A Very Abbreviated Version of My Story

Recently someone who is working on their master's project approached me. He is working on his master's project which entailed writing a book and forming a class around it. He choose to do his project on mental disabilities from the view of people who actually have to live with them. He asked me to write a piece on what it was like to live with being bipolar and having an eating disorder. The following is what I gave to him. It is a very brief outline of my life that leaves out a lot of major things mainly for the sake of keeping it relatively short. 

I have not done an actual story of my life blog on here, mainly because it's not something that can be written about in one post. But for now this is the closest sum up version there is. 

Growing up my life was fairly average. I liked trying out new things and I started with dance, dabbled a little in soccer, but found my true love was gymnastics. My parents were always encouraging me and drove me around to practices and meets. I excelled in school, and with very little effort I was able to maintain straight As. In fifth grade I quit gymnastics partly because of a reoccurring injury and partly because of the management and coaching staff that had now taken over my gym. I began to hang out with people from school instead of only having gymnastics friends. I loved having this new group to hang out with and it certainly made school more fun as well now that I was actually becoming part of the group.

 My body was used to working out six days a week for at least four to five hours a day. Now I was lounging around on couches watching TRL and Boy Meets World snacking on Doritos and homemade chocolate chip cookies. Needless to say, I gained a couple pounds. I was not ok with gaining weight, so I started to cut back what I would eat. Eventually that became hard to do without people thinking I was weird for not eating so I found myself another solution, purging.

My bulimia soon had a life of its own. Once I got my driver’s license I was binging and purging constantly. I blew off friends to spend the evening driving around from drive through to drive through, stopping at gas stations to throw up along the way. I paired my bulimia with not eating for 3-4 days at a time. My weight dropped significantly.

Senior year is supposed to be the best year of high school. For me it barely even existed. On Thanksgiving my senior year my parents told me I was going to get help for my eating disorder. So while my friends were out shopping on black Friday, I was sitting in room with a therapist and my parents who were trying to assess just how much help I needed to get this under control. It was decided that I would start the night program which meant that I would be going to group therapy three nights a week and on Saturday mornings. I would have to bring a meal to eat with the other patients before participating in groups. I was less than thrilled. This meant I had to cut back on my hours of work (I was a hostess at the restaurant Red Robin) and I had a lot less time to hang out with my friends. The whole thing seemed completely ridiculous to me. I had zero interest in recovery and I thought that besides my eating disorder, I was perfectly fine.

 Looking back now I can see the fluctuations of moods even then. I remember going several nights in a row with barely any sleep, instead staying up binging and purging and playing around online. And I remember the lows that followed although at that point they were just a tiny dip compared to what was yet to come.

Night therapy didn’t prove to go so well for me. I continued to lose weight and my resting heart rate plummeted into the mid 50s. So in January, a few weeks into the spring semester I was admitted to the hospital where I stayed for two weeks. There I was forced to eat and was watched after to make sure I didn’t purge the food I had just consumed. I was on bed rest and hooked up to machines that made sure my heart was still working semi-properly. Once I was considered stable enough to leave I was put into a day program, which meant I had therapy from 8:00am to 8:00pm Monday-Friday then a four hour group on Saturday. All of my meals and snacks were given to me while I was there. When I was at home I was responsible for sticking to my meal plan that had been given to me.

 My friends didn’t really know how to handle all of this and my distant behavior and sometimes irritable moods left them not coming around at all. Occasionally they would answer my calls and invite me along but I always felt out of the loop, so eventually I stopped calling.

 I moved to Tampa, FL the following January to go to school at The University of Tampa. I was starting fresh and everything was going to be fantastic. However, the eating disorder was completely out of control and I was starting to see that my moods were too. I had been diagnosed with depression when I was 17 and had been trying to find an antidepressant that would fix it ever since. Prozac, Celexal, Cymbalta, Effexor XR, Paxil, Lexapro, Seroquel XR,  Wellbutrin, and Zoloft. None of them worked. What they would do was initiate a hypomanic episode which was followed by a huge crash. And the lows started to get really low. I would lie in bed for days at a time, getting up only to go to the bathroom and that was when I really had to go. Doing everyday things such as brushing my teeth and watching TV took SO much energy.

 It became exhausting to simply exist. I would get so frustrated with myself because I knew I was a smart person, perfectly capable of not only completing daily life tasks but excelling at things. I had always done well at school but now I didn’t have the energy to get out of bed, much less go to class. I stayed locked up in my room for days on end. Behind the closed doors life seemed to be a little less daunting. I thought maybe if I stayed in there long enough no one would notice the colossal failure I had become.

