Guest Post: A Journey With Depression

This guest post is written by Anita and how she made her own way through depression and medication.

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I was diagnosed with a clinical depression when I was 18 years old. Before it came to this, I had struggled with several physical complaints, like an ulcer, migraines, nausea, insomnia, basically any signs that my body, or even better, my brain was trying to tell me something. Because I wasn’t educated enough, I was put on medication in combination with psycho therapy, thinking this could fix me. Twice a week I went in to talk about whether the medication was working, whether I felt better. After a few sessions, the psychiatrist felt like I wasn’t making any progress, so he increased the dose of the medication.

This went on for another couple of weeks and according to him (I can’t remember whether I felt different or better, or worse) I still wasn’t making any progress nor had any improvement, so he put me on a different anti depressant. As I later on learnt, with the development of the internet and forums, the first one was an MOA inhibitor, the second one an SSRI. The same cycle repeated itself, no improvement after a few weeks, dosage was increased, still no affect, increase dose and see therapist.

By then my doctor got really crafty, he prescribed me a TeCA, a tetracyclic anti depressant. Yes, even I had to look this one up, since I can only remember the brand names or generic names of the pills. This procedure went on for I think more than a year. By that time I had stopped seeing the therapist, because my health insurance only allowed me for 20 sessions. Instead I went to see my GP once a month for repeat prescriptions. By that time I don’t think I had made any progress. Okay, I didn’t feel suicidal any more; I didn’t sleep for days any more. I had kept the same job and house, in other words I was functional in society.

During this phase, I was also diagnosed with ADHD, which meant more medication. The (in)famous Ritalin. But the internet and my access to information grew. I started asking questions online and talking to people who were in the same boat, so to speak, as me. And like Edward Norton in the Fight Club, I went to support groups for people with depression and people with ADHD and people with a combination of these two. I kept my mouth shut and just listened, and asked questions; lots of them. And I learnt a lot. I learnt that the pharmacy that I carried around with me wasn’t helping me at all, especially the anti depressants. After coming home from a 5 week holiday, I decided to quit the 120 mgs of Citalopram (Celesta, Cipramil) a day. Cold turkey. In hindsight I hadn’t researched that part very well, because you are supposed to taper these things. Anyway, after maybe three or four months of mood swings, terrible mood swings, anger fits (I killed 2 vacuum cleaners, drove the car into a tree, not on purpose, I see how this coming from a depressed person may sound like a suicide attempt, but it wasn’t and smashed a bathroom window with my bare hands) and more horrendous things I started to feel “normal” again. With normal, I mean, I could feel the rain on my skin again when walking outside. And normal like being a tad bit more excited about something that just the flat, careless uttering of the word “meh”. All in all it took me at least a year to balance things out. Next step was quitting Ritalin. The only reason I used this was to increase my attention span from 3 seconds to 35 minutes because I had a demanded (mentally) job and I needed to money to pay for my immigration to New Zealand.

Once in New Zealand, I quit Ritalin as well. Any immigrant can agree, my first job in New Zealand could be done by a retarded hamster, so no major mental effort needed, which meant no Ritalin needed. I was up to 90 mgs a day and quitting that was easier.

Years after my first diagnose with depression I figured out medication is not for me. I’m not saying they don’t work, I’m saying they don’t work for me. I have a friend who’s been on Prozac for 5 years now and every time he tries to lower the dose, he feels like harming himself. He and I both know that these pills do work for him.

I am a balanced and happy person now. I took a long and sometimes very painful journey to get there, but I am here now.

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I (Fae) asked Anita to explain further how she now manages her depression.

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It sounds very simple, but I basically turned my life around. I changed everything, especially my way of thinking. I used to be locked into that negative spiral of thinking, you know, Oh they won’t return my call = they hate me. Now I think “They probably are busy” and they often are

Podcasts are essential. I have a few I swear by. Honest people that tell me things my parents should have told me. I’m catching up and learning every day.

2010 and 2011 were really bad years for me and the events that happened forced me to change my outlook and priorities on life.

I got divorced, lost my house, lost my job, lost my sister. But I gained so much more. Every time I was about to give up, something little happened, a friend rang, someone visited my house, anything small which made me carry on and appreciate the things I had.

I met my current beautiful partner. I found a new job. I found a new house. I learned to live in a destroyed house without water and electricity.

