Blue Monday

Incredible. 
It's nothing short of incredible.
And I, the biggest cynic regarding all things 'Pseudo Science', am pushed towards AWE by the fact that, until I overheard a conversation in a local supermarket, I had no idea it was 'Blue Monday', or that such a phenomena existed.


It's practically against my religion to expand on such things, such is the level of distrust (and possibly even... disgust) of anything vaguely pseudo scientific. In this case however, I'll make an exception.


I woke early on Monday morning to find Anorexia squatting at my bedside bed, waiting patiently for a clamour of stupefying chants to fully penetrate every square centimetre of my being. 


Flatly refusing to succumb to the temptations offered, I ran through my normal routine and ate my porridge and apple, pleasantly distracted by Chris Evans and a large general knowledge crossword.


By midday however, the Anorexia had stepped up it's game and I, like a swatted-at wasp, zipped from cupboard to fridge to freezer to cupboard to fridge to freezer, unable to make a decision about food, furious at myself for being hungry and confused by the sums and figures coursing through my head.
And so I have nothing.
Or bits of food.
Or nothing.
Or bits.
And I don't know anymore.


I end up kneeling against my bed, hands pressed against my eyes, thinking of nothing at all.
Because that's the only way I can find comfort in a pain that is almost physical.
Ripped apart. Visceral pain.


Later, in a paler shade of darkness,  I forced myself to drive down to the supermarket, where I stumbled round in a malnourished daze.


"They say it's the worst day of the year today", the man said to the woman as he patted her back sympathetically.


Hopeful for something, ANYTHING, to explain the day, I googled it.
To find this.

The date for ‘the most depressing day of the year’ was first identified by Cliff Arnall, formerly of Cardiff University, marking the symbolic time in January when people suffer from a series of combined depressive effects.

His date was devised using the following mathematical formula:

The model was broken down using six immediately identifiable factors; weather (W), debt (d), time since Christmas (T), time since failing our new year’s resolutions (Q), low motivational levels (M) and the feeling of a need to take action (Na).

The formula calculates that Monday 16th January 2012 is the worst day of the year, when the Christmas glow has faded away, New Year’s resolutions have been broken, cold Winter weather has set in and credit card bills will be landing on doormats across the land – whilst the January pay-cheque is still some way away.

The formula started a chain of events which led to the designation of ‘Blue Monday’ – the third monday of January.

Believe it or not... But it was certainly my worst day in a very long time.

Beyond Friday.

After Friday's session, being the mature adult that I am, I drank myself stupid.

And what better way of dealing with the desperation I was feeling?

(OK. You may not hear the irony that question is heavily weighted with... You'll just have to take my word for it. It is).

Although it feels as though almost every cell in my body has been screaming, the cries have been largely unintelligible. Trying to translate has been like walking down the street past people's conversations, catching snippets, exclamations, disjointed and unrelated.

I seem to be in very separate parts.

One part has been in agony.

Some nights have seen me curled, clutching my bear against my stomach, pressing into the pain in a fruitless attempt to make it subside.

Applying pressure to the wound, is what springs to mind as I type.

The writhing and the breathless, empty pain, reminiscent of the twisting nights where my sister's illness was so new and the loss was so raw and immediate.

That same deep and desperate ache.

The ungroaned, churning and building in the middle of me.

So, one part agony... Another, disgust and hatred.

It started the following afternoon when, despite the alcohol - induced drum, beating in my head, I stood under the shower, my inside no more than a shell. Sans feeling.

Suddenly and unaccountably, a photograph appeared in my head.

Dad and three little girls wearing white spotted, cotton sundresses.

One little girl is standing slightly in front of the others three figures. She has her arms folded across her, clutching her arms as though cold; and her face is a picture of frowning discontent.

Perhaps I was cold. Perhaps sulking.

But in less than a second, I was flooded with a disgust and self hatred so strong it might have split me in half, my body the tower of Babel and my horror as powerful as God's own rage.

