Mirrors have become my enemy. My clothes have become my enemy. I am a shadow of my former self, and I desperately want my body back.
Perhaps, it’s not normal for a man to concern himself with such things but, if you’re familiar with me, you know I’m far from normal. Two years ago, before I began my first downward spiral into madness, I was an athlete. I am average height for a man (5’ 10”), and back then, I weighed 225 pounds –all muscle. My arms measured 19” and I could bench press 400 pounds!
I was all-natural too, and that’s something to be proud of. Plenty of my friends experimented with anabolic steroids (back when I was a teenager), but I always stayed clean in that area. I did have a head start though. I got involved in bodybuilding and martial arts at the ripe age of seven. Motivated by fear, I applied more discipline at that young age, than most adults could manage. I was convinced; it was inevitable I would have to defend my mom and myself, physically, against my psychotic father someday.
That’s quite a burden for someone who slept with a teddy bear and had cartoon characters on his underwear.
In any case, by the time I turned seventeen and my friends were sticking needles in there asses, I had ten years of weightlifting under my belt… and it showed. Steroids –not necessary. Don’t get me wrong though. I was no saint. By the time I was twenty, I’d eaten magic mushrooms, dropped acid, popped pills, and smoked my fair share of marijuana (actually… I smoked about twelve people’s fair share of marijuana).
Back to being seventeen…
This is also the time, my grandpa died on his way up to visit my mom –she was being devoured by cancerous tumors and only had days left to live. She actually died the very next day. Two months later, my father choked to death in a friend’s apartment. We’d been estranged, but I had reason to believe he was a different man from the monster I grew up with. With my mom gone, I wrote him a long letter, reaching out to him. I mailed it two days before he died. I don’t think he ever got to read it, but I’ll never know for sure.
I was weeks away from turning eighteen, and I found myself, orphaned and homeless. I also found myself slipping into a dark, foreign place in my mind. A place that’s all too familiar to me now, and has grown much deeper and darker over the years.
This was the beginning of a pattern, or cycle, which would continue for the rest of my life. I survived the fourth one last year… barely.
Back then, when my family members started dying one after the other, I was a heavily muscled 200-pound kid. I’d recently taken third place in the Rhode Island Karate Classic, and some pro wresters had even approached me from my gym. They thought I’d be perfect for a career in the ring.
My life went way off coarse though…
I became trapped in my own mind. I moved into my dad’s abandoned car (officially homeless) and I stopped eating and working out, all together. Six months later, I weighed 149 pounds. I wasn’t purposely starving myself, but my thought process had become completely irrational, and I had no money to eat. I did try to work… a little, but it was part time for minimum wage, and I only showed up half the time. I used that little bit of money to support my marijuana habit.
My stomach hurt all the time, and part of me just learned to ignore it. The other part of me, the part born in that dark crevice in my mind, liked how it felt. I would go 2-3 days without eating a thing. It felt like I was dying (I was), and that part of me thought dying felt pretty good.
I survived.
I built myself back up, physically. I found myself again, mentally. There was a slingshot effect, and I went from death’s doorstep to functioning at an extremely high level in every aspect of my life –at work, in the gym. I even had a nice apartment, and was in a serious relationship with a woman who would become my wife (that’s a whole other story).
At twenty-five years old, and over 200 pounds of muscle again, the world of professional wrestling tapped me on the shoulder a second time. The WWE (WWF back then) came out with a reality show called Tough Enough. I came amazingly close to capturing a boyhood dream –out of 4,000 hopefuls; I was placed in the top 200, and invited to New York City as a semi-finalist.
I failed.
After I got that surreal phone call from the meca of sports entertainment, my marriage (long story again) started to collapse. By the time I made it to the big city, I had already begun to lose touch with reality for the second time in my life. My final audition was a disaster, and sometime during the bus trip home, I disappeared completely.
I went through the same thing all over again, that I did after my parents died, except my ailments had increased in number and intensity. I lost it all –my job, my body, and of course… my mind.
Again, I came out of it… and again, I became highly functional for the next five years. Since the death of my parents, that seems to be the general rule –I go crazy every five years (roughly). I built my mind, body, and career up all over again. I found the inner-strength to finally break free from my ten-year, very damaging, co-dependent relationship. I got a new job, and became the supervisor in less than a year. I started learning how to play the guitar, at a record pace that my teacher couldn’t keep up with. I even turned my talent for drawing into a talent for tattooing, that I was able to supplement my income with.
This, of course, is when I found myself involved in the emotionally crippling love triangle that would kick-start the third cycle. This was the first time I would starve myself, with purpose. My bodyweight plummeted, I hardly slept (about 9 hours a week), and I kept company with vivid hallucinations of my dead mother –beckoning me to join her.
I snipped the intercom (doorbell) wires in my apartment, moved my furniture against my door (full-blown Agoraphobia), and disabled my phone. I was ready to die. My ribs poked at my skin, and my skin was adorned with intricate patterns of self-inflicted lacerations. My ex-friend, and my temporarily ex-girlfriend (Hailey) kept sending the police to my apartment (suicide threat). I fooled them the first time, but their next visit led to my being institutionalized in a mental hospital.
