long post you need to read it :)

9/18/13

Hello all, as promised I am getting more into my blog again so you will see more posts. Today I have several things I want to talk about. First is my overwhelming desire to write, I want to write write write! I want to write at least 3 books and become the new Susana Kaysen. She is only one of my inspirations in writing. My plan still is to attend the Community College of Baltimore County and take as many general education requirements as I can then transfer my education to Towson University and Major in English Writing with a minor in Creative Writing, because all I want to do is write- creatively. There are so many interesting English classes in my future I just can’t wait, I wish I could just bypass all the gen-eds but even I know that is required for a formal education. Some of the courses I hope to take in the future are as followed:

Women’s Words Women’s Lives

Writing Poetry

Modern Jewish Literature

Historical Linguistics

History and Literature of the Old Testament

Writing Fiction

Literary Essay (which will be fundamental)

British Literature since and before 1798

American Literature since and before 1865

Shakespearean Comedies and Tragedies

And many more!

Some of the great authors I hope to learn about are Virginia Wolfe, Emily Dickenson, John Donne, Edgar Allen Poe (excitement!), James Baldwin, and Shakespeare of course. These are all outlined in the English Department curriculum at Towson University. I still have much to learn about sentence structure and minor punctuation though so my beginning courses will help me out with that.

Now about my life, I have been ruminating on my surroundings lately. This group home has been great to me for the most part, but a lot of the people here are really starting to bother me. Most of the people here have Schizophrenia or Bipolar Disorder (like me) and some of them are very odd and difficult to get along with (my roommate in particular). I have been in psychiatric wards of all sorts and this is beyond the lowest of the dumping ground for the mentally ill I have ever seen. This is a place where the mentally ill go when they have nowhere else to go. Fortunately I DO have somewhere else to go, and I will be going there relatively soon. Just to give you an idea of what life is like here, imagine waking up at 3AM to your roommate turning on the light and getting on her knees and praying…at 3 AM…which she does about 20 times per day, or imagine waking up at 6:30AM to the sound of a 54 year old man with a tattoo of a star on his forehead singing away to himself in the smoke yard. Imagine eating dinner next to a dear fellow who is so feeble and ill he has to have puree food and can’t feed himself, and had to wear a diaper. Imagine your roommate coming up to you several times per day screaming “you are dead” and you will eat horse shit! For no apparent reason this is what she says to me. She has a “voodooist” in her head that makes herself sound like me and she thinks I am saying evil things about her she screams “Power, Power, Power, you all have power and I know what you are going to do”. In other words she is completely off her rocker. I have sympathy for these people though (except when they get violent); because Schizophrenia is a brain disorder just like Bipolar except it comes with much more delusions. Most of the people I live with are completely psychotic. I still feel bad for them though because although I don’t deal with active psychosis I have symptoms and I feel bad that they have to go through that. I am just ready for my move already. This will all be part of my book because it is part of my life experience.

The symptoms I deal with are different than delusional psychosis. I suffer with Bipolar Disorder and a personality disorder (most likely), so I have mood shifts- one day I will be okay and the next day I may be very depressed and low and hardly able to make a decision. Every couple months I also experience mania in which I get overly excited about an idea and I will concentrate on nothing but a certain idea and everything else is gone. I may do “reckless” things such as get my nose pierced or my lips (which I have done), I may spend a significant amount of money (which I have done), and I may get easily angered and very irritable. They say some people with Bipolar 1 Disorder can get psychotic but I have yet to get psychotic…I think. I hope not to.

Besides that my eating disorder has been the prevalent sweet poison of my life. I will describe my Binge Eating/Bulimia as this – Crave nothing but high calorie fattening food and all you want to do is eat all day and then take an entire package of laxatives. You hate your body so much because you have gained weight but you can’t cut the tie with food it is you’re drug-literally. You still get on the scale 4 times per day just like you did when you were anorexic. You still count calories only this time you are so drugged up on lithium that all you can do is sleep your food depression away. You stay in bead 13 hours per day and watch TV and eat 2 boxes of cereal followed by 3 brownies, followed by whatever else you can get your hands on. You have tried to make yourself vomit using every method you have heard of but you just can’t do it.  So- you are a laxative junkie. You go to Walmart every day and buy your laxatives and if they don’t have them you panic and go to the Walmart 10 miles away. You smuggle your laxatives into the house hoping your parents don’t catch you because laxatives are like heroin to your parents, just like heroin. After your massive binge at 4:30PM you take your laxatives while your whole family is still out doing their day, you weigh yourself, cry, maybe cut yourself and get into bed at 5pm for the night. That was the life of Marissa Adams the lithium zombie laxative addict Binge Eater. And to this day I am still laxative dependent.

