Dazzle Lamp

It’s the first day of November, and the darkness is already starting to get to me.

Finland, my adopted home, is pretty far north – on a par with Alaska, and the northern parts of Russia. In practical terms, this means that summer days are long and glorious, and winter days are basically non-existent. Today, on November 1, already we are down to less than 9 hours of daylight. Sunrise today was just before 8am, and sunset will be just before 4:30pm this afternoon.

I was thrown by how quickly the shorter days started to affect my moods this year. Last year our family made it through until January before we started seeing persistent grouchiness, constant cravings for carbs and sweet things, perpetual lethargy, and even headaches and feelings of being just not quite well. At the time, I was still firmly in denial about Seasonal Affective Disorder, honestly believing that it could be prevented or cured with The Power Of Positive Thought. I was sure that if I told myself often enough to “suck it up” and “get a grip”, and brightly encouraged my exhausted kids to jump around the playground in the cold, weak sunlight, then we would be just fine.

We really weren’t. My then-5-year-old summed it up perfectly: “Mummy, I just feel sleepy and sad all the time.”

This year, I am already feeling that dark, leaden curtain of Seasonal Affective Disorder descending on me. I feel unreasonably exhausted and snappish and S.A.D. 

This year, though, I am ready to fight it - tooth and nail.

Practical strategies are already firmly in place. The whole family has been religiously taking Vitamin D supplements. The kids play outside at least 1 hour every day, and sometimes more than 2 – rain, hail, or shine (since, as Finns like to say, “There is no such thing as bad weather – only bad clothes!”) – and I force myself to take a brisk 20-minute walk twice a day between home and Little Sister’s daycare. I’ve been feeding us all lots of Positive Energy foods – bananas, oatmeal, blueberries. We are trying to sleep longer nights.

We even bought a Brighter-Than-Bright light-therapy lamp! The instructions recommend that our retinas be within 1 metre of the Dazzle Lamp for at least 30 minutes each morning. If the idea of sitting in front of a bright light for a full half hour sounds odd, let me tell you that at first it really was a weird feeling, not to mention difficult to accomplish as far as my lively children’s retinas were concerned. Eventually, we put it in the middle of our breakfast table. There we sit each morning, like deer in the headlights, eating our highly-illuminated oatmeal or eggs.

(PS: I took this photo without a flash not only to make it look artsy and to showcase Dazzle Lamp in its full glory, but because a flash would have highlighted the mess arts and craft centre that is the other end of our dining table…)

It is the middle of the day here as I write, but it’s so dark and gloomy outside that I have turned Dazzle Lamp back on. It does seem to help – a lot. The brightness is apparently lowering our levels of melatonin; in practical terms, having it on actually makes me feel brighter. Comforted. Empowered. 

It is, quite literally, a light in the darkness. 

Core Meltdown

Earlier this year, I was having big issues with rage.

Anger, of the incandescent variety.

I would wake up in the morning feeling sluggish and scratchy after a bad night with my then-almost-two year old. Things would go quickly downhill from there.

My big girl (then aged 5) would be awake already, perky and full of cheerful enthusiasm, ready to chat, looking forward to the day ahead at preschool. We would enjoy 15 or 20 minutes of quiet chat, or craft, or reading – until our happy reverie was disturbed by the distant sound of crying. Big Sister’s face would fall at the ominous sound of her little sister waking up, and she would instantly become quiet and withdrawn.

Back then, Little Sister was not a morning person. Once she had shrieked to be liberated from her cot, the always-memorable first part of her day would be spent whining, crying, shouting, throwing things, refusing to eat, refusing to have clothes put on her… you get the picture. Big Sister would quickly start sulking due to lack of attention - Mummy had her hands full with Little Sister’s antics and Daddy was still in bed, resolutely refusing to let parenthood get in the way of 9 hours’ sleep. Big Sister’s sulks would quickly turn into disobedience, and suddenly I would have a second child sullenly refusing to get out of her pyjamas, stubbornly stalled at the breakfast table, answering my requests with naughtiness or aggression.

I would keep ploughing ahead, but could feel my inner capacity to handle all this being slowly but surely eroded. At first I would manage to be patient, generous in spirit, even kind. But as the minutes ticked by, it was as though all those warm and comfortingly soft qualities inside me were slowly but surely being squeezed to nothing by a giant, leaden hand of anger, frustration and hopelessness.

