an illness named deanne

today is august 26th, 2007, and i couldn't be more grateful for it. for this day, like any other in my life since i started living it. i couldn't be more thankful to be alive and well. i will never take those things for granted.

i'm going to attempt to scribble (figuratively speaking as i am typing, but i AM mentally scribbling) down a synopsis of my illness and my life up to the point of me recovering. i'm not going to worry about wording things beautifully, succinctly, or even correctly because the message is the important thing. not the way it is written. i used to be an excellent, talented speaker and writer who was dying. now i am an out-of-shape, mediocre writer who really doesn't have many of her former intellectual pursuits, but who is living.

about a year ago, i began speaking to a few people from high school. which i never ever would have been able to do prior to that point. why? because high school was when i became chronically ill. i was in such a tremendous amount of pain and agony. and i don't want to sound like a 24 year old woman who is bitter about high school for whatever reason....trust me, i moved past it within a year of entering college. i had new agony. so, last year when i began speaking to jennifer karnes (first and foremost), it was definitely a healing process for me. so incredibly healing. and i have expressed this to her over the past year. i know that i tend to sound too sweet or schmoozy at times, but i am living as a person who shouldn't be living. i shouldn't have survived. but i did, and now i am happier (mentally and physically) than i ever would have even HOPED for. ( i would have settled for mundane survival.) also on myspace, i have been in contact with primarily one girl that i was in baptist medical center in kansas city (eating disorder unit/known affectionately as the EDU by the alum). she is the only person i have remained in contact with after so many years. she is struggling currently, after having over 2 years of recovery under her belt. she has a beautiful spirit.

more on that stuff later.

back to high school. i always thought that people could see the self-loathing on me. physically. they could see on my body and my face that i hated myself with such a fervent passion that i would be more comfortable doing something destructive to myself in the middle of a class/social situation than i would be just being there/just sitting. this bred my chronic cycle/issue of punishment. my eating disorders, depression, psychosis, self harm, etc etc etc were all a fruit of punishment. i had to harm myself to be worthy of being a human being; the more drastically i harmed myself (in whatever form) the more worth i had. otherwise, i had no worth at all. i mustered courage for speaking and debating or just walking through the halls by having not eaten for multiple days, for having run 8 miles the night before, by having cuts all over my arms and torso underneath the long sleeves i always wore. for some strange reason, these terrible diseased things had to be present in my mind. i remember one of my many mantras at the time, i hate myself but at least i'm not lazy about it. i'm proactive. i hate myself the most of anyone who has ever hated themselves. so at least THAT'S something.

and i never told anyone this. i didn't have anyone to tell. i lived by myself through much of high school, as i was basically sequestered from my family. for their sake. but being alone did not help me.

to remember this pain from back then (it took a different form in the college years) brings a sore sick ache in my heart/stomach/mind. but the fact that i am sitting here where i am right now, broadcasting this to the world, with my wesley asleep in the other room, drinking coffee, looking out the window of this house at the beautiful morning, makes it all the more powerful.

when i was hospitalized the summer after my freshman year, right before the beginning of the next school year, i didn't know that i was sick. i thought that a person had to merit the title of "sick"; that "sick" implied some sort of innocense whigh implied some sort of nobility and worth. i was in some sort of adolescent unit in i think the mizzou hospital in columbia.....i was really quite severely underweight and that was the era when i was running so much every day. the whole thing started with wanting to be health conscious. ironically. well, rather the whole thing started even before that actually--in junior high when i felt some sort of huge weighted wave of deep sadness come over me that never went away from that point on. but back to the e.d. stuff.

during this formative time when i was extremely impressionable, and forming habits on calories and carbs blah blah blah, i had a negative influence in my mother. (keep in mind these wounds have long since been healed also). she was and has been wrought with bulimia since her 20's when she was with t.w.a. she is 65 now. she taught me things. so, you see, i really never stood a chance.

also, the fact that my brother and sister were fairly normal people further placed the blame squarely and solely on me.

i am not sure if people around me in high school saw me as the girl who hid in the bathroom stalls during classes and lunch, tugged her long sleeves down to her wrists to hide things, and couldn't bear to make eye contact; or the person who was an all-star at the speech and debate stuff and came home every weekend with a new wall of trophies. i don't know. it's highly possible that people ignored me alltogether, in which case i should have been a lot easier on myself.

college started out much the same way, but i was living in a dorm apartment with three other girls who had to witness my binge/purge cycles as they lasted for days/weeks at a time or whatnot. again, i don't know if my habits struck them as odd or not; as an illness or just as an unpleasant annoyance. i made many friends in college, especially in the beginning (before i had the chance to slowly erode those friendships to the point at which they could no longer exist). i got along much better with guys; i detested girls. so i was the only girl in a huge group of crazy college guys, and that was by choice (i kind of ruled the roost.) NONE of these close friends knew of my problems until after the first time i was hospitalized. at the beginning of my second semester at mssc (it has been mssu for several years since then, in joplin mo). i remember that night, february 2 2002, as i was admitted to the psych ward at the main hospital in joplin. (i would come to know it well in the years following this. unfortunately.) i had really never told more than 1 person (and that was just an attempt) about the cutting primarily, but secondary all the many anguishes and diseases i was suffering from.

after being at that initial place for a month (yes, a MONTH), i was sent to a state psych rehab place as an intermediate facility before i could be accepted at baptist in kansas city.

in 2 month's time, i was in kansas city. i was officially on medicaid and social security disability. i would be in kansas city for a very long time that first stay. two and a half months.

