PLEASE Support my Petition: “Improve CAMHS services in Cumbria, especially surrounding eating disorders.”

Hello!

I’ve kept this petition on the down low until I knew that it was fully up and running and agreed by the authorities that allow these kinds of things to be published. Until NOW.

(As a little foreword, I had to email this petition to 5 people and have them support it to first get it up and running and I finally have those 5 supporters now. This now means it will be checked and verified and then published officially, giving me 6 months to collect 10,000 signatures in order for it to be reviewed by the government/parliament.)

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/162797

I have wanted to make this petition for so long but have always too anxious to; convincing myself that I was an attention seeker BUT even if that was true, which as much as I may try to convince myself, it really is not, this action will help so so many other sufferer’s lives in our county in the years to come.

This is something I feel very passionate about as it is something very close to my heart and has been a part of my life for around 5 years now. I am learning not to be ashamed of the fact that: I have Anorexia Nervosa. I have had for 5 years of my 17 year-long life now already. I also have multiple other mental illnesses that have made my life immensely difficult in the past and still do despite being in active recovery.

I am soon to be discharged from my second stay in a specialist eating disorder inpatient unit. I have spent a total of a year of my life (or more) in this very unit.

It is 120 miles away from my home.

That is a minimum of a 2 and half hour -journey ONE WAY.

This is the closest one to me as there is zero specialist eating disorder treatment within the entire county, with an area of 4206 miles squared.

 

I want to make it clear that this is not a vendetta against a particular individual. Nor am I saying that this is the services’ fault; this really is through lack of funding and trained individuals working within the service in this county. It is not even a direct action for myself and my own care as I will soon be transitioning into adult services which begin at the age of 18. But this has gone on long enough. It has effected far too many people already and it will only continue to happen in the future if direct action like this isn’t taken.

In my own experience of the CAMHS services, that despite being incredibly grateful for a lot of the direct support that I have received in understanding myself and my illnesses, there is still a long way to go and a lot of failings, not caused by any one individual, but rather a general lack of resources and funding. Mental illnesses are allowed to get out of hand before proper intervention is taken. Personally, I was allowed to destroy myself and my body, despite constantly telling the services and originally actively seeking support, not just once but twice. I was allowed to deteriorate to below my dangerously underweight lowest before I was finally referred to inpatient services. This was at least a wait of 6 months, if not much, much longer. Many sufferers are not able to actively seek support this way and intervention must be taken so much sooner to stop this from happening, especially surrounding eating disorders.

In my own experience, every single person that I have met in my inpatient centre in Middlesborough, has been struggling so drastically that they were not physically able to or allowed to walk. They were in a wheelchair, even to get to their bedroom down the short corridor. Why must we as sufferers from such a horribly common mental illness, have to physically deteriorate ourselves at all to be taken seriously, never mind to such a dangerous degree?

 

This has to change.

We recently received a letter telling of a grant of money being given to Cumbria to increase eating disorder services which I am immensely grateful for. I can only hope that this goes ahead and services do improve. I guess I’m just a desperate and scared teenage girl trying to make even the slightest difference.

 

Soooooo:

Here is the link to my petition below and I can only ask you to take a couple of minutes out of your day to make such an incredible difference.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/162797

 

 

Party Pooper; Drowning in Depressive Tears

I have just got myself in such a state.

I just felt so unbelievably depressed, as always, after being surrounded by young children. What it is about them that sucks the life out of me? That leaves me feeling so utterly drained and painfully sad and weighed down.

To give a bit of context, all I did was go up to my cousin’s house (who I am really not close to, but do appreciate him and have recently been connecting a little as I have turned 17 and he is in his late 20s). He was holding a “birthday party” for his girlfriend’s 3 year old girl and asked my loving and dear Nan and Fad (granddad) to invite me and my mam along too.