The life of Anorexic Marissa was extremely different yet she still hated herself and weighed herself 4x per day. The worst was my sophomore year of high school and my first year out of high school. In 10^th grade I am convinced I was almost schizophrenic myself…I wore shorts with leggings, with skeleton shoes, and carried a leopard animal backpack around all day. Get up at 7AM wash face do morning ritual go out to the freezing cold bus stop at 7:55AM and pray that the bus is warm so that your bones won’t turn into ice. Get to school at 8:20AM and sit through sociology and drivers ed/PE for the first two classes. They drag, because you are freezing cold but not even hungry because your cravings for food have completely diminished. All you crave is diet coke and raw vegetables. During PE your stupid teacher doesn’t know you are anorexic and when you try to run and you can’t she says “Marissa run or no points”! So you pull the energy from within your bone marrow and start jogging a little bit. You are past the point of over exercising you are just living the holocaust victim life. At “lunch” you get a cherry coke zero and sit by yourself and some random twit says “hey eat a fucking hamburger”!! You pick up your stuff and go into the bathroom with tears in your eyes almost hoping you will be forced back in the hospital soon. At the end of the day you are the last stop home on the bus so you fall asleep in the warm bus as usual. You get home and your mom’s wide eyes look at you with horror and ask with a cringe “How was your day Marissa”? “Fine”, you say. Nothing about this day or year or life is fine. You drink a nice warm cup of instant black coffee without splenda because even splenda because you are convinced even that has hidden calories they don’t put on the label. After your coffee break it is time to head over to work at the retirement home for a strenuous night of serving the residents. The managers despite having a dyeing co-worker in front of them only care about the residents. You pray you get out before 7:30PM so you can go home and eat your little bit of food and be in bead (or on the couch) by 9PM. Twice during working at the retirement home I had to sit down on the couch because I felt like I was going to pass out. Despite that, Marissa got up and went back to work. It wasn’t until February 2009 that you were forced back to the Sheppard Pratt Hospital because you’re eating disorder was about to kill you. You have to tell your boss you are leaving because you are “sick” she tries to show sympathy but it’s corny. On my last day of work they manager gives me a hardy slap and the back and says “boy you really are a sack of bones”! (Yeah what else is new)??? You get admitted to the old familiar asylum at age 16 with a height of 5”6 and you weigh in at 82 lbs. The psychiatrist looks you square in the eye and says “Marissa, you are near death it is good you came here when you did”. Your sugar is low, your potassium is low, and your liver function is off. I knew in my head it was nothing weight gain wouldn’t fix. I learned in a few days after I had osteoporosis and the bones of a 60 year old woman. I was in the hospital for 10 weeks. I watched the news every morning, went to group, and beat to the drum of the eating disorder facility. That was the life of 16 year old Marissa Adams. I should have been getting my drivers permit, playing on a sports team, going to football games, making friends, and having fun. Instead I was in a 330 bed psychiatric hospital 5.5 hours away from home. I stayed there for a very long time. I argued, I flipped out, I screamed, I manipulated my psychiatrist, I put my feet in the ground, but in the end they one, my psychiatrist discharged me at a healthy weight. There is no point in fighting the system because the medical team will always win and the mentally ill patient will always lose the argument. They will put you on meds and they will force you to eat. And if you don’t you just stay longer. Or in the sad case your insurance stops paying and you are forced back home to deal with your illness until you have to go back to the hospital again. That is the life of an anorexic. It is sad, depressing, and shameful.

I will talk about my current eating disorder and how it affects me next time. Stay tuned!

“Behavior is what a man does, not what he thinks, feels, or believes.”

~Emily Dickinson