Books…

…that deal with eating disorders.

I was asked by a friend to compile a list of books that deal with the subject of eating disorders. This is just a preliminary version:

Bulimia: A Guide to Recovery by Peter J Cooper.
Fed Up and Hungry_ a series of essays on EDs edited by Marilyn Lawrence
The Beauty Myth by Naomi Woolf
Womansize by Kim Chernin and The Hungry Self by the same author which may be out of print.
Fabulous Figures by Rachel Swift – a humorous, critique of society’s obsession with aesthetic perfection.
Getting Better Bit(e) By Bit(e)_ (A Survival Kit for sufferers of Bulimia Nervosa and Binge Eating Disorders by Ulrike Schmidt and Janet Treasure
Some novels that deal with EDs:

The Passion of Alice by Stephanie Grant
Eve’s Apple by Jonathan Rosen
LifeSize by Jenefer Shute

About BED:
Sweet Death by Claude Tardat
She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb

And of course:
Second Star to the Right by Deborah Hautzig
The Best Little Girl in the World by Steven Levenkron (a tad too didactic IMHO)

Catherine by Maureen Dunbar

Oh, and OT: I now have a copy of Steven Levenkron’s The Luckiest Girl in the World. It is out of print but Amazon found a copy of it for me.  it arrived a couple of months ago all the way from some second hand bookshop in the good old US of A!  They are now scouring the continent on my behalf for a copy of  Kessa so, fingers crossed!

Oh, and a book I have just finished reading called  The Mermaids Singing by Lisa Carey (which I mentioned in another post) has an anorexia sub-plot.

The Body Betrayed

I wonder which way round it was: did I betray my body or did my body betray me?  Have years of abusing my body, be it bingeing, purging, starving and occasionally (very occasionally) over-exercising ruined me beyond repair.  That’s the hardest thing to deal with: that I did all this to myself.  And that I’ve left it too late to do anything about it.  I took a fully functioning body and tried to destroy it.  That’s sick, stupid and selfish.  And now the body I’ve systematically abused for nearly the whole of my adult life is having its long, slow, excruciating revenge.  Sometimes I think I am useful only as a cautionary tale.

Black-Edged and Borderless: Assignment

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.

Hierarchy of Needs

I love the way that even among the marginalized there is a hierarchy.

What’s that all about?

Is it ’cause I is ugly?

I’m so tired.  Curl up and sleep.  Deep.  Never wake up.

And I didn’t choose anorexia/bulimia/schizoaffective disorder. I did not stop for them, they stopped for me.

Now the drugs don’t work · They just make you worse · But I know I’ll see your face again ·

Am I hopeless at everything I do?

Mental illness in a sentence: The universe is not your friend.

Did that do?  Was it good enough  for you?

Addendum: I went to L’s place for dinner on Friday and told her about ordering meds from over the net and she went and told my mother.  I don’t know whether to feel betrayed or flattered that someone would take the trouble to do such a thing.  Mother (a psych nurse) said that I should agree to into hospital to wean myself off them.  Unlike most people I hate being in hospital.  As soon as I arrive I am planning my escape.  In my area they are quite heavy handed.  The last time I ‘absconded’ they sent the police around to my flat.  I was bundled in a van and dumped at the doors of the hospital like an unwanted parcel.  The police, however, were for the most part professional and courteous.  I don’t think returning escapees from mental asylums is a task they enjoy.  And I can’t say I blame them.

Stolen From ASE-D

‘I don’t understand how I can be so unimportant.  I want to believe that I deserve a chance, it is the rest of the world that seems to tell me I do not.

I know a lot of people here complain about weights and numbers and sizes and calories and foods and spoiler this and spoiler that but honestly those things do not trigger me at all.

The unequal distribution of love is my one and only trigger.  Always has been and always will be.  I don’t care if you post that you weigh 22 pounds.  I don’t care if you shop in the infant section.  I don’t care if you’ve eaten nothing but celery for 19 months.  What bothers me is when someone cares about you, or is willing to help you, or when you have an opportunity and squander it, when you get some form of love and act like it is nothing worth having.’

How can I expect people to empathise with me or indeed me with them when I don’t even feel as though I have a right to inhabit this planet. My weird combination of illnesses means that I will never be fully understood.  What then is the point of it all?  What is the point of even trying?  I can’t get past this wall I have built around myself.  I am a prisoner in my own skin.  Ugly and worthless.  ‘You don’t belong here,’ says the voice in my head.  ‘And you never will.’

