Category Archives: Health & Body Image

Becoming

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My mother often jokes about the crayon marks on the wall- you’d think that in a 150 year old house, with a husband that does custom paint jobs on cars, my artwork would have been painted over in the last twenty years. However, it perseveres, abstract renderings that my mother claims will make the house worth more when I’m famous. I think of this sometimes when I traipse through the living room… What will these be worth when I’m successful? That phrase then sticks in my head, wandering over and over, taking laps through the same worn paths. Half the time I can’t tell whether the thought “when I’m successful” boils down to “when I’ve achieved something of significance in my life” or “when I’ve done it right while attempting suicide.” I’m sure both would add value to the scribbles on the wall, entirely different kinds, but still, something.

I’ve attempted suicide twice in the last two months. Maybe this is too honest, maybe I shouldn’t be sharing this. But things don’t change by letting them sit in silence. When I get chastised for joking about another attempt(as I do), I’ll often reply “I’ll try harder next time.” How this becomes a joke for me can be unclear to others, I know, but I can’t help it. I’ve wanted to die for as long as I can remember. It’s all I know. I think it’d be evidence of being more unbalanced if I COULDN’T joke about it.

Cognitive distortions. I’m told these are the things that tell me I am worthless. I currently only see them as truth. That is the way it will be until I put in the very, very difficult work of training myself otherwise.

Someone once told me, “If you could see yourself through other people, you’d know you are worthwhile.”
My reply was “If I could see myself through other people, those people would need to go to the hospital.” Snark is a defense.

The hospital is a place I’ve been several times. It doesn’t seem to help for very long. Therapy is a place I‘ve been several times, through several programs. It doesn’t seem to help for very long. Hey, I’ve even had an exorcism. That sure as hell didn’t help.

A last ditch effort was ECT, electro convulsive therapy. The phrase makes most people immediately jump to a Cuckoo conclusion, but things are very different now than were portrayed in that film. It’s highly civilized and ultimately very hopeful. I got several weeks of what may have been normalcy out of it. I’ve also gotten a fair amount of damage to both my long and short term memory systems, some of which may shake out, some of which is permanent. However, once again it didn’t seem to help for very long. I did more damage to myself than I ever have before, after having been normal and happy for awhile.

Now I’m starting DBT, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, which is all about teaching people to respond to stress, harmful impulses, bad thoughts, etc. in healthier ways. I’ve just started, but I’m feeling very hopeful. I’ve already gotten a bit of practice with one of the techniques. It’s an intense program, and a commitment. A patient signs up for an entire year of the program, which, for me, meets an hour away and twice a week. It will be worth it if I can achieve healthier mannerisms through this process, naturally, but if this also fails me, then I have run out of options.

I am determined to make this year mean something.
I will learn.
I will learn to believe, believe the good things that people tell me that I am.
Because I am stronger than I can see.
I am more than I believe.
I am above the sum of my faults.
And I am worthwhile.
I am creative.
I am kind.
I am talented.
I am loved.
I am smart.
I am funny.
I am giving.
And I am capable of changing the way I think about myself.
I am capable of becoming what I am.
I can’t think of anything that would make me more successful.
Wish me luck this year.

Value

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I was having a discussion with my parents today and the following statements came up:

You’re perfectly capable. You have ten fingers and ten toes. In fact, you’re above average in a lot of ways. You’re very bright. You’re above average intellectually and have above average skills, and yet your intellect is trying to process your self worth, and you’re accepting some lies that are mixed with some truths. In your heart and in your spirit you know you have value, but you’re processing mistakes and failures in your mind and you’re assigning your self esteem and your worth to these mistakes and failures and that’s not right.

They asked me if I had anything to say about that.

I did.

“Can you write that down?”

Something

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I don’t remember what exactly we had been talking about when Alyssa looked at me and said “You’re destined for greatness.”

“Yeah, okay, JOSH.” Kind of sad that the best response to that was to point to another person with similar hopes about me.

“You have too much going on in you to not be meant to do something.” The emotion in her eyes was genuine.

