#I've been skinny my entire life I got weight gain shakes as a kid and am anorexic in remission

[lago-morpha]

It's weird how I'm too physically strong for my mom to abuse me now. If she tried to hit me like she used to I could legitimately hurt her enough to get her off me. I suppose it doesn't mean much when I'm a 17 year old boy and she's 37 but I'm gradually not the helpless child I used to be

[aria-laughs]

Real talk..(needed to vent, feel free to not read this if you don't like long rants)

When i was 11 years old i had already been through my fair share of crap. Coming from a "broken" home with little money, a depressed mother and an absent father. At that time i remember being bullied as a biproduct of my sister stoping one of her classmates (a 13 year old girl) from traveling half accross the contry to meet her 19 year old boyfriend who she'd met online for the first time.. under the pretence that she was traveling to visit my dad with my big sister. This all ended with the police stoping the train and picking the girl up before she reached her destination and everyone didn't have to suffer through the ordeal with a minor being raped or worse by a yound adult in a strange city..anyway. when the summer ended and we (me and my two siblings) gor back home, all these rumors spread about us and school became tricky. I got used to it tho, i had my friends and i quickly learned to keep close to teachers whenever i was alone. At the home front my mom became sick and the kids got a lot of grown up responsibilities. It was okay too.. kids get used to a lot, and today im a wizz in the kitchen and i clean with the best of them.

My mother had a temper, and would hit us when we did something wrong. I remember trying to cover for my siblings as much as possible, trying to shield them from the worst of it. Don't get me wrong, i LOVE my mother. She's been through hell and her sroty is worse than anything i've ever heard of. I understand what happened when i grew up and i love her because she allways did her best.. but i haven't forgiven her for making my home unsafe. At 11 years old one of my teachets notised that i had a hard time with my schoolwork. They couldn't get me to focus on my work and i was distracted by anything. I remember the letters mixing up as i read, and it became impossible to do my homework because no one could see the letters moving like i could. The teached contacted my mom and my stepfather and told them he'd talk to a specialist about me maybe having ADHD. The next week my mom dropped me off at the specialist and i got tested in every subject known to man. As usuall i exelled at language, history and music. But everything else was a bit off, i remember hearing him telling my mom that it couldn't be HDHD because my memory was too good. But refered her to a doctor for more tests. The ordeal took another week before my mother came to pick me up at lunch one day and told me we had to go to the hospital.

I had a thyroid condition that firsly was almost non-exsistent, and secoundly was unheard of in someone my age. They took blood, and sent me to get an MR and CT. When all the tests came back, we got the good news that i wouldn't die if they treated it quickly. But since i was still waiting for normal bodyparts to arrive, and hadn't gone through puberty yet.. he had no idea where to start. I don't remember the name of the medication, but i remember taking 15 a day. 5 in the morning, 5 when i got home from school and 5 before bed. I took them and 39 minutes later i was sprinting to the bathroom puking my guts out. This obviously didn't work in the long run and by the end of it i was so skinny you could see my teeth through my cheeks. They changed my meds and i stopped with the hurling. Instead i gained about 30 kg in the first 6 months and looked like a beach ball on legs. And as a kid being bullied, this wasn't that fun. Let me remind you that this had been going on for a while and tho my mom did what she could.. the was depressed and didn't see how bad it got for me and all the responsibilities i had at home made me dissapear in the day-to-day of it all. Alone and scared as the bullying became physical I panicked and stoped taking my meds, and all my symptoms came back. I would sleep for 14 hours and wake up exhausted. I'd go full days without getting hungry and i'd get moodswings and get real clumsy. My family got used to this and the symptoms stoped being symptoms and started being "just me".

So now i'd wake up and have to care for my siblings, go to school without lunch for myself because i had to make it for my siblings, or forgetting to shower because i had to remind my brother to do it. I get off the buss and get my ass kicked on my way to the classroom. Some days i'd get through it and come home to start dinner for my family, and other times the bullying sent me to the ER to get stitched up (i didn't have to make dinner on those days). This happened often enough that the doctor knew me by my first name, and instead of "how did you hurt yourself?) I'd get "Again!? When the nurses came to get me. One day i slept for 16 hours and my mother confronted me about my weightloss and asked if i'd been taking my meds. I came clean and a few hours at the doctors office and one frustrating car ride later. I'd promissed to take my pills again, but by that point i had ruined my body enough to never get better. So at 15 years old the doctors decided that they'd treat my thyroid with radioactive iodine. This worked great and killed the thyroid gland, making me dependend on meds for the rest of my life.

For anyone who don't know, the thyroid gland is responsible for your bodys metabolism. This means everything... your metabolism is a part of every funktion of every organ in your entire body, tho we usually think about how fast you burn fat because this is what we see on the outside.

We did our best, and we got through it. I had a safe place with my best friend and his family. And i'd escape there as often as i could. His mother would remind me to take my meds, she'd let me shower at their place and when she realised that i never ate at school she started packing lunch for me to send with her son every day.

