Posts by Katey:
- Studies show that girls as young as five years old report being concerned about their body and wishing to go on a diet.
- 30% of anorexia sufferers continue to experience the disease long-term. Only 40% of sufferers recover completely. 5% are fatal.
- A history of sexual abuse is present in 30% of cases of anorexia.
- 92% of people with eating disorders do not feel like they can tell anyone at all – not parents, not friends, no one.
- An estimated 90,000 people are being treated for anorexia or bullimia at any one time. Often, only the most serious and extreme cases result in treatment. This figure does not even come close to the number of people suffering from these illnesses.
Hi, I’m fat. I’m over a size six.
January 11th, 2011If you are a twitter user, you might have seen the recent drama involving an account belonging to some idiot called Kenneth Tong. In case you missed it, this ex-Big Brother contestant who seems to have done absolutely nothing (including that) of note, began promoting his magicalicious super fun happy pill that could make even the most disgusting fatty into a desirable size zero.
A size zero is a UK size four. My skinniest, boniest friend is a size eight. In the modelling industry, despite many rumours of the pressure put on young girls to achieve unrealistically small figures, the standard sizes are between a six and a ten. Sample size garments for runway shows are often on the smaller end of this scale.
A size four is so small that only a tiny handful of highstreet stores even stock it, and even when they do, it is only in their petite range. (Namely River Island, but only in jeans, as well as Miss Selfridge and Topshop).
I am veering away from the point, but I wanted to give a little perspective as to what Mr Tong was promoting. Along with his miraculous skinny pill, he called for admiration to be given to the emmaciated models who serve as “thinspiration” – a term thrown around within pro-anorexia circles to describe images and people so thin their bones protrude, their periods stop and their hair falls out. How desirable.
Mr Tong today retracted his statements made recently, and claimed that they were made as part of a hoax. They were an experiment of how to become globally famous within a week, he claims. He apologised in the same paragraph as he boasted proudly of the publications that have chosen to feature him in response to his recent comments and the outrage he caused. He said he was going to make all the offence he has caused all better by donating to an appropriate charity, like kissing a booboo makes the nasty wound go away.
Except it really doesn’t.
I am not saying anything new, here. The internet has its gameface on with regards to this man and his various words. Basically everyone who has an ounce of sensitivity and a twitter account is pretty appalled by this hideous man and his bullshit. But it did prompt me to look up some stats about anorexia and how the media influences body image, because I think calling this crap a “hoax” is an insult to anyone with body image issues, and letting Kenneth Tong apologise and fuck off back to obscurity is like forcing a playground bully to apologise under duress.
This website provides further terrifying reading. All in all, what I am trying to present here is that this is not, in any way, an acceptable subject for hoaxes, jokes or publicity stunts. While this shit, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to qualify as a crime (fuck you, freedom of speech!), a media career is clearly what Mr Tong is aiming for, and I would hope that his method of attaining it is never forgotten.
Sources
A good year.
December 24th, 2010
Well, for the next week or two, we’re all going to end up sitting down for a minute at some point or other and deciding for ourselves whether or not we’ve had a good year. Good is, incidentally, a bit of a bland label to slap onto something so complex.
Part of the way my mind has worked for a while has been to stick to the assumption that me and everything I am, do, and think is shit. But I was sitting in the passenger seat of my mum’s car somewhere on the A38 today when I had the realisation that… this year has involved leaps of progress that I am actually quite proud of.
Let’s not get too excited, mind you. I’m still a bit grumpy about living at home, but the me sitting here today has come a long way from the me sitting here last year. While it may be true that the metre sticks I measure my achievements against are different from many other peoples, I am proud all the same.
This year, I quit smoking. For ten years I was a polite addict, smoking away from others and not around children, but all the same my habit was setting me back, at its worst, £2,500 a year. I had absolutely nothing to show for it but an apologetic smile full of yellowed teeth, a morning cough and really smelly clothes.
Quitting was not easy – in fact, it never got easy until after ten months I finally gave in and had a cigarette. It was absolutely, utterly fucking disgusting, and not something I will ever be doing again. I still miss it though, which is so strange. But I am so pleased for myself that I finally quit.
This year, I finally went and saw a bit of the world that I’m so in love with. Going to the USA felt like coming home, even though it was my first visit. Turkey was brilliant, it genuinely felt like we were experiencing a different culture, and I loved that.
This year, I admitted I wasn’t well, and I went to the doctor. I can appreciate how, to many people, this doesn’t seem like a particular feat. To people with depression and other problems with their mental health, it might strike a chord. To people who know me – the idiot who never asks for help with anything, ever, and usually turns it down when offered – it’s probably about fucking time.
Finding the right medication for me has taken a long time. It has been difficult and frustrating, wanting so much for there to be an easy way. I call them my happy pills but that’s not true – happiness is still a battle that’s hard to fight even on the good days. All the pills can really do is help you realise that it’s worth fighting for it. I know eventually I’ll need a lot of counselling too – and maybe that can be a goal for next year, when I feel up to it!
This year, I went to… the dentist.
