In 2014, I was photographing a place for one of my (then) realtors. I happened to catch a look on their face... I was angry and embarassed all at the same time. I could tell they were disgusted by my size. I had been doing a fair amount of work for this client, but after that day, I never heard from them again. I was so appalled, hurt, and hating myself.
I had just gone though a period - being a good two years - of a deep depression and had gained a lot of weight - maybe not a lot by some standards, but 50lbs on a 5'4" frame is a lot. My ideal weight is between 120 and 125.
Around the same time, my sister came to my house. She hadn't been over and we hadn't seen each other for several years. If you read this blog, you'll know the backstory. She had barely sat down at my table before she looked at me and said, "You need to lose about 50 pounds, hey?" Between her and my client, I was again pitched into a pit of self-loathing.
In February 2015, I hired a trainer and hit the gym for a bunch of reasons: I was super pissed of by that client's unspoken but very loud comments, and my youngest was getting married. So I went at it. Hard. For 18 months, I was on a specific, non-changing diet and in the gym five to six days a week. I lost a ton of weight, gained a pile of muscle, was wearing a size 4, and was feeling great. My trainer encouraged me to compete, and I did that too. I came in last there but that was ok.
During that time, I donated a lot of my clothing because I couldn't imagine not being in the gym at least four days a week. I thought my habits were well-established and that yes, I'd gain a bit of weight - because one cannot survive on a competition diet forever - but I was pretty confident I'd be able to maintain a reasonable weight for a person my age. My trainer said not to get rid of my clothes - she's a very winning competitor and she told me she usually gains 20 lbs between competitions, but I was deluded and thought size four was a forever thing.
Shit happens when you're not paying attention.
In 2017, early in the year, I took up pottery. I was still in the gym, but I really enjoy pottery and it began taking up more of my time. The weight began to come on. I should note here I have very few mirrors in my house and none are full-length. That's a whole other story in a book called dismorphia.
By 2019, I wasn't in the gym more than three days a week. I didn't have my trainer anymore, and I had let other pursuits take some of that time.
I knew I wasn't doing well, so in the spring of 2018, I got an appointment with my friend's doctor, who my friend likes very much, for an assessment for anxiety. Unsurprisingly, it came back with high anxiety and depression. That doc sent me to a counsellor, who was great but who is part of a group of professionals. I could not see this one person on a regular basis and couldn't choose to see them specifically - one gets who one gets in that clinic. I didn't want to be relating the whole story every time I saw a different counsellor, so I didn't pursue. I should say though, the initial assessment was that I'm not a terrible person, that I have some life-long family-related challenges, but I have a very supportive spouse and three great adult children, who are in the loop about the family stuff, so I figured I'd just carry on. I wasn't feeling awesome but I wasn't suffering too much.
In early Feb 2019, I was asked to participate in a public talk with five other people in my profession. It was a HUGE nod: one of the presenters is top of the field in this country, and I was blown away to share the stage with her. I remember seeing the video of my part of the event, and liking my presentation but also being aware I had gained a bunch of weight. I was disturbed and that realisation bored into my brain like a worm...
Then the pandemic hit. My gym closed, we were locked down for six weeks, I was lonely, bored out of my mind, angry, frustrated. Stupidly, and not realising I was sliding deeper, I was on twitter a lot. Twitter is poison generally, but for depressed people, it is as dangerous as a loaded gun.
I stopped going to the gym after it reopened. It was so on again, off again for another year, I couldn't re-establish a healthy, regular habit. Add to that, I developed a real dislike, bordering on phobia about seeing people masked. Masked and huffing at the gym was not on my dance card...
I wore a mask when necessary but I avoided going anywhere it was necessary, which is to say I quit going out of the house any more often than necessary - work, and pottery. Our studio owner at the time was a 77 year-old man with a pacemaker and diabetes, so for him, I masked.
My spouse loves grocery shopping so that was covered. There was a period I'd go to the shops with them but I would not go in, becasue I didn't want to see them in a mask. I still have PTSD about masks, especially those damned blue medical masks.
What I didn't know was that I was already depressed and sliding into another debilitating depression. I knew I wasn't doing well, but I didn't have a clue how far in that deep dark well of despair I already was. By January 2021, after the 2020 winter holiday season that didn't happen, I was in bad shape. Bad enough that I was ideating not rarely. In late January that year, I was in full thinking about it all the time mode - and I'm talking about suicide here.
One evening - a Sunday night, I was in the pottery studio by myself, and I could not stop crying. I was alone, sobbing, and wondering if there was any tubing about. I was lucid enough to know I was in crisis, so I called our city's crisis line and was with an intake person for two hours. She was concerned enough about my state she wanted to send the city police to transport me to hospital, but I told her I was going to go home, that my spouse was there, and I'd be ok. I was, until about 2 a.m., when I woke up in a panic of despair, and again was picturing where there was hose in my garage. Again, I called the crisis line and spent another two hours with them.
