Part 3
I'm addicted to food. We can debate the meaning of addiction and whether it's really a medical problem. We can debate whether it's about willpower or if it's a nearly unbeatable mental compulsion, but it's pretty certain that I have a food addiction.
I love food. I don't mean that in the way a gourmet does, although I do. I mean that food is the object of my need to love something and feel loved in return. Food is how I make myself happy. It's how I get through the day.
Now, we can all see the obvious problem here. Food is inanimate. It can't receive my love, nor can it love me back. It is simply the thing that I have put in place so that I can fulfill the human need to feel love and happiness. It is also killing me. I'm morbidly obese and a type II diabetic. Like so many doomed romances, my love is slowly breaking me down, body and spirit.
My addiction to food has built my prison. My body is so large, so abnormal, that most people stay away. It's hard to make friends. It's harder to confidently ask a girl out for coffee. I have built a desperate wall of flesh around myself that very few can penetrate. The sad thing is, I needed to do it.
When you're a depressed child, you need to feel happy. You have to feel happy. Humans need some happiness or we die. I was an unhappy child and teenager. I idn't have a lot of friends. I was weird and always a little overweight. My father was basically absentee, and my mother had been dragged into running a the business with him so she absent as well. More, my interaction with her had become very uncomfortable for reasons I didn't really understand until I was an adult. She was being emotionally battered by the same man I was. Add to that the stress of watching a business, and thus our livelihood, wither and die, and creating a loving, meaningful relationship was not high on anyone's list of priorities.
What mom could indulge was my desire to eat. Food was love. She had no time to cook, so it was take out, or convenience food. It was unhealthy as hell, especially in the portions I was eating, but it was great to a kid. Food became the symbol of maternal love. It was the best expression of maternal love that my mother could produce at what was pretty much the worst period of her life.
There's a real problem in replacing actual affection with the giving of objects. The objects themselves become the source of those good feelings. In time, food became the way I knew I was loved and felt happy. Not that someone was providing it for me, but the food itself. It was always there. It didn't call me names. It didn't yell at me. It didn't think I was a failure. Food, itself, was happiness.
There's clearly another facet to this: food creates its own problems. I have been steadily gaining weight since I was a small child. My weight isolates me and, as I am subject to the standards and mores of my culture, it makes me disgusted with myself. When I go out, I feel eyes on me. I feel the threat of attack from any person on the street, at any time. I've been verbally assaulted before. People driving by will yell at me. They call me a hippo. They call me lardass. Sometimes it's just "fatty!" At some point, I learned that the world didn't particularly want me out in public. So, more isolation, more sorrow, more food to feel better.
That's when I instinctively learned about the law of diminishing returns. Over time, food stopped being happiness. It stopped bringing me that sense of joy and well being I so desperately needed with all my soul. It became the means to stop feeling so bad. The high was basically gone, replaced with momentary cessation of sadness.
Now, I don't want to lie, here. Food can still give me a high, but it takes more and more to get that high. Mostly, though, it provides temporary respite from a nagging, bone deep ache that comes from being isolated as well as clinically depressed.
That depression, and the need to make it stop is the real core of the issue. It's what none of my therapists have ever really been able to address. My depression is a deep, dark, terrifying hole that I can't help but slide into. It takes over my thoughts. I'm irrational when I'm depressed. I'm scared. I also am absolutely certain that life is not worth living.
I live in fear of my depression.
Every minute of every day.
Food helps lift me out of it, if ever so slightly. It makes me feel just a little better so I can go on living. Not thriving, mind you. There's no great creative boost that I get after eating or an energy rush. It just lets me go another day without killing myself. The misery is still there, but it's lessened just enough to go away and come again another day. Every day. Into that charming scenario, we inject a therapist.
I want to make it very clear that I'm not opposed to therapy. I have a great therapist. We've made great strides together. I adore him. I consider him my most trusted adviser. What no therapist has presented me with is a means to go without happiness long enough to not binge eat. I live in fear of my life getting so miserable that I want to die. The one thing that keeps me from feeling that way, the one thing that has never abandoned me or hurt my feelings, is food. That's the terror that I as an addict, and many, many other addicts, face. We fear that the one thing we need to keep our lives just barely livable will be taken away and there is nothing we can trust to take its place. Our addictions are destroying us. We know that. I, personally have no illusions that I have severely shortened my life expectancy and overall happiness by binge eating. It's also the only alternative my screaming, self loathing depression can see that isn't suicide.