Oh yes, six month checkups meant nothing to me. A heavy dose of dental pain went along with a heavy dose of painkillers (and the knowledge that you can safely take 600mg of ibuprofen instead of the 400mg it says on the box was such an enabler).
It’s not to say my teeth were particularly gross, but I was aware that I needed work doing. There were a few cavities I could feel with my tongue, and a few areas where I knew I’d need work done. But then one day, when eating pizza of all fucking things, sitting on Abbi’s sofa… a tooth broke. At the fucking front.
Luckily my mouth is pretty small, so even when I smiled it was barely noticeable unless I was pointing at it and making a sad face. (This happened often). But all the same, the day it broke, I knew it was time to man the fuck up.
I’ve found a brilliant dentist who I get on well with, which puts me at ease. He understands my nervousness, he drugs me up to the eyeballs and he talks to me like I’m a toddler who just did a poo in the potty. (“Well done, you did really well, I’m proud of you!”)
I would recommend him personally to anyone in Bristol, because to get a person like me comfortable enough to attend a dentist on multiple occasions speaks absolute volumes to him personally. So here – and if you call Bristol Clifton, ask for Dr Jason!
Anyway, all in all, my life as of right now isn’t as different as I had hoped it would get. I am still an idiot with a myriad of problems and issues and bullshit. But I am proud of the steps I have taken and the progress I have made, and I know they must seem small to anyone else.
And you know that they’ve been taken in fantastic shoes. Is there anything else that really matters?!
Sadness and everything after
October 26th, 2010
Kaya Koyu, or Levissi to the Greeks who inhabited this village. It was abandoned in 1923 when the Anatolian Greeks were evacuated. Taken by me.
I’ve been wanting to write about this for a good few days now, but the words never seem to come. I think too much at the best of times, and I can hardly describe the last few weeks as that. Thoughts that tumble around in my cranium, little snippets of quotes from sources that I never remember. “If you’re not lost, you’re found”. “Life is what happens when you’re making other plans”.
I used to think that one day I would win this silly battle with depression, but I’m not sure if it’s really something you can win. You just learn to cope with it a little better, one day you’ll get off your medication and hopefully learn to love the you that you are. There are alternatives to this outcome, but they are not worth considering.
One of the things I have struggled with most lately is how the chemicals that mush my brainful of cells together seem to think these other outcomes are worth thinking about. These dark thoughts that fill me, engulf me. It feels like a taboo, almost. I told my mother that I’ve been having really black thoughts, and she patted my hand and told me to go to the doctor, like you’d tell a friend who had missed her period to take a test. I told an SL friend, whose inworld name is Bette, and she was fantastic – the right balance of not over-reacting, but not being patronising either. I told writerJames, and he was brilliant too, trying to focus me on the brilliant things that there are in my world – like him! (He’s right!).
But then, in the quiet of the end of the day, when all the people have stopped saying the right things, the only company I have is myself. As Grandma Death said in Donnie Darko – every living thing dies alone.
I would never do anything like that. Never. In a way, that’s why I feel like I can be as honest as I have been here. I am not an angsty teenager crying for help or attention. But these horrific thoughts are a very real part of a very, very common mental illness. Your inner monologue can be very hard to stifle.
Depression isn’t really something you recover from, and it’s not a battle I will ever win. I realise this now. I will relapse, like I am now. Like plucking your eyebrows, like breaking in heels, like dumping someone – it will always be painful, but every time you do it, you manage it a little better.
Second lives.
August 31st, 2010I thought I would share something on this blog today that for a long time I have kept very separate from my primary existence, but it strikes me as odd that I do this – I tell the friends I make in Second Life all about my real life plans, hopes, dreams, loves and failures.
So, real life – meet my second one.
There is a blog project, called the3six6, which is 365 days as told from the perspectives of 365 people. It’s a great idea – our lives might all be quite similar on the surface but the intricacies of our days and indeed experiences are beautifully and wildly different.
But there’s an awful lot of people who don’t just have one day to talk about. And for them, thanks to the brilliant Trace Osterham, a Second Life friend of mine who Abbi and I hung out with for a day when we were in New York, there is twothreesixfive. And today, it was my turn.
I wrote about how I felt about the nature of the friendships I have forged within Second Life, and how they have positively impacted my first life. Second Life is a valuable commodity to me and the hundreds, maybe thousands of other people who are lucky enough to have such a diverse, creative job. But it’s more than that. It’s a rich fabric of experience and I am a better person for it.
Hiding places
July 31st, 2010I feel a bit weird having the most recent post here still being me ranting on endlessly about depression, so let’s move it down a bit and replace it with a photo I took at Westonbirt a few weeks ago.
It makes me think of hiding places, the little pockets inside of us where we store the bubbles of memory and emotion that really matter. Sometimes they’re good things and sometimes they’re not, but they all go somewhere.
Can you ever really find a new hiding place when an old one gets found? I’m not so sure. But sometimes just hiding things isn’t enough. Sometimes you just want it to fuck off.
This makes no sense to anyone but me.
I has a sad.
