The letter I am going to be emailing to the masseuse who mindfucked me.
And her Boss.
Although comments one of the bosses made to me when I said "Living in my head isn't fun" makes me think they'll do nothing. My membership is up for renewal as well and I'm scared they'll kick me out.
Got a callback from the depression/suicide hotline I rang in a fit of desperation last week. They actually cared enough to hunt my down and call me.
The letter:
Dear Katherine.
I have the nagging feeling that if I was lucky enough to be in any form of decent therapy right now, I would be told to write you a letter.
So I am.
I know that your comments last week were no doubt meant kindly, and I appreciate that. However, they have pulled an almighty mundfuck on me, and that I do not appreciate. Due to the fact that I essentially never show or tell anyone how I'm really feeling, you would have had no idea of this and I am very sorry if this seems like an overreaction to you doing your job. You guys are kind enough to help me look after my body, but there is nobody helping me do the same with my brain.
And, unfortunately, overreactions and irrational thoughts are very much a part of my pathology. I have lived with unmanaged Clinical Depression for my entire life, and irrational overreactions are part and parcel of the illness. It is only the fear of being forced into an institution and becoming dependent on my parents again that has kept me alive this long without developing more maladaptive coping mechanisms.
It may not seem so, but I am very much aware of my weight. The illness I live with gives me incredibly low self-esteem and a tendency to isolate myself from all human contact. Since going to the gym means seeing people, being seen by people and being surrounded by mirrors, I tend to stay at home unless I feel I'm capable of handling being around other humans. It is difficult to focus on training if you're using all your willpower not to run screaming from a room full of people. While I knew I had to be coming in more than I was to keep my shoulders under control, it was nearly impossible to leave a place where I felt 'safe' even though I knew I would pay for my lack of spine with physical pain.
While the weight gain frustrates me, it is something I am willing to live with if it means having some form of functional sanity. I have been planning on talking to my doctor about the side-effects of this medication when time allows it, but I would rather not rely on prescription appetite suppressants to control my weight.
Please note that when I was at my lowest weight in recent years I was on a medication that suppressed appetite, sped the metabolism and stopped me from sleeping. I became hypomanic and attempted suicide several times and was also self-harming in an attempt to shut up the screaming in my head. (Please be aware that not all self-harm leaves scars! I am very jealous of my tattoo canvas and this fact forced me to improvise.) During this time I often wasn't able to leave the house to go to lectures or work, which ended up with me being put on academic probation.
After trying peppermint tea, chamomile tea, valerian tea, nutmeg tea, exercising myself into collapse and various forms of meditation in order to make myself sleep I was only managing 3 hours a night, tops. This went on for months. Eventually I had a rather embarrassing breakdown where I recall begging a doctor for sleep or death. The doctor prescribed me a few days of the least addictive sleeping medication available. He was understandably reluctant to continue prescribing it to me, given my history and the state I was in at the time.
Cue last year, when I changed medications to something that would actually let me sleep. During the weeks where I was unmedicated I once again became a self-harming, suicidal mess because I have been offered no other concrete way of managing this illness. I seem to have reached a tenuous balance where the medication lets me sleep and keeps a baseline of sanity in my head. I am proud of the fact I can now recognise the "sick" thoughts can at least resist the urge to act on them, even if I lack the strength to change them at this point.
I was extremely reluctant to accept medication in the first place. It was not a decision I made lightly. I have seen family members and friends be fucked up by prescription drugs, and I didn't want to end up like them. I refused it for years, letting an already bad situation get much worse than I should have before giving in and accepting the prescription. I only agreed to be medicated on the condition that it would be a temporary crutch to stabilise my brain chemistry while I got some "real" help.
Unfortunately, that "real" help has not yet materialised. Student Health's therapists are worse than useless (The actually sent me to the woman who was directly responsible for a close friend's suicide attempt) and the DHB won't touch me because I am technically still a student, even though I am no longer enrolled. I got the maximum 12 free sessions with the GP-associated therapist when I was in immediate danger of suicide, but when she attempted to refer me on after those sessions ran out we ran into the bureaucratic brick wall that is the DHB.
Basically in this country you don't get any "real" help until you are beyond the point where it would do any good. In light of this knowledge I have been researching Cognitive Behavioural Therapy techniques that can be used by yourself, not buying anything I could use as a poison and relying heavily on the arm-length list of distractions in my W.R.A Plan and my "safety net" of friends who understand and help me thought the bad days.
The idea that I should throw away what little mental health I have managed to gain because of a little fat enrages me. I feel that it invalidates everything I have fought so hard for over the last four years. The idea that a woman's appearance is more important than anything else about her is one of the most infuriating things humanity has ever come up with. Unfortunately, my brain interpreted your comments along the lines of that societal pre-rogramming, which added to the self-esteem issues and turned the inside of my head into a Roman Circus. This was not your fault, and I'm sorry if my anger seems directed at you. It's not. It's a generalised anger born of New Zealand's retarded attitudes to mental health.
It is an unfortunate truth that with many antidepressant medications, the side effects can cause weight gain no matter how little you eat and how much you exercise. To use the words of a friend: "I'd rather be fat and sane than skinny and suicidal". Now that the dosage required to keep me mostly functional has been more or less worked out, I have been using a calorie tracking program to ensure I get a decent nutritional profile while not consuming too many or too few calories. Thanks to this I have managed to stop the weight gain (I haven't gained ANY in the last 3 months) and have even lost a little bit. It's going slowly, like everything else, but at least it is going and the medication is working.
In the grand scheme of things, fat is so much easier to fix than dead.
Believe me when I say that I am working on the "fat" problem. (I only wish it was as easy to fix the insides as it is to fix the outsides!) It is no reflection on you guys and the gym that I've porked out recently. It is simply a symptom of attempting to fix a brain with less than half a toolbox. I have worked out a reward system for myself and put it in place to counteract the self-isolation and force myself to come in to the gym to reap both the physical and mental benefits of exercise. I'm not quite "there" yet, but I'm a little closer than I was yesterday and light years from where I was a few years ago.
Not all people are this lucky. Please don't assume that people are on medication by choice, or that they will be as functional without is as they are with it. It's hard enough to ask for help with our cultural stoicism without being made to feel weak for needing it.
Sincerely,
Peri
