Tag: anorexia

January 21st. 

There have been a lot of ups and downs in the last few weeks. 

Shortly before New Year’s, I ran out of my antipsychotic, Seroquel, due to problems having it refilled. My wife had gone to the pharmacy for me since she was in the neighborhood. The pharmacy said the psychiatrist never sent the prescription over, my psychiatrist’s assistant (whom I finally got a hold of) said she had, and my psychiatrist—whom I talk to on the phone for a few minutes once a quarter—was out of office. There hasn’t been anyone else on my care team in quite some time. In the end, I missed two of my typical daily bedtime dose (went three days between taking it). 

Without the Seroquel, I didn’t sleep worth mentioning, and was basically awake for sixty hours straight. During that time, I felt great. I went about all of my waking routines as usual, perhaps with extra vigor, catching up on my monthly writing goal, and going to a previously scheduled experience gift of a guided painting night from my mom, with her and my wife. Despite increasing psychosis symptoms (and the complete lack of sleep), I began to feel that maybe there was no point in going back on the meds at all. In reality, I probably had something like a brief, withdrawal induced (hypo)manic episode of some kind. 

In the end, my psychiatrist’s assistant got a hold of my psychiatrist, who sent the prescription over again. Now that I was definitely in no state to drive, my wife went back to the pharmacy. They still said they didn’t have it. She called me to troubleshoot some more. In the end, it turned out she didn’t give the pharmacy my maiden name (and my psychiatrist/pharmacy seems to switch between my maiden and married names at random). I always give both names, and thought she’d observed this and would do the same (or at least the pharmacy might prompt her). In any case, problem solved. I went back on Seroquel and tried to bank extra sleep. 

Yet, after that, my mood, focus, symptoms, and energy plummeted. I became more anxious and moody, feeling self destructive. The increased psychosis symptoms continued; there’s Farrah, the recurring dog, teleporting around, and a song I was listening to, my father’s corpse, gibberish voices, more. 

I suddenly spent hours of my free time curled up on my office floor crying for no apparent reason. 

I relapsed and cut myself for the first time in over a year and a half, after a lot of resisting the urge. 

I couldn’t (can’t) write for long, no matter how clear the words are in my head. After finishing up my December goal on New Year’s Eve, despite a lot of time sitting and staring at my notebook, I haven’t posted anything since, my January goal deadline looming. 

I took two days off from my usual routines (though I taught a class in that time), the first time in over a month I did so without solid reason (holiday, travel, someone else’s cancellation). 

During the time I was off meds, I rapidly lost weight (not a lot, given that it was three days, but noticeable to someone who habitually hops on the scale several times a day, even after moving it to a bathroom I don’t go in much). I’m currently theorizing that the main reason my BMI is still low-normal and not underweight is because of the Seroquel, normally famous for making you gain weight—though I’ve lost some weight while on it, and am below my ideal weight, I am not losing at the rate I would normally. And that gave my eating disorder symptoms—primarily calorie restriction and overexercising—new life. About a month ago, I’d thrown out a crucial part of the enema kit I was abusing, sometimes multiple times a day, to “purge” in an attempt to quit; in stomach pain (unrelated), I acquired a new one, used it the once somewhat legitimately, but also very aware of my inability to quit with the kit around. After one more semi legitimate use, I gave the crucial piece to my wife and asked her to hide it, but later found it while she was out (Monday), and used it again. 

(I was supposed to be running a routine TNG meetup event that night, but for the first time since I started the group—about a year and a half ago—I decided, day of, that I was not up to going, and she was my backup host.)

I also did a lot of eating disorder related research (and general media consumption). I read Almost Anorexic and Elena Vanishing. 

I’ve still hosted the other TNG meetup event, and taught both virtual classes as scheduled so far this month. 

I took another night (Thursday) off from my usual routines. 

Yesterday, delusions joined the hallucination upswing. Why the fireplace would try to poison my dinner after failing to explode, even though I saw the smoke of it, I don’t know. Based on a dream I’d had, voices taunted that I was responsible for the long ago suicide of a then long ago former friend-quaintance. In a confused state as my wife tried to convince me to sleep it off, to try functionality again in the morning, I told her she was very pretty, and asked her whom she was, and where she had come from, picturing something like Farrah’s Void. 

