I am not depressed

I am not depressed.

I thought I was clinically depressed; both my therapist and my psychiatrist told me so.  I mean, I take antidepressants. I have taken them, on and off, since the 11th grade.

And yet, I am not depressed, and I wonder whether I ever have been.

No, I’m not perfect.  I have anxiety, and sometimes I feel down.  Sometimes I doubt myself. Sometimes I feel like staying in rather than going out. Okay, a lot of the time.

But depressed? I’m not so sure. Here’s why:

I can remember thinking I didn’t measure up to others for most of my life. I know, what’s new, join the club. But the passionate self-loathing and hopelessness, that caused my doctor to whip out her prescription pad, didn’t start until I began binge eating.

When I was recovering from anorexia in high school, I was forced to gain weight. Around that time, I began the binge eating behavior that has tormented me ever since. My body had been so starved for so long that my instincts took over and I binged.  And when I began binge eating, I began to hate myself. 

Since then, I have gone through short periods when I don’t binge. And during those times, I have felt normal. Happy, even. The prospect of spending time with friends doesn’t send me into a panic. I have a general disdain for my thighs and the usual desire to be smaller, but it isn’t the vitriolic self-loathing I feel the day after a binge. My moods are stable. My thoughts are clearer. I can appreciate all of the wonderful things in my life. I feel good.

But when I binge, my entire psyche takes a nose dive. I feel sad, hopeless, angry, moody, pitiful, disgusting, and worthless. And then, after a day or two of eating normally, poof! The clouds have lifted, and I am me again.

Kathryn Hansen addresses this in her book, Brain Over Binge. She notes that her therapists tried to place a myriad of labels on her emotional issues, when what she really had was a problem with binge eating. She realized that the only thing she needed to do in order to regain control in her life was to stop binge eating. Imagine that.

It’s refreshing to think that I am not damaged or broken. I just have this one problem, albeit a large one, that is keeping me from being the person I want to be: Binge eating.