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KEY
Gam – Godmother or Grandmother
Boss-ass – A boss. The best of the best – a real OG.
I was very sceptical about writing about the decay of my mental health from the beginning, and admittedly there are some things I have chosen to leave out and will aim to come back to throughout this month whether that is on this website or in my own personal time. I have decided to write about this because I feel that I am in a place in my life where I am ‘free’. I also know that I can be perceived as joyous and content, but it isn’t always like this. I find my own mental health to be incredibly complex, as there are layers and layers of things that have taken me a while to address and think about. There is so much for me to write down, and if I wrote it all I could probably have enough words to fill about 100 book volumes. For a while, when thinking about my mental health, I used to cringe. I cringed because I felt uncomfortable and ashamed about the personality traits I used to have and I think that this is because the remnants of the unkind voice and whispers (murmurs) remain.
I was 11 years old when I starved myself for the first time. I have a diverse background on both my mother and father’s side of the family and food is a big thing in my culture. Cook outs, barbecues, birthdays, the list goes on and on and I was celebrating a party at my Gam’s* house. I discovered the scales in my own house around two days before. I stepped on and the glow of the glaring red lights stared back at me. I didn’t really understand measurements of weight because 1) I was 11 and 2) my mathematical skills were bad and if I’m being honest they are still quite atrocious. I didn’t understand what these numbers meant but I remember looking up in the mirror, picking at things I did not like about myself and just feeling a bit distressed.
When I went to this party, I still had this picture of myself in my head and the memory of how these feelings of distress made me feel. With this in mind, I still ate from the plethora of food around me, because who can happily really say no to a glazed BBQ rib? (side note – I have avoided eating meat for about 5 months now and my soul still croaks inside when declining a rib) However, I didn’t each much and I was very restrictive of what I ate that day.
Fast forward to the next day and it was Monday and I was getting ready for school. I decided to step on the scale again and noticed that the red numbers had increased by 5 or 6lb since the last couple of days I checked. Obviously, at 11 I was not aware of the fact that several things can affect your weight day to day such as your menstruation cycle, water retention etc., and how I would have to consume an immense amount of food to really put on 6lb in two days, but anyways I didn’t know any better and after seeing the difference on the scale I was distraught.
That day, I only ate an orange, an apple, and dinner of pasta in a tomato sauce. Throughout the week, similarly, I did not eat much for breakfast and lunch as I knew I could get away with this without receiving comments or concerns. With dinner, this was obviously a lot harder because of how little I ate in the daytime. Having a substantial meal at dinner time also probably prevented my body from completely shutting down.
If I had to put a number on how long this specific restriction phase lasted, I would say that it lasted for around 3 months with some obvious ‘days off’ such as Christmas day or when I went to a friend’s house. The main reason this stopped was because of the concern and stern words I was met with from a family friend at the time. It was the hockey season and after matches I would come home tired. Obviously, running up and down a field with sticks and balls is tiring but I was coming home from everything tired and probably slept for more hours than I was awake. This was obviously beginning to get noticed and so was my excessive sleeping as I did this so that I could skip meals and sleep through them, meaning I didn’t have to eat.
Anyways, my family friend had noticed my weight loss, my lethargy and the little food I was eating. She took me aside and I was told that I should try my hardest to adhere to normal eating habits and that restriction was doing me more harm than good.
I appreciated this talk and tried to take it on board. Admittedly, 10 years on, I have gone through 3 more periods of starvation. Aside from these starvation periods, I’ve frequently gone through stages of being really tiny to being overweight and yo-yoed between the two, which some could argue to be even more damaging. I am using this word ‘starvation’ because not once in these 10 years have I ever been to a doctor about my eating habits. I have not been placed under the category of an illness or disorder, so I will not label it with a medical term or self-diagnose myself.
I recognise that the trigger for this was my own insecurities. I was called fat and teased when I was younger (and I was overweight) and I recognise that I still hear these jaunts 10 years later.
I would say that now that I try not to let weight or food control my mind and I try not to weigh myself anymore to prevent myself from falling back into this toxic mindset, but I do admit sometimes I fail. In general, in the last year, I have decided to find a balance when reacting to positive things and negative things I am told about myself. I try to not let them go to my head too much especially as they are other people’s comments and not my own. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate kind words and ask for reassurance about several things at the best of times but in general, I’m trying to remain zen about other people’s words to prevent an uncontrollable spiral into a ‘relapse’ per se or reinforcing bad habits.
The most important lessons I have learned about my mental health over these 10 years are that other people’s opinions of myself good or bad, should not shape my own of myself. I wish I could go back to 11-year-old Kes and give her a hug. These individuals may be calling you fat etc. but why should you care about what they’ve got to say? This leads on to lesson number two, that we are and can choose to be so much more than our physical features, we don’t have to allow them to define us if we don’t want to. I am a sister, an aunt and a friend and I am also the love and the kindness that I share. But on occasion, I’ll happily allow the boss-ass* braids on my head to define me, Kes, a sister, aunt, friend and also a boss-ass individual.
I love food very much and for the last year have had no problem when it comes to eating. Admittedly, I struggle to balance my time and I have found myself in the last academic year eating only two meals a day because I struggle to find the time to. I hope this year I can.
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