Days like these I really hate people.

Today I was referred to as denser than a black hole for defending the rights of a woman to simply exist how she is. I've also been called an idiot for saying that there are people who negate the importance of feminism simply because they are not educated on what feminism is.

Both of these things seem like no-brainers to me. Treat people with respect - that means equality, for everyone. Just because a woman doesn't look like you want them to look doesn't mean they are not deserving of a career, of living their life, of having love and a family. If they stand up for themselves, it is only because there is something to stand up FOR, because they have had enough of being torn down, of being seen as "less than". Fuck you and your asinine assumptions, your prejudice. And surely if you know the definition of feminism - the dictionary definition of the word - you can't be against it, or see that it's not important? Equal fricking rights! Same opportunities whether you've a dick or not! Same pay for the same work done! If you are against that, then you need to stay the fuck away from me.

I've also been screamed at because I filled a 7oz bottle to only 5oz and because I insisted on the dinnertable being cleared prior to dinner being served.

Fuck this shit. Fuck today.

Dysphoria

“You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female’.”

― Erin McKean

I've been pretty. I was pretty when I studied chemistry, I was 19. I was pretty when I studied art, I was 22. I was pretty when I studied hairdressing, I was 27. I was pretty when I got pregnant with our second child, I was 32. I was pretty when he stopped breastfeeding, I was 34. I'm going to be 36 on Saturday. I'm not pretty.

Did I say "pretty"? I meant "slim".

The truth is, I don't recognise myself as female, let alone "pretty" unless I am slim. Slim for me means having a BMI around 25. Below that and I tend to look ill. So let's talk about that.

When I was 19 I was put on a crash diet by the doctor. I got down to 69kg and people thought I had cancer or some shit because I was always tired, never at class, looked gaunt. I had depression and mono and couldn't eat anything above 5% fat content. I was miserable.

When I was 22, I dropped a ton of weight as I quit smoking. I picked up fruit instead of cigarettes and didn't eat much else during the day. I was svelte yet curvy and got a lot of attention. I was also depressed and diagnosed with a mood disorder.

When I was 27, I was slim thanks to having a dodgy thyroid. My BMI was 24.9. As soon as they took me off the thyroxine, I started putting weight back on. I was actually pretty stoked at this age. I was recently divorced, actually doing something meaningful with my life, had met a nice guy on a dating website and had a social life. Post-thyroxine and the weight crept up and continued slowly until I hit 90kg.

Got married to nice-guy-from-dating-website. Full term with first child and I was 102kg. We both started dieting after that and I was just about 75kg when we got pregnant with our second.

I hit 102kg at full term with him, too. Breastfeeding for a year and not being silly with food got me back into my size 12 shorts when second child finally weaned onto a bottle. I started some different meds at that point because the mood disorder turned out to be BPD and - you guessed it - the weight came back on in leaps and bounds.

Every time there's been family trauma (first child was critically ill, we lost my husband's father later that same year) the weight jumps up by a few kgs. I tried coming off the meds, but in November last year I started a different medication and since then I've put on 10kgs, so these days I float between 123kg and 125kg. Almost twice the person I was at my adult skinniest. I'm back on thyroxine because I have sub-clinical hypothyroidism, but it can't even help stabilise my weight. I'm up or down by up to 2kg each week. My weight chart looks like a silhouette of a mountain range.

I have emotionally dissociated myself from my ever-expanding body, so I no longer feel depressed because of my size. Trouble is, I no longer feel anything about it. I don't feel feminine, I don't feel female even. I don't feel sexy. I don't feel sexual at all. My body is merely a means to an end. It allows my brain to learn and process information and it allows me to connect with my family through hugs and kisses.

That can't be healthy, but reconnecting will mean emotional pain, pain that stems from not being recognised as female by virtue of the fact that I am not the size and shape society deems acceptable for a female to operate within. A lot of that is self-stigmatising behaviour, but it's difficult to break. I'm in absolutely no rush to even try until I'm back down to a regular kinda size/shape. I can't accept myself for the size I am, why should anyone else?

What am I doing to lose weight then, I hear my grandmother in particular cry. Well, I am doing what we did the last time and calorie counting. Breakfast and lunch are no more than 400 calories, dinner is usually around 600 (rarely up to 800 and often sub-500). I'm wary of the calories I drink and am weaning myself off of the 400+ calorie milkshakes I casually gulped to relieve heartburn and back onto a more measured coffee with sweetener and skimmed milk. I lost weight 3 weeks in a row but this last week it all came back on in one go.

Losing weight at a consistent rate of 1-2kg per week requires a level of sacrifice I'm not strong enough to make just yet. I'm in the gloomy shadow of residual depression and I simply cannot face preparing, cooking and eating food that I don't like for the sake of everybody else's comfort.

I've been pretty. I'm sure I can be pretty again. It just won't happen any time soon.

Results, results...

I've been waiting a sorry 5 weeks to hear feedback on the Creative Practice module. Two weeks longer than I ought to have been waiting, point of fact. In these two weeks, I've been shouting, screaming, pulling my own hair until it pops out from the roots, biting myself and I've been sorely neglecting just about everything of consequence in my life. I'm a shadow in my own home, incorporeal, barely there. When the stress becomes too much, rage rears its ugly head once again and the shadow becomes a malevolent poltergeist.

Today, I cowered in front of my computer (which was on another go-slow) and I wept. My kids came up to me and hugged me and soothed me, wiped the hair from my face and said "I love you mummy" over and over. These sweet little kids that I'm so lucky to be mummy to.

