In theory, bipolar disorder only affects the chemicals in my brain, but like a cancer it has insidiously spread to other parts of my body.
It's in my left leg which spasms and jolts in response to the barrage of pharmaceuticals assaulting my nervous system.
Early last year it spread to my right thigh when in a deluded state I thought I could spare my life by offering up a blood sacrifice. Taking a knife to my thigh I felt a rush of euphoric relief. The sense of control it gave me made the behaviour a daily ritual and I felt I was recovering rapidly. It was only after one of the cuts became infected that I was forced to see my doctor and the whole trick unravelled.
I'm left now with puckered, purple lines, like tiger stripes, adorning my thigh.
I have tiger stripes elsewhere on my body from bipolar disorder. The wavy indents of stretch marks on my breasts, stomach and arms. A rapid increase in medication made me swell in size; fluid retention, disturbed metabolism and the particularly nasty trick of Zyprexa, suppressing the thing in my brain that lets me know when I'm full.
I walk around now in my puffed up body and feel torn between the disgust I'm conditioned by society to feel towards my own fatness and the acceptance I really need to let my body be at peace while my brain is piecing itself together again.
At the gym one of the trainers looked at me and told me I could set a weight loss goal. I should have explained to her that my goal at the gym was to keep my dopamine levels up. I should have but I didn't. I just felt ashamed.
Feeling shame is a big part of being fat. I'm now incredibly conscious of what I eat in public, fearing if I'm caught with a mouth full of fries that somebody will jump out at me and tell me I'm disgusting. I also quietly accept that my body will be in pain. My back aches and aches from carrying around these excess kilos but I feel that it's my penance for not prioritising my weight loss.
So you see, there's this feedback loop where taking care of my brain has caused me to put on weight, which is causing me to house negative thoughts in my brain.
One solution would be to go on a grand weight loss journey. I could go hard at the gym five nights a week, count my calories, or worse, and I'm ashamed to say not unthought of, just stop eating altogether. I did it once before after a horrible breakup. People kept telling me how terrific I looked when inside I felt miserable and empty.
The other solution would be to stop waging war against my body and accept and love it as it is. Because my body is doing some remarkable things. It's putting one foot in front of the other to get me out the door each day, a previously insurmountable task. It's adjusting to the large doses of chemicals ingested into it each day and not letting them poison me. It's housing a fragile mind that is healing itself.
And maybe it's not such a bad thing for me to be carrying extra weight. It's a physical reminder to go slowly right now.
Most importantly, to the people who love me I am not a body shape. Thank you for loving me just as I am. I aspire to do the same.
Reading this, I can't help but feel your pain. I understand because I to suffer from bipolar disorder. I use suffer strongly. I gained 70 pounds in two months. I ate the same but literally looked like a balloon. Almost 10 years later, I still can't lose the weight and I've tried. The only time I've realized the weight just starts pouring off is when I stop taking my meds. So it's either be depressed and feel "crazy" but look good, or be sane but miserable and insecure on the meds because my weight is ridiculous. What options.
ReplyDelete