Me & Rex.

"I wanted to kill the me underneath. That fact haunted my days and nights. When you realise you hate yourself so much, when you realise that you cannot stand who you are, and this deep spite has been the motivation behind your behaviour for many years, your brain can’t quite deal with it. It will try very hard to avoid that realisation; it will try, in a last-ditch effort to keep your remaining parts alive, to remake the rest of you. This is, I believe, different from the suicidal wish of those who are in so much pain that death feels like relief, different from the suicide I would later attempt, trying to escape that pain. This is a wish to murder yourself; the connotation of kill is too mild. This is a belief that you deserve slow torture, violent death." 
— Marya Hornbacher

A rather sad opening to another depressing post. We're going to talk about my "friend" Rex.

Now Rex and I first joined forces when I was fifteen years old. It was the right time to meet Rex, I was deeply in love with a boy who, in return, told me I was too "chunky" and "not his type." His type was, and still is, women with a catwalk figure, with the beauty and appeal of a Kate Moss. I, being a chunky, awkward teenager, was definitely not ever apart of that group, nor will I ever be.

I was devastated following that rejection. I went home and cried, promising myself that I would change my diet, exercise more and generally be more healthy, then he would want me. So I did, for months. I had the best diet of anyone I knew, I ran every morning and was complimented for all of this. I felt so ecstatic that I was closer to my goal, but still, none of it mattered if I wasn't his "type."

I got down to a very healthy 60 kilograms, all from a combination of willpower and effort, but then I met Rex. Rex, who promised me that I could be his type, who promised me beauty and perfection, all the things I lacked. I believed Rex. I became a Vegan under his guidance, I amped up my exercise to over two hours everyday, regardless of school and homework, this was more important, THIS WAS MY LIFE! School, friends, family, my social life, all of that came second to Rex and our goals together.

The problem was, no matter how much effort I put in, no matter how little I ate, Rex was never pleased with me. I had depression before I met him, but it was lacking motivation and a genuine cause, now I had the fuel to feed my illness. My disappointment and despair made it grow, it made Rex grow, until I felt like he was the only thing I ever knew and felt.

Striving for perfection, like Rex wanted.

The side-effects of meeting someone like Rex are well-documented. Apart from the obvious physical changes, he is all-consuming of the mind and causes people like me to do things which normally, they would never do. Even in my darkest moments before I met Rex, I never considered suicide as an option. I was raised Catholic and while I did not think it was a sin, that people who committed suicide chose the easy way out, I could never bring myself to consider it. I usually just wished I could be invisible at home and definitely at school. Then people would leave me alone, instead of reminding me what a waste of space I was.

The first time I ever considered dying was because I had a bowl of cereal. I locked my door, sunk to the floor and couldn't stop crying. Suddenly dying seemed to be the only option I could think of. But then a  close friend of mine, Dom, called me and said I had to come meet her that night and that I wasn't allowed to say no. So I couldn't then, I had to go meet my friend, I wasn't allowed to wallow in my despair.  When I saw her all I could think was, "you saved me, you saved me and you don't even know it." It is a fact that people generally underestimate the impact they have on people's lives, usually for the better. I didn't die that day or even think about dying for many days after.


The second time came around though, and this was followed through, it was the first suicide attempt. Rex not only told me what to eat, how much to eat, how much exercise I had to do, he also told me how worthless I was, how my family and friends hated me, how my existence was a joke to everyone around me. I believed him of course, why wouldn't I? I thought everyone was laughing at me behind my back and Rex provided many examples that proved the theory to be accurate. With that in mind I realised that even though I had an important trial exam that morning, school had to be ignored for the greater good. What was the point in trying to attempt it anyway? I was only going to fail again. No, I had  to die and not fail. So I took a cocktail of drugs and went to school anyway. I ended up in hospital and met Doctors and nurses who only reminded me that if I ate a "piece of cake" (as one nurse said), then I wouldn't be in that position. I didn't tell them I had actually taken pills, I just let them assume because that is what human beings are good at, assuming things with no evidence. I realised I was playing Russian Roulette with my life by staying quiet, but Rex and I were angry. Angry at the fact that these people who are supposed to care, didn't even bother to look beyond the physical. That is why, to this very day, I despise doctors and their assumptions.

