Tuesday, there was a cinnamon roll--breakfast, grabbed on the way to class--without guilt. A cinnamon roll, a banana, a glass of water, that I did not feel ashamed of, did not want or try to hide. An incidental meal, eaten without caving to the sugar and fat and lack of whole grain--without thinking, how dare I violate this propriety--thinking, I'm hungry, it's time to eat. And I'm going to eat what I want to.

When I got there, Newlin turned around to me and gave a big thumbs up; same breakfast. Is this how normal people eat? So relaxed, casual?


I see my body mostly as betrayal. Its fatness, its roundness; its weakness. Injury and breakage and pain that must constantly be accommodated. Needs for food and sleep and rest that are always slowing me down. Helplessness, fear. I want to live in a body, yes, but I want to live in a fighter's or a dancer's body, lithe, powerful, open, graceful, strong. Something for living a fiery and glorious and short life that also isn't mine.

For the first time I catch a glimpse of it, my body, my broken body as it is now, as some sort of victory. I have been taking care of myself, in some way; there are other parts of me deserving of care, not just this body on which the war has been waged, other needs besides hunger that deserve to be filled. This has been my compromise, my choice, my survival--and maybe that's ok. Maybe it's alright to be the marginalized fat woman, forever explaining to people that I didn't need that lover or that job, I never expected to live past thirty, thirty five. May be a freedom worth having, keeping, holding up against the world.

It's not a choice to say no unless you can say yes.


I don't want to always say yes, but for now--for now, yes. Glorious.

As soon as I finish this semester's work, I'm taking a year off. People keep asking me what I plan to spend it on, and it's been hard to answer. This is the answer: Learn to take care of myself.


Here's the longer answer:

Pick a reasonable standard of cleanliness and organization, and implement it (no more feeling guilty when my house is dirty and when I spend time cleaning it)

Make good decisions about what to own--includes culling accumulated junk and old files, as well as careful budgeting

Get in the habit of maintaining the things I own, in very good repair

Keep working on good financial habits

Work on certifications (at work) or other projects for long term financial independence

Develop better work habits for personal projects

Focus on taking really, really, really, really good care of my back

Learn enough compromise, body awareness, and ability to ask for help to keep up with basic life stuff without further injuring myself

Get in the habit of keeping up on medical care, including the small stuff

Learn food skills--cooking, rotating food, gardening, planning

Get PTSD under control. . . maybe the depression too. . .

Come to some terms with fear and happiness and whatever else seems urgently important, emotionally

Deal with the emotional stuff that has to get out of the way before I can fix disordered eating

Develop the network and skills to have a really rich, diverse, and satisfying social life

Become more emotionally independent (or, less dependent on social contact to "feel better"/escape)

Study only what I want to study

Try to enjoy life (?)

this last one is hard.


It's especially complicated to summarize when you're trying to explain why you aren't doing what (I guess?) people are supposed to do these days--pack their schedules very very full, and let all of this "taking care of yourself" stuff just happen. Some of this I don't know how to do, or I have bad habits about, because my parents taught me more about Fermat's last theorem than how to take care of a body or a house. A lot of it, I feel I don't deserve. This is a common trauma related thing, I hear--I guess I'll add another list item: get rid of unnecessary guilt.

I'm not going to go to school, volunteer, do political work, or commit myself to academic projects for other people. I'm just going to learn to take care of myself--for myself. For a time.

Dear body,

I propose a truce. You will not hurt all the time, and I will try very, very hard not to hate you. I will not get angry about how squishy you are, I will not daydream about impaling you on things, I will be excruciatingly careful with you, and I'll try to give you all the healthy delicious food, exercise, and painkillers that you need.

Sound good? Think it over. We can talk about it in the morning.


-Day

Today was different; feels of possibility. I woke up to an alarm after five hours sleep to finish writing about Irigaray, finished that in plenty of time and got ahead on my reading. After class, I spent four hours grocery shopping for my sister.

It was interesting. I was doing things for myself from an early age, but I've never shopped for a family of eight. The amount of planning involved--especially with a diet high in produce--is spectacular. Also, the repeated push-starting of the car (not my car, which would have completely stressed me out) and a mild blizzard contributed to the sense of adventure. :)

And now I'm home, in pain (a high 4) but thrilled. There are vegetables in my fridge, a backup jar of nutella in my pantry, and--perhaps most importantly--a dozen packets of seeds across my desk. I have been counting them, reading and re-reading, arranging them. I've narrowed it to four I definitely want to grow and six others in the running. They are my sister's seeds, shared because that's what we do, and because out of the packets that I choose, I'll only need a few. It's important not to get involved with too many different varieties. This is, after all, the girl who killed lavender and rosemary in Utah making her first beginner garden.

Before now I never appreciated how much fantasy goes into planning a garden, but I'm making up for lost time, savoring every choice in vivid detail. The nutty, crisp warm of biting into a parsnip? Or the high contrast of casper and sweet pumpkins sprawling across my yard, disconcertingly orange and white against the lush green of their vines? What do okra plants even look like? And what kind of tomatoes do I want for making my first eggplant parmesan completely from scratch?

