What would you define as your rock bottom? What pushed you to get the help you needed to change your life?
Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
J.K Rowling
We listen to songs, watch moves and read books wherein the protagonist must hit their all-time low in order to make their way up in the world. I spent years wondering ‘When will I finally hit my rock bottom? What happens then?’ Apparently what happens then is tears, tantrums, suicidal idealisations, arguments and, finally, epiphanies.
I had been on autopilot since the day we settled the purchase for our new home in February 2018.
My anxiety had become crippling, often leading to panic attacks on the hard shoulder of the M1, and, as a result, my gut was an absolute mess.
I’ve talked about this briefly before but in May 2018 I started to experience extreme abdominal pain, accompanied by constipation and an absence of bowel movements for days, sometimes weeks. I felt horrible to the point where I was afraid to eat anything, and couldn’t sleep at night. For almost a year following this, my days became filled with medication and the ‘will-i-won’t-i’ of waiting for my bowels to cooperate. The doctors told me it was just ‘something I might have to deal with’ after they found nothing in my samples, and then they handed me Laxido. They handed laxatives to a quasi-recovered anorexic. I know; I’ll hold for your astonishment.
Anyway, I digress.
Work was stressful, life just wasn’t going right and multiple people in my close family circle had been given the dreaded cancer diagnoses.
I was handling it through a mixture of coffee, frequent insomnia, self-harm, and cigarettes.
This translated into only eating dinner along with snacks every day due to the persistent feeling of anxiety and uneasiness in my guts. Eventually, I slipped into the old, comfortable habit of eating little more than 500 calories every other day with intermittent fasting in between and lowering it as I saw fit.
I was weak, I was trying to keep my emotions under wraps, I was passively suicidal and I was suffering from chronic ‘brain fog’ (wherein you are unable to remember very much, unable to retain information and unable to focus due to malnutrition). I couldn’t remember getting up and going to work most days, let alone how I was meant to function.
I would weigh myself every day and let the number on the scale dictate to me how the day would progress.
I would sit in work, high from hunger and cigarettes, and just go about my day almost like a zombie. All I would think about from lunchtime onwards was what I would weigh when I got home? It eventually got to the point where I would stop drinking after a certain time until I was able to see the number on the scale.
I had it in my head that so long as I kept my weight in check everything would be fine. Anything could happen and, if my weight read lower than it did the previous day, I could cope.
Decemeber 11th, 2018; My Rock Bottom Finally Arrives.
I was signed off work for being too ill to continue. By the time the end of the year had rolled around, I was well and truly exhausted, physically, emotionally and mentally. To this day I don’t even know how I made it to December, to begin with.
If you have a similar story I would be honoured to hear it. So many people I speak with have some sort of rock bottom story, and I’m always fascinated to hear and see how people manage to cope with it.
You can also read my more detailed rock bottom memoir over at Coaching with Klara.
** If you like what I do please consider donating to my KO-FI fund. I’d like to be able to reach more of an audience so I can potentially grow this blog to be much more than it currently is. I also hope to bring freebies and eventually toolkits to you all as a way of saying thank you for your support.