                                                            I thought this was almost perfect. 

The second suicide attempt was actually much like the first attempt and the first thought of dying, before an exam and after eating a cupcake. By this point, Rex was my best friend and my worst nightmare. He wouldn't leave me alone, quite like my friend Sarah at this very instant. Same method, same result, a sure sign of insanity. At least this time I had a lovely male nurse named Dean to look after me, even if he did force me to eat buttered toast. Rex hated him on sight. My Dad did too, but for different, more parental reasons.

At school and thinner still.

The point of all this, of me describing to you the darkest moments of my life, is to draw attention to the present day. The fact is, Rex NEVER goes away, not completely. He's been laying dormant for years and all it takes is one small thing, one offhand remark and BOOM, Rex is back with a vengeance. These past years, I was always aware of him lingering in the back of my mind, but now the downward spiral into depression has opened the gates for him. It's too hard for the mind to try and fend off two different sources of pain. Unfortunately for me, this means I have to deal with the the self-pity and self-hatred, combined with thoughts that my physical imperfections are the cause of all my problems.

It's not helped by friends telling me how much weight they have lost, how their new diet is working so well for them, how being thinner has made their relationships that much better. It certainly isn't helped by a friend I'll call Hannah, shoving pictures and evidence in your face of your own imperfections, reinforcing every little doubt you had about yourself. To me, you see, appearance is very important, but not in a vain way. I could care less about what people thought of the way I dress (most don't like it) and I really couldn't give a flying fuck about what people think of my ever-changing hair, but I will ALWAYS care about comments regarding my weight. People don't realise, those jokes and jibes, they're never forgotten. I am blessed and cursed with an exceptional memory for conversations and though I may forgive someone for calling me chunky, I will NEVER forget those jokes or slights against me. NEVER. That extends to more than just my appearance though, I generally don't ever forget a single criticism. I guess this "talent" of mine is as much to blame for my current predicament as my friend Hannah is.

I'm writing this in the hope that you will just UNDERSTAND. I don't want judgement, I don't want to be told I'm wrong, because I KNOW, people like me KNOW what we're doing, what we're feeling is wrong, but we can't help it. Unless you have personally met Rex, you don't understand how much of a charlatan he is. He can be your best friend and your archenemy simultaneously. He can be your greatest source of comfort when you look in the mirror and all you see are collarbones, hipbones, when you can feel the dips between your ribs and your legs no longer touch. He becomes your worst tormenter after you have eaten, whenever you step on that scale and the numbers are not low enough for you, when you're so hungry and all you want to do is die, he amplifies all those thoughts and feelings of self-loathing. He will never leave you alone.

It has been years and today, all Rex wants from me is to be perfect. All my depression wants from me is to die. Together they both think I should either be this incredible perfect woman, with bones jutting, a high IQ, successful, or I have to die. I'm stuck in the middle and there seems to be no way I can emerge unscathed from within my own mind. My body is a war zone, with every scar a reminder of a mental battle I've had, and I've had quite a few. Together and with Hannah, they've told me no one will ever want such a scarred (mentally and physically) person and I agree. That doesn't bother me anymore. I gave up looking for my soul mate when one of my closest friends scoffed at the thought of me finding him. Why bother?

The things my friends don't usually understand:
1. Why do I, a person living with Rex, care so much when they diet or they don't eat?
That's simple, because I love them. I love them so much that I don't want them to suffer like I do every day of my life. I don't want them to feel hunger or to strive for "perfection," they're all beautiful and brilliant people.
2. Why can't I just accept that I'm "beautiful"?
That's harder to answer. I have thought about that a lot. The most honest answer I can give is that, if I left myself believe that and found out that it was all just a lie, that it was a joke on me, there would be no coming back from that for me. I'd die out of shame and humiliation, from the fact I was so gullible that for a second I was acceptable, just as I am. It's a defensive mechanism for me. Even when my closest friends compliment me in the back of my head I'm always wondering, why are they saying that? What do they want from me? What's the motive there? That may sound cyclical, but in my life I have learnt that most people are not nice, they're only nice when they want something from you. Once they have it, you're history.