I was on borrowed time. If I hadn’t started out with all that muscle, I would have died days before the cops showed up (hadn’t eaten in a full week). The hospital helped me that time, and under their careful scrutiny, I started to eat again and find my way back to reality.
I had survived… again!
I went on to work things out with Hailey, and we had our beautiful baby boy (Chris), and I started working and bodybuilding again. Before long, I was the Manager at work, and was bigger and stronger than I had ever been in my life. I was healthy and active. At 225 pounds, I could still do a full split, a back flip, and jump rope for 30 minutes without stopping. I was an action hero, and my kids and their friends looked up to me like a comic-book super-hero –I loved it!
Then the fourth cycle came. It grabbed me with its familiar icy grip and whispered in my ear, that we had unfinished business –we did.
I can’t explain how my heart broke and my mind collapsed when I realized I was going through this nightmare again. I should have died the last time, and knowing it consistently gets worse each time it happens, I figured my life was over. I abandoned my family. I moved out of our house and wanted, desperately, to be left alone to finally die. Keep in mind that I was utterly insane at this point, and usually so distracted by audio and visual hallucinations that all rational thoughts ceased to exist for me.
Deep in the core of my heart, I missed my kids and Hailey more than I could ever explain with words. I didn’t see it as… me abandoning them. I saw it as… me saving them. Insanity and death (in my mind) were inevitable. I didn’t want to be around my family when I came undone for the final time. I didn’t want to expose my kids to such madness. I was prone to blacking out and cutting myself –it could happen anytime, and I didn’t want them traumatized by such things. I didn’t seek support from the woman I love, because I felt that I was beyond saving. I thought I would do unforgivable damage to her, if she tried to help me, only to have me die anyway.
So I left.
Fortunately, Hailey loves me with all her heart. As much as she may have wanted to just let me go, at times, that was impossible for her. It was a long, hard, and painful road… but two months later, I returned home to let my family love, support, and try to help me.
I had lost my job again, and I had programmed myself to starve –I’ll try to explain that a little. I didn’t just want to die… I wanted to suffer. I had the deepest sense of self-loathing you could possibly imagine. I hated myself for not being able to overcome my internal demons. I genuinely saw myself as weak, pathetic, and a poor excuse for a man. I knew I had damaged my family with my insanity, and I sincerely wanted to be punished for that.
I thought about the other three times I went through this, especially the last time. I remembered how bad it hurt –my body cannibalizing itself in a desperate attempt to sustain life. My muscle tissue, quite literally, eating itself. I decided starvation, not a gun or bottle of pills, would be how my life would end.
It was kind of like self-hypnosis. Before, at my healthiest, I ate six perfectly nutritious meals a day and loved food. In my madness, I trained myself to hate everything about eating. It got to the point that I couldn’t eat most things even when I actually wanted to. When I moved back home I’d nibble on dry toast or have a few potato chips, in between days with nothing at all. Hailey tried to cook wonderful meals for me, and I honestly tried to eat them, but the smells made me sick. The way the different textures felt inside my mouth made me sick. Even the sound of myself chewing made me want to throw up.
Now…
I’m better… in so many ways. Finally, after all these years, I’ve figured myself out. I love my family, and myself and we’re happy for the most part. I don’t hate myself or have any regrets, because all the roads I traveled led to where we are now, and where we are now is a good place. I’m proud of myself too… for new reasons.
I know I’ll never be free from a lot of my ailments. I’m mentally ill, and I always will be. For the first time in my life, I accept that. I have freedom from the unrealistic burden that I have to be cured to live a happy life. I’m not necessarily proud to be mentally ill, but I’m now proud of how I look at it. I’m learning more and more to live with my illness instead of against it. I’m not ashamed of myself anymore either. I’m not worried I’ll be embarrassed about my agoraphobia or social anxiety when my son gets older. Eventually he’ll understand these things, and he’ll be proud of me too for how I’ve learned to deal with it. I’m a survivor
Still…
I want my body back!
I’m getting better week by week, but I did so much damage (70 pounds lost this time), recovery is slow and difficult. Eating still bothers me, but I’m adding to the menu of things I can tolerate all the time. I’ve put about 15 pounds back on, but I’ve got such a long way to go, and it definitely gets discouraging. My tailbone hurts when I sit, and my hipbones hurt when I lay on my side, because I have virtually no body fat. I can’t stand the way my shinbones feel, as if they’re cutting their way out of my skin, and I hate how my face looks –still drawn and unhealthy.
My mind feels so much healthier… now I just need to get there physically. I want to live for a long time (such a good feeling to finally have). I need my body to be able to support that goal. Perhaps I’ll never bench press 400 pounds again, but I’m looking forward to the day when my pants don’t fall down when I walk anymore.
You Can Find Out More About My Favourite Author Daniel On His Own Blog Or Read The Other Blog Posts He Has Written For The Real Supermum Blog.
