5-22-2013

I have had class every day since Monday, and today is Wednesday. I have to get early (7:30am) two times per week, today included. But wow, I am really out of shape as far as sleep goes, because only getting 7hours of sleep as compared to my usual 11.5 is having an effect on me. I am proud that I have been able to do it thought. I crash hard at the end of the day though….and I take a nap about 3 hours before I got bed ha-ha. Going to college on the Virginia Beach campus made me feel like a “real” college student for approximately 10 minutes. The Virginia Beach campus is the largest of all the campuses of my college, and it seems almost like a university. As I walked through the path surrounded by geese and squirrels I saw a few students smoking a cigarette, I saw a girl talking on her cell phone, and I saw some skater fly by on his cool dude skate board. I took in the eloquence of this scene and realized that this is what people my age are supposed to be used to and feel familiar with. This experience for me was suddenly frightening and new; I was used to walking the narrow halls of a psychiatric hospital with a hospital band on my wrist – identifying me as a captive of psychiatric life. I was used to sitting in Milieus at 9:30pm drugged on Seroquel with the rest of the crowd who just wanted to go to bed. The thought of this kind of life was surreal to me. Yet here I am sitting in a classroom of 30 other people between the ages of 18 and 55, and no one knows my sinister past but me. College really does feel odd, but I don’t mind it. I don’t particularly like it, it just is kind of boring at the moment, and I know, I know I just started, and if I was in Anatomy and Physiology I would be pulling my hair out and going crazy with stress. I suppose this is better. I am gradually working towards something that I have no idea what it is.

I left off last time with my being readmitted from PHP to Inpatient in April or May of 2011. I was pissed but whatever I was being a little fucker in PHP anyway. I was secretly happy I was back inpatient; the compulsion to do a little bit of exercise was gone because I knew it would not happen when I was inpatient. It’s like the same feeling of dropping a completely brat kid off at daycare or summer camp for a day, you don’t have to deal with it for the time being. That’s how it was with my eating disorder when I was inpatient (most of the time), the brat kid (eating disorder) had to follow the rules. I had to eat snack every night at 8:30 or 8:45 whatever, and I had to fall once again into the monotone of inpatient life. It was very short lived. A new personality was beginning to form within me and I was becoming more manipulative and conniving than ever before. Before I signed myself in the middle of May 2011 I was watching the news with some other patients late at night on May 3, 2011 and someone randomly said “hey they killed Osama bin Laden”. I was so confused at first then I was so happy!! I was, and still am a Navy brat and what matters even more; I was outside the continental United States on September 11, 2001 so I saw the reaction of the military through my own 9 year old eyes. Since 9/11 I had always hoped the bastard would be caught, and finally he was dead. What a great distraction from my own eating disordered thoughts! Even cooler was my own dad was in Afghanistan, and I knew he had nothing to do with killing the monster but I still thought it was cool. It really did have a profound effect on me. I will reiterate something I said in one of my first blog entries. I never had a traditional “trauma”, but I did have things happen that were traumatic to me, one of which was 9/11 for some reason. I was living on a small navy base and I loved it and it was my way of life. I had lived on a Military Base my entire life at that point. I also did not understand the extent to which evil took over a person. On 9/11 when I watched the live feed of fox news in Manhattan and I saw the United Airlines Flight 175 slice through the South Tower of the World Trade Center, I understood right then and there – there are evil mother fuckers in this world. So when Osama bin Laden was killed it was a land mark in my mind, I was thrilled, and you better believe I bought the movie “Zero Dark Thirty”, and watched it about 20 times.

By now I am sure some people are thinking “Hey Marissa, why don’t you join the military since you are so interested in that”? Simply put: I can’t. Due to the extensive history of my mental illness and eating disorder I have permanently damaged myself in the minds of the big ass military officials. They also do not want anyone coming into the military on psychiatric medications. Well that alone pushes me so far out of the loop. I will most likely have to be on psychiatric medication of some sort for most if not all of my life. There have been a few times when I have come off of it, and I am a mess. I cry, I am depressed, and I even feel physically sick. However, coming off medications is possible if you have an educated M.D. watching over you. The point being made here is that due to my eating disorder primarily, I am not able to serve my country in the military, and I have always loved the military (so I thought). I was GI Jane Marissa. I played with Barbie’s sometimes but the majority of the time I played with army figures from dollar tree, pretending to set off missiles and sending my bad ass army men on missions to get the assholes who flew our own plans through our own towers. Tis the price I pay though. Now I am on a quest to figure out what some other perfect career.

I signed a 72 hour notice within a week of being back inpatient and my psychiatrist was not happy but I was at a healthy weight and there was almost no debatable reason to keep me. So I went home, and I went back to high school for the last barley month and a half of my entire high school career. I went back to my job in the guidance office and the cheers and the praises I got was disgusting. “Marissa your face is so bright, Marissa you look so healthy!” Marissa you are fat, was all I heard. There was no dietician this time, but I was going to be seeing a new therapist who my parents had tried to get me in with since forever. She was one of the only “eating disorder specialists”, in our area. This therapist was truly amazing; she was one of the most intelligent people I have ever met. Along with her intelligence came compassion and a desire to help. Her intelligence reminded me of that of the Director of the Johns Hopkins Eating Disorder Program I had seen long ago, but this woman was different. She was kind, she listened and I completely trusted her, because I knew she knew her shit. I am going to skip to the point. One day she came said to me “Marissa, I don’t think your eating disorder is your primary issue, I believe you have something called Borderline Personality Disorder, and your eating disorder is a ‘symptom’ of your personality disorder”. I was so brought aback at this, no one had ever considered me anything more than depressed or anxious, other than just sickly eating disordered. I remembered I had read a book about Borderline Personality Disorder; no this is not where you hear voices and see things you shouldn’t, this also isn’t Multiple Personalities Disorder in which there are several personalities in one person. No, this was very different from both. This is one of my main diagnoses as of today and it is a struggle because it leaves people having intense emotions, confused identity, self-hatred, and there are many more sub-symptoms. Look it up if you like. This Psychologist was brilliant for suggesting this diagnosis because finally there was something more than “just Marissa is Anorexic”. There was an underlying problem that might be causing it. Further investigation has lead me to believe that there is a certain amount of eating disordered patients that do have Borderline Personality Disorder, hence a symptom of Borderline is Binge Eating (or chaotic eating in general). This new revelation left me feeling upset yet gratified for another answer to my “problems”.