I don't think they realise, over at the college, that to make someone of my nature (Asperger's, BPD) wait so far beyond a deadline is practically torture. I'm neglecting myself, my duties as a household manager, my parental responsibilities so I can sit in front of my computer or with my phone repeatedly refreshing my emails, waiting, waiting, waiting for the feedback to come through. The worst part is, I cannot logic myself out of this deleterious habit. I can't power through and ignore that this feedback is so very late. I can't "chill", dude. Sorry.

In an attempt to kill time, I've invested a little in myself and bought Photoshop 2017. Tenner a month or thereabouts. Same as a WoW subscription. I think I'll get more use out of this, tbh, than I will Warcraft. Until we can get the right parts to Frankenstein my computer to be a bit faster, I'm kinda in limbo. Can't do what I would like, can't do what I need to do to keep my mind from screaming out for feedback, feedback.

Going Forward

It's only taken half my life to realise, but here it is. There is no fix, there is only a work-around - and nobody is qualified to help me create and implement that work-around. It's all on me.

*Obligatory Trigger Warning - sexual abuse, self-harm, disordered eating/drinking*

I was given an anger management CD once, when I was about 18 or 19. I don't remember much of it, only that anger didn't form part of my issues again until much more recently. Back then, Anger was because I'd been molested by a babysitter. Anger was because a boy attempted to rape me in secondary school. Anger was because I was an easy target for bullies. I went through some CBT and it helped resolve that Anger. All was well.

These days, Rage is the reason I'm on the meds that I'm on. Rage is the reason I sought psychotherapy, because my psychiatrist wants me off the meds. My psychotherapist sent me away with the offer of a refresher MBT course (not needed, the MBT kicks in appropriately enough and a refresher won't improve that) and some sheets of A4 with information for the newly diagnosed, whereupon my brain whips up this image:

So in short, that isn't really going to help. The meds help with containing 3/4 of an episode, the MBT helps with the last 1/4. What I need is to better manage the source of the Rage so that there's less work for the meds to do. Unfortunately, the source is something I cannot control. You see, the Rage spikes because of the kids. Because they don't respect the word "no". Because they aren't obedient. Because they are wilfully defiant in the face of logic, in the face of kindness. Because they are 2 and 4 years old and aren't yet emotionally or maturationally equipped to behave in a respectful or obedient manner, because they are only just on the brink of being able to employ logical reasoning.

Parent of the year, right? Well, if I had known that this Rage monster would rear its ugly head because of these sweet little children, you can bet your life savings I would have pre-medicated to avoid it. I would have built defence mechanisms to circumvent it. I would have employed a more robust support system* and learned to temper my own expectations of the kids. Instead, we have the situation at hand where I have to accomplish all of that at extremely short notice.

(*I have a pretty good support system, we live not far away from my dad and my mom and my hubby is super understanding and supportive of my ever-evolving diagnoses and needs. Sometimes though it's not enough and I've found myself screaming into my pillow and biting my hands because it's all too much to bear.)

I have a flip-chart which I will use when brainstorming with hubby on how to better manage things both locally and globally. I'll put those A1 pieces of newsprint on walls and doors around my house so that I have constant reminders of what I need to do and when in order to minimise the stress and anxiety that inevitably builds until the point of ignition and the Rage explodes. It will be good to have, in black and white, everyone's responsibilities and timescales for achieving them so that I don't feel like everything is up to me and consequently feel like an utter failure when I can't manage to do any of/all the things.

At this point, it is looking unlikely that I will be able to go without meds until the kids have moved out of the family home, but at least there is actually an end point to all of this. What I have to do in the meantime is work my ass off to make sure that my own conditions, illnesses, weaknesses (call them what you will) do not impact on the kids in a memorable or permanent way.

This means I will be continuing to use the various coping mechanisms I've come to depend upon. It used to be that when shit got too bad, I'd cut myself. The external pain matching the internal pain helped me to deal with the intensity of my feelings. Getting it out of my head and onto my body where I could see it provided relief. Once Taylor was on the scene I swore I wouldn't do that any more, I didn't want to have to answer his innocent questions of why mommy was sore. So what does mommy do now? Mommy occasionally goes through periods when she drinks in the evenings and at the weekend more than the recommended amount for a regular and extended period of time (hey, it averages out over the year). If it's not alcohol, it's chocolate. Right now, we are in a chocolate cycle but its coming to a close. It'll be booze by next week. It seems to change around every quarter. Summer and Winter tend to be alcohol, Autumn and Spring tend to be chocolate.

Another, rather odd coping mechanism linked to these, is that I have pretty much completely dissociated my self from my body. I am just...me. I'm not attached to the notion of feeling in any way female. I'm no longer depressed because of the weight I've gained over the past almost 2 years and the effect it's had on my shape. I have an image in my head of how I look and it doesn't change even if I do. That'll do me. My body is a means to an end, nothing more elaborate than that. I'm not emotionally attached to it at all. I've felt (not felt?) this for 4 or 5 months now, and I tell you something, it saves me a world of self-torment and guilt. It has helped lift the miasma of depression that started to settle in the summer of 2015, because a lot of that was linked to the sudden weight gain I experienced as a result of simultaneously stopping breastfeeding and starting medication. So, to sum up: instead of cutting myself, I abuse the calories in food and drink and then dissociate myself from the weight gain that results, all in an attempt to damp down my affect. Seems legit.

On the plus side, my emotions are, overall, in check! I have the occasional wobble but I can pull it back before it spirals out of control. I have the occasional meltdown, but they too are short-lived. I get the Scottish Blues from mid-September to the end of March, but it's more of an annoyance than anything, a factor in exacerbating everything else that I need to be aware of.

And the Rage? Because it all boils down to that, doesn't it. I'll need to find a way to prevent life from conspiring to ignite that flare, rather than try (and fail) to squib the flare itself. All this time, the thought has been "oh, a symptom! Let's try to cure the symptom!" when it should have been "Let's try to cure the cause." Silly rabbit.