At this point, with the clock ticking and Big Sister’s preschool day about to start, I would typically lose the will to stay in control. A spectacular core meltdown would ensue. Declaring, “That’s IT!” I would randomly start screaming at the kids for the slightest infraction of rules I had suddenly decided to over-enforce. Little Sister would refuse to have her teeth brushed; I would hold her down and forcibly get the brush into her mouth. Big Sister would complain about having to wear so many layers of clothes; I would shriek that I was fed up with having exactly the same argument with her every day when she knew it was minus 10 degrees outside and freezing cold, and would start yanking her clothes onto her. Little Sister, incensed at not getting her own way about anything, would release one of her tornado specials, fists and kicks flying at the nearest person, and I would practically throw her into the Naughty Corner. I would continue to yell and rant at both children, outdoing Gordon Ramsay at his best, until they were fully dressed and ready (and frequently both in floods of tears). At some point, my husband would finally emerge from the bedroom, unable to ignore the high-decibel yelling any longer, and would silently help me get the girls through the rest of their morning routine.     

One morning, in the midst of a Mummy Meltdown, the girls decided to fight about who got to open the front door. One of them pushed past and yanked it open. The other one started to scream. I had had enough. I pulled them both roughly back from the door, and I slammed the door shut – violently, with as much angry force as I possibly could. The door crashed shut. The whole wall shook. The noise was deafening. The children were instantly silent with surprise and fright.

And then, slowly and gently, the door swung open again.

I had slammed it so hard that I had actually broken the lock.

I would like to be able to say, “And from that day forth, I realized how frightening and damaging rage can be, and never lost my temper again.” Of course it didn’t happen that easily. However, that slamming incident was the high point (or, more accurately, the low point) of my anger. I had let myself get so enraged and out of control that I had managed to break an industrial-grade lock, and that frightened the hell out of me. What next? Blinded by rage, would I rip into a person? One of my babies, even? I realized that I would have to take big steps to make sure this never happened again.

It has been a long road, and I can’t honestly say I have reached my desired destination – a calm, rational place where I discipline my children without yelling at them, and never lose my temper. I have worked on changing a lot of things about myself – I try to remember the huge benefits of remaining patient and calm with people; I remind myself that parents who shout generally breed children who shout; I force myself to acknowledge that sometimes I shout when what I’d really like to do is hit someone, and that this is dangerous territory. I try to stop and let these ideas wash over me when I feel like losing it with my children, and I often find that it really is possible to redirect my reaction into something calmer and more constructive. Then, in quieter moments, I try to ask myself why the situation made me feel angry, whether it mattered enough to merit getting that worked up, and if so, what I can do to stop the trigger situation from happening again?

In asking myself, "Why?", I have taken a good look at where my anger came from in the first place. Fundamentally, my fury had very little to do with the irritation I felt at my kids' challenging behaviour (which was just a trigger). My bigger issues were unhappiness, depression, anxiety about not being in control, and being just plain worn out and feeling put-upon from trying to do too much without asking for help.   

I feel a whole lot better now that I have carved out some time for myself from our daily routine. At first it felt self-indulgent; now I realize that free time and headspace are necessities I've forced myself to do without for too long - only through time with our own thoughts can we get a grip on them and sort through them.

I have also learned to ask for help when I need it - sometimes even at the expense of hubby's precious beauty rest :) 

And I've worked to understand and overcome my subconscious need to win at all costs, and to refuse to relinquish control over situations. Winning - especially when it comes to arguments with the hubby or the kids - is rarely the key to getting the end result you are seeking. More often, progress is made by consciously allowing another person to take control and feel like a winner.   

Oh, and I’ve also come to the earth-shattering realization that going to bed earlier works honest-to-God miracles inside my head.

It also helps that the kids have grown up a lot more since then. Little Sister in particular has really made progress. She is no longer a powerless and highly frustrated infant, but a communicative and engaging little girl. Her mum is also trying hard to grow up.

We will both get there.

I'd really like to hear your opinion, so please leave me a comment. If you're interested in reading more of my posts, please scroll up and subscribe to my blog, or follow me by email to get new posts sent to your inbox. 

 

 

Defeating the skinny bitch

When I see people who are painfully thin, my heart goes out to them. Chances are they are seriously ill – physically or mentally. I feel especially sorry for those who are anorexic. I have never experienced full-blown anorexia myself, but I've had a taste of what it might be like.