I also have, from this afternoon, 20$ of un-designated cash in my coat pocket. I would hate to associate poverty with virtue, but I think that it (poverty) can, for some people in some circumstances, be good. I'm one of those people in one of those times; some alchemy of my current circumstances allows me to unpack the magic in a twenty-dollar bill like never before. I was recently out of gas, funds, and fresh food all at the same time, but still had my basic needs completely covered. Knowing what I can do without makes it easier to understand what the things I have are worth--and turns a small amount of cash into much more freedom than I thought it could be.

Purity

is one of the most common measures of morality; it's about cultivating virtue and keeping out the things that don't belong. Among liberals and leftists it is often manifested through food. Veganism is not for everybody--only for the virtuous, those who care about ethics, those who are willing to sacrifice. Eating local, organic, produce and excluding whatever is ethically dubious will make you skinny and healthy and. . . virtuous. Right?

Maybe. If one is concerned with animal welfare and the environment, having a lifestyle that supports that is a spectrum, not a step, and it isn't just food. As humans in the first world, virtually everything we do has a detrimental environmental impact. How does your veggie burger hold up against your refusal to take the bus? The clothes you bought new at Wal-mart? Your soap from the dollar store? Do you know what oilfield your 100% vegan fleece came from? Is it really better, just because the bodies of the dead are rotting in the Niger delta instead of marinating in tariyaki sauce?

I don't mean to belittle the efforts of really dedicated environmentalist vegans. They have my admiration and support. I also don't mean to imply at all that any effort which doesn't cover everything isn't worthwhile. I even believe in being vocal about your ethical choices, and I want people to hold each other (socially) to a high ethical standard with regards to environmentalism.

My beef with this comes in when people think it's ok to try to invoke other people's sense of purity. Moral reasoning, I'm fine with. If you want to stop me from eating meat because of justice--because by eating it I'm doing harm to people and creatures who deserve no violence from me--I am absolutely fine with that. However, I'd rather have vegetarianism forced on me by violence than have people appropriate my understanding of virtue to get me to adopt it on my own.

When we disagree about what priorities are appropriate for the wider society to accept, that effects me but it is not an attack on my identity. When it comes to individual choices, there is only person one who should be allowed to decide what belongs in me--in my body, in my ethics--and what does not. This person is me. If I adopt an ethical standard based on selfish and inconsistent hedonism, as an individual you can think less of me, and as a citizen you can help enact laws that curb my outward behavior--and that's all.

I feel very strongly that trouble comes when outsiders try to arbitrate an individual's sense of purity. Religious readers might disagree with this, but I see this as a major problem in religious practice. When the emotional and ethical development process have not taken place for a teenager to reject pornography of their own accord, based on their own moral foundation, others will often attempt to impose this conclusion socially. The result is a massive cycle of guilt and shame. I don't know if it works or not, but guilt is an ugly motivator--and when allowed to fester and spiral into something huge, it does terrible damage to the person experiencing it.

The thing to be avoided is manipulation--projecting your values over someone else's, or usurping their values so that they will act in support of your preferences.

Besides its modern incarnation, there's a very long spiritual tradition of using food to establish or symbolize moral superiority, using purity. My first bout with severely disordered eating was triggered--after many other things had been set in place--by a sacrament meeting devoted to how fasting can make you pure. You don't stop eating because of things you think; you do it because of things you feel. You do it because you want to feel pure and you don't feel like you deserve to live. When you associate purity with restricting food, you can get a double dose of self-destructive relief from one tragic course of action.

When others try to appropriate my sense of purity for their cause, I get defensive quickly. The idea that veganism isn't for everybody--only for the virtuous--pushes all the wrong buttons. I like to see myself as virtuous. I like to feel myself as pure. I enjoyed exercising for seven hours a day on a 1200 calorie, mostly-vegetable diet, and it makes me angry that people who were supposed to be my friends encouraged me to do so.

I think in dealing with these questions it's terribly important to get in touch with your own sense of virtue, your own sense of purity, your own moral reasoning--and to get in touch with your own judgmental side. Saying "I think you are in the wrong" makes it much clearer whose values are whose than saying "you could be pure if you were like me."



Someday, when there are less triggers associated with it, I'd like to become vegan with the exception of
a) foods I've raised myself humanely, and
b) significant cultural and culinary experiences.

I want to eat at the French Laundry, learn to make a spectacular saag paneer, and taste peeking duck when I'm in China. These moments will not come often, and I choose not to miss them.

My values lead me to think a lot about the ways my time and money impact other people and creatures, but they also lead me to assert my own claim to a rich and full existence. I am willing to take a stand for the things I care about. I am willing to make sacrifices, and I care passionately about changing the world for the better. I am not, and do not plan to be, vegetarian or vegan. This is what I believe about the purity and virtue of the way I eat.