ANA WRECKS YOUR LIFE

And other such side-effects

This isn’t the newsletter that I wanted to send today, but it’s the one that I felt that I could write about this week.

Now that I’m back on the East Coast, I had my first intake with a mental health specialist. They reviewed my history, we talked, and she said that while she could handle my case, I might need a true to form psychiatrist, as she described my case as “complex” (she would only handle “standard” cases on her own apparently). In other words, I need several more specialists, same as I had in the Bay Area.

The trips to Maui were wonderful, but scared the friend I was with: all my ribs are visible when I took off my shirt, and I continued to choose to not eat most meals. I had clearly lost most of my weight, and thus she was concerned. Swimming, whale sighting are tough (but we saw a lot of them!). The bamboo forest was too, but she didn’t venture into it, so I was only judging myself.

I have photos of me swimming in Brazil without a shirt from years earlier and I would say that I looked pretty normal, but who am I to judge.

All these meds list things like “sleep too much or too little,” or “eat too much or not enough,” so it’s hard to pin down the exact cause, but I know that I wasn’t anorexic before these meds.