I brought up a story from the night before. “You should’ve heard what Josh said when I mentioned trying for that job. He goes on, ‘When they ask you to weld aluminum to titanium and then stainless steel and loop it around again, you smile at them and say “I got this. I did that last week.” Because you can. You tell them that you’re the best damn welding engineer in the city. In the state. Because you KNOW you. You know your learning curve, you’re smarter than 99% of people out there. You got this. You just gotta know it.’ I just looked at him, a little stunned(only slightly thinking about the metallurgical sins he mentioned) and said ‘You really believe that.’ He gave me his you’re-the-smartest-idiot-I-know grin and said. ‘I do. ‘”

“Yeah, he’s right. There’s no reason that you can’t be the best in the state.”

“There’s a lot of people out there that are smarter than me.”

“Josh and I both see something in you- and we’re negative people. For you, we’re hopeful cynics.”

I cocked my head and nuzzled in with “I collect the delusional.”

“We’re not delusional. We just see the potential in you. And how brilliant it must be, if the negative people see it in you.”

I kissed her, she wrapped her hands behind my neck and told me to leave.

“I’m getting mixed messages…”

She smiled, kissed me, and then let go of my neck.

“Go home. Write me something.”

Doing and not doing

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I haven’t been blogging lately. Or writing at all, really. Or exercising. Or getting up on time in the morning. One thing that I have been doing is drinking.

Depression and alcohol abuse are really a chicken and the egg problem. I know the depression came first in my case, since the first time that I told someone I wanted to kill myself was second grade, and I certainly wasn’t abusing alcohol then.

Together, my drinking and my depression spiral with each other, in an elegant, lumbering dance to the shame pit.

My husband mentioned to me regarding my recent binges “I don’t know what happened, you were doing so well.” It was hard to hear my sobriety as a thing that I would or could be doing well at, or think that it has a moralistic view to it, not drinking good, drinking bad. This is because I like to pretend alcohol doesn’t have a grip on me, or at least not that bad of one. These are the lies I tell myself.

I know what drinking does to me. I know what it did to me, the damage it’s caused. A hundred pounds of weight gain, 2 institutionalizations, a brilliant mind that’s become twisted with doubt and fear, wasted time
wasted life
getting wasted.

Why did I write today? I don’t know. To be honest, I had given up on me writing. I guess it’s because I was thinking about the measures of success. For me, today was a failure because I didn’t get up on time and I had drank the night before. I viewed it as a failure before it even started. I’m crying right now at that realization, the standards I hold myself to. I know I wouldn’t want anyone else to think the way that I think, especially because today was a good day. I cut a lot of wood with my husband and my dad. I spent 6 hours with some of my favorite people planning for an Artprize project that’s bigger and more out of my scope that I would ever dream of accomplishing, and I’m honored to be a part of. But as we were packing up, I was overwhelmed by the sense of emptiness that sank in my chest. I don’t ever seem to remember the good moments, the laughter, the productivity, the engagement with the team. But I know I will remember that feeling of emptiness. In fact, it’s creeping in right now.

Maybe I’ll go have a drink.

And maybe tomorrow I’ll try to focus my self sabotage making me human, not a failure.

Long day.

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I woke up early, under the advisement to see the day as an opportunity to create. The night before, Denise had been teasing me lightly about my last blog post via text. Very shortly, I was in her car, driving to a storage place as a GRMakers field trip. At one point during our conversation, I turn on my hippie voice and declare “I’m just one of those artist types, man.”
Quick and devilishly observant as ever, Denise replied “So you need constant reassurances and validation?”
She had me. “I don’t know abou- Yes.”
As we laughed and I made faces to exaggerate my hurt, I was actually feeling a little stung. She was quick to reassure me. “It’s totally okay, I am too.”

We reached our destination, a large brick building with an entryway of swooping curved metal. We were there to meet a guy who buys up the fixtures and furniture of businesses that close down and resells it. His warehouse is massive. The downstairs is rented out, and we passed factory workers, who would look up from either their phones or their work and watch us curiously. There were rows upon rows upon rows of racks filled with racks or barrels or little metal tidbits. The place seemed endless. Then we got upstairs, where we could really dive into the miscellany that we were there to look at.