It was just a house party, with mundane, trashy music playing that little bit too loud on the TV. Her elder daughter Jenny was there, shouting and playing unfairly and being a little brat as is usual. I shouldn’t complain as she may have ADHD and I do try my hardest to understand even if other’s don’t, but even so, it is draining on me and my own mental illnesses. Another baby came, playing preciously on the floor with the balloons we were forced to blow up for Jenny even though it wasn’t her party, and those weren’t her toys she pressured us angrily into removing from the packaging so that she could wreck them so as to hurt her sister. I smiled at her, I laughed, I bounced the balloon as was so amazed by how beautiful and interesting it is to see a one year old make sense of the world around them.

But people just kept coming. I was desperately worming away from the buffet in the next room, silently praying to a God I don’t believe in to not let anyone get any until after I had slipped away. More and more people. I was getting slowly more and more drained and upset. I could feel all happiness leaving my soul like the pink balloons comically releasing air on the floor by my feet. It was happening again.

Then it was just all a wash.

It was too much.

I couldn’t do it and I had to leave.

I started to cry as my chest rose and fall rapidly and a panic attack set in despite my attempts to make it stop.

My darling Mam held my hand and eased me out of the room to stand outside beside the three dozen rotted, discarded cancer sticks stuck limply in the muddy and uncared for garden.

 

I’m at my house now, typing this out dangerously alone. My Fad tried to take me for a walk but it started to rain: another thing to ruin my day and drag me further down. He chatted and chatted but I didn’t hear a word he said. I just dissociated way out of there, as I had already done 2 hours previously.

Why is that children make me feel so depressed? So honestly, genuinely depressed as though I had not taken my medication for months. Is it that I see their carefree happiness and wish that I could have something so uncherished and disregarded so easily? Is it that I see their future so perfectly panned out in front of them? I honestly don’t know but it has ruined my happy streak and left me feeling so down, hating myself and feeling so worthless and stupid, regretting all I have eaten.

I have just done a meditation on YouTube.This one if anyone would like to try it (it is for depression), and it was so uplifting in the moment that I began to sob. I guess it has given me the energy to write out this post, too.

All of my head is telling me no one will read it anyway.

 

 

My Torture Became My Remedy

I have just read this blog post and in writing my comment, I really delved deep into myself and I ask that you take time to read it and do this yourself! I’ve included my comment below too, but obviously read that after the original post.

This is so inspiring! Honestly, I have felt so alone in this: almost ashamed of the fact that Anorexia has consumed me and my identity. I have had Anorexia for so long (despite only being almost 17 now), and so severely that I physically cannot remember what life was like before this. It has become my normal as you worded so well.
But we need to recognise that there is so much more to us than this. I’m trying to think as I type this about what I am. I am a daughter, I am training to be a psychologist (to give back the amazing support I have received and save other tortured souls), I am caring, I am artistic, I am worthy of so much more than this. My head is giving me such a hard time for typing this and thinking of something other than the endless calories and numbers and fears and rituals.
But just as I am more than this, you are too!
YOU ARE MEANT TO BE HAPPY.

One of the hardest parts about recovering from an eating disorder is trying to remember who you were before the eating disorder took over your life. Is it physically hard to eat? Absolutely. Is it mentally hard to eat? Yes. Is it hard to accept my body for what it is and accept myself for […]

via My Torture Became My Remedy — LIFE IN RECOVERY

Inpatient Call

I’m writing this in uncertainty.

Well, my mind is uncertain. Of everything.

The pre admission assessment for my second inpatient stay was on Friday; they called yesterday to reassure me that they were thinking of me and to reassure me that I was not “wasting their time” as I choked out at our meeting. They’re going to call today. Tuesday the 15^th March 2016.

I’m so sure they’ll tell me I’m faking it and wasting their time and turn me away, which would destroy me. But a yes and a definite date for admission would do so simultaneously.

I don’t actually know if I’ll publish this, and if I do it will likely be days or even weeks after the verdict. I’m just super surprised that my faltering brain is allowing me to type, even though it is through confusion and a haze.

That is why I haven’t posted for weeks. Why I barely function in college. Thinking only, constantly about shape, calories and restriction, plotting on how to avoid a set amount of poisonous numbers to further destroy myself and my pointless existence that I so wish wasn’t. I wish that I wasn’t. That I wasn’t ever a thing. And I’m so detached and disorientated, I often convince myself that I’m not real, anyway. That none of this is. That the whole world isn’t really real.