I learned how to survive.

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If you’re reading this anywhere but That Girl, Fae or a feed reader without attribution, it has been STOLEN! Who knew that my stuff was that good? ~ Fae

That Girl, Fae by R Simpson-Large aka Fae Teardrop is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 New Zealand License.

The Trials of Being the Owner of a Vagina

This post is going to be about vaginas and labias.  Generally mine, so just the one vagina.  If you have no desire to read my complaints about said vagina or her health, or public waiting lists for gynecologists, then consider this your fair warning.  I’m going to be a little detailed, but purely in a clinical manner.  Feel free to go here instead.  Immediately following there is a cute animal buffer, below that, you were warned.

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For a while now my vagina and I seem to having problems with getting along.  I’d had enough of it, so decided to see a nurse.

I explained to the nurse that I was sore, all the time, occasionally itchy, occasionally crampy along the vaginal wall spontaneously (these cramps are nothing like period cramps, which I haven’t had since October 2010 when I started taking Noriday), my labia minora had shrunk to half its previous size (I used to be a outty, now I’m an inny), and the smell had… changed, it wasn’t bad, it was just different.  And there was also that I haven’t been able to have sex comfortably in about a year.  Lubrication is generally fine, but most of the time it hurts like a mofo.  She had a look, took samples to be tested, and said everything looked normal, but suggested I also see the doctor.

One of the problems with labias and vaginas is that because there’s such a variety from person to person, there’s a huge range for what is considered normal.  Unless you happen to see the same person more regularly than once every three years for a pap smear, but not so often that they can’t notice slow changes over a period of time, then things are generally going to look normal. (Does that make sense? I think it makes sense.)

I get to the doctor, explain all of the above again.  She takes a look as well, thinks I may have some thrush, but it generally looks fine.  Tells me to get some blood tests to check my hormone levels, and to wait for all the results to come back.

While the nurse actually treated my concern about my labia minora seriously, I did feel that the doctor just kind of brushed it aside, like it wasn’t something to be worried about, that I must have been mistaken in my recollection what my own vagina/labia minora used to be like.

So I wait for the test results to come back.  A couple of days later I get a message saying results all came back negative, there’s no infection of any kind, and my hormone levels are all normal.

I asked the doctor to please, send a referral to the hospital so I can see a gynecologist.  I told her that I know something isn’t right, even if the test results don’t agree.  She said that she would, though it felt like she was doing it begrudgingly.

And now I wait.  I’ve been placed on the routine waiting list, and should receive an appointment within the next six months.  And while I wait, I continue to feel that I’m somewhat failing at being a wife because I can’t have sex.  Even if J tells me otherwise, it sucks.  I don’t know what else I can do about it, if there is anything I can do, and it makes me kind of sad.

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If you’re reading this anywhere but That Girl, Fae or a feed reader without attribution, it has been STOLEN! Who knew that my stuff was that good? ~ Fae

That Girl, Fae by R Simpson-Large aka Fae Teardrop is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 New Zealand License.

No Really, No One is Taking This Obesity Problem Seriously

Having written about our apparent ignorance of the “obesity epidemic” on Friday, another little gem popped up on stuff.co.nz earlier today.  Written by Dara-Lynn Weiss, she explains why she decided her daughter needed to go on a diet, and how she policed that diet.

She’d decided that 42kgs (about 96.2 pounds) was to heavy for her eight-year-old daughter, and, apparently, so did her daughter’s doctor.  Queue calorie counting over every single item of food that was to enter the child’s mouth.  Including while at a birthday party.  This method of dieting always means certain foods become forbidden, unless you don’t want to eat anything else for the rest of the day/week.  And, as often happens, once something becomes forbidden, it becomes relatively high on the ‘must have’ list.  Inevitably, this leads to arguments between mother and daughter, in public, which Dara-Lynn even admits were embarrassing.

Over the course of this diet, the daughter weighs in at 35kgs (about 77 pounds).  Dara-Lynn sees this as mission accomplished, that weight was their goal after all.  Nothing is mentioned with regards to how quickly this weight was lost.

Let’s take a look at how the daughter feels at the end of this:

When our appointment ended, Bea got dressed and we stepped outside of the office. I looked at her, beaming expectantly as we walked down the street. But she said nothing.

