An Open Letter to a Struggling Friend

Hey you.

It looks like things aren’t going so well right now. In fact it looks like things suck balls right now. It looks like you’re terrified and hurting, and you don’t know how to let people help without giving up who you are and all your coping mechanisms.

Trust me, I understand. I understand what it’s like to know, deep down in your gut, that what you’re doing is right and that everyone else should piss right off because they don’t get it. I understand what it’s like to know that you can’t get through a day without doing those things that everyone else says are “bad” and “dangerous” and “self-destructive”, but you know that you wouldn’t even be alive right now if you couldn’t use them to cope.

I also know what it feels like to not want to be alive anymore. I don’t have any trite words of wisdom about how it gets better. Some days I’m still not convinced that I make the right decision by choosing life over and over again. Life is exhausting and thankless, and seems to be a hamster wheel of attempts at happiness. I don’t know what we get out of it, and I don’t know whether it’s worth it. What I do know is that I care about not hurting people, about being a compassionate, decent human being. I know you do too. And I know for a fact that hurting yourself will hurt many, many other people. Not a small, insignificant hurt either. The kind of hurt that lasts and lingers and comes out of nowhere when you least expect it.

You know that kind of hurt.

I know it comes across as unfair and guilting when other people ask you to be healthy for their sake. They don’t know how hard it is. You’re not doing anything to them. You have the right to your own life, and they need to get over it. You’re doing what you need to do to get by, so screw everyone else who wants to change that. Why is it your responsibility to take care of everyone else’s god damned emotions?

It isn’t fair. In no way is it fair. However it is also the reality of the situation that your actions affect others, and if you want to be consistent with your values you have to start taking care of yourself. You also have to start listening. I know that you are a strong, brazen individual who doesn’t give a fuck…except that you do. You give so many fucks and that’s why it hurts so bad when others are hurting. That’s why you have to poke and poke at the people who want to hurt you, that’s why you want to prove you’re stronger than it all, that’s why you want to look stone-faced. It couldn’t possibly get any worse, could it? Maybe it will get bad enough this time that you won’t have to keep going, you’ll be able to give up.

That doesn’t work. I have tried nearly every trick in the book to turn off the feelings. They keep coming back. Always.

And you and I have something in common that means you will never give up. We have a special kind of stubborn streak. You may be the only other person I’ve met who has one quite like mine. It’s the kind of stubborn streak that means we never leave things half-assed, including our own lives. Oftentimes it leads to problems. But this is one of those times where the stubborn can be used to your benefit. You will hold on to your bad patterns with the strength of Superman, but you will also hold on to life because change is terrifying and you’re used to being alive. Relish that stubbornness. Relish the fact that you’ll survive just to prove that you fucking can and you’ll be fine without any help thanks very much.

Except of course that you won’t be fine without any help.

There are people who are telling you that they love you and that they want to help. That’s not what you want to hear. You want to hear that they’ll leave you alone because you don’t even know what help looks like and you don’t know how things could possibly get any better (because they always seem to find a way to get worse). Somehow it doesn’t hit that these people really might have a perspective that you can learn from. How on earth would they know better than you about your life? They think they care about you and they think they love you, but if they knew who you really were they wouldn’t? They’re lying, it’s a trap, it’s a trick, they’re condescending fucks.

Or that’s what you tell yourself.

In reality, you cannot understand how terrified and in love your friends are. You will never understand what you mean to them. You will never understand how badly it hurts them when you lash out, when you tell them that you know they hate you. You think that you have to be the one to manage them all, to keep them in line. You have to come up with the magic bullet that will fix all your problems and they’ll stand there and smile nicely and maybe lend a hand, but they don’t know what’s going on and so they can’t help.

Except that each of your friends has an entire lifetime of coping behind them. The feeling of finally being able to fall into their arms and give it all up is amazing. They might not know exactly what to do, but a little bit of trust goes a long way: they probably know how to help a lot better than you think they do. They are willing to put up with so much more than you think they are.

Imagine, briefly, that one of us was far away and hurting. Imagine that we were cutting off contact, instigating fights, hurting ourself. Imagine what you would do to get to us, to save us, to make god damn certain that we were ok. Imagine how badly you would want to fold us in your arms and get us to a doctor and shut out the rest of the stupid world until we were safe.

And I get that it feels like we want to control you, and I get that it feels like you’re a damned adult and you can handle yourself, and I get that this all feels like a stupid overreaction and you don’t want it. But you know what being an adult means? It means taking responsibility for your relationships. It means being willing to do shit that is hard and terrifying and unpleasant. It means being willing to talk to your friends and listen when they say they’re worried and do silly, potentially useless things to help calm their fears.

Because really, how would it hurt to let them in? Besides the overwhelming fear of rejection (which you’ve already forced by pushing them away), what would happen? You’d have to stop doing all the things that rip your body apart and leave you broken but in control (or so you tell yourself). You’d have to stop holding so damn tightly to all the little things in your life that are making you feel human.

