I'm finally getting tested

 It's been at least 10 years since my dad was formally diagnosed with ADHD in his adulthood and we all saw an incredible improvement in his functioning and overall wellbeing as a result of medication. It wasn't, however, immediately obvious to any others in the family that perhaps this could be a reason to all review our behaviours and experiences.

It's also been several years from my Developmental Psychology course, where I was assessed on my knowledge of teratogens, such as tobacco smoking; linked with ADHD in the child. Again, no sudden revelation of all the instances of my mother swearing black and blue that the stress of cessation is more harmful to the unborn child than the benefit of not smoking during pregnancy, including hers with me, being a potential red flag. 

I cannot impress upon you the amount of times I have felt wildly productive for having started multiple projects only to immediately abandon them for some newer, shinier project that has caught my attention. Even something as simple as having breakfast, by the time I've eaten the food I've forgotten to complete the task by cleaning up after myself because "Oh wait, did I clean my ears?".

Friends have verbalised that they can tell I have "a lot of open boxes in my warehouse." Within weeks they could recognise the rapid beginning and immediate abandonment of thoughts and tasks that plagues my existence.

Hell, even this blog, my 3 YouTube channels, my Twitch channel and any social media platform I've ever created. It's all or nothing because I get the urge, I tornado into it for a while and as quickly as it began the flavour is gone from the cheap gum of my dopamine production. 

It wasn't until these last 2 years where I've had multiple friends, with whom I share several common experiences, who've taken the plunge bravely and come back as having ADHD that I've committed to doing it myself. 

While I'm yet to have my assessment done, I can't help but look back at the years Little Kate struggled, being told she was "disruptive" in class for talking to other students, where term after term the parent teacher interview would involve an average report card and the summary that "Kate would do better if she actually applied herself", and feel a deep weight of very sincere remorse for her. 

For the 2 years I spent at university studying a degree I would not complete and coasting through on the same approach, only to discover that for me to actually take in information I needed to study something I was interested in and apply a radical approach to note taking and study that involved filling multiple notebooks with slides written word for word and spending lectures alone in the second-to-front row, right in the middle.

Hell, I even have to read aloud just to make sure I remember where I'm at and don't get lost and just start drifting off into the exploratory abyss of my mind. 

I do everything at high velocity, nearly barrelling over strangers in the street too dumbfounded to move out of my way in time. I fidget so aggressively my water bottle is covered in dents from where I've thrown it and not caught it properly. I forget what I was going to do with my phone by the time I lift it to my face. I could spend an entire day walking over the bridge from South Bank to the city and back just because I forgot something I was meant to or wanting to do in one spot and remembering when I'm in the other. I lose everything, including time. (Seriously, can anyone please explain how time works?)

Again, I know this is the first stages. I have confirmation that my experience aligns with that of diagnosed ADHD adults in my family and friend group. My doctor has validated my concerns and suggested I have verbalised the experience of many diagnosed ADHD patients of hers. The referral has been read and accepted by the psychiatrist and the appointment is made.

But here I am, still burning to know what happens next. What could happen if Kate applied herself? What might happen if Kate can track when assignments are due without thinking she has months and doing them all the night before? How many meltdowns could Kate avoid if she could plan, forward think, and execute plans sequentially? If this is Kate working with a handicap, then... What is Kate actually capable of?

Or, am I just a dirty neurotypical with internet addiction brain rot?

I'm Moving

This is not a drill. I am, in fact, moving.

 It is an incredible and momentous event. Not only is moving hard enough on its own, it is tremendously more difficult when the original move was so important.

Moving into this apartment marked the beginning of my psychology degree. The night I moved in here, I purged for the last time. The entire time I've been here, my ex has known where I've lived. He's spoken about checking in on me and how he's wanted to come visit. He even has on a few occasions.

This was the first apartment where I've purchased new furniture for myself. I decorated my apartment to reflect a comforting, homely space that I could feel safe and appreciate myself. I allowed myself to try new things and explore my aesthetic.

In this apartment I have relapsed and recovered and relapsed and recovered repeatedly. I've memorised walks and worked my butt off here. I built routines of self discipline that have helped and ones that have hindered. I designed daily structures and formulated walls to protect myself from the outside world.

