The Eyes I Live Through with BDD

The Eyes I Live Through

By Guest Blogger D. A. Ayers

Growing Up with BDD

I grew up in a traumatic household where I never felt safe. From a young age, I didn’t like myself. It didn’t help that I had ears that stuck out and a bad stuttering problem.

My parents paid for surgery to fix my ears when I was five years old. That was my first indication my appearance wasn’t okay, and that surgery was needed to right what was wrong. I was always told I was a cute kid, but that was also a problem. I was never told I had any other positive qualities.

As a teenager, I really struggled with my appearance. I remember wrestling with my hair in the mirror before school one day. Whatever product I was using wasn’t working the way I wanted it to. As a result, I didn’t go to school that day. The same thing happened when I got my first pimple. I woke up, freaked out, and stayed home from school.

Depression and Self-hatred

Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) wasn’t well known at that time so my parents chalked it up to being a teenager. I battled depression for most of my high school years and had no clue why I felt the way I did. I just remember feeling this intense self-hatred. Looking back now I know that it was related to my BDD. But in my mind, I was disfigured or flawed in some way.

There’s a scene in one of my all-time favorite movies, Vanilla Sky, that can provide someone without BDD a quick look into a sufferer’s world. The main character, played by Tom Cruise, gets into an accident that destroys his face. This cripples him due to his vanity. After getting surgery, there is a moment when he is looking at his new face. His old, mangled face flashes in the mirror and he freaks out. That is how I’ve felt my whole life. People may see me with a normal face, but I will always see a mangled one.

In high school, other kids also made fun of my small body size, which led to a massive life spiral. I became obsessed with bodybuilding. I lived and breathed it. I would do anything to not be the skinny, flawed person they teased and bullied. I carefully watched what I ate, exercised excessively, and experimented with performance-enhancing drugs (steroids). Looking good was more important than being healthy.

Diagnosing Myself with BDD

One night I was up late watching television and stumbled across an episode of CSI (TV crime drama). This one was about a model they suspected had BDD. I had never heard that term before so I looked it up on the internet. I remember feeling seen for the first time, going through the list of symptoms, and being able to check all the boxes. The next day I mentioned my findings to my long-term girlfriend. She laughed in my face. We broke up not long afterwards.

The breakup with my girlfriend was a catalyst for change. She had been my only support system, albeit not a great one, because my family life was so chaotic. The breakup was a long, drawn-out ordeal that lasted many months. While going through that, I lost a lot of weight due to stress, my hair was falling out, I wasn’t sleeping, and I looked like hell. Not something that someone with BDD wants to experience.

One night I decided that life wasn’t worth living anymore and I tried to take my own life. Surviving that suicide attempt made all the difference. I never spoke to my ex-girlfriend again. That summer I applied to university to study Psychology and got accepted.

My Life Now

I am in a better place now. I am in my mid-forties with a family. When I was younger, I didn’t think I had anything else to offer the world other than how I looked. How we look is our currency when we are younger and looking to meet a partner.

Once I got older and came to the realization that looks fade, it changed my mentality a bit. I still don’t like the way I look, and I still don’t like getting pictures taken, or looking in mirrors.  However, that doesn’t ruin my world like it did when I was younger. I’ve gotten to this place by working on myself. I now realize I have many qualities that make me a good person, ones that are not based on how I look. I still have bad days of course, but I live in a different world now than I did when I was younger.

You can read more about my story in The Eyes I Live Through which is available on Amazon.