I wish I didn’t exist.
That sounds extremely negative, but at times it’s very true. It’s different than being suicidal, although admittedly I’ve been there. It’s being exhausted by the sheer weight of being a person. You don’t care enough to even try to kill yourself, you are so apathetic that you just lie around hoping that the Earth will swallow you whole.
Or you just watch Netflix and not shower.
Depressive states of being comes in waves for me. Usually my anxiety is too high for my depression to show itself as true depression. I constantly do things to distract myself from being swept up by the waves of crippling fear over my own mortality. But when the storm of anxiety quiets and the depressing thoughts remain, I become completely numb.
Being numb sucks. You don’t care if you’re working on things you love because it doesn’t matter anymore. It’s the weirdest kind of sad. I can’t even stomach food, which is hard because it exasperates my eating disorder.
When you’re a person who balances a lot of different disorders, the way you feel is split into a different spectrum.
A lot of people think that eating disorders are solely linked to societal pressure, but they aren’t. It can be triggered by these pressures on yourself, but it isn’t the cause. It’s hereditary. Everyone can be triggered one way or another into disordered behaviour, but the threshold of which you need to cross is different for everyone.
Say everyone has a bucket that they carry around every day. Every time something bothers them or stresses them out, they put it in the bucket. The thing is, everyone has a bucket that’s a different size that matches their biological family’s. While someone whose family has a good sized bucket, the person next to them was given a sand pail. Although the person with the larger bucket can handle the stress of their day, the person with the smaller bucket will have stress spilt all over them, even if each person’s stress was equal in volume.
So it’s true that societal pressure can add to that bucket of stress, but it isn’t the only thing in the bucket. The straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak. And some people are more susceptible to it than others.
Sure, there are countless days that my insecurity screams in my ear that I don’t look pretty enough, but if that were the sole thing I had to deal with I would probably just go on some diet or work out. But it’s not. I hate my body for even existing. I don’t want to be unappealing, but I don’t want anyone to find me attractive or look at me either.
When my anxiety and depression are in remission, I note my insecurity and I feel shitty, but I go about my day. I go to work, eat dinner with my boyfriend, watch television while lying in bed after a day of work.
When my anxiety is rampant, I calorie count. I always think about food. What I’m allowed to have, what I wish I could have, how many inches the circumference of my stomach is, how many steps I’m taking… when I’m anxious, it’s not how I look. It gives me a distraction, something I can control. My friends will tell me about their auditions and I’ll smile, but I’m wondering if I can still function if I don’t eat anything for another 8 hours. I make love with my boyfriend and I’m wondering if he feels how lumpy I am and how many calories I can burn. It becomes an obsession to fight against my panic attacks. I want to take up less space.
And when I’m only depressed… it’s hard. Especially when I’m in recovery. When I’m depressed, I physically feel sick. I call in sick because my body feels sore and I get a severe stomach ache. I know I should eat because it doesn’t matter what I look like (or anything else), but it makes me nauseous. Food makes me nauseous, hunger makes me nauseous.
But how do I explain that to people? I hate being anything but happy for people. I hate disappointing or worrying anyone. I don’t like the attention or worrying looks. I want the world to keep moving while I’m gone so I can slip back in as if nothing happened.
I want my biology to be fixed so I can be “normal” sad, “normal” nervous, and have “normal” insecure days.
My extremes are making me awful.
So what do I do? When I can, I make stupid jokes. I make fun of myself, I make fun of the parts of society that mock my disorders, I try and get by the best I can. Some days that helps enough to get me through a rough patch. Other days? I make stupid mistakes. I do unhealthy things. I hate myself and every single imperfection I can see. I hate it when I upset other people, even if I’m in the right. I don’t have the strength to fight if it means having another person on top of myself hating me.
I stay quiet because I hate sympathy. I hate people trying to help because I know this is my own battle. They can provide support, but I can’t lean all of my weight on them. I hate when people ask me if I just “tried dieting” or that they “couldn’t tell” I suffer from an eating disorder because I look fine. What I hear is that I failed, like I fail at everything I do.
I need a vacation from myself.
The post I Don’t Want to be Attractive, I Want to Stop Existing appeared first on Feminspire.