So, what therapists have asked me to do is give up this one lifeline in favor of... something else. Usually, they tell me that it's the long term reward that should replace the food. If I give up the food, if I work out, if I do this for years, I will be thinner and happier. I will have easier access to the rest of society. I won't be so alone.
Great, but in the meantime, I face an indeterminate amount of time without the one thing that makes me safe in the slim hope of something else coming along. That thing coming along, by the way, would be people. Almost all of the hurt I have experienced in my life has come from people I have developed emotional attachments to. So... fantastic. I give up the thing I desperately want to make me feel better in order to get access to intimacy and relationships, which have caused the most intense pains I have ever experienced.
That's the dilemma facing mental health professionals trying to help people: we need the end goal before we can give up the self destructive crutch that is keeping healthy happiness from us. It's a critical dilemma. How can I trust that I will not die when my fix is gone. How can I put off the only thing that keeps me alive and try to go months or years without anything to fill that horrifying void. It terrifies me.
I know that a lot of you don't understand that fear. If you don't suffer from depression and anxiety or a physical lack of safety, you generally can't relate to the irrational, awful, soul sucking nature of facing life without any hope of ever feeling good, or at least not so miserable you want to die, again. This isn't rational. It doesn't stand up to an analytical understanding of life. The equation is messed up. Well, for depressed people, especially those with addiction, and there are a lot of us, we live in a world of math that just doesn't work out. We've been depressed or hurt too many times to trust anything other than our own experiences. It's phenomenology turned inward. The sadness and fear seem real, so they are. Empirical evidence be damned.
A lot of people have tried to convince me that the suffering is worth it. If I go without binge eating, I'll lose weight. I'll feel better. I'll meet someone. It will take time, but it will happen and the time and effort will not kill me.
I don't trust them. I can't trust them. They don't understand how deep the hole is. Even the ones who do. I'm as trapped in my mind as I am in my own body. Neither my body nor my mind can grab hold of the fact that less food and more exertion will equal less weight and more access to healthy friendships and relationship.
I need the relationship and acceptance to come first. A lot of us do. I am, emotionally speaking, desperately holding on to a rock for fear of being swept out to see. I'm being battered by the freezing tide and my fingers are being torn raw. The sad thing is, if I just let go, if I risked the waves, I'd likely discover that the water isn't that deep. That, with considerable effort, I could walk to shore against the tide. I could lift myself out of the icy water that is weakening me. Worse, I can see others not only walking on the beach, but actually walking out of the tide to warmth and safety. They look happy.
Not me though. I've nearly drowned before and I know, I know with every fiber of my being that the beach drops off where I'm at. If I let go, I'll be pulled into deep water and drown. I' have to hold on and sit here, miserable, but without any alternative.
I have no idea how to resolve this. I need a miracle. I need for the beach to extend out to my rock. I need to see the beach, the dry sand, under my feet before I can let go. My mind won't accept any alternative. If I let go of the food, the depression will kill me. If I don't resist the depression with something healthier, the food will kill me.
That's the answer I want from therapy, friends, and family. I don't know how to survive depression without love. Love, for me, is food. It's the only love that hasn't betrayed me. Without love, I'll die. The depression will get bad enough, lonely enough, that I'll kill myself. I don't know how to balance that. My therapist, and my past ones, have said that I need to trust them. That I need to believe that they can see me through this. That they will help me develop the tools necessary to do the work, and not die. At my core, though. I don't trust them.
Well, really, I don't trust myself. I don't trust my own ability to survive the onslaught of seemingly unending depression with no immediate hope of respite. How do I prepare myself to resist that when I've always failed before? How do I trust that, like some after school special, I'll develop a sense fo calm and confidence that will make people want to be close to me, rather than be repulsed and run away? I want to know what these tools are. I want to know how, exactly, they're going to work. How they will prevent me from feeling so terrible that I want to die. Food works. I understand food. I know food. I don't know trust. I don't know intimacy. I don't know confidence. These things all seem like the end result, rather than the tools to do the job. They're the amorphous finale reached at the end of the struggle. The desire for them certainly isn't enough. I've always wanted them desperately. It's the struggle I can't handle.
So far, I don't have the answer to these questions, and neither does anyone I've spoken to. I've never been able to get the balance just right do that I can trust enough to risk, then have the confidence to push further. Truth is, I don't even know what order these things really need to come in. My fear is absolute. The solution needs to be as well. I know, with metaphysical certainty that my sadness and fear will overwhelm me without food. The solution needs to be, or at least feel, just that certain.