I tried living without food rules. I failed, but I tried that here.

Living here, I shut down, shut in, and shut off. I hibernated long and hard. Eventually, I also re-emerged. Rested, anew. Slowly allowing people into my inner circle. I leave here with a beautiful group of people I consider my family.

I've been here almost 5 years. I'm leaving this lease a different person than the one who signed it.

I saw floods, storms, heatwaves, lockdowns.

I saw the local shopping centre drown.

I worked my way through a catastrophic customer service job, got myself through a degree, managed to achieve a distinction on my honours thesis, had my mother become disabled and then took on the role of being her carer at my own expense both emotionally and financially. In the same vein, I let my dad live here with me when he was made homeless. I was here when my childhood dog died.

I have seen so much life in the time that I've lived here. None of it I regret.

Yes, I am crying as I write this. It really is the end of an era.

I don't have to be little miss independent anymore. I can open up and let people in. I can ask for help. 

I've invited a beautiful soul into my world and I am welcoming the next era; the era of us.

dear friend

  I’d like to pre-empt this by saying I honestly went to great lengths to write this blog post. So much so that on a few occasions, and perhaps with the help of it being 11:30, I had forgotten what I was doing it for and considered dropping it entirely. But the reason I’m making it a blog post and not an Instagram story or, as my first idea had been, a message to someone who had suggested they were there to talk, is entirely the reason for the blog post.

This began because I was having a little meltdown thinking about how much I’ve eaten over the weekend, and how heavy and sluggish I feel, and how I still can’t for the life of me seem to get a grip on eating any differently. I have a partner now, and they’re fantastic. They cook, they enjoy food, and they are absolutely astounded by how 1) awful my chicken is, 2) it’s the only thing I eat, and 3) my lack of variety and enjoyment of food. I’ve tried foolishly to explain my anxieties around food, just saying I don’t like wet food and saying I’m scared of things, but only really came to the honest truth of my genuine panic around weight gain for the first time today on a FaceTime call. He has an honesty above all else policy, and a very boyish mentality of just “not eating” when he thinks he’s gained too much weight. He’s also mentioned that my obsession with protein is a problem and that he wishes I was softer, claiming that I have no fat.

Now I could sit here and debate the reasons I prioritise protein or the amount of fat I want to loose or try justify my reasonings - and for a time in the call I did - but it’s just sad. I’ve had a few days of eating with him, and I’m just scared. I’ve gained weight, I feel uncomfortable, I have no control around enjoyable food, and it’s shameful. I can do the behaviours of eating (not in a recovered way, but it’s better than some), but I can’t bring myself to relinquish control. I can’t allow myself flexibility on a daily basis. I can’t enjoy food. I have to get the tasty thing and finish it then and there so it doesn’t tempt me tomorrow. Then I have to return to my diet as quickly as possible, coddle myself into believing it’s okay that I had a weekend of indulgence, validate and justify my decisions, and then calculate how bad it might be.

I am so ashamed of myself for having these problems with food. I don’t know how I’m supposed to solve this problem. I can’t ask my new boyfriend to just never eat with me, that’s entirely illogical. I can’t control myself to only eat a smaller portion of the off-plan food so I can enjoy without over-indulging, I’m just not there yet. And I can’t just do what any sane person would and enjoy the food every day so the novelty wears off because I will genuinely become fat as a fool.

It doesn’t help that I skipped a training session to spend time with him. Yes, I am fully aware that you can’t out-train a bad diet, but it softens the blow of over-eating. 

And now I return to why this rant was a blog post. Someone in my life has, on a few occasions, mentioned I can reach out to them to talk about this stuff. I don’t tend to believe people when they say that, because I think it’s normally for optics and if not, it’s for ammunition. I can’t trust people with this. It’s also just absolutely horrible to be dealing with. I gained 15kg in 6 months. They watched it happen. So in my sick brain, I’m just here thinking they probably think I’m fat and aren’t scared of me having an issue, that I looked better before, that me saying anything would be admitting weakness. 

And what can they truthfully do? I don’t want to recover. I want to be thin. I want to be light. I don’t want to gain weight. But I also don’t want to be unhealthy and I don’t want to fuck my health up. I want to be able to enjoy meals with my partner and feed my body enough to be well enough for a family one day. 