So yeah, it does hurt to let them in. And maybe some of them won’t be able to handle it. And that is a horrible, miserable feeling. But I can promise you that if you don’t let your friends in, none of them will be able to handle it and you’ll be really, truly alone. I can promise that you KNOW it hurts right now. It may very well get worse if you ask for help and you do the damned hard work of learning new ways to cope. In fact it probably will. For a while. It is a thankless task. But when you hear your friends and family saying things like “I never could have said this to you a year ago”, or you notice how much more relaxed they are around you, or how you haven’t felt like you have to hide or lie in weeks…somehow it’s a little bit worth it.

I’m not going to tell you it will all get better. There are no rainbows and unicorns. But you can get better. You can do better. And I expect better of you. I know that you’re hurting, but that doesn’t give you license to treat your friends the way you have. So please, stand up and be the version of yourself that is vulnerable, open, and compassionate, to yourself and to others.

I love you more than you can imagine.

Olivia

Taking the Long View: On Recovery and Motivation

Recovery from a mental illness is a rough gig. I’ve written many times before about how I wish people would be more honest about just how difficult it is and what that difficulty looks like. Right now, my motivation is low. I want to be done with this stupid, frustrating, painful process. I want people to just leave me alone to wallow and make bad decisions. I want to be allowed to feel bad.

This is basically how I feel all the time right now

Now in the traditional narrative of recovery, this means that I’m slipping. It means the “eating disorder voice” or the depression is getting louder. It means that what I really need to do is double down and fight harder. It’s part of the “roller coaster ride” of recovery. If I don’t nip it in the bud though, then I’ll have given up, I’ll have wasted my progress. I’ll be back to square one, fallen harder than I did the first time and it’s all because I didn’t have “the proper motivation” or I didn’t “fight hard enough”. So if I’m slipping I need to keep my eye on the prize of recovery, think about how great I’ll feel, post a few affirmations around my house, and remind myself once again that I can’t live my life the way I have been living it (because who wants to live in the hell of an eating disorder if you can have recovery, amirite?)

If I was telling the story of my eating disorder, that would be the expectation of how I’d frame this. But that is not the reality. Here is the reality.

Recovery sucks. By most basic cost/benefit analysis standards, it’s a really risky, difficult, long venture. It takes flipping forever, and the time that you put into treatment is not fun. In fact it’s more than not fun: most of the time you feel even worse during treatment than you did when you were happily living out your delusion that starvation was the way to a great life. Things have suddenly gotten a whole hell of a lot more complicated and you can’t just rely on rules anymore. So say you’ve been trucking along in your mental illness and then treatment comes and hits you like a ton of bricks. You spend the next 2/3/4/5/forever years working through mountains of crap. And those years SUCK.

And the more you realize that they suck, the more you realize that a lot of the suckiness will still be there even if you do “recover” because life isn’t easy and being healthy isn’t easy and it’s hard work to enforce your boundaries and balance your needs with the needs of others and fight against sexist and damaging media and somehow put together a clear and cohesive identity that can stand up to the trials of life. So you get this picture that in the long run you’re going through a whole hell ton of suffering right now to maybe feel like you can cope with the fact that life is really hard later.

Now pile on the fact that it often looks as if you’ve made no progress whatsoever. Seriously. I’ve been at this for about 3 years (with the same therapist), through intensive programs, groups, dieticians and many, many, many hours of therapy, and a lot of commitment. Three years is a long time to be spending at least 2 hours every week in therapy and most of the time in between wrestling with all the hard questions. And yet when I think about the things that really get in the way of feeling content or grounded, I see no change. Perfectionism still drives me. I still feel unlovable. I still cannot accept praise and focus exclusively on the negative. I can still be flattened emotionally by one negative comment. I still personalize, I still tend towards black and white thinking, I still feel anxiety for no reason, I am still afraid of social interactions…

Logically, it makes sense to be a little low on motivation when there is little evidence of how far you’ve come, much evidence of the pain you’ve suffered and will continue to suffer, and no guarantee that things will be a whole lot better if you continue to work (for another 3/4/5 years?). Part of recovery is trying to make sense of what is worth it and what isn’t, what life can or can’t be like. This isn’t some sort of slip, this isn’t an indication that I just need to fight harder. This is coming to grips with reality.

But there’s another truth and it’s one that I’ve had a really hard time accepting. It’s about the long view. I spent the better part of 20 years developing these really bad coping strategies. It will take me a long time to change them, nearly certainly more than 3 years. For many things that I care about I am willing to invest huge amounts of time (schooling as an example), often because I can see that the end goal is worth it. And many times I can make these investments on faith (when someone tells me that I’ll get a diploma at the end as an example). With nearly everything else in my life, I can take the long view; I am willing to put up with the pain of the now to get something in the future, even when that something isn’t happiness or a perfect life. Why does the pay off for treatment have to be held to a different standard?

