The Toad Blog

After posting yesterday’s entry things went totally crazy. I suffer from a severe and enduring mental health problem in the form of what is called a Borderline Personality Disorder. It is so called because it is a mental health condition that borders on lots of other mental health problems. I border on symptoms of schizophrenia, manic depression (bipolar), depression and have an Eating Disorder. I suffer from symptoms of these problems, without having enough of the symptoms to have something like Bipolar diagnosed in its entirety. I get very paranoid and lately have been getting really angry.

My anger is just crazy when it comes over me. I shout and totally lose my temper with TuT. I become convinced that my paranoid thoughts are the truth and anyone that disagrees with me just ignites my anger further. When I get into my disordered thinking as a result of my personality disorder I stop being able to care for myself. I don’t eat properly or take showers or baths. I can do dangerous things like self harming; my left arm is a mass of scars from the days when I would channel my anger towards myself. I’ve attempted suicide numerous times, and as recently as last August I locked TuT out of the house and took an overdose. I really am one crazy chick when the Personality Disorder comes out to play and it’s scary.

I am so angry about my weight gain. In gaining weight I have lost so much of myself. My confidence, self esteem and feelings of self worth are all rock bottom; bordering on non existent. When I first starting seeing fiancé TuT I’d lost a lot of weight and was continuing to lose weight. We had a big chat one day in the car coming back from shopping and TuT was saying not to lose any more weight. I agreed with him but said under no circumstances did I want to gain any.

“Just a small gain of a couple of pounds and it’ll destroy me. I won’t go out the house. I will be depressed. I stay this weight and that’s it – no gains!!”

I said with strong emotions running through me. For the first time in my adult life I was a nice size 10/12. I loved buying clothes and getting dressed up. Now my uniform is my black track suit bottoms and blokey black fleece I flinched from TuT.

I know that the gain is not my fault, although I have spent the last 18 months thinking that I have been eating too much, and it is going to take some time before this way of thinking changes and I can enjoy a healthy meal without feeling guilty. I got a fantastic email that really made my day today from a lovely girl called Sara Lake. Her blog, www.sanafit.blogspot.com, is brilliant reading and so inspiring. I had some questions about how she was going about getting fit and slim so I dropped her a mail. Sara replied so quickly and had even taken the time to read this blog and told me she loved the story about the red-coated lady cheering me on when I was running. What was really interesting was what Sara wrote about my weight gain :

“As for your weight gain, I think you can stop blaming yourself. I have seen two cases like this of massive, ‘unexplained’ weightgain. One of them was taking Depo Provera injections (as a nice bonus, she also got full-face acne every time she got the shots), the other was on anti-depressants. Both returned to normal weight once the meds were changed.”

This made me feel so much better, especially the part that once the meds were changed their weights returned to normal. I had TuT frantically searching the web last night to find out how quickly the injection will be out of my system and when I can start to expect to see some improvement on the weight loss front. A part of me wants to stop trying to lose weight until the injection is fully out of my system, but doing this will probably lead to more weight gain and I will have to start from a higher weight once the injection gets out of my system. It just feels so horrible to diet hard at the coal face all week and have no chocolate at Easter to lose a mere pound. And this makes me angry. And Frustrated. The injection is not going to be out of my system until mid-May and this is stressing me out as that’s practically the summer and if I am still this weight into the summer it is going to be the worst thing – no vest tops, no short skirts, no nice dresses. Just me sweating away, probably in the blokey fleece that hides my rolls of flesh and fat.

As you can tell from today’s blog entry and the previous ones, this weight gain and trying to lose it is one of the biggest things on my mind at the moment. It feels like it is always there, never going away or changing or getting any better. This has had a knock-on effect with my mental health problems. TuT is worried that losing weight could flare up my borderline anorexia; when he expresses this I get SO ANGRY because I think he trying to stop me losing weight and wants me to stay fat and miserable. This is not true, I know this, he just wants me to be healthy. But yesterday the lid on the pressure cooker of my mind just exploded and I had probably my first borderline episode since moving. My anger knew no bounds, I believed TuT was playing mind games with me and my paranoia was out of control. All I could think about was how fat I am and there’s nothing I can do about it. I hate not being able to change things. My thoughts went round and round in circles winding me up more and more; getting more and more angry. Things got so out of control that I left the flat and refused to speak to TuT.

Things got so bad that TuT had to leave work as he feared for my safety. The state of mind I’d worked myself into, anything could have happened. He found me outside SpecSavers. He’d attempted to adjust my glasses the previous day and made them worse. This small thing became so important to me – it was essential that I got them adjusted correctly and did it that day, although I was wearing my spare pair. It was one of those days where the smallest things grow into mind-mountain-sized problems.

My glasses were fixed by a lovely optician and I started to feel calmer. TuT arrived and talked to me calmly and accompanied me to the library to return my books and bought me some lunch as I never eat when I have a borderline day. It took me a long time to eat my sandwich and drink my coffee but I felt better afterwards. Gradually things returned to normal, I just felt very very tired.

Today sees me back at the dieting coalface and not so out of control with my mental health. I managed to go out for a run after neglecting it for almost a week. I decided to walk for two minutes and run for three minutes for a total of 4km. This was fine until at the 2km mark it started hailing. Being pelted with sea-side hail hurts!! I managed to get shelter for a little while, but then the hail turned into steady rain and I just had to get wet and get myself home. I was reluctant to go running but TuT persuaded me as I haven’t been for so long. I can’t say I enjoyed getting pelted with hail and getting soaked to the bone wet, but now I am warm and showered I am glad I went for a run afterall, and wouldn’t you know it, the sun is now shining.