needless to say, after being in controlled environments such as these for 6 months, aside from the fact that i was released from baptist because i had 'exhausted their program twice over' was therefore not really much better, i was frantic and desperate and the issues only got much much worse in a mutated form.

this is when i suppose a new era of illness sort of emerged, the seasoned era.

every semester after that one (i finished it via correspondence, my professors loved me very much so i never dropped out until 2005) was sprinkled with frequent and earth-shattering hospitalizations either in joplin or kansas city or a few other places. there is no way to briefly sum up the awful things that were going on in my life, in my mind, during this time. one of my best friends in the whole world, josh celli, died in a car accident on february 27th, 2004. this too was a new era. i was completely and utterly destroyed from this point on. i was so destructive and addicted to so many horrid things (alcohol binges/addiction and pill overdoses plus the things that go along with those) that i was really truly dying. it was that classic clichee---a downward spiral. i destroyed myself time after time after time until i couldn't see any hope of recovery. (after i had tried so hard for so many years, i saw that it was not going to happen after my entire life had been nothing but diseased. it just couldn't; it just wasn't practical.) so i set my sights on piling up the self-harm inventory. when people use the term "rock bottom", i tend to think that this characterizes one event. well, for me, it was about a year and a half of NON-STOP, unrelenting misery. (not to suggest that i didn't try to make it stop, just for the sake of peace.)

i was in kansas city 4 times, for at least a month each, total. the other hospitalizations? way too numerous to count, and i wouldn't want to. so i wll just put a cap on this description: i was put in a nursing home in november of 2005. i withdrew from college for good, i was forced to. unable to leave that nursing home. a 22 year old girl in a nursing home.

i was there for three months, which were (for obvious reasons) terrible. but the important thing was that it did not at that time look as though i would ever be released. there was mention of power of attorneys/legal guardians, which meant i would be there for the rest of my life. i had screwed up one to many times, and i was in a nursing home for that reason.

the special part of this story, however, is that immediately prior to being admitted to that facility, something lifted. something in my brain led to some sort of relief. it was like something finally clicked. i felt different. i continued to feel different from that moment on.

of course i had to deal with this while i was believing i was locked in a nursing home indefinitely. but despite that looming over my mind, i felt better.

long story short (as i am getting really sick of typing;), i was released around the beginning of february 2006. nowhere to go, no life anywhere, but i was alive and i was free and i had another chance.

i have never been back to joplin, i have never spoken again to the doctor that i saw for all those years who finally released me in good faith from that nursing home. i am not going to return to school; not that school or any other (despite my being about a semester from graduating).

i neglected to mention that i met wes on christmas eve 2005. totally random. i had decided to turn on my computer (i was allowed to have it in my room there), and up to that point i hadn't wanted to turn it on---to face telling what friends i had left that i was in a nursing home and couldn't leave etc. so we met randomly on myspace, talking about the smashing pumpkins. i did want someone just to talk to....talk to about nothing, not about where i was or the past or anything. just someone to talk to about tv and music and christmas.

also, wes suffered from a severe eating disorder from about the time he graduated high school up to about a year before i met him. very severe. he had been to kansas city also, but they had turned him away because his depression was so bad (probably just discriminating against him for being a guy though). it used to kill me to hear of his pain. early on, i thought we wouldn't really be friends as friends with those topics of conversation usually take a turn towards the competitive eating disorder stuff. feeding off of each other in negative ways, either purposeful or unintentional.

i started my life over, moved to springfield. didn't even know my way around springfield. my sister stephanie had lived there since high school though, so that gave me some feeling of security and comfort. and, although wes lived in aurora, i made sure that he wasn't the only reason i was choosing springfield. he read the phone book to me oe night when i was in the nursing home, i wrote down numbers of psychiatrists and therapists etc. and he recommended the place where he still went for bi-annual checkups.


this past christmas, we had our own christmas tree. we reflected a lot on the christmas before that one and the year that we had had together. it was very powerful to me. i got to open presents christmas morning at his parent's house, with myself, his mom, and amanda and logan all wearing surprising matching pajamas to make the guys laugh:)

i will always say (no matter how cheesey it sounds) that i turned one year old on christmas of 2006. always. i am truly me now, the me that i was always supposed to get to be.

i have taken thousands (literally) of pictures in the past year and a half. it took a massive amount of discipline for me to live on my disability and do nothing (no school, no job) for over a year. to not beat myself up about that. to manage each of my days until i had acquired a rock-solid management of my daily emotions and moods, my eating routines, my human happiness and sadness.

everything is truly beautiful to me now. and i would say that even if i didn't have wes. if i was still healthy that is. i am the luckiest and most grateful person in the world. unfortunately i am rushing this last part, which is truly the most important part of my whole story.....but i have pancakes waiting for me. ;) i love me, i love to laugh at myself. i love the way i am clumsy, ditsy, way way way too eager and zealous most of the time. i have accepted myself, become ME, and given me to wes and vice versa.

i still have scars, but i don't even think about them any more. (many physical and otherwise). this past year has been a lot of work towards that goal. and i have achieved it.

it is of the utmost importance for those out there who are suffering under a mound of self-destruction to know that there is still hope. don't give up just because you have done more to kill yourself than you have to live. (again with the clichee corner but it's true). i never would have hoped for this outcome; i didn't even know this outcome existed for anyone, let alone me. but i love it and although i will never forget what i went through to reach this point, the important part is this point and now. happiness and health.