Tuesday, 13 January 2009

• Not Just for Girls Anymore - Body Dysmorphic Disorder

  Mr. Marshmallow
  
  

  
  

  
  I have mentioned several times before my aversion to all reflective surfaces. Mirrors? Hate 'em. Shiny, newly polished silverware? I'll take mine tarnished and cloudy.
  
  Anything that can show me my current state of physicality is all but banished from my view. I have what has been diagnosed as Body Dysmorphic Disorder, or BDD. The origins of BDD can be traced, interestingly, to bodybuilders, who can become obsessed with needing to sculpt, build, and amass more muscle. BDD means becoming fixated on an aspect of one's physical appearance - in my case, it is my weight.
  
  I think women -- and especially young girls -- growing up in an increasingly vain and superficial world are highly susceptible to BDD. My bulimia and struggle with food addiction places me in this group.
  
  There is a silent, but growing, group of our society who are struggling with BDD - the gay community. Gay men are notoriously vain creatures. I have refused to go into the Castro if I am feeling fat or ugly in any way. To be fat is a curse in most of the gay world. With the exception of the Bear Community, any extra weight is seen as a badge of ugliness. But I think that I am grossly generalizing, because when I go out there is no single person who can make me feel worse about my appearance than myself.
  
  I had an incident several years ago when I attended a Disney on Ice show in Oakland. The fact that I was even attending Disney on Ice is enough to warrant a swift but painful execution, but I digress. I was sitting through an abhorrent, edited, and incredible dumbed-down version of "Under the Sea" when suddenly, I could not breathe.
  
  I was about 350 pounds at the time, and I felt as if the entire audience was looking at me, staring at this wretched behemoth before them. I felt awkward in the small stadium seats, my ass squeezed in so tight, I am surprised I did not rip the chair from the ground when I stood up. Or in the very least, there should have been a loud wet "POP" as I extricated myself.
  
  But all at once, I had the most profound anxiety attack. I felt like a spectacle, a freak, a walking monument that warned, "This is what happens when you can't eat just one Lay's potato chip!"
  
  It was physically painful, and I remember talking about this with my therapist - a wonderful psychiatrist I saw for several years who treated me for depression, eating disorders, OCD, and low self esteem. He asked me a very blunt, and at the time, seemingly harsh, question. He asked, "What makes you think that any one of those thousands of people would want to stare at you? Chances are, you are the very last thing on their minds with the show going on, their own lives to worry about, among any number of other thoughts." It didn't occur to me until years later how ironic this was.
  
  Here I am, a depressed, obsessive-compulsive fatty, believing myself to be the most disgusting blob to shuffle across the planet, and I believed that thousands of perfect strangers would be looking at me over the show they paid good money to see. Do not get me wrong, this did not alleviate the pain of shame and repulsion I felt about my body. But it did put into perspective for me how egocentric this disease can be.
  
  At my thinnest weight, when I was in pretty great shape, I always felt just as I did at 350 pounds, and just as I do now. The physical shape may expand and detract, but the mind always sees what it is conditioned to see. Hence, dysmorphia.
  
  I was recently trying on jeans, and while I am far from my thinnest, I am still many sizes below what I once wore. I took several pairs of jeans into the dressing room to try on - some fit, some didn't, and there was one pair that was just right. Close to the bottom of the stack of jeans was a pair that was, according to the hanger, one size larger than I normally wear.
  
  It was my "just in case" pair: just in case my ass grew larger and needed a safety net. When I removed the jeans from the hanger, I noticed it was very heavy, and as I opened the jeans up I came to realize someone had put the wrong jeans on the hanger. I was holding a size 58 - enough to hold me, my partner Mike, and our two dogs, with enough to spare as a throw pillow. I was shocked - even at my heaviest I had never worn a size 58, but I do believe I felt as if I was that size while I was sitting in that Oakland arena. I also realized I still feel as if I am a size 58 when I look in the mirror.
  
  As I left the store, I took comfort in knowing my jeans were many sizes smaller, and the tune to "Under the Sea" suddenly came to mind with a vision of dancing fish, lobsters, and crabs flooding me from memory. I decided on the spot to have seafood for dinner.
  
  Are you or someone you know anyone struggling with Body Dysmorphic Disorder? How's are you/they dealing with it?
  
  

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