I love food. I don't mean that in the way a gourmet does, although I do. I mean that food is the object of my need to love something and feel loved in return. Food is how I make myself happy. It's how I get through the day.
Now, we can all see the obvious problem here. Food is inanimate. It can't receive my love, nor can it love me back. It is simply the thing that I have put in place so that I can fulfill the human need to feel love and happiness. It is also killing me. I'm morbidly obese and a type II diabetic. Like so many doomed romances, my love is slowly breaking me down, body and spirit.
My addiction to food has built my prison. My body is so large, so abnormal, that most people stay away. It's hard to make friends. It's harder to confidently ask a girl out for coffee. I have built a desperate wall of flesh around myself that very few can penetrate. The sad thing is, I needed to do it.
When you're a depressed child, you need to feel happy. You have to feel happy. Humans need some happiness or we die. I was an unhappy child and teenager. I idn't have a lot of friends. I was weird and always a little overweight. My father was basically absentee, and my mother had been dragged into running a the business with him so she absent as well. More, my interaction with her had become very uncomfortable for reasons I didn't really understand until I was an adult. She was being emotionally battered by the same man I was. Add to that the stress of watching a business, and thus our livelihood, wither and die, and creating a loving, meaningful relationship was not high on anyone's list of priorities.
What mom could indulge was my desire to eat. Food was love. She had no time to cook, so it was take out, or convenience food. It was unhealthy as hell, especially in the portions I was eating, but it was great to a kid. Food became the symbol of maternal love. It was the best expression of maternal love that my mother could produce at what was pretty much the worst period of her life.
There's a real problem in replacing actual affection with the giving of objects. The objects themselves become the source of those good feelings. In time, food became the way I knew I was loved and felt happy. Not that someone was providing it for me, but the food itself. It was always there. It didn't call me names. It didn't yell at me. It didn't think I was a failure. Food, itself, was happiness.
There's clearly another facet to this: food creates its own problems. I have been steadily gaining weight since I was a small child. My weight isolates me and, as I am subject to the standards and mores of my culture, it makes me disgusted with myself. When I go out, I feel eyes on me. I feel the threat of attack from any person on the street, at any time. I've been verbally assaulted before. People driving by will yell at me. They call me a hippo. They call me lardass. Sometimes it's just "fatty!" At some point, I learned that the world didn't particularly want me out in public. So, more isolation, more sorrow, more food to feel better.
That's when I instinctively learned about the law of diminishing returns. Over time, food stopped being happiness. It stopped bringing me that sense of joy and well being I so desperately needed with all my soul. It became the means to stop feeling so bad. The high was basically gone, replaced with momentary cessation of sadness.
Now, I don't want to lie, here. Food can still give me a high, but it takes more and more to get that high. Mostly, though, it provides temporary respite from a nagging, bone deep ache that comes from being isolated as well as clinically depressed.
That depression, and the need to make it stop is the real core of the issue. It's what none of my therapists have ever really been able to address. My depression is a deep, dark, terrifying hole that I can't help but slide into. It takes over my thoughts. I'm irrational when I'm depressed. I'm scared. I also am absolutely certain that life is not worth living.
I live in fear of my depression.
Every minute of every day.
Food helps lift me out of it, if ever so slightly. It makes me feel just a little better so I can go on living. Not thriving, mind you. There's no great creative boost that I get after eating or an energy rush. It just lets me go another day without killing myself. The misery is still there, but it's lessened just enough to go away and come again another day. Every day. Into that charming scenario, we inject a therapist.
I want to make it very clear that I'm not opposed to therapy. I have a great therapist. We've made great strides together. I adore him. I consider him my most trusted adviser. What no therapist has presented me with is a means to go without happiness long enough to not binge eat. I live in fear of my life getting so miserable that I want to die. The one thing that keeps me from feeling that way, the one thing that has never abandoned me or hurt my feelings, is food. That's the terror that I as an addict, and many, many other addicts, face. We fear that the one thing we need to keep our lives just barely livable will be taken away and there is nothing we can trust to take its place. Our addictions are destroying us. We know that. I, personally have no illusions that I have severely shortened my life expectancy and overall happiness by binge eating. It's also the only alternative my screaming, self loathing depression can see that isn't suicide.