Today:

Below are recent creations by me, designed to inspire my quest for perfection.

This is the cover of my "thought book," what I allow to inspire me everyday.

The mantra of Rex, the motto of people like me. 

This is one of the side-effects of letting Rex be your mind's roommate. This is what happens if I fail. 

I don't know at the moment what I'm supposed to do. There's no solution to my problem. Everything is just different shades of grey and I can't grasp an answer. I would give anything to divorce Rex, to leave depression lying in some dark alleyway, but they're like my friend Hannah, they're NEVER, EVER, going to go away. Not unless I go with them.

I've been through all of this before, my life is completely circular. Funny though, I can't actually remember how I did it then, just when I need to remember how the most.

So what do I do now?


"You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad." 
— Marya Hornbacher

In all disorder, a secret order.

Maybe it's the sheer amount of numbers that has you thinking about it.

You think about things you shouldn't be thinking about anymore. Like the metal held between your fingers. It's so heavy, even without any additions. You don't think you could bear the weight of it a second longer or the taste of metal in your mouth.

You get a tired look in response to your fiddling and you think for a moment, why bother with the instrument. How many numbers did they fit inside your blood?

*

You go through days of bitter cold and hazy recollections. Days meld. You wake up with numbers in your head and the weight in your chest and the cold adds to the mass. It's always long hours which could be added and subtracted. Add a blanket and another and another. Layering yourself with more clothes, when the ice in your veins seems too blue, the skin above it too thin to shield you.

And the weight and the numbers swirl inside your head, until it aches and you have no where to go and no way to make it stop. You can't keep out the cold and you can't block out the numbers, but the sharpness of hipbones and the reassuring presence of your rib cage are comforts. Their weight is measurable and true.

*

You were at first just a glutton. You would buy food, resting it between your palms, feeling the weight of it. The smell, the taste only imagined, but the weight of it was too heavy. It became too daunting, so you threw it away before it had the chance to get stuck inside your head.  There isn't enough room for that weight and you know, there isn't enough sanity left to add it up.

You baked cupcakes. Adding each ingredient carefully and only after it was weighed. You waited patiently, but fiddled with the boxes on the counter. Then they were done and you decorated them, lined them up and then put them on plates at the vacant table. It wasn't long before they were crushed, thrown out windows, into garbage bags or even ripped apart into something that just would not go down the drain. The bulk of it was only a stopper which blocked it up.

But sometimes you didn't seek to destroy, you just left them. Waiting until they were disgusting, untouchable and completely unrecognisable. You imagined them broken down, adding to the weight and the numbers, until you felt you couldn't breathe. They were gone the next time you looked.

*

When you went so long without any food, it made you ache and plead, but the numbers went away.

"Why don't you eat?" That wouldn't have been asked years ago.

You thought about it for a while and you thought about the numbers.

"It's an addiction," you said, "it turns into something you do over and over again, until you have to keep having it, because if you don't you could lose it all."

But you had already lost it all, apart from your constant companions.

*

You used to love sweets. Sweets and chocolate and whatever Nan made you. Whenever you went to her house, there would be choices and more choices, weight and more numbers, but they had never bothered you then. No one ever bothered you then. The numbers just slid down your throat without resistance and you barely recognised the heaviness that settled inside. Now the thought of it is terrifying. How can people carry so much? It's almost enough to drown you now.

You didn't go and see Nan much anymore, nor did you spend your time picking up sweets.

You knew at some point, you had to have eaten before. That this weight was not always present. You can't remember it clearly though. Somewhere along the line you lost whatever it was that anchored you down and kept the heaviness at bay.

Now it was just too much.

*

"You have to get up, you can't just stay in bed."