July 27th, 2010When Abbi and I first discussed buying a web domain and writing regularly in a blog, I already knew that I would find it to be a helpful exploration of an issue that has been ongoing in my life to date.
There are many blogs about depression, many websites about mental illness, many people who are sad. I’m not going to try to educate anyone – I know as much as google and a few years of low level psychology class will tell me – but I would really like to write about my own depression, in the hope that one day I can look back on it and understand it, and myself, a little better.
The term “depression” is one I have always been wary of using. Before I had a doctor-provided diagnosis, or even acknowledged that my feelings may seriously warrant one, I have been annoyed by people who sigh and say “Ugh, I feel so depressed”. Some of them may have been genuinely depressed, I’m sure, but it seems to have entered colloquial vocabulary as a synonym for frustration, or sadness. Depression is not sadness.
It’s different for everyone, I’m sure. But this is me, and my experience of it. For me, it was like breathing thicker air than everyone else. Every breath laboured, every single moment of every single day overshadowed by this crushing feeling in my chest. Depression is not sadness, it’s helplessness, hopelessness. It’s feeling that nothing is worth doing because everything is empty, pointless. It isn’t laying in bed because you’re lazy, it’s laying in bed because the thought of getting up and existing in a world so clearly not intended for you to exist in, leaves you feeling so raw and vulnerable that you can’t bear to do it.
Depression is not being alone. It’s being surrounded by people and still wanting to cry without knowing why. It’s avoiding phonecalls and texts from people who genuinely care about why you’ve disappeared, and ignoring them for so long that they stop coming, and it’s feeling relieved that you don’t have to avoid them anymore. It’s not seeing anyone or anything of meaning or note for weeks on end because it’s agony to be social, when the first thing anyone ever asks is “How are you?” and you’re too emotionally exhausted to lie but the answer is too horrible to face.
There are a lot of people who feel as though treating depression with medication is the easy answer. As someone who made four doctors appointments that I didn’t attend, and two that I did attend but chickened out at the last minute and made up another problem when they asked me what was wrong, let me assure you that there is absolutely nothing easy about walking into a room, sitting down with a medical professional and saying, “I need help. I think I have depression”.
It’s the subtext in that, that makes it so difficult. It’s the things you don’t say, by saying that. “I’ve tried to have a life, I can’t, it’s too hard”. “I failed at being happy”. “There is something so desperately wrong with me that I think about killing myself for most of every day”. That is not a good conversation to have. It’s not an easy conversation to start. No one who takes an anti-depressant, does so because they think it will fix their problem.
But when your problem is that you can’t deal with life, you need something to make dealing with it possible, and that’s what these pills do. Almost all of them have side effects. These are not easy options. When you start to feel better, that’s when you can start looking at the things that have been making you feel this way. I’m sure that bit will be even harder still.
I’m starting to feel a little bit better, but I’m not there yet. As much as I may have really good ideas about the things that have turned me into this shell of a person, I’m still not ready to really think about them in any depth. Some things I can’t even say properly because I can’t force myself to use the words, so I think I’m still a way off.
This blog may or may not help me. It might just chronicle yet another failure of mine to deal with my myriad of issues. I hope not though. But one thing is as clear as ever, as clear as it has always been – I’ve never been alone while I’ve been trying to get better. Thank you guys for being my friends. I’m not sure that it was always worth it for you, but know that you were always appreciated.
New Yawk.
July 22nd, 2010I don’t know if you’ve noticed (lol jk, you couldn’t escape it) that Abbi and I went to New York recently. It was pretty fucking fab. Here are some photos of it.
#newyorkwankers
July 12th, 2010Whenever there is anything exciting to be excited about, I turn into a small child all over again. I’m a little bundle of energy, all sparkly eyes and high pitched voice, annoying as I remind you bi-hourly about whatever event it is that has me all worked up.
In two days and twenty three hours, Abbi and I will board a plane bound for New York. On twitter, where we regularly talk bollocks, it has been granted a hashtag of its very own – #newyorkwankers. (Abbi’s twitter is here and mine is here!)
It’s the first time I’ve been outside of the country since I was thirteen, and that was a family holiday that my father insisted on dying in the middle of, which ruined everything frankly.
When I was twenty-ish, I tried to get my passport so that I could go on holiday, but no no! Thwarted! Pesky housemate had thrown my birth certificate in the bin. This would have been a mild annoyance, but I was born in South Africa and it took three applications before I finally got my birth certificate a few months ago. I’m twenty-five!
So when my passport finally plunked through my letterbox, it felt like a weight off my shoulders. It’s really hard to prove anything about who you are without a passport or a driving license, which I also couldn’t get without my bloody birth certificate. I hope I’m adequately conveying how fucking, fucking annoying it has been.
This trip to New York, although short, feels like a really big deal. It feels like my freedom, my coming-of-age, and not to mention my dream of visiting America coming true.
So when we are sitting on the plane, and Abbi will I’m sure be thinking about shoes and shopping and museums, I’m going to be thinking about myself. And a bit about my dad too. And maybe a bit about shoes and shopping and museums. God, such a #newyorkwanker.
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