The next day, I told my spouse what was going on so they were aware. They're very supportive. Very.
Meanwhile, there was encouraging news about a vaccine, and spring was coming. I had some hope. But I was out of the gym completely, my diet was shit; there was a lot of wine by this point - not to the point of alcoholism, but a couple glasses every night. Again, I had no idea I was as depressed as I now know I I was. Everyone was struggling, we were 14 months into the damned pandemic, and I just figured everyone was feeling as I was.
In July 2021, our government lifted the mask mandate. It was absolutely amazing. It lifted my spirits a LOT to not see everyone masked up. Yes, people carried on masking but very many fewer. At the same time, our city's huge annual rodeo happened, and we got the go-ahead to photograph an event we'd been shooting for four years. So the summer was fine. I knew I wasn't at my best, but I felt the pandemic was behind us, and I could begin healing. But no.
In early September, our goverment put the mask mandate back into place, and I felt absolutely crushed. I had three vaccinations on board by then, so having that mandate come back... On September 4th, I walked into our members only pottery studio thinking we wouldn't be subject to the mandate, and found everyone masked. I lost it. I went on a big, scary, loud, angry rant. I absolutely freaked out everyone in there - 20 people at least - who had never seen me in any kind of state, let alone ranting. I had to apologise specifically to two people who I seriously scared - and I will say I scared myself as well.
As I sat at my wheel, tears pouring down my face, despair choking me, one of the members came by me. As background, I thought we were good friends. I had introduced this person to their spouse, photographed their wedding, done headshots for them both, hung out with them, trained with one of them for a while. As he passed in front of me, he asked what was wrong. Through my tears, I said I was so frustrated at people who wouldn't vaccinate because we were back to mid-pandemic dystopian facelessness everywhere. He literally laughed in my face. I didn't know he was an anti-vaxx idiot. I felt like I'd been struck.
Two days later, on his facebook, his mother, who was faced with vaccinating or being out of a job for a while, posted that she had "gone on the special train, and it was really smoky in there." There is little that enrages me as much as racisim, so this horrifing equating vaccinating - literally a life-saving, socially-conscious, right minded thing to do - with trains transporting Jewish people to their deaths in German ovens absoltely blew me apart.
And I was descending ever further into a black, black depression. You know the "frog in water on the stove" analogy - the one where a frog in water won't notice the heat creeping up until it's too late and it dies by being boiled? Yeah... that's what was happening to me.
An aspect of depression for me is intense anxiety centred on my weight; an anxiety so profound and debilitating, I had become absltuely obsessed about my weight. I would wake up sometimes 20 times a night in an absolute panic. Concurrently, I was so depressed, I couldn't imagine going out of the house, let alone to the gym. I did not want anyone to see me: I'd gone from 130, all muscle to 160, flabby, palid, anxious, angry.
December 2021 rolled around. We had a very good winter holiday - lots of friends and family over for dinner. I wasn't ok, and I knew it, but at least we could have our traditional holiday family dinner.
This is where it took an absolutely devastating turn. I lost my persective. My anxiety became extremely pronounced to the point I was misinterpreting everything, and I was engaging in rants - two hours at a time - a few times a week. My spouse could not understand, and could not help. In this context of massive depression, debilitating anxiety and paranoia, I started to believe my kids (all busy, productive, amazing adults) had begun to dislike me to such a point they were no longer calling, or even responding to texts.
There was LOTS going on I didn't know about: I didn't know my eldest and her partner were really struggling. Add to that, she had to let go of her lovely dog - an 11 year old boxer/bull terrier with terrible joint issues. His joints literally liquified. It was terrible. My other daughter in town was also struggling with massive anxiety which at one point caused a physical reaction - paralyisis in one of her legs. So their not calling was due to all sorts of stuff not related to me. But I knew none of it except for the dog, so I was taking it all very, deeply, horrifyingly personally.
I finally decided I should say something, but in my state, I had no good grip on what to say, or how to say any of it. They took it as an indictment. It sparked five months of silence from one of them, and utter chaos via texts - I was writing pages and pages of insane angry, abusive, horrifying, accusitory rants to my children - all three of them, and imagine for my youngest, who lives in the US in a no-travel permitted bloody pandemic. Meanwhile, I had ramped up my rants to almost every day, for hours on end. This culminated in June with me essentially telling my spouse to leave, that we were done, me jumping in my car and heading west into the mountains in a white-out spring storm. The one thing that saved me from not driving off a cliff - literally, because I wanted to so, so badly - was my dog; she was in the car with me and I adore that dog. There is no way I was going to hurt her.
