Looking in a Funhouse Mirror

I haven’t written for awhile. I could give you a whole list of reasons, but mostly I feel like the two biggest ones are 1) I didn’t really have anything to say 2) back to school season is upon us. As everyone knows, this year will be a year like no other. Preparing for the unknown is a pain for everyone, but is the worst nightmare for someone like me who struggles with anxiety and feeling out of control, even when the world doesn’t seem to be falling apart around us.

Undoubtedly, there will be posts coming about what it looks like to navigate school and teaching in the time of COVID. Although there is stress and uncertainty, there is also so much anticipation and excitement when I think about reuniting with the kids and being all together under one roof with my team again. Finding joy in those things is what will (hopefully) keep me sane.

However, tonight’s post isn’t going to be about back to school. As much as all those thoughts are swirling in my mind, there’s something else that has annoyingly pushed its way back to the forefront. We recently talked in a staff meeting about how hard it is to focus on a task if you are anxious or preoccupied with thinking about something else. It hit home so hard with me, because that’s been my recent struggle. Tonight, I’m going to give you a brutally honest look into what my brain has looked like for the past couple of weeks.

Alright. Do me a favor and close your eyes for a second. Actually, don’t do that because you can’t read with your eyes shut. I guess just try to make a mental picture as you are reading: 😂

You are at a carnival. You decide to walk into the room with all the funky funhouse mirrors. You spend time walking from one to another, getting a kick out of how each one changes your body to be taller or shorter, bigger or smaller. You may even take a snap for your snap story and post a picture of you looking super tiny for your Instagram. All fun and games, right?

Now, imagine that you leave the carnival and go home. You walk into your bathroom and look into the mirror, just to see another exaggerated version of yourself. Your reflection in the mirror looks huge. You stare down at your body, then back up at the mirror, hoping the reflection has gone back to “normal.” But it doesn’t. No matter what mirror you look in, your reflection is significantly bigger. You start to believe that this is what you actually look like. Regardless of how many people tell you that you don’t look any different, or that you look “skinny” or that you look healthy, you can’t believe them because every time you look in the mirror, that’s not what you see. You obsess about your weight and your size. You obsess about how your clothes fit. You start to believe that everyone around you notices every single flaw or change about your body and that they are constantly looking at you and talking about you and judging you.

Welcome to the life of someone who struggles with body dysmorphia.

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Body dysmorphia, as defined by the Mayo Clinic, is “a mental illness involving obsessive focus on a perceived flaw in appearance.” Therefore, it varies widely from person to person. For some people it can be a specific body part. However, the piece I can speak from experience from is the body shape/weight piece.

Through my stays in treatment, therapy, and many conversations with my dietitian, I’ve come to realize that how I see and perceive my body is not necessarily the reality. What I see when I look in the mirror, in fact, is very different from what someone else sees when they look at me. For someone with an eating disorder, this can be a very dangerous thing. When you look in the mirror and see yourself as much larger than you actually are, it can result in ramped up eating disorder behaviors. The more you engage in eating disorder behaviors, the more dangerous and risky your eating disorder becomes.

For people that are watching their loved ones suffer, this phenomenon can be very confusing and frustrating. From the outside looking in, as things get more dire, you can see how sick your loved one is and watch as their body deteriorates. But for the person suffering from body dysmorphia and an eating disorder, the reflection that they see when they look in the mirror can be so distorted they can’t see how much their body has changed and deteriorated at all. All they see is the exaggerated “funhouse mirror” reflection.

While in treatment, one of my friend’s therapists gave them an assignment one day. The therapist laid out a big piece of butcher paper, big enough for my friend to lay on. She had to trace how big she thought her body was. Then, her therapist had her lay down and traced what her body truly looked like. The difference was staggering. My friend’s tracing was more than twice as big as what her actual body tracing was. This helped me to have the outside perspective on how devastating body dysmorphia can be for one’s body image. When I looked at her, I could see how sick and ravaged her body was. But when she traced herself, or looked in the mirror, she saw a completely different, much larger reflection.

