In the past week or two, I have noticed a lot of people coming up to me and saying something along the lines of: "Have you lost weight? You look fantastic!" While the notion that people are even paying attention to me is nice, I always give a half-hearted smile and a quiet thank you, which usually elicits a peculiar look. I always chalk it up to my newest job as a server, or that marching band has started, but I know the reasoning behind why I've dropped nearly 30 pounds in two months, and it's not something that I feel like deserves congratulations.
The truth is that I simply am not eating.
Which I know is not healthy. Which I know is a terrible habit. Which I know is the exact opposite of what I should be doing. And I don't say this as someone who is choosing not to eat, I am saying this as someone whose body and brain won't let me. I am saying this as someone who doesn't know what else to do.
One extremely terrible side effect of suffering from depressive episodes is that 95% of the time, I do not have the desire or the energy to eat anything. Absolutely anything. It's a pretty amazing accomplishment if I get even one small meal into my body during the day. This has affected the way I interact with friends in a huge way, because a large part of social life in college revolves around food, and now I don't even want to be at the dinner table. And I always feel terrible when a friend invites me over for pasta, and I eat about five noodles before my brain decides that my body doesn't need any more. When we go out to eat, and friends ask where I would like to go, I always say "It doesn't matter to me!" because anything I eat is going to taste the same: like personal torture and sadness. Which sounds dramatic, but there are few feelings worse than knowing you must force yourself to eat when it is the last thing you want to be doing.
As a guy that weighs nearly 300 pounds, a lot of people see my inability to eat as "a success" or as a step towards finally "taking care of my body" but I have never felt like more of a failure in treating my body the way that I should. If I were truly taking care of my body, I would be much more excited about your comment, but I'm not, and I know that about an hour after this interaction I will probably be back in bed wrapped up in a blanket not wanting to feel the way that I do.
Like I said, the notion that people are even noticing my state of being is nice, but instead of hearing about my amazing weight loss, I would rather hear about how you've noticed that I haven't been my happy self lately, as morbid as that sounds. Hearing that you care about my mental health shows me that you care about me more as a person than simply about how I look. Besides, it's always nice to have people by your side when you seem to be at your lowest point in your life.
