Kaila Thomas: Thoughts & Reflections

Something that I really didn’t expect to come as much as it has in my therapy sessions has been my history with food. When I went in to the Counseling Center, it was to talk about the panic attacks and terror I had been experiencing. But on the initial evaluation, there were lots of questions asking about food and my body image, about whether I felt I was in control of what I ate or if I liked the way I looked. Apparently, my answers to those questions indicated that I had a not-so-stellar relationship to my body. My therapist asked me in our first meeting if that was something I wanted to address. At the time, I was doing okay–honestly, much better than i had been in the past. I wasn’t on a specific diet, I was okay eating junk, I was exercising a regular amount. I told her I wanted to put it off for a while, so we could focus on addressing the OCD. My relationship with food and exercise and my body had been toxic for years, since I first started middle school. That was a beast that I did not want to mess with.

Luckily for me, my therapist is really good at her job and somehow finangled me into opening up about it. While I wouldn’t say that I had an eating disorder, I certainly suffered from disordered eating. As is common for a lot of women, the problems started in middle school. I started to see myself as too tall, too fat, too freckled, too ugly. I didn’t look like the stick-thin blondes that I went to school with. I started restricting what I ate. It started out with genuinely healthy switches, like wanting whole wheat bread and skim milk instead of white bread and 2%. But as I aged into high school, things grew more restrictive; for lunch every day I would eat a Greek yogurt, almonds, carrots and a piece of fruit. Or some days, just an apple with peanut butter and some almonds and carrots. I would skimp on the dinners my mom made if I thought it wasn’t “healthy enough”, only to give into unbearable hunger later in the night, devouring bowls of cereal, ashamed that I couldn’t resist. I saw myself as fat and ugly: You can’t get away with eating nothing, so eat as little as you can without it being too noticeable, so Mom doesn’t notice. You’re already too fat, so you better not gain anymore weight. Even though I was 5’10” and weighed 130 pounds–certainly not fat–I looked in the mirror and loathed what I saw. There was so much I wished I could change about the way I looked, so I took it upon myself to do everything I could to change it.

Exercise was another mechanism I used to try and change the way I looked to be more “beautiful.” After my basketball practices in middle school, I would come home and bounce up and down on our Bosu ball for up to an hour (since I read somewhere that was considered a good cardio exercise) and it was more subtle than the treadmill so my parents couldn’t get mad at me for exercising too much, something they told me frequently. My parents were angels in all of this–constantly comforting me and reassuring me that I was beautiful and wonderful, that I didn’t need to be so rigid. But I couldn’t hear the truth they were trying to help me understand. I was completely desperate to burn more calories, to get rid of as many of the calories I had eaten that day as possible. In high school, I would end up going for runs after two hour basketball practices, because the practices weren’t “enough” exercise for my standards. I overused my body so much that I fractured my foot and had to wear a boot for six weeks. But that still wasn’t enough to stop me. Nothing was enough. I told myself I would always be too ugly and too fat, and I had to do all I could to change the way I looked.

Other people noticed my habits. They praised me for being so dedicated to working out and eating “healthy”, always choosing a salad no matter where we went. And I loved it. I loved being known as a health nut. They could see that I had it all together. Their praise morphed into an unhealthy standard for myself: “Kaila, you can’t order anything but a salad. What will people think if you eat a burger, even though you really want one? They’ll see that you aren’t what you say are.”

I clung to this for years. When I was with other people, I ate salads and fruit, keeping my crown as the queen of eating healthy. But in secret, I had developed a binge eating problem. I would eat an entire bag of popcorn, or 12 mini Twix bars, or an entire box of cereal in one sitting. I hated myself, so the massive amount of food helped me to not think about how angry and sad I was with the way I looked. The bingeing made me feel worse–I hated myself for eating so much, for not maintaining control on what I ate, which made me binge more to combat the negative feelings. A vicious cycle.