It's my fault. I was the sister from hell. If I hadn't existed, she would have been ok. It must have been cold there in my shadow, playing in my head.
And that little girl, THAT little girl, she needs to be starved to death.

And she is.
I'm at my lowest weight in a long time today. It feels good to be in control of her.

A third part experiences rage.

Monday's session, which I can't much recall, stoked a fire of anger at myself.

How dare I have this... How dare I?

Everyday I work with children who have suffered the most unimaginable trauma.

Torture, rape, abuse, terrible loss.

I go and see the woman, I tell her and she listens.

She talks about me. My pain. Things that may or may not have happened and I am so, so, so angry.

Like me, this woman hears the most awful things. Atrocities. People who have suffered beyond what I would consider to be bearable.

And here I am. And here she is listening.

I can't get past the fact she must be disgusted by me.

I am invalid. INvalid. There are no explanations or excuses that justify my pain.

My propensity for weakness is astounding.

On Monday my anger and my fear is too much, and I vow not to go back to her and I am absolutely certain that I won't, because I can't justify it.

I consider an email which will ensure I am too ashamed to ever return, just in case my will were to weaken.

And now, come Wednesday, I am not sure how I will cope with not having a place to take this pain. Because I can hate it, deny it, minimise it, rage and resent it all I like. But it's still there and

it still makes me fold in half.

And I hate myself with all the raw passion of an angst ridden teenager, and all the weary loneliness of a man at the end of an unfulfilled life.

Today has mostly been a series of blanks inside.

My Very Sad Case came into my room first thing. She wanted to talk about a shock she had had.

I listened and spoke carefully. I wanted her to feel the care.

I taught my lessons, I ate some lettuce and tomatoes, I wrote my plans and I came home and curled up and slept.

Writing this post, I am again struck by the wave of disgust at myself.

There is no end to it.

Tying it Up - The Need to Starve.

There is a twisted irony in the fact that whilst I have worked so damn hard to eliminate 'need' (a word not in my vocabulary, remember?) I have developed a need strong enough to kill me.

In my first post I wrote about the concept of needing, and how it causes such pain and such disgust in me, and I realise, in many others.
I later realised that without thinking, I had not acknowledged that not all needs inspire such a strong reaction in me, and I got to thinking that not all needs are equal.
In the last post then, I wrote about Maslow... about the fact that his hierarchical structure identifies and prioritises five different needs which, when met, culminate in self actualisation.
(Others have added an additional layer to the triangle, a top section which identifies the need, once self actualised, to trascend oneself, but I would argue that the notion of self actualisation somehow incorporates a degree of transcendance. That, or it completely nullifies the need to transcend.
It's not my intention to debate the neccessity of adding tiers to Maslow's work but it provides a (somewhat welcome) avoidance.

I have this thing where I start out trying to write something and I encounter such a magnetic resistance to it that my brain actually starts to disconnect (dissocation, I realise).


So.

Forcing the wires to connect...


At some point in the last two years, a tiny bomb went off inside me.

Looking back now, I think it had been in me for a long time and though Iknow I searched for it, the search was hampered by the fact that I couldn't always hear it ticking, and I didn't really know what it looked like, this thing I was blindly trying to locate.


In keeping with either the contained nature of the bomb itself, or the steely numbness of the container it was in, I didn't even really notice when it went off.

A controlled exposion perhaps.

It was only later that I realised something had changed. I still can't find a moment.


What had changed was my way of managing feelings. (Okay... okay... I learned that was what it was about in therapy).


I had, unwittingly I think, walked straight into the easily stretched jaws of an eating problem which may or may not be defined as Anorexia (and you can't hear me but I am wailing, "I'm too old to be Anorexic! I'm too old!")

My sister (who I intend to leave out of this post, honestly I do) was born right at the entrance of that gaping mouth. Now, God knows how many years later, I seem to have landed there.


Actually, as I type, I am aware that I have been tiptoeing up to that cavernous mouth for years on and off. I have run in and out like a child testing its bravery, testing whether mum and dad will still be there if they dare to go into the cave.

It was when I stopped smoking that I suddenly found myself inside.
Which is weird, isn't it?



