cold just like december
on repression, torment and recovery on the eve of turning 22
For about 16 years of my life, charting from when I first developed some semblance of consciousness until age 20, few things would have felt more liberating than tearing my skin off whole. Not clawing it off in an attempt to harm myself, or gradually shedding it as if undergoing chrysalis- no, a gentle tug at a loose seam undoing every layer of skin enveloping my musculature would do. If I was able to rid myself of the malleable, deceptive putty encasing me, maybe I’d have felt less- not less full of self-loathing, not less sickened by a glance in the mirror or less suicidal. Just less. Knowing more meant feeling less- sounded simple enough. Feeling less wouldn’t pose much of an obstacle- it was practically standard operating procedure, an M.O. for reckoning (or avoid reckoning, as it were) with any contradictions or troublesome emotions. Levelling the onus for that absence of feeling on a rigorous upbringing would be just as simple, and yet not entirely honest, despite the veritable bursting manila envelopes full of evidence to suggest a direct correlation. At a certain point, accountability is unavoidable, and having arrived at a point where I’m just about all out of excuses, it’s as good a time as any to accept a discomforting fact: nearly offputting, neurotic and downright hateful little quality about me is entirely a product of my own agency. I’m likely paraphrasing, but I am reminded at this moment of a notion from Cormac McCarthy’s screenplay for Ridley Scott’s fatalistic neo-Western The Counselor:
“You are the world you have created, and when you cease to exist, this world that you have created will also cease to exist”
Perhaps it’s the truth of the notion that has- so far, at least- prevented me from taking any irrevocable steps towards some form of self-annihilation. Even now, it’s less fear than it is a concern for that self-constructed world and its occupants that prevents me from being truly honest about why I have harboured, and continue to be unable to rid myself of, that distinct feeling that I should not be here. To speak plainly would be to introduce genuine material risk, the kind that can’t be tempered by carefully constructed paragraphs or reasoned arguments. In that vein, the reason for why this confessional/self-flagellation/reconciliation even exists becomes less clear- it makes it messy and fragmented and fundamentally incoherent. I can’t say incoherency is an accusation that’s ever been levelled towards me- being verbose and self-indulgent (as I’m sure whoever’s reading this is already muttering under their breath agree with), sure, but incoherent? I don’t know whether someone who expresses a wish for self-annihilation so clearly could be considered incoherent.
About a month ago, I was close to getting my wish. Since last fall, I’d made a concerted effort to try and alter the ontological state of “fat ugly fuck” that I’d considered myself almost imprisoned by, and which had worsened almost exponentially since the beginning of my degree. By this point, it’s probably evident that self-pity is a familiar friend, but the self-loathing had metamorphosised- it was no longer the relatively benign kind of hatred that leads you to constantly pinch the fat around your waist or quickly count the amount of chins hanging from your neck. Instead, it had become the kind of hatred that boils over into a desperate urge for something, anything to change. By all accounts, that hatred was one of the best things that ever happened to me- without it, I wouldn’t have had the will to commit to a nigh-militaristic routine where the attainment of skinniness triumphed over all else. Without hatred, I wouldn’t have woken up almost every morning to run at least 40 minutes, even on the days where everything ached and I wanted nothing more than to simply crawl beneath the covers and suffocate. Without hatred, I wouldn’t have been able to stick for months to a diet that consisted almost entirely of Huel, protein supplements, vitamins and hyper-attentive calorie counting, at one point sinking to 600 calories a day and trying to find excuses to avoid eating wherever possible. Hatred was why I hit a push/pull split at the gym nearly every day since the beginning of this year and recoiled from the notion of eating bread, sugar and quite simply anything that I would have genuinely enjoyed eating. I don’t know where I’d be without hatred, which pushed me to lose almost 25 kilograms since last August. A certain addictiveness developed somewhere along the way, where I’d be content with losing enough weight until I simply disappeared. Like any kind of addiction, one kick was simply never enough- I wanted to push myself to a point where I could genuinely believe that I was no longer the same person.
On the evening of August 2nd, I attended one of the last few performances of The Royal Haymarket Theatre’s production of A View from the Bridge, with Dominic West as the lead patriarch, Eddie. Miller was one of the first playwrights whose oeuvre I was genuinely invested in, and the Oedipal tragedy of A View From The Bridge was perhaps my favourite work of his. Hunched in the rear stalls, though, the play was the last thing I could focus on. Instead, I was racked with a pain so severe that walking down the steps to the stalls was an arduous undertaking. I couldn’t make heads nor tails of why- after all, I was in the best shape of my life, wasn’t I? I could run faster and longer than I was ever capable of, and I could lift more than I’d ever considered myself capable of lifting. Pain was simply weakness leaving the body, I reasoned, and to feel pain was irrevocable proof that change would and could happen. If I could just feel enough pain, I could silence the perpetual barrage of insults and condemnations that seemed to fall from the clouds the moment I stepped outside. If I could just feel enough pain, I would one day be able to look in the mirror and not recoil from the misshapen, disfigured lump staring back at me. If I could just feel enough pain, I could perhaps be able to treat myself like an actual person.