The year I turned 18, I went to live in Japan for half a year. It was not a “proper” student exchange – something that my parents had actively discouraged – but somehow I’d managed to win a trip to Japan in a national Japanese Speech Contest, and this convinced my parents that I had earned the right to my coveted exchange. Teachers at my high school were kind enough to liaise with teachers at our Japanese sister school. I would be allowed to attend classes there and live with students’ families.

My first host family was one of 5 host families in 6 months—planned this way by the school, so that no one would be unfairly burdened with a foreign student visitor. The K family was kind and welcoming, but they spoke almost no English.  

I was immediately in over my head.

Every single aspect of life was suddenly a struggle. I had studied Japanese throughout high school—I had won a national Japanese speech contest, for God’s sake—and suddenly I found I knew almost nothing of any practical use, especially in a rural part of the Kansai region where the local dialect was nothing like “textbook” Japanese. I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying, and they could barely understand me. Sometimes we spend a long time with dictionaries and pen and paper and sign language trying to establish what time breakfast would be, or what I should do with my dirty laundry; sometimes we just mutually called it quits and I allowed myself to be led (almost by the hand) through the day.

The middle sister of the family, who was my classmate, was always in an impatient hurry, and I soon started to feel as though I was an unwanted piece of baggage that she’d been instructed to carry.  I remember the first school day of my stay there. It was 7am, and apparently we were running late.

Yuki: “Now [incomprehensible]. Have [nope, didn’t catch this either]?”

Me: [blank look]
Yuki: [impatiently] “Now go. You have keiki?”
Me: [do I have cake? what cake? is she asking me if I want to eat cake? we just had breakfast! or is she asking me if I have cake with me? where would I have gotten cake, and why would I need to take it to school with me?] “Cake?”
Yuki: [pulls open my bag and looks around; finds my purse and opens it; sighs theatrically when she sees my train pass there]
“TEIKI-KEN!”
[Aha. “teiki”. Not “keiki”.]
Yuki urged me out of the house, and we sprinted down the road together to the train station.

The lack of comprehension, and uncertainty of what life would bring from one moment to the next, became a source of huge anxiety. Every time communication was difficult, I felt that I was inconveniencing people and making their lives harder than necessary, and all this when they’d been kind enough to take me on as an exchange student. As well as that, because I couldn’t understand what people were saying, I frequently imagined that they were talking about me, and not in a positive way. If two girls looked at me and said something, giggling, I guessed they were laughing at my acne. When people repeatedly commented on how “big” I was, I assumed they meant “fat” (turns out that Japanese say “big” when they mean “tall”, though to be fair, at 173 cm and 68 kg I was probably also “fat” by Japanese standards). Most of all, I felt so inadequate academically. I had been an A-student in Australia. Now, by failing to communicate effectively, I looked like a dumbass, and felt like I was letting down my teachers in Australia, who had advocated and supported my coming here.

I became miserable, though I never allowed my smile to slip in public, and saved my tears for my bedroom at night. I had brought different kinds of Australian candy to share with my classmates at some point; now I broke into the packages and comfort-ate at night in bed. I gained a few kilos, which of course made me all the more miserable. I didn’t know how I could keep going when it all felt so hard. The worst part was knowing that this was what I had asked and begged for. Pride (and stubbornness) stopped me throwing in the towel and leaving.

And then one day it dawned on me. Maybe I couldn’t control my language ability (at least, not in the short-term) but I could certainly control other parts of my life. In particular, I didn’t need to be “big”. This would be the perfect time to start a diet and lose some weight. I could understand enough about lunchtime conversations among my classmates to realize that diets and weight loss were a big deal here. A diet could help me fit in, in more ways than one.

And so it began.

At first I just cut out high calorie foods, and started exercising (I got myself a skipping rope and jumped around in my host family’s tiny garden). By the time I moved to my next scheduled host family a month later, I had lost a little bit of weight — not much, but enough to encourage me. I started cutting out more foods — meat, eggs, anything relatively dense in fat or calories. I told people I was on a diet, and no one seemed to mind.

After another month, when I moved to my fourth host family, I was making great progress, and had already lost some 8 kg. This host family already had three children and both parents worked, so everyone essentially made their own breakfast and lunch from ingredients that Mum provided every morning. Perfect! I took tiny amounts of food for both meals, and even at dinner I ate the smallest amount I could get away with [not] eating. I drank hot water spiked with pepper in the hope that it would boost my digestion somehow, or at the very least suppress my hunger in a zero-calorie manner. I claimed that I was vegetarian so that I could cut out an entire (high-calorie) food group. We all rode bicycles to school every day, and as it was quite a long way, this helped my weight loss efforts no end.

