I Spy With My Little Eye

TRIGGER WARNING: mentions of disorders of a mental, emotional, and physical nature, including anxiety and depression as well as personal image disorders.

I tried counting and researching the number of mental illnesses there are? Yeah, so I stopped counting. There are so many, and they're very real. Just because you can't see them, doesn't mean they're not there. And just because you see something different than someone else does, doesn't mean you're going to be able to fix the problem. It's THEIR problem.

I have a lot of friends in my life who have something called BDD - Body Dismorphic Disorder. The technical definition is "a mental illness involving obsessive focus on  a perceived flaw in appearance". Basically, you have an issue with the way your body looks. However, this can be something very minor, like someone thinking they look bloated when they don't, or it can go to the more extreme, and that's what I'd like to talk about.

I have a friend I was romantically involved with. This friend was one of the first people in my closer circle that ever asked me to use "they/their/them" pronouns, and they identified as agender with an underlying thought of "I may transition in the future but I'm figuring shit out". They're one of the reasons I decided that pansexual was a better label for me. They're not something that fits into the two-gender spectrum that bisexuality represented, so it just made sense. And while I do understand that people who identify a certain way - mainly male or female - should be recognized as such. It was the inbetween and the not-so-much-in-either-direction I was attempting to include in the label I identify with.

So, long story short... With the curse of depression, and the weight of anxiety, and the added burden of BDD, the relationship we had ended. The issue was knowing that in an ideal world, they would have been born in a body that wasn't biologically female. The breasts were the biggest issue (no pun intended), and it was something so prevalent in their head that it distracted them from anything else.

While I'm still sad the relationship ended, think about it like this, with statistics pulled from adaa.org, the webside for the Anxiety and Depression Association of America:

• Anxiety is something we all have as a natural reaction, but anxiety disorders affect over 18% of, or 40 million, adults over 18 in the United States
• Generalized Anxiety Disorder, which affects about 6.8 million adults
• Panic Disorder, which affects about 6 million adults
• Social Anxiety Disorder, which affects about 15 million adults
• (There are others, like Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, as well as specific phobias and things like Bipolar Disorder and eating disorders)
• Major Depressive Disorder affects over 16 million adults in the United States, and it can break down into more than one category as well
• Persistent Depressive Disorder, or Dysthymia
• Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder
• Seasonal Affective Disorder
• And then there are the co-occurring disorders that come with anxiety disorders, such as
• Eating disorders (Anorexia Nervosa, bulimia, etc.)
• Irritable Bowel Syndrome
• Sleeping disorders
• Attention Deficit/Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD)
• Chronic pain
• Headaches
• AND FINALLY, Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD)

Look at how many people have these issues. There are 450 million people worldwide who suffer from mental illness. They are not exempt from one just because they have another, and usually these illnesses tend to pile up onto one another. These are not uncommon things, and things like BDD are just as common as these things are, even on the severe side.

This is difficult to think about, but put yourself into someone else's shoes for just a moment. Imagine waking up and PHYSICALLY not being able to love your body for what it is. It's valid, and I see the pain it brings people. It crushes me. I'm just starting to love my body for what it is, especially because I do have the power to change what I don't like. Imagine what it's like to wake up and know that it's not an easy task to change what you know isn't right for your body.

I don't have a cure. I suffer from a lot of these illnesses myself, including BDD. I look in the mirror and have no idea what I'm looking at half the time. But I do have one thing to say: be fucking kind. You don't know what a person is going through. It feels like a cop-out to say, but it's true. Not all illnesses are visible, so don't assume someone is okay simply because they don't look like a leper and have limbs falling off in front of you.

Do not talk about anyone's body. Just don't do it. Compliment their clothes, hair, eyes, smile, personality, attributes, ANYTHING. But do not talk about someone's body, especially if you know they might not be okay with it. It's not our fault that we can't see who and what we really are in the mirror, and it is not anyone's fault that their outside doesn't reflect their inside. Ever hear someone say something negative and your natural response is, "No, you're beautiful!" or "You look fine!"? Yeah, no. It doesn't work like that.

We won't realize you're not lying to us until we believe it ourselves. We won't be comfortable until we can make positive changes to reflect ourselves. The best you can do is show us, and people transitioning, and anyone not comfortable with themselves - or really, anyone at ALL - that you love us for the inside. Let us deal with the outside, please. Help us do it safely, and show your love in any way you can. But as far as trying to help us view our physicality better? If you don't have anything nice to say, shut the fuck up.