I’m getting dizzy.

I can’t remember anything I’ve said. I can’t remember anything I’ve done. I can’t even remember what the start of this post says. I can’t hear what people are saying, it’s all one long mumbling blur that I nod along to, staring at the floor avoiding all human contact, protecting my eyes from others as anxiety consumes me. Depression has taken over me again. I spend hours curled up, staring, plotting the next meal that I so dread.

My chest is pounding; my arms are tingling. My head is spinning.

I can’t.

You Don’t Have to Look Like an Eating Disorder

This video is so so poignant and really does need to be seen by so many more people.

It is less than 3 minutes long yet it speaks VOLUMES about how painful it can be to make thoughtless remarks like this. Tears welled in my eyes as I saw the first speaker, a beautiful young woman, crying as she speaks about her battle with the unseen Bulimia Nervosa.

“There’s a pretty gendered nature to it,” one man responds. “It feels even more shameful. I just feel like weak and embarrassed, like ‘This is something you should figure out on your own.'”

 

Please, know and remember that eating disorders do not discriminate. They can affect anyone of any gender, age, size or shape. Please take time to watch this video and share it because this naivety needs to be stopped and can only be done so by raising awareness.

“Oh, I Had That Too”: Mental Illnesses

I want to start this with an apology, really on the state of my writing recently. I must hold myself back from constantly apologising, because it’s one of my deep set compulsions stemming from countless core beliefs and therapy is constantly telling me “STOP” (insert little hand up emoji here because it would be very fitting). But I do believe this is called for and justified: my mind is so hazy, so confused and flustered, that I just really can’t focus. I worry that I make no sense, and my sentences take so so long to form as they should. There’s something time consuming and poetic about venting here and writing, but I really need to admit that it takes so much out of me. That I have been wanting to do an update on my Instagram for weeks but just seriously don’t have the energy from failing to fuel my body. I have wanted to write this post for months, but I stare at my laptop with the screen closed firmly, mocking me with its dusted, black emptiness where there should be a projection. (I cannot even open it to play the Sims 3, and you know that’s serious.)

Moving on, if you are still reading, I’m going to go into one of my faaaavourite sayings *sarcasm overload and spontaneous combustion* “Oh, you have *insert major and severe mental illness here*? I had that for a few days/weeks too.”

But did you??? Ok, then. Just, okayyyyyy then.

It’s been happening a lot around me in college, (but now thankfully the main person is not in the class, which frankly means I am completely alone again) but of course it happens ALL the time in society and even on the television this very morning.

It makes my blood boil inside.

Or even, rather, it just makes me fall deeper into my own actual, clinical and highly medicated depression (…and anxiety and severe Anorexia and self-harm to cope with that). Because I know as a scientific and medical FACT that you didn’t.

You had depression for a few days then voluntarily pulled yourself out of it? Allow me to correct you, and it’s going to be blunt: you were slightly sad and you got over it because it was trivial and it didn’t matter and you didn’t have a chemical imbalance in the very structure of your brain.

You had an eating disorder for a few weeks and then just got better and never bothered about food or calories again. As you sit there with your Lucozade and chocolate bar as a snack. (I mean I can’t even go there with this one because I have just gone through way too much and there are people in my college who are my “friends” saying bullshit like this while I am teetering on the edge of a second inpatient admission with my health deteriorating daily, having full, screaming, clawing mental breakdowns at night. And if that makes me selfish so be it, I need to let that slide, because I’m on the brink of tears, or rather full panic attack already. Hmm, Anorexia, you are so poetic and beautiful.)

*takes a few days break from the writing process, and comes back after even more breakdowns (again, how beautiful, “I wish I had Anorexia”)*

You tell me you had anxiety, you used to panic. But were you trembling all over at something so seemingly trivial it made you sick with embarrassment and even more pain? You were dizzy, hyperventilating, feeling so close to passing out as your heart fluttered or palpitated in your aching, convulsing chest? That’s so great you just turned those off! I WISH I COULD.