At this point, I went to visit the older sister of an Australian friend, who lived in a nearby city. She was shocked at the amount of weight I’d lost— at least two dress sizes. I assured her that I was fine, and just dieting, but I’m sure she realized something was wrong. I barely ate, and even refused cake she had bought for my birthday. I weighed myself constantly—several times a day. I could tell that her flatmate thought my behaviour was odd and rude. I didn’t care. I weighed less than 60 kg – a weight I hadn’t been since primary school.

This should have been enough for me, but my now I was on a roll. It was so easy to keep going. And so I did.

I remember going shopping with my host sister during the summer holidays, and for the first time ever being able to fit into Japanese women’s sizes without having to look for XXXXXL. It was such a rush.

Counter-intuitively, though, losing weight actually made me more anxious — anxious about losing control over food and gaining all that weight back again. I became even more obsessive about calories and exercise. My body started to rebel. I found myself sneaking downstairs in the middle of the night to scoff low-fat yoghurt, because I was literally starving.

At the end of 6 months, I had lost something like 17kg and was down to 53 kg – my all-time low. I thought I had conquered the world, but found that unless I ate almost nothing, exercised like a fiend, and indulged my cravings strictly on caffeine-free diet coke, I could not help but gain weight.

My arrival home was a shock to everyone. Family and friends thought I looked skeletal, and the horror showed clearly in their faces. I was devastated – I was so thrilled about being thin, and their disgust was a disappointment beyond words.

With no one supporting my efforts to stay thin, I felt lonely, and as though the world was united in a conspiracy against me. It made me sad, but it also made me tough. I ignored all kindly-meant advice and pleas. I lapped up the admiration of unknown men who whistled at me on the street.

It took a very long time to break out of this mindset. Meanwhile, my body continued to rebel. One morning I woke up with two delicious, high-calorie biscuits beside my bed. In my state of crazed hunger I had craved them so badly that I had apparently sleep-walked to the kitchen, retrieved them, and placed them comfortingly beside my pillow. I remembered nothing of this when I woke up, but I do recall feeling, for the first time, that perhaps I had a problem.

When I was in my second year of university (still determined to stay super-thin) I took a very challenging Japanese language class. I realized almost immediately that it was way beyond my ability, but I refused to give up. I spend more time preparing and studying for that class than for any other class before or since – literally hours and hours looking up and memorizing kanji characters, and committing to memory obscure Japanese phrases.  The stress and the time investment were so demanding that I found I had to divert my dieting energy to studying. I no longer had the mental fortitude or the physical energy to resist my cravings, and I started binge-eating. It was fairly horrific. I found myself eating so much at a single sitting that I felt physically ill and as though I might burst. I gained weight at a rate of knots. It was horrible, and my self-esteem hit an all-time low. I could not believe how fat I was getting – the kilos were literally piling themselves on my body before my very eyes.

However, a few of my course-mates and I, united in our struggle to conquer Japanese From Hell no matter what, became lifelong friends. And somehow, I had also managed to find and hang onto a boyfriend who was fiercely and blindly and utterly loyal (almost to a fault). If these people noticed what I looked like or how quickly I gained weight that year, they didn’t say a word, and I love them all the more for that.

That year, two major victories were mine - I scored an A+ in that super-challenging Japanese language course, and I beat my eating disorder.

The first victory was incredibly important to me at the time. I was overjoyed; elated; proud of myself.

The second felt like anything but a win – at the time, I felt like I had lost a long and hard-fought battle – but looking back now, I believe it was one of the great victories of my life.

The path of an anorexic (or would-be anorexic) is lonely and hard, and victory over bodyweight comes at the price of obsessive thoughts and behaviour, socially-odd eating habits, and constant anxiety. Some people can't give it up; don't want to give it up; cannot see that their need to be anorexic ultimately has nothing to do with food or thinness.

I am sad that I spent such a long period of my life wasting energy on an eating disorder. I am sad that I spiralled so far down into self-hatred and negativity that I ended up in that dark place in the first place. I am exhilarated, though, that I found my way out and have never again fallen that far.