"But it's so cold out there. Why can't I just stay here?" The buzzing in your head and the pain in your stomach made the thought of leaving unbearable.

Even as she sat at the end of your bed and just stared, it did little to comfort you from the overwhelming cold and the shivers that could only be kept inside and not shared.

"Why do I ever have to get up at all?" Everything was just numbers and cold and pain. Coming and going never changed that. There was no distraction to push that away.

"You know why."

You closed your eyes. The dotted lights amongst the black underneath were comforting. You wish you didn't know why.

*

Some days everything was okay again.

You looked in the mirror, you dressed yourself up, but with no intention to go out. The sharp angles that had replaced the softness, with your ribs and your hipbones proudly on display. You still had that fat that reminded you of the presence of numbers and of those people with less numbers. There was always someone with less. Some days when you went out you looked at those people and wondered how they managed that. How did they ignore the heaviness of the metal in their hands? Why were they so blessed? At least they gave you something to strive towards.

And when the first feelings of fullness hit you, it was a buzzing in your head and a quickened beat of your heart that reminded you, you hadn't died. But everything was too fast and suddenly your make up was no longer so bright or attractive.

How many calories does your blood have? The metal in your hands much lighter than anything that was hidden in the kitchen. When you spent the night lying on the floor you thought of the loss of calories down your leg and started recounting your numbers.

*

You sat on the bus and thought about metal and about weight. The heavy metal in your mouth and the cold glass against your cheek. Your skin was frozen and marred with blue which clearly ran up your arms. You imagined scrubbing the blue away, over and over, until it came off. It never did come off but the added red was so warm and you were so cold.

*

"It's going to be okay." You spoke to yourself, long after everyone had left or cared anymore.

You listened to your own breathing, you could feel the frost settle in your chest once more. You waited to hear any sounds or breathing from the other rooms. There was no sound. There was no response. There was only the insomniac's ritual of counting over and over, including those little, white pills by your side. You counted 22.

Not long later there would be hospital beds, made up of stark white sheets, that did little to bring you warmth. The blue had to stay and the red locked away, feeling ever more heavy without any release.  There were lights that were too bright and voices that seemed too far away. While you knew it had something to do with you, the cold drip in your arm reminded you that it would never be so easy to live with the numbers again.

You stayed on the floor some days later. You thought of numbers and the metallic taste in your mouth and wondered if you would ever find out how many numbers they poisoned you with. But for now you were content with the red and the weight in your hands had never been so light before.

Depression and an eating disorder: A recipe for disaster.

One of the theories of what causes depression, is the lack of coping abilities of the individual who is suffering. That was something I was taught in a philosophy tutorial and it has stuck with me until now. I thought I'd take a detour from my childhood musings and talk about depression and eating disorders, topics which have been endlessly covered to death and yet, I still believe I have something to add to this never-ending discussion.

For me, depression is not something which is curable or managed by the new trends of yoga-practicers, chinese medicine (who bloody knows what that is!), meditation or rubbish practices like acupuncture. Strangely though, to me at least, these are some of the things I have been told can help me. Now it is highly likely that being a very skeptical and cynical person I have dismissed some of these unfairly, I'll admit I have because they're rubbish, let's be honest. These recommendations actually insult me to varying degrees and to understand why, I should probably put my experiences with depression into context.

I think I diagnosed myself around the age of 15, a teenager with hormones raging and angst being my emotion of choice, it made a lot of sense that people would dismiss it as teenage rubbish. However it didn't go away as I got older, it grew with me, until I reached a point where I had to make some change to my life, to do something that I thought would end my torment and make me happy. I rather stupidly began to believe my depression stemmed from my unhappiness with my physical appearance, which made sense at the time, given the fact I was surrounded by thin and gorgeous girls and I had throughout my teenage years always been on the heavier side of the scale. My solution was to diet and that leads us to eating disorders. Very cliche I know.