You had a bit of OCD? Well that’s so fantastic that you just got over your “fear of germs” or you stopped ordering the crayons into the colour of the rainbow. How strong of you.

 

I’m so glad that you decided to just flip that switch and decide not to have a life-consuming mental illness.

Or how about, I AM REALLY NOT.

Because none of you had a chemical imbalance, or mental disease/disorder for a few days. For one nervous moment before something completely rational like a test. For one week’s dieting. For feeling a bit down. For picking at your scabs a few times. For saying you didn’t want to wake up tomorrow because you couldn’t be arsed going to school.

None of you were “depressed” that there wasn’t any of your favourite cereal in the house either.

None of you had a “schizo” mother because she got mad at you.

There’s hundreds of things I could list, so I’m going to round this up for you and end this patronising.

It’s annoying isn’t it?

So how do you think I feel when you tell me that you got over something that consumes my every waking moment, and even my restless, anxious time that I allow myself to sleep between compulsive and dangerous over-exercise and self-harming. When you use something so deadly and destructive to describe your emotions or daily activities. I really can’t stress this enough.

 

Because of someone’s naïve and plain STUPID comments today, just overhearing 2 minutes of their conversation, set me into a major panic attack and breakdown in the middle of college for hours. I’ll treat you to that post when I’m strong enough to do so.

Take time before you make mental illnesses sound so miniscule and unimportant: trivial even.

 

I’d love to hear of your experiences with this: if I get enough of them I will make a post with them on, linking you, so please share below or email me at:

deni.is.gaga@gmail.com

 

(I hope this post was okay at least!)

 

Thankyou and a Request For Everyone With an Eating Disorder

I’ll start this post with a huge thank-you for all of my blog followers!

I know it is not a huge amount, it is likely very average but I am unsure about what “normal” is here on WordPress as a newbie.

But, and it’s time to get soppy, I want to thank you for just being you. For fighting your daily fight, EVERY SINGLE DAY and surviving and thriving and living.

It means so much to me to have you read my blog, to know I am worth listening to for one as all of my very being tells me I am not, and that I am getting my messages across. Thank you.

 

And the latter half of this short post, is a request. I am at the end of my tether (particularly with one particular girl who genuinely fakes having an eating disorder, which in itself is pretty disordered but certainly not in the way she claims…) *and breathhhhhe*. So I want to write a post about the realities of eating disorders.

It is going to be far too difficult to write alone: I mean, I began, but got panicky within much less than half an hour and felt it was too taxing on my distressed and majorly struggling self to carry on.

So I’m putting out a request to anyone with an eating disorder, diagnosed or not, or even if you know someone who has one, or know about them (in detail). EDNOS, Anorexia, Bulimia. Any number of subtypes (eww, number. That is all my brain is made up of.)

Please comment on this post, or send me an email at deni.is.gaga@gmail.com

Any little thing is welcomed greatly, just one statement like, for me,

In this relapse, I have started to lose control of my bladder and I pee myself.

GLAMOROUS.

If you feel strong enough to write more, tell me any of your story, daily routines or thoughts or compulsions, I will really appreciate it. I can also post it anonymously for you?

 

Thankyou!

The Perks of Being a Wallflower and My Own Hospitalisation

This is another personal post: one that explains why The Perks of Being a Wallflower (TPOBAW) matters to me. I should trigger warning this as it talks of my own hospitalisation and mental breakdowns.

If you don’t already know Stephen Chbosky’s work The Perks of Being a Wallflower, it is written in the form of letters, written by the young boy Charlie who has just lost his friend Michael to suicide. As the story progresses Charlie slowly begins to lose his sanity after a distressing family secret resurfaces which later causes him to suffer a severe mental breakdown and his hospitalisation. At the end, when he is eventually released from hospital, he closes the book with a final letter telling of how he hopes to get out of his head and into the real world: participating in life instead of just watching it fly by.

I avoided the film for years and years, knowing I would inevitably hate it and indeed I did. Turning mental illness, yet again, into a quirky “rom-com”. Tell me: what about this film was funny? There was not one thing funny about this situation or storyline.

