Billie Holiday: lady sings the blues
In therapy this week I had one of the sudden flashes of understanding which therapy can bring you at times and about which it is easy to be derisive if you haven't needed them, or experienced them, or known what it's like to seek a cure for something which is invisible and in your head. They aren't Freudian flashes; they aren't dark and sudden dream revelations; not realisations that your brother stold your doll when you were six and now you fuck everything that moves in revenge or out of a desire to get your doll back. These flashes are usually quite simple, and in retrospect seem self evident; they are more like the tying up of threads, or the untying of knots- two things which were unrelated suddenly knit themselves together and you see why something is. These moments are rare in my experience. Most of therapy is the constant chipping away at the ways you think about yourself, and it you only see it working later, when you look back in suprise and see how far you have come. But the odd moments when something suddenly makes sense make you feel like you have achieved something fast, even though usually what you have achieved is seeing a new way in which your behaviour is pretty much completely futile.
The session was long and hard. I started it in tears, and ended it in tears, and there were quite a lot of tears in the middle too. I've been feeling a particularly pernicious hate towards myself lately. It's partly that my mood has cycled back into depressed again, and partly that a lot of things feel like they aren't going very well in my life at the moment, but I have been feeling like a faliure, a waste, a lazy lump of nothing. I have been feeling like nothing will ever change. Like I will be forever unhappy, alone, chaotic, without the qualities other people have which make them personalities, which give them souls. I have felt myself to be souless. I have felt myself to be loveless. I have felt myself to be lonely and unlovable, have felt that the centre of my being is rotten, and that, more to the point and worst of all, it's all my fault. As a result I haven't been eating. I don't mean that I haven't been eating properly, or that I haven't been eating three meals a day. I mean that I stopped eating anything, at all.
In amongst trying to explaiin this (badly) to my therapist, and crying a lot and sniffing repellantly, and being in all ways a miserablist snotbag, I understood suddenly what it is that people get wrong about eating disorders.
It is true that eating disorders as I understand them (and my own, if it even gets dignified with that name, has always been mostly latent, a last resort when all the other ways of quietening my thoughts have gone away) have very little to do with getting thin and nothing at all with getting beautiful. It is also true that the prevelance of size zero models in the media is very bad for eating disorder statistics. These two points often seem to be set on opposite sides of debates at present, and that to me seems wrong. The link which is disturbing is not the link between thin and beautiful, but the link between thin and happy, and eating disorders are all about being happy.
The thing is, if you feel that you aren't loved, if you feel flawed and failing, then you look for a way out. The impulse towards health is incredibly strong, but also terrifyingly easy to subvert- in myself, the impulse towards health has almost lead to my death, and that's the somewhat bitter irony in personality disorder based mental illnesses. When things are bad, people look for a way to make them better, and the horrible thing about the media culture at the moment, the awful, glib cruelty of this consumer society, is that it gives the impression that thinness and happiness are the same thing, so that you can attain one by striving for the other. If you look through celebrity magazines (and they used to be a secret vice of mine, before they started making me so angry I wanted to be physically sick all over their glossy entrails, so I know what's in them) what is notable is not the copy which says that thin is beautiful, but the images which say that thin is happy- pictures of thin, happy celebrities in love with nice clothes, and fat, miserabe celebrities in rehab with tracksuits.
Eating disorders aren't about the need or desire to be thin. They aren't about emulating celebrities. They have bugger all to do with girls (and, increasingly, boys) being told that the ideal is thinness. People with eating disorders aren't dim, and they aren't shallow, and this sort of reductivity is not a little insulting. On the other hand, the mind, and particularly the unhappy mind, is a very simple thing. It will latch on to something which it thinks will relieve the awful grinding moods, and it will take a lot to unlatch it, because the mind also has a tendency to blame itself, to think that if it isn't happy, then it just isn't trying. The thing it latches onto might bbe quite simple, but there's a supersitious thing going on in the human psyche that's hard to undo with education, and it comes out when a person is in pain. If you've never been depressed then think of times you have experience physical pain- wouldn't you have latched on to anything if you thought it might take that pain away? If someone had told you that not eating would make the pain go away, wouldn't you have done it? Of course, no one would tell you that, because it would be criminally negligent as well as grossly stupid, but while we are open enough about physical pain to sell analgesics over the counter, we don't talk much about pain in the mind and pain in the psyche. Too many children grow up not knowing how to salve unhappiness and make themselves feel better. Without a learned, healthy path the drive to happiness will make its own, and if thin and happy get linked then it's easy to see why it might forge that way. The tragedy in watching someone with a severe eating disorder is not watching someone starve themselves in an effort to achieve bodily perfection, but watching someone desperately unhappy try to make themselves happy, and fail, and try harder, and fail harder. It's the will to life and health getting it all wrong again. If you look at it like that, it's so sad it almost takes your breath away.
It was something like this that I understood, suddenly, while howling my way through another miserable therapeutic hour. I'm lonely and unhappy just now, and I want to do something about it, and somewhere in me there is something which says that if I were only thin then I would be happy and I would be loved. And so I stop eating. And of course I know it isn't going to work. I know it isn't going to bring my mother back from the dead or give me a dad who isn't a flakey, crazy alcoholic, but those things don't matter in this context- they're complicated, analytic needs with subjects and objects which come from the conscious mind trying to work out what would make me feel better. The drive to happiness isn't really conscious and it certainly isn't complicated. It's very simple, and it's very strong, and it's very hard to reason with when it's decided on its particular method, and it's why some people will starve themselves to death because they think it might work, and it's why I have cut my skin so badly I look like a tabby cat, and it's why people will eat until they can't walk, or drink until their livers disintegrate, or work until their families fall apart.
