Black Edged and Borderless
I was supposed to write about my mental illness last week but procrastination is my middle name and I didn’t get around to it. Another problem is that I am so ambivalent about it. I have a truly weird diagnosis – or rather, diagnoses – schizoaffective disorder and bulimia nervosa although like many bulimics I started out with anorexia – at least that’s what it says on my medical notes. I actually started out with binge eating disorder and ‘progressed’ to anorexia when others commented unfavourably on my weight. So I am like Churchill’s Soviet Union: A enigma within an enigma within an enigma. Basically, I am plain weird. I do weird things, say weird things, think weird things and for all of those weird things I take a bucketful of weird medication. And I hate it. Even those bucketfuls of medication don’t make me ‘like everybody else’. But then as a CPN once said to me ‘You will never be normal because there really is no such thing as normal.’
That made me feel better for about a quarter of an hour.
Tags: anorexia, binge eating disorder, bulimia, comorbidity, enigma, medication, mental illness, normal, Radio Rental
So Sick of Drowning 
September 7, 2009 at 12:21 pm
I’m weird too! But I’m ok with it.
I was narrating my duties out loud at work yesterday (“put the dishes in the dishwaher, oops don’t drop things on the floor, lock the cupoboard etc) because it helps with my anxiety and it had been a difficult morning. A colleague said to me “do you enjoy talking to yourself?” I said yes, and that it was better that I was talking to myself rather than talking to people I thought were there but weren’t. Hehe. She knows nothing of my mentalness and just gave me a funny look. It’s good to be strange.
Weird medication isn’t so fun, because it sometimes gives me the shakes, but it does stop me from being completely off the wall and locked up. Hooray!
Do you want to be like everybody else? I don’t. Sure, when I’m miserable (or “depressed” as the professional folk like to say), I’d give anything to be less sad, but I still don’t want to be like everyone else. Like that CPN said – there really is no such thing as normal.
It’s ok to be you. You are a good, talented person. It’s ok to be weird, if that’s your perception of it. 🙂
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September 8, 2009 at 2:17 am
If someone sees me talking to myself (and I do it rather a lot) and they use the standard ‘talking to yourself is the first sign of madness’ then I respond: ‘Well, I have to have an intelligent conversation with someone.’ A bit acerbic, I must admit. Thank you for your kind thoughts but I don’t feel particularly good or talented at the moment.
And you’re right I don’t want to be everybody else. I just want this feeling I have that I don’t belong on the planet to go away. Extra meds time methinks.
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September 9, 2009 at 2:33 pm
And that CPN stole that jolly good line from Morrissey.
Bastard.
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