  Soon enough my mood would switch and life would suddenly take on a whole new purpose. I felt a constant need to get things done and started project after project giddy with excitement. My roommates weren’t entirely sure what to make of sudden thirst for life. While they were happy because it seemed the real me was back they questioned where all this new found energy had came from and urged me to get some sleep. But I didn’t have much time for sleep nor did I feel the need to do so. My friends all laughed as I dragged them along for spontaneous road trips, dancing till dawn, and whatever other ideas I could come up with. Before long though, my energy levels would start to drop. And with a heavy sigh I would retreat back to my room, curled up under the blankets, hiding from the world.

This up and down pattern made it hard to accomplish any of my major life goals.  I had to drop out of school because I couldn’t make it through a semester without a depressive episode leaving me unable to complete my work. I had a hard time holding a job because my work performance and attendance often depended on my mood. Eventually I had to move back to St. Louis because I couldn’t support myself in Tampa. This continued on until I was twenty three. At that point I decided to finally seek help for my eating disorder which had never been under control aside from a few forced stints in treatment.

Off to San Diego I went unsure of how I really felt about recovery but well aware of the fact that if something didn’t change soon, I was going to wind up dead.

           

After being in treatment a few months my psychiatrist told me the reason the antidepressants weren’t working was because I was actually in fact bipolar. I welcomed the new diagnosis happy to finally have an explanation for what my life had been like in the years leading up to that moment. Now I knew what was wrong. I could find the right medications to balance me out and hopefully live a more normal life. My ride on the emotional roller coaster was now at an end. Or so I thought. Turns out finding the right mix of meds and getting insurance to pay for them is a little easier said than done. And of course I didn’t help matters by foolishly thinking I could use the meds only when I was depressed, and still be able to enjoy the highs that came along with being bipolar.

 I actually tried to do just that until my first real manic episode hit. This wasn’t the fun loving life and getting crazy amounts of things accomplished that I was accustomed to. Instead my thoughts were racing so quickly that I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I blew through money that I didn’t even have. I tried drinking to get myself to fall asleep since it had been days since the last time I even took a nap but that only ended up with me being blackout drunk and making a complete fool of myself.

 After almost a month of complete insanity my parents and close friend tried to get me to go get help. At that point I wanted nothing to do with such things. I crawled out my bedroom window and ran away in hopes they wouldn’t make me go. After tracking me down they took me to talk to someone at a psychiatric hospital the next day. Somehow I managed to convince this person that I just needed group therapy and start my medications up again and I would be fine. They wrote me a script and let me walk out the door with the promise of returning to group therapy the next day. My parents reluctantly dropped me off at home with instructions to check in with them frequently.

At some point that night I got the incredible urge to go on a road trip. A good friend of mine was shopping for wedding dresses in Tampa that week, how fun would it be if I showed up to surprise her. I made it to Atlanta then my parents who were beyond frustrated at this point told me to turn around and come back home. At this point I was running out and money and I was starting to feel myself come down from my high. I made it back to Tennessee before calling a friend who sent my parents to pick me up at the cheap motel I finally crashed at. Needless to say, outpatient wasn’t an option this time, and when we returned to Missouri our first stop was the psychiatric hospital.

Once stable again I returned home to pick up the pieces of my life I had so carelessly thrown around in my manic state. I was mortified at the way I had acted, the things I had said, and the way I treated the people I love the most. I knew then I never wanted anything like this to happen again. I found a cocktail of medications that worked well for me Lithium and Latuda. They don’t give me very many side effects which is a blessing since most of the drugs used to treat bipolar come with very unwanted reactions.

 I quickly learned that it isn’t as simple as just taking your meds every day. Highs and lows will still come and adjustments will need to be made. As much as I like to live on a whim and be spontaneous, routine is better for me. Getting into a regular sleep pattern is crucial to avoid slipping into hypomanic or manic episodes. I have to upfront and honest with a good core group of people who I trust in order to ensure the bumps in the road I inevitably encounter don’t throw my whole life off track. This means sharing the parts that I am most embarrassed of which isn’t the most exciting thing in the world.  

This also helps with my recovery from my eating disorder. I have found that I need to make a conscience effort to eat three meals a day regardless of how hungry I may or may not be. I have to make the choice not to purge every time after I eat. I have to focus on who I am as a person and not pay attention to what I look like. Certain foods I know I will end up binging on so I don’t allow myself to keep them in my house.

When I left for San Diego I thought recovery would mean I could package all these parts of myself up leaving them in my past and that besides taking a few different medications each day I would be totally fine. ‘Normal’ even, whatever that is. Now at twenty seven I know that is not the case. Recovery is instead a choice I make each day, sometimes I make each minute. The fact that I am bipolar and have an eating disorder will forever be a part of me, but they have shaped me into the person I am today. Without them I never would have realized my strength to overcome whatever it is life throws at me nor would I have the compassion that I do today without these things. Although they are a part of me, they do not define who I am as a person. That is something that is entirely up to me.

So there you have it, my life in a tiny, teeny package or at least as close as you will get to that.