Pain may have been what I sought, but little, if anything, could have prepared me for what it actually felt like. On my way home from the theatre, a split-second moment of clarity forced me to drag myself to the hospital, where I momentarily blacked out along the way from how overwhelming the pain in my legs was. Every step was another bout of agony, and the tremors that seemed to emanate from my bones and spread across every nerve ending in my legs seemed like desperate pleas for my body to simply stop moving. I’d trudged along the route from Warren Street to UCL countless times over the course of the past 3 years, but in that moment I earnestly doubted that I’d actually be able to reach the hospital doors before my legs collapsed in a heap. Nevertheless, I managed to make it to the hospital before what I expected to be an eventual succumbing to blinding pain.
What follows is more a hastily-knitted tapestry of bright lights, needles and resounding phrases than it is a coherent memory, but certain images and sounds remain as sharp as ever in my mind. Any number of possibilities ran through my head as I lay back in A&E with skin as pallid as the walls surrounding me and an IV drip plugged into me, with questions like pinballs in the back of my skull, amongst the most insistent being: was I going to die? I’d been hospitalised before, of course, but I had never rushed myself alone to a hospital on account of pain that felt as if was intent on ridding me of the ability to walk. Part of me wondered whether to simply try and surrender myself to the warm embrace of unconsciousness. Wasn’t this what I wanted? No matter how far I pushed myself, I would never be enough- always too big, too asymmetrical, too irregular. The only spark of levity, really, was that if I was too much of a coward to have the will to take my own life, then maybe it was only fitting that something else did the work for me. Hysteria is the obvious culprit for these streams of thought, but it was something to distract me from the pain, at least.
Rhabdomyolosis- that was the word that stood out to me from the specialist doctor’s diagnosis like a fresh headstone in a cemetery. Several iterations of the condition exist, ranging from those caused by traumatic injury to alcohol abuse- in my case, a confluence of numerous factors triggered it, amongst which the one I was most culpable for was recklessness. The day prior was one of the hottest days of the year, and the ensuing dehydration, an excessive amount of caffeine as pre-workout and relentless self-loathing pushed me towards hitting almost 10 kilograms above my usual load for every machine. Dismissing the obvious signs of injury as the telltale signs of an effective leg day, I bore through each set of curls, extensions and presses with a complete and total ignorance of the signs my body was giving me to stop. To make matters worse, I adhered to my routine the next day even whilst I had already induced rhabdomyolosis through injury, further destroying muscles that had already begun to dissolve. In the simplest terms possible: I had injured my quads and hamstrings to the point where both muscles tore open. Ripping open those muscles, in turn, had begun to release excess creatine into my bloodstream, therefore also raising haemoglobin to dangerous levels. A number of debilitating effects follow, but the one that concerned the doctors the most was that the molecules of excess creatine are simply too large for kidneys to filter. As I was informed in no uncertain terms by the specialists, I was in need of urgent medical attention and litres of IV fluid- that much seemed obvious even to myself.
Prior to meeting these specialists, I had broken down into tears for what felt like the first time in forever, asking any white-coated professional who passed through the halls whether they knew what was going to happen to me. Upon speaking to the specialist, I received both an answer and something far more haunting: while I would largely only need at least a week and a half’s bedrest and somewhat excessive amounts of hydration to flush out the toxins from my bloodstream, I was fortunate to have wound up in A&E when I did- that part was the answer to my question. The part that haunted me the specialist’s admission that if I had simply dismissed the pain in my legs as mere aches and put off seeking medical aid for even just a few more days, I would have likely ended up with fatal kidney damage, which is the endpoint for almost half of all cases of rhabdomyolosis. Fundamentally, the only thing that stood between myself and death was the thing I thought I never had enough of: time.
After being discharged the next day, I was bedridden for almost a week until I could begin walking for more than five minutes without excessive pain. Running and any sort of regular exercise was out of the question for the near future, and with little else to do but to lay racked with discomfort, I had plenty of time to reckon with the conundrum of what I’d endured: that being in the best shape of my life was what brought me closest to death. It didn’t seem fair- why did I have to suffer in order to try and live with myself? Living in fear of something like this reoccurring almost seemed worse than dying from it. Various kinds of fear, both of the physical and metaphysical, kept me up at night in the days that followed, amongst which the most terrifying was the prospect that almost a year’s worth of routine deprivation and punishment to achieve some slight semblance of peace with living in a body that never quite felt as if it belonged to me. I’d never felt subject to any cosmic misfortune or the wrath of a divine entity, but the week spent virtually trapped in my flat felt truly felt like some sort of curse, thrust upon me for the sin of trying be someone I was not. It was a sign that nothing would ever really change, that I would always be repulsive one way or another, and that I would always be at war with my body.
