Jane is 17 years old. She is a high school student who wears capri pants, likes to listen to music and tries her hardest to get out of doing anything realated to school work or learning.  Jane also takes lithium to keep her even, she has been diagnosed as bipolar and will go from 0 to 60 in a second.  It doesn’t take much to get her upset and she will not back down, and unless you talk to her in a calm, soothing voice she will escalate until you have to call some type of authority to detain her. 

Jane is a ward of the state, she has recently been placed in a new foster home (brand new, not even a month) in her sophomore year of high school. Technically she is a junior but has failed a few classes, she is in my junior English class.  Jane is functionally in 3^rd grade, she has no figurative reading comprehension skills and can repeat back to what is said to her, but cannot make any kind of inferential connection with anything.  She is also severely OCD, she will spend 10 minutes shuffling papers trying to find the right one rather than focusing on the lesson being given, and will not stop unless you gently speak to her and help her get organized. 

Jane isn’t being served by a public high school. Even in a smaller special education class Jane has to deal with a curriculum almost 10 years past where she is, and has to deal with the social rigors of 2000 kids, 4 lunch periods, a 3 day rotating schedule, standardized tests and gym class when she is bipolar and OCD to the point where her medication knocks her right out.  When she takes her medication, Jane is a ward of the state, and being bounced around from foster home to foster home and school to school, her files don’t necessarily follow her and she may take breaks from her meds, and when we sit at her intake meeting everyone is a little awkward while the social workers ask standard questions because no one knows enough about her to formulate any kind of proper case history, and her file is probably two schools removed from where it should be and won’t be coming anytime soon.

Jane needs an immediate psychiatric referral whitch will be filed for, but may not get done because there are only 4 weeks of school left.  She needs to be placed in an acute care specialized school which has a therapeutic setting so she can get the help she needs in order to succeed academically. The referral is over 100 pages of work and data which takes a minimum of 4 weeks, required by state law, before her referral will even be considered. I’m not sure if she will even be at our school long enough for the referral to be processed. 

More than likely Jane is going to end up homeless and in jail, or worse dead and alone. She is difficult to get along with and isn’t really one to reach out, but if she likes you she will be your shadow.  Jane isn’t unique to my situation, Jane exists everywhere and needs to be loved and helped by someone.  Even just noticed would be more than she is used to.  Jane exists, and that should mean something.

1.24.12

         It’s been a minute, so where should I start?  Today was a day unlike any I have experienced.  It starts with a class I’m teaching, social skills. This class is something I came up with. I teach self-contained special ed English.  Kids with learning disabilities and behavior disorders who need a small class setting to be taught the general English curriculum.  One semester to teach kids with learning disabilities Shakespeare, a novel, nonfiction, persuasive writing, grammar, all the while preparing them for a state standardized test; needless to say corners need to be cut and the time investment required to make these students successful is simplified to the extent very few remain functional and the majority do a little worse than fall through the cracks. They fall flat on their faces, give up, and in frustration wreck havoc and lash out at everything and everyone. Is this their fault? Yes, to an extent, but at the same time systemic dysfunction in public education is vastly responsible for their neglect, in their minds what other options do they have?  This is where my social skills class comes in.

            Social skills is a handpicked class of many of the students in my self-contained literature class and some other high needs students, some behavioral, some academic, who all needed an extra semester of one-on-one attention to help them become functional high school students. These are students who don’t bring pencils and paper to class, read at maybe a 1^st or 2^nd grade level (some better, some worse, and they are all in high school), and have an excessive amount of school absences or tardy to class marks (a few of them are on the verge of being kicked out).  I’ve had most of them in class at one point or another, and some of them I have back to back in social skills and another lit class in the period before.  It’s my job, a job I volunteered for, to get them back on track. To get them to focus on one thing, to read better, write better, function better as students and decrease their disciplinary referrals, to be that adult in life that believes in them and cares about them when everyone else has written them off and wants nothing to do with them. Most adults talk about them like they talk about a distasteful meal, being condescending and dismissive at the same time.  I really dislike those people but that is another conversation.