“Uh… Queens?” she said.

“You’ve met the queen?” I asked, enthused, completely misunderstanding, yet also apparently with it enough to think that if you’d met the Queen, you were someone important, even though I didn’t know whom my own wife was, and if you’d asked me the Queen of what, I probably couldn’t have told you. 

Later, she told me, “You should go to sleep,” and I asked her if it was nice there, and if it was in Queens, and for directions. (I had no memory of this in the morning—I abruptly remembered it several days later while out on a walk, and started laughing, much to the confusion of onlookers.) 

But today—another morning off—I feel at a bit of a loss as to why this is (still) happening, or what to do next. 

… 

It’s January 22nd now. I took last night and this morning off from most of my daily routines again. To be fair, both were spent on nice, special occasion family things, and I caught up and got back on track before dinner and my evening routines today.

… 

January 23rd. The gibberish voices returned last night. I’ve been on track, though, and I’m experimenting with ways to rest more, stress less. 

I still can’t seem to write more than a few sentences at a time, even though I have a lot that seems ready to go in my head.  

It’s not even that I’m just unfocused. I’m not starting to write and then going to scroll the web intermittently instead. I open my notebook, or I open the document, and then I blink, look at the clock, and maybe half an hour’s gone by, there’s nothing on the page, nothing in my browsing history, and I have no idea what just happened. I seem to just be sitting and staring. 

This morning, I thought I’d try time tracking to figure out where in the world that time went. Every now and then, every few months or so, I track my actual time in detail for about a week, to make sure it’s going where I want it. Normally, it is.

Today, at 11:05, I took a break. I had a snack and I went on the swingset in the backyard. At about 11:35, I wrote that I was about to start writing. I felt inspired. Then I blinked, looked at the clock, and it was 12:15. Nothing in the document. Nothing in my browsing history. No clue. 

Shortly after writing the above, I mentioned the time tracking gap to my wife, who suggested I work at the extra desk in her office so she could see what happened/nudge me before I “blinked” and it was forty minutes later.

I sat down and opened up my notebook, and then apparently stared into the void. I remember more of a perception of time passing, but not much else. She nudged me at some point, but not much happened—minimal movements/speaking/response, almost catatonic. Eventually she got me to the bedroom for a nap, a little after 1:30, and I proceeded to sleep until almost 4, having strange, half awake feeling dreams and waking groggy, but feeling my recent normal between the missing times. 

I have no idea why I’m so tired. I’ve tried shifting my wakeup time twenty minutes later; I’ve done a lot of sleeping in lately; I’ve slept well and plenty overall. But I did feel like I was about to pass out, stumbling my way down the landing to my wife’s office earlier. 

… 

January 29th. I took the rest of the 23rd, and the 24th, off, then got back on track. Writing is going better—slow but steady, though I still haven’t posted anything—and I feel better overall. My energy’s up. Still feeling kind of overwhelmed as certain deadlines loom. Eating Disorder Mode has largely continued, unfortunately, with near daily enema purging, and falling into chewspitting again for the first time in two months or so. 

But I taught a class yesterday, with lots of people and lots of participation, and got other social time in, and that always perks me up. 

I’m tweaking my schedule for sustainability. I’ve shifted my wakeup and lights out time slightly later to better match my natural rhythms. Closed an unproductive gap and removed an admittedly unproductive item from my routines, but created a gap at night, after my wife goes to bed and my electronics get turned off, to get some alone time, offline, to decompress before Seroquel and lights out, maybe do some writing (and she gets her own gap before I wake up). Finally admitted that consistent grocery shopping—having to feel up to driving, physically shopping, the sensory experience of the store, so on—is still often a Lot for me, and handed the general shopping to my wife at her nudging (actually, a lot of this was her idea), though I’ll still make the list and handle all the rest. 

I’m hoping I’m still just a bit off kilter from the med mix up, and those changes will help both short and long term. If not, I still have my psychiatrist appointment in less than two weeks to discuss more.  

I’ve gone back and forth on whether this is a blog post, a failed start at an incondite blog post, or a little log I’m keeping for myself (outside of my usual journaling). As I read it over, it sounds like a pretty basic life update for a mental health blog, and while that’s not necessarily bad, it’s not quite my usual style, either. 

