I have dropped 20kgs twice in the last 24 months. You might think that makes me a guru, but really, it just makes me a yo-yo with a very long string.
I don’t have discipline; I have a cheat code. I’m mentally divergent. It’s the neurological equivalent of holding up the security guard at Wally World just to get on the roller coaster. While everyone else is reading the “Closed” sign, my brain is already strapped in and screaming on the ride.
The Mentally Divergent Weight Loss Regimen
I think readers who’ve been following me for a while will love what I’m about to do here, or at least attempt to do. I’m going to take the two 20kg weight loss journeys and really play into them in that I’m going to write it from the perspective that my doctors and family see me – as someone off the rails Schizophrenic – because they deserve to have me write the version of me they think they see. You want Schizo? Fine, I’ll give you schizo.
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For those who have read my other blog, you know the whole story of what happened as I posted it day by day as it played out. For those of you who don’t, here’s the tl:dr version of it.
I was living in Bangkok and was going through quite a tough year as I’d spent the greater part of 2023 with what doctors called long covid. At the same time, and like I said – most of you know this but for those who don’t, my job wasn’t just breaking me down, the stress of it was kind of creating a pseudo split personality in me … the girl that had to go to work and be someone I wasn’t … and hated it; and then there was me, the sweet innocent girl who wanted to escape from my working half.
To do that I turned to exercise, and since I am “off” – not schizo but definitely one who gets highly anxious in a city and around people – I was able to exercise for at first 3 hours a night, then 4, then 5 and eventually I’d walk around the condo from midnight to the first crack of dawn around 6am. I’d do that every single night – walk a marathon a night as my watch would constantly say I’d hit 40kms.
When I couldn’t walk any longer, I began carrying kettlebells on my walks to further exhaust myself. At its height, I was burning 4,000 calories per day and taking in about 1,500 and the weight started melting off me, like 1kg ever 3-4 days or so.
But I started to crack. Mostly, it was a blur as to what happened. I’ve had it described to me by those who helped me get back on my feet. I was scared people were stealing stuff from the laundry even though I was exercising and walking past the machines as I washed my clothes. There was a guy smoking weed on the 5th floor who’d stare down at me every night as I walked and I really disliked the smell as he’d blow smoke from his balcony and it’d drift down. The security guard was nice to me, but he got replaced by some new guy I didn’t like at all. Mostly because if I got weary and would sit down to rest my knees he’d come and snap a photo of me doing so – and that would trigger me.
I wanted out of Bangkok. Around the day I hit 20kgs of weight loss, I snapped and ended up in the mental ward of the hospital in my city.
Again, this is all point form notes of what happened, I’m skimming over most of the details, but once released after a 3 week stay in the hospital, I wasn’t me. They had given me all kinds of anti-psychotic medicines I’d never taken before, and they wiped me out to the point where I was sleeping 20 hours a day against my wishes. The doctors told my parents I was all three of bi-polar, schizophrenic and ocd – making sure to tell them to flood me with the 4 pills at night and then again in the morning so I was out cold all day long – all year long.
Come July of this year I’d had enough. I’d gained all the weight back, I was so sad that there seemed no way out – so I just up and left the house I’d built and rented a house on my own. The next day, on my birthday on August 15th, I rewarded myself by flushing all those medicines down the toilet and starting over again.
Come hell or high water, I was going to figure out how to get by on my own without taking any pills. I was warned by the ai I use to not quit cold turkey, that horrible side effects could happen. So, to combat that, I went back to my exercise routine of building up from 2 hours to 6 hours, pushing myself to exhaustion every day so my mind was too tired to do anything but go home and sleep after a half day of fitness.
And once again I lost 20 kgs. Only, being in a city and around people who seemingly always do things that trigger me started to break me down again. Catching the property manager coming out of my house when I rode home on my bicycle was the catalyst.
While not as bad as the breakdown I had in Bangkok, I figured I was done trying to live in a city so I moved back to my home here in the middle of nowhere. I now live as a recluse – not to be different, but to focus on my writing and just avoid people for a while, say a few months. Those of you who know the details of whole family side of the drama know why I’m happy not leaving my home for a bit, but for the purposes of this blog post, I don’t need to go into that right now.