I did not, as most people believe until this very day, automatically starve myself. Over the next year, from Year 10 until Year 11, I completely overhauled my diet, exercised mornings and evenings and even began to feel better. I was riding a rush of being praised by my father, my mother and by other people at school who noticed and soon I threw myself into the challenge of losing even more weight, setting new goals every time I reached them. The problem with this should be quite clear to you, every time I achieved a goal weight, I would make it lower and lower and lower.

I got to the stage where I was a very healthy 60 kilograms, which is quite a good weight for someone who is 5'6.5.  I couldn't stop though and things turned quite bad from this point on. I began to cut out foods, became a Vegan to do this more easily and exercised more and more. I set a goal to exercise 2 hours everyday and eventually my calorie limit plummeted from 1800, to 1500, to 1200 and at my worst, 600 a day. Starting to count my calories was and still is, the biggest regret of my life.

Having an eating disorder, I have told my close friends, is like being an alcoholic. You may give up the alcohol, the action of drinking it, but you will always be an alcoholic, that craving and those psychological tendencies are always there. Eating disorders are also extremely self-obsessed for the obvious reasons. I paid little attention to anyone around me and when I did, I began to twist and manipulate things that were being said, into things that I wanted to hear. When finally one teacher asked me how much I weighed, I replied 52 kilograms almost instantly, because of course I knew, it was always in the forefront of my thoughts. I spent every lesson calculating how many calories I had eaten and how many I planned to eat that day, while trying to ignore the freezing cold which had settled permanently in my bones. People began to start telling me I looked sick, I was unhealthy. Those words did not produce the reaction they wanted, in fact, in my mind 'sick' and 'unhealthy' had become some sort of sign that I was succeeded. Indeed, being told at my year 12 Formal that I looked healthy made me feel disgusted with myself.

I ended up in the hospital twice, not because I was underweight (although that caused problems at only 46 kilograms) but because my depression got the better of me. Perhaps the reason I'm writing this blog, combining these two issues, is because of a rather dull conversation I had with the psychiatrist the emergency room staff made me see there. She told me my circumstances occur in two different ways, in some instance the depression causes the eating disorder, or the reverse, the eating disorder causes the depression. I always knew it was the former for me, I'd lived with that far longer and it was my constant companion during my loneliest hours and still is.

It will have been three years this month, since I was first rushed to an emergency room for the first time in my life, having collapsed in a HSC Trial exam. I was amazed I actually made it into the exam, I was wondering how long the pills would take to kick in. By the time I got to school, having taken a cocktail of valium, anti-depressants and Panadeine Forte (a prescribed cocktail by the way), I was quite convinced I had failed and that nothing was going to happen to me. I was wrong, but not completely. I'm still here. Three years on and I still experience extreme lows quite frequently. I still count calories, obsess about my weight every single day, I've almost made dieting into some sick sort of art form. I am a master at calorie counting.

After all my musings (I did go on a bit didn't I?), there are two main things I just wanted to make clear. Firstly, depression is not a fancy way of saying 'Oh boy I'm rather sad today,' it's something people like myself have to deal with on a daily basis. It is not something you can brush away just by thinking happy thoughts, it's an illness that is unique to every individual and cannot be dismissed. Secondly, people suffering from eating disorders (and they do suffer), are not doing it for the attention, they are not intentionally being self-absorbed or trying to cause others pain. I never wanted to cause anyone around me any sort of pain or guilt for being unable to help me and if I did, I can only apologise for that, I can't change it. Everyone is different (although have you been to Newtown recently?) and I'm sick to death of people giving me advice on how I should help myself or take vitamins and other rubbish. I deal with these illnesses in my own way, which may not be the best way, but there is no right way.

So, do I lack sufficient coping abilities and that is why I have depression? I don't think so, whoever thought that up should meet my family, I have brilliant coping abilities thank you very much.


Do I think I will ever not have depression or an eating disorder? You never know, but I'm going to play it safe and say that I doubt it. Those thoughts will always be there in my head, so perhaps the better question is 'Can I learn to manage them and not let both kill me?' That is a question I would like an answer to, because at the moment, I just don't know.