Dissociative Disorders

This is a story about eating disorders, Dissociative Identity Disorder, disordered eating, and how I fixed my damaged relationship with food. Nothing graphic, but (unlike my garlic) I do not mince my words.

***

I don’t have a microwave. Not since 2012.

When learning this, people usually respond with surprise, incredulity, and a touch of learned helplessness. They ask how I melt butter or re-warm leftovers; I tell them stovetop or oven, and, occasionally, toaster oven.

PeanutButter got rid of his when we moved in together, and neither of us miss it. In fact, when later encountering one in the office kitchen at work, I had no idea how to heat up my lunch.

"But, Motley, no microwave? Don’t you like convenience?"

Sure, I appreciate efficiency. But I had to fix my relationship with food, and that was the first step. A drastic step perhaps, but we’re no stranger to doing things differently. Or drastically. Or drastically differently.

Getting rid of my microwave got rid of instant gratification. Got rid of the ability to make an entire meal in less than five minutes. Made it harder to have seconds (or thirds, or fourths, etc.). It sutured the disconnect between my body, my mind, and my meals.

Let’s talk eating disorders, and disordered eating — both common in complex dissociative disorders and DID. Not gonna go deep into the subject as a whole, but I will give you a quick ’n’ dirty rundown of my own personal experience.

Disordered eating showed up young — some of it learned, conditioned, and engineered, and some of it my own attempts at control.

I was an average-sized child, but the collective snickers from my peers started in third grade. Pre-adolescence made me thick, toxic shame made me withdraw, and by my teens, I was easily overweight.

I started skipping meals at twelve. There was never enough time in the morning for breakfast anyway, and there was a legitimate fear of home-prepared lunches. The supper table was filled with mockery and bullying (and prods for seconds, thirds, fourths, etc.) so I’d hide in my room or stay out late enough to miss dinner.

The full-on eating disorder didn’t hit until my twenties, and I was bulimic for seven years.

It was something for which I never went into treatment, never disclosed to any therapist (though I did have it disclosed for me), and I never, ever shared it with anyone (except select online friends). This was my dirty, desirable secret, and I wasn’t going to let it get taken from me.

The fact that nobody knew became a source of pride and instigation, akin to my struggles with self-injury. And, looking back, that’s all this was, too.

I assumed I was in control, but different alters thought they were in control. We were waging an inner war with no idea how it started, with self-hating and punishment parts very prominent during this time.

Some alters would over-eat while some refused to take a bite, and different alters had different binging preferences and purging methods. Distant factions screamed at each other, each fighting to exert their will and desperation over the body. Any illusion of control quickly slipped away.

We knew something had to change.

Something drastic.

It helped to remove the convenience. Preheating trimmed away that pesky impulsivity. The more time, energy, and electricity spent preparing food, the less I would eat in both frequency and volume: a burrito is four minutes in the microwave, but forty in the oven.

I stopped buying instant, fast, and snack food, and I started teaching myself how to cook real meals.

Boiling noodles was easy. So was mashing potatoes, browning hamburger, bacon, and stew meat. I stocked my freezer with chicken breasts and bagged veggies and searched for copycat recipes of my guilty pleasures. And the first soup I made from scratch is still my current favorite (and since perfected).

Specific items aren’t allowed in our cupboards, such as high fructose corn syrup, and I am shocked at the difference that has done. I am no longer addicted to my food, and it’s really hard to explain (but you know I’ll try some day). I recognize artificiality by its flavor, and prior comfort foods are sadly but gladly verboten.

I never thought I’d be the person who reads every ingredient on the box. Never thought I’d turn up my nose at sweets or snacks. Never thought I’d be someone who chooses bowls of salad, grains, and seeds. Never thought I’d be someone who enjoys and is satisfied by it.

Every change I made stopped being about weight or control and instead became about health.

I wasn’t dieting; I was making permanent lifestyle changes. Wasn’t trying to slim down, but aiming to be healthy, fit, and strong. I wanted to be the best version of myself, one that didn’t depend on numbers or pant size, and I wanted it naturally.

I found it in intuitive eating, moderation, and balance. In paying attention to cravings, and giving my system what it asks for, physically and emotionally. Restricting, binging, and purging are habits of the past.