“How do you feel about all the weight you lost?” I asked her when we got home.

“Good,” she said, blandly.

“Do you like the way you look now?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, definitively.

“Do you feel different?”

“No. That’s still me,” she said. “I’m not a different person just because I lost seven kilograms.”

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She went on. “I’m not comfortable with saying, ‘Oh, yeah, I’ve changed everything and everything’s going to be perfect for the rest of humanity,’ ” she said. “I’ve changed half of the way, but not fixed my entire life. Because that isn’t true. Who can fix their entire life when they’re eight?”

“Well, no, of course you haven’t changed your whole life. But you’re not overweight anymore. You did fix that. That part of you is in the past.”

Her body tensed in my arms. She began to tear up. “Just because it’s in the past doesn’t mean it didn’t happen,” she said.

After sharing this revelation from her daughter, Dara-Lynn goes on to say:

I had believed that I could set Bea on a different track, that I could “cure” her of being overweight by changing her eating habits before her self-image dimmed so much that she came to think of herself as a fat person. But I was too late. Or maybe it was never possible. She had indeed changed her body and her lifestyle, but the metamorphosis was bittersweet, because it had cost her some of the innocence of her childhood.

(Emphasis mine.)  Because thinking of yourself as a fat person is obviously the most terrible thing that can ever happen to you.  This kind of thinking on her part is confirmed by an earlier statement:

…  Was admitting to being overweight any more humiliating (or obvious) than just being overweight? Wasn’t it less embarrassing to acknowledge it and let people know you were aware of the problem and doing something about it?

As a fat person myself, I just don’t understand how I can continue to live with myself each day.

Dara-Lynn also divulges that she also had/has issues with her own weight and self-image:

My MO has always been two-pronged: cover up my flaws as best I can, then lay them out on the table for discussion to expose my insecurity pre-emptively. Throughout all the years that I’ve battled with my weight, even as I sought to hide my body under layers of obfuscating clothing, I fessed up about my feelings to others. I was the girl you could overhear groaning, “Ugh, I am so fat,” as I patted my distended belly. If I had an obvious pimple on my face, I would attack it with concealer, then find a way to work it into conversation, just so everyone knew that I knew that they noticed it, and they shouldn’t feel awkward about it.

Let’s have a look at some of the numbers here:

• The mean average height of an eight year old girl is 125cm (about 4’2). Source.
• Starting weight of 96.2 pounds.  This equals a BMI of 21.7.  Normal weight is 18.5 to 24.9. Source.
• End weight of 77 pounds.  This is a BMI of 26.  The overweight range is from 25 to 29.9. Source as above.
• As much as I hate using BMI to measure anything, the range for being obese doesn’t start until you are at least 30.  This doesn’t stop Dara-Lynn from throwing the word obese around willy-nilly when describe her daughter’s weight.

Great work, Dara-Lynn!  You have successfully pushed your own weight and body image issues onto your impressionable eight year old daughter and taken away some of her innocence.

H/T @ColeyTangerina

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If you’re reading this anywhere but That Girl, Fae or a feed reader without attribution, it has been STOLEN! Who knew that my stuff was that good? ~ Fae

That Girl, Fae by R Simpson-Large aka Fae Teardrop is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 New Zealand License.

Wanna Contribute?

I haven’t had a guest post since forever.  In fact I’ve only ever had one (on Sexuality and the Sex-Positive Community by my friend Alexis) and that was back in February 2011.  Nearly two whole years ago!

So, I’m pretty keen in seeing if anyone would like to compose a guest post for me, or participate in a collaboration.  The topics I’d be interested in are pretty broad:

• fat-acceptance/activism
• queer theory and LGBTQ rights
• experiences with sexuality and sexual/gender identity
• sex-positivity
• paganism
• polyamory and non-monogamous/non-traditional relationships
• mental health
• social history (any era, though my area of study is modern world)
• philosophy
• Woman’s rights

I would love to talk to anyone who’d like to join me.  You can email me, leave a message on my Facebook Page, or @ me on Twitter.

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If you’re reading this anywhere but That Girl, Fae or a feed reader without attribution, it has been STOLEN! Who knew that my stuff was that good? ~ Fae

That Girl, Fae by R Simpson-Large aka Fae Teardrop is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 New Zealand License.