I don't think i'd survive and be the person i am today without them. I remember the day i finally told them what was going on at home when i grew up, at this point i had grown up and moved away from home. I had started opening up to people i trusted and understood the power of talking about my problems. i never ment it as a "why didn't you see".. im thankful for my life, even the bad pars, but i needed them to know how much they saved me. To understand how much i love them all. I'll keep their reactions to myself, but i'll tell you that i have never felt more treasured in my life.

I was 22 years old the first time someone told me that I never deserved the abuse at home. I was 25 years old when i told my mother i forgave her for the physical stuff, but that i couldn't forgive her for stealing my feeling of home and safety. And i was today years old when i wrote it down for anyone to see.

I've been taking my meds for about 17 years now, but I have yet to actually get a normal metabolism. My last stunt was that i suddenly didn't need that much medicine so my metabolism speed up to lifethreatening speed and i had to endure panic attacks, dizziness, lack of consentration and shaking so bad that i almost quit school and almost sent me into a brainfailure (yes thats a thing) over the summer. My doctors paniced and reduced my meds so much that i didn't get nearly enough. This ended with me loosing weight, not eating, shaking, being sick and passing out all over the place, and almost sent me into a life threatening coma as my body overcompensated for the loss of thyroid hormones. My dad said something i've never heard my family say before. We were eating dinner last weekend and i was having a bad day when he told me "its painful to watch you struggle like this". And i almost cried, this was the first time in forever that a parent told me that they see me. And now i'm finally starting to get back to where im used to.

I have skipped a lot of stuff that happened. Some things i don't think i'll ever talk about, and some things that are too personal or too painful or too stupid to write down. But i needed to work through the new stuff, to reflecr back and to realise how close i came to loosing my life again this year. How lucky i am that i not only held on for dear life, but that with all the crap i felt. All the sickness and panic and everything. I managed to finish this semester at school. I managed to survive again, and im 6 months away from reaching my goal of allways being able to help when im needed. I am so proud of myself for getting to where i am today. And im so thankful!!

[mjoriginals]

So something I realized I've never told anyone about but like was kinda traumatic as a kid is that my mom almost died and the intergenerational trauma surrounding that ? There's no reason I haven't told anyone really except like trying not to embarrass her or anything but it's kinda both our stories to tell maybe? So ig this story starts with the fact that both of my grandpas were very involved with the democratic parties in their cities (so maybe that's where I get the dem gene from? lol) however my mom's dad was kinda sexist (as were a lot of men at the time). So my grandpa told his daughters they had to look good and lose weight or they would never marry a rich man. Like he told them this a lot so you can only imagine what that does to a growing child’s brain. My Aunt Constant has never gotten married and my Aunt Kathleen was in an abusive marriage for a while until he died and now she is married to a decent enough man (with anger issues) but we all know she could do better. My mom somehow got lucky or knew her value enough to marry my dad, however it was tough going for a while because at one point she was engaged to a mentally and emotionally abusive guy, but that is a whole other story for another day. My mom’s just strong and resilient as fuck is the point. But anyway, she’s dealt with these body image issues her entire life and has accidentally passed them down to her kids even. It’s actually really hard to have a parent who doesn’t see how beautiful they are and doesn’t seem to believe it when anyone tells them so. My mom has constantly been on different diets and exercise routines to try to lose weight. When I was little, she got the lap band surgery done. Which is essentially where they put a little band around your stomach so you physically can only eat a little amount or it can't go down your stomach and you'll puke it up. Well this worked "well" you could say and she lost A LOT of weight, like a lot. To the point where she could barely eat anything and I could barely recognize her as my mom. She was pretty skinny but also ghostly almost. Then there were days she couldn't eat at all. She went for weeks only able to keep down protein shakes and couldn't get out of bed because of the pain in her stomach. And it should be noted that my mom has gone to work and not even noticed that she had bronchitis before. She is not one to call out sick from work or complain about feeling sick. So when she couldn't get out of bed for days we all knew there was something very wrong. She called the surgeon who performed her lap band surgery and he said he was on vacation so she would have to wait a week until he got back. Thank God my dad said FUCK THAT and rushed her off to another hospital because the doctor there said the band had slipped from where it was supposed to be and if they didn't perform emergency surgery to get the band out, she would die. Her stomach was literally gray and dying. So they took the band out just in time and she was fine after some recovery period. However, obviously, when they took the band out, she began to gain the weight back again. So fast forward years later and she got a gastric sleeve (without telling anyone else in our extended family) to try to lose weight again. I have just been dealing with body issues my whole childhood not just because of bullying in school but also because my biggest role model in life, my mom, sees being skinny as the ultimate best body type. The best thing I’ve done for my body issues is be queer because I would date a woman who looks like me. I’m actually a fuckin catch.