I even tried using mushrooms and doing a personal healing trip. I managed to have a profound experience seeing my flesh suit and being shown all the damage done to it. I was so touched by the fact that my heart, the muscle that gets the least amount of care or affection from me, has been beating in my chest since I was a kid being abused. That heart just kept going. Kept keeping me alive. Even now, I have a deep remorse and sorrow for what I’ve done to my heart. I know there’s no real damage done and I’m probably fine, but I also know that my heart rate drops to 35bpm if I restrict or go a few hours too many without food. I also know I get arrhythmias and palpitations that I don’t remember from beforehand. I also know my hands go numb and cold sometimes. And I’m no entirely unaware of the way it races at random with the slightest input on days where I restrict. Or in response to large meals. 

But again, I say I’m fine. 

Anyway. I wanted to message this person and say I’m sick of being able to do the behaviours of recovery when I still get all the panic. And truthfully it’s only partly true. There’s nothing recovered about eating a 400g bag of trail mix, 5 cookies and a protein bar in one sitting. There’s nothing recovered at all about needing to finish the pods from yesterday just because they’re open and you don’t want them to taunt you tomorrow. There’s nothing recovered at all about only eating chicken and vegetables and being scared that the chicken is too pale or wet, or too big and not being small pieces enough to make <150g per serving. There’s nothing recovered at all about wanting to restrict or have a tooth extracted just to avoid eating and drop weight.

But I really do, at least some times, think I wish I had that recovery. I can see, almost a little, the benefit of that.

I just worry what the people in my life would say if they saw me gaining again. I can’t think of anything else interesting about me except that I’m petite. If I got fat, I wouldn’t be as good at a lot of things. If I weigh any more than I do currently, my clothes won’t look as good, my legs will touch and be uncomfortable, some of my clothes won’t even fit, and people will notice that I’ve failed. I don’t want people to see me gaining weight anymore.

I also know that people ignore and avoid me like the plague when I’m losing weight because it’s the only thing I can talk about.

This is the argument I’m in with myself and after all the junk I’ve just pushed into my abdomen, another argument is brewing: to lax or not to lax.

It’s midnight. I have work tomorrow.

And I never know how to end these.

x

feeling like a terrible person

 I'm pretty well known for finding it terribly difficult to put a sock in it, and today I was painfully reminded of that.

I have a problem with feeling invisible, so I say outlandish or cryptic things to scare and alarm people in a horrible bid for attention. Lately it's been my blasé approach to health complications as a result of my relapse.

I've been dropping very obvious clues to my demise and hoping someone will give a fuck about me enough to ask what's going on.

Today I think I discovered that one of the people I've been doing it to is in recovery.
And I feel like a horrible human being for not giving a fuck to think that I could be effecting people's own experience.

And now I don't know what to do. I want people to know why I might be a little off, but I can't share that without the context of outing myself, and I can't talk about it without giving people the opportunity to opt out of the conversation with full understanding of what I'm talking about for fear of impacting their mental health.

Relapse is weird

Milk might have been exactly the catalyst to push me over the edge, and here we are.

Obviously I could have seen the warning signs for what they are. My obsession with ensuring protein intake and meal timing was probably a red flag, and the desire to time exactly the right amount of calories at each meal to prevent catching up at night wasn't exactly normal. Hell, even the need to catch up on calories and devour large meals in a single sitting was perhaps a little disordered.

Admittedly, it's been months - perhaps more - of eating to a regimented plan. Protein oats, chicken breast & vegetables, chicken breast & vegetables in a rice bowl with some kewpie mayonnaise and salad, protein shake or protein yoghurt for a snack. But it has rice and mayonnaise included. And I had cheat days sometimes. And I wasn't hungry.

But it included none of the tenets of recovery.

I was deluded to think that rice and mayonnaise once a day would have saved me. I was ambitious to think an attempt at milk would have helped, milk that is still in my fridge now by the way. It was naive to think that I could disorderedly get myself through recovery. What's that saying? Insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting a different result? Yeah, that one.

So I gave up on the milk. I went back to my water made oats after 2 days of crying about milk in the morning and panicking about how much it weighs and how to track it. "It's just so much smoother" I told myself and anyone who dared to listen. "It doesn't upset my stomach". Hell, to people I trust I even explained that I was just plain defeated by the milk. It was too scary.