More than a month after this shock to my sense of being, I am still in recuperation. Whilst the overwhelming pain has dissipated and my ability to walk has largely returned, I continue to hesitate undertaking any intensive physical activity. Within a purely medical context, my recovery would have been complete within two weeks of being discharged from the hospital, and yet the occasional spasms and tugs along my muscles remind me that I likely won’t- or shouldn’t- try and distance myself from the incident, that I should learn from it somehow. I still can’t figure out what I have to learn from it, besides the fact that I do indeed have physical limits, and that transgressing these limits could have dire consequences. Then again, it’s not the first time I’ve endangered myself but trying to transgress those limits, but there’s a distinct difference between knowingly pushing yourself too far- which is not at all unfamiliar to me- and crossing into waters deeper than you can comprehend. Ultimately, of course, the fact that it was my ignorance of these limits that created the conditions for fatal consequences means that I fucked up. Maybe the only real lesson here is that I should stop fucking up?
By this point, I would have diverged into a discussion of a work of art- probably a film- that pertains to my experience. Perhaps I would have situated my injury against the backdrop of Cronenberg’s Crash and that film’s exploration of the often sexually charged relationship between risk and gratification. It wouldn’t be out of place to bring up Mann’s Miami Vice, a film that quite literally ends with the phrase “time is luck”, which couldn’t be more painfully relevant to my circumstances. Truthfully, I don’t really know how else to really talk about myself than to try and use art as a coda, as a shell that could obfuscate any remnants of myself in what I write. Richard Brody of The New Yorker, one of the few critics whom I not only admire but envy for the ways they find the words never I never quite could, wrote of how the audience’s relationship to the filmmaker-as-artist is one in “which one’s own inner world vibrates to the tones of someone else’s and gets significantly retuned, enduringly changed, in the process”. So much of what I know to be true of myself has been mediated and irrevocably altered by cinema- and yet, at the same time, I can’t help but feel as I have been relying on it as a crutch that stops me from standing on my own two feet. Events acted are out on a proscenium and dioramas of people are formed, but I never quite feel qualified to be a performer- and so, I remain in the audience whilst everyone else leaves because it’s the only place where I can feel a semblance of safety. I know the feeling of the soft velvet seats and the gentle gust of the curtains being drawn, all the while ignoring the sounds of conversation that echo throughout the hall. To gaze into a screen and see someone else’s life play out before you, I’ve found, is a source of far less grief than having to gaze into a mirror.
As I write this a day before my 22nd birthday, a lot has changed, chief amongst them the coping mechanisms I use to try and avoid dealing with change. I try and immerse myself in noise and conversation instead of avoiding it, to the point where it drowns out the eternal barrage of insults and reproaching that my mind hurls towards me. The friends who have become dearest to me in the past year are about as many as I’ve had to say goodbye to. I no longer fear defining psychological torment in blunt terms, having accepted that what I have been experiencing until very recently was an eating disorder, and that I have had acute body dysmorphia for about as long as I can remember having a sense of self. Discussing this with those closest to me is no longer out of the question, and whilst I’m a long way from fully silencing the voices that pushed me to the brink of disappearing, I now know that it doesn’t always have to be this way. What has become evident to me is that body dysmorphia, more than being a source of fear or despair, is infuriating because of how deceptive it is. I know that I am more than just my body, and that there are people who care about me regardless of what I look like, and I refuse to be lied to any longer by a disorder that refuses to take reality at face value.
A few days ago, I stumbled upon the music video for Charli XCX’s forever, which is one of my favourite tracks off my favourite album of hers, how I’m feeling now. I hadn’t seen the video in years- in fact, I don’t recall having seen it since it was first uploaded in 2020, smack-dab in the middle of quarantine. The video is composed almost entirely of partners, friends, families, pets and other loved ones of Charli’s fans, whose clips were crowdsourced by Charli during COVID and stitched into a tapestry of memories. Watching the video, I was struck by how much time had passed since then- in particular, how much time had passed since I first discovered Charli’s music, and how much it has grown to mean to me in the time since. In forever’s music video, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of moments frozen in time. No matter if the lovers embracing each other or the pets dashing around in circles are gone, they continue to live on through not just the recording of those memories, but through the fact that those memories are preserved through art. I found myself welling up with tears, not because of thinking about how many of those in the video were gone, but because of how each and every person and animal in that video, no longer what they might have thought of themselves or wrestled with, was loved by someone else, and that there was irrevocable proof of it. I don’t know what lies ahead of me or what the future holds. Hell, I don’t even know what tomorrow is going to look like, or if there will even be a tomorrow, but what I do know is that come what may, I find myself- for the first time- welcoming change, knowing that a change in my prospects does not mean a change in how I feel about those dearest to me, or how they feel about me.