            So I’ve been plugging along with this, and I find myself constantly rewriting my playbook. If grammar and basic skills aren’t working, I try and figure out what works for them to make them more functional. Eric clearly needs a father figure; he gets fathered (many of them do, but whatever). Isabelle has aspergers syndrome (a type of autism) and has trouble spitting out sentences but her mind goes a million miles and hour and she has a ton to say. She needs patience and someone to listen to her.  Finally there is Jimmy, no teacher in the school has any love for him. He is a known drug dealer and at one point last semester had skipped so much class he was going to be withdrawn. I had him as a freshman, we had our moments but at the end of the day we had an understanding. If he worked I would pass him, and no matter what he did the next day was always a new day.  I’m better with him than most, and in a way this story is about him.

            Today I discovered a graphic novel I brought for one of my students to read was stolen. It was from my own personal collection, a giant, encyclopedia sized hardcover of spider-man comics. It was for a student who has so much anxiety he can’t eat lunch in the cafeteria so he has to eat in the classroom, and for the life of him he hasn’t done one once of schoolwork in quite some time (I have documentation to prove this). He does like comic books though, and in an effort to get him to focus on one thing for more than 20 minutes I brought the giant spider man book for him to read. I told him we would start slow, sit and read for 20 minutes at a stretch and we will build from that. It wasn’t going as smoothly as planned but I think I was making headway. Then I discovered some kids who used my room in an afterschool program trashed my room and stole the book. I was pretty defeated after that happened. It wasn’t about the book, it was the fact I would have loaned the book to any kid who would have asked me.  All my students know that. The young man who was reading the book? He was pretty upset. He literally turned the room upside down looking for the book before we decided it was stolen. Not knowing what to do I kinda shut down. I thought I was doing everything in my power to help, and this is what I get for my efforts.  After school I was walking to my car and Jimmy, the known drug dealer, chased me down.  He had my giant spider-man book in his hand and said, “hey, we found who took your book and got it back.” That’s all he said. I looked at him and hugged him.  There was nothing else I could do.  He went back to the afterschool program to do his thing and I went home.

            What did I learn here? Selfishly, I’ve been struggling with who I am now. I used to be fat; that was my mantra for a minute. It always goes back to that but then it doesn’t. I don’t want to be that guy anymore. I actually hate that guy. He was mean and took his anger out on the world and made himself fat because he wasn’t sure why anyone would love him, so why not make that a reality and destroy myself and be mean.  You all know the story, I got my act together, it all went away and I was left with the question, “who am I?”  Still trying to figure out that answer, but today, at least for now, when Jimmy brought my book back, I know who I am and I’m not the guy who used to be fat. I’m the guy who cares about those whom no one else cares about because I know what it’s like to be them, and I’ll be dammed if I’m ever going to watch another kid suffer through that.  

How did I do it?

That’s the question I get the most. Someone at the gym will walk up to me, someone who is more often than not severely overweight (saying “morbidly obese” sounds like a put-down) whom someone pointed in my direction as the guy who lost over 200 lbs.  Anyway, they always ask, “how did you do it?”  I think they want me to give them a short answer, like, “X,Y, and Z diet”, or “colon cleansing” (seriously, because shoving something up your ass is a great way to loose weight), or whatever trend of the month fad weight loss technique they are wanting to purchase and use for a quick fix.  Clichéd as it sounds, an infomercial did not “fix” me.  In all honestly I don’t even feel “fixed”, I’ve actually substituted one mental illness for another more than likely, but at least I’m healthy and I’m in a better place to make better decisions, but getting there wasn’t a quick fix.

Being a perfectionist was my standard operating procedure for as long as I can remember. All my GI Joe’s had to go back in a particular place in a particular order as a child, but that’s just the start. Coming from Dr. parent’s and being sent to boarding school at the age of 13, perfection was something that was drilled in my head before I had any normal coming of age experiences.  As an adult, being a failure in my eyes (but more realistically in the expectations set fourth by a family I didn’t even talk to anymore) led to depression, which led to the initial weight gain.  Then came the moment of clarity, which led to an obsession.  Even though it was a slow start, cardio three days a week, snacks went from king size candy bars to hummus and wheat thins, over the next couple of years it cascaded to five to seven days a week of cardio, weight training four days a week, muay thai, BJJ, pushing myself to the point of pain.  I haven’t eaten fried foods in three years, I haven’t drank a soda in three years. The thought of either of those things scares the shit out of me. Cake, candy bars, all of that is so far away from me I don’t even want to think about it. I still have trouble going to a grocery store or a restaurant without an escort. Not just anyone either, the friends I have I’ve latched on to like a small child who is scared of everything latches on to an overprotective parent.