I consulted with that psychologist I see every so often. I initiated the appointment by explaining I was going to share something vulnerable and asked that she focus more on reflecting and exploring the experience than providing an answer. She immediately jumped into telling me everyone has the same issues and to not worry about whether I relapse or not because I have no control. She told me it was silly, that I look fine and that it wasn't an issue. That sounds like permission enough to relapse if you ask me, just so long as I wasn't stressing about relapsing I could do it. 

Well that's a relief, now I can relapse in peace.

[Rice and mayonnaise exit stage left.]

Trying to keep my cool at work, getting a new job, ambiguous interactions with people at the gym and failing on exercises I used to find easy. Sleep at a beautiful 5hr average.

[Peanut butter runs off stage right.]

I awake to thoughts of whether I'm hungry or not, I sleep to fears of how much I ate, I move throughout the day with the hopes of undoing food.

Scales need new batteries and I body checked so hard I nearly walked straight into someone.

Body checking by proxy through the coaches and they're starting to get annoyed.

My brain has this beautiful skill to fall into the following conundrum: nobody will like me if I'm this big, and my eating disorder can solve that, but nobody deserves to be in a relationship with me while I'm in my eating disorder.

I want desperately to have a partner and a family, and I think my eating disorder will help me get that, but by engaging in my eating disorder I'm pulling myself away from social interactions and destroying the health that is necessary to have a family.

My eating disorder makes it difficult for me to engage in meaningful relationships and is the only skill I know to make someone find me attractive.

I don't find myself to hold any inherent worth or value without having some neat party trick like not eating for 72hrs.

My eating disorder is still the coolest thing about me.

And relapse kinda fucked that all up, because I don't really have any of the cool brag worthy behaviours that my eating disorder provides, and I certainly don't have any of the resulting physical manifestations of engaging in those behaviours either. So instead of resenting my brain for telling me the eating disorder is cool, I resent the recovery behaviours I've engaged in from pulling me away from the best thing about me.

Anyway, I'll get batteries for my scales and check how much weight I've lost so far and in a week or 2 I'll be down a little bit. It's wild how quickly this escalated to full blown eating disorder.

I will say, having friends tell me I need help and they don't want to be in my life anymore also kinda stung.

That's okay, I have my eating disorder to keep me safe and happy. I can keep myself company. I can go for walks and try new sugar free foods and eat cucumbers and drink water and black coffee.

What the fuck is wrong with me?

Recovery is really hard

 This statement brought me to tears this morning.
Then again, so did milk.

So. You know. Maybe not that deep.

I keep going back and forth on whether I'm actually in recovery or if it's just pseudo recovery. Like, sure, I only eat a handful of safe foods on a daily basis, but I have no problems eating cheat foods or meals. I can eat out, I can indulge, I can binge on desserts.

Okay, so that's not the most recovered thing to do, you got me there.

But it felt like a liveable state. It felt like I was doing okay enough to say I didn't have an eating disorder.

Then I noticed that by going to work I was finding it really hard to get my meals in. And if I eat meals in portions that I think are acceptable, I'm wildly behind on my daily calorie allowance when I finish CrossFit after work, meaning I have to eat two thirds of my daily food in one sitting and then try to go to sleep.

So after much panicked contemplation I decided that replacing water with milk in my morning porridge would be a good way to boost my calories to allow for a more sustained intake and a less ravenous and deprived self when I finish the day. 

I thought it would be as easy as changing the 200ml of water I normally use and just using the same amount of milk instead. However, milk is more viscous and dense than water. Meaning it provides a different yield depending on how it's measured. 

I didn't want to use my watering jug because it's another dish I'd need to clean up and I use that to water my plant, Bud. So instead I had the bright idea of weighing the amount of milk by switching my scales to mls.

While I was pouring the milk, however, there seemed to be a wild discrepancy between the amount of milk:oats I had, and the weight as measured by my scales. Then as I took the bowl off and switched it back to grams, I noticed there's another setting; mls MILK.

This lead me to inevitably catastrophise, because how much moo-juice do I actually have in my bowl right now and how do I actually track that? Furthermore, how long do I have to microwave it oh my god it won't cook properly and now it looks like I've frothed it and it smells like cheese.