Hidden Twin

I have a hidden twin.

Embedded somewhere

Deep within

And even the night,

Even sleep offers no respite.

She comes alive at dusk

And does not rest

‘Til the break of day

She invades my dreams

In a multitude of guises.

She is a hawk with talons of steel,

Savage and merciless and ravenous.

She is the evil spirit sucking me dry.

A pallid bluish green ghost.

A malevolent spiritual being,

A Roman deity.  A rainbow.  A butterfly

A fluttering moth, plain and brown

A flamboyant flake of crimson flame.

Sometimes she is an enchantress, an angel

Swelling as I shrink into myself

A swarm of black beetles.

Obscuring the moon

She pursues me through the dark forest

In which my nightmares dwell.

She whispers into my ear,

‘You are like the farmer’s prize heifer

Destined only to be sold at the cattle market

And milked for the rest of your life.’

Vacuous Bimbo Extraordinaire…

…Liz Jones of The Daily Mail strikes again in this article.  Ms Jones expresses her sympathy for women with anorexia but asserts that: ‘I have never been bulimic, thinking that particular illness too messy and self-indulgent… ‘, implying that both bulimia and anorexia are chosen by the sufferer.  ‘Which eating disorder would you like today, Ms Jones?’  No one ever asked me that question.  I wonder if she is aware of the existence of a subtype of anorexia called ‘purging anorexia’. I also wonder if she is aware that many women who become bulimic have a history of anorexia. Having suffered, at various times in my life, from both illnesses I found this article less than helpful. Making anorexia sound like a lifestyle choice further trivializes and simplifies an illness that both society and the medical profession have trouble taking seriously enough in the first place. Well done, Liz!  You’re about as helpful as the Maginot Line.

Addendum:  And I’m just a tad pissed off that Liz Jones, someone who uses her profession ‘journalism’ as a form of therapy and who is one of the most self-indulgent people I have ever encountered (irl or online) has the audacity to castigate an entire group of people who suffer from a genuine psychiatric disorder as ‘self indulgent’.  Look in the mirror, Ms Jones, and you’ll see the very personification of ‘self indulgence’.  And she hasn’t even bothered to research the illness she so casually dismisses.  The paragraph I quoted above concludes with this: ‘But the truth is I saw my three-week experiment of eating ‘normally’ as a bout of bulimia.’  The word ‘bulimia’ is a Greek word roughly translated as ‘ox hunger’.  It is a widely acknowledged misnomer.  Just like ‘anorexia’ when, roughly translated means ‘loss of appetite’.  To be officially diagnosed with Bulimia Nervosa the patient has to fulfill several diagnostic criteria one of which is ‘Bulimia nervosa is harder to spot than anorexia because many with bulimia have a relatively normal appearance. Those with bulimia always purge, but they don’t always do it by vomiting.’  Eating three thousand calories a day is not bulimia, Ms Jones, unless you regularly purge.  Something a proper journalist should have researched.  I do not know whether Ms Jones sees herself as a ‘journalist’, a ‘diarist’, an ‘editor’, or a ‘columnist’ and frankly I do not particularly care.  All I know is that calling sufferers of a very real, distressing illness ‘self indulgent’ is hideously irresponsible and someone who writes for a newspaper that regularly castigates female celebrities for failing to be ‘good role models’ for their ‘fans’ should be painfully aware of this.

Slowly Growing

I am slowly growing out of my youthful egocentrism. Others are becoming more important than me. I have accepted my insignificance. My treatment for bulimia begins next week. The Olanzapine seems to be working as it should: filtering out the ‘veil’ thoughts and fears and yet still permitting me to be relatively creative. It’s quite sedating though – I am sleeping ten hours a night. I am sketching a lot – not terribly well – like a dog dancing on its hindlegs. The final essay of my OU course is due in next week.

I am re-connecting with friends. I saw Lisa over the weekend. She is giving (yes giving) me her old desktop. My current one is driven and associated with the pseudo-messiah (I bought it from him a few years ago when he impulsively decided that ‘computers are evil’ and that he did not wish to be a slave to technology. Anyway, it’s so old, it’s steam driven. I can’t wait. I love new gadgets.