In many ways I’ve reverted. The outside scares me because the freedom of before is what ruined my life and I’ve proven myself incapable of making certain sound decisions, particularly when it pertained to my own health.  I’ve gotten a little better, I’m going to restaurants now and I’m serving myself rather than having my wife serving me, but even those activities are guarded. I reward myself with a Greek salad instead of chili, I stop eating when I’m not hungry.  I’m not great about that, but rather in excess I err to the minimal.  Sometimes I will skip lunch because I feel I need to be punished because I was “bad”.   Sometimes I force myself on the treadmill rather than the elliptical for the same reasons, I need to punish myself for all the mistakes I’ve made. None of this is healthy, there is a healthy way to live and stay fit, but having been so far on the other end of the scale coming to this end came at a cost.

Counseling has helped, and my wife and my friends have helped. The healthiest thing I did was surround myself with people who care.  Without that support system I never would have made it.  So how did I do it? Yeah, mostly by myself, but I had help...

I got nothing...

Everyone wants to know how I do it.

I guess I should clarify that statement before I continue. I used to weight 550 lbs. Well, yeah, I’m not certain but it was well over 500.  I never really got on a scale that could accurately measure my weight. 550 was my best educated guess. I used to have a size 58 pants.  Before I would even register on a scale I had to get down to a size 50 pants, and then I finally started showing up at 440 lbs so my best guess is I started at 550 lbs in February 2007.  I had a final “retreat” meal (I’ll explain that in a minute) of a large cheese-steak, a full size bag of kettle chips and a diet coke and then I started the next day with my new lifestyle.

I say retreat meal because retreating was why I ate the way I did. I was retreating from everything. I hated my life and I hated myself.  I lost the only job I ever loved (my short time as a police officer) for reasons I had no control over.  My only sense of self-identity up until that point was being the biggest and meanest guy in the room, and at one point I may have been the most muscular but I was slowly just becoming “big” as in fat. Obese. When people would try to be nice about it they said “wow, you’re a big guy” but they meant, “damn, you are unhealthy”.  It wouldn’t have mattered if they had actually said that, I wouldn’t have listened. I mean, people did say it. My friends, my wife, they all said they were worried and they all tried to help but I didn’t listen and I didn’t care. Eating was a retreat and it gave me something. It was an escape, an instant gratification.  It almost killed me though, until I figured it out and came all the way back.

I started by acknowledging I had no idea what I was doing. I told my wife I didn’t want to make decisions for myself anymore because clearly I had no idea how to take care of myself and asked her if she would make all pertinent decisions about my health and my diet for me. At least for awhile.  She was a medical professional and sought the aid of a dietician and a personal trainer. In conjunction with my wife the people at my gym provided me a lot of support.  Deidre, the manager, had known me for a few years. I started going there when I was still big and strong and had that going for me, but in a couple of years I had lost it and was just getting unhealthy. She saw this and offered me some help. She told me she was worried about me and would do whatever it took to help me get on track and she did. She had a trainer work with me and she provided me emotional support, which doesn’t seem like anything but to someone who hated himself it was a lot. In fact it was everything. If it weren’t for her support or my wife’s I never would have gotten started, and now here I sit. 4 years later, 250 some pounds lighter, and post-surgery. I finally got to the point where I needed to have the excess skin around my abdomen removed, about 15 lbs of it after they were all done. And Deidre and my wife were there for that too (in fact, Deidre and the gym paid for it). 

So I sit here typing this going a little crazy, I just had the surgery 4 days ago and I have a couple hundred stitches across my abdomen. I can’t exercise and I haven’t left the house since the surgery, and I can’t leave the house until Tuesday which is my post-op and I get my drains removed.    But I’ve had visitors, people who have been with me ever since I started, and new people I just met who say I’m an inspiration (which I dismiss, I mean, as I said, I put myself in that position to begin with so I don’t see how I did anything inspirational).  Either way, these are all people who love me and have supported me, and without that I never would have gotten here. My wife has been doting on me and showing me love she knows I’ve never had. Even though it’s hard to see through all my anxiety and self-deprecation, I hope she knows I love her the same way.  The bottom line is though, it’s just starting, it hasn’t ended the path is the same as it always was.  Inspirational, no, at least I don’t think so. Mental illness? More than likely, if it is hereditary then yes, mental illness for sure. Either way, I’m going to chase after it…