So, what therapists have asked me to do is give up this one lifeline in favor of... something else. Usually, they tell me that it's the long term reward that should replace the food. If I give up the food, if I work out, if I do this for years, I will be thinner and happier. I will have easier access to the rest of society. I won't be so alone.
Great, but in the meantime, I face an indeterminate amount of time without the one thing that makes me safe in the slim hope of something else coming along. That thing coming along, by the way, would be people. Almost all of the hurt I have experienced in my life has come from people I have developed emotional attachments to. So... fantastic. I give up the thing I desperately want to make me feel better in order to get access to intimacy and relationships, which have caused the most intense pains I have ever experienced.
That's the dilemma facing mental health professionals trying to help people: we need the end goal before we can give up the self destructive crutch that is keeping healthy happiness from us. It's a critical dilemma. How can I trust that I will not die when my fix is gone. How can I put off the only thing that keeps me alive and try to go months or years without anything to fill that horrifying void. It terrifies me.
I know that a lot of you don't understand that fear. If you don't suffer from depression and anxiety or a physical lack of safety, you generally can't relate to the irrational, awful, soul sucking nature of facing life without any hope of ever feeling good, or at least not so miserable you want to die, again. This isn't rational. It doesn't stand up to an analytical understanding of life. The equation is messed up. Well, for depressed people, especially those with addiction, and there are a lot of us, we live in a world of math that just doesn't work out. We've been depressed or hurt too many times to trust anything other than our own experiences. It's phenomenology turned inward. The sadness and fear seem real, so they are. Empirical evidence be damned.
A lot of people have tried to convince me that the suffering is worth it. If I go without binge eating, I'll lose weight. I'll feel better. I'll meet someone. It will take time, but it will happen and the time and effort will not kill me.
I don't trust them. I can't trust them. They don't understand how deep the hole is. Even the ones who do. I'm as trapped in my mind as I am in my own body. Neither my body nor my mind can grab hold of the fact that less food and more exertion will equal less weight and more access to healthy friendships and relationship.
I need the relationship and acceptance to come first. A lot of us do. I am, emotionally speaking, desperately holding on to a rock for fear of being swept out to see. I'm being battered by the freezing tide and my fingers are being torn raw. The sad thing is, if I just let go, if I risked the waves, I'd likely discover that the water isn't that deep. That, with considerable effort, I could walk to shore against the tide. I could lift myself out of the icy water that is weakening me. Worse, I can see others not only walking on the beach, but actually walking out of the tide to warmth and safety. They look happy.
Not me though. I've nearly drowned before and I know, I know with every fiber of my being that the beach drops off where I'm at. If I let go, I'll be pulled into deep water and drown. I' have to hold on and sit here, miserable, but without any alternative.
I have no idea how to resolve this. I need a miracle. I need for the beach to extend out to my rock. I need to see the beach, the dry sand, under my feet before I can let go. My mind won't accept any alternative. If I let go of the food, the depression will kill me. If I don't resist the depression with something healthier, the food will kill me.
That's the answer I want from therapy, friends, and family. I don't know how to survive depression without love. Love, for me, is food. It's the only love that hasn't betrayed me. Without love, I'll die. The depression will get bad enough, lonely enough, that I'll kill myself. I don't know how to balance that. My therapist, and my past ones, have said that I need to trust them. That I need to believe that they can see me through this. That they will help me develop the tools necessary to do the work, and not die. At my core, though. I don't trust them.
Well, really, I don't trust myself. I don't trust my own ability to survive the onslaught of seemingly unending depression with no immediate hope of respite. How do I prepare myself to resist that when I've always failed before? How do I trust that, like some after school special, I'll develop a sense fo calm and confidence that will make people want to be close to me, rather than be repulsed and run away? I want to know what these tools are. I want to know how, exactly, they're going to work. How they will prevent me from feeling so terrible that I want to die. Food works. I understand food. I know food. I don't know trust. I don't know intimacy. I don't know confidence. These things all seem like the end result, rather than the tools to do the job. They're the amorphous finale reached at the end of the struggle. The desire for them certainly isn't enough. I've always wanted them desperately. It's the struggle I can't handle.
So far, I don't have the answer to these questions, and neither does anyone I've spoken to. I've never been able to get the balance just right do that I can trust enough to risk, then have the confidence to push further. Truth is, I don't even know what order these things really need to come in. My fear is absolute. The solution needs to be as well. I know, with metaphysical certainty that my sadness and fear will overwhelm me without food. The solution needs to be, or at least feel, just that certain.