The Magician, The Enemy & The Warrior

My mind is a magician, a wizard if you will. But not the kind like Harry Potter, if that were the case then perhaps I would enjoy the curses I have been afflicted with. My mind is well versed in tricks and spells alike, it has no problem keeping me up at night. 

My thoughts are my enemies, they pit me against myself and seem to enjoy watching the chaos that ensues. My thoughts are not always my choosing, sometimes I wish I could just turn them off. 

My body is a warrior, and sometimes it feels like I am fighting a losing battle. I take up proverbial swords and weapons, trying to ward off the thoughts that my mind conjures up; but to what avail? Because, even when I successfully fight off these thoughts, they always manage to come back again. 

I was first diagnosed with depression at the age of fifteen, generalized anxiety at seventeen and developed an eating disorder at nineteen. This is what my life has felt like since then. I feel that I am constantly afraid of the things my mind can do to me, the thoughts it can produce and the horrors it can wreak on my body and my life. Living with multiple mental illnesses is a daily struggle, and I wish I could say that I’ve come up with all the answers, but I have not. I am learning things about myself day by day, and I am hoping that these sometimes small lessons are enough to continue fighting my battle.

My mind is skilled at casting spells and controlling the thoughts that flood it. There are days when my mind is the scariest place on earth, so I sleep to avoid confronting it. I am never sure of what version of myself is going to wake up; this is a fear that is so paralyzing that staying in bed all day out of fear has at times become the easier option.

My body tries to fight against my mind and thoughts. There are days where this fight seems totally doable; like I am Harry Potter, I am the chosen one and I can take on anything life throws my way. But there are also days where the fight seems like I am a single feather in the direct path of a tornado; a fight that is over before it starts. On these days my body feels like a shell of which the contents are completely detached.

Everything is impossible to explain, so I don’t even try to understand. Nothing seems reparable, so my toolbox collects dust.
On these days, I feel like a stranger to myself.
On the good days, I know and understand every last bit of myself.
On the good days, I am Harry Potter. On the good days, I win.
On the good days, I fight hard enough to accept the bad days where
even the idea of fighting is too much.
I have accept that my life is about give, and take.
I have accepted that there are times that the hand I have
been dealt seems like it is the worst possible hand.
But I have learned to make daring plays,
I have learned to cast counter spells,
I have learned to combat my enemies,
and I have learned that this battle is mine to win. 

 

When Did “Fat” Become the Real F Word?

Why do we force words to live exclusively from one another?
Why can fat not mean beautiful?

I recently remembered something from when I was in the sixth grade. There was a girl in my class who was a bit bigger than most of the other students in our class. I remember hearing the way that the other students spoke about her, the mean jokes they would make behind her back, and the almost as cruel things they would say to her face. I remember noticing that she was being treated differently and in a negative way because of her size.

I decided then that I would never let myself look a way that would give other people an opportunity to treat me poorly. I wish I had taken this experience in a different way, as an example of people I never wanted to be like. I never would want to be treated like this classmate, but the lesson I learned was not to be kind to people, it was to never become fat enough to allow people be cruel to me.

I used to be so scared of the word fat because we live in a society that equates fat to ugly, or less than. I was scared of the idea of gaining weight because I thought that if I did then I would also become ugly or less than. We live in a society that puts limits on what words can be. I was more scared of being fat than I was of being a bad person, of being considered rude or mean, and I was scared of being fat more than I was worried about getting bad grades.

I was eleven when I learned that our world says that being fat is bad. I was eleven when I became afraid of gaining weight. I remember it like it was yesterday, and one day I hope to not be afraid. But for now, I will remember to be kind, and to stand up for those who are mistreated. I do not view gaining weight as the end all and be all of my life, and there are now many things I consider to worse things than ganging weight, but I am still somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of it. So until the day I am not afraid, I will choose to be kind and to reject cruelness.

Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are

I used to think that the parts of me that I hated, were hated universally by anyone and everyone I met. I assumed that because I hated my stomach and the excess fat I thought I had, that everyone around me hated it too.  I remember thinking that no one would ever fully love me. Because if I didn’t fully love me, how could I ever expect anyone else to?

So I would hide the things I didn’t like about myself from most people. There were times when I was completely ashamed of the fact that I live with multiple mental illnesses, so I would only disclose it to a select few people. I remember even after I had stopped self-harming I was completely petrified of the idea of anyone seeing my scars that I would wear long sleeved shirts and sweaters on even the hottest summer days.

This caused me to keep secrets from people close to me; parents, friends, partners, you name it and I probably kept secrets from them. I’m not talking life threatening secrets, but secrets nonetheless.

The thing is that I should never have felt like I had to hide any parts of me. Sometimes letting people in and showing them these parts of me helped me to see how they could be lovable.

I remember when I started taking medication for my anxiety I was tentative to tell people. I was worried that the stigma surrounding taking medication for mental illnesses would be too much for me to handle. Then I talked to a close friend about it and she told me that she viewed it as a sign of strength. She felt that by me making the step to take medication that I was being self aware enough to admit that my life needed more help than I had been giving it. Now I try to talk to people about the fact that there is no shame in taking medication for a mental illness, the same way there would be no shame in taking medicine for a cold.

Since being in recovery from my eating disorder, I have gained a substantial amount of weight. It’s been a huge adjustment for me, going from thinking that gaining weight was the worst possible thing that could happen to me, to trying to understand that gaining this weight was healthy. If I had never worked up the courage to be intimate with my fiance even after gaining weight, I never would have been able to fully appreciate my new body. I am still learning to love myself, but seeing that someone else loved me despite something that I perceived as a flaw was a huge catalyst for my journey of self love beginning.

