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.

food I

I am in love and hate with food.

The love is deep and satisfying. Books about gourmet cooking hold my attention as well as the most escapist fantasy novels. Feeding people I care about really well, striking that perfect comforting or enlivening chord to make their day suddenly better, is intensely pleasing. I remember great meals, the interplay of flavors and textures and aromas, in vivid detail. I believe in food as art.

Cooking for myself is a gesture of respect. It serves my long-term welfare by saving money, and by developing a skill that will make it easier and easier to feed myself inexpensively and well as time goes on. Insisting on learning to cook brilliantly for myself is also a tool for battling disordered eating.



The hate, as hatred usually is, is complicated, destructive. Sadness can take me two ways. In one direction, I start by eliminating animal foods and sticking to whole grains. Deeper in, nothing but fresh fruit and undressed salad will do. Eventually the solid fruit seems like too much trouble; eventually nothing is good enough, anything would be a defilement. This has happened to me once. It is a path I try to avoid.

The other direction starts with baked goods, muffins, cookies, pastries. As things get emotionally darker I crave meat, ground pork, sausage, cheese. I crave things I find disgusting, things I find morally wrong. For awhile, I was sick and at the same time hungry for meat in this way. Every time I closed my eyes I would see feverish images, tearing off chunks of flesh from my own arm with my teeth, feel my body moving to cannibalize itself. In the worst of this place, I will eat until I take absolutely no pleasure, continue until it causes me pain.

Shallow

This week I´ve been obsessing about ¨shallow¨ things. Beauty, possessions.

Our desire for beauty, including beauty in each other, is hardwired in. We treat beautiful people better. Life is unfair. We should try to be evenhanded with each other, but we should also not expect that this will succeed in making the appearance playing field fair. . . or even close.

I´m ok with that--and I´m ok with people doing things to level the playing field. Makeup, fashion, even plastic surgery. Here are the problems I see.


1) Men desire beauty more than women do, by about 30%. This is from Survival of the Prettiest. Additionally, many beauty practices emphasize aesthetic differences between the sexes.

Accepting that artificially enhanced beauty should be the norm, we run the risk of emphasizing the non-physical differences between the sexes as well. I would be fine with that if we had the science to understand what, and how big, those differences actually are, but we don´t. What we have are hints and possibilities, and thousands of years of speculation. And when I say speculation, I mostly mean patriarchal bullshit that uses the concept of essential difference as a justification for oppression.


2) Artificially enhanced beauty takes time and money. Right now, there´s a minimum standard of beauty practices that women must engage in to send the message that they care about how they look. That minimum standard is rising. It sort of looks to me like an arms race, with a lot of horrible waste.


3) For the most part, public discourse is insipid and superficial. I think we should openly and shamelessly acknowledge that we want beauty, but put limits on what we are willing to sacrifice (or have others sacrifice) for that desire. Currently, we seem to not acknowledge it--we treat it like a dirty secret, shyly acknowledging that ¨of course I want to look my best, and be healthy¨ while de-facto we treat it as though there is nothing more important.


A culture that fails to put clear limits on what is socially acceptable to sacrifice for beauty runs the risk of that arms race going fatal--which, indeed, it has. Anorexia, with a 20% kill rate, is the most fatal mental disorder. Major plastic surgery (general anestesia always carries a risk of death) is becoming increasingly accessible and common. And of course, countless lives are wasted peace-meal--not for their own satisfaction, but merely attempting to keep up.

And now for a spinal PSA

When I went to the hospital for my most recent back injury, the fact sheet they gave me said that one in four Americans will experience disabling back pain in their lifetime. It´s like a modern plague. Being active sometimes helps and sometimes hurts. It´s easy to re-injure yourself by being too active. Typically, without treatment there will be a series of progressively worse injuries over time.

Happily, I found a great physical therapist, and he gave me a list of ways to know you´re pushing it too hard. If your pain is behaving in these ways, take a day off, then gently get back to core strengthening exercises the day after.


1) Pain that spreads from your back to your buttocks, hips, or legs, or if the symptoms are are already having in these areas become more intense or move further down the leg.

2) Pain that steadily increases to an unacceptable level.

3) Increased pain for more than 1-2 hours following an activity that limits what you are able to do.

4) Delayed pain later that day or the next morning that limits what you are able to do.

5) Pain that increases a little bit every time you do something.

some most important things

1) The person who sexually abused me was sadistic about it, mostly emotionally sadistic. Fear leaves less obvious marks than pain, and she used our fear in very intentional ways. This was about control. As best I remember, she preferred the unwilling. By a lot.



2) The person who sexually abused me was a child herself at the time. She is now one of my closest friends.

This was not an easy process, and obviously it isn´t always a comfortable friendship, but I think it was the most honest thing to do. I genuinely like her and enjoy her company. She is not the same person now that she was as a child. There was a long time of separation, and then I slowly came to know the person she had become as an adult.

As I write these words, that she is not the same, I wonder at them. Am I being honest? Am I hiding from myself? Am I betraying myself? Do I believe this? She´s not as different as I would sometimes like.

But she is not the same. And I believe in forgiveness; I believe in letting people become something different, if they´re desperately trying to, if they´re willing to behave differently, instead of locking them into what they were in your head. Someone who messed up before they were twelve deserves that. This, I unreservedly believe.



3) As far as I can tell, the response (or more often, lack of a response) and the cultural atmosphere in which I grew up did at least as much damage as the actual abuse. This atmosphere consisted significantly of my parents doing their best to create a gospel centered home. I alternate between being angry at God/Mormonism and wanting nothing to do with him. More later on this.



4) My parents, who I love and respect, were very negligent.



5) I am ashamed of all of the preceding items.

What makes trauma trauma is that your brain can´t quite handle it. You can´t grasp that this is actually happening to you. If it is happening to you, and it really, really isn't your fault, that means it could happen any time and it is completely out of your control.

That weigh is crushing, and frequently trauma victims will completely re-invent themselves to avoid it. I caused this, and so I must become as different as possible to stop it from happening again. It doesn´t work, of course; it can always happen again. And once you´ve accepted the adaptive premise that this is all your fault, the shame is permeating, brutal, reasonless, and nearly impossible to contain.



6) Lastly (again), in Andrea Dworkin´s words:


¨As a feminist, I carry the rape of all the women I've talked to over the past ten years personally with me. As a woman, I carry my own rape with me. Do you remember pictures that you've seen of European cities during the plague, when there were wheelbarrows that would go along and people would just pick up corpses and throw them in? Well, that is what it is like knowing about rape. Piles and piles and piles of bodies that have whole lives and human names and human faces.¨