I can’t speak for everyone’s reality, I can only speak for my own. Therefore, for me, this is a constant, daily struggle. Every single week when my dietitian and I talk, she reminds me that my perception about my body isn’t necessarily the reality. I’ve come to know this. However, knowing this, and believing this are two very different things. I’m so attuned to any tiny perceived change in my body, that it often distracts me from my daily life. All of a sudden I’ll be very aware of the waistband of my pants. Are my pants tighter? Did I gain weight? Or I’ll obsess over what others are thinking about me. Everyone can see how my body has changed over quarantine. Everyone is staring at me and judging me right now. Or I feel like I have to constantly check in with myself and my body about any changes that I perceive that day. This behavior, body checking, starts with trying to soothe yourself and talk yourself out of all the disastrous changes you think have happened in the last 10 minutes to your body, yet in the end, make you miserable as you obsess and check and obsess and check. Mirrors are your worst enemy. Depending on the day, I can spend way too much time in front of it, obsessing over changes, or avoid it at all costs, literally walking around my house as I brush my teeth so I don’t have to look at myself, closing my eyes as I wash my hands, etc.

The worst part of the day, at least for me? Getting dressed in the morning. Every morning, for months now, I’ve dreaded getting dressed. Now that I’m back to work, it’s 100x worse. What if my pants are tighter today than they were last time I wore them? What if my pants don’t fit at all? This shirt fits differently than it did a couple weeks ago. Everyone’s going to notice... And on and on and on. Every. Single. Morning. And when I do perceive a change, which is pretty much every morning, I meltdown. All of a sudden, I’m in a state of pure terror and panic over the thought that my body has somehow changed overnight. My rational mind knows that it isn’t true, but I can’t seem to talk my emotion mind into that same fact. My poor dietitian has gotten more “My pants are tighter today. I know they are. I know I’m gaining weight. I don’t know what to do” texts from me than she can probably count. It’s insane. And so absolutely, utterly miserable.

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This is just one small snapshot of what my brain has looked like, for well, awhile, but especially lately. Should I instead be thinking about how to deliver lessons to both in-person and remote learners? Or how to best welcome back students into a brand new (to me) classroom? Or how grateful I am for my health and safety in the chaos of our current world? Yes, yes, yes. But are those things sometimes being thrown aside in my brain for other ruminations and obsessions about food and my body and my anxiety around both? Also yes.

That, I think, is the most frustrating part of all. I know all the productive, positive things that I would rather be thinking about. But more often than not, these obsessive, intrusive thoughts keep sneaking in and hijacking my brain. I wanted so badly to think that I’ve learned how to cope with these thoughts better. And maybe I have. But I also hoped that these thoughts would somehow start to fade away, the longer I was in recovery.

I guess what I’m remembering and re-realizing now, is that my eating disorder served a purpose in my life: to try and find a sense of control, and to also numb big, uncomfortable emotions. I stand back and look at my life in this moment, with school starting, COVID still running rampant, social unrest, derecho damage, on top of “daily life,” and realize that there are many things that I don’t have control over. And these things bring up some pretty big emotions. Cue: that eating disorder voice is coming in loud and clear trying to talk me into going back to it so I can feel in control and numb out the emotions that I don’t want to feel. Do I know that in reality, my eating disorder actually does neither of these things? Yes. But is it sometimes hard to remember that, especially when both my brain and the world are really loud right now? Also yes.

This post is not written to evoke sympathy. In reality, it was mostly a therapeutic exercise for me to write out some of the thoughts and feelings I’ve been having. My goal, as always, with this blog is to educate and be transparent and genuine with my recovery journey, and this just happens to be one of those times that the road seems especially treacherous.

Thankfully, I know that the more treacherous the road becomes, the more of myself I seem to find. So I guess right now, on this leg of my journey, I must be “finding” a whole bunch of myself. Here’s to hoping for a smoother road to travel soon.