My intention was to drive 3 hours west and hole up in a hotel in a small town where I feel safe. But I was so incredibly depressed, I couldn't do it. My anxiety was so intense, I could not drive that road I've driven so many times in my life. I managed to get 45 kms west of my city, and could not do it. Depressed, massively anxious and loathing my inability to do ANYTHING. I dragged myself back home, still white hot angry, buzzing with anxiety. Finding my spouse here, I badgered them. "Why are you still here?!" My spouse is a strong person. In 26 years, I've seen them shed tears twice: once when our first dog had a terrible accident, and we had to let him go, and this moment, where I was bullying them to leave.
I was still not fully aware of how actually serious my depression was. I had been crying for hours every day for, by then, four months, but in that state, I believed my children were victimizing me, my spouse was colluding with them, and that everyone was against me.
Then, my middle daughter sent me a long text. Within, were the words, "you are my abuser." That was the bottom. I was done. I had done to my children what my mother had done to me. I had not only abused them for by then six months, I believed they hated me, and that left me zero to live for.
But that message, those words, were like a kick in the head. Something broke through. I called my doctor and said I wanted to take my life, that I had ruined my relationships with my children and my spouse, and that I could not live anymore. Writing this, I'm sad for myself. I've struggled with depression all my life, and I have had three periods where suicide seemed the only way to stop all the pain, but I had never called anyone to say, "I'm doing this. I am a liability to everyone around me."
I've known my doctor since she was 4 and I was 5. Her former spouse hung himself where his children would find him. She knew the sounds, and she HEARD me. She immediately sent me mental health assessments, booked an apointment with a psychiatrist, got me connected to a psychologist and got me on an anti-anxiolytic.
Often attendant with anxiety and depression is gut issues. It should have been a clue that I have had such severe reflux for 10 years that between that an waking up due to obsessing about my weight, I was not sleeping. I think I was getting maybe four hours on a good night for the last 15 years. Didn't help we had a mattress with memory foam, which is bloody torture for hot sleepers. My doc got me on some meds for reflux too.
I've been on this drug now since June. My suicidial ideation began subsiding about four weeks after starting this drug, and between then and now, it very, very rarely peeks around the corner for a sec and then goes away. I have also finally stopped obsessing over my family issues, which invaded my thoughts very, very often for more than 40 years. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this particular drug I'm on literally saved my life, and let me put up a huge, thick, mostly soundproof wall between myself and my family and their bullshit and their narcissism. I'll come back to this in another post.
So back to the issue of weight. I am the heaviest I have ever been in my life. I don't know how much I weigh, but I know it is probably 20 lbs more than before I began training in 2016.
Depression can kill a person by many means; suicide, alchoholism, poor diet. In my case, I don't eat regularly - I hear there's a term for this, "atypical anorexia, where sufferers are heavy but don't consume enough calories, leading to the body acting as if it is starving by slowing metabolism to a molasses in january pace. This leads to rapid weight gain if one begins eating regular meals. Without exercise, the body stays in starvation mode.
So this is where I am. Last year, I didn't think I could still ride a bike and being as depressed as I was, I was very terrified to try. I finally did, and it was fine, but between a very very wet spring and an intensely hot summer, we didn't get out very often. But at least I knew I could do it.
Last week, we were in DC to be part of a panel discussion about our exhibition there. We walked 60 kms in the four days we were there. That was very encouraging. Today, one of the organisers sent photos from the event, and I was left absolutely SHOCKED at how I look. I know I've gained weight but I had no idea what I look like - again, no mirrors lower then collar bone around in my house. I don't recognize the person in those photos. I turned sixty in the middle of the pandemic. It took my youth, my health - mental and physical - and has left me an old, fat, very out of shape, high blood pressure, self-hating person who in no possible way resembles who I once was.
But. I called my gym to make sure I still have an active membership (yes, unused for two years, so that's $400 for nothing). I am absolutely terrified to go back. I am terrified that someone who knew me "when" will see me and say something. But I'm going to try. I feel like if I don't, even with good drugs on board, I'm going to slide back into black.
The moral of this story? If you encounter someone you used to know, and see they have changed a lot in the last three years, PLEASE don't say "wow, you've gained weight," or "you've changed a lot." PLEASE ask them "ARE YOU OK? Can I help? Tell them you care for them. Tell them they're important to you. And PLEASE stick it in your brain they are STRUGGLING, sometimes to get from day to day, and sometimes not to die.
Be kind. Be aware, be compassionate.
(I haven't copy-edited this yet, so if you're reading and you find errors - and you will - forgive. I will fix).