So we are talking about the book here: which admittedly was far from perfect in its handling too…

TPOBAW was the last book that I read before I was hospitalised (on September 27^th 2013). I had just finished reading of Charlie’s breakdown, relating so much to the poignant story despite our differences in mental illnesses, when I myself was rushed into the world of clinical white, being fattened up from my skeletal state while I was wheeled around, monitored 24/7 and restrained (admittedly never officially but I have came very close and would have been if the nurses had known what I had been doing on a few occasions… Ahem.)

I devoured the pages, completing the book in record time between my bedrest and compulsive secret exercise.

And I read through those poetic sentences, feeling my mind floating in the abyss just as Charlie’s was: as a wallflower. A real wallflower may I add, not a plastic hipster version that is fogging over Tumblr; laughing at the fact that a person couldn’t answer the door or phone for a pizza.

I don’t know what the medical definition of a complete mental breakdown is but I definitely believe I have came close.

My Anorexia was clouding my mind so much that as I was tricked into hospital that day, I fully believed I’d be out right away. I manipulated my way through, eating everything and smiling as long as I could, to prove I was fine and “sane” and I could go home to starve myself in a slow suicide. When I began to realise that I wasn’t coming out of that general hospital: that I was having to beg to be wheeled to the toilet rather than use a bedpan, that I hadn’t walked, or been outside in over three weeks, that I was getting fatter and being force fed while I was surrounded by toddlers and their staring, judging parents: that was it. I would scream. I would throw things. I would cry and cry and cry, until I was dried up completely, staring achingly at the children who could walk out, run around and play, while I was scolded for playing with my monitors checking my failing breathing and heart palpitations.

I spent those achingly long 5 months in a secure inpatient centre: throwing myself into recovery again thinking I could come home early (I was painfully far away from home: close to two hours each way). And I broke down frequently. But there was something deep inside that kept me going, when all I wanted was to attempt suicide or stop eating until I was sectioned and NG fed. I still believed deep down I could manipulate my way out of there, so long as I wasn’t sectioned, I would be let out.

And now that I’m out, and have been for just over two years, I have no one there in my breakdowns. I recognise they are lapses in sanity, when I am clawing at myself and whimpering, when I am running towards the towering embankment above the train line near my house, when I am screaming and screaming, fighting the walls and my own wilting body. I have had to be locked in the car by my parents to stop me from killing myself. I have had to be held by the nurses as they searched my room for the blades that I stole in desperation after I flushed away my others.

And this is the devastating truth of having my 4 severe mental illnesses, with their endless subtypes and symptoms.

This post took an unexpected turn but I am not sorry for it (that is one thing I am training myself). I need people to realise the severity of mental illnesses, even the ones you wouldn’t particularly expect to cause people to lose their minds and need restraining in order to keep their life. This book raised a lot of awareness, and one that I personally loved, but it must NOT to be glamorised. It is not the black and white gifs on my favourite website Tumblr (overwhelming sarcasm here, please see my other posts on this). It isn’t those “funny” remarks of people “going crazy” or “having a breakdown”. Nor is it the derogatory “oh they’re on A ward again” or “oh they’ve tried to kill themselves again”.

It is endless pain.

And if you relate to any of it, I am so sorry. No one should suffer like this. Ever.

Suicide Is NOT Selfish

Firstly, I recognise that this is a somewhat controversial view, and of course I am NOT condoning or promoting suicide in any way because each and every one I find out about (and indeed the countless others I do not) make my heart ache for the beautiful lost soul, taken away by internal agony that they should not have experienced at all.

It is for this exact reason that I am writing this post today.

Also, I should put a trigger warning on this for talking about suicide and feeling suicidal.

There is a common belief, and to be fair, a quite rational one, that anyone who attempts suicide or indeed does commit suicide is selfish.

They must be, right? To think solely of themselves. To rid themselves of pain. To not even consider those around them and what it will do to them: the people who keep on living with the black hole in their life.

Well: excuse you for thinking that.