So the first day was, needless to say, a certified failure. But alas, I made some TikToks about it (nobody understood what I meant), and decided I'll try check with a measuring jug.

So I measured the 200mls of water in my watering jug, poured it into a food safe jug and saw that it came to ~210mls there. Then I disposed of the water and poured milk into the second jug, just at the 200ml line.

Then, because I wanted to check convergent validity, I placed the bowl of 50g oats onto my scales, zeroed them out and switched them over to mls MILK.

"173 mls".

Okay now I'm really panicking, it looks like the right amount, but that maths isn't making sense.

And again, I'm unsure how long to microwave it for because it keeps getting so damn thick. 

All that to say I've tried to use milk in my porridge two days in a row and I've become enraged, disheartened, disgusted and appalled. I've also tracked it as 250mls of milk on MyFitnessPal on both days, too, even though I honestly couldn't tell you if it was 200 or 500 mls of milk.

It's terrifying trying to increase calories. 

I'm scared of milk.

I couldn't possibly add milk and peanut butter, something I used to do with ease.

I don't know what I'm going to do with this stupid milk.

I really thought I'd be able to do this, I really thought milk was just a simple fix to a problem I thought I wanted to resolve, instead I'm closer to relapsing than ever before and I can't figure out how milk works.

So what am I supposed to do now? Go back to using water? Throw the milk away? Keep persevering with this recovery challenge until I've consumed it all and see how I feel then?

I'm also really tempted to just go back to my low calorie version of breakfast, stick to my low calorie lunch, and then instead of trying to catch up on calories for dinner, just cutting the calories there.
Oh right, that's called relapsing. I'm tempted to relapse. Duh.

This was probably the most poorly written post I've made in a while, but I needed to get it out of my head. I don't know what I'm supposed to do. I don't know why something as trivial as milk was enough to set me over the edge so bad. And genuinely, I just feel sick and nauseas from trying.

Anyway, stay tuned for more I guess?

Thirty

 It is my birthday for another 55mins as of writing this right now.

To be honest, I expected it to be worse. There was a sense of a looming deadline as the birthday approached, as if I was sure to expire or feel some catastrophic change as a result of simply no longer being in my twenties.

Alas, it was uneventful when I awoke this morning. Genuinely nothing felt different. Perhaps it was the residual vodka from last night's drinking stream (thank you to everyone who helped make that successful), but honestly it was honestly anticlimactic.

However, as the day wore on, I couldn't help but feel like there is something wrong with me. Not for turning thirty, I know I can't change that, but for the fact that I've accomplished so little by this point.

For example, I have no partner, I'm bad at dating, I'm not very lean, I'm not very strong, I don't have a career, I haven't finished enough study to actually be able to use the degree I have, I don't know how to drive so I can't get a job in my field of study, and I'm broke. 

I finished a workout where I failed on squats and just left feeling less than. For obvious reasons I was hungry afterwards and might have unleashed some hanger at my friend, and then when the tiredness hit and I felt like crying, I immediately jumped into consuming content to numb out and ended up staying up later than I had anticipated. Then I climbed into bed and couldn't sleep because my heart was keeping me up, which resulted in more anxious interpretations of the thoughts I was having, and by the time I realised I was clenching my jaw (along with probably every other muscle in my body) it had been 30mins since I first tried to attempt sleep.

I might just need to go back on my antidepressants. I might not have anything wrong with me at all. This might just be the birthday blues. Perhaps it's the would-be hangover, or the introvert drain, or some combination of any number of factors.

Whatever the cause, I feel pathetic. I get jealous of other people for all sorts of things, be it their body, their confidence, them talking to my crush, them being better at the gym, whatever. I'm stubborn for the most stupid reasons, refusing to do things that would potentially resolve my concerns, simply because I'm stuck in some form of self-sabotage fuelled indignance. I'm convinced the people I care about simply tolerate me and are just keeping me around for a joke. 

I really wish I could make an effort to disprove myself, to find evidence for the contrary, to give myself a pep talk, self soothing and personal nurturing. 

At the very least, I can almost convince myself that perhaps this isn't just because I'm thirty now.