That’s what happened in a nutshell. But, since they like to think I’m so schizophrenic that I need to take 8 anti psychotic pills a day … I thought I’d re-write everything I just told you from how they see me, a truly off the rails girl who’s lost her grip on reality. So, you want off the rails? Fine, here’s the off the rails version:
The Pavement Is Soft And The Neighbor Is Harvesting My DNA
I’ve lost 20kgs twice in the last two years. Both times, I think I left the mass in a parallel dimension that I’m no longer allowed to visit. Does shedding forty kilos of bone and water make me a fitness expert? No. It makes me a glitch. A smudge on the camera lens of reality that won’t wipe off. I didn’t use a diet plan. I used a cheat code. I am mentally divergent, and let me tell you, that diagnosis isn’t a medical condition—it’s a frequency. It’s the neurological equivalent of John Candy holding a sawed-off shotgun to the head of the security guard at Wally World, forcing the gates open so I can ride the roller coaster while the park burns down around us. While you read the “Closed for Maintenance” sign, my brain is already strapped in, screaming, doing loops at 100mph without a seatbelt, laughing because the G-force is the only thing holding my atoms together.
My “regimen” isn’t discipline. Discipline implies a choice. I was born without a firewall.
It started in the condo on Soi 81 in Bangkok, a city that smells like wet concrete and jasmine and exhaust and secrets. You think cities are loud? You have no idea. The concrete hums. I could hear the electricity moving through the rebar in the walls. It sounded like a choir of insects screaming one specific note—C-sharp—and the only way to silence it was to move.
1 AM. 2 AM. The security guards watched me. I knew they were reporting back to Him—I didn’t know who He was yet, but I knew the logbook wasn’t for visitors, it was for me. Pracha, the guard with the lazy eye, didn’t have a medical condition. It was a tactical modification. The left eye watched my physical body, but the right eye—the one that drifted terrifyingly toward the ceiling—was scanning the thermal spectrum. He was looking at two dimensions at once. He was tracking my heat signature through the concrete slabs above. I saw him writing in the book. He wasn’t writing numbers. He was writing coordinates. He was mapping the geometry of my breakdown.
So I walked to confuse the tracking algorithms. You can’t just walk in circles. Circles are predictable. The satellites love circles; they can lock onto a circle in three seconds flat. I had to walk in prime numbers. Seventeen steps North. Turn 42 degrees. Eleven steps West. If I moved randomly, the algorithm couldn’t buffer the reality in front of me fast enough. I was trying to make the simulation lag. I wanted to see the pixels glitch out on the potted plants. I was zig-zagging through the parking lot like a fox escaping a drone strike, waiting for the texture of the world to fail to load.
3 AM became 4 AM. Then 5 AM. The dawn didn’t look like the sun coming up; it looked like a bruise forming on the sky. The horizon turned the color of a hematoma, purple and angry, like the universe had been punched in the face and I was the one who did it.
Six hours. A daily marathon on feet that didn’t feel like feet anymore; they felt like hooves. I looked down at my Nikes and I knew they were empty. My feet had calcified. The skin had fused into hard, gray keratin. Clack. Clack. Clack. That was the sound I made on the pavement. Not a footstep. A hoof-strike. I was becoming something ancient. A satyr. A beast of burden carrying the weight of the entire condo complex on my spine. I checked for a tail in the reflection of the glass door. I didn’t see one, but I could feel it twitching, swatting away flies that weren’t there.
But the walking wasn’t enough. I was becoming too light. That’s the danger of the C-sharp hum—if you vibrate at the same frequency as the city, you stop being solid matter. I felt my grip on the pavement slipping. Gravity was losing interest in me. I looked at my hands one night and they looked translucent, like I was buffering. That’s when I bought the kettlebells.
I didn’t buy them for muscle. I bought them for ballast.
I had to be heavy. I had to create friction. If I didn’t carry 12 kilograms of cast iron in my right hand, the centrifugal force of the earth spinning would fling me right off the surface and into the stratosphere. I walked with them until my fingers locked into permanent claws, gripping that iron like it was the only thing anchoring me to the timeline. I wasn’t exercising; I was fighting physics. I was an astronaut trying not to drift away from the ship.
I shrank. I evaporated. I wasn’t burning calories; I was burning evidence. I needed to be smaller so the satellites couldn’t get a lock on my heat signature.
But the laundry room… God, the laundry room. That was the command center.