Because it is so painful. It is all consuming from the moment you wake, dragging on all throughout the day in very activity that you manage to do in your crippling depression, to the nightmares and idealised dreams you have at night. It is alright for me to describe this to you, but if this is something you have never experienced, you will never understand.

I am so, eternally glad that you haven’t, and if you have I am so sorry.

I’ve had my own experience with this, and to be fair still do, but it is managed. I’ve had more than three friends attempt suicide; and I am forever fearful that they will try again, checking up constantly for fear it is the last time I will speak to them. I know for a fact that none of those were selfish to try.

90% of the people who commit suicide have a mental illness that they have either had for a long time, or have developed shortly before the ending of their life.

That is a truly staggering amount, but it is very easy to envisage.

And that isn’t to say that it’s only the “crazy” people who attempt suicide, countless other people do too, for countless different reasons. Every life is important and precious. A mentally ill person’s life is not any less valuable than a “sane” person’s, and likewise this is true for the reverse.

But to say that a person is selfish is would be laughable if it weren’t so triggering and heartless.

I’ll explain it to you.

You have just woken up. You realise you have done so and let an audible sigh that you have survived another night and not died by some freak accident of nature and biology.

You stare up at the ceiling, tears pricking behind your eyes but not being released because you have cried so much already. You are so depressed you don’t even have the emotional energy to cry.

You stagger out of bed, leaving it un-made: because why does it matter? You don’t want to exist, if you kill yourself today you will never sleep in it again anyway.

Staring into the kitchen cupboards, if you even manage this, is like choosing a last meal. Every single day. You wonder about whether any of it matters: the calories, the occasion the food was created for. You drag something out and pick at it, looking through it, still hurting from waking again. You are so sad inside that it is a physical pain in your chest and your very being.

And every single thing you do that day: from bothering to brush your teeth, to leaving the house if you can manage, to human contact and that plastered on, sickly smile coming back… It is all going to be your last, it all doesn’t matter. You are in so much internal pain from your mental illness or other worries, you can’t focus on a single thing. The bus driver asks you three times for your money, while you wonder how many paracetamol that could have bought you. You wonder if you will even manage to get home, or if you could find somewhere in town to do it.

You can’t take it anymore. You can’t.

You’ve done this day in, day out for as long as you can remember, but you carry on the draining fight for those around you.

What would your mother do when she found out? What if it was your little brother that found you in your bedroom? What about the mess, and who would have to clean it up? What about the money that you bring in to support your family? What about your wife arranging your funeral before you had even had any children, or even settled down?

It is an endless list: all of utterly selfless things, until you reach your own internal fight at the end of the thought process, and how you personally cannot envisage another day. Cannot find the strength anywhere inside to pull yourself through the night again.

Only then might you try…

And what if it fails? What if everyone thinks you’re pathetic? What if, what if, what if?

So don’t you dare say that anyone who tries or does is selfish. It is not a religious sin; it is not a self-centred act, or a pathetic cry for help, or a hypochondriac reaction to a meaningless daily event. It is contemplated and planned for longer than you’ll ever be aware of, even by those who are smiling and laughing in your classroom or workplace.

Think.

And if you are feeling suicidal yourself, or know someone who is, you do not have to face this alone. You are beautiful and unique and deserve life: it will not always be like this, I promise it will get better, and I will keep that promise. It will get better. You will get better, and improve. Remember that there are doctors and therapists, or Samaritans or Childline, or even your friends and family there to support you.

Support YOU. This is who it is about, this is who matters: YOU.

Nature or Nurture: Which Most Impacts on Mental Health?

I began the 30 Days Mental Illness Awareness Challenge on my recovery Instagram (but have since deleted the posts as they did not fit in with my feed; damn aesthetics hehe).

But I came across this question and immediately made a note so that I could post it as a blog entry instead.

Do you believe nature (biology/physiology), nurture (environment), a mix, or something else has an effect on mental health?

This was a very important question: one that is very strong in my own recovering mind and one that link perfectly with this blog and its theme.