So. This is my figuring. And I'm no expert.


I think that when I stopped smoking a big thing happened in me.


And this is where it somehow gets tied together but bear wth me because my brain is tryingto slide.

Years of depression wasted certain parts of my insides. Even killed a part of me (and for all the 'oh but I want to believe the world is ultimately a sunny place' people out there, that will be a line that they will want to jump on and slap dismissively as they shake their critical heads).

It is impossible to write about the depths of the depression, or to say just what it stole from me - again, a topic that my brain goes to great lengths to stop me articulating -

Part of the darkness was an inherent knowledge that I would die before I gave up smoking. I never, ever really believed that I had any willpower... I had repeatedly chanted to myself that I couldn't do it, that I was hopeless at self denial and that I was weak and needy.

Ashamed and disgusted by the inability to say "no" to myself, a spiral of need and denial, self harm and self hatred took over.


I stopped smoking in February 2008.

With that came the realisation that I could execise self discipline and that it was possible to have power over my self. To CONTROL.
I could control the shameful needs I had.
I could control everything if I could just teach myself not to need anything.
(Insert inner child theories in here. I can't).


So. If I can deny myself food I can teach myself not to need anything.

I will train myself to be grateful for the absolute minimum.

I will silence the need, whatever it is, by starving it.




This was a part of it.



I'm wondering whether I should slit this post in two.

It's very long.
But then, so is the history behind all this.

Oh for the gift of writing succinctly.


When I had spent a fair amount of time just tucked between the lip and the sharp teeth of this mouth, and I was reassured that the mouth wasn't moving/shutting etc, I moved further in.

What I didn't quite notice was that at some point, the mouth swallowed.


It's hard to describe the fear and desperation in here but it is perhaps true to say that those feelings exist in completely overwhelming proportions on the outside of this prison.

On The Rack

Tortured by his enemies, a film I once watched showed a man tied between two posts which were then gradually pulled apart, thus ripping his whole body in half.

Nice start huh?

Thought I'd jump in headfirst before I got cold and ran out on the balls of my feet.

Medieval England practised "Stretching" as a form of torture on a hideous frame known as 'the rack'. It was often used to punish or to extract information from a victim.

I'm not great at history, but even the narcoleptic kid wakes up for the part of the lesson where the teacher tells about torture methods.

It's that morbid fascination thing.

Not to sound too melodramatic, but the image of someone being pulled apart has floated around my head over the past couple of days.

I feel as though parts of me are engaged in a game of "tug of war", and while that conjures up images of happily exhausted, muddy heaps of people who have engaged in the battle of the rope, for me, it feels as though my two teams, who are unfortunately, both inside me, are actually going to rip me in half.

It's a tug of war with a hell of a lot at stake and another part of me watches with some degree of horror as the stubborn struggle between me and me reaches a ridiculous intensity.

On one end of the rope, Desperation pulls me towards the gym to work my body into a frenzied, sweating, mechanical state where I no longer feel anything except a physical exhaustion and a terrible desperation to deplete my body in a any which way.

On the other end, Depression pushes me down, won't let me move, pulls my energy away from me so I have to step further back to retrieve it.

And as they pull, I am torn.

Desperation to lose weight is screaming in my ears.

"You must be in control".

"You only have this".

"If you allow yourself an inch, you'll be sure to take miles and miles and it'll be unstoppable".

Depression whispers,

"Don't bother".

"What's the point?"

"Nothing matters".

Yet another part, cries at the pain of being torn so violently. It feels as though I am on a rack.

I end up in the gym but the inside is weary and tired from the fight.

It would seem that I am able to cope when depression is not begging me to stop and when I am winning what I know is an unhealthy battle against my weight. Which is absurd!

This is not how it's meant to go, surely?

I suppose that when you are on a rack, if the force is only pulling you in one direction, it ceases to be torture.

The lesser of the two evils (in terms of short term outcomes) is the force which drives me to starve and exercise.

It's when that force is opposed by the dreadful weight of depression that it becomes so painful.