A little about me before we dive in!
Well, Hi there. My name is Sara and pictured with me is my handsome husband and best friend, Hayden. We've been married since August 8th of 2015 and have a beautiful little fur baby named Coal. We've had him for just over a year now and he has brought so much love, joy, and laughter to our home.
I've lived in Arizona since I was just 5 or 6 years old, and my husband grew up in Washington state and moved out to Arizona when he was around 20 to 21 years old. I am currently 24, and my husband 26. We love tattoos, Netlifx, painting, & late night talks. In our spare time, we enjoy quoting The Office, Friends, and vines nobody has ever heard of. We're overly comfortable with each other and most people find our couple habits gross - I happen to find them endearing ;).
He loves Dungeons & Dragons & video games and I love makeup, fashion, & home decor. While mental illness does not define me, it is one of the biggest parts of my life. I speak out about it in small chunks over my social media, but I realize that doesn't even give a glimpse into what's really happening and after years of contemplation, I'm finally ready to fully talk about it. No holding back, no fearing what others will think of me. Just pure, brutal, ugly, beautiful honesty & transparency. I truly believe one of the best ways to heal is to be open and share what is truthfully going on. And while I haven't been fully doing that, I want to start implementing that change now.
A Little History
My history with the auto immune disease, Juvenile Type 1 Diabetes
So, a little history about my illnesses...
When I was eight years old, at the end of the school year in May, I was hospitalized and diagnosed with an auto immune disease called Juvenile Type 1 Diabetes. In case you don't know what that means, Type 1 Diabetes is an auto immune disorder where your body attacks your pancreas causing your body to no longer produce insulin, which is an essential hormone in your body helping you stay alive. Insulin is the hormone in the body that helps to distribute sugars from foods and carbohydrates throughout your body to avoid your blood stream being over saturated with sugar. I plan to write more about my diagnoses in detail in future blogs, so definitely watch out for that!
Being diagnosed with an auto immune disease was the beginning of my mental health issues. I was made fun of and bullied as a kid for having a "fat person disease" because most people's only knowledge on Diabetes was Type 2 Diabetes. Dealing with comments from kids who truly didn't know better while simultaneously learning how to give myself 7 shots a day and completely change my living habits at the age of eight was a lot for me. I definitely tended to victimize myself when it came to my diabetes, and I really avoided taking care of myself as much as possible. Most of my childhood and teen years were spent with my blood sugars in the 300s (my current healthy Blood Glucose range is 80-120) and I would go days on end without checking my blood sugar. My body was constantly at a high blood sugar that I stopped feeling deathly sick when my blood sugar was that high (which is really really not good). I always had bad relationships with my endocrinologists because I could never take care of myself and that obviously brought them frustration. Why was I rejecting taking care of myself so much? At least I live in a time period where we have the ability to treat this disease and be able to live a relatively healthy life, right? It took me until my 20's to appreciate my ability to be able to live due to this medication. Without it I would have died before the age of 10.
Depression
Being diagnosed with Depression.
Being diagnosed with depression was a weird experience for me. Somehow I already knew it was something I struggled with, based off of signs starting after being diagnosed with T1D, but it never fully hit me until it was confirmed by a doctor. I was a sophomore in high school when my mom finally decided to take me to the doctor because she suspected that I was struggling. Since my mom took me to the doctor, I kind of sugar coated everything. I made my suicidal thoughts seem like they happened less often, I lied about self harm, I was ashamed and embarrassed and felt that she wouldn't understand. Which to be honest, wasn't 100% wrong. I was then prescribed a low dosage of a generic version of Prozac, which I definitely didn't take consistently and never fully reaped the "benefits" of the medication. I think I was slightly more stable, but I mainly used avoidance and some healthy, some not so healthy coping mechanisms. But I managed my way through middle and high school - slightly. I still struggled with self harm and would have mental break downs every few months and cut myself. I didn't realize why I was doing it at the time, but I now understand it's because my mind couldn't process the mental and emotional pain I was dealing with until that pain was in a physical form. Physical pain was easier for me to process and understand.
When I met my husband, Hayden, I completely fell off the wagon with taking my medications. I stopped taking my anti-depressants all together and I really really stopped taking care of my diabetes. I was on a high from love and stopped focusing on taking care of myself. At first it was fine. I was in a cloud and solely focused on love, that kept me completely happy. But what I started to do was base my happiness in Hayden and what others thought of me. And that's what led me to the inevitable up hill battle that has been my life over the last few years.