I’ve talked to a few different people recently about balancing different parts of my public image. Like almost anyone, I’m more inclined to show off my wins online than discuss the hard, or even, for me, mundane, parts of life. As someone whom people tell me they think of as an educator, a leader, a role model, it’s especially tempting to brush over things like mental health symptoms when in front of a larger audience. And I don’t like to worry anyone. 

But… I also write and teach on mental health, so at some point, it’s weird if I’ve never actually discussed or displayed symptoms in public as they happen, as part of life, in a sometimes unpretty way—only smoothed over, as part of topic centered pieces, after the fact. 

And I think it’s important for people to have a real reference for day to day, honest, non sensationalized mental illness, from inside of it, especially for the conditions shrouded in stigma. 

So, here it is. A few notable, but not entirely unusual, weeks in my life. 

I wrote a post a while back: “Tracking Contrivance vs. My Mental Health at the Time,” an exercise in tracing changes in my writing versus changes in my mental health.

For this post, I’m doing it again, with the emphasis on the I’ll Give You series.

(Note: this post was updated to go through the current month, after the original post.)

May 2020

It’s been most of a year since the whole “my father died suddenly at fifty-eight and I found his ten day old corpse in his house” thing. I seemed to be over the worst of the trauma response for a little while, but the pandemic struck full force two months ago, reports about overstuffed refrigerated trucks dominating the news. My grandmother passed just days ago at home in hospice care; I arrived just moments after her death to sit with family. 

I’ve spent most of a year buried in Contrivance, my dark, primary original fiction project of most of a decade, writing instead of sleeping. My fear of beds—too many bodies in too many beds, memory and flashback and nightmare and hallucination—is so bad, I’ve taken to sleeping on the floor in the loft (after scaring the daylights out of my best friend—now our quarantine roommate in the guest room—by unexpectedly sleeping on the couch, in the house we closed on the first day of March). I’m not on meds, and I’m Zooming my therapist weekly. The world is burning. I just got engaged.

And I need less doom and gloom.

The idea for a new writing project is slowly taking shape. Daydreams—erotic and otherwise—start to take real shape, the same characters, situations, themes, showing up again and again. I could use a distraction, a little side project. Maybe eighty-thousand words, I tell myself, a few months, one book. Just a detour while I figure out a few things about my real writing love, Contrivance. (It’s not you, it’s me. Maybe we just need a break.) 

I start hashing out character basics, scroll Zillow for setting inspiration, combining random ideas into a plot. I sit on the couch and talk it all out with my best friend, also a writer in need of distraction.

I’m taking an online writing workshop, and our prompt for a freewrite one day is company from out of town could mean trouble. I misinterpret it slightly—though the instructor stresses that it’s open to interpretation—and a plot is born, an enemy, a cause, an ending to the story. 

I start writing for real, and it’s like a dam bursting. I struggle with titles for a bit, but eventually settle on I’ll Give You Everything I Am (You’ll Give Me Everything I Want to Be). And I start posting it on Archive of Our Own to a silent reception for a full five chapters, because why not? 

July 2020

I am still writing like crazy—even winning Camp NaNoWriMo, writing over fifty thousand words in July alone—though I dropped out of the more structured writing workshop. (I finished a shorter one on dialogue, and I notice that this project’s dialogue is much more relaxed, natural, than in Contrivance, something I want to take with me to my edits.) I’m also picking up a bit of an audience, which is exciting, and a little nervewracking—I’ve never really written erotica before, not even something centered on romance. 

I’ve also picked up two tricky, additional main characters, whom I battle with—they want to throw grenades at my plot, and I would like them to go away and leave my three-month, eighty-thousand word, one-book side project alone. I retcon them out of past chapters where they’re not strictly needed only for them to pop up again, more significantly, later, until we’re seriously throwing the word polyamory around. 

I’m spending a lot of time at the park, on the swingset in triple digit heat, listening to music and trying to figure this project out. Who on Earth are these two, and where do they fit into my beautifully simple, tiny project? 

And so Jen and Clara are born. 