Personally I believe it is a mix; a potent mix of bad and harmful things to create something as dreadful as mental illness. From my own experience with my mental illnesses, it was definitely much more to do with nurture and the surroundings and company I found myself in, but this may be because it is (severe) Anorexia Nervosa that I mostly suffer with. An illness so naively promoted all over the internet as a poetic fad diet: pro ana breeding and spreading like a bacterium disease, feeding on the negativity of humankind and seemingly nothing else but ice cold waters (goodness I hope you don’t understand these references).

It is most likely dependant on the mental illness itself: whether it is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD or OC traits), or any number of the others that inflict daily, endless pain on the sufferers and victims of itself.

To give you an insight and make this post more personal, I’ll relate it to my own struggles:

I have always been underweight. Always. Varying degrees admittedly, but I have never been a healthy weight, especially not as a child stuffing her face with Fruit Winders and Happy Hippos and unbuttered white bread slices, one after the other. This was due to my super speedy metabolism (which I still have now, but perhaps not as much). This meant that there has always been some sort of obsession with my weight and size: as if other people couldn’t comprehend how I was so thin, or rather how I “stayed so skinny”. I was bullied in my tiny primary school, that had 65 people in its entirety. I was called “lanky” and a “stick insect” and pushed into walls because I bruised so easily. This may not sound so bad, and in retrospect it wasn’t, but this meant that there was an awareness awoken in me of my body and my size. As if a metaphorical demon woke up that I could never turn off. This is when I started self- harming, but I didn’t even realise it at the time as I flung myself at the floor to skin my knees and develop “carpet burns” at the age of 8.

(Just a reminder, I will try to keep this as related to the subject as possible: so clearly a lot more happened in these years but this is focused on my development of Anorexia Nervosa. I have mentioned this before, but I also suffer from severe forms of depression, anxiety and self-harming ((but am now clean)).

In secondary school I was, again, a commodity. I was something to stare and revel at in the changing rooms. When the class was weighed individually in fitness (part of the P.E curriculum), people would crowd around me as I stepped on the scale or just after to question my weight and gawp at my BMI that was dangerous to begin with but dropped another 2.0 or more as the monster took over. I began to become aware of myself even more, and as the natural process of development and puberty began, I was bewildered at the tiny differences that were all consuming in my head. I was developing two years after everyone else, and after all of this attention that I received for my size, being glorified and liked for being so thin, I began to wonder that if I were to lose more weight, would I be liked more? “OF COURSE! LOSE MORE WEIGHT. MORE AND MORE AND MORE.” Piped up the awakened demon which manifested itself into Anorexia over years. In the midst of all this of course was the revolting world of pro ana on Tumblr, mentioned in my previous posts.

Super long, stressful and traumatic story short, one thing led to another and I was not liked for being thin, I was worried and gossiped about. I was gawky, I was disgusting, I was fainting up to once a day. My heart was failing and I was rushed into hospital where I began my really rocky path to recovery. (Almost typed rocky road there hehe. )

Literary perfectionism hates the way that the above was worded, but I wanted to shorten my story as much as possible as it wasn’t particularly the subject of the post.

The point that I wanted to make with the above point was: did my mental illnesses develop because of nature or nurture?

For me personally: both.

Would I have been bullied for being so “lanky and thin” if it hadn’t of been for my genetics of growing tall so quickly?

Would I have become aware of my body at such a fragile, young age if it weren’t for this bullying?

Would I have been paralysed with fear of gaining weight and of losing my poisoned “popularity” if I wasn’t glorified at the height of my illness, then discarded like rubbish as soon as it “went too far”?

Perhaps most importantly: would I have even known how to lose the weight, or even wanted/felt the need to if it weren’t for society: modelling, pro ana and the typical trash talking teenage girls in the changing rooms?

One thing leads to another in this world. But the journey would not have begun at all if it hadn’t been for my natural genetics: something out of my control.

I wanted to know what you thought about it, and I’d certainly love to write another post about it.

Do you believe nature (biology/physiology), nurture (environment), a mix, or something else has an effect on mental health?

Think in depth about it: how did it affect your own journey or those around you, or even what do you predict is the truth?