression of the feelings of nausea I would get at the sight of myself in photographs ever since I was about twelve years old. If you're looking for a photo of me between the ages of about 12 and 16 in which I am not pulling a conscientiously grotesque expression, you may as well give up. They don't exist. Because I had decided it was useless to try to look what I and others around me would consider attractive and therefore if only I could look like it was deliberate I could save a little dignity. Of course, I doubt now that anyone was fooled. My first memory of disliking the shape of my body was when I briefly wore cycling shorts to primary school; I would have been about nine years old I think. And I was glad that they would squash my thighs in a bit. At nine years old. How fundamentally sick is that? What kind of world causes someone so young to worry about something like that? 

When the boy I had a crush on called me a 'fat bitch' at the age of ten, it cemented into place a neurosis that I've been harbouring ever since. For the record, I was not a bitch. I can't speak for how unpleasant I may have been at various points in my life, but I was a caring, generous, imaginative and friendly child. Isn't it great how, at ten, this boy had already been taught that my weight was inversely proportional to my value as a person? With hindsight, I suspect some of his hostility was born of having been somewhat embarrassed in front of other boys by my own 'friends' insisting on telling him how I felt about him. I have guessed and second-guessed and guessed again at whether those girls genuinely thought they were enabling a pre-adolescent fairytale or whether the response they got was roughly what they had hoped for. Couldn't tell you. I hope it was the former, but I fear the latter to this day.

I was a cerebral, out-going and reasonably talented child - part of me was already deciding that since I would never be one of the pretty ones, I needed to be one of the smart ones, one of the musical ones, one of the creative ones... anything else I could sift for some value as a person, to be noticed in a positive way. I was dimly aware that my older sister was bullied at senior school for her spots and frizzy hair so clearly my peer group wasn't going to become any more forgiving of the physically imperfect. I made friends with any grown-up I could - teachers, basically - because they didn't care what I looked like and were impressed by my precociousness instead of alienated by it. I clung to my stage school principal's compliment that I had a 'very expressive face', because it was better than feeling like all my face was was spotty, chubby and hairy: the teenage girl hat trick of horror. It was often sweaty, too, just for a few bonus self-loathing points. Of course, to put a lovely double edge on the sword, my false confidence and some success in music caused other people with terrible self-esteem to want to put me down. I wish I could be the, uh, bigger person and accept that they were probably deeply unhappy people themselves and are probably not horrible to people anymore; I can't. Their comments are still with me nearly two decades later, along with the memory that they always seemed to be laughing at a point in my life when I always wanted to cry.

It felt like my choices were to acknowledge that I wanted to be pretty, fail and be disliked for it, or ignore those desires altogether and make sure what I was disliked for instead was something at which I was successful. Better a boffin than a fat bitch. Better that I be insulted by those jealous of me than by those disgusted by me. 

It fills me with sadness to realise now the burden of misery I accepted at such a young age. Before my most recent bout of therapy, I'd always said 'sure, my childhood was pretty happy' and indeed my memories of my first eight years are mostly positive, if we ignore a few holidays I was dragged on against my will and the time my sister sneakily ate the fruits of an hour's raspberry-picking while I was finding a grown-up to show it off to. From that point, though, most of the memories that stick with me involve shame, fear, and disappointment in myself.

There is no sudden upbeat conclusion to this post in which I became suddenly accepting of myself. I still fear hearing someone mocking my weight or shape every time I leave the house at the age of twenty-seven. I am furiously proud when people do mock me aloud for my hairy legs and armpits because, just like I chose vocabulary and music when I was younger, I have chosen not to shave. Mock the choices I'm happy with all you like. But when I'm mocked for what I already detest about myself, it cuts right to the bone. The last thing I need is for the vicious fear in my head to be justified.