What I’ve learned over the years is that someone who truly loves you will never make you feel like you have to hide parts of you. Someone who cares about you and your best interests will want to know about every part of you, and yes, I mean even the dark and scary parts that you keep so hidden they’ve collected dust.  There’s nothing healthy about secrets. Sometimes they start out with the best of intentions, but rarely will they have positive end results. Letting those dark and dusty parts come out can be a really daunting task, and I get that. The thing is that when you find someone worth letting them out for, it will be one of the most liberating and full of potential experiences of your life; it has been for me.

If You’ve Never Tasted Peanut Butter

I really hate questions about “what I did today.” I understand that questions like this are a pretty standard part of life, but they make me uncomfortable.

Why, you ask? Well, because some days, I really do not do that much, and that can make people look at me differently. There are days when either my depression, anxiety, or body image (or any combination of the three) make it extremely difficult to do things. There are days where leaving the house is too much for me, and migrating from my bed to the couch is my greatest accomplishment. There are days when every sight of my body brings me to tears, so the thought of being naked even for the purpose of bathing is paralyzing. There are nights when I’ve slept for two hours because the thought just wouldn’t stop, so I spend the day following binge watching Netflix to keep my mind from wandering.

But I can’t just tell people these things. When they ask me “What did you do today?” it’s easier sometimes to come up with a lie than to deal with the looks of pity, confusion or disgust. I know they don’t mean any harm, but they just do not understand. If I were to be honest on those days and respond with something like “Well today my biggest accomplishment was moving to the couch from my bed,” I know that some people would look at me differently. That is the problem with stigma. People do not understand that things that may seem like “simple, everyday tasks” are quite the contrary.

I live with multiple chronic mental illnesses. I am still learning how to cope and how to deal with them in my day to day life. People try to do their best to understand, but it’s hard to understand something they haven’t experienced. If you’ve never tasted peanut butter, you can’t really imagine the taste. Sometimes the thought of explaining the taste of my mental illness is just too hard. So if I seem hesitant to tell you how I spent my day, take a beat, and ask yourself if you’re ready for any possible answer. Remember that my life taste different than your’s and unless you’ve tasted my problems, you may not ever fully understand them.

Can You Measure A Life in Boxes?

I saw my life
packed up in bins,
bags and boxes. My
whole life had been
condensed into assorted
cardboard and plastic.
I said goodbye to
nothing and no one.
I went silently,
too tired to fight. 
But the bins, bags
and boxes, said more
than my silence
ever could. 

How could five
years fit into 
such a cramped 
array of containers?
Where is everything I
spent time building
and creating?
Since when are adult
children the 
youngest of all?
Why will I always
be sick even when I 
become well?
When did they all
become blind to
logic and reasoning?
When will I
learn?
When will I stop
trying to change
and understand
them?

All of the questions I
could never say,
were spelled out in
packing tape and
Storage lockers. 
I couldn’t look back, 
the tears were coming, 
so I ran as fast as my
car could drive.

Price Tag

Sweet girls, 
please wait for, and remember
that
you will never have to
prove your worth
to someone who knows
you are priceless.

August

If I were a weather pattern, I would be one of those late August days. The days that look so good on paper, the ones that never look bad on the surface but if you look beneath it you’ll wish you hadn’t.

On the surface, late August is perfection. School is out for the kids, warm weather, long weekends, swimming… What’s not to love? But if you go deeper you’ll see the wandering minds of children and wandering minds are dangerous. You’ll see the sticky and humid feelings of discomfort that accompany warm weather. You’ll see routines interrupted and ensuing chaos and you’ll see the possibility of drowning.

When people saw my surface, they saw a helper. They saw someone who had it all together. But if those people took the time to peel back my layers, they would see that I needed more help that I could have ever given out. They would see the struggles I masked with humour. They would see the years of wounds I left unattended. They would see the discomfort I felt in my many sticky and humid situations. They would see the constant closeness I was to drowning.

They would look beneath my surface and see all of these things, but they would wish they hadn’t. The surface is always easier to stomach.

I am Her

She has a fire
in her eyes
and a sparkle
in her soul.

She is everything
all at once
and can fade to
nothing when she chooses.

She is full of
feeling so deep
that she often
drowns in them.

She is consumed
by the tears
that spill out of her
confusion filled brain.

She has a heart
so big that it
spills open
to those she cares for.

She can give love
as plentiful as salt
in the ocean, but her
thirst is forever unquenched.

She has the
spirit of a saint,
and the mind
of a tyrant.

She is me. 

The Story of the Trees

We start to grow
leaf by leaf and
day by day
we soar.

The winds of the
world will try to 
blow us down
with all their might. 

But we stand 
strong, our roots
planted firmly
where we will them. 

Humans are plants
with the power to
water themselves
in order to bloom. 

Though we are scarred,
we weather many
storms and the changing
of the seasons.

We are flourishing
and beautiful 
despite our fallen leaves
we hold onto our petals.

Intention Manifesto

I want simple things, and I will bring them to me.

I will be happy in my life.
I will be happy in my skin.
I will love myself with every fibre of my capable being. 
I will first direct my love inward instead of pouring it out.
I will accept my past as part of my history, and allow myself to 
move forward.
I will love my mind as it is, flaws and all.
I will treasure my memories and learn from my mistakes.
I will forgive myself.
I will listen to myself first.
I will honour my scars as the war medals they are.
I will be forthcoming about my feelings.
I will put my needs first.
I will take the time to sort through my thoughts.
I will say no when I want to.
I will say yes when I want to.
I will be authentically and unapologetically me.
I will nourish my mind, body and soul as I see fit.

I will.
I will.
I will.
Because I am worthy.