I didn’t think I had a problem. Every girl struggles with body image, I would think. It’s not like you’re eating nothing or making yourself throw up. What you’re doing is fine–normal, even. But the attitudes I held toward my body and sense of self were destructive. I didn’t see myself as beautiful or worthy. When it came to boys, I assumed that there would never be one who thought I was beautiful, because I saw myself as fat. I didn’t deserve a romantic relationship because I didn’t weigh what I wanted to, my hips stuck out too much, my stomach was too fat, my chin had too much loose skin. I was convinced that I was the ugly fat friend of my friend group, and that they all judged me for not being skinnier than I was, despite all the healthy eating and working out I did.

This semester, I have begun the difficult task of deconstructing these lies I’ve been telling myself all these years. I’ve realized that they’re all made up, false limits I’ve put on myself that no one was expecting me to live up to. I really am my harshest critic. And that has been painful to realize. I was looking at old pictures of myself today, from freshman year of high school. I was skinny as a rail–thin arms, thin legs, thin face. And it broke my heart, because I HATED the way I looked at that time. I saw myself as totally overweight and hideous. I spent so much time and energy hating myself, time I won’t get back.

The road ahead is long. Eight years of hating something as strongly as I hated my body cannot be undone in one semester. And there will always be a struggle, a back and forth between actually being healthy and being obsessive. Slowly but surely, I am learning that my body is capable of so much: running, dancing, laughing, singing, cooking, hugging. I am ready to embrace it for what it can do, rather than hating it for what I feel it can’t. I may be heavier than I was in middle and high school, but I am SO much healthier, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything.

My name is Kaila Thomas, and I don’t have it all together.

For years, I have been described as happy-go-lucky, funny, smart, organized. Many classmates would often come to me with questions about school, because they saw me as someone who was on top of it all. I actually enjoyed working out and eating healthy stuff, like you’re “supposed to”. I went to church and had good friends and made responsible choices.

So when my therapist first told me that I had Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, I was taken aback. Despite the education I had received surrounding mental illness, I had still come to associate OCD with handwashing, organizing, and straightening (which are actually more of the compulsions, rather than obsessions.) I didn’t engage in any of those behaviors, at least not out of some irrational need to do so. I was just having scary thoughts about my parents or siblings dying, but I didn’t know that when I was excessively texting or calling them to make sure they were safe, or googling the likelihood of dying in a travel accident for long amounts of time, I was engaging in compulsions, and my behavior was therefore considered OCD. I didn’t realize how much it had taken over my life and become a normalized part of my day. I had hit a point where these thoughts were happening, I was crying and scared and worried constantly, but I didn’t know what to call it or how to make it stop. At my wit’s end, I walked into Baylor’s Counseling Center and boom, there was the label: OCD.

In my experience with this illness, it usually starts with something mild. Like for instance, back in August, my parents came and dropped me and my sister off at school for the semester, then flew out of the Waco airport, then to Dallas, then home to Chicago. I knew they were traveling, but it had been a couple hours since I’d heard anything from them. First, the intrusive thought shows up:

What if something happened to them?

Rationally, I know that they are most likely fine, just on their way to and from connecting flights, that everything is fine.

 But what if it’s not fine? What if there was a freak plane accident and they were killed and that’s why I haven’t heard from them?

Oh, wow, I mean, maybe, but like, that’s not likely.

But it could be true. And honestly, there’s a pretty good chance it is true, because freak things happen.

Oh, wow, okay, yes I need to text them to make sure they’re safe. So I do: “Hey, just checking in. Have you guys landed yet?”

A few minutes go by.

Why haven’t they responded to me? Why is it taking so long? This is making me so anxious. I’ll text Foster and Ellie.

I text them, nonchalantly: “Hey, have you guys heard from Mom and Dad?”