Somewhere, I think, our whole society had its will to happiness subverted so badly it's lost all sense of how you get to be well. That's quite broad as staements go, though, and might have something to do wwith the fact that I'm a bit depressed myself right now and tend to think the world iis failing horribly and about to, you know, fall apart or something. You don't have to agree with that one. On the individual level, though, understanding what lengths people will go to in an attempt to be happy might give us all a better understanding of mental illness.
The session was long and hard. I started it in tears, and ended it in tears, and there were quite a lot of tears in the middle too. I've been feeling a particularly pernicious hate towards myself lately. It's partly that my mood has cycled back into depressed again, and partly that a lot of things feel like they aren't going very well in my life at the moment, but I have been feeling like a faliure, a waste, a lazy lump of nothing. I have been feeling like nothing will ever change. Like I will be forever unhappy, alone, chaotic, without the qualities other people have which make them personalities, which give them souls. I have felt myself to be souless. I have felt myself to be loveless. I have felt myself to be lonely and unlovable, have felt that the centre of my being is rotten, and that, more to the point and worst of all, it's all my fault. As a result I haven't been eating. I don't mean that I haven't been eating properly, or that I haven't been eating three meals a day. I mean that I stopped eating anything, at all.
In amongst trying to explaiin this (badly) to my therapist, and crying a lot and sniffing repellantly, and being in all ways a miserablist snotbag, I understood suddenly what it is that people get wrong about eating disorders.
It is true that eating disorders as I understand them (and my own, if it even gets dignified with that name, has always been mostly latent, a last resort when all the other ways of quietening my thoughts have gone away) have very little to do with getting thin and nothing at all with getting beautiful. It is also true that the prevelance of size zero models in the media is very bad for eating disorder statistics. These two points often seem to be set on opposite sides of debates at present, and that to me seems wrong. The link which is disturbing is not the link between thin and beautiful, but the link between thin and happy, and eating disorders are all about being happy.
The thing is, if you feel that you aren't loved, if you feel flawed and failing, then you look for a way out. The impulse towards health is incredibly strong, but also terrifyingly easy to subvert- in myself, the impulse towards health has almost lead to my death, and that's the somewhat bitter irony in personality disorder based mental illnesses. When things are bad, people look for a way to make them better, and the horrible thing about the media culture at the moment, the awful, glib cruelty of this consumer society, is that it gives the impression that thinness and happiness are the same thing, so that you can attain one by striving for the other. If you look through celebrity magazines (and they used to be a secret vice of mine, before they started making me so angry I wanted to be physically sick all over their glossy entrails, so I know what's in them) what is notable is not the copy which says that thin is beautiful, but the images which say that thin is happy- pictures of thin, happy celebrities in love with nice clothes, and fat, miserabe celebrities in rehab with tracksuits.
Eating disorders aren't about the need or desire to be thin. They aren't about emulating celebrities. They have bugger all to do with girls (and, increasingly, boys) being told that the ideal is thinness. People with eating disorders aren't dim, and they aren't shallow, and this sort of reductivity is not a little insulting. On the other hand, the mind, and particularly the unhappy mind, is a very simple thing. It will latch on to something which it thinks will relieve the awful grinding moods, and it will take a lot to unlatch it, because the mind also has a tendency to blame itself, to think that if it isn't happy, then it just isn't trying. The thing it latches onto might bbe quite simple, but there's a supersitious thing going on in the human psyche that's hard to undo with education, and it comes out when a person is in pain. If you've never been depressed then think of times you have experience physical pain- wouldn't you have latched on to anything if you thought it might take that pain away? If someone had told you that not eating would make the pain go away, wouldn't you have done it? Of course, no one would tell you that, because it would be criminally negligent as well as grossly stupid, but while we are open enough about physical pain to sell analgesics over the counter, we don't talk much about pain in the mind and pain in the psyche. Too many children grow up not knowing how to salve unhappiness and make themselves feel better. Without a learned, healthy path the drive to happiness will make its own, and if thin and happy get linked then it's easy to see why it might forge that way. The tragedy in watching someone with a severe eating disorder is not watching someone starve themselves in an effort to achieve bodily perfection, but watching someone desperately unhappy try to make themselves happy, and fail, and try harder, and fail harder. It's the will to life and health getting it all wrong again. If you look at it like that, it's so sad it almost takes your breath away.
It was something like this that I understood, suddenly, while howling my way through another miserable therapeutic hour. I'm lonely and unhappy just now, and I want to do something about it, and somewhere in me there is something which says that if I were only thin then I would be happy and I would be loved. And so I stop eating. And of course I know it isn't going to work. I know it isn't going to bring my mother back from the dead or give me a dad who isn't a flakey, crazy alcoholic, but those things don't matter in this context- they're complicated, analytic needs with subjects and objects which come from the conscious mind trying to work out what would make me feel better. The drive to happiness isn't really conscious and it certainly isn't complicated. It's very simple, and it's very strong, and it's very hard to reason with when it's decided on its particular method, and it's why some people will starve themselves to death because they think it might work, and it's why I have cut my skin so badly I look like a tabby cat, and it's why people will eat until they can't walk, or drink until their livers disintegrate, or work until their families fall apart.
Somewhere, I think, our whole society had its will to happiness subverted so badly it's lost all sense of how you get to be well. That's quite broad as staements go, though, and might have something to do wwith the fact that I'm a bit depressed myself right now and tend to think the world iis failing horribly and about to, you know, fall apart or something. You don't have to agree with that one. On the individual level, though, understanding what lengths people will go to in an attempt to be happy might give us all a better understanding of mental illness.
posted by tattybluetrees at 12:24 PM
1 Comments:
Good words.
Post a Comment
<< Home