Anxiety
Being diagnosed with Anxiety
Anxiety wasn't something I experienced chronically until after I was married. It wasn't something I knew until I was isolated for a long period of time and the outside world started to become a scary and dangerous place. Nowhere I could go was safe for what I was going through, which made me feel out of control, which drove my anxiety. I was literally scared to leave my apartment. I started getting anxiety over little things first. Like thinking about embarrassing memories from middle or high school, and I would beat myself up for it and it would mentally drive me insane. I would have to literally hum loudly to try to block out the thoughts that would automatically pop up. I couldn't allow myself to categorize those memories as funny, embarrassing teenage moments. I tore myself apart and told myself that people thought about these things all the time and laughed at my expense behind my back. Then every social interaction I had from there on, I over analyzed, second guessed, always left feeling like I did something wrong or said the wrong thing. I felt like everything I did was wrong and like I didn't have anyone to help me.
Feeling that inadequate made me doubt my skills in everything. I couldn't work because I felt I was incapable of doing even the simplest of jobs. I tried to get a small little part time job after the isolation, and I was literally throwing up and getting sick everyday before work because of the anxiety I was getting just going to work. I felt like all of my faults were on display and that everyone could see that I was broken. I felt wrong for needing more time before being ready to handle the job on my own and didn't speak up because my manager made me feel like I should be able to get it after only a week. Being at that job is what inevitably drove me to seek help from the mental health hospital, which was hard at the time, but I am extremely grateful for it now.
The anxiety continued to grow until I reached a place where I didn't want to do anything or live my life in fear of messing up. I couldn't allow myself to mess up because it would only reassure the trash I believed I was. I couldn't function because of the physical ailments anxiety brought me.
Overeating, emotional, binge eating, and food addiction eating disorder
Food was always a weird subject for me. I grew up with parents who were constantly crash dieting, on the new fad diet, extreme measures of dieting and then letting loose. I was never really taught how to have a healthy relationship with food. I began to associate diets and healthy eating as a negative or something only stuck up people did. I was triggered when seemingly healthy and skinny people would complain about their weight and not allow themselves to indulge in a treat. I made it my mission to never be like that. But what I didn't realize was that I was starting an addiction and an eating disorder.
When I first started eating for emotions, I would create emotional ties to certain foods or restaurants. Taco Bell was my number one go to for any emotional event. Happy, sad, stressed. Whatever emotion I felt, I tied it with food. Overeating became an idolized thing because not a lot of people in my circle were comfortable getting down into a burger in front of a love interest, and I was always so proud that I never felt the need to act like I never ate those foods. I started shaming people for eating healthy or demonizing junk food as evil. And every time I went out I started to get whatever I felt like instead of intuitively choosing a meal. My eating habits started to become, let's just get what sounds good and that always resulted in grabbing food. For about a year I ate almost every single meal out. Almost never once a fruit or vegetable, several diet cokes a day. I would joke that I got water from the ice in my diet coke and I got veggies from the tomatoes and lettuce in my burger. But that wasn't really a joke. That was real life.
When I started gaining weight, my mom instantly blamed Hayden for allowing me to eat whatever I wanted. She said that it was his fault since he told me he would love me no matter what size I was. That only made me want to eat more. All the emotions I felt from my mom saying that, and every other comment ever made, turned into sick-full stomachs from countless fast food restaurants. Eating was the only way I knew how to make myself feel better. And not a lot of people understand being addicted to food. For most people it's a fuel to get through the day. For me, it started to become what I woke up for everyday. When everything else was shit in my life, at least I had one thing to look forward to: a delicious, warm, comforting meal. Every meal I made had to be the perfect, most delicious thing I could think of in that moment or I wouldn't be happy. That was the only thing I could control in my life, and I was going to make it the best meal I ever had...for every single meal.
This is something I still continue to struggle with very hard, but I am making mental progress which is the most important step. I did the crash diets, I did the obsessive working out and the obsessive meal planning. I can't do that long term, most people can't. But I can work on my mindset to create a healthy relationship with food that will end up lasting me a lifetime of change.