I do so without giving them any way of knowing how real this danger feels to me. How real it feels that my parents might have actually been in a plane crash and are dead. A few minutes go by, and I don’t hear anything. At this point, the intrusive thought has spiraled and tightened so much that it has become reality. I begin to panic. I feel nauseous and can’t breathe. I lie down on my bed to try and calm myself down, all the while rationally knowing that this is nonsense, they’re probably fine, but the intrusive thought persists and persists and persists: They haven’t texted me because their plane crashed and they’re dead.

Finally, a response: “Hey, sorry, yes, we’ve landed. Headed home now.”

I breathe a sigh of relief. I feel myself relax, my body unclench itself, free for a moment from the anxiety and fear that had taken me over so quickly.

Sometimes the relief only lasts a few minutes. It might last longer. Sometimes I’ll feel better for a few days even. But then I’ll get a random headache in the middle of class, a real bad one, like someone is squeezing my head between their hands. I’ll think, “Wow, this really hurts.” And then an intrusive thought comes along: What if it’s a brain tumor?

Again, I know rationally that most likely my headache is not a symptom of a brain tumor. But the thought is there and it’s really hard for me to push away.

Freak things happen. What if your headache is a brain tumor and you only have months to live because you didn’t catch it until now and now you’re gonna die?

Kaila, don’t pull out your phone. You know that googling this stuff only makes it worse.

You need to make sure. Just check and make sure that headaches aren’t a symptom of a brain tumor.

I can’t resist. I feel real fear, real terror of this theoretical brain tumor that I now believe has grown inside of me and is overtaking my body, killing me with every second. I pull my phone out and google “Headache brain tumor.” Dozens of medical websites pop up, and I click on one after the other, for almost an hour, until I feel like I have enough research to indicate that my headache is most likely not from a brain tumor, but is instead from stress or dehydration or some other cause.

So I can relax again. Maybe for a couple days, or hours, but it might only last a few minutes.

Man, this headache really won’t go away.

You should research again. To make sure it’s not a tumor. What if you weren’t using a reliable website? You should research more thoroughly this time around.

And the anxiety has already come and taken me over, so I whip out my phone again. And google again. And again. And again.

These intrusive thoughts come at any time of day, in any situation. Sometimes, when I’m around other people, I have an easier time resisting the compulsions, because I am distracted by what’s going on. But sometimes, even in those settings, the thought feels too real to resist researching or texting or avoiding. I know it’s impolite, that I should hang up and hang out, but if I don’t research and check, I can’t be confident that the thing I’m afraid of is not actually happening to me.

OCD is a bitch. I’m not gonna sugar coat it. This semester, my OCD has centered around all kinds of things. I obsessed about my personal and family’s safety when traveling, being shot at the school I’m interning at and other public places, getting into a car accident, or having some sort of tumor in my body. Each worry produces a different safety behavior: avoiding long car trips and driving in adverse weather conditions, closing and locking doors when it isn’t normal to do so, staying home from things I would normally go to, Googling medical research for hours when I should be doing other things. All of these behaviors give me the illusion of safety, as though I am able to prevent these things from happening by acting on the fear–until the fear returns again, sometimes more real than it felt before, and the cycle repeats itself.

Every day is filled with new fears and struggles. It is hard.

But I am fighting it. I make time to see my therapist once every two weeks, sometimes as much as once a week if things are really bad. I make myself do “exposures”, where I resist engaging in my safety behaviors and engage instead in activities that produce anxiety. My therapy has given me new language with which I can approach OCD to help me better understand and name what I am experiencing. I take medication and it helps me manage my intrusive thoughts. It is hard work but it is worth it. I still go to school. I still hang out with friends. I still do social work and go for runs and go out to eat, like I normally would. From the outside, you’d probably have a hard time recognizing the dark place my mind might be at the same moment that we’re studying together or sharing a meal.

I am a person who thought that if I didn’t have it all together, then I wouldn’t have worth. My experience with OCD has proven, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I don’t have it all together. My brain doesn’t process things the way it should, and that I need help to make things right. And that’s okay. I am still valuable. I am finally learning that it’s okay to need help.