I eat better than I ever have in my entire life. What I eat has expanded exponentially, and I have made massive strides in how I view, prepare, and understand food. I don’t think I could ever go back to how it was, and a stroll down most grocery store aisles only affirms it.

Throwing away my microwave has increased my culinary skills, connected me with my body, and deepened my link to the planet and its offered sustenance. I’m healthy, strong, and (mostly) fit. The kitchen is a major stage for system cooperation and communication, and PeanutButter and I have a good time experimenting with dishes together.

We’re still uncovering the catalysts to our destructive eating, but I can confidently say we’ve been in the clear from our eating disorder for a decade now.

And that we’ll definitely be microwave-free for the rest of our life.

#EatingDisorders #DissociativeIdentityDisorder #MentalHealth

The minuscule details of my outside world became the blueprint for my inside world.

Vast fields of rippling carpet fibers. Bedsheet mountain ranges. Prism-reflected pathways crisscrossed walls and dimensions.

A world where logic was built on riddles, and secrets were spoken in rhyme: where the deeper you go, the more there is, and everything is both nothing and exactly as it appears.

***

We started surrounded by stone darker than midnight. Stone that would gleam with phosphorous, gradually-fading fingerprints when touched, and sometimes when not.

We started in the dark. Not knowing who was beside us, behind us, or in front. We started with a blink, started with a step. We started with a tentative “hello?”

And the dark whispered back.

***

Inner world. Mindscape. Head space. Mental landscape.

Everyone has one. It’s how we think, where we think. The phenomenon is not limited to DID, but it is often utilized in recovery work as a way to process trauma, practice containment, and communicate with dissociated parts.

Inner worlds reflect our history, memories, emotion, and translates it into pictures, into a narrative we can tolerate. Our inner world absorbs unfelt feelings and unthinkable thoughts and gives us a place to go when the reality at the edge of our fingertips starts to burn.

***

For some survivors it’s a house. Or a couch. Or an expansive city. For some, it’s nothing, and for others, it’s much more.

At first, I couldn’t understand or relate to other dissociates who talked about manipulating or creating their internal spaces. Ours just was, and we had to survive it like everything else.

It didn’t seem to make sense; it wasn’t seamless or mappable, and it wasn’t just one place, either. Our inner world is precisely that: an entire universe (nay multiverse) seeded from the mind of a child.

Friendly forests and wooded clearings. Barren wastelands and acidic swamps. Earthquakes, floods, thunderstorms, mudslides. A beach, an ocean, a volcano. An attic. A snow globe. A motley-cobbled spaceship. An empty theater. A scrapbook.

Dreamlike and liminal, hovering between awake and asleep, dead and alive; while young, my inner worlds were a place not of safety but escape. At my worst, my mindscape was a treacherous, traitorous environment; an inseparable mental purgatory.

Every metaphor is a clue. We are learning symbiosis — to pay attention to the information given, to hear the message inside its scream, and we are learning to visualize and reshape for the betterment of all.

Through these worlds, we’re reaching between time to pull ourselves free. We’re bridging the gaps between past and present, weaving our universe together, creating our future, and I am only just beginning to truly understand the power of the mind.

***

When drafting this piece, there were a few topics from which to choose, and I thought I’d selected the easiest one. But there’s nothing easy about this. Turning the literal into metaphor is effortless, but reverting symbolism into its mirrored reality is gut-wrenching.

Let them stay gargoyles and trees. Let them stay starfish dreaming beneath the ocean. Let them stay in their forests and pockets and raindrops. Let them stay in their mercy sleep, where dreams are kinder than memory.

Emptiness signified escape. Monsters meant bravery. Wilderness defined freedom. Everything in our inner world is truth couched in the cryptic, and probably why it’s still so hard to talk about my life in any way other than poetry.

We’ve had to be careful while writing this; revealing too much about our inner world would expose too much about us and our history. Every element in us reflects something that happened to us, or what we did to survive it.

It also shows us, underneath it all, exactly who we are, and what we can do.

#DissociativeIdentityDisorder #dissociativedisorders #DissociationDisorders

*** Original Title: "Bigger on the Inside" ***