Now there are very real differences here. I like school, the pain that I’ve experienced while in treatment far outstrips anything else I’ve ever felt, and the evidence I have of the benefits of recovery aren’t as strong as the evidence I have of many other things (that, for example, a higher degree would make my life a lot easier). Recovery is harder than anything else I have done in my life because when I look at it logically I can’t guarantee that I’m making the right choice to pursue it. But if I look at the long haul, I can see that I can’t come to the conclusion that it’s failed yet. The experiment has to continue. And I do believe that when people are waning in their motivation, it’s because they are re-analyzing the long view and that view is scary.

But I hope others can join me in realizing that it has to be long, but we are capable.

 

 

 

Thoughtfulness, Tragedy, and Autonomy

A few weeks ago I wrote about some of the rhetoric that we use around women’s rights and their autonomy in terms of their own bodies. In particular, I focused on women’s health, and how the dialogue around women’s health tended to have two modes: “this is serious, debilitating, and tragic” or “A WOMAN DID SOMETHING WITH HER OWN BODY WOOHOO!” I believe that this type of dichotomy exists in all sorts of places in women’s lives, and that it doesn’t do women any good. When we are talking about women’s lives, almost nothing exists in the black and white places of life. More often than not, there is a dialectic. Something can be empowering and good while also being thoughtful or difficult. To look at a particular example from my own life: my attempts at recovering from an eating disorder are clearly a form of taking my own empowerment in hand and standing up to many of the expectations of women in my life. However at the same time it is something that comes with a great deal of pain, a great deal of stress and anguish and difficulty, and a great deal of thought and reflection. Most of the empowering things in our lives come only after deliberation and reflection.

 

Because of the role of oppression in women’s lives, we need to be extremely careful about understanding how the personal and the communal interplay in any individual decision that a woman makes. For example, I am all for applauding when a woman exercises her rights over her body, but having some empathy for the fact that it might have been a hard or confusing or thought-filled decision is probably a good idea. Societally, when a woman takes control of her own body and does something like have an abortion or have a mastectomy, she is helping to break down patriarchal values and oppression for everyone around her, including herself. However personally, these may be decisions that required some thought, that were painful or uncomfortable, or that just were not fun. We are allowed to both praise something and show sympathy for whatever toll it might have taken on the individual who enacted it.

 

Having empathy about the experiences that women go through while they are exercising their rights allows us to hear the individual experiences, something that has always been hugely important to the women’s movement. We cannot try to improve women’s experiences unless we actually take the time to hear what those experiences are.

 

Particularly in the realm of women’s health, we can both applaud someone for the fact that they have done something bold in their personal choices, while also recognizing that most health decisions and procedures come with some price and that we should be aware of that. We should recognize and celebrate that women go through complex thought processes surrounding their mental health. We should make it HARD for conservatives to view us as stupid little womens who don’t know anything about their own health and who just frivolously run around cutting pieces of ourselves off. We should respect each other enough to make thoughtfulness (without tragedy) part of the dialogue about women’s health. It’s something that is often missing. More often we hear about morality, or about rights, or about access, or about money. Rarely do we stop and listen to deliberations that women have to go through in order to make their healthcare decisions, particularly when they are in oppressive situations that limit their access. When thoughtfulness does come into the dialogue, it’s often as a way of casting women’s healthcare and health choices as something tragic, difficult, or heartbreaking in a way that men’s health is not (few people talk about how thought-filled the decision to get a vasectomy is, despite the fact that people probably put a great deal of thought into it).

 

Indeed the idea that “thoughtful” necessarily means difficult is simply wrong and unhelpful. We are thoughtful about many things. Sometimes they’re difficult and also positive (deciding where to go to college), sometimes they’re difficult and heartbreaking (whether to pull the plug on a dying relative) sometimes they’re not difficult at all and they’re just great (like trying to decide which flavor of cupcake to buy…that takes a lot of thought let me tell you) and sometimes they’re not difficult but they kind of suck anyway (like choosing to get a pap smear, which I always think about and always know what I’m going to answer and always hate the answer to anyway). We think about all kinds of things and we make decisions based on thought processes all the time. Saying that something requires thought or reflection doesn’t necessarily mean that we don’t know what we’re going to answer or that it will hurt us or that it will have a negative consequence. It just means we wanted to make sure it was the right decision.

 

We need to create space for the ways that women actively navigate their lives, and the balance that they must constantly keep between their personal needs, their personal decision making, and the societal pressures around them. We need to keep in mind that while a woman might have really loved getting that abortion because it was exactly the right thing in her life, there are social repercussions and we should be empathetic to that. We need to keep in mind all the sacrifices that women make nearly every time they make a choice about how to exercise their autonomy. And the more we do this, the less we will have black and white thinking and dichotomies, and the more we will have a conscientious dialogue with other women about how frustrating it is to navigate the world we live in, in which there are almost no “right” choices, only better choices. I think that definitionally, as women, nearly every decision we make has to be thoughtful (obviously there are some exceptions, but when you’re part of an oppressed group you’re forced to be more conscious of your decisions). And because of this, we are always aware of the costs and the benefits of our decisions. Now we need to start recognizing that process in others.