~

As I walked up to rest of the group(inspecting desks), Buttercup broke from the herd to say hi and pulls me aside. “You know, as you were walking up here- today is the first time I can like SEE that you’ve lost weight. You’re like a different person.” Sometimes I think he says these things just to perplex me. It’d be within his personality to drop weird statements to throw me off. He’s one of my truest friends, but about 12% of the time he’s an asshole. There’s the 88% of the friendship where he builds me up and we joke together and muse about people, but the 12% can rip you right down(hence the nickname Buttercup). I didn’t get his motives, he had a funny look on his face and we’ve got enough history of us pushing each other that I’m generally second, third, and fourth guessing anything he says.

I don’t usually see the lost weight(about 45 pounds), I just see how far I have to go to. And I’m certainly not a different person. In fact, that’s the wall I keep bumping into with my mental health. I know that no matter how I progress or what changes I make, I’m still me. And I’d still be living my life. But the real key of this whole experience was that it’s winter. This is the first time he’s seen me without a hoodie or jacket on in months. Of course I finally look like I’ve lost weight.

~

As a fledgling makerspace, this place was ideal to outfit the place. We eagerly plotted about desks, chairs, materials racks, transformers, carts, saws, dust collectors, fans, cables, shelves, and a welding table. The two things that interested me most were the barrels of chain(for my chain horse idea) and these great big metal spoke wheels that were pulled from an overhead conveyance system. When I saw them, I saw Giraffecycle.

Giraffecycle is a very old idea of mine, I’ve wanted to build her since I was a small child. It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like. A pedal powered vehicle in the shape of a giraffe. Preferably life size, and with an articulating neck.

Building her would be a dream come true.

Eh, probably never gonna happen. But there’s power in dreaming, and I was basking in that joy for the rest of the day.

~

 
After that I went to work. The slightest task can become a festival of tangents there. All I had to do was assemble two more parts to fill an order. I made the argument for setting up a machine to make new parts for an order, but my father insisted that I sand some polished display hinges to send them out, he’d rather get the order out ASAP. I didn’t want to throw away the work that someone had already put into polishing them, but I did as he asked. It involved chucking up the little lathe with a thin rod wrapped in sandpaper and center drilling one end. Then put the rod between the chuck and the live center support, and after more fiddling around, flipped on the lathe and started to sand the tricky inner curve of the part.

The sandpaper immediately shredded. We had center drilled the wrong end, so the sandpaper was wrapped wrong. More fiddling around, cleaning the rod and replacing the papers. But I got it done, went to the other buffing jack to sand the rest of the part, and reassembled the hinge. Then we realized there are no more flanges, and my father decides that if I have to make 2, I should make eight instead, that way the whole order will match instead of some having a zinc finish and some plain.

So I start welding flanges. At one point, I notice some moisture on my glove. I was baffled. I looked at the ceiling for a leak, I wonder if maybe I had wiped my nose or something without remembering. Then I look at the torch. The water cooled TIG welding torch. There was a leak.

I only had two more parts left, 125 amps of electricity and a leaking torch, bad idea, but surely it could hold out for two more parts? The next arc strike makes my hand tingle. BETTER NOT.

I watched for a moment as my dad repaired the leak. “I guess I’ll go vacuum or something.”
“Don’t you want to know how to do this next time it happens?”
“Yeah, but I also feel bad for not being productive right now.”
I stayed standing right there, productivity be damned. Learning is important too.

Repair complete, I finish the parts and my father and I had another discussion, where it was determined that we should indeed set up the CNC machine and run more new parts. Turns out that the 2 pieces I had worked so hard on had a different hole pattern than the rest. It took until after I sanded away the nice polished finish that I was so keen to preserve earlier. Sigh.

~

My evening was spent at Celebrate Recovery and ended with squeezing arms wrapped around my ribcage. Trudy came to visit me and brought with her a hand lettered card for me with a quote from Sir Francis Bacon. It represents our shared struggles and was really very sweet. It’s going on my wall.

“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.”

Right now I am certain of only one thing; that it’s time for bed.

Unintentional body image humor

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My mom shows my sister and I an ad of a young woman in a tiny blue bikini with dangly fringe. “That’s gonna be my swimsuit this year.”

I stare blankly at her. “Okay.”

She steps back, grinning with exasperation. “It was supposed to be a joke, it’s funny, laugh!”

“I’m trying to not make assumptions about your comfort level with your body.”

That got laughs.