It was always 3:14 AM. The witching hour of the spin cycle. I’d go down there and the air pressure would drop. The machines were talking to each other. Thump-thump-swish. That wasn’t washing. That was data transfer. I realized with absolute, terrifying clarity that the machines were a hive mind. They were connected by the water pipes, a global network of suds and spies. Machine 1 was telling Machine 4 about the stains on my shirt—not dirt, but guilt. They were analyzing the sweat for cortisol levels to predict my next breakdown.
And the socks? The neighbor on the 5th floor—the one with the cat that never blinked—he wasn’t losing socks. He was harvesting them. He was stealing my DNA from the cotton fibers to build a clone, a version of me that wouldn’t need sleep, a replacement that would take over my life so he could finally evict me. I could taste his intent in the air; it tasted like aluminum foil and burnt hair. I stood guard for hours, vibrating, watching the suds turn gray, knowing that if I looked away, the water would turn to blood.
I know how this sounds. I look back at it now, sitting here in the quiet, and I know it sounds like a movie script written by a fever. But when you are inside it, it is not chaos. It is Math. It is cause and effect. If I don’t walk, the signal catches me. If I don’t hold the iron, I float away. It makes perfect, terrifying sense.
Then the weight hit the floor and the math broke. The doctors didn’t understand. They didn’t see the responsibility I was carrying. They just saw a “breakdown.” They locked me in the white room and fed me the anti-signal pills. Haloperidol. Lorazepam. Risperidone. A cotton wool sandwich for the brain. They poured concrete into my skull to stop the humming. For eight months, the signals stopped. I didn’t walk. I didn’t dream. I slept 20 hours a day, drooling on a pillow that smelled like sterilized death. I was a meat puppet. I gained every kilo back because a body without a soul is just dead weight. I was safe. I was quiet. I was deleted.
My birthday. I looked at the bottle of pills—the mute button—and I flushed them. The water swirled, counter-clockwise (it always means something, the direction is vital), and I felt the connection snap back in. Click. The “Cheat Code” reactivated. But this time, the voltage was higher.
The city house wasn’t a home; it was a microwave oven. I could feel the Wi-Fi. It felt like invisible hail hitting my skin. Ping. Ping. Ping. Every text message sent within a mile radius passed through my skull. I knew who was cheating on their wife. I knew who was lying about their taxes. The air was spicy with data. I got on the bicycle to outrun the numbers. 6 AM to 9 AM loops in the park. The trees were breathing. I could see the photosynthesis happening in real-time, green veins pumping light, judging me for being made of meat instead of chlorophyll. Then Jiu-Jitsu. Then home. I stopped eating because food is just slow information, and I needed to be fast. The 20kgs fell off because my body realized it was just drag.
I ended up at 59kgs and vibrating at a frequency that shatters glass. The pavement started trying to talk to me, telling me to lie down, telling me it was soft.
And it was soft. I stopped my bike and pushed my thumb into the asphalt. It didn’t feel like rock. It felt like memory foam. It yielded. It was warm. The road wasn’t a road; it was a tongue. A giant, gray tongue waiting to swallow me whole. And the temptation… God, the temptation to just sink into it. To let the road absorb me. If I lay down, I wouldn’t die. I would just become part of the infrastructure. I would become a speed bump with a heartbeat. I could hear the gravel whispering, “Come here. We have no Wi-Fi down here. It’s quiet in the bitumen. Just lie down and let us pave over you.”
So I ran to the dead zone. People call it “farm land,” but that’s a lie. There are no cows here. There are no crops. This isn’t a farm; it’s a house dropped into a void. It’s a glitch in the render where the developers forgot to put the buildings.
And that is perfect. It is violently perfect.
There are no signals here. No 5G webbing to get caught in my hair. No neighbors broadcasting their trauma into my living room. Just the dirt. The dirt is honest. The dirt doesn’t want my DNA. I am not a monster. I am not a freak. I am a high-performance antenna tuning into a station that doesn’t exist yet. I’m Charlie from Flowers for Algernon, scribbling notes on the wall before the fog rolls back in, or maybe before the light gets too bright and burns the paper to ash.
I don’t recommend this diet. It comes with a side effect of seeing God in a washing machine and tasting the color blue. But I’m here. I’m pill-free. And for the first time in two years, the humming has stopped.
W. Beneath