Meanwhile, my mental health isn’t going so well. I’m hallucinating regularly—mostly Dad, dead, and, of all things, a mysterious golden retriever puppy named Farrah. I’m catatonic for hours at a time, occasionally delusional, and generally a mess. 

I also start this—The Schizophrenia Diaries—because I sure have mental health things to talk about. I’m still maintaining my older blog—more alternative sexuality education—too, and that’s now picking up attention from my erotic fiction audience. 

My therapist thinks I should go back on meds, but I can’t even get in to my old psychiatrist.

Everyone is a mess right now. 

August 2020

I’ve accepted—mostly—that Jen and Clara exist. In Chapter Fourteen, Clara tells Lalia a story that just begs for more, about a time she ran away. In the middle of the night, in the dark, I fire up a new document and title it bluntly “The Night That Clara Ran Away”, a title which oddly sticks permanently, and has a few more stories titled in something like parody, like the later “The Night That Clara Just Wanted to Sleep” and “The Night That Evan Ran Away.”

So I begin writing companion stories. 

September 2020

I’m back on meds, and it’s mostly great. I’m sleeping at night, and all but bouncing with energy during the day. I stop seeing my therapist. My best friend moves in with my mom, and I get my own swingset in the backyard. Vaccines are on the horizon, my wedding is in two months. I’ve been posting Contrivance bits on their own website. A neurologist rules out the idea that I’m having seizures.

In that process, I’m required to do a sleep deprived EEG. So I pull an all nighter. My appointment also happens to be right after Yom Kippur. So I start fasting at sundown, sleep, fast for about twenty-six hours total, eat dinner, and then stay up all night, snacking, and have my morning appointment and then a full afternoon and evening awake, for a total of thirty-eight consecutive waking hours.

If one wasn’t psychotic at the start of that, they would be by the end. 

And, y’know, I was schizophrenic to start with.

In the middle of the all nighter, I create a Discord server to chat with myself, like a normal person, figuring out I’ll Give You plot bits. In that crazed night, the plot of what becomes Book Two—by now I’ve accepted a Book Two is coming—is born. 

November 2020

I get married. It is one of the best days of my life, and another one is close on its heels. 

I finish what I now acknowledge is only Book One of what I’ve hesitantly started to call the I’ll Give You series/trilogy, and, for fun, have a few copies vanity printed for me and friends. But now that I’ve put all the formatting work in… why not self publish? 

So I do. It’s surreal, to hold a published book that arrived in the mail, with hundreds of pages, a real cover, a summary on the back along with reader reviews, a dedication page with my wife’s name on it, and my (pen) name on the front.

But… that looks like a book, my mom says when I send her a picture. She had a vague understanding that I was posting erotica online after my best friend blurted it out at dinner, but is surprised—as am I—by the almost four hundred page hardcover in my hands.

Yeah. My quick little side project, indeed. 

To my shock, people who aren’t my mom even buy it.

December 2020

Encouraged, I start posting Contrivance in the same manner—serially, in order, as a book, on Archive of Our Own. It doesn’t get quite the same engagement, which is funny to me—Contrivance is still my precious baby in a way, not the I’ll Give You series, but that’s okay. Sex sells. I accept that. I’m also accepting I might actually know something about these things I’ve been writing about, and schedule my first classes as an alternative sexuality educator.

I think I’ve just about got things figured out—I know how Jen and Clara fit into my no longer so simple plot, I know how I like to post things, I know how self publishing works, I know what has an audience, I know how to talk to my mom about it, I know what’s coming in Book Two—and then, Clara tosses another grenade. 

She has an eating disorder. Anorexia, specifically. Well, mostly recovered, but it’s been there this whole time. 

And… it has. It’s there, all right—in every time we see her interact with food. It’s there, every time she might want a coping mechanism. It’s there, in the way she looks in the mirror, in the way she lives in the dance studio, in her penchant for self destruction. It’s there, in the former perfectionistic, traumatized teenager without a mother. It’s been there. 

So I do some research, and I make it work. 

February 2021

This whole writing companions thing is kind of out of control, and now there’s a book’s worth of them, and I publish The First IGY Companion as almost an accident. 

I’ve started teaching webinars, I’ve started going to butler school. Other areas of my life are picking up—not just hunkered down writing. 

