Food II

Sometimes therapy is vindication.


I get exhausted of eating. I get exhausted of choosing. There are breaks sometimes, but over time it's still destroying my health. I am loosing my arches. I spend time resting to relieve back pain most days, more than once a day the past few weeks. You know when you wear a big t-shirt swimming? That is how my fatness feels to me, as thought it's billowing up around me, enormous and uncontained. On bad days I wonder if I will simply eat until I die.

There are alternatives: drugs, alcohol, cutting, my old habit of constantly putting myself in dangerous situations. I've tried them all a few times, and they're all more effective than binge eating, a cleaner escape for those moments when you're afraid you can't bear another moment in your own skin. Choosing to overeat instead is about the least of evils. This is me digging my heels in, refusing to be taken all at once.

And though sometimes I've hated myself for it, I've chosen to eat too much instead of not enough very intentionally. It is easier to control. Not eating requires a certain commitment over time; it feels better, the longer you stick with it, and it's harder to break out of. That hollow feeling inside, once you've got the hang of it, is unbearably comforting. It is satisfying; it feels clean. And as much as this culture laughs at the fat girl who chooses to become more fat so that she will not be addicted to her own emptiness, I've been there enough to know. This risk is real.



None of it is sustainable, of course. I think maybe loosing the crutch of binge exercise is what's done me in, but I don't want to keep going like this. I'm tired of eating. I'm tired of being fat. I'm afraid that as time passes, this will become more of a compulsion, less of a choice.

So I asked my therapist--one of her specialties is eating disorders. And she told me I was right, right to worry about my hunger for emptiness spiraling completely out of control. She said she was worried about that too. I asked her what I should do, and she told me it won't go away until I figure out why I'm trying to kill myself, and deal with it.