May 2021

I take a little staycation, a few day writing retreat alone at a nearby hotel, using rewards points that we got to keep through the pandemic.

I don’t take care of myself well, though, too lost in my words. My mental state spirals, and I self harm for the first time in many years.

Interestingly, the chapter I’m writing is the one where the main character, Lalia, tries blood play for the first time.

My wife takes me home early, and I recover quickly.

July 2021

By now, I’m running Las Vegas TNG, a local alternative sexuality group, and I publish Service Slave Secrets (Volume One), the first years of my blog on the subject, to a nice reception.

Book Two—I’ll Give You Everything I Want to Be (You’ll Give Me Everything I Need to Be)—is flowing, as everyone unpacks their issues in and out of therapy.

I try going off my meds briefly, gradually cutting down with the thought that I’ll stop when it starts to affect my sleep, as that’s the easiest way to measure the minimum dosage. However, my sleep doesn’t really suffer, but I abruptly realize, five minutes overdue for the first dose I’ve totally skipped, that I’ve been absolutely miserable, and can’t hear my own thoughts over the music hallucinations I mistook for a song stuck in my head, among others. 

I go back to the full dosage that night. 

November 2021

Several months into the “health kick” that’s taken an especially dark spiral recently—hint hint, healthy diets don’t include this much purging and fasting and overexercising—I accept that I have an eating disorder—all of the symptoms of anorexia, not quite underweight—and start the cycle of on again off again commitment to recovery. I don’t need to weight restore, but this cycle has got to stop. I start to talk about it with the people close to me, and write a post in which I theorize about where it came from: 

Clara. 

It’s been almost a year since my abrupt realization that Clara had an eating disorder, and I am now detangling my thoughts and hers. I write a post on this—the dangers of writing a character with a disorder I don’t have, as a schizophrenic author with a very fine line between character and self. 

At some point in my research, the tables turned. Now I’m writing backstory companions to pour what my head sounds like onto paper—this many calories eaten, this many hours left to fast, this many pounds, BMI this, BMR that, that many minutes of exercise—thoughts that weren’t mine when I started. 

I write about how I took an online eating disorder assessment as research early on, and got a very safe, normal score. Now, though: yup. Something’s not right. 

Which came first? Was I already developing disordered eating habits, projecting them onto a character until I couldn’t deny it was me anymore? I’m convinced that the character’s disorder came first, but we’ll see. 

Incidentally, I finish and publish Book Two instead of winning NaNoWriMo.

March 2022

I publish The Second IGY Companion along with Contrivance in the same hectic week, having recently finished my first (posted) AU for the I’ll Give You series: “Let’s Not Be Star Crossed Lovers”, a short multichapter of alternate backstory. 

I’m also finally learning to drive, hallucinations under control, which is always an emotional roller coaster. 

Book Three—I’ll Give You Everything I Need to Be (You’ll Give Me Everything I Am)—continues on. 

It’s certainly an interesting month. I’m still bouncing back and forth on the eating habits, now with my wife’s help supervising three meals a day for a while, starting to sort out my disordered thoughts around food, focusing on the fact that skinny seems to represent productive for me, and that I’m actually more productive if I just suck it up and eat.

August 2022

Book Three is still in progress, flowing along. A few companions have gone up, but they’re slowing down, and I’m thinking of editing them into a future edition of The Second IGY Companion rather than creating a third. I have at least one more AU going on in my head to write.

I’ve gotten into hiking in the last few months, started donating plasma, and started a Little Free Library, and have been working on my newest blog, A Productive Hannah, and am eyeing a brewing sequel to Contrivance.

I publish Service Slave Secrets: Volume Two, breaking my personal royalty records.

August is a hard month for me, though. I’d like to blame it on hormonal, non psychiatric med changes, but I’m not sure. Right on the heels of some major anniversaries involving my father’s birth and death, symptoms, especially the eating issues, flare, and burnout threatens.

I take a week of vacation in Boston, and pledge to take September off from events.

October 2022

I’m back to events, but we’ve gotten into camping, a welcome reprieve from most of the world. I’m trying to find balance, and overall, my events and writings are going really well. I’m really feeling what’s going on in Book Three, and soon to